If you open your bible at the beginning you find Genesis, the book of beginnings. This book has been the most attacked, vilified, scoffed at, ignored & mythologized book in the bible. Why?

If one of my boys reads the creation account in chapters 1 & 2 he would say that God made all things in 6 days & rested on the 7th. This seems fairly straightforward, why then is there such controversy?

The reason is that God could not have created things in 6 days because the Big Bang requires billions of years for matter to expand & fill the universe, because it takes millions of years for stars to form, since the Earth formed after the stars, not before & life has evolved over vast periods of time.

This was my problem when I started reading the bible. I was what the bible called a ‘Greek’. I had been taught about evolution at school, at college, by the media & even Richard Attenborough had a go. To me the biblical record was ‘foolishness’ to me. When I became a Christian I tried to tie the two records together & like so many others, failed miserably.

After giving up on it for some time I felt God challenge me, “Will you accept what I said?”. I thought er, yes. I don’t understand, but I will believe. Shortly afterwards I went to a creation conference (like the one in March) & found out the real truth about what happened in the past.

In the 19th century, when the acceptance of evolution was increasing, many in the church compromised on the teaching of the bible when being confronted with the new ‘facts’ of science. This brought about ideas such as theistic evolution (God used evolution to create), progressive creation (God formed things through long periods of time), Day Age theory (the ‘days’ of creation were when God revealed his creation to man), etc, etc. These models still exist in the church today to attempt to justify the biblical account in a time increasingly controlled by scientific thought.

Compromise always weakens belief in the bible. If one part is shown to be wrong how do you know what is true & what is not?

Belief in the theory of evolution has been a major influence in the decline in church numbers through the western world over the last century.

Today most people think that evolution cannot be challenged & evolutionists insist that it is no longer a theory but is a fact. The world is billions of years old & life originated in an ancient pond by natural processes. This teaching is bombarded at us from all angles, it must not be challenged!

In my next letter I will look beneath the surface & describe the faith needed to be a true evolutionist.

Stephen Martin