Darwin Year

Originally posted on January 24, 2009 – by Andre Piet

Darwin current

The origin of the world and of life on earth is at this moment a highly topical issue. That of course has everything to do with the fact that 2009 has been declared Darwin Year. It is 200 years since Charles Darwin was born and 150 years since his book “On the Origin of the Species” was published. But the topicality of the theme is also to a considerable extent related to the shift that opinion leaders within orthodox Christian circles have made with regard to creation and evolution. Whereas the EO in the 70s and 80s was known for promoting creationism, today former EO director Andries Knevel openly professes to stand behind the theory of evolution. Even the quintessential creationist figurehead, Dr. Willem Ouweneel, nowadays calls himself an origins agnostic. Whereas previously there was insistence on the historical reliability of Genesis 1–11, now these chapters especially must no longer be read too literally. In a few years the EO has undergone a development that took the NCRV a generation. Clear answers have made way for noncommittal and high-flown quibbling (see among others the lecture series ‘Clashing over the Beginning’). OK, that sounds unkind. But what else should I call it when, in an academic smokescreen, the reliability of Scripture disappears into the mist?

creationism in embarrassment

The above does not alter the fact that creationists certainly have no reason to sit back in complacency. There is embarrassment regarding the great age of both the earth and living nature. Furthermore, one struggles with a number of inconsistencies that the usual reading of the first chapter of Genesis repeatedly produces. How, for example, can there be daylight, evenings, and mornings if the sun does not appear until the fourth day? And how can Adam and Eve have been created on one day if in chapter 2 we read that so much happened between the creation of both? Every attentive reader of Genesis 1 and 2 encounters such questions.
Or… are we missing something significant? Perhaps we are not reading correctly?

new light on Genesis 1

In the month of February a number of studies are scheduled on the Goedbericht agenda that have everything to do with the major themes of Darwin Year. That applies to the study on February 8 (‘who wrote the book of Genesis?’) but especially to the study day (‘new light on Genesis 1’). The latter title indeed sounds rather pretentious, but well, an approach in which just about all major questions disappear like snow before the sun may rightly be considered groundbreaking… Groundbreaking, however, means that new paths are taken. What else? Where questions remain unanswered and inconsistencies persist, the well-trodden paths must be abandoned. Curious to know how it really is. For… he who seeks, finds!

Let me conclude this blog with a quotation that could serve as a teaser for February 22…

No human being could have been a spectator of creation. I imagine that God walked with Adam in paradise and showed him His acts of creation in a vision. Such a vision must have been the raw material for the creation account in Genesis.
drs. Tom Zoutewelle (geologist and biologist and chairman of the Stichting Creaton)

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