Gospel at Stake in Creation-Evolution Debate, Argues Ministry Leader

Friday, Jun. 5, 2009 Posted: 9:51:14PM HKT

Participants at the morning session of the premiere of The Voyage That Shook The World, Creation Ministries International's professional documentary response to the Darwin Year celebrations browsing CMI's book booths outside the New Sanctuary of St Andrew's Cathedral last Saturday. (Photo: The Christian Post (Singapore))

There have been various attempts to 'reconcile' Darwinian evolution with biblical creation.

And yet, for Dr Carl Wieland, Managing Director of Creation Ministries International in Australia, it's not a mere matter of choosing between several equally plausible options, whether it be Young Earth creationism, which holds that the age of the earth is thousands of years and that it was created in six earth-rotation days, or Old Earth creationism, which incorporates geological findings that seem to point to the fact that the earth is billions of years old but rejects evolution, or theistic evolution, where evolution is fully embraced as God’s method of creating the world and universe or many others.

Responding to a query from The Christian Post (Singapore) during the Saturday premiere of a cutting-edge documentary produced by CMI at the New Sanctuary of St Andrew’s Cathedral, Dr Wieland believes that the view of Creation is inextricably tied to the reliability of the Bible as God’s supreme guide for human life.

He highlighted that evangelical commentators from hundreds of years ago never had any doubt that the six days of Creation mentioned in the Book of Genesis were referring to earth-rotation days, judging by the use of the Hebrew word ‘Yom’ in conjunction with the words for ‘evening’ and ‘morning’.

Moreover, the Lord Jesus Christ Himself alluded to the Old Testament as a trustworthy historical witness in His references to Jonah and the big fish and how God had created human beings male and female from the beginning of Creation, as opposed to millions of years later.

“[A]ll of the time-honoured rules of Christian exegesis, the historical-grammatical method tell you that Genesis was written as history,” he said, citing “pressure from science” rather than theological understanding as the main reason for the reservations of many Christian scholars in this regard.

“[A]nd yet you’ll find that most of the theologians don’t even understand enough about the science,” the General Practitioner-turned-Creation Science ministry director charged.

Indeed, liberal scholars, who have no interest in the fight for biblical authority, readily concede that the author of Genesis was trying to tell his readers that it was six ordinary length days and that the world was really covered in flood and so on.

What is the result of denying that Genesis is a historical record of God’s Creation?

“[A]t some point, you’ve got to come down on one side or the other; are the words of Jesus authoritative for the Church or are they not? If they are not, there’s a possibility of all sorts of error in the Bible. Then everything is up for grabs because you can invent your own Christianity by acquiring it from this bit and that bit and saying, ‘Well, I’ll throw this piece out because I don’t like it or am embarrassed by it’ and so on,” the MD stated.

And this has significant reverberations in society, according to the German-born Christian leader. He emphasised that social dilemmas that Singapore was currently experiencing such as the issue of homosexuality are related to the abandonment of biblical doctrines – in this case, that of marriage, how God intended for marriage to be one man for one woman.