Stephen E. Jones

My testimony of how I became involved in the Creation/Evolution debate

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The following is my personal testimony of how I became involved in the creation/evolution debate in 1994.

My Testimony of how I became involved in the creation/evolution debate

From atheism to deism
From deism to Christianity
Doubting Thomas
The two `books' of nature and Scripture
The days of Genesis 1 and the pattern of creation
The cares of this world
Back to Perth, Fidonet and Laurie's post
Creation/Evolution rediscovered
Phillip E. Johnson and the Calvin Reflector
A Fiddler on the Roof
Progressive Creation
Evolution's catastrophic effect on Christianity
My calling
ID, CED & biology degree
CED Blog & books
The Shroud of Turin

My Testimony of how I became involved in the creation/evolution debate

From atheism to deism
I was raised in a non-Christian home and in my early teens became an atheist. However, in my mid-teens I realised from reading Bertrand Russell¹ that the universe would inevitably grow too cold for life and it would one day be as though mankind had never existed, I became depressed about the meaninglessness of life and contemplated suicide. One night in my late teens I looked up at the Milky Way and the feeling came over me that with all this order and beauty, there must be a God. So from that moment I was no longer an atheist, but what I now recognise was a deist (God created the universe, but does not intervene in it). So I could not see how I could ever know anything more about God than that he was the Creator, so life still seemed meaningless. [top]

From deism to Christianity
About two years later I noticed a new typist at work named Jenny² who seemed to be very hard-working and happy. I asked her what she was so happy about and she said, "Because I believe in God"! I was taken aback and she explained that she was a Christian. I expressed my scepticism about Christianity, although I knew very little about it, so Jenny dared me to go to church and find out for myself. I began attending a Baptist Church (Jenny was a Baptist) and a few months later I responded to the gospel invitation, committed my life to Jesus Christ and became a Christian. The change in my life was dramatic and my former sense of despair and meaninglessness was replaced by a sense of joy and meaningfullness, which has continued to this day, thirty-plus years later. [top]

Doubting Thomas
However, when the initial euphoria of becoming a Christian had settled down, my sceptical nature reasserted itself (doubting Thomas is my `patron saint'!), and I became plagued by doubts. To resolve them I started reading book after book on Christian theology, apologetics and Bible-science. After several years of intensive reading, I became satisfied that Christianity was a rational worldview, even though I did not know all the answers (and still don't) and I needed to trust God that there would be answers. That trust has proved over the last thirty- plus years to have not been misplaced. More and more the answers have been forthcoming, particularly from modern science! [top]

The "book" of nature and the book of Scripture
I had always been interested in science and that had, before my conversion, led me to believe that the universe was billions of years old. But the Bible in Genesis 1 seemed to teach that the world was created in only six literal days. I read Science Returns to God, by James Jauncey (who was a scientist with degrees in both science and theology), and The Christian View of Science and Scripture, by Bernard Ramm, a scientifically literate theologian. I took as my bedrock position Ramm's basic assumption that the `book' of nature and the book of Scripture had the one Author and therefore, when all the facts were known and layers of misinterpretations are cleared away, these two `books' must ultimately be in mutually supporting agreement³. Ramm produced compelling evidence from the Bible that the days of Genesis 1 were symbolic for long periods of time, and from geology that the Earth was billions of years old. [top]

The days of Genesis 1 and the pattern of creation
However, I was still nagged by doubts that the Bible might after all teach that the days of Genesis 1 were literal days. So to resolve the issue once and for all, I bought a book of Hebrew grammar containing a Hebrew-English interlinear translation of the early chapters of Genesis. After praying to God that I would accept whatever his Word really said, I sat down with an exercise book and wrote a word-by-word "commentary" on Genesis 1 based on the transliteration from the original Hebrew. When it was completed I was satisfied that Genesis 1 did not require me to believe that the world was created in six literal days, and in fact there were strong indications in the text itself that the days were not to be understood literally. I also found that the pattern of creation in Genesis 1 was first God creating the "raw materials" of the universe out of nothing (Gen 1:1), and then forming and filling the Earth in successive stages by His supernatural words of command, through natural processes, using existing materials made in the preceding stages. This supernatural-natural pattern of creation most nearly fitted Ramm's "Progressive Creation" position, so I adopted the latter as my own position. [top]

The cares of this world
For about five years after my conversion I was still interested in Bible-science issues, but the "cares of this world" (Mark 4:19) in the form of increasing demands of study towards a Health Administration degree, marriage, home, children, church and job promotions to Hospital Administrator positions in different country towns in Western Australia, relegated Bible-science to the back-burner. I adopted a pragmatic "theistic evolution" approach that if evolution was true, it was just the way God created. I taught my two children this in order to minimise any conflict they might have with what they were learning in school and what they might be told in Sunday School and church Youth Group. [top]

Back to Perth, Fidonet and Laurie's post
In early 1994 we moved back to the State capital Perth to be with our two children who were then at university. I decided to take advantage of the cheaper telephone rates and dialled up various Fidonet (an earlier version of the Internet) Bulletin Boards. I found one titled "CvsE" (for "Creation versus Evolution") on which there seemed to be some very knowledgeable people on the evolution side, including one professional biologist and at least one science teacher. I was intimidated by their scientific knowledge (and my lack of it), so I timidly took the line that creation and evolution were complementary, and it should not be "Creation versus Evolution" but "Creation and Evolution"⁴. I probably would have become bored with this and left, except that an older man named Laurie Appleton⁵ who was a young-Earth creationist, posted a series of quotes from evolutionists doubting aspects of evolution. I was surprised that there were any evolutionists with doubts about evolution (I had never read any Creation- Science material), and I expected these knowledgeable evolutionists to slaughter poor old Laurie with calm, courteous, rational, scientific arguments (which is what I then thought that real scientists did!). But the evolutionists responded to Laurie's quotes with ridicule, abuse and answers that even I could see were weak. This aroused my suspicion that there was more to this than met the eye and the evolutionists might be trying to cover up the weaknesses of their theory by bluff and intimidation. I was well and truly hooked! [top]

Creation/Evolution rediscovered
I started to read every book on evolution I could lay my hands on. The local library near where we were temporarily staying had an excellent collection of Creation/Evolution books. I read Parker's Creation: the Facts of Life, Macbeth's Darwin Retried, Pitman's Adam and Evolution and even Darwin's Origin of Species! Then I bought Darwin on Trial by Phillip E. Johnson and after reading it, I realised that the real problem was not so much the scientific facts, but the reigning scientific philosophy of materialism-naturalism which by definition ruled out any form of supernatural creation and makes some form of naturalistic evolution necessarily a `fact,' irrespective of the evidence. I began to raise questions to the evolutionists on Fidonet from these books, and to be fair to them they started to take my questions seriously and tried to answer them to the best of their ability. But I found that there were too many problems with evolution for me ever to go back to my old, lazy, Creation and Evolution position. No matter how hard it was going to be, or how long it took, I was going to try to find out for myself what really happened. But I don't think I fully realised what I was letting myself in for! [top]

Phillip E. Johnson and the Calvin Reflector
In 1995, I decided to try out the Internet and to see if I could locate some Christian experts overseas who might be able to help me in my Fidonet debates. The evolutionists' arguments were getting better! The only expert I could think of overseas was Professor Phillip E. Johnson, so I found his email address at Berkeley University in California and sent him a message asking for the email addresses of Christian scientist who could answer some of my questions. This was my first overseas email message I had ever sent and I hit the jackpot! Professor Johnson replied saying he had subscribed me as a member of his Internet mailing list called the Evolution Mail Reflector (later called the Calvin Evolution Reflector). I didn't even know there were such things as Internet mailing lists. I felt like Aladdin who had just entered his cave! [top]

A Fiddler on the Roof
I have now been debating Creation/Evolution on the Internet for over a decade with atheist/agnostic evolutionists, theistic evolutionists, and creationists, some of whom are scientists or philosophers. I love the `Darwinian' ruthlessness of Internet discussion groups. Wrong facts and bad arguments are punished mercilessly sometimes by experts in that field, and only the "fittest" views survive (my opponents would say my views haven't survived, but I just don't realise it!). I feel like Tevye in A Fiddler on the Roof, whose dream was to "discuss the holy books with the learned men seven hours every day - and that would be the sweetest thing of all". I am finding the issue of Creation/Evolution the most fascinating thing I can imagine studying. I read everything related to Creation/Evolution I can get my hands on, including scientific journals, webbed science news items, and creationist, intelligent design and evolutionist books (the latter I find contain some of the best evidence against evolution!). Evolution seems to me like a fierce giant in a computer game I once played. No matter what I did, this fierce giant killed me. If I picked up a weapon to defend myself the giant killed me. If I ran away the giant killed me. If I stood still and did nothing the giant killed me. The giant seemed unbeatable and so I felt very discouraged. Then I did the only thing left I could do. I advanced unarmed straight towards the fierce giant and it backed away! Similarly I have found with evolution that the evolutionists act fierce and intimidating, but it is mostly bluff. When one advances towards them without fear they invariably back away. [top]

Progressive Creation
From my debates with evolutionists over the last four years, I am more and more convinced that while Darwinian evolution might be an adequate scientific theory to explain the comparatively minor variations among the lower taxa (microevolution), and even then it has its problems, it is an inadequate theory to explain the origin of life and of the higher taxa (macroevolution). I firmly believe that even though the scientific evidence has been selected and published by scientists who mostly have an anti-theistic bias⁶, it actually points to the Genesis 1 pattern of progressive creation by the intervention at strategic points in life's history by a supernatural Intelligent Designer (who I assume to be the Christian God) working through natural processes and existing materials. I call my position "Progressive (Mediate) Creation" (after the position of the great Presbyterian theologian Charles Hodge⁷). However, despite this overwhelming evidence for intelligent design in nature, the majority of scientists (including many of those who are Christians) still believe in what they call "the fact of evolution" even though they are vague about what mechanisms that are supposed to have caused it. My counter-argument is that if they don't know what caused evolution, then they don't really know that it was evolution. It might well have have been creation, that is, "a mediate, progressive creation; the power of God working in union with second causes"⁷! [top]

Evolution's catastrophic effect on Christianity
Jesus warned his followers that after him would come false teachers, and these would be recognised by their "fruit" (Mat. 7:15- 20). The Apostle Paul warned: "For the time will come when men will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear." (2 Tim. 4:3). Evolution, particularly the reigning Darwinian version, has had a catastrophic effect on Christianity⁸, and more than anything else is responsible for the evils of our modern world, including Nazism, Communism and, strangely enough, `robber-baron' Capitalism⁹. These are all manifestations of the underlying philosophy of materialism- naturalism which holds that either God doesn't exist (materialism), or if He does exist, then he doesn't intervene in nature (naturalism). I therefore conclude that belief in evolution is a "strong delusion" (2 Thess. 2:11), a terrible consequence of rejecting the plain evidence of creation (Rom. 1:18-32), and part of Satan's torrent of lies directed against the Church (Rev. 12:15-16). This is not to say that I believe that individual evolutionists are evil (I don't), but I do believe that Evolutionism, which functions as a modern secular "creation-myth"¹⁰, is evil and must be resisted to the end by all Christians. [top]

My calling
I believe I have been called by the Lord Jesus Christ to this apologetic ministry and it is part of that ministry to debate this issue with evolutionists(non-theistic and theistic) in as firm but as loving a way as possible. It should not be assumed that I am just a stereotypical, naive, `Bible-thumper,' who is wedded to Biblical literalism and rejects the scientific evidence out of hand. On the contrary, I believe all truth is God's truth and the facts of nature are just as sacred as the facts of Scripture¹¹. I therefore enjoy reading scientific books and journals and I am willing to be flexible in my interpretation of the Bible to more closely fit the facts where the evidence warrants it. I believe, on the basis of the text itself that Genesis 1- 11 is probably at least partly symbolic history (i.e. real history clothed in symbolic form)¹², and I accept all the empirical scientific evidence, including an old Earth, and common ancestry. I would have no problem even if Darwinian evolution was proved to be 100% true (i.e. its facts, not its philosophy), because the God of the Bible is fully in control of all events, even those that seem random to man (Prov. 16:33; 1Kings 22:34). Jesus said that not even one sparrow will die unless God wills it (Mat. 10:2930), which means that God is fully in control of natural selection. But if the Biblical God really exists there is no good reason to assume in advance that Darwinian (or any form of) naturalistic evolution is true! [top]

ID, CED & biology degree
In late 1997, I joined the Intelligent Design Movement. In 2000, I enrolled part-time in a Bachelor of Science (Biology) degree at Perth's Edith Cowan University. In late 2000, I left the Calvin Reflector after it was announced it was closing down and joined another Creation/Evolution Internet discussion group. However that group did not live up to its own rules of "providing a friendly atmosphere where members are free to share their knowledge but without fear of being attacked," so in February 2001 I left it and started my own Internet discussion group, CreationEvolutionDesign (CED). In late 2001 I retired and in 2002 commenced full-time study for my Biology degree. In December 2004 I received notification I had passed, with a distinction average. On 22 July 2005, having grown to 200+ members and over 500 posts a month, I terminated CED in order to make time to write my book, "Problems of Evolution (see below). In place of CED, I started a new blog, also called CreationEvolutionDesign. [top]

CED Blog & books
I had for a long time felt that I should write a book on creation/evolution. Many Christian friends had urged it and one Sunday our Pastor preached on the Parable of the Talents (Mt 25:14- 30) and even used as example of the "wicked, lazy" and "worthless servant" (Mt 25:26,30) a Christian who felt called to write something but was too afraid of the reaction! I felt the Lord was speaking through the Pastor to me personally, and after a number of false starts, in August 2003 started to write a summary of a book called "Progressive Creation." However, in November, 2003, I also felt that I had to first write an outline of another book called "Problems of Evolution." So from December 2004, I began writing online the draft of "Problems of Evolution" with "Progressive Creation" on the backburner. In April 2006, I decided to take a one-year detour to put my 6+ megabytes of online evolution quotes into an Evolution Quote Book. [top]

The Shroud of Turin
In January 2005 I bought a secondhand book, "Verdict on the Shroud" (1981), about the Shroud of Turin, co-authored by a Christian philosopher-theologian, Gary Habermas whose opinions I respected and trusted. Up till then I had given very little thought to the Shroud, thinking it to be just another fake medieval relic. But as I posted to my then Yahoo discussion group, from the evidence presented in the book (and from reading many books on the Shroud since), I accept that the Shroud of Turin is the very burial sheet of Christ and bears His crucified and resurrected image. In May 2007, I started posting on my CED blog a series, "Bogus: Shroud of Turin?" responding to an article (by a Christian) that the Shroud was "bogus". After responding to the 1988 radiocarbon dating of the Shroud's linen where it was claimed that it dated from the 14th century, the thought occurred to me that the Shroud's pollen could also be radiocarbon dated, but as far as I was aware no one had proposed this. To stake my claim for scientific priority I quickly wrote and posted on 28 May 2007 to my CED blog, "A proposal to radiocarbon-date the pollen of the Shroud of Turin." I then emailed two leading Shroud researchers, alerting them to post and they confirmed that it had not been proposed before and could potentially be a very important new line of research in Shroud of Turin studies. One of the Shroud researchers edits a leading Shroud of Turin journal, and he agreed to publish a paper with the same title to the next issue of his journal. So since then I have been working almost full-time on that paper. On 30 June 2007 I created a second blog, TheShroudofTurin (TSoT) solely devoted to Shroud of Turin related matters. [top]

Notes:

¹"That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of: the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins- all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built." (Russell, B., "A Free Man's Worship", in "Mysticism and Logic: And Other Essays," [1910], George Allen & Unwin: London, 1949, reprint, pp.47-48) [return]

²The reason I mention Jenny by name is because of the amazing "coincidence" that after not seeing her again for the best part of 25 years, when we moved back to Perth in 1994, in a city of 1 million people we found we were living only three doors from Jenny and her husband! [return]

³"If we believe that the God of creation is the God of redemption, and that the God of redemption is the God of creation, then we are committed to some very positive theory of harmonization between science and evangelicalism. God cannot contradict His speech in Nature by His speech in Scripture. If the Author of Nature and Scripture are the same God, then the two books of God must eventually recite the same story." (Ramm, B.L., "The Christian View of Science and Scripture," [1955] Paternoster: Exeter, Devon UK, 1967, reprint, p.25) [return]

⁴My first post to Fidonet of 15 February 1994 included: "Why must it be Creation versus Evolution? Genesis 1 - 2 has a lot of process in it `Let the earth bring forth...'. One of the key themes in the Genesis account of Creation is `separation'. `And God separated... light from darkness' ... `water from land' ... `day from night', etc. If forming by separating means making something new out of something existing, then it doesn't seem far from evolution to me...The whole Creation V Evolution thing just might be one gigantic smoke screen...Arguments about Creation V Evolution seem to me to just cloud these real issues of life." [return]

⁵I mention Laurie's name deliberately because, although he is well- known (even notorious) on Fidonet and the Internet for his strong young-Earth creationist stand (which I don't agree with), I owe him a debt of gratitude for his being instrumental in helping me see that there are problems with evolution that even evolutionists admit. [return]

⁶"... we all have to work with data that have been provided by metaphysical naturalists, and we have to decide how to remove the layers of naturalistic interpretation to uncover the facts that could have been interpreted differently." (Johnson, P.E., "Foreword," in Moreland, J.P., ed., "The Creation Hypothesis: Scientific Evidence for an Intelligent Designer", InterVarsity Press: Downers Grove IL, 1994, p.8) [return]

⁷"But while it has ever been the doctrine of the Church that God created the universe out of nothing by the word of his power, which creation was instantaneous and immediate, i. e., without the intervention of any second causes; yet it has generally been admitted that this is to be understood only of the original call of matter into existence. Theologians have, therefore, distinguished between a first and second, or immediate and mediate creation. The one was instantaneous, the other gradual; the one precludes the idea of any preexisting substance, and of cooperation, the other admits and implies both. There is evident ground for this distinction in the Mosaic account of the creation. God, we are told, " created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters." Here it is clearly intimated that the universe, when first created, was in a state of chaos, and that by the life-giving, organizing power of the Spirit of God, it was gradually moulded into the wonderful cosmos which we now behold. The whole of the first chapter of Genesis, after the first verse, is an account of the progress of creation; the production of light; the formation of an atmosphere; the separation of land and water; the vegetable productions of the earth the animals of the sea and air; then the living creatures of the earth; and, last of all, man....There is, therefore, according to the Scriptures, not only an immediate, instantaneous creation ex nihilo by the simple word of God, but a mediate, progressive creation; the power of God working in union with second causes." (Hodge, C., "Systematic Theology," [1892], James Clark & Co: London, 1960, Vol. I, reprint, pp.556-557) [return]

⁸"As far as Christianity was concerned, the advent of the theory of evolution and the elimination of traditional teleological thinking was catastrophic. The suggestion that life and man are the result of chance is incompatible with the biblical assertion of their being the direct result of intelligent creative activity. Despite the attempt by liberal theology to disguise the point, the fact is that no biblically derived religion can really be compromised with the fundamental assertion of Darwinian theory. Chance and design are antithetical concepts, and the decline in religious belief can probably be attributed more to the propagation and advocacy by the intellectual and scientific community of the Darwinian version of evolution than to any other single factor. Today ensconced in our comfortable agnosticism, after a century of exposure to the idea of evolution and quite inured to the idea of a universe without purpose, we tend to forget just what a shock wave the advent of evolution sent through the Christian society of Victorian England." (Denton, M.J., "Evolution: A Theory in Crisis," Burnett Books: London, 1985, p.66) [return]

⁹Clark, R.E.D., "Darwin: Before and After: An Examination and Assessment," [1948] Paternoster: London, 1966, reprint, pp.115-118, 105-107. [return]

¹⁰"The twentieth century would be incomprehensible without the Darwinian revolution. The social and political currents which have swept the world in the past eighty years would have been impossible without its intellectual sanction. It is ironic to recall that it was the increasingly secular outlook in the nineteenth century which initially eased the way for the acceptance of evolution, while today it is perhaps the Darwinian view of nature more than any other that is responsible for the agnostic and sceptical outlook of the twentieth century. What was once a deduction from materialism has today become its foundation. The influence of evolutionary theory on fields far removed from biology is one of the most spectacular examples in history of how a highly speculative idea for which there is no really hard scientific evidence can come to fashion the thinking of a whole society and dominate the outlook of an age. Considering its historic significance and the social and moral transformation it caused in western thought one might have hoped that Darwinian theory was capable of complete, comprehensive and entirely plausible explanation for all biological phenomena from the origin of life on through all its diverse manifestations up to, and including, the intellect of man. That it is neither fully plausible, nor comprehensive, is deeply troubling. One might have expected that a theory of such cardinal importance, a theory that literally changed the world, would have been something more than metaphysics, something more than a myth. Ultimately the Darwinian theory of evolution is no more nor less than the great cosmogenic myth of the twentieth century." (Denton, M.J., "Evolution: A Theory in Crisis," Burnett Books: London, 1985, pp.358-359). return

¹¹"Nature is as truly a revelation of God as the Bible, and we interpret the Word of God by the Word of God when we interpret the Bible by science. As this principle is undeniably true, it is admitted and acted on by those who, through inattention to the meaning of terms, in words deny it. When the Bible speaks of the foundations, or of the pillars of the earth, or of the solid heavens, or of the motion of the sun, do not you and every other sane man, interpret this language by the facts of science? For five thousand years the Church understood the Bible to teach that the earth stood still in space, and that the sun and stars revolved around it. Science has demonstrated that this is not true. Shall we go on to interpret the Bible so as to make it teach the falsehood that the sun moves around the earth, or shall we interpret it by science, and make the two harmonize? Of course, this rule works both ways. If the Bible cannot contradict science, neither can science contradict the Bible. ... There is a two-fold evil on this subject against which it would be well for Christians to guard. There are some good men who are much too ready to adopt the opinions and theories of scientific men, and to adopt forced and unnatural interpretations of the Bible, to bring it to accord with those opinions. There are others, who not only refuse to admit the opinions of men, but science itself, to have any voice in the interpretation of Scripture. Both of these errors should be avoided." (Hodge, C., "The Bible in Science," New York Observer, Mar, 26, 1863 pp.98-99; in Noll, M.A., "The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind," [1994], Eerdmans: Grand Rapids MI, 1995, reprint, pp.183-184. Ellipses Noll's) [return]

¹²"I do not enter into the question of how we are to interpret the third chapter of Genesis,-whether as history or allegory or myth, or, most probably of all, as old tradition clothed in oriental allegorical dress,-but the truth embodied in that narrative, viz. the fall of man from an original state of purity, I take to be vital to the Christian view." (Orr, J., "The Christian View of God and the World," [1887], Kregel: Grand Rapids MI, 1989, p185). [return]

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