GOD'S REVELATION IN HIS ROCKS AND HIS WORD

The Need

This paper is a part of the Does God Exist? program which was begun in 1968 by John Clayton as an attempt to show that intelligent, scientifically literate, thinking people can and should believe in God and in the Bible as his Word. I, John Clayton, was a science teacher who began [more]

The Nature of Fossils

I am a high school earth science teacher. I took my advanced degree work in a program sponsored by the National Science Foundation and, since it was government sponsored and involved locations all over the United States, I was able to see first-hand the geology of [more]

The Nature of Dating Techniques

We are not just interested in what the stories are that the fossils have to tell us, but we are also interested in when those stories took place. When we find a plant-eating dinosaur with a Tyrannosaurus rex (T. rex) tooth imbedded in its hip bone, we would like to date the bite. [more]

Biblical Time

How old does the Bible say that man, life in general, and the earth are? The first point that needs to be made is that God can do whatever God likes! God has the power to create the cosmos as it is, with you sitting there reading this, the paper in your hands, the memories [more]

The Nature of the Biblical Account

We have spent a great deal of time discussing what the Bible does not say. The remainder of this discussion is about what the Bible does say. Before we start a verse-by-verse examination of the Genesis account, there are a number of basic understandings about the nature of the biblical account that need to be understood. The first of these is that we are not reading a document written in the twenty-first century for one scientific scholar to communicate with another. We are reading a document that is designed to be read by the ancient [more]

The History of Creation According to the Bible and the Fossils

It may be helpful to the reader to use the biblical text with the Hebrew words that are listed in Appendix A to follow this discussion. The first verse of Genesis is a creation (bara) verse, not a making (asah) verse. The things created, according to verse 1, are the heaven (shamayim) and the earth (erets). What this means is that everything above and everything below were brought into existence by a miraculous act of God. It is interesting that the Hebrew shamayim, according to Young’s Analytical Concordance to the Bible, has a root that [more]

What about Dinosaurs?

The one remaining question in our study of the Genesis account is the question of how prehistoric creatures like the dinosaurs fit into the Genesis account. Before tackling this subject, it is important to present an explanation of our approach to the words of Genesis. It is our belief that, in order to have any meaningful understanding of the Bible, we must understand words to always have the same meaning unless there is an unquestionably unique reason why they do not (such as the biblical writer redefining a term). A New Testament example might be useful. [more]

Conclusion

God created basic animals in a number of groups. The flesh groups are identified while insects, worms, etc., are not. Changes have occurred within these groups. An understanding of these changes allows a great deal of biological understanding. In the prehistory of the earth in Genesis 1:1-3 the earth went through an undated, untimed period in which the resources man would need were produced. They were produced by the original materials being created and then being altered by natural processes so that man could find them. As our knowledge gets better, we find [more]

Appendixes

Front Matter

THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO
Karl H. Marcussen

• — Karl has served God without flare or notoriety, but is one of the most dedicated Christians I have ever known.
• — It is Karl who will do what no one else wants to do and will do so without complaint or negativism.
• — His willingness to help anyone, his openness and fairness, and his quiet unassuming manner has been an
  ....inspiration to me personally.
• — He has helped us when water backed up in our house and I was out of town conducting a lecture series, when
  ....transportation was needed, every time something needed to be fixed, or when we just simply felt like talking.
• — Without Karl, the Does God Exist? program would never have been able to reach out to people at no cost to
  ....them and help them meet the challenges of our day and solve the faith problems of the twenty-first century.
• — Thank you, Karl, for radiating Christ and his Spirit so powerfully.