We noted in our last issue that the fundamental difference between one who embraces creation and one who embraces evolution is not the data, but the approach that one brings to interpret the data. It so happens that there is a third alternative which men have concocted. This inventive group seeks to blur the lines and straddle the fence of the evolution/creation debate. They are hybrid evolutionists or creation compromisers and their approach is different yet than what we previously discussed. This alternative group is divided under two major umbrellas: theistic evolution and progressive creationism. Where as evolutionists approach the world and see not God, and creationists approach the world believing in the infallibility of God's revealed word, theistic evolutionists and progressive creationists approach God's word to find and inject evolutionary assumptions and time! Truly their quest is a circus act of attaining "respectability" from a scientific world of cynicism while walking on a tight-rope juggling the scriptures. The irony is that they become rejected by both creationists and evolutionists. Notwithstanding, human wisdom is their supreme standard of authority and scientists in white robes are their high priests. And so they will readily drop the juggling of scripture and re-interpret it, rather than fall from their lofty place on the tightrope of human speculation. David Matthews, one who rejects taking Genesis literally, wrote: "Christians should keep in mind that it is much easier to re-interpret the Bible than it is to compress billions of years of history into a six or ten thousand year time frame" (The Pronouncements of Science, par. 4, www.geocities.com/dmathew1). Few are so honest!

Identifying These Approaches:

• Theistic-evolution: Essentially believes that God "kick started" the creation but allowed evolutionary processes to bring about the organic and inorganic creation. Their approach is evolutionary.
  
  

• "Gap" Theory: This theory holds that there is an extremely large but undefined span of time that is crammed between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2. God supposedly created and destroyed the world in this alleged gap. This span of time becomes their "black hole" to throw all hard to explain things into (i.e., dinosaurs, uniformitarian geologic history, etc.). Gappists wish to translate Genesis 1:2 as, "The earth became formless and empty" rather than as it is, "The earth WAS without form and void." The Bible nowhere teaches that the world was ruined and restored before Adam.
  
  

• Multiple Gap Theory: This theory teaches that the days of Genesis were literal 24 hour days, but that there were gaps of long ages between each day. Space limits us in discussing this, but we are to speak where the Bible speaks and not invent something from its silence (I Pet. 4:11).
  
  

• Day-age Theory: This theory, as advocated by Shane Scott, Bible professor at Florida College, teaches that the days of Genesis were not literal 24 hour days, but figurative for long ages of time. In fact, brother Scott contended in his article, The Days of Genesis:
  "All of the other days of creation ended with the phrase, 'and there was evening and there was morning, a xth day.' I understand that phrase to mean that each of those days had a distinct conclusion. However, there is no such statement for the seventh day, which must mean that it has not ended. . .and that day has continued until now because He still 'rests' from creating new life" (Sentry Magazine, Vol. 21, No. 1).
  God's seventh-day rest was not a continuum for thousands of years any more than the Jewish Sabbath was ". . .on the seventh day He rested and was refreshed" (Ex. 31:17; cf. Gen. 2:2).