“For this they willfully forget: that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of water and in the water…”
(This devotional is out of the norm for Verse-by-Verse Commentary in that we deal here with some scientific and philosophical issues of evolution and creation.)
that by the word of God the heavens were of old
God created by His “word.” Ten times in the first chapter of the first book of the Bible, we read, “And God said.” God created the world through his “word.” He did not use the process of evolution but spoke the universe into existence. Creation “by the word” is what we call special creation. God created the world ex nihilo (out of nothing).
Ps 33:6, “By the word of the Lord the heavens were made,
And all the host of them by the breath of His mouth.”
He 11:3, “By faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that the things which are seen were not made of things which are visible.”
and the earth standing out of water and in the water
On the third day of creation, the earth emerged from the water (Ge 1:9-10).
The Bible submits a cosmology of the universe in this passage. The cosmos is ordered the opposite of chaos. God is a God of order. He, therefore, made creation a place of order and system.
Biblical cosmology is the opposite of uniformitarianism, which attributes the origin and development of all things in the cosmos to innate laws and processes eternally resident therein, with neither beginning nor end. Biblical cosmology presents the destiny of the cosmos in terms of the creating, sustaining of the universe by a transcendent yet immanent and personal God. God reveals the origin and nature of the universe, primarily in the Bible, not only in creation itself.
All present creation processes are basically processes of conservation and disintegration, not processes of creation and integration.
Uniformitarianism will be the philosophy of “latter day” thinking. Without the principle of uniformitarianism, there would barely be a science of geology. This flies in the face of special, instantaneous creation.
Catastrophism holds that one or more catastrophes influenced the shaping of geological formations. Catastrophism is a fighting word among present-day evolutionists. Geology suffers from great want of scientific data. Some evidence contradicts uniformitarianism, such as pollen grains in Pre-Cambrian rock in the Grand Canyon.
Present processes from the viewpoint of Scripture are the process of providence, of sustaining, upholding, and preserving (Co 1:17; He 1:3; 2 Pe 3:7) rather than the process of evolution. The basic structure of cosmic law (energy and entropy) supports creation. Energy is the capacity of a system to accomplish something. Entropy is a state of randomness and disorder.
The first law of thermodynamics is the conservation of mass-energy. Nothing is now being created, but all things are in the process of preservation. The first law testifies that the beginning of the cosmos could have never been accomplished within present processes, none of which are creative processes.
The second law of thermodynamics is the entropy of a system must increase without the injection of intelligence. This is what we call a “closed system.” A closed system is isolated from external sources or ordering energy. However, the system may be enlarged to any arbitrary size, even to that of the cosmos itself, in so far as the actual scientific evidence goes. Systems tend to become disorganized, approaching a maximum state of disorder or “death.” If the universe were indefinitely old, it would have already reached this state of maximum entropy. Since the cosmos is still far from dead, it must have had a beginning. The present, conservative processes of the cosmos could not have accomplished that beginning.
Summary: all present processes are basically processes of conservation and disintegration, not creation and integration processes.
The presupposition of natural science that our universe is an infinitely closed cosmology (all reality is declared to be within this realm of energy and matter) defined its own reality. However, this is not science at all but is a philosophy at its core.
To postulate creative processes that scientists cannot prove by the scientific method is just as metaphysical as to postulate a Creator. The failure of uniformitarianism to establish its presuppositions scientifically has led to physics making metaphysics in science. To postulate creative processes that cannot be proven by the scientific method must now be as metaphysical as to postulate a Creator.