The Supposed Gap Theory
Just a word about the supposed gap theory. If you have never heard of the gap theory you haven’t missed much. Some see a “gap” between Genesis verses 1 and 2 where Satan falls and sin and chaos enter the world before the fall of mankind. They say Satan’s fall left the earth in darkness and covered with water as a divine judgment. Then, they believe, that God “re-created” the world in the literal days described in Genesis 1:3-31. The main purpose for this has been to harmonize evolution with the Bible. This is the only way these theistic evolutionists can account for the geological ages (otherwise known as dinosaur years) necessary for evolution to take place. But not only is their motivation suspect, so is their scientific premise.
The gap theory does not account for the billions of years it says it does (to read more about this click – here). The system of geological ages is based completely on the theory of uniformitarianism. That is a big word, but simply put it is the belief that physical processes have always functioned in the past essentially as they do today, and implies vast amounts of geological time. This is an important theory and will be proved to be scientifically false in Chapter 7. Uniformitarianism would eliminate any worldwide punishment from God as required by the gap theory. Therefore, the gap theory is self-defeating scientifically. It attempts to accommodate the geological ages by postulating a worldwide catastrophe, but a worldwide catastrophe denies the premise on which the geological age system is based, and would indeed wipe out all the so-called evidence of the geological ages. A worldwide catastrophe that would leave the earth formless and empty, with darkness and waters covering it would take nothing less than a global explosion, blowing billions of tons of earth into the sky. This kind of an explosion would wipe out the sedimentary crust and all its fossils. You can’t have it both ways. Either the LORD destroyed the earth and re-created it or He didn’t. If the earth were destroyed, the earth and all the geological age evidence for evolution would be destroyed with it. But the gap theory is not only impossible scientifically, it is also damaging theologically.
Anyone who accepts the gap theory accepts the fossil record that goes along with it. Fossils, however, are dead things! And if the world of dinosaurs existed before the worldwide catastrophe necessary for the gap theory, then it existed before the sin of Satan that brought on the catastrophe. That is, suffering and death existed for billions of years before the sin of Satan and the subsequent sin of Adam. But the Bible is clear that sin and death came into the world only through Adam (Romans 5:12 and First Corinthians 15:21-22). This directly contradicts the assumption of the gap theory. God’s normal method is to work from chaos to order. Therefore, before the earth was formed, the Spirit of God moved to create order out of disorder. This is the natural reading of the first two verses of Genesis.12
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