Genesis 1:24, 25: And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so. 25And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good.
What about cavemen? For the Scriptural answer, we examine:
- Historical Context: The author of the Book of Genesis is not identified but attributed as Moses, writing around 1440 – 1400 B.C. Many of the great questions of life are answered in Genesis. (1) Where did I come from? (God created us – Genesis 1:1) (2) Why am I here? (we are here to have a relationship with God – Genesis 15:6) (3) Where am I going? (we have a destination after death – Genesis 25:8). Genesis appeals to the scientist, the historian, the theologian, the housewife, the farmer, the traveler, and the man or woman of God. It is a fitting beginning for God’s story of His plan for mankind, the Bible. The overriding theme of Genesis is God’s eternal existence and His creation of the world. There is no effort on the part of the author to defend the existence of God; he simply states that God is, always was, and always will be, almighty over all. In the same way, we have confidence in the truths of Genesis, despite the claims of those who would deny them. All people, regardless of culture, nationality or language, are accountable to the Creator. But because of sin, introduced into the world at the Fall, we are separated from Him. But through one small nation, Israel, God’s redemptive plan for mankind was revealed and made available to all by the work of Jesus Christ foreshadowed in Genesis 3:15, immediately after the Fall.
- Grammatical Usage: V. 24: “God” in the Hebrew is “’elohiym” is a masculine noun in the plural (often referred to as the “plural of majesty” appearing some 2, 570 times meaning, “the Lord God of heaven and earth…the subject of all divine activity revealed to man therefore the object of all true reverence and fear of man”; “earth” or “’erets” meaning, “inhabitants”; “forth” or “Yatsa’” meaning, “causative…to come from as a result…an emphasis upon source or origin”; “creature” or “Nephesh” meaning, “that which breaths…a breathing substance indicating life”; V. 25: “kind” or “Miyn” meaning, “species” [Groups of living organisms belong in the same created “kind” if they have descended from the same ancestral gene pool. This does not preclude new species because this represents a partitioning of the original gene pool. Information is lost or conserved not gained. A new species could arise when a population is isolated and inbreeding occurs. By this definition a new species is not a new “kind” but a further partitioning of an existing “kind” and does not support classical evolutionist view which requires developments across kingdom, phyla and classes.]; “good” or “Towb” meaning, “pleasant, agreeable and of practical benefit in an aesthetic, substantive or economic sense.”
- Literal Application: “And ‘elohiym, God of all creation who is be reverenced and feared said, ‘Let the inhabitants cause to reproduce its life as offspring of the same species – livestock, small animals that scurry on the ground and wild animals.’ And that is what happened. 25 God made all sorts of wild animals, livestock, and small animals, each able to produce offspring of the same kind. And God saw that it was pleasant, agreeable and practical in that each proved a marvel as well as fulfilling a function within creation.”
- Contextual Interpretation: The basic creation story is found in Genesis 1 and 2 and with the account of the Garden of Eden in chapter 3. Genesis 1 begins before the existence of anything except God Himself. Since this is the case, there is no such thing as a “pre-historic” time. God’s revelation of Himself and His will for mankind is the beginning. In this beginning, God created everything in the universe in six literal 24-hour days. This includes all the heavenly bodies (including every star and planet), as well as everything on the earth. While the triune nature of God is not explicit in the Genesis account, God does reveal an “us” within the Godhead (Genesis 1:26). The Spirit is active in creation (Genesis 1:2) as is Christ (John 1:1-3; Colossians 1:15-17).
In the six days of Creation, God formed the universe and the earth (day 1), the sky and the atmosphere (day 2), dry land and all plant life (day 3), the stars and heavenly bodies including the sun and moon (day 4), birds and water creatures (day 5), and all the animals and man (day 6).
Chapter 1:24-31 is by far the longest section given over to a particular day, indicating that day 6 is the peak of interest for this passage. The final region to be filled is the dry land, or Earth (as it has been designated in v.10). Here a significant distinction is drawn between all the living creatures that are created to live on the dry land, and human beings. Whereas vv. 24-25 deal with the “living creatures” that the earth is to bring forth, vv. 26-30 concentrate on the special status assigned to humans.
Chapter 1:24-25, our specific text, deals with livestock and creeping things and beasts of the earth. These terms group the land-dwelling animals into three broad categories, reflecting the way nomadic shepherds would experience them:
- the domestic stock animals (e.g., sheep, goats, cattle and perhaps camels and horses);
- the small crawlers (e.g., rats and mice, lizards, spiders);
- the larger game and predatory animals (e.g., gazelles, lions).
This list is not intended to prove exhaustive, but provide examples as to the respective categories.
Mankind is special above all other creatures because he bears the image of God and has the responsibility to steward and subdue the earth. All of creation was completed in six days in all its vast array and wondrous beauty. The six literal 24-hour days have no time spans separating the days. God announced that His creation was very good. Genesis 2 sees the completion of God’s work and gives a detailed account of the creation of man.
The seventh day is marked by God resting. This is not because God was tired, but He rested or ceased from His act of creating. This establishes a pattern of taking one day in seven for rest and sets the number of days in the week still in use today. The keeping of the Sabbath will be a distinguishing mark of God’s chosen people (Exodus 20:8-11.)
Genesis next takes a closer look at the creation of man. This passage is not a second creation account, nor is it contradictory to Genesis 1. The account simply takes a step away from a linear report to refocus the reader on God’s work concerning man specifically. God formed man from the dust of the earth He had previously created. After forming man, God breathed life into him. The fact that God chose to form man this way shows His great care in this process. God next placed the first man, Adam, in a special place, the Garden of Eden. Eden was beautiful and bountiful. Adam had almost everything he needed including food and productive work. However, God was not done with man.
God helped Adam to see his need for a mate by having him review all the other creatures and naming them. Adam understood that he needed a mate. God caused Adam to sleep and then formed Eve with as much care as he formed Adam. Eve was made from Adam’s rib. When Adam saw her, he understood that she was special. She was his counterpart, his complement, and flesh of his flesh. God made both Adam and Eve in His image (Genesis 1:27). This passage establishes the family as the basic building block of society (Genesis 1:24; Matthew 19:5-6.) As a God-ordained institution, marriage is to be only between one man and one woman. Adam and Eve were created in a state of innocence (Genesis 1:25) and had not committed any sin. They enjoyed communion with God in Eden. Part of the relationship was the inclusion of one simple rule: Adam and Eve were forbidden to eat from one tree and only one tree in the entire Garden (Genesis 1:17).
At some point Eve was tempted by the serpent to eat from this one tree, which she did. Adam also ate from the forbidden tree. Adam and Eve sinned against God and lost their innocence (Genesis 2:8-12). Sin brought consequences. God cursed the serpent to crawl forever on the ground and be hated by men. God cursed Eve to pain in childbirth and conflict with her husband and He cursed Adam with toil and hardship in his labors (Genesis 3:14-19). Part of the consequences for their sin included Adam and Eve being expelled from the Garden (Genesis 3:22-24.) But also included in the consequences is a message of hope. The first mention of the coming Messiah is found in Genesis 3:15. He would come to crush the Serpent (Satan), but not before Satan bruised Him at the Cross. Even in the midst of sin and its dire consequences, God shows Himself to be a God of grace and mercy and love.
- Scriptural Comparison: What about “Theistic Evolution”?
Under the banner of “theistic evolution,” a growing number of Christians maintain that God used evolution as His method for creation. This, in my estimation, is the worst of all possibilities. It is one thing to believe in evolution; it is quite another to blame God for it. Not only is theistic evolution a contradiction in terms—like the phrase flaming snowflakes—but in the words of the Nobel prize-winning evolutionist Jacques Monod: “[Natural] selection is the blindest, and most cruel way of evolving new species….The struggle for life and elimination of the weakest is a horrible process, against which our whole modern ethic revolts….I am surprised that a Christian would defend the idea that this is the process which God more or less set up in order to have evolution.”
First, the biblical account of creation specifically states that God created living creatures according to their own “kinds” (Gen. 1:24–25). As confirmed by science, the DNA for a fetus is not the DNA for a frog, and the DNA for a frog is not the DNA for a fish; rather the DNA of a fetus, frog, or fish is uniquely programmed for reproduction after its own kind. Thus while the Bible allows for microevolution (transitions within “the kinds”) it does not allow for macroevolution (amoebas evolving into apes or apes evolving into astronauts).
Furthermore, evolutionary biology cannot account for metaphysical realities such as ego and ethos. Without data demonstrating that physical processes can produce metaphysical realities, there is no warrant for dogmatically declaring that humans evolved from hominids (two-legged primates).
Finally, an omnipotent, omniscient God does not have to painfully plod through millions of mistakes, misfits, and mutations in order to have fellowship with humans. As the biblical account of creation confirms, He can create humans instantaneously (Gen. 2:7) and had immediate fellowship (Genesis 2:16; 3:9).
Evolutionism is fighting for its very life. Rather than prop it up with theories like theistic evolution, thinking people everywhere must be given to demonstrating its demise.
What about Neanderthal man?
The first Neanderthal bones were unearthed in 1856 and were soon touted as supporting Darwin’s 1859 theory of human descent from the animals. And ever since, Neanderthals have been presented as beetle-browed, bowlegged, brutes-half ape and half man. School students and museum visitors worldwide still believe that this “caveman” was a sub-human ancestor.
It surprises many to find out that in recent years, Neanderthal has been upgraded to fully human—an ethnic group with certain distinctive characteristics, but a bonafide member of Homo sapiens. The only controversy, which remains, is whether or not the Neanderthal group went extinct or merged with other humans.
The Homo sapiens designation was given after it was recognized that Neanderthals had, on average, a larger brain size than modern man, with a fully developed language center. Culturally, he cared for his sick and elderly, buried his dead, employed art and religious rites, appreciated agriculture, clothing, and music. His cultural level was “primitive” compared to 21st century technology, but not all that different from many people groups worldwide in recent centuries.
So what do we make of the recent recovery of Neanderthal DNA which places him genetically outside the range of modern human ethnic groups? Does this prove the evolution of man from the apes? A close look at the real data actually supports the creationist view.
The DNA was recovered from the bone of the first Neanderthal discovered, an individual so riddled with rickets and old age that his legs had bowed. The DNA was mitochondrial DNA, not from the cell nucleus, and only 379 base pairs out of 16,500 (thus about 2%) of the total. It was found to differ from standard human mtDNA in 27 locations. Since modern human mtDNA differs on average in only eight locations within this stretch of 379, it was concluded that Neanderthals were probably not closely related to humans.
However, modern human mtDNA varies beyond the average, with the extremes statistically overlapping the Neanderthal measurement. Since all modern humans are interfertile (can mate and reproduce), this measurement does not place them outside the family.
From a creationist perspective, the Neanderthals were descendants of Noah—a language group that migrated away from Babel and found themselves in harsh “Ice Age” conditions with a meager lifestyle. Linguistic and geographic isolation may have produced a variant, but still human, genome. Whether they went extinct or interbred with others is not yet known, but from what we do know based upon recent DNA evidence, they were as human as you and I.
The Bible speaks of the very earliest cultures as being highly civilized, with musical instruments, woven tents and clothes, metal working, animal husbandry, etc. (Genesis 4:3-4; 17-22). The fact that we find people in the very earliest times living in caves simply means that they lived in caves instead of houses. We find people around the world doing this very thing today. For instance, some families living along a 40 mile stretch of the Rhone River in France dwell in the caves that are situated there. The Bible has incidents of cave dwelling also. Refugees lived in caves (Genesis 19:30; Judges 6:2; 1 Samuel 13:6).
Man and Apes Have a Separate Ancestry?
Although highly imaginative “transitional forms” between man and ape-like creatures have been constructed by evolutionists based on very fragmentary evidence, the fossil record actually documents the separate origin of primates in general (Kelso, A.J., Physical Anthropology, 2nd ed., Philadelphia, J.B. Lippincott, 1974. p 142), monkeys (Ibid., pp.150,151), apes (Simons, E.L., Annals N.Y. Acad. Science. V.102, 1962, p.293, Simons, E.L., “The Early Relatives of Man,” Scientfic American, V.211, July 1964 p 50), and men. In fact, Lord Zuckerman (not a creationist) states that there are no “fossil traces” of a transformation from an ape-like creature to man (Zuckerman, Sir Solly, Beyond the Ivory Tower, New York, Taplinger Pub. Co., 1970, p.64). The fossils of Neanderthal Man were once considered to represent a primitive sub-human (Homo neanderthalensis), but these “primitive” features are now known to have resulted from nutritional deficiencies and pathological conditions; he is now classified as fully human (Ivanhoe, Francis, “Was Virchow Right about Neandert[h]al?”, Nature V. 227, 1970, p. 57). Ramapithecus was once considered to be partially man-like, but is now known to be fully ape-like (Zuckerman, pp. 75-94; Eckhardt, Robert B., “Population Genetics and Human Origins”, Scientific American, V.226, 1972, pp.94,101), Australopithecus, in the view of some leading evolutionists, was not intermediate between ape and man and did not walk upright (Oxnard, Charles E., “Human Fossils: New Views of Old Bones,” American Biology Teacher, V.41, 1979, p.264). The strong bias of many evolutionists in seeking a link between apes and man is shown by the near-universal acceptance of two “missing links” that were later proved to be a fraud in the case of Piltdown Man (Eoanthropus) and a pig’s tooth in the case of Nebraska Man (Hesperopithecus) (Straus, William L., “The Great Piltdown Hoax,” Science, V.119, 1954, p.265 (Piltdown Man); Gregory, William K., “Hesperopithecus Apparently Not an Ape Nor a Man,” Science, V.66,1927, p. 579).
Creation/Evolution Model Summary
| The creation model includes the scientific evidence and the related inferences suggesting that: | The evolution model includes the scientific evidence and the related inferences suggesting that: |
| I. The universe and the Solar system were suddenly created. | I. The universe and the solar system emerged by naturalistic processes. |
| II. Life was suddenly created. | II. Life emerged from nonlife by naturalistic processes. |
| III. All present living kinds of animals and plants have remained fixed since creation, other than extinctions, and genetic variation in originally created kinds has only occurred within narrow limits. | III. All present kinds emerged from simpler earlier kinds, so that single-celled organisms evolved into invertebrates, then vertebrates, then amphibians, then reptiles, then mammals, then primates, including man. |
| IV. Mutation and natural selection are insufficient to have brought about any emergence of present living kinds from a simple primordial organism. | IV. Mutation and natural selection have brought about the emergence of present complex kinds from a simple primordial organism. |
| V. Man and apes have a separate ancestry. | V. Man and apes emerged from a common ancestor. |
| VI. The earth’s geologic features appear to have been fashioned largely by rapid, catastrophic processes that affected the earth on a global and regional scale (catastrophism). | VI. The earth’s geologic features were fashioned largely by slow, gradual processes, with infrequent catastrophic events restricted to a local scale (uniformitarianism). |
| VII. The inception of the earth and of living kinds may have been relatively recent. | VII. The inception of the earth and then of life must have occurred several billion years ago. |
- Conclusion: Dr. Louis Bounoure, former director of research at the French National Center for Scientific Research, calls evolution “a fairy tale for grown-ups.” (Phillip E. Johnson, Darwin on Trial, 2nd ed. (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1993) I call it a cruel hoax! In fact, the arguments that support evolutionary theory are astonishingly weak.
First, the fossil record is an embarrassment to evolutionists. No verifiable transitions from one kind to another have as yet been found. Charles Darwin had an excuse; in his day fossil finds were relatively scarce. Today, however, we have an abundance of fossils. Still, we have yet to find even one legitimate transition from one kind to another. In fact, as demonstrated with Neanderthal man, the modern DNA research technique denies the heretofore held transitional theory.
Furthermore, in Darwin’s day such enormously complex structures as a human egg were thought to be quite simple—for all practical purposes, little more than a microscopic blob of gelatin. Today, we know that a fertilized human egg is among the most organized, complex structures in the universe. In an age of scientific enlightenment, it is incredible to think people are willing to maintain that something so vastly complex arose by any other means then design. Like an egg or the human eye, the universe is a masterpiece of precision and design that could not have come into existence by chance. Instead it was created by and reflection of ‘elohiym who pronounced it “good.”
Finally, while chance is a blow to the theory of evolution, the laws of science are a bullet to its head. The basic laws of science, including the laws of effects and their causes (again, Genesis 1:24, “forth”) —energy conservation and entropy—undergird the creation model for origins and undermine the evolutionary hypothesis. While I would fight for a person’s right to have faith in science fiction, we must resist evolutionists who attempt to brainwash people into thinking that evolution is science.
There is scientific evidence for creation from cosmology, thermodynamics, paleontology, biology, mathematical probability, geology, and other sciences. There are many scientists in each field who conclude that the scientific data best supports the creation model, not the evolution model leaving us with yet more evidence as to the demonstrated abilities of our God and the truth of His Word.