The Parable of Creation

And the disciples came and said to Him, “Why do You speak to them in parables?” Jesus answered them, “To you it has been granted to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been granted. For whoever has, to him more shall be given, and he will have an abundance; but whoever does not have, even what he has shall be taken away from him. Therefore I speak to them in parables; because while seeing they do not see, and while hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand. In their case the prophecy of Isaiah is being fulfilled, which says,

‘You will keep on hearing, but will not understand;
You will keep on seeing, but will not perceive;
For the heart of this people has become dull,
With their ears they scarcely hear,
And they have closed their eyes,
Otherwise they would see with their eyes,
Hear with their ears,
And understand with their heart and return,
And I would heal them.’

But blessed are your eyes, because they see; and your ears, because they hear.
Matthew 13:10-16 NASB

par·a·ble [par-uh-buhl]: a short fictitious story designed to illustrate or teach some truth, religious principle, or moral lesson.

Origin: 1275–1325; Middle English parabil  < Late Latin parabola  comparison, parable, word < Greek parabolḗ  comparison, equivalent to para- side by side + bolḗ  a throwing

Synonyms: allegory, homily, apologue.
Dictionary.com Unabridged
Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2013.

When Jesus explained to his disciples the reason he taught in parables, he was not giving them instructions to follow in order to achieve effective pedagogy. Just the opposite, in fact: parables, as used by Jesus, were meant to be equivocal in order to give an out to those not willing to learn. Some would consider that deceptive, I consider that brilliant, and far more to the point--effective to the purpose Jesus was aiming to achieve.

Two classes of audience would hear the parable and both would perceive it differently. The same words, the same syntax, the same context, and yet those in one part of the audience were meant to understand one thing, and those in the other part something else. This was not due to flaws in communication, nor glitches in reception, it was by design and it worked perfectly.

Jesus' use of parables was meant to filter out those with faith. Those listeners with the faith perspective Jesus desired, would hear the parable, and with some added elucidation, understand the divine truth contained therein. Those without the faith perspective Jesus desired would hear the parable and not see divine truth at all. Advertisers today attempt to do something similar in public media by using their craft to target a more specific audience within a broader one.

I see the creation as a parable spoken by God. One not communicated in words capable of being reduced to ink on a page, but one assembled in subatomic particles and fields and perceived as reality. Like the parables of Jesus, it is not produced so as to garner the same perception in one group that sees it as it does in another. Either group looks at the same phenomena, the same facts, sees the same interactions, and uses the same mathematical language to describe it, but they see a different underlying message.

For those with the faith perspective God desires, it's divine message is all too clear. For those without that perspective, they see no divine message at all. Someone might protest that that is deceptive. If it is (and I don't think that is the case), it is no more deceptive than Jesus teaching by parables. God knows what makes for everlasting life and is well within his rights to filter for that amongst the creatures he's made in his image. The problem involved is with the hearers and seers, not with the communicator.

And let's be clear here: this phenomenon is not a mere accident, the foibles of communication, nor simply a trick. There is an "otherwise" at play in this that the unhearing consciously act according to. There are consequences to seeing or hearing with a faith perspective, repercussions that are just too repulsive to abide in their judgment. So they close their eyes, and stop their ears, and guard their hearts against the parable of creation.

The Incompatibility of the Bible and Evolution

I find it very disturbing that so many folks identify themselves as Bible-believing followers of Christ and yet embrace evolution. The Bible and evolution are incompatible as is betrayed by the labyrinthine exegesis of Genesis those who attempt to syncretize them invariably use to do so. The Bible says that God created life, and death followed afterwards: the evolutionist says that life was created through death. The overarching concepts are clearly at odds with with one another, and the details assure immiscibility.

The syncretic approach to origins, Theistic Evolution, is a result of faithlessness not evidence. There is not now, nor will there ever be a slam-dunk case for a scientific approach to origins that stands in opposition to the Word. Evolution relies upon trust in a godless narrative, Creationism on a God-inspired one, to fill in the speculative gaps that will always be left in either approach. Faith picks a side, whereas unbelief rides the fence. Shaky believers who mesh atheistic and biblical viewpoints attempting to achieve some happy median create nothing but a mess that destroys both.

Foundationally, I believe Jesus Christ, the Son the God, is without error in all he believed and all that he taught. He was, in fact, without error in every possible respect. If Jesus Christ was an evolutionist, he certainly gave no hint of it. Quite the opposite in fact, he believed in the biblical Creation Story and the Noahetic Flood. One can hardly cede authority to Christ as Lord and then take exception to his cosmology.

When it comes to God, it is always put up or shut up. Stand on the Word or confess to being a heathen at heart. Nothing in the scripture should cause anyone to blink if they also believe that Christ rose the dead. If one doesn't believe that, he isn't a Christian and has no basis for the forgiveness of his sins. If one does believe that, why blanch at Jesus' avowal of Creation and the Flood? Is it even possible to trust in the power of the blood of what would have to be an ignorant or duplicitous charlatan if evolution were true?

Every time the evolutionists have laid claim to a smoking gun, we have always found, after the fact, that they spoke too soon and overstated their case. Whether the claim is for missing links in the fossil record, abiogenic experiments, ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny, "undesigned" nylonase, fused chimpanzee chromosomes, interchangeable genes for nanomachine parts, or junk DNA, it's always the same. So the arguments endlessly ratchet back and forth while, in the end, the realm of physical and theoretical science can offer nothing but doubt.

God chooses faith, not sight. Those who depend on sight seldom find faith, and those who depend on faith usually do just fine with sight. Why throw your faith in the Word under the bus for something that actually cast aspersions on Christ and which has nothing more as its greatest claim to fame than making a monkey out of you?

The Ubiquity of Fossils and the Bible

Ubiquity speaks of the commonness of a thing—it’s everywhere. Fossils have that quality, from the peaks of the Himalayas to the valleys of the Appalachians. In fact, fossils are so prevalent in sedimentary rock that the fossils found in it are the metric used to date it.

According to classical, uniformitarian evolutionary scenarios, fossils formed by regular processes of death, deposition, compaction and mineralization. Water, winds, volcanoes, and landslides laid down sediments upon the bodies, tracks, even the excrement of animals, upon plants, and even upon microscopic lifeforms. Those in turn were covered by other sediments, and ultimately, the column of sediments became rock with mineralized fossils embedded.

When things die, especially animal life, there is not much opportunity to preserve it in the fossil record. If a dead thing is not buried completely and relatively quickly, thousands of creatures, microscopic and large, begin a feeding frenzy. What they don’t destroy the elements do. The corpse doesn’t have thousands of days let alone thousands of years to mark its existence for posterity.

It is apparent that fossils only form if the burial process that covered the once living is rapid, as in floods, landslides, volcanism, or sandstorms. Such is demonstrated by those fossils which are like action snapshots-- creatures caught giving birth, eating, even devouring another creature. Suddenly, they were covered by sediment, eventually becoming a freeze frame in the fossil record.

But these rapid mechanisms produce not only fossils, but also sharply delineated, localized fields of sedimentary rock. The fossil bearing sedimentary rocks, however, stretch square mile after square mile in vast fields across the entire planet. About 75% of the land surface of the earth is covered by them to an average depth of over 5400 feet. The scope of these layers is the basis for the geologic column and its ability to be applied to formations across the globe. 

Generally, sediments are laid out flat, kind a like a college student during holiday breaks. If you examine an outcropping in the Appalachians it may not appear that way, but the curvy strata there were caused by folding after sedimentation. In other places where sedimentary rock is present but not horizontal other geotectonic mechanisms can be forwarded to explain its tilt.

The rule is that sediments are laid horizontally: the physics of particles precipitating out of solution or suspension demand it. Even if the floor they are settling on is serpentine, sediments settle in the low spots to a greater degree than the high spots until things are more or less evened out. When sediment fields stretch square mile after square mile in relatively uniform strata, a single body of murky water over the entire sediment field must have been responsible.

How that occurred simultaneously with all manner of flora and fauna being rapidly covered by those precipitates presents some serious problems to the uniformitarian geologist, and most certainly to the evolutionist. It seems to me they don't actually have a plausible mechanism for the ubiquity of fossils.

There is, however, a biblical answer:

For forty days the flood kept coming on the earth, and as the waters increased they lifted the ark high above the earth. The waters rose and increased greatly on the earth, and the ark floated on the surface of the water. They rose greatly on the earth, and all the high mountains under the entire heavens were covered. The waters rose and covered the mountains to a depth of more than twenty feet. Every living thing that moved on the earth perished—birds, livestock, wild animals, all the creatures that swarm over the earth, and all mankind. Everything on dry land that had the breath of life in its nostrils died. Every living thing on the face of the earth was wiped out; men and animals and the creatures that move along the ground and the birds of the air were wiped from the earth. Only Noah was left, and those with him in the ark. The waters flooded the earth for a hundred and fifty days.

Genesis 7:17-24 (NIV)

In my mind, it's a better answer.