CYPRESS, California—John McKenna, special adviser to the WCG president, attended a conference titled "Beyond Genesis 1," presented by Reasons to Believe, June 28 to 30.

Led by Hugh Ross, this organization is devoted to an understanding of the relationship between the gospel of Jesus Christ and the nature of the universe.

The conference played host to more than 500 people from the United States and international areas seeking to become apologists for Dr. Ross’s Reasons to Believe. Sixteen lectures were presented laying down the fundamentals behind the organization’s belief in a testable creation model for the nature of the physical universe. Just as Billy Graham’s organization gathers people for training in evangelism, so Dr. Ross gathers them for training in apologetics.

"For the conferees, there was evidently something quite exciting about being able to understand the universe in such a way that the existence of its Creator cannot be doubted," Dr. McKenna said.

Here is his report:

The lectures began by stressing the fine tuning associated with the development of the Big-Bang Theory of the universe. It would be unreasonable, claims the apologist, to account for the fundamental constants inherent in the 15 billion year old universe without reference to the Creator. His is the only sufficient explanation for the singular rationality associated with this beginning of the world. The only consistent and thorough argument for explaining the nature of the physical laws of the universe belongs to the assumption of an intelligent designer. It is the experience of Dr. Ross that the continued refinement of this fine-tuning ever verifies the assumption. To view the universe as the creation of the biblical God is the only way to avoid contradictions in the biblical record and the natural record. The question of why, not just how, concerning the laws of the physical world cannot be answered without the assumption of the biblical God.

Dr. Ross grants that the assertion that this Creator is Jesus Christ belongs to a faith in which we may err some about the Person of the Creator and Redeemer of the world, but his experience in schools across the nation is that people respect the belief when he is forthright about it and then argues that the heavens and the earth tell of the glory of this Creator.

Joining Dr. Ross in the training were Professors Walt Russell from Talbot School of Theology, John Rea from Regent University, Ken Samples, David Rogstad and Fazale Rana from his staff, and Mick Ukleja, pastor of Grace Church in Cypress. All these apologists held in common the notion of a general revelation based on the world as the creation of the one God and a special revelation whereby we are given to understand this one as the triune God. With the assumption of a natural theology heard under the Word of the One God and a revealed theology heard under the Word of the Blessed Trinity, they sought to teach the conferees the apologetics that employed without contradiction the testable creation model of Reasons to Believe.

Russell, teaching the conferees the fundamentals of Bible interpretation, stressed the lack of objectivity fostered by world cultures in our time. Subjectivity and relativism has turned even the church into an organization where each individual seeks to do what was right only in each one’s own eyes. It has made us a narcissistic nation of autonomous individuals bent on emptying of all real meaning out of our world views. To overcome the centrality of this "I" in our worship and work in the world, Russell suggests that the plural "we" is more appropriate to the kind of top-down thinking we must learn to do when reading and attempting to understand the texts of the Bible. We should not seek to apply the meaning of these texts until we are persuaded that we have heard them as they were meant to be heard by their authors. This means we must learn to appreciate the literary nature of the texts and the world in which they were first produced. Only then ought we to seek to apply them to our time.

Professor Rea sought to remind his audience that the role of the Holy Spirit and his creative activity in all that we do in order to understand the Bible. He argued that it was the personal presence of God in his freedom that allowed the record to act as witness to the living God. Creation in Genesis 1 possesses a polemical character against the myths in the ancient world about the beginning of the world and the fate of its people. The same Spirit that was in the beginning was also in the new beginning of the new creation and the church’s inception in the world. God the Creator is a speaking, breathing, life-giving God and all the images and metaphors and symbols that we find in the biblical world must be interpreted in the light of this living Spirit of God. Rea pointed out that the "waste and void" of Genesis 1 could not in this case be identified with evil chaos, but they belonged to the nature of the "good" world God created and made and shaped in the beginning.

Along with the professors, Samples stressed the importance of the development of this world view for apologetics. Without a testable and coherent world view, the gospel stands to be presented to the world in some fragmented form bringing into question its compelling nature for the development of our thought. He argued for the importance of allowing our theories to correspond with our experience of life in this world. This correspondence allows our theories to be tested, making them compete in the marketplaces of world cultures. With this in mind, Samples also argued for a definition of the image of God in its intrinsic and extrinsic forms. Sin does not affect the instrinsic dimensions of the image. It does affect the extrinisic, when with the fall the human race became out of tune, so to speak, with its Creator resulting in that loss of righteousness that has marked the real history of humanity upon the planet. In this analysis, humans differ only in degree from the animal kingdom and are distinguished by their conceptual powers. Thus, it is mankind that produces civilization and moral values. He quite unabashedly declared his work Calvinistic, while respecting the Arminians on the staff.

Ukleja gave reasons why the doctrine of creation was so important for the meaning of the gospel in the world. For this pastor, creation was a point of evangelism, reflected the accuracy of the Scriptures, and fundamental to the history of the development of thought in the Christian world wiew. The biblical view of creation has proven itself superior over all other notions about the world as a creation of God. It is behind the development of science and the marketplaces of modern life. Religion without a creation theory is impossible, and the Christian faith gives us a doctrine of creation that sustained the development of our scientific culture across the centuries. It was argued that this theory argued against the particularity of the "canopy" often employed by young earth creationists to explain Genesis 1. The notion of a canopy is rendered without value when one understands the testable created model and its correspondence to the reality of our experience in the world. We were made to worship this Creator, then, and without a concept of this Creator’s transcendence over the world, the world and its inhabitants would suffer a great suffocation of their purposes as God’s "good" creation.

Rogstad rendered the testable creation model of the organization in terms of its explanatory powers. The science developed by Reasons to Believe has concordance with modern scientific progress as well as with modern biblical interpretation. In this model, both revelation and empirical evidence are given a just weight. What is false can be rejected. What is verified can be embraced. Adjustments can be made. Undoubtedly, the testable creation model has the best of both worlds.

Rana applied the apologetics of the testable creation model to the origins of life. The development of life some four billion years ago upon the planet evolves into life as we now know it some 3.5 billion years ago. The fossil record presents us with this development, where species endure annihilation from time to time as well as repopulation. The fine-tuning of the universe allows for catastrophe and divine intervention. Complexity is explained by adapted speciation on the earth. The thing for which we have no evidence is the transformation from one species to another. Evolutionary theory dependent upon this assumption is denied any cogency. Life as we know it is very improbable according to the laws of probability. The only real explanation must come from the divine interaction of the Creator with the speciation processes. Although Rana would not identify his argument with Paley, he admits some great similarities, explaining the motors of life as biological as displaying a design without explanation if not for the designer.

But by far the most central arguments were presented by the president of Reasons to Believe, Dr . Ross. A radio-astronomer by training, Dr. Ross posses an excellent grasp of general relativity and the struggle the theory has in our time with the quantum desciptions of the world. His staff is tireless in keeping his data up to date and he brings to the forum always the latest developments in our scientific culture. This year Ross concentrated on showing how the life of advanced animals developed on the earth of the 15 billion year old universe. Natural selection and mutations may be employed to explain changes in the development of life, but there exists a fundamental complexity at life’s foundations that must be acknowledged and respected. Natural selection and mutation serves adaption but not to change a species. The action of the Creator in the beginning forms the limits of speciation, dependent upon divine making and shaping at the primeval level of life’s energies. Sudden appearances of species can only be explained by this divine making and shaping at this level. Ross considers Neanderthals as bi-pedal primates existing outside of humanity made as the Image of God in the world. Modern humans are dated some 40,000 years ago. The main point to which Ross drives, however, is the fact of the new creation. If there was an old creation in the beginning, there will be a new creation in the end. That is all that ultimately matters. The Creator’s beginning of the new creation, begun with Jesus Christ, is not simply some restoration to the primal paradise of the Genesis account of the creation, but something radically and fundamentally new. Evil, sin and death will have no place in the new world. The laws now applicable will have been utterly changed. A new kind of time will be experienced, during which we will forever enjoy the eternal life of our Creator and Redeemer. Perhaps it is fair to say that this pointing to the new creation was the highlight of the presentations.

Criticism of the conference must occur on the presuppositional level and its assumptions. Is it really true, for instance, that we are to conceive of the relationship between general and special revelation or natural and revealed theology in the way of these apologetics? Is Barth’s "no" to Brunner an ultimate rejection of natural theology or rather, as Torrance has taught us, a call for a transformation of natural theology in the heart of revelation where it becomes a real natural theology capable of resolving issues between science and theology? Is not Torrance’s contention that, just as Einstein placed Euclidean geometry at the heart of physics, natural theology worked out in the light of the self-revelation of God in Christ would become a far more consistent and thorough explanation of the world as God’s Creation? Is it possible then that the transcendence of God may be distinguished, without separating it, from the created transcendence inherent in the intelligibility of the world? Would this way of conceiving the relationship between the uncreated reality of God and the created reality of the world allow us to conceive, rather than the concordance sought by Reasons to Believe, a concurrence theory in which faith’s view of the world and reason’s grasp of it were compelling resonant with one another? Would we not honor in this way the divine freedom with which God created in the beginning? Would this not allow us to think together, without an "error bar," the incarnation’s relationship to the creation?

However much Big Bang theory may be an ally of the gospel, we do both a disservice when we identify the doctrine of creation out of nothing with the nothingness and fine-tuning of its beginning. No particular cosmology can replace the belief that wrote Genesis 1. It was a belief whose view of the world has reminded people down through the ages of the real world, against all the myths made by man, but it has also participated faithfully in the mystery of God and his revelation with us. To move beyond Genesis 1 we need to take seriously the incarnation of the Word that created in the beginning and seek to understand this faith in the light of the Lord Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is not the Creator plus some error bar that we may posit because of some antecedent conceptual system of thought we may possess outside of his Light, but he is as our Redeemer the way in fact the Creator has made himself known among us as the Creator of the heavens and the earth, a fact that is alive and always quick to judge all of our judgments about him. It seems that Reasons to Believe will do well in the future to take on the task of transforming our sciences’ way of carving up reality into something more integrated into the actual way God has chosen in his divine freedom to make himself known to the peoples of the world. Dr. John McKenna.

Copyright © Worldwide Church of God, 2001