Compromising On Literal Six Day Creation Is Unbelief And Wins No One To The Truth

Outstanding article from the Institute of Christian Research (excerpts below)

Heb 11:1 Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. 2 For by it the people of old received their commendation. 3 By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible.

Dangerous Turn Ahead: Traveling down the road to compromise
by Henry Morris, Ph.D. (1918-2006)


Genesis 1:1 states, "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth." This is the first and foremost apologetic. If a person stumbles on this one profound truth, a lifetime of doubt and confusion lies ahead for him, full of uncertainty about the ultimate purpose for being alive. But when a Christian attempts to alter this ultimate statement of reality to fit the compromising philosophies of men--even scientifically-trained professionals--then woe to him for his unbelief and, even graver still, for teaching others that unbelief. The following article by the late Dr. Henry Morris, published some years back, contains a timeless warning about the failure of Christian scientists who compromise the truth. Today, the names of Christian leaders who advocate compromise in the Genesis record are different, but the precipice on which they stand is just as dangerous. -- Lawrence Ford, Executive Editor [ICR's Acts & Facts magazine]

The road of compromise looks attractive at first, but long experience has proved it to be a one-way street. The evolutionists at the end of the road are never satisfied until their opponents travel all the way to the atheistic void at its end.

Charles Darwin set the pattern. Starting out as a Bible-believing creationist, he first became enamored of Charles Lyell's uniformitarianism and his "progressive creationism." Soon he abandoned the Bible and creationism altogether, moving on into the domain of theistic evolutionism. Eventually he became an agnostic and finally an atheist.

Many others in his day followed this compromise road. Darwin's chief opponents, in fact, were scientists, not the theologians of his day.

"Despite abundant evidence to the contrary, it is widely believed that the church was a bitter opponent of evolution."

Whole denominations and their religious colleges and seminaries were teaching evolution during Darwin's lifetime, and multitudes of more fundamental Christians were accommodating the evolutionary ages of geology by their "gap theory," "local flood theory," and other devices of artificial biblical exegesis.

But did such compromises ever persuade the evolutionists to meet them half way? The present state of the schools and colleges and the intellectual community in general is the obvious answer.Despite these lessons of the past, most modern Christians seem oblivious to the fact that all their different accommodational schemes were discredited a hundred years ago and that none of them ever budged the evolutionary establishment from its base of total naturalism.

A good modern example is found in the writings of Davis Young. As a beginning graduate student, Dr. Young originally believed in a literal six-day creation and flood geology. Under the guidance of his Princeton professors, however, he converted to "progressive creationism" and the venerable "day-age theory" of Genesis. This position he strongly advocated in two influential books. He did acknowledge, however, that the "natural" interpretation of Genesis, as well as the teaching of the early Christians and the Protestant reformers, was the literal interpretation. He had simply decided this had to be abandoned because of its supposed geological difficulties.

His progressive creationism did not even satisfy his theistic-evolutionary colleagues at Calvin College, however, let alone his geological peers at the secular universities. So how far was he willing to travel down this road?

I further suggest that both literalism and concordism have outlived their usefulness, and that these approaches should be abandoned for a newer approach that does not try to answer technical scientific questions with biblical data.6

I suggest that we will be on the right track if we stop treating Genesis 1 and the flood story as scientific and historic reports.7

This approach is essentially that advocated by Christian "liberals" a century ago and now taught in most mainline seminaries.

The road of compromise, however attractive it seems, is a one-way street, ending in a precipice and then the awful void of "rational religion," or atheism. Our advice is to stay on the straight and narrow road of the pure Word of God.

End quote.

~Morris, H. M. 2009. Dangerous Turn Ahead: Traveling down the road to compromise. Acts & Facts. 38 (6): 4.

The entire article at the site, including 7 footnotes.

This goes along very well with Morris' article "Old Earth Creationism":

Many evangelical leaders today, unfortunately, have capitulated to the evolutionary timescale of modern unbelieving geologists and astronomers. They feel that they must somehow reinterpret the Genesis record of creation to allow for billions of prehistoric years, which the evolutionists must have in order to make cosmic evolution and biological evolution seem feasible. This compromise is necessary, they say, in order to win scientists and other intellectuals to the Lord...

The difference is this: we believe the Bible must take priority over scientific theories, while they believe scientific theories must determine our biblical interpretations.

It all seems to us to hinge on one overriding question. Do we really believe the Bible to be God's inerrant Word or not? If the Bible is really the Word of our Creator God, then--by definition--it must be inerrant and authoritative on every subject with which it deals. This assumption leads clearly to the conviction that the creation took place in six literal days several thousand years ago. We believe this simply because God said so and said it quite plainly! And then we find also that this revealed fact will fit all the facts of science much better than the long-age evolutionary scenario does.

It is no good to say, as one evangelical leader said recently: "Well, I believe that God could create in six days or six billion years--it makes no difference." Yes it does, because it has to do with God's truthfulness! It is not a matter of what God could do. The question is what God says that He did! And what He said in writing was this, recorded with His own finger on a table of stone: "In six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day" (Exodus 20:11; see also Exodus 31:15-18).