#851 Late Creation

Dr. craig’s response

I suppose that it was inevitable that my remarks would be misunderstood, and so I’m grateful for the opportunity to clarify them. I assure you that just as your question is genuine, Jacob, so my comments were wholly sincere and in no way dishonest (which in my book would be sinful). 

My remarks concerned what I call “late creation.” By that, I mean God’s creating living organisms out of nothing, not at the beginning, but spread out over eons of time. Given the long history of life on Earth, I’ve struggled to understand how God brought about the diversity and complexity of living organisms. One suggestion is that over the eons, God has repeatedly intervened to create organisms which were not genealogically related to prior organisms.

At first that sounds unremarkable. But when you really think about it, it strikes me as incredible. That’s what my story of the family of ducks’ suddenly appearing out of nowhere on the surface of a prehistoric pond many million years ago serves to illustrate. It’s hard enough to imagine ducks appearing in this way, but it seems incredible to think that families of 50-ton Brachiosaurs or ravening Tyrannosaurs came into being this way.

My incredulity has nothing to do with a lack of belief in miracles. Rather, my incredulity is based in the kind of miracle that we are being asked to believe in, a kind of miracle that seems contrary to the God of the Bible that I know. To give a quite different illustration, I remember reading about one saint who, needing to ford a river, removed his head and, holding it above the water, walked through the river to the other side, where he replaced it. Now God has the power to perform such a miracle. But would you really believe such a story? It just seems incredible. This isn’t the kind of miracle that God does. Similarly, when we read the Bible, I don’t find acts of late creation. For example, when Jesus turned water into wine, he did not create the wine ex nihilo in the empty jars. Rather he had the servants first fill the jars with water and then turned the water into wine.

So I’ve got no difficulty with in the beginning God’s creating the universe out of nothing or creating all living organisms without progenitors, as the young Earth creationist claims (indeed, the young Earther might applaud my scepticism about late creation). Nor do I have a problem with God’s directing the mutations that would produce additional genetic information in living organisms that would never have come about via purely natural causes. Nor do I have any difficulty believing that Jesus changed water into wine.

But acts of late creation would be an endorsement of God’s creating things with a mere appearance of age. You evidently have no difficulty with God’s doing such a thing. But there are at least two difficulties with such a hypothesis: (1) It threatens to make God a deceiver, which is morally impossible. (2) It requires us to reject as false our well-established empirical beliefs about the world. The more recent that acts of late creation are, the more empirical beliefs about the world we must reject. This knows no stopping point. God could have created the world a few thousand years ago or even one year ago with the appearance of being billions of years old. Surely the fewer empirically justified beliefs that a hypothesis requires us to reject, the more plausible that hypothesis is.

For that reason, I am sceptical about postulating acts of late creation.