(© 2008 Institute for Creation Research. All Rights Reserved. http://icr.org)

EVIDENCE FROM SCRIPTURE 

Accurate Data

The Bible is unique among all books. Not only is it different in its form, structure, and history, but it takes the position of supernatural superiority to all other communication. It insists on total accuracy for its content and absolute obedience to its commands. No other book is so demanding.

Historical Accuracy

The Bible has proven to be more historically and archaeologically accurate than any other ancient book. It has been subjected to the minutest scientific textual analysis possible to humanity and has been proven to be authentic in every way.

Genesis Is Historically True

http://www.icr.org/bible-genesis The most controversial book of the Bible is Genesis, especially the first eleven chapters. Those chapters speak of the creation of the universe, the fall of man into sin, the world-wide flood of Noah, and the language-altering event at Babel . There is much evidence that these events are historically accurate.

The core of religious, historical, and scientific debate centers on the first eleven chapters of the book of Genesis. Contrary to many academicproclamations, there is much evidence for the factual accuracy of those pre-history chapters.

Creation Was 24/6 and Recent

http://www.icr.org/creation-recent Although some would suggest that the biblical account of creation is either allegorical or analogous to the evolutionary story, the text itself does not permit such an application.

The language of Genesis chapters 1 and 2 are technically precise and linguistically clear. Any reader would understand that the author of those pages intended to convey a normal six-day creation, involving God's supernatural intervention both to create (something from nothing) and to make and shape (something basic into something more complex). Three days (Day 1, Day 5, and Day 6) involve creation. Three days (Day 2, Day 3, and Day 4) involve the organization, integration, and structuring of the material created on Day 1.

Life was created on Day 5, a life in which all animals and man share. A special image of God was created on Day 6 that only man has. The movement from "simple to complex" may appear to follow evolution's theory, but the specific order (water > land > plants > stellar and planetary bodies > birds and fish > land animals > man) most emphatically does not.

The Hebrew word for day (yom) is used some 3,000 times in the Hebrew Bible, and is almost always used to mean an ordinary 24-hour day-night cycle. On the few occasions where it is used to mean an indeterminate period of time, it is always clear from the context that it means something other than a 24-hour day (day of trouble, day of the Lord, day of battle, etc). Whenever it is used with an ordinal (1, 2, 1st, 2nd, etc.), it always means a specific day, an ordinary24-hour day.

The language of Genesis 1 appears to have been crafted so that no reader would mistake the word use for anything other than an ordinary 24-hour day. The light portion is named "day," and the dark portion is named "night." Then the "evening and the morning" is Day 1, Day 2, etc. The linguistic formula is repeated for each of the six days, a strange emphasis if the words were to be taken as allegorical or analogous to something other than a day-night cycle.

When God wrote the Ten Commandments with His own finger (certainly the most emphatic action every taken by God on behalf of His revealed Word), God specifically designated a seventh day to be a "Sabbath" day (rest day) in memory and in honor of the work-six-days, rest-one-day activity of God during the creation week (Exodus 20:11). In that context, spoken and written by God Himself, the creation week can mean only a regular week of seven days, one of which is set aside as holy.

Plants and Animals Are Distinct

http://www.icr.org/biblical-lifehttp://www.icr.org/biblical-life In the Creator's design, plants were made for food and animals were living evidence of the Creator's wonder and diversity.

There is no hint, of course, in the Genesis account that God equated the replicating systems of earth with the living creatures later created on Days 5 and 6. Much has been written to justify this equation, but neither the Scriptures nor science supports it. There is a vast difference between the most complex plant and the simplest living organism. If one uses the biblical distinction (blood, Leviticus 17:11) as the wall between plant and animal, the differences are even greater.

There is no question that God created the various categories of grass, herbs, and fruit-bearing plants. The gulf between "dirt" and "plants" is huge! No naturalistic scheme can adequately account for such wonder. But according to God's words, they do not have "life." Plants do replicate within their kind, but so do certain crystals and some chemicals. They replicate within kind, but they are nowhere said to possess chay (life) or nephesh (soul), the Hebrew words for living things. Job 14:8-10 is cited as evidence that plants die like people die, but that passage most certainly does not use the words for life. The supposed comparison is really a contrast between plant and man.

The food created by God as a "good" product and part of the process to maintain life cannot be equated with the awful sentence of death pronounced by the Creator on His creation. Animals and man have life. Plants do not.

Sin Caused Death

http://www.icr.org/cause-of-deathhttp://www.icr.org/cause-of-death The biblical record is very precise: Adam's sin introduced death into the world (Genesis 3:17; Romans 5:12), with death being the "last enemy" (1 Corinthians 15:26). Naturalistic interpretations must have death as a good mechanism to produce the "most fit."

A major platform of those who hold to the long ages of formative biology is that death is a normal part of the original creation. The position is that the fossil remains are a record of eons of natural development rather than the awful debris of a worldwide, year-long sentence of destruction executed by an angry Creator.

The Bible insists, however, that death is an enemy (1 Corinthians 15:26), a curse ( Genesis 3:14-17) pronounced on all creation, including living creatures. That awful judgment was because of Adam's rebellion (Genesis 3:17; 1 Timothy 2:14), and is not a part of God's good creation.

Death by the design of God is so foreign to the revealed nature of God, one is at a loss to understand why anyone would want to suggest that God "authored" death in His creation, a creation that was designed to tell us of His invisible nature and Godhead. The whole message of Scripture turns on Genesis 3. All of the "good" of the environment was withdrawn with God's sentence. The "groaning and travailing" (Romans 8:22) began at that moment, or the words of God Himself are void!

If there were eons of pain, suffering, and death before the rebellion of Adam brought death into the world, then a whole sweep of biblical teaching is thrown into the black hole of allegory. Hundreds of Bible passages are twisted from a warning and a bad consequence to a "normal" event. In the Bible, physical death is specifically identified as absolutely necessary to accomplish the atonement for sins.

There is no question that the Bible teaches that it was necessary for Jesus Christ to die physically in order to accomplish the payment for our sins (Hebrews 2:14-18). If death is normal and/or good, even if it is merely relegated to a "spiritual" effect, then the physical death of Jesus Christ becomes unnecessary and meaningless.

The Flood Was Global

http://www.icr.org/noahs-floodhttp://www.icr.org/noahs-flood The language of Genesis 6-9 demands that the great flood of Noah be understood as a planet-covering, geologically destructive, year-long water cataclysm. That global flooding left enormous evidence of the event.

There is a great divide between two major systems of belief on the biblical Flood in the days of Noah. There are those who say it is either a purely mythological event or else possibly a local or regional flood. Then there are those who accept the biblical record of the Flood as a literal record of a tremendous cataclysm involving not only a worldwide deluge, but also great tectonic upheavals and volcanic outpourings that completely changed the crust of the earth and its topography in the days of Noah.

Here are a few of the many biblical reasons for believing in the global Flood:

Jesus Christ believed the Old Testament record of the worldwide Flood. Speaking of the antediluvian population, He said: "The flood came, and took them all away" (Matthew 24:39). Evolutionary anthropologists are all convinced that people had spread over the entire earth by the time assigned to Noah in biblical chronology, so an anthropologically universal Flood would clearly have required a geographically worldwide Flood.

The apostle Peter believed in a worldwide hydraulic cataclysm. "Whereby the world [Greek, kosmos ] that then was, being overflowed [Greek, katakluzo] with water, perished" (2 Peter 3:6). The world was defined in the previous verse as "the heavens . . . and the earth." Peter also said that "God...spared not the old world, but saved Noah...bringing in the flood [Greek, kataklusmos] upon the world of the ungodly" (2 Peter 2:5).

The Old Testament record of the Flood, which both Christ and Peter accepted as real history, clearly teaches a global Flood. For example, the record emphasizes that "all the high hills, that were under the whole heaven...and the mountains were covered" (Genesis 7:19-20) with the waters of the Flood.

Since "all flesh died that moved upon the earth...all that was in the dry land" (Genesis 7:21-22), Noah and his sons had to build a huge Ark to preserve animal life for the post-diluvian world, an Ark that can easily be shown to have had more than ample capacity to carry at least two of every known species of land animal (marine animals were not involved, of course). Such an Ark was absurdly unnecessary for anything but a global Flood.

God promised that never "shall there any more be a flood to destroy the earth" (Genesis 9:11), and He has kept His word for over 4,000 years, if the Flood indeed was global. Those Christians who say it was a local flood, however, are in effect accusing God of lying, for there are many devastating local floods every year.

Biblical Data Is Historically Testable

http://www.icr.org/bible-history Historical evidence routinely includes ancient literature, business records, and government documents, analyzed in conjunction with linguistics, geography, and archaeological analysis of physical objects (pottery, coins, remains of buildings, etc.), using forensic science techniques.

After many millions of man-hours of research and evidence analysis, archaeology has repeatedly confirmed the reliability of the Bible. The Bible has been proven geographically and re-proven historically accurate, in the most exacting detail, by external evidences.

The Bible has become a significant source book for secular archaeology, helping to identify such ancient figures as Sargon (Isaiah 20:1); Sennacherib (Isaiah 37:37); Horam of Gazer (Joshua 10:33); Hazar (Joshua 15:27); and the nation of the Hittites (Genesis 15:20). The biblical record, unlike other "scriptures," is historically set, opening itself up for testing and verification.

Two of the greatest 20th-century archaeologists, William F. Albright and Nelson Glueck, both lauded the Bible (even though they were non-Christian and secular in their training and personal beliefs) as being the single most accurate source document from history. Over and over again, the Bible has been found to be accurate in its places, dates, and records of events. No other "religious" document comes even close.

The 19th-century critics used to deny the historicity of the Hittites, the Horites, the Edomites, and various other peoples, nations, and cities mentioned in the Bible. Those critics have long been silenced by the archaeologist's spade, and few critics dare to question the geographical and ethnological reliability of the Bible.

The names of over 40 different kings of various countries mentioned in the Bible have all been found in contemporary documents and inscriptions outside of the Old Testament, and are always consistent with the times and places associated with them in the Bible. Nothing exists in ancient literature that has been even remotely as well-confirmed in accuracy as has the Bible.

(© 2008 Institute for Creation Research. All Rights Reserved. http://icr.org)