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> I was religious once and I still do respect religion a
> great deal.

I am not religious. I do not believe that rituals or regular church attendance or repetitious prayers or unintelligible utterances can save anybody.

My faith is based on a personal relationship with the Living Creator God.

> What you have is beautiful

If Evolutionism is correct, then what I have is NOT beautiful.

If Evolutionism is correct, then Christ’s sacrifice to defeat Sin and Death on the cross is meaningless and Christ becomes a liar for teaching the Genesis account of Creation as fact.

Death, being the engine of Natural Selection, which in turn is claimed by Evolutionists to be the mechanism by which radically new taxa emerge, would have had to have been part of what God declared was “Very Good” at the beginning.

If Death is a part of that which was “Very Good” from the Beginning, then why must Christ, as God manifest in the flesh, sacrifice Himself on a Roman cross to defeat it?

And since Christ taught the Genesis account of Creation to be true, He is made a liar by Evolutionism.

I believe, and Jesus taught, that Death entered the world through the Sin of Adam.

Christ came to defeat Sin and its consequence, Death.

Evolutionism makes Christ a liar and His sacrifice meaningless.

If Evolutionism is correct, then what I have is a lie and my faith is in vain.

That is not beautiful.

Thank you for sharing your testimony, Westbrook!

My faith is based on a personal relationship with the Living Creator God.

I too walk with the Lord and have for almost a half century.

I believe, and Jesus taught, that Death entered the world through the Sin of Adam. Christ came to defeat Sin and its consequence, Death. Evolutionism makes Christ a liar and His sacrifice meaningless.

If I may, I’d like to present a summary of Christian views.

At the forefront of these debates is the different understanding among Christians concerning the creation of man which derives, not from science, but from our understanding of Scripture.

Specifically, we Christians have different interpretations of Romans 5:12–14 and I Corinthians 15:42–48: one side says that Adam was the first mortal man and the other says that Adam was the first ensouled man. Thus, the interpretation among Christians concerning Genesis 1-3 (the origin of man) cuts this way:

Young Earth Creationism which says that Adam was the first mortal man and therefore the physical evidence must support a young earth of some 6000 years of age in proper or absolute time.

Gosse Omphalus Hypothesis which says that Adam was the first mortal man and that God created an old looking universe some 6000 years ago in proper or absolute time.

Old Earth Creationism which says that Adam was the first ensouled man, that the universe is some 15 billion years old in proper or absolute time, that evolution occurred and Adam was ensouled some 6000 years ago in proper or absolute time.

Special Creationism which says that Adam was created some 6000 years ago in some unspecified time and place.

My view – which is akin to Jewish physicist Gerald Schroeder's is that we must consider both relativity and inflationary theory – that some 15 billion years from our space/time coordinates is equal to 6 equivalent earth days at the inception space/time coordinates. There is no conflict with Genesis 1.

I go a bit further than Schroeder in asserting that God is the author of Genesis and the only observer of His own Creation and thus we must look at those Scriptures from the inception perspective until Adam is banished to mortality at the end of chapter 3, at which point the space/time perspective changes to Adamic man.

Therefore, I assert that the first three chapters of Scripture deal with the creation not only of the physical realm but the spiritual as well (Gen 1:1, Gen 2:4-5) For Scriptural evidence I point to these:

The tree of life is in the center of Eden (Gen 2:9) and Paradise (Rev 2:7).

God created the plants and herbs before they were in the earth (Gen 2:4-5)

God’s curse to Adam was that he would die in the day (Gen 2:17) he ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil v that he died at age 930 (Gen 5:5) and that 1,000 years to man (Adamic perspective) should be understood as a “day” to God (Psalms 90:4, 2 Peter 3:8, Epistle of Barnabas, Enoch, et al).

The intersection or “types” in the physical realm and spiritual realm: Temple, Ark, Eden.

The differences in our understanding is not troubling to me because God did not make us with a cookie cutter. Peter was not like John who was not like Paul who was not like doubting Thomas. But Jesus Christ chose each one them. Rather, I assert that we are each to “work out our own salvation” (Phl 2:12) as He guides us individually according to His own will. (John 14-17, Romans 8, I Cor 2)

Moreover, a Christian believes that the Son of God became enfleshed in the body of a virgin, died on a cross for our sins, resurrected and is sitting at the right hand of the Father in heaven and will come again. That while He was here, He walked on water, raised the dead, made the blind to see, the lame to walk and so on. Since we believe all of this, it is not a stretch for us to believe other miracles, e.g. Jonas and the whale, the Noah flood, the parting of the Red Sea, the burning bush, the plagues on Egypt, Creation week and so on.

For us, reality is God's will and unknowable in it's fulness. Why would we be bothered by the view of anyone whose (false) reality consists of what his senses can perceive and/or his mind can comprehend?