Abundance! God created in opulent, glorious, profuse, spell-binding abundance. Wherever eye could see, whatever area created, God created with flourish; from desert sands to mountain peaks, from lavish glades to dense forests to barren plains. God created with elaborate color, texture, size and imagination. He made the sun to rule the day, and lesser lights to rule the night: trees and grasses and herbs; a sufficiency of orchards and meadowland; tall forests and mossy glades with seeds within to replenish. The waters teemed with multitudes of living creatures; the great sea-monsters and every living creature that moved; the birds – every winged bird after its kind; flocks of geese and beasts of the earth, and everything that crept upon the ground. Abundance! Overflowing, profuse, lavish abundance. Nothing was spared; not color, nor texture, nor size. With magnificent fullness and array God created his earth, his universe.
And God created man in his own image. He created male and female, and he blessed them; and told them to be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth, and subdue it, and have dominion over it: the fishes of the sea, the birds of the heavens, and over every moving thing that moves upon the earth. He gave man every herb yielding seed which was upon the face of the whole earth; every tree in which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed that was upon the face of the earth to be used for food: for every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the heavens, and to every thing that crept upon the earth that had life. He gave every green herb for food. Seeing what he had made and seeing that it was very good, God finished his creation on the sixth day.
Did god also create an abundance of humans to inhabit the earth? Or did he create one male and one female only, namely, Adam and Eve? Did he act lavishly and with imagination, design and assortment, or was he act illiberal and made only one man and one woman?
Our churches would have us believe, and they teach us that we are all descendants of one source: Adam and his wife, Eve. However, much confusion and many questions arise if this story holds true. Theology has created many unresolved questions with argumentative factions that stimulate unrest and confusion. Still many people hold on to this religious concept (dogma) as the only explanation for our ultimate creation.
Those who would reject this idea have turned to an even more confusing theory, that of Darwin. Darwin would have us believe that we are descendants of the apes. His reasoning for this is due to his observations on the Islands of the Galapagos where he noticed that as the finches that flourished there “multiplied and ‘took over’ the island, variations among individual finches offered the birds different MICROENVIRONMENTAL NICHES in the islands. (1) He noted that some finches had beaks designed for boring as a woodpecker does; some had beaks designed for eating seeds; and others had parrot-like beaks designed for feeding on buds and fruits. (However, the finch remained a finch.) This process then was called NATURAL SELECTION, and it is used to substantiate that ape was the forerunner of mankind. In fact, this theory is so widely accepted now that the Field Museum in Chicago, Illinois, has a section devoted to the evolution of man from ape.
There is the “Big Bang” theory wherein there was a big explosion in the middle of nothing, and from that came a floating, molten rock which cooled and became Earth. Then, through spontaneous regeneration, that is, with all conditions being correct, life in the form of a one-celled amoeba appeared and more complicated life forms emerged that gradually escalated to include mankind.
“Revolving around the sun in 365 days each of 24 hours, our earth, which was then only a vaguely shaped gaseous sphere, progressively cooled, and it was only when at the end of chemical changes with which this book is not concerned, it reached a temperature well below 300 degrees Centigrade, that the first living forms could survive. In our own day some bacteria, called thermophiles, live in hot springs, but even the most hardy of them can scarcely bear a temperature of 85 degrees Centigrade.
“There is therefore no option but to agree that matter preceded life and that life could only have appeared on the planet at a certain favorable moment in the chemical development of the earth’s surface. Accepting this, only two possible hypotheses remain to explain the origin of life on earth: either life came from elsewhere, from some other planet in the Universe (this is the theory of panspermy), or life was born on the earth itself by spontaneous generation as a result of certain complex chemical reactions.” (2)
The Bible says creation began with God, and after many years of study and research pouring over the first few chapters of Genesis, it appears this is the best and most probable, as well as most plausible answer to the question of where did man really come from. All of biblical scripture correlates with the findings of science, anthropologists and archaeologists. We are not all the offspring of Adam and Eve. Rather … well, let’s take a look at the knowledge supplied to us through science, anthropology, and archeology and construct the creation puzzle in the first few chapters of Genesis as written by God.
