Creation and Change: Genesis 1:1 - 2:4 in the Light of Changing Scientific Paradigms

Rating:
Summary: Unique among creationist tomes.
Review: Doctor Shedstrom's polemic can be disregarded. Whenever someone uses invective of that nature without giving credit to the thought, depth, or breadth of a book...then we may safely chuck his view for being off the rhetorical map. Young earth creationism is alive and well and Shedstrom's ilk should take anger management classes so they can discuss the pros and cons of creationism without hyperventilating. Is Kelly's book without flaw and inspired by the Lord himself? No...but it is still a damn good work.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent support for the historical straightforward view
Review: Dr Kelly thoroughly documents from grammar and history that the correct interpretation of Genesis is the correct one. I'm amazed that some people can read this book and still claim that the young-earth view is some kind of 1960s novelty.

WRONG -- as Dr Kelly shows, it's the billions-of-years interpretation that's the novelty. No-one had thought of this before some conservative exegetes felt the need to harmonise with the views of Hutton and Lyell in the first half of the 19th century. Even allegorizers such as Origen and Augustine recognised that Genesis allows only for Earth to be thousands of years old. Dr Kelly cites people such as Basil the Great and Calvin to prove his point. Critics also ignore the 19th Century Scriptural Geologists, documented by Dr Terry Mortenson's Ph.D. thesis at Coventry University, UK, outlined on the Answers in Genesis site.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent support for the historical straightforward view
Review: Dr Kelly thoroughly documents from grammar and history that the correct interpretation of Genesis is the correct one. I'm amazed that some people can read this book and still claim that the young-earth view is some kind of 1960s novelty.

WRONG -- as Dr Kelly shows, it's the billions-of-years interpretation that's the novelty. No-one had thought of this before some conservative exegetes felt the need to harmonise with the views of Hutton and Lyell in the first half of the 19th century. Even allegorizers such as Origen and Augustine recognised that Genesis allows only for Earth to be thousands of years old. Dr Kelly cites people such as Basil the Great and Calvin to prove his point. Critics also ignore the 19th Century Scriptural Geologists, documented by Dr Terry Mortenson's Ph.D. thesis at Coventry University, UK, outlined on the Answers in Genesis site.

Rating:
Summary: Kelly Stresses Careful Biblical Exegesis
Review: Dr. Doug Kelly's book "Creation and Change" is an excellent treatment of the exegetical and scientific issues surrounding Genesis 1:1-2:4. Kelly stresses that the interpretation of the Scriptures should be governed by the text, not by presuppositions imposed upon the text by the interpreter. He stongly makes the point that time and matter do not define God's creative capabilities, rather they are, in fact, defined by Him.

In passing, I had the privilege of having Dr. Kelly for a class in seminary. He is a wonderful classroom teacher as well as a gifted author.

Rating:
Summary: Another psuedoscientific young-earth emotional plea
Review: Odd how the author leaves out how the vast majority of theologians now and always have thought young-earthism is ridicoulous. YECS like his good-time-buddy Jonathan Sarfati whom works for the wild and wacky Answers in Genesis, headed by the 20th Century's greatest mind, Ken Ham, seem to forget young-earthism only vaguely existed before the '60s YEC revolution.

Yes, their "plain meaning" of Genesis is a child-like reading of the book. Oh, the horror, and the embarassment of people whom don't understand science. Thank goodness the YEC movement is on the verge of packing its bags and returning to the outback.

Rating:
Summary: Another psuedoscientific young-earth emotional plea
Review: The main thesis of Dr Kelly's book is that the author of the Hebrew text of Genesis 1:1-2:4 can only have intended to write a straightforward, historical account. Although many modern theologians claim that Genesis is poetry, it has none of the hallmarks of Hebrew poetry, such as parallelism. Dr Kelly backs this up by sound linguistic analysis. He quotes an earlier authority as saying:

'the man who says "I believe that Genesis purports to be a historical account, but I do not believe that account" is a far better interpreter of the Bible than the man who says, 'I believe that Genesis is profoundly true, but it is poetry.'

Also, Dr Kelly painstakingly documents the history of interpretation of Genesis, and shows that the almost uniform view throughout the church era was that it was intended to mean what it said. Long age and theistic evolutionary interpretations were invented only after long ages/evolutionary views became fashionable. That is, the interpreters were trying to read things from outside Scripture into the text. So they ceased to regard Scripture as authoritative, so were effectively if unwittingly contradicting Christ, e.g. John 10:35. Instead, they regarded man's (fallible) interpretation of nature as authoritative. How can anyone be a consistent follower of Christ if he denies what Christ believed about Scripture, including Genesis 1 and 2 (see Matthew 19:3-6, Mark 10:2-9)?

Dr Kelly quotes not only evangelicals, but liberals like the 19th century exegete Prof. Marcus Dods, who wrote that any interpretations of Genesis 1:1-2:4 that deny the straightforward meaning were 'futile and mischievous', and that they:

'do violence to Scripture [and] foster a style of interpretation by which the text is forced to say what the interpreter desires.'

Dods also said,

'if, for example, the word "day" in these chapters does not mean a period of twenty-four hours, the interpretation of Scripture is hopeless.'

We can see the results in seminary after seminary -- when one generation denied the plain meaning of the creation account, the next generation or two denied the plain meaning of the accounts of Christ's bodily resurrection and virginal conception.

Dr Kelly is highly qualified to write about the theological aspects of Genesis -- he is Professor of Systematic Theology at Reformed Theological Seminary, Charlotte, North Carolina. Although he is not a scientist himself, he augments his case with examples of design in biology expounded by people like the biochemicst Dr Michael Behe. The main materialistic argument against Behe has nothing to do with real science, but an a priori rejection of a Designer. Behe, although not a biblical creationist, has faced the same sort of academic arrogance, argument from authority and chronological snobbery faced by defenders of biblical creation. It's not surprising when it comes from the most dogmatic atheists, defending their materialistic faith. But it's even worse if the same attacks come from professing evangelicals, but it just goes to show that they have adopted an essentially materialistic world view ('methodological naturalism'), and in some cases adopted materialistic manners as well.

However, since science is not Dr Kelly's forté, it's to be expected that there are some inaccuracies. But these have been pointed out by creationist scientists themselves! See the review by Dr Carl Wieland, CEO of Answers in Genesis, in Creation Ex Nihilo Technical Journal 12(2):52-54, 1998. But these inaccuracies don't detract from strong scientific evidence for creation, which is best found in other books. And nor do they affect the exegetically and historically sound case for a plain understanding of Genesis made by Creation and Change.

Jonathan Sarfati, Ph.D., F.M.

Rating:
Summary: Creationist science is bad science.
Review: There is a suicidal tendency, evidently, among the proponents of fundamentalist religion to run old apologetic horses until they drop. Kelly quotes few current sources for his rehashing of creationist claims, and, frankly, gives insult by not mentioning the many refutations of his tired thesis by even well educated evangelical scientists and theologians. If creationists who champion a young earth want to say something, let them trot out a real scientist to say it, not another biblicist so-called "theologian" referencing already answered arguments. This book was a waste of my money, and will be a waste of yours also. See the online debates regarding Behe's supposedly definitive refutation of Darwinism, recognize that Behe supports an old, not a young, earth, and some of the complexities that Kelly blithely wades through will become readily apparent. This is pseudo-scholarship, not scholarship, and has nothing at all to do with real science, or with real religion. Kelly needs his literal Genesis, whatever this does to real science, or reason in general, and biblicism of this sort has been rejected by all real scientists and most educated theologians for a hundred years. Charles Briggs told us that long ago that Genesis was Hebrew poetry, not science, but Kelly's biblicism allows no such logic or evidence. Unfortunately, in the Conservative Evangelical community, in the United States, at schools officially committed to biblicism, speaking out against even terrible creationist apologetic can be a dangerous thing, and most of the best scholars I know, working in this context, don't do it. I do not work for an Evangelical institution, although I am an Evangelical historian, but I will say, loud and clear, this book is not worth the paper it is printed on, as either scientific explication, or as theology. To drag names like Torrance, et al., into this, as if they somehow enhanced Kelly's thesis, is the worst of several tricks the author plays on perhaps unsuspecting readers, who possibly have not read enough to grasp the range and integrity of the real science and theology being done today. Go to any of the sites for discussion of evolution/creationism/theology and you will find much better elucidation than Professor Kelly's book offers, for free. My copy of this book gets assigned to that growing file of supposedly Christian apologetic, that is no apologetic at all, but a kind of wishful thinking on the part of people who seem not to know what century they are living in.