Passages referencing God as Creator, or creation itself, appear in every section of the Hebrew Scriptures, the Tanakh—the Law, the Prophets (Former and Latter), and the Writings. They appear in the New Testament as well—the writings of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, as well as the epistles of Paul, Peter, and the author of Hebrews, and the apocalyptic book of Revelation.

Some years back, I wrote a series here explaining why I am (still!) a young-earth creationist, even though more and more of the cool kids are eating at a different lunch table. In evangelical academia, most scholars, while rejecting the atheistic evolution of, say, Richard Dawkins or the late Stephen Jay Gould, Carl Sagan, or Christopher Hitchens, have adopted one of two theistic accommodations of evolutionary theory: either theistic evolution, typified by Biologos and its founder Francis Collins (most famous for his time as leader of the Human Genome Project, which produced a fully mapped human genome in 2003); or what I would call discontinuous or punctuated evolution, typified by Hugh Ross’s Progressive Creationism, which posits that God worked direct acts of creation at points along the timeline that natural processes could not account for. (Theistic evolutionists are generally nearly as dismissive of Progressive Creationism, labeling it a “god of the gaps” solution, as they are of Young Earth Creationism, which they view as uneducated and therefore ignorant.)

I think it’s noteworthy that although evangelical scholars are generally old-earth creationists, the same cannot be said of the folks in the pew, or even outside the church: a 2024 Gallup poll recorded the most popular view as “God created humans in their present form” (37%); slightly fewer held that “humans evolved, God guided” (34%); and fewer still held that “humans evolved, God had no part (24%).” (Compare an earlier Pew Research Center survey here.) This spread is remarkable, given that public education has promoted atheistic evolution exclusively for well over half a century. I wonder whether there is something inherent in humans that resists atheistic “solutions”; it’s almost as though one has to go to college to be pressured away from it.

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