Creationism - National Center for Science Education

attacking evolution. Of the three, Leander Keyser supported Price’s strict recent
creationism, while A.C. Dixon, editor of The Fundamentals, supported Gap Theory
creationism, and Riley argued for Day-Age creationism. Since Whitcomb and Morris’s
1961 Genesis Flood, recent creationism has come to the fore, but Day-Age, Gap Theory,
and other old-earth creationist schemes remain surprisingly popular.
GAP THEORY
The Gap Theory, also known as the “ruin-restitution” or “reconstruction” theory,
preserves the Genesis creation account as six literal days, of recent occurrence, but
assumes that the vast ages so well attested to by science occurred prior to this set of
events. In other words, the earth—and life—was created before the Creation Week of
Genesis. This exegesis is accomplished by postulating a tremendous “gap” between the
very first two verses of Genesis, into which go all the geological ages:
[Genesis 1:1] In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
[… GAP …]
[Genesis 1:2] And the earth was [“became”] without form, and void;...
The universe—heaven and earth—was originally (“in the beginning”) created many
aeons ago; life flourished for millions or billions of years. But this world grew to be evil,
and God destroyed it in a gigantic cataclysm. Earth became “without form and void” as a
result of this destruction. (Gap theorists hold that the verb in the second verse is more
accurately translated as became or had become rather than as was. The familiar six-day
creation—are-creation really—then followed, mere thousands of years ago, upon the ruin
and chaos of this ancient former world.
Gap Theory advocates, by this maneuver, are able to reconcile the scientific
evidence for an old earth and universe and for life itself with Genesis. They maintain that
this interpretation preserves biblical inerrancy and even literalism (though it is clearly not
the plainest and most literal interpretation), while allowing for indefinitely long ages as
demanded by science. They reject evolution just as strenuously as the young-earth
creationists. The re-creation, some six thousand or so years ago, was not entirely ex
nihilo (although humans may have been created out of nothing) but it was certainly by
divine fiat. Therefore, although they differ markedly from “strict” creationists regarding
the age of the earth, their anti-evolution attitudes and arguments are virtually identical.
The Gap Theory, incidentally, has nothing to do with the fact that there are two
somewhat contradictory creation accounts in Genesis. Because gap theory creationism
has received little attention compared to young-earth creationism, and because its
proponents tend to use the same anti-evolution arguments anyway, many critics of
creationism are unaware of it or are confused about what it is. The founders of the
British anti-creationist group APE, for instance, erroneously reported that the gap theory
“proposes that geology happened sometime between.the Fall and the Flood” (Howgate
and Lewis 1984:703). Cavanaugh, in his otherwise excellent sociological study of
creationism, mistook the gap theory as an attempt to reconcile the two Genesis creation
accounts (1983:169n), as have others.