Creationism - National Center for Science Education

survived the catastrophic judgment of Genesis 1:2 and were allowed to grow again in the
newly reconstituted earth:
It was animal life which perished, the traces of which remain as fossils. Relegate fossils to the primitive
creation, and no conflict of science with the Genesis cosmogony remains.
Like Pember, Scofield cites Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Jeremiah 4:23-26 to support the idea of
this ancient pre-Adamic creation.
In the New Scofield Reference Bible, a 1967 revised edition, and in the 1984 New
International Version (NIV) Scofield Bible, the Gap Theory is somewhat downplayed; the
supporting comments are relegated mostly to Isaiah rather than Genesis, where it is
mentioned only as a possible interpretation. The older editions remain quite popular with
fundamentalists, though.
Clarence Larkin’s Dispensational Truth; or God’s Plan and Purpose in the Ages
(1920; originally 1918) was also quite influential in popularizing dispensationalism and
belief in Christ’s pre-millennial return. Larkin graphically protrayed the dispensations by
means of 90 large detailed charts. Creation of the original or pre-Adamite earth was in
the “dateless past.”
It was not at the beginning of the first day as described in Gen. 1:3-5. The six days’ work as described in
Gen.1:3-31 was the restoration of the earth (not the heavens or starry space), to its original condition
before it was made “formless and void,” and submerged in water and darkness. [1920:21]
The original world was corrupted by sin, and God destroyed it by the awful Flood
catastrophe described in 2 Peter: “the world that then was, being overflowed with water,
perished.”
Watchman Nee, the Chinese theologian, argued for the Gap Theory; his Mystery
of Creation (1981) is a very readable summary of Pember’s classic interpretation, who he
follows closely; he also cites Chalmers. Nee also states that 2 Peter 3:5-7 refers to the
pre-Adamic world, its destruction by flood, and the present creation. Strict young-earth
creationists insist that a straightforward reading of this passage clearly shows this to be
Noah’s Flood, not some pre-Adamic cataclysm. Indeed, John Whitcomb, Morris’s
Genesis Flood co-author, entitled his sequel to that work The World That Perished,
quoting 2 Peter 3:6. 35
Giorgio Bartoli, the Italian geologist, chemist, and mine director, presented the
Gap Theory (which he called “restitutionism” or “reconstructionism”) in The Biblical
Story of Creation (1926).
35 This chapter of 2 Peter is a rich source of “proofs” for various and conflicting schools of creationism.
The verses just before those quoted by Nee refer to “scoffers” during the last days who refuse to believe
that God ever destroyed the world or could do so in the future; many creationists maintain that it describes
uniformitarian evolutionists. (This makes little sense, however. The “scoffers” oppose biblical historicity
with its prophesied Judgment and End of Time. Though they seem to acknowledge a creation, they deny
that the world changes—hardly an evolutionist position. The verse immediately following, which says that
“one day is with the Lord as a thousand years,” is, along with Psalm 90:4, the best available scriptural
support for Day-Age creationism. And the coming of the Lord “as a thief in the night,” two verses later,
followed by the destruction of the earth, is cited by pre-tribulation premillennialists as support for the secret
Rapture to heaven of the faithful.