Creationism - National Center for Science Education

may be closer to the actual intent of the ancient Hebrews. He suggests that Chaos existed
before the first verse of Genesis. God may have created it in prior ages, but the Bible
does not speak of this. Genesis begins with this Chaos already in existence. Referring to
Job, Psalms, and other scriptures, Bixler argues that Chaos was under the control of evil
and destructive entities. God’s work during the six days of creation involved immense
effort: actual “warfare” against this evil Chaos, which resisted mightily. God forcibly
restrained the Waters of the Deep (the Abyss) and the Darkness. References to sea
monsters or dragon/serpents ib the Bible—Leviathan, Rahab—are personifications or
examples of this evil which God “muzzled” at creation. During the Flood, God allowed
the Waters of the Deep and the Waters Above the Firmament to revert temporarily to
their former untamed and unrestrained state. (Bixler equates the Waters Above the
Firmament with the water canopy.)
This titanic struggle between God and the evil Chaos during the six day creation
is unabashed dualism, as Bixler openly admits: “Certainly the Bible is dualistic!”
(1986:133). Bixler is fully aware that his exegesis makes Genesis sound like pagan
cosmologies, unlike the later Christian ex nihilo interpretation, which stresses its
uniqueness. He professes not to worry, saying that “Satan consistently displays the
counterfeit, the half-truth.” Bixler also denies the doctrine of dispensationalism, asserting
that God operates now just as He has since creation. God creates wine out of water and
heals blind eyes in the same way that He created the earth from Chaos.
Inspired by Velikovsky and especially by Donald Patten, who wrote a Foreword
to this book (a second Foreword was written by John Rea, a professor at Pat Robertson’s
CBN University), Bixler proposes that Creation was a cosmic catastrophe: the approach
of an ice planet or ice comet to the fiery proto-earth Chaos. The first four days of
creation involved extraterrestrial catastrophes. Appealing again to pagan cosmologies,
Bixler suggests that the lesser light appointed to rule the night was Saturn (1986:175). A
later cosmic cataclysm provoked the Flood and the Ice Age, and restructured the solar
system, producing our moon.
Bixler dismisses the standard Gap Theory as an ad hoc “concordistic” attempt to
harmonize the ex nihilo interpretation with accumulating evidence for an old earth. He
praises Weston Fields’ exegesis (1976), which refutes the Gap Theory, as “almost
flawless” (except for Field’s refusal to critically examine creatio ex nihilo!), and
discusses many of the early commentators claimed to be early Gap Theorists by Custance
and others, giving a more plausible rendering of their views as referring to a pre-existent
(pre-Gen. 1:1) Chaos. 39 Bixler submits that his exegesis eliminates the vexing conflict
between young-earth and old-earth dating claims, confessing that there is strong evidence
for both. Bixler solves this dilemma with his proposal that the six-day creation of
Genesis occurred just a few thousand years ago, but the pre-existent earth—Chaos—is
billions of years old.
The authoritative Unger’s Bible Handbook, respected by fundamentalists,
similarly proposes a “pre-Genesis Gap” while rejecting the standard Gap Theory. Merrill
Unger suggests that Gen. 1:1 refers to a “relative” beginning—a “refashioning” of the
39 Charles Taylor (1984:48), a strict creationist, protested the 18th-century theological views expressed in
Haydn’s 1798 oratorio The Creation for these reasons. The oratorio’s opening section—before God’s first
creative act (“Let there be light!”)—is a marvelously inspired classical depiction of Chaos. Presumably
(according to Taylor) this constitutes a denial of creatio ex nihilo.