Creationism - National Center for Science Education

Despite disclaiming any direct linkage of the creation days to geological eras, Stokes
goes on to explain how each Genesis ‘day’ corresponds to scientific knowledge of the
formation of the earth. He praises recent books by Isaac Asimov and Carl Sagan
(notorious “secular humanists,” according to strict fundamentalists) for helping him
arrive at these conclusions, and criticizes Robert Jastrow for failing to pursue the
religious implications of his books.
R.E.D. Clark, author of Darwin: Before and After (1967; originally 1948), The
Universe: Plan or Accident? (1972; originally 1949), and other books highly critical of
Darwinism, affirms that creation occurred billions of years ago. According to Alan
Hayward (1978:213), Clark argued for the Revelatory Theory of creationism in The
Christian Stake in Science (1967).
Hayward himself, in God Is; A Scientist Shows Why It Makes Sense to Believe in
God (1978) said that Day-Age, Revelatory creationism, and what he calls “Days of
Divine Fiat” are all possible options. Thus, he says, both Genesis and geology are
correct. Hayward goes on to propose the theory of “successive creation”: that “God has
been at work ever since the universe began, performing a great number of creative acts at
intervals” (1978:197-198). In Creation and Evolution: The Facts and Fallacies (1985),
he expands on these ideas, urging a “middle position” of “ancient creationism.” Hayward
is strongly opposed to young-earth Flood Geology creationism, and thoroughly refutes all
its major scientific arguments. The succession of fossil types is undeniable, says
Hayward, but it is not due to evolution; rather, to “successive acts of creation over a long
period.” Darwinism is “contrary to the evidence, and—evolution is therefore nothing
more than an unsupported speculation” (1985:6).
According to Hayward’s Days of Divine Fiat theory, creation was declared by
God in six days, but the process of creation was manifested over long ages, and the six
day/ages may overlap. The first two verses of Genesis describe the original creation of
earth, and its original condition.
At this point, God begins to speak. According to the Fiat Theory, the rest of the chapter is basically an
account of the great creative fiats, which were uttered upon the six (presumably literal and consecutive)
days. Inserted into this primary narrative is a whole series of parentheses, which describe the subsequent
fulfilments of the fiats. These out-workings of the fiats, of course, could have taken any amount of time to
occur. [1985:170-171]
This theory was first proposed by F.H. Capron in 1902 in his book The Conflict of Truth,
but subsequently ignored. Dallas Cain, who is affiliated with R.C. Newman’s
Interdisciplinary Biblical Research institute, has researched it and advocates it in a
privately-published paper “Creation and Capron’s Explanatory Interpretation” (1982).
Henri Blocher, a French professor of systematic theology, discusses various
interpretations of the Genesis creation account, including the “literal” theory (strict
young-earth creationism), the “reconstruction” (Gap) theory, and the “concordist” (Day-
Age) theory in In the Beginning: The Opening Chapters of Genesis (1984; originally
1979, in French). Blocher prefers what he calls the “literary” interpretation: the
Framework Theory. He says the Genesis account is thematic rather than chronological,
and the activities of the creation ‘days’ overlap. Blocher accepts transformation of
species at least up to the level of Linnean orders, but rejects naturalistic evolution of
major forms, and considers the mathematical probablility criticisms of evolution
“unanswerable.”