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Biblical Creationism: What Each Book of the Bible Teaches About Creation & the Flood
Many Christians consider the doctrine of creationism to be a marginal issue -- perhaps not important to our faith. But do you know that the Bible speaks on the subject . . . in each of its 66 books? Henry Morris, the father of the modern creationism movement, has meticulously researched the subject and his classic Biblical Creationism stands as a powerful witness that creation is anything but a trivial issue. From the fall of creation in Genesis, to creation restored in Revelation, we are given insightful clues about God's mighty work. Be amazed at the dialogue Job and his friends have concerning Noah's flood, or Peter's assertion that future generations would scoff at the idea of special creation. This book will enrich the faith of clergy and laity alike.
276 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1993
68 people are currently reading
110 people want to read
About the author
Henry M. Morris
132 books65 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author with this name in the Goodreads database.
Henry M. Morris (1918–2006) was an American engineer and young Earth creationist, widely regarded as the father of modern creation science. He founded the Institute for Creation Research.
Not to be confused with his eldest son Henry M. Morris III.
Henry M. Morris (1918–2006) was an American engineer and young Earth creationist, widely regarded as the father of modern creation science. He founded the Institute for Creation Research.
Not to be confused with his eldest son Henry M. Morris III.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
July 19, 2018
Biblical Creationism is a pseudo-commentary in which Morris comments on biblical texts related to creation. This makes the book a bit uneven, in that he'll cover huge portions of Genesis, but then the rest of the book jumps from book to book to book commenting on variou passages in it. This is fine, in a sense, but it never really ties things together in a satisfactory way.
There is much good in the book, but it isn't especially convincing or even focused enough to articulate a cohesive doctrine of creation. I found James B. Jordan's book "Creation in Six Days" far more satisfactory and far more convincing.
There is much good in the book, but it isn't especially convincing or even focused enough to articulate a cohesive doctrine of creation. I found James B. Jordan's book "Creation in Six Days" far more satisfactory and far more convincing.
May 1, 2018
In most of pgs. 15-23, Morris could have applied the 'Commentary' moniker. At least his name is on the book, so that we know that it is not God Himself asserting these things. Morris, of course, wants to speak the truth of God as to origins. But, for such a culturally important book, he could at least have qualified his opinions as such, even among those who agree with him as to what Genesis 1 and 2 basically say. Many who do agree thereon nevertheless disagree as to his particular ideas about some of this pair of accounts. I, for one, despite agreeing with his basic view of Genesis 1, strenuously disagree with much of what he has to say in this book about these two accounts.
Morris reasons that, since Genesis 2:23 implies that Adam knew that Eve had been made from part of himself, God must have explicitly informed him of this. But Morris expressly places this explicitly informing event sometime after when Eve was brought to Adam. I think that this, alone, is a problem, since I think that the only normal way to interpret Adam's saying this is that he said this at the same moment that he met Eve.
Morris has to do deny this interpretation in order to allow for God to have outright informed Adam of the matter *outside of the account*. In other words, Morris is reading the account as if that which it spells out is strictly and shallowly what it means: a sequence of words to be memorized only in what they directly describe. Thus, to preserve that conception of the account, Morris allows himself the liberty of an extra-account deduction in order to explain how Adam knew that Eve had been made from part of himself.
But even if we allow that God had outright informed Adam of the material source of Eve prior to his meeting Eve, that still would not help explain any of the account's data. And this is the basic problem of an essentially pedestrian 'familiar' approach to the text: it renders the text according only to its most obvious level of information: that for which the account is thereby rendered a kind of Complete Idiot's Guide. Thus, if it does not slap us in the face, as it were, as to the explanation of some obscure detail in it, then it contains no information on that detail. In short, Morris takes for granted that Genesis 1 contains no information that normally would suggest as to how Adam knew that Eve had been made from part of himself. And other purely speculative explanations are available than that which Morris proffers.
Morris's own speculation is purely that, for it does not appeal to any textual data except that of the fact that the data imply that Adam knew.
Humans are designed to be a host of good things, such as having an unassuming initiative, being explorative, perceptive, intuitive, visceral, and conversational. But Morris not only puts Eve out of the intelligence equation, he reduces Adam's own 'intellect' to an essentially disembodied, non-intuitive, non-visceral, dutifully academics-ready blank slate. All this is because (1) the accounts do not mention Adam's ever speaking in any way until God supposedly 'commands' Adam to name the animals, and (2) the bulk of the second account supposedly explicitly involves only God's relation to the man (not to the woman), and that there is only one small phrase near the end of the second account that could normally be seen to expressly indicate otherwise ('brought her to the man' v. 22, but brought her from where? Not the same location where God made 'awdawm'?).
Thus, Eve readily is misconstrued not to have had a personal relation with God in her own first hours, since the account does not outright mention such a normal thing as that she had (nor that Adam had with God in Adam's own first hours). The same mindlessly 'loyal' logic applies to the rest of the canon, so that we supposedly are well within our rights to conclude that God simply does not want for us to know of, much less what, those respective initial conversations were. This is not what it means for the account to be 'sufficient' and 'authoritative'. For that would mean that the Bible is a kind of Complete Idiots' Guide to What God Wants Us To Know of the Canon, Despite That The Canon Overflows With Material That The Canon Does Not Outright Explain.
The conclusion Morris tacitly proffers is that God did not think it important for us to know as to whether there was any conversation at all between God and the respective two humans *in those humans' respective first hours*, therefore much less did God think it important that we know what such conversation was about.
Thus, despite that it would be normal to assume that there was such conversation, the lack of any data expressly that there was is seen as warranting the conclusion that God does not want us to have any deep concern for the issue. Hence, the entirety of Genesis 2 is seen as little more than a sequence of words to be memorized, assented to, and defended as historically true. No study required.
In other words, Morris renders Genesis 2 as teaching us that the two first, fully functional, uniquely prototypical human adults were implicitly held by God to a 'fearful silence and passive attention', just as were the students in a typical high school class during the Sputnik Era class explicitly held to this as the teacher began writing the morning's material on the chalkboard. Morris's tacit motive for this is that the pair of accounts are thereby rendered the more authoritative.
Indeed, this is how he renders Genesis 1, which is essentially no better that how MacArthur renders it. (2017, 'The Theology of Creation (Selected Scriptures)'. Youtube, Grace to You https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkkYQ...)
MacArthur epitomizes the logically extreme dichotomy for which Genesis 1 ignorantly is utilized in ostensible favor of its instructiveness. Specifically, this is the false instructiveness of blind assent to a blindly polemic-centric interpretation according to which the account describes a 'series' of 'instantaneous' miracles that therefore cannot be allowed to be accessible to what we can know of how Earth's ecology basically coheres.
So this is a reduction of the instructiveness of the account to that of a proto-poetic appeal to our duty of blind assent to that which we have already blindly mistaken of the account! This is how MacArthur reasons: (A) God technically was free to have created in any which way that we can imagine; Therefore (B) there can be nothing in what He did create that could help us understand, much less predict, the realities and methods described in this pair of accounts; Therefore, (C), despite the fact that natural languages are not alternate lexicons for Anglo-Saxon grammatical conceptual schemes, at least the Genesis 1 account is to be interpreted purely by what it seems to spell out to our own Anglo-Saxon grammatical conceptual scheme of the thereby-seeming subjects of each point in the account.
This is a logically foolish extreme dichotomy that, for those who, like MacArthur, are driven to it by their own ignorance and erroneous conflations, supposedly solves every nuance of providential concern, on the part of everyone, as to the believability of the two accounts. In short, this dichotomy is an ignorance-driven action of 'hiding one's head in the sand', and thus that can help only to further confirm the erroneous conflations that provoke that action in the first place. Applied the whole Bible, the result is familiar to many, but MacArthur is too intent on his version of defending the account to realize this.
So, in regard to Morris, it does not befit those who see better of the kind of logic to which MacArthur appeals to relegate the pair of accounts to anything less than what our own ignorance of them admits is their *conceivable potential on all fronts". This is because God created a comprehensible cosmos, not a bag of mutually alien whatnots.
So I give Morris's book only 2.5 stars. (I fail to notice a way to make that show on the stars themselves.)
Morris reasons that, since Genesis 2:23 implies that Adam knew that Eve had been made from part of himself, God must have explicitly informed him of this. But Morris expressly places this explicitly informing event sometime after when Eve was brought to Adam. I think that this, alone, is a problem, since I think that the only normal way to interpret Adam's saying this is that he said this at the same moment that he met Eve.
Morris has to do deny this interpretation in order to allow for God to have outright informed Adam of the matter *outside of the account*. In other words, Morris is reading the account as if that which it spells out is strictly and shallowly what it means: a sequence of words to be memorized only in what they directly describe. Thus, to preserve that conception of the account, Morris allows himself the liberty of an extra-account deduction in order to explain how Adam knew that Eve had been made from part of himself.
But even if we allow that God had outright informed Adam of the material source of Eve prior to his meeting Eve, that still would not help explain any of the account's data. And this is the basic problem of an essentially pedestrian 'familiar' approach to the text: it renders the text according only to its most obvious level of information: that for which the account is thereby rendered a kind of Complete Idiot's Guide. Thus, if it does not slap us in the face, as it were, as to the explanation of some obscure detail in it, then it contains no information on that detail. In short, Morris takes for granted that Genesis 1 contains no information that normally would suggest as to how Adam knew that Eve had been made from part of himself. And other purely speculative explanations are available than that which Morris proffers.
Morris's own speculation is purely that, for it does not appeal to any textual data except that of the fact that the data imply that Adam knew.
Humans are designed to be a host of good things, such as having an unassuming initiative, being explorative, perceptive, intuitive, visceral, and conversational. But Morris not only puts Eve out of the intelligence equation, he reduces Adam's own 'intellect' to an essentially disembodied, non-intuitive, non-visceral, dutifully academics-ready blank slate. All this is because (1) the accounts do not mention Adam's ever speaking in any way until God supposedly 'commands' Adam to name the animals, and (2) the bulk of the second account supposedly explicitly involves only God's relation to the man (not to the woman), and that there is only one small phrase near the end of the second account that could normally be seen to expressly indicate otherwise ('brought her to the man' v. 22, but brought her from where? Not the same location where God made 'awdawm'?).
Thus, Eve readily is misconstrued not to have had a personal relation with God in her own first hours, since the account does not outright mention such a normal thing as that she had (nor that Adam had with God in Adam's own first hours). The same mindlessly 'loyal' logic applies to the rest of the canon, so that we supposedly are well within our rights to conclude that God simply does not want for us to know of, much less what, those respective initial conversations were. This is not what it means for the account to be 'sufficient' and 'authoritative'. For that would mean that the Bible is a kind of Complete Idiots' Guide to What God Wants Us To Know of the Canon, Despite That The Canon Overflows With Material That The Canon Does Not Outright Explain.
The conclusion Morris tacitly proffers is that God did not think it important for us to know as to whether there was any conversation at all between God and the respective two humans *in those humans' respective first hours*, therefore much less did God think it important that we know what such conversation was about.
Thus, despite that it would be normal to assume that there was such conversation, the lack of any data expressly that there was is seen as warranting the conclusion that God does not want us to have any deep concern for the issue. Hence, the entirety of Genesis 2 is seen as little more than a sequence of words to be memorized, assented to, and defended as historically true. No study required.
In other words, Morris renders Genesis 2 as teaching us that the two first, fully functional, uniquely prototypical human adults were implicitly held by God to a 'fearful silence and passive attention', just as were the students in a typical high school class during the Sputnik Era class explicitly held to this as the teacher began writing the morning's material on the chalkboard. Morris's tacit motive for this is that the pair of accounts are thereby rendered the more authoritative.
Indeed, this is how he renders Genesis 1, which is essentially no better that how MacArthur renders it. (2017, 'The Theology of Creation (Selected Scriptures)'. Youtube, Grace to You https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkkYQ...)
MacArthur epitomizes the logically extreme dichotomy for which Genesis 1 ignorantly is utilized in ostensible favor of its instructiveness. Specifically, this is the false instructiveness of blind assent to a blindly polemic-centric interpretation according to which the account describes a 'series' of 'instantaneous' miracles that therefore cannot be allowed to be accessible to what we can know of how Earth's ecology basically coheres.
So this is a reduction of the instructiveness of the account to that of a proto-poetic appeal to our duty of blind assent to that which we have already blindly mistaken of the account! This is how MacArthur reasons: (A) God technically was free to have created in any which way that we can imagine; Therefore (B) there can be nothing in what He did create that could help us understand, much less predict, the realities and methods described in this pair of accounts; Therefore, (C), despite the fact that natural languages are not alternate lexicons for Anglo-Saxon grammatical conceptual schemes, at least the Genesis 1 account is to be interpreted purely by what it seems to spell out to our own Anglo-Saxon grammatical conceptual scheme of the thereby-seeming subjects of each point in the account.
This is a logically foolish extreme dichotomy that, for those who, like MacArthur, are driven to it by their own ignorance and erroneous conflations, supposedly solves every nuance of providential concern, on the part of everyone, as to the believability of the two accounts. In short, this dichotomy is an ignorance-driven action of 'hiding one's head in the sand', and thus that can help only to further confirm the erroneous conflations that provoke that action in the first place. Applied the whole Bible, the result is familiar to many, but MacArthur is too intent on his version of defending the account to realize this.
So, in regard to Morris, it does not befit those who see better of the kind of logic to which MacArthur appeals to relegate the pair of accounts to anything less than what our own ignorance of them admits is their *conceivable potential on all fronts". This is because God created a comprehensible cosmos, not a bag of mutually alien whatnots.
So I give Morris's book only 2.5 stars. (I fail to notice a way to make that show on the stars themselves.)
August 28, 2024
Excellent source for understanding the Truth about creation. One can read straight through or return to a specific chapter for a discussion of a book of the Bible.
A must read for those who want to know Jesus better as He was the Creator before He was the Savior.
A must read for those who want to know Jesus better as He was the Creator before He was the Savior.
Want to read
January 3, 2024Bought in Harrisburg Dec. 2023
January 27, 2008
Some of the best books take the longest to read. Biblical Creationism by Dr. Henry Morris is one example. It took me much longer to read than it should have, but it was always a rewarding experience when I put away the candy-like reading of lighter books and picked up the nourishing meal of Biblical Creationism.
This book is an in depth, comprehensive study of the entire Bible from the viewpoint of Creation. What does the Bible say about the origins of the universe? Does the entire Bible affirm the truth of the first 10 chapters of Genesis? Did the Prophets and New Testament writers believe the story of creation?
Dr. Henry Morris unabashedly believes in the divine inspiration of the entire Bible from Genesis 1:1, "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." to Revelation 22:20-21, "He who testifies to these things says, “Surely I am coming soon.” Amen. Come, Lord Jesus! The grace of the Lord Jesus be with all. Amen."
The Bible teaches one uncorrupted word from God, and this book is a strong rebuttal to anyone who believes that the first part of Genesis can be interpreted as allegory without changing the Gospel of Jesus Christ. For we learn that Jesus is not only the Savior of the world but the Creator of the world. He is the "I AM."
Almost every scripture that refers or alludes to the first several chapters from Genesis (including the creation, fall of man, flood account, and early men such as Adam, Seth, and Enoch) is quoted by Dr. Morris as he moves through each book in the Bible from beginning to end to affirm the unwavering truth of God's creating power.
Unlike some modern people who struggle with stories from the Bible such as Joshua's long day (when the sun stood still) and the parting of the Red Sea, Dr. Henry Morris finds every answer in an all powerful God who has the ability to create from nothing. The entire universe is sustained by Him, and the laws of nature are reliant upon Him.
Biblical Creationism teaches the importance of creation in evangelism. It references Paul, Peter, John, and others who rooted the gospel message in creation. When one understands that we were created by God, it should be clear that we are responsible to our Creator. Man needs a Savior.
I recommend this book. Dr. Henry Morris brought six decades of Bible and word origin study to the table in the writing of this book, and I think it is safe to say that the lie of evolution will find a deadly enemy in any Christian who arms himself with the Bible knowledge found within Biblical Creationism.
This book is an in depth, comprehensive study of the entire Bible from the viewpoint of Creation. What does the Bible say about the origins of the universe? Does the entire Bible affirm the truth of the first 10 chapters of Genesis? Did the Prophets and New Testament writers believe the story of creation?
Dr. Henry Morris unabashedly believes in the divine inspiration of the entire Bible from Genesis 1:1, "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." to Revelation 22:20-21, "He who testifies to these things says, “Surely I am coming soon.” Amen. Come, Lord Jesus! The grace of the Lord Jesus be with all. Amen."
The Bible teaches one uncorrupted word from God, and this book is a strong rebuttal to anyone who believes that the first part of Genesis can be interpreted as allegory without changing the Gospel of Jesus Christ. For we learn that Jesus is not only the Savior of the world but the Creator of the world. He is the "I AM."
Almost every scripture that refers or alludes to the first several chapters from Genesis (including the creation, fall of man, flood account, and early men such as Adam, Seth, and Enoch) is quoted by Dr. Morris as he moves through each book in the Bible from beginning to end to affirm the unwavering truth of God's creating power.
Unlike some modern people who struggle with stories from the Bible such as Joshua's long day (when the sun stood still) and the parting of the Red Sea, Dr. Henry Morris finds every answer in an all powerful God who has the ability to create from nothing. The entire universe is sustained by Him, and the laws of nature are reliant upon Him.
Biblical Creationism teaches the importance of creation in evangelism. It references Paul, Peter, John, and others who rooted the gospel message in creation. When one understands that we were created by God, it should be clear that we are responsible to our Creator. Man needs a Savior.
I recommend this book. Dr. Henry Morris brought six decades of Bible and word origin study to the table in the writing of this book, and I think it is safe to say that the lie of evolution will find a deadly enemy in any Christian who arms himself with the Bible knowledge found within Biblical Creationism.
January 19, 2024
This is a piggy-back of Henry Morris' other book on creation, "Scientific Creationism." While the other book attacks a false, scientific worldview, this book promotes a greater understanding of the truth presented in the Bible to support the reality and fact of Creation and the flood. Together both of these books do an excellent job of engaging in the apologetics of these topics, while separately they offer what might be a different flavor of discussion in their approach to understanding why the Bible is true and modern thinking is false.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews