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Gibber! Gibber!

Chugley

Ramblings of a ‘redneck’

The journey of a pastor-scientist with biblical creation

By Jim Wilson

Published 16 Sep, 2026

Does simply “reading the Bible as though it were true” make one a ‘redneck’? With qualifications in both science and theology, Jim Wilson shares his conviction regarding the importance of biblical creation

In 1959 I entered theological college not knowing what to expect. One lecturer gave us a love for, and confidence in, the Old Testament. He was an excellent teacher, with a great knowledge of Hebrew. He was especially strong on the prophets, the history of Israel, and archaeology. Subsequently, he spoke at my wedding and we corresponded quite a bit over his remaining years. He went from being my lecturer to a friend.

On one occasion he was asked what he thought about Genesis 1–11 as it was not a subject which seemed to come up in lectures. He used the word ‘myth’, and possibly ‘legend’. Over the years I came to realize that almost all theological college lecturers held to ideas of ‘myths’ and ‘framework hypotheses’ for those early ‘poetical’ chapters. It appears that part of Scripture was not now held to contain actual history as it stood against the current and now widely-held ‘long ages’ perspective. It supposedly only contained/conveyed spiritual truths via imagery and poetry. What brought this about?

Up until the early nineteenth century among the Christian mainstream there seemed to be no problem with taking Genesis 1–11 as literal history, and that our past was the key to understanding the present. What changed?

What happened?

A new and secular version of history gradually took shape, encompassing our biosphere, planet, solar system, and universe. It attempted to explain everything as having come about gradually, naturally, and spontaneously over millions and billions of years. James Hutton, a Scotsman, asserted that the Earth was much older than 6,000 years. Another Scotsman followed—Sir Charles Lyell, who claimed similarly and said that the study of geology needed to be rescued “from Moses”. He wrote a book called Principles of Geology, which Charles Darwin read during his voyage on the Beagle.

The new approach was that ’the present is the key to the past’ and therefore slow geological rates observed today, such as erosion and deposition of sediment, told the story that the earth was old. This interpretation of geological features became known as uniformitarianism. Fossils, rock layers, and coal seams also came to be interpreted through this lens of slow processes, and gradual biological evolution. It allowed no large-scale rapid processes (catastrophism), such as would operate during Noah’s Flood. Darwin and others quickly came on board. God was no longer needed to explain anything and was eased out of the picture. In due time it became an academic embarrassment to hold to a ‘young Earth’.

How does this new narrative stack up with facts?

1. The features of sedimentary rocks do not fit in with long ages.
2. Fossils are not formed by gradual burial.
3. There are no ‘transitional’ species in the so called ‘Cambrian Explosion’.
4. Many of the imagined gradual changes in a species’ supposed evolution could not function. For example, if the front legs of a running creature had gradually turned into wings, a stage would be reached when not running well anymore, yet not flying well enough to compensate.
5. Mutations are overwhelmingly either neutral or damaging. They rarely, if ever, produce the new genetic information essential throughout the story of Darwinian evolution.

The new history of the world of long geological ages, with names like Carboniferous, Devonian, and Jurassic, is based on a lot of supposition and conjecture. It ends up reinforcing itself, because the fossil record is interpreted on the notion of a series of successive ages, rather than an order of burial of ecological systems. There is insufficient hard evidence to back up the whole unfolding story; its attraction was its naturalism¹ not its science. It kept the ‘divine foot’ out of the door.

Gordon L. Herries Davies (1932–2019) was a geomorphology researcher, a pioneering historian of geology, and a distinguished academic at the University of Dublin. Writing in Nature in 1993, he said: “Surely what we know as geohistory originates not within rocks but within the minds of their human observers.” In this context, perhaps we need to take another look at the early chapters of Genesis.

Linguistics

The study of numerous languages indicates that there is a widespread tendency for them to become simpler.² This is the opposite to the evolution story, which has them moving gradually from noises and grunts to more varied sounds. The record of the language dispersal at the Tower of Babel fits with what we observe. A batch of entirely new languages arose suddenly, with a continual process of diversification since then into many more. The languages within any of the language ‘families’ of today (Indo-European, Sino-Asiatic, etc.) are clearly related to each other, but not to any in another family. This is because those in family A derived from a different original Babel ‘stem’ language to those in family B.

Genetics

Mutations in our human genome continually increase the detrimental ‘genetic load’ of defects. This picture is the very opposite of ‘onward and upward’ evolution due to favourable mutations. And it suggests a genetically superior starting point in the past with the unstoppable downhill run occurring in some thousands of years, not millions. It leads to extinction, not progressive improvement.³

Geology

We find evidence of widespread catastrophism, with continent-wide sediments, large-scale folding of sedimentary deposits while still plastic, and much else that fits in well with Noah’s Flood. There are also multiple layers of graded sediment over large areas with little evidence of erosion (time) between them. Huge ‘fossil graveyards’ speak of catastrophic burial.⁴

Human history

Written and reliably dated human history only goes back a few thousand years. Not even tens of thousands.⁵

Paleontology

Scientific observations like these encourage me to hang my hat on the historicity of Genesis 1–11 as it stands.

Fossil dinosaurs contain tissue that is still soft and flexible, as well as intact proteins like hemoglobin and osteocalcin. This does not fit with the 66,000,000 years since they supposedly went extinct.⁶

Together, scientific observations like these encourage me to ‘hang my hat’ on the historicity of Genesis 1–11 as it stands. The scenario of billions of years is not necessitated by science but by evolutionism and atheism.

How the plain reading of Scripture transformed a clergyman’s life

English clergyman Henry Francis Lyte was in ill health for much of his later life and died of tuberculosis at the age of 54. He went to Oxford and became an Anglican minister in 1815. But he was quite bewildered and had little idea of what role he was to play. However, after a year or so a dying priest convinced him to take the Bible seriously—“Read it as though it is true”. He did, and began to preach earnestly, his life having completely changed. He achieved much in his short life. He wrote poetry, started a Sunday school that grew to many hundreds, as well as a Sunday school for sailors. He also worked to oppose slavery.

He would rise at 6 am and spend about two hours in prayer. He knew Latin, Greek and French and studied wildflowers. He played the flute and it was said that he was tall and unusually handsome. But we hear nothing of this today. It has all faded into the mists of time, as all our lives do. As a hymn by Isaac Watts puts it, “Time like an ever rolling stream bears all its sons away. They fly forgotten as a dream dies at the op’ning day”.

However, one thing that Lyte did has not faded away. As he lay very ill with TB in 1847, he wrote the hymn ‘Abide With Me’—just a few weeks before he died. It is a hymn that has had a profound influence on the world. It flowed naturally from a life changed by reading the Bible “as though it is true”.

While some branches of the Christian church rejected the old-earth paradigm, most mainstream denominations tried to adjust to it, often via some version of theistic evolution—God using evolution.

What drives theistic evolution?

1. Ignorance

Some theistic evolutionists sincerely hold that biblical creation is a red herring and takes attention away from the Gospel. But what exactly do they mean by the Gospel? If God used evolution to ‘create’, then He used millions of years of death and suffering to slowly create a dog-eat-dog, nature-red-in-tooth-and-claw world by means of genetic accidents and natural selection. This does not line up very well with the first chapter of Genesis where creation, at its completion, is described as ‘very good’, with the animals only eating vegetation.

Also, Genesis 3 teaches us that death came on all creation because of sin. Theistic evolution must allow for millions of years of death and suffering that were not the result of man’s sin. This is quite contrary to the New Testament teaching that “by man came death” (1 Corinthians 15:21), and to other many biblical passages that reinforce the fact that sin brought the Curse of death and suffering to a once-perfect world. Theistic evolution and a disbelief in a literal Genesis is a recent invention to try and accommodate something contradictory to the Bible, and that ‘something’ never happened anyway.

Prior to Lyell and Darwin the church in general accepted the straightforward understanding of Genesis chapters 1–11, as did Jesus, Paul, and nearly all scientists. Genesis is foundational to the Gospel. Where do we draw the line once foundational Scriptures are conveniently turned into myths? What are the facts, and what are the myths? The last 60 years has seen a widespread adoption of belief in evolution and long ages. At the same time, the Christian church, in the developed world especially, has become seriously weakened, and naturalistic, secular humanism has become the dominant worldview. Anyone who argues that this weakening of the church has had nothing to do with belief in evolution has their head in the sand.

Anyone who argues that the widespread adoption of belief in evolution has had nothing to do with the weakening of the Christian church has their head in the sand.

While Christians should battle against all those frontal attacks on our Judeo-Christian heritage such as the promotion of abortion, killing of the terminally ill, same-sex marriage, pornography, etc., they are but the cobwebs. Evolutionism is the spider that weaves them and has eaten the Scriptures and destroyed the biblical authority that previously justified our Judeo-Christian worldview.

The ultimate question Christians face is, “Do we interpret nature through the lens of Scripture, or Scripture through the lens of the latest ideas about nature?”

2. A mistaken idea of a fall-back position

An academic colleague of mine at my university advised me not to hold openly to a literal interpretation of Genesis 1–11 as I might end up with ‘egg on my face’. What is truly sad is that the authority of Scripture has been compromised by all those trying to avoid egg on their face, especially theological college lecturers.

It is inconsistent to avoid supernaturalism in the Old Testament so as to accept the secular imagination of history, yet allow for the supernatural in the person, teaching, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It reminds one of Bunyan’s Mr Facing Both Ways.

The modern view of world history is considered sacrosanct not so much because of its supposed basis in science (which does not fit on many fronts), but because it cannot sanction anything supernatural. Naturalism must rule the day, even where it is a poor fit with reality. Is there any hard evidence for the long ages? Some ‘hang their hat’ on dating methods, of which there are many. Some of the dating methods give answers far too ‘young’ for the secularist, so are either challenged or ignored.

3. Pride

The sin of pride may be one of the most important sins of all. Nobody appreciates being labelled a ‘flat earther’, or similar! An example of this was when well-known journalist Paul Sheehan interviewed a prominent Sydney Anglican in 2003.⁷ I refer to the last part of the interview:

Anglican prelate: “We are setting up new Anglican schools and giving the Scriptures far more attention in schools.” Sheehan writes: “I asked if creationism is making a comeback in scriptural studies at one leading Anglican school, which is what some parents have told me”.

The clergyman replies, “We are evangelicals, not fundamentalists … . The attitude of the media is to treat us like rednecks. I’m a graduate of Oxford but I’m still treated like a redneck”.

A larger question for any Christian academic is, “Can the Gospel still be ‘good news’ if death came before Adam?” Whence came death? By man, as the New Testament says? According to evolutionary thinking, death is a perfecting, cleansing and creative mechanism weeding out all those unfit to survive. It is believed to have gone on for hundreds of millions of years before there could be anyone called Adam and Eve.

I believe there are solid grounds for holding to the integrity of Genesis 1–11 without the need for any hermeneutical gymnastics.

Fallout

I met my late wife in theological college over 60 years ago. About 30 years ago we made a list of all those who were our fellow students and noted where they were ‘at’ now. We were students at a time of turmoil for both the college and our denomination regarding the authority of the Bible. It was also a time when the desire to see student numbers grow may have overrun suitability criteria. Nonetheless, it was disturbing that as far as we could ascertain, around one third of those who were our fellow students were no longer even attending church.

Various things could have contributed to this ‘wastage rate’. One wonders though, what would have happened if the Word of God had been allowed to stand on its own two feet, unclouded by qualifications and intellectualism. It may have had a powerfully positive effect on outcomes such as the vitality of the student’s daily Christian walk, a more powerful, effective, and fulfilling ministry in their churches, and the health of the denomination as a whole. I include myself as one negatively affected by the lack of this approach in my training.

An ironic sidebar

In the early 1990s I asked the theological college librarian, a friend of mine and former fellow student, if I could add some books on biblical creation to the college library. His response was, “Give us the money that they are worth and we will buy the books we want for the library.”

Around that time, I was told by the librarian at the tertiary institution where I worked that some of the overseas students complained that there were no books in the library on the Creation explanation of origins/biology. Could I offer some suggestions of what may be some helpful books? I was of course happy to oblige.

So, we had a secular institution happy to have books on Creation in their library, but not a theological college! Was the latter afraid that a student might stray from the party line? And perhaps, perish the thought, decide to follow the likes of Henry Francis Lyte, and “read the Bible as though it were true”?

Most theological colleges in Australia do not allow Creation Ministries the opportunity to address their students. Is it that their academic reputation would be compromised by any student who might graduate a ‘redneck’ and an academic embarrassment?

Jesus Christ was an academic embarrassment to the Jewish establishment of his day. The Apostle Paul was too. When we stand on the clear teaching of the Bible, we stand in good company!

References and Notes

1. Naturalism: the belief that nature (matter/space/energy) is all there is; there is no supernatural.
2. Steel, A., The development of languages is nothing like biological evolution, Journal of Creation 14(2):31–40, 2000; creation.com/articles/the-development-of-languages-is-nothing-like-biological-evolution
3. Price, P., Genetic entropy: The silent killer, Creation 41(4):48–50, 2019; creation.com/articles/genetic-entropy-vs-evolution
4. Was the Flood global? Creation Answers Book, chapter 10
5. Halley, K., Archaeology supports the Bible, 2016; creation.com/articles/archaeology-supports-the-bible
6. Wieland, C., Still soft and stretchy, 2026 (updated); creation.com/articles/still-soft-and-stretchy
7. Sheehan, P., Derided, ignored and unstoppable, The Sydney Morning Herald, 11 Aug 2003, p. 11.