Genesis: the real history of the universe

Today we hear a very different history of the universe to what the Bible teaches. This is called cosmic evolution – everything made itself. There was nothing and it exploded and here we all are! But it had no cause – God didn’t do it. It just happened. They believe in magic rather than miracles. Christians believe in miracles, but I don’t have enough faith to be an atheist because they believe in magic, not miracles. Miracles require a miracle worker, and they have no miracle worker. So, they have nothing becoming everything with no cause whatsoever! Has anybody seen nothing do anything? Nothing does nothing! But this is what they have to believe if they don’t want to believe in God. Atheism is rife in Australia. And the basis of it is the idea of biological evolution. Richard Dawkins said that evolution enabled him to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist. So evolution is the creation myth of the atheist.

This article is based upon a talk given by Dr Don Batten of Creation Ministries International.

Surveys have been done of young people raised in Christian homes that leave the church. In the 18-35 year old category, they found 71% dropout of these. And when they were asked why, the number one reason was “science”. If people actually believe what the Bible says they won’t dropout. Firstly, they doubt the Bible, then they dropout. And evolution is the intellectual excuse for dropping out. Our young people are being taught that there is no need for a creator. The creator is just our imagination. And then they read in Genesis about God creating everything in six days and they’re indoctrinated with millions and billions of years. And they say, I don’t believe this and then it flows through to the rest of the Bible. They think, “how could I believe the Bible if it was wrong from the start?”. If Jesus is not the creator, He’s not the savior either. And that’s where it all falls apart.

The seven Cs of biblical history

Key events in the history of the world according to the Bible are outlined below.

Creation: “In the beginning [of time] God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen. 1:1NIV). God made everything in six days. The seventh day was a day of rest, which was the base of the seven-day week. And He said that it was all “very good” (Gen. 1:31).

Curse: Then the curse of death and suffering came into the world because Adam and Eve rebelled against God. And that’s what people are doing today. That’s what sin is. And so then death and suffering and disease came into the world.

Catastrophe: About 1656 years after creation, there is the catastrophe of the flood when Noah was instructed to build this massive barge with three decks to take all the animals. The catastrophe of the flood was God’s judgment on the sin in the world that began at the fall. Only Noah’s family and the land animals that God sent to Noah were on the ark.

I struggled with these things as a young Christian. It wasn’t until high school that I was taught about evolution (but today 10 year olds know about evolution, they know about billions of years, they’ve already got it in their minds) and I thought I had to believe it because it was in a science textbook and the teacher taught it. I thought, how can I fit that into the Bible? And so I had this idea maybe the days were long periods of time. Someone said to me, “with the Lord a day is like a thousand years” (2 Pt. 3:8). But you have to make the days into a couple of billion years to even get near their time frame!

Fortunately, the meaning of the days in Genesis chapter 1 is defined. It says, there was evening and morning, one day. There was evening and morning, a second day. There was evening and morning, a third day. There was evening and morning, a fourth day. You don’t have an evening and morning with a billion years! You have billions of evenings and evenings. So, this is twisting Scripture, and I did that. But I just tried not to think about it. I said I’d rather be a New Testament Christian and just forget about the Old Testament. But the trouble is when you read the New Testament, it keeps referring back to the Old Testament. Why did Jesus come? Because of what happened back in Genesis.

Confusion: After the flood, God instructed the people to spread out and fill the earth. And they again disobeyed God and stuck together rather than spreading out and filling the earth. So, God came and confused the languages causing them to split up and spread out and fill the earth.

Covenant: Then we have the covenant with Abraham where God selected this special man through whom He would bless all people. He said by the seed [descendant] of Abraham all people would be blessed. Jesus Christ is this seed of Abraham.

Christ: Jesus came into the world as God in human flesh to take upon Himself the curse of death that came through Adam in His body on the cross. And He was raised from the dead having conquered death. And then we have the formation of the church to propagate this good news throughout the world that we can be saved from our sins.

Consumation: And then in the end Jesus is going to come again. And finally, there is going to be a new heaven and new earth where there’s no more death or suffering or disease.

So, we have this big picture from the Bible. The evolutionary story eliminates the first 2,000 years of history according to the Bible. In fact, evolution is an explanation of how everything came to be without God. It wasn’t God’s way of making things like I tried to think at one stage. I used to say, “God used evolution to make everything”. Well, if God used evolution to make everything, He’s an evil sort of God because evolution is about death of the unfit and survival of the fittest. It’s nature red in tooth and claw.

No room for God

Here is a typical statement by a prominent evolutionist, Sir Julian Huxley, who was head of UNESCO for many years. “In the evolutionary pattern of thought [way of thinking] there is no longer either need or room for the supernatural. The earth was not created: it evolved. So did all the animals and plants that inhabit it, including our human selves, mind and soul as well as brain and body. So did religion”. So, in this view God didn’t invent us, we invented God!

If you study theology at a university, it will probably be taught by an atheist! And you would be taught that we invented God. That humans invented the concept of God to control people. Or if they are generous, they say it was to help stabilize society (which it does).

So, what happens when you kick God out? Society becomes unstable. And that’s what we see happening today.

In the Old Testament you read about the judges and kings, where the people went through cycles of having a godly leader and acting in a godly way. And then they got an ungodly leader, and they went off the rails. It never went well when they went off the rails. What are we doing in Australia? We’re going off the rails and it’s imploding. When I was child, nobody locked anything. We’d go away on a holiday and leave the house unlocked. That’s bizarre to young people. That can’t be right. That’s what it used to be like because people believed there’s a God in heaven and there would be a payment if you transgressed God’s standards. Now, I’m not saying that they were all Christians, but they were God-fearing in that sense. And so society was stable.

The idea of cosmic and biological evolution is an alternative atheistic history of the universe. When you look at the growth of atheism in Australia (using the census data from 1901 onwards), it shows that there were almost no atheists before 1961, ~6% in 1971,  ~15% in 1985, ~30% in 2015, and ~39%  in 2021. 1965 was when they started to teach evolution to school students in Year 10 (in NSW it was the Wyndham Scheme). Darwinism enabled intellectually fulfilled atheists and undermines the Bible. It means you can reject the Bible and go your own way.

History and science

One of the things that helps many people in this is that history is not science. What happened in the past is not accessible to the scientific method. So, we have experimental science which has given us amazing benefits in today’s world. All sorts of technology and understanding disease and things. This involves doing experiments in the present – observable repeatable experiments. If you think water might not boil at 100 degrees Celsius at sea level pressure, you can do an experiment and test it. That’s science.

But there is a different sort of science called historical science. What happened in the past? If someone looked at a fish fossil and imagined that 300 million years ago this fish grew legs and walked out on the land and became our ancestor, they didn’t see that happen. Nobody saw that happen. So how do they know what happened? Well, they don’t but it is a convenient story that fits their philosophy of life. And they may work at a university where if you don’t adhere to this story you lose your job. So, it’s in the past, it’s unobservable and unrepeatable. You can’t do experiments on the past. How does it qualify as science? Why is history being taught in science classes today? And a major part of Year 10 science and first year university science is the indoctrination of evolution. Science studies the repeatable, history studies the unrepeatable.

Do you know that the Bible is a history book? It’s not a science textbook, otherwise it would be out of date! But the Bible never goes out of date because it’s the inspired word of God. And it tells us the real history of the world, the salvation history of the world. Salvation depends on what happened back in Genesis. People wonder about where dinosaurs fit into the Bible when they are told that the dinosaurs died out about 65 million years ago. Where do millions of years fit into the Bible?

Millions of years?

Did you know that you can use dinosaurs to teach children the truths about the Bible? Land animals, including dinosaurs, were created on day 6 of creation week. Creation week was a week of miracles when God spoke things into existence. Only God can do that. We can’t. Adam and Eve were also created on day 6. This means that people and dinosaurs lived together. Fred Flintstone cartoons are correct! In fact, there is a lot of evidence that they did live together. If you saw a dinosaur before 1841 you wouldn’t have called it a dinosaur because that is when the word was invented. There are a lot of historical accounts of things called “dragons” which match with what we’d call dinosaurs today. In fact, all around the world there are dragon stories. Now, not all dragons are dinosaurs. Some of them are flying creatures like pterosaurs and things like that. And some of them have been embellished in myths to make them scarier. But the original accounts clearly are dinosaurs. For example, Bishop Bell was buried in the floor of Carlisle Cathedral in 1496. As he liked animals, many animals were etched in the brass relief on his tomb. These included two sauropod dinosaurs. People weren’t doing paleontology then, so the image wasn’t based on fossils. One had spikes on its tail like a Shunosaurus dinosaur. Seven year old boys will tell you what they are! They are fascinated by dinosaurs. But the books they read about them tell them about millions of years and evolution. We need to give them books that tell the truth about these things.

Not only did people see these dinosaurs (as depicted in art), but today you find things in the fossils that shouldn’t be there if they are millions of years old. Things like blood cells, stretchy blood vessels, and proteins are being found in fossil dinosaur bones (Gupta, 2025). If they were millions of years old, they would not be there! And they can even be carbon dated as only thousands of years old. They’re not millions of years old. But the evolutionist can’t change their story. The dinosaur story is so much entrenched in our society that if they said, “Oh, we‘re wrong about dinosaurs, they didn’t die out 65 million years ago afterall”, then people would say, “What else have you been telling us that is not right?”. Because that has become such a part of the story, they can’t let it go. And so they are trying to explain how you can have this stuff in dinosaur fossils that are millions of years old. And some other fossils that are claimed to be over a billion years old still have proteins in them! They are bizarrely wrong!

Why is the evolutionary millions of years story so devasting to people in terms of believing the Bible? Genesis chapter 1 doesn’t make much sense to someone who is indoctrinated in evolution because they have millions of years in their heads. And where are the millions of years? Well, they’re in the rock layers under our feet. But in those rock layers there are fossils. And fossils are the remains of once living things which are now thoroughly dead. In fact, the fossils are a record of pain, death, killing, disease, thorns, struggle for survival, suffering and extinction over hundreds of millions of years. So, where do you fit that into the Bible? Because when God finished creating everything, He said “it was very good” (Gen. 1:31). The garden where Adam and Eve lived was like paradise. Everything was very good. It was perfect. So, the millions of years could not be in Gensis 1-2. Otherwise, Adam and Eve would have lived above the rock layers with fossils, which would not be “very good”. It puts death, suffering and disease before sin came into the world.

And the millions of years could not be in Genesis 3-11. Because precise chrono-genealogies are given from Adam to Abram (Gen. 5:1-32; 11:10-26). So, the millions of years can’t be fitted into Genesis.

The death and suffering and disease come about because of sin (Adam and Eve’s rebellion against God), which is described in Genesis chapter 3. It wasn’t the way God created everything. It wasn’t in the world before sin. The New Testament talks about this. For example, “the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time” (Rom. 8:21-22). God didn’t create groaning and suffering – it became that way because of sin. The creation will be liberated from its bondage to decay because of what Jesus did. The only view that does justice to this clear biblical teaching is that God made everything in six days, with a seventh day of rest, which is the basis of the 7-day week. And the catastrophic flood produced most of the sedimentary rock layers under our feet. So according to the Bible, most of the hypothetical millions of years of evolutionary time was actually a one-year flood, which was followed by an ice age of a few hundred years.

But I naively thought that scientists could put a rock in a machine and measure its age, called radiometric dating. It doesn’t work like that. They have to assume a history to do the calculations. What history do they assume? They assume the millions of years before they even start. The question is who are we going to believe? A scientist or God? It wasn’t until I was doing my doctorate that I came to grips with all this in a sense of understanding that I needed to believe God’s word. I changed my attitude towards God’s word. Up till then, I was trying to make God’s word say what I wanted it to say. And from then on I said, “Lord, teach me from your word”. I don’t understand everything in the Bible. That is my problem, not the problem of the Bible. And one day I will understand everything. But for now I just trust God’s word. And that’s what we need to do as Christians. Many people think they can’t trust God’s word. What turned it around for me was to realize the importance of Noah’s flood in explaining the real history of the world. The flood (Gen. 6-8) is the key to understanding the history of the world.

The flood is the key to understanding the history of the world.

Scoffers

Peter said something very interesting, “in the last days scoffers will come …. they deliberately forget that long ago by God’s word the heavens came into being and the earth was formed out of water and by water. By these waters also the world of that time was deluged and destroyed” (2 Pt. 3:3, 5-6). People deliberately overlook or forget or are willfully ignorant of two things. First the earth “was formed out of water and by water” by the word of God. But what they teach today is that the earth was a molten blob that cooled down over hundreds of millions of years. This is opposite to what the Bible says! Second, that by means of these waters “the world of that time was deluged and destroyed”. They deny that God created everything and that He destroyed the world with a flood. This has happened in the last 200 years. Up until about 1800 just about everybody believed the Bible’s history.

A tranquil flood?

If there was a global flood like the Bible talks about, you can’t have a global flood without leaving evidence for it. That was one of the early mistakes of the church. They said, “we had a tranquil flood”. You can’t have a global tranquil flood! It’s not possible.

The Bible gives a warning to ‘scoffers’ who “deliberately forget that, … the world of that time was deluged and destroyed” (2 Pt. 3:3–6). This means that the flood must have left some incontrovertible evidence. If not, then why are these scoffers condemned because they “deliberately forget”? A tranquil flood that left no trace would surely give them an excuse for being unaware of this event. But this is not the case because most of earth’s land surface is covered with sedimentary rocks or sediments that have been water deposited.

And on scientific grounds, the idea of a tranquil flood is as absurd as a tranquil explosion. One cubic meter of water has a mass of one tonne. There would be an enormous amount of erosion and deposition as the flood engulfed the land, and as the floodwaters ran off the land. The huge deposits of sediment left behind, containing millions of rapidly laid down fossils, are a stunning evidence of this.

The water currents grind up the rock and change it into mud. And when the currents slow down they will deposit the mud which can cover up animals and create fossils. That’s how you get fossils. It requires rapid burial. There are fossil graveyards worldwide where lots of mud has buried land and marine animals. For example, you need meters of mud for a horse fossil. There are rock layers around the world that were once mud, like the Grand Canyon. The Coconino sandstone layer near the top of the canyon is 100 meters thick and covers over 500,000 square kilometers of United States. It has massive cross-bedding which indicates that it was deposited under very deep fast flowing water in a matter of days. The Sauk sandstone sequence near the bottom of the Grand Canyon can be traced across the USA, Alaska, Greenland and North Africa. And there are five of these sequences that are global in extent. Don’t let anybody tell you that there is no evidence for the flood. The evidence is everywhere to be seen. And it’s willful denial to say there was never a global flood.

But is there room for a period of tranquility when the earth was totally covered by water? Certainly not! The earth’s rotation alone would generate large-scale circulating oceanic currents, called gyres, above the flooded continents. Tidal effects would be another generator of water currents. And the tectonics associated with continent formation from the original supercontinent, mountain building, volcanic activity and earthquakes would also affect water currents.

More magic

Here’s a reality check on the millions of years. According to uniformitarianism the Phanerozoic eon occupied the last 540 million years years. It’s a section of the sedimentary rock layer that contains lots of fossils. It averages about 2 kilometers thick around the world. Remember that we need to have plenty of mud to make fossils. Even small things require a fair amount of mud to fossilize. If you divide 2 kilometers by 540 million years you get an average deposition of about 0.004 mm sediment, sand or silt per year. That’s a 25^th the thickness of a piece of paper in a year! And yet this is full of fossils. That’s more magic. This is wrong by many orders of magnitude. It is not just slightly wrong. The millions of years are just totally inconsistent with the physical evidence. Think about it. It would take 270 years to get a layer of 1 mm deposited! And there are fossils all the way through the Phanerozoic eon. It doesn’t work. How could any fossils form under this scenario? The millions of years are fiction.

By comparison if most of these fossils formed during the Biblical flood which lasted for about one year, then the average deposition was about 5.5 meters of sediment, sand or silt per day. That’s the kind of sedimentation that can bury horses and dinosaurs.

Carbon 14

If someone says that “carbon dating proves that things are millions of years old”, you know that they don’t know anything about the subject (CMI, 2006). Carbon dating can’t give you millions of years because carbon 14 has a short half-life (about 5,700 years) compared to many other isotopes. This means that it is all converted to nitrogen by 100,000 years. 60 samples were tested for carbon 14 right across the spectrum of uniformitarian time of 500 million years (Cenozoic to Paleozoic) (Thomas, 2017). There should be no measurable carbon 14 in any of these samples if they are actually the ages they claim, but all were found to contain carbon 14 above background levels. This means that they were less than 100,000 years old, not millions of years old. Interestingly. They all had a similar amount of carbon 14 (20k-50k radiocarbon years) because they were buried during the flood. Before the flood there was a lot more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere – at least 16 times the current level. This means that it would take four half-lives (about 23,000 years) to reduce this to the current level assuming uniformitarianism (16/2*2*2*2 = 1). So, this effect accounts for over 20,000 years of the inflated pre-Flood carbon dates. Carter (2022) states “we have good reason to believe the ‘oldest’ carbon dates are artificially inflated due to the events surrounding Noah’s Flood”. And he provides a carbon-14 recalibration curve that can be used to bring carbon dates in line with biblical history.

Geomorphology

The impact of Noah’s flood is evident in many landforms we see around the world. The Blue Mountains in NSW Australia is a plateau that is eroded by deep valleys. How did that happen? If it happened over many millions of years there would be no plateau left, it would all be eroded away. At the end of Noah’s flood, the waters were sheet flows over the land and into the newly formed ocean basins. The plateau was formed by this sheet flow of water. Then as the water lowers it begins to channel and these increase in size to form a valley. The Grose Valley has a tiny stream at the bottom of it. This small stream could never erode such a vast valley. It is called an “underfit river”. These rivers are too small to explain the valleys they are flowing in because the valleys were formed by the vast volumes of runoff while the floodwaters were falling. They weren’t formed by millions of years of erosion.

A planation surface in the Kimberly of Western Australia is claimed to be 540 million years old. How could it possibly be still a plateau after so long? It should be heavily eroded.

Monument Valley in the United States has mesas whose tops are all about the same altitude. The sheet flow of water during the flood produced the plateau and the material between them was eroded by the channel flow when the floodwater was falling.

Chapada Diamantina, which means ‘plateau of diamonds’ is an erosional landform in the state of Bahia, Brazil. Diamonds were discovered here in 1844. Clearly, the plateau was eroded by the flood sheet water flow leaving flat topped mountains (table mountains), with channel flow producing deep valleys like in the Blue Mountains and Monument Valley.

The geomorphic evidence of the flood is everywhere.

Our purpose

The purpose of our lives is summarized in the Westminster Shorter Catechism as “Our main purpose is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever”. Jesus said our main purpose is to love God and to love our neighbor as ourselves. But if God doesn’t exist, what’s the purpose of life? There is none. The atheist Dr Susan Blackmore said, “In the end nothing matters … If you really think about evolution and why we human beings are here, you have to come to the conclusion that we are here for absolutely no reason at all”. Our children are being taught that we are here for absolutely no reason at all. Is it any wonder we see the suicides that we see today.

Jesus said, “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I have come that they may have life and have it abundantly” (Jn. 10:10). Jesus came to bring us abundant life. And there’s a challenge, “Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect” (1 Pt. 3:15). CMI has a vision to see the Lord Jesus Christ honored as Creator and Savior of the world. To encourage this, they publish Creation Magazine.

The New Testament reaffirms the truthfulness of Genesis and the importance of the gospel. “For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive” (1 Cor. 15:45). So, we die in Adam, and we live in Christ. Adam brings death, Jesus brings life. We need to understand what Adam did in order to understand why Jesus came into the world and why He died and why He rose from the dead. He now reigns in heaven at the right hand of the Father to intercede for us. So, the good news of salvation in the New Testament depends on the bad news of the origin of sin and death in Genesis. That’s why this evolutionary indoctrination is so devasting for young people. It undoes the gospel.

Conclusion

So, the big picture is a perfect world in the beginning followed by the intrusion of death, suffering and disease into the world because of sin. Later Jesus came into the world to rescue people from this if they trust in Him. And Jesus is coming again to bring in a new heaven and earth where there’s no more death, suffering and disease.

But because they don’t want to believe in God, many people don’t want to believe the seven Cs of biblical history.

References

Carter R W, 2022, How carbon dating works.
CMI, 2006, What about carbon dating?, The creation Answers Book, Creation Book Publishers.
Gupta S, 2025, Dinosaur bones reveal 80 million year-old blood vessels that survived ‘deep time’
Thomas B, 2017, “Young radiocarbon in old samples”, ICR Acts and Facts Newsletter, p.9

Acknowledgment

This article is based upon a talk given by Dr Don Batten of Creation Ministries International; a biologist who believes in creation.

Posted September 2025

Also see: Six reasons to be skeptical of the geologic time scale
Converting ancient secular dates to biblical dates
Why as a biologist I believe in creation