Is the issue of a six-day literal Creation part of your family's core belief structure? Should it be? And, how does your conviction on this point affect the way your children are raised?
In our book, a six-day literal Creation is "a hill to die on.” Why? Because without it, statistically, a person would raise children for calamity—for secularism, for eventual total unbelief. The fruit of not believing in a six-day creation seems to be evident already in the current generation of children—including some of the ones who are homeschooled. As Ken Ham says, an evolutionary model is a fissure at the foundation of one's total belief system; it is a slippery slope to unbelief. If the stress upon children's faith gets high enough (the peer pressure of unbelief, and the college professor pounding on it), the culture (i.e., the children who are so trained), will collapse in the area of faith. The evolution issue is a major tactic that the Enemy has used to bring our culture to its knees. We already see it in American culture at large. Recent surveys are revealing that 85% of our young people (this is a tragic statistic) are losing their faith by the end of their first year in college. Why? Over this one core, vital pivotal, consequential issue of Creation that is hammered on by the Enemy from kindergarten through grad school. No doubt this is why men like Ken Ham and Henry Morris have devoted their lives to clarifying this one point—as have the Institute for Creation Research www.icr.org and others. The results of not thinking it matters has become alarmingly dangerous in the world. Creation vs. evolution is the issue before modern man. Its implications are total. We may do well to die on this one hill.
If a person has an evolutionary model of Creation, he may not know it, but he believes in evolution, period. All of it—even that we are still evolving. So, let’s run with where that leads. Is our conscience evolving, too? In our judicial system, then, can we try a person for robbery, or is he not responsible because he is evolving? The courts are currently saturated with this belief (chaos), rendering the administration of justice relative, i.e. virtually impossible. The confusion even outside the courts is all over the place. "Remember the Sabbath Day"; is that a day (Hebrew, yom) or thousands of days or thousands of years? Do we work for 6,000 years without rest, if we are waiting for Creation to be completed, before we can rest? Can we rest even now, if it is not yet completed; we're still evolving, right? At what point did accountability/ morality enter the human race; in the trilobite?
But the core issue (why it hugely matters in a marriage) is that evolution as a Creation model has huge implications for a literal Fall. The Bible states that sin entered the world through one man, Adam. If you tamper with that—that the Fall did not occur through one man—you don't have a fall. If you don't have a Fall, you have no need for a Savior. This belief is anti-Christ at its core. The Enemy is anti-Christ. He has commandeered the evolution issue for this very reason—it is solidly anti-Christ. The Devil hates Him and he hates the redemption He paid. No doubt, the thought of divine blood spilled for man makes him rabid. The Enemy is foaming at the mouth to stop the need for it. So, his primary strategy is to eliminate the need for a redemption!
You can't have a general Fall that happened over thousands of years, and sustain a faith in a need for a savior. You can't have a slippery eventual Fall—because when would it have been? Under what circumstances? How? You can't have a belief in no Fall, at all—or else where did Hitler come from? It puts one in a tailspin of logical incongruity. Without a Fall, without knowing it, a person ends up a secular humanist at one's core, believing that man is basically good, or at the very least neutral. Regardless of how much one loves God emotionally, even praising Him, such a person will be loving Him in spite of his disbelief in what Scriptures tell us in Genesis—and eventually one will be at odds with himself spiritually at a deep level, even over other Biblically contested issues. It is a Pandora's box. Many children from godly homes nowadays are there right now—wondering what is it all for. Likely, at some deep level they are not entirely convinced that it isn't all a fairy tale, because of their daily "schooling" to the contrary—especially about origins.
Summit Ministries http://www.summit.org/ hits this issue hard. Thousands of young still-impressionable teenagers walk out of Summit knowing WHY a 6-day literal Creation matters and knowing why the theory of evolution is a sham. These students, so trained, emerge strengthened in their faith, in every word that God has spoken—because they are presented with science that shows that there is not one whit of evidence to support evolution. We have access to the scientific documentation now; we don't have to guess any more. Anyone who wants to believe in a six-day literal Creation, can, with strong intellectual support. If evolution were true there would be "millions of dead things laid down by rock layers all over the Earth." We would have evidence. We have yet to find one! Anyone who is questioning this can visit Answers In Genesis's website http://www.answersingenesis.org/ which offers a world of scientific material, and also could delve into The Creation Institute's marvelous materials to clarify this point. Reading Morris' book, alone, would be sufficient to cover all of the bases, and would nail the issue cold.
To orient young children, easily, about this vital all-important issue order our Impossible Evolution book It uses drawings to summarize many of the most powerful arguments against the Theory of Evolution.
