Early World History

This essay outlines very briefly some of the most important events in early world history, as described in the first eleven chapters of Genesis. Following the days of creation we find:
Adam and Eve live in the garden of Eden.
Adam and Eve disobey God; they are punished and have to leave Eden.
The perfect creation is cursed - God allows death to enter the world.
Adam and Eve have children; Cain kills his brother Abel.
Everyone becomes bad (except Noah's family).
God sends a worldwide flood, saving only Noah's family and selected representative animals.
God scatters the growing population at Babel by confusing their language.
People and animals spread across the earth.
Physical separation leads to the formation of different races and cultures.

When Adam and Eve disobeyed God, he cursed the perfect world he had made (Gen 3:17). From then until now the world has been in a state of decay, both physically and morally. This physical decay is known in science as the "Second Law of Thermodynamics", which says that the energy in the universe is becoming less useful for work - that the universe will ultimately die a "heat death" (the entire universe will be the same temperature). The first death in the world occurred when God himself killed an animal to make garments for Adam and Eve after they sinned (Gen 3:21). Adam and Eve lived for a long time had many children. The children married each other, but this was ok at the time, as they were no genetic imperfections yet. But in the very first family, Cain kills his brother Abel, and all the people in the world become bad, except for a man named Noah, and his family.

God sends a worldwide flood as punishment. God specially picked the animals brought onto the ark (Gen 7:9) to ensure that the genetic makeup of these animals would allow all the variation we see today to be derived. Two or seven animals of each "kind" were saved. For example, a dog was probably a kind from which all dogs and wolves today are descended. Most of the animals would be young, to not take up as much space on the ark. By only needing to take representative specimens of a limited number of "kinds", and not of each species (of which there are very many), it has been shown that the ark would have had more than enough space. Baby dinosours were among the animals on the ark.

The worldwide flood created the "geologic column" that scientists point to as "proof" of evolution (most evolutionary scientists don't believe that a worldwide flood ever happened - evolution assumes that the past has been more or less "uniform" in terms of the operation of physical processes). The column tends to show smaller/simpler living creatures at the bottom (the oldest "age"), and larger/more complex creatures at the top. The explanation for the appearance of the column (only a small part of which typically exists in any one place) can be explained in two ways. First, the water action had a sorting effect on the creatures, causing the smaller ones to fall to the bottom and the larger ones stay on the top (like what you see when opening a bag of potatoe chips!). Second, all of the creatures of the same kind would tend to die at the same time as their suitability to the rapidly changing environment was exceeded. For example, a marine community might be buried first, followed by a swamp community, followed by a lowland community, etc. Also, the more intelligent and mobile creatures, like apes and men, would move to the highest ground and would be the last to die and be buried. The explosion of Mt. St. Helens has produced physical features (like a mini "grand canyon") in only hours that evolutionary scientists would have said took millions of years to produce. This illustrates the power that catastrophic natural events can have on shaping the features found on the earth. Many of the geological features of the earth today were formed as a result of the world-wide flood of Noah's time.

After the flood the population began to grow again. It is interesting that the place in which the ark landed (on Mt. Ararat in Turkey) is an ideal location from which to re-populate the earth's land masses because of its central location. When the people at Babel decide to build a "tower that reaches to the heavens" (Gen 11:4), God had seen enough and confuses their language so they will not be able to understand each other. This forces the people to start to scatter across the earth. As they spread into new areas a couple of things happen: one, inter-marriage within the smaller groups leads to changes in physical appearance and the formation of the different races; two, knowledge, skills, and base technology are lost, making many of those groups that spread the furthest appear more primitive, at least for a time. Even the knowledge about the one true God would fade and disappear over the generations. Some would live in caves as ready-made housing. Some would acquire new knowledge and develop new skills not possessed by others, leading to a differentiation of cultures. The study of ancient cultures finds that many of them were quite remarkably advanced. This is not surprising in the creation model, but is quite unexpected in an evolutionary model.

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