The Case for Creationism

When Randy Guliuzza ’82 left engineering school to attend Moody Bible Institute in 1979, he believed the earth was 4.6 billion years old and that humans had evolved from an ape-like ancestor.

As a fairly new Christian, Randy embraced theistic evolution—the belief that, as he describes it, “God used the standard evolutionary scenario of random genetic mutations that were acted on by natural selection over millions of years of survival of the fittest to bring about the diversity of life on earth and the magnificent design that creatures manifest.”

Through secular education, Randy was an ardent evolutionist. “I believed that Christians who didn’t affirm this evolutionary account were ignorant and an embarrassment to the rest of Christianity,” he says. “So I looked for any way possible to fit evolution and millions of years into the Bible.”

Today Randy serves as president of the Institute for Creation Research in Dallas—the culmination in his journey to creationism.

A ‘born-again again’ discovery

Randy grew up in Wyoming, where his pastor recommended Moody. He married his wife, June, when they were quite young—she was 19 and he was 18.

While studying in Moody’s library, Randy found an issue of Acts and Facts, a free magazine published by the Institute for Creation Research. “I read it in one of the cubicles, and I was like, born again again. I mean, the biblical explanations were clear and the science was so compelling. It was a real eye opener,” he says.

From that point on, he was convinced of the truth of the Genesis account of creation. “And that’s what I felt the Lord was calling me into—creation ministry.”

After completing a Moody degree, Randy took the advice of Dr. Henry Morris and Dr. Duane Gish of the Institute for Creation Research to finish his engineering degree and study biology. He graduated from medical school, became a doctor, then earned an MA in Public Health at Harvard. During this time he also served as an engineer for 10 years in the US Navy, then practiced medicine in the Air Force, retiring as a lieutenant colonel.

“All of that was to get a background to do creation science ministry,” he says. “From the time I picked up the Acts and Facts at Moody and felt called to go into the creation science ministry until I started at ICR was 28 years.”

Randy started working as a national representative for ICR in 2008 and became president in 2020. Today eight PhD scientists are on staff, including geologists, geneticists, a developmental biologist, and a physicist. He frequently encounters two basic questions about a literal 24-hour day view of creation.

“First, How can so many scientists be wrong? And the second objection is, What will people think of us if they think we’re science deniers?”

In this interview Randy answers 10 common questions he hears about the biblical creation account.

Is Genesis, particularly creation, real history—or is it mythology or an allegory?

Our position is that Genesis 1–11 is real, recorded history. Those chapters record the creation, the fall of man, and the flood. Adam and Eve were real people who really existed and were directly created by God, not from some intermediate form. They really fell into sin. They really were banished from the Garden. The world really was destroyed by a flood. I mean, it’s real history.

What evidence exists that the world was created in six 24-hour days rather than billions of years?

Consider the meaning of the word “day” in Genesis 1. Everyone on the planet has seen a sunset and sunrise, and everyone knows exactly what that means—that’s a 24-hour day. Then in Exodus 20 (8–11), God says, “Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God.” It’s really hard to stretch that into a long period of time. If you think a day is a thousand years, you’d be working for 6,000 years before the next sabbath. That would be a long time before you get a break! The biblical narrative as normally understood gives no indication of millions of years. Hundreds of scholarly articles at icr.org detail biblical and scientific reasons for holding to the historical narrative of Genesis as written.

What do we miss if we abandon the biblical account of creation for an evolutionary explanation?

First, the biblical account of creation provides the basis for original sin and the gospel. When Adam fell, all of us in Adam fell with him. Therefore, all of us, all of humanity, needed what 1 Corinthians 15:45–47 calls the second Adam, that is, the Lord Jesus Christ. And so it records the need of salvation, which is the basis for the gospel.

Why did Jesus come? It’s because we all were sinners, and we needed to be saved. And there’s only two groups of people, those who are in Adam and those who are in Christ. You’re either in Adam and lost or you’re in Christ and born again and saved.

Second, Jesus believed in Genesis as it was recorded. When asked about whether it is lawful for a man to divorce his wife or not, Jesus quoted from Genesis 1, saying, “Have you not read from the beginning of creation, God made them male and female?” And then He quotes from Genesis 2, saying, “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother and cleave unto his wife.” So the Lord Jesus believed in Genesis as recorded.

Third, the authority of Scriptures in the life of the believer means we can read the Bible for ourselves—without the necessity of an intermediary to understand correctly. If you put a scientist between us and the Bible, then the Bible is no longer our authority. The scientist becomes our authority. Yet in John 16, the Lord Jesus said, “When the Holy Spirit comes, He will lead you into all truth.” So you don’t have to have a scientist tell you what the Bible says.

Why does evolution emphasize chance and mutations?

The reason why evolutionists or naturalists use the words chance, purposeless, mutation, and broken is to give the impression that adaptation happens in a chaotic, uncontrolled manner. That’s how they argue for anti-design, which is by nature anti-theistic. If they described biological functions as they really are—which are highly regulated, purposeful, targeted, and show clear evidence of foresight—that is strong evidence for a rational Engineer who made us.

Do you believe microevolution exists, and how is it different from macroevolution?

In evolutionary theory, macroevolution is the change of one creature to a fundamentally different kind. For macroevolution to be true, it requires microevolution plus a long period of time. In other words, microevolution piled upon microevolution eventually changes one creature to a fundamentally different kind. But microevolution is a really bad term; it suggests that some evolution is happening when there isn’t any. What is labeled microevolution is just biological adaptation—organisms adapting to their environment, based on (and this is really important) internal systems, innate systems, which give them the ability to self-adjust to different conditions, just like a human adaptable thing can adjust itself. Creatures were created as incredibly adaptable entities, but they can only adapt within a limited range of parameters.

Does evolution converge with creation in any way? Are there any points of commonality?

Absolutely not. No middle ground, zero. Evolution is the naturalistic explanation for the origin and design of living things without a designer. That is how it is taught by evolutionists. It’s pure imagination to try to work in some odd version where God somehow controlled the evolutionary process in a completely undetectable way that nobody could ever find out and used a mechanism of broken, accidental processes. Evolutionary theory says there were no direct creations by God, that there were no completed creations, and that everything is in a constant state of flux or change. Evolutionary theory is the atheist’s or unbeliever’s answer to general revelation.

The truth is that there’s very good scientific evidence to support a young earth and very good evidence that geology argues for a worldwide flood.

What is the difference between your position and Intelligent Design ideas?

Intelligent Design critiques the implausible aspects of evolutionary theory by studying the complexity and engineering that we see in creatures. At ICR we do the same things plus original laboratory research, but we’re more specific—we are called to bring glory and honor to the Lord Jesus Christ as Creator and pointing to Him also as Savior.

What is the ultimate reason to believe in biblical creation?

When you have full confidence that everything in the Bible as written is real history, you have a freedom and a release in your walk with the Lord Jesus. I didn’t have this freedom when I was questioning and wondering if the Bible was true or not true, and if it was real history or not real history. So I can speak from firsthand authority as one who doubted based on what I thought science was telling me and now as one who fully believes, confirmed by what science is telling me.

The Bible records that people before the flood lived up to 900-plus years. What if someone says, ‘I don’t believe those long lifespans are literal’?

The key words are, “I don’t believe.” That’s the root of the problem. They won’t believe because it sounds fantastical. But there are discoveries of many things that were different in that pre-flood world, such as fossils of a dragonfly with a two-foot wingspan. These giant insects, giant sloths, and other giant things in the pre-flood world that we don’t see today were clearly trapped in fossils. They clearly lived. Recent research at ICR indicates that humans and many other creatures prior to the Flood developed more slowly, reached maturity at much later ages, and lived significantly longer than their counterparts inhabiting today’s world. The conditions on earth were very different than we see now, and there’s no reason to disbelieve the Bible especially when it’s accurate in so many other areas.

Why is the worldwide flood rejected by evolutionists?

It’s rejected because evolution needs time to happen. You need unimaginably large amounts of time for organisms to evolve. But people can’t comprehend a million years, let alone 500 million years. It’s mindboggling—so people begin to think, “Well, I can’t see evolution happening, but if you have enough time, then maybe it could happen.” A worldwide flood can account for essentially all the geology that we see around the world—all in the time span of about one year only about 4,000 years ago. In fact, the flood of Noah’s day is a far better explanation for the thick sedimentary layers that are stacked flat on top of each other with no signs of erosion between them and contain the fossils of literally billions of animals buried in water. It accounts for the huge coal and oil deposits that we see. Research at ICR has demonstrated that we find some of the same rock layers in the same order of deposit on every continent around the world. The world’s geology is powerful evidence of a worldwide flood that eliminates the time evolutionists desperately need for evolution to happen. Our website, icr.org, has hundreds of articles to answer many more questions of serious seekers.