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What is needed is not time, but cause.

Aimless movement in time will produce an ordered world! You might as well suppose that if you stir up a mass of type with a stick long enough, the letters will be found to have arranged themselves in the order in which they stand on the printed pages of Dante’s Inferno. It will never happen—though you stir for an eternity. And the reason is that such effects do not happen, but are produced only by a cause adequate to them and directed to the end in view. . . . Assuredly, what chance cannot begin to produce in a moment, chance cannot complete the production of in an eternity. . . . What is needed is not time, but cause. ~ B.B. Warfield

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"God's creative handiwork reveals and prompts praise for his power, divinity, care, omniscience, sovereignty, wisdom, goodness, and kindness."

Gregg R. Allison

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"The concept of the universe developing by means of an undirected process like natural selection acting on random mutations does not provide support for the deity of Jesus Christ, as proved by his creation of all things visible and invisible, whom the church has historically proclaimed to be both Savior and Creator."

Gregg R. Allison

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"The church has traditionally considered as absurd the notion that random collisions of existing elements fortuitously resulted in the development of what currently exists."

Gregg R. Allison

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"God's creation . . . was not a creation of generic material but of specific kinds and varieties of creatures."

Greeg R. Allison

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"We teach that the first man was not brutelike nor merely capable of intellectual development, but that God created man in His own image, Gen. 1:26, 27; Eph. 4:24; Col. 3:10, that is, in true knowledge of God and in true righteousness and holiness and endowed with a truly scientific knowledge of nature, Gen. 2:19-23."

Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod

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Doctrinal Positions of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod: Of Creation...

We teach that God has created heaven and earth, and that in the manner and in the space of time recorded in the Holy Scriptures, especially Gen. 1 and 2, namely, by His almighty creative word, and in six days. We reject every doctrine which denies or limits the work of creation as taught in Scripture. In our days it is denied or limited by those who assert, ostensibly in deference to science, that the world came into existence through a process of evolution; that is, that it has, in immense periods of time, developed more or less of itself. Since no man was present when it pleased God to create the world, we must look for a reliable account of creation to God's own record, found in God's own book, the Bible. We accept God's own record with full confidence and confess with Luther's Catechism: "I believe that God has made me and all creatures."

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We believe that the same God, after he had created all things, did not forsake them, or give them up to fortune or chance, but that he rules and governs them according to his holy will, so that nothing happens in this world without his appointment . . . his doctrine affords us unspeakable consolation, since we are taught thereby that nothing can befall us by chance, but by the direction of our most gracious and heavenly Father; who watches over us with a paternal care, keeping all creatures so under his power, that not a hair of our head (for they are all numbered), nor a sparrow, can fall to the ground, without the will of our Father, in whom we do entirely trust; being persuaded, that he so restrains the devil and all our enemies, that without his will and permission, they cannot hurt us. And therefore we reject that damnable error of the Epicureans, who say that God regards nothing, but leaves all things to chance.

~ Belgic Confession

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"Adam and Eve were substitutes for the whole human race, inasmuch as they ought to be regarded as both the natural (i.e., seminal) and also the moral source of the human race, namely, of the entire progeny in nature and grace . . . For our first parents were then considered not only as the first individuals of the human race, but also as the first true root, stock, and source of the whole human race, which in them could both stand and fall."

David Friedrich Hollaz

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Westminster Confession of Faith: Chapter 6, Of the Fall of Man, of Sin, and of the Punishment Thereof

By this sin they fell from their original righteousness and communion with God, and so became dead in sin, and wholly defiled in all the faculties and parts of soul and body.

They being the root of mankind, the guilt of this sin was imputed, and the same death in sin and corrupted nature conveyed to all their posterity, descending from them by original generation.

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"Our first parents, being seduced by the subtlety and temptations of satan, sinned, in eating the forbidden fruit."

Westminster Confession of Faith

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But, when man was in this high position, he did not appreciate it nor did he value his excellency. He gave ear to the words of the devil and wilfully subjected himself to sin and consequently to death and the curse. For he transgressed the commandment of life which he had received; by his sin he broke away from God, who was his true life; he corrupted his whole nature. By all this he made himself liable to physical and spiritual death.

Since man became wicked and perverse, corrupt in all his ways, he has lost all his excellent gifts which he had once received from God. He has nothing left but some small traces, which are sufficient to make man inexcusable. For whatever light is in us has changed into darkness, as Scripture teaches us, The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it (John 1:5); where the apostle John calls mankind darkness.

~ Belgic Confession

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"Since man became wicked and perverse, corrupt in all his ways, he has lost all his excellent gifts which he had once received from God. He has nothing left but some small traces, which are sufficient to make man inexcusable. For whatever light is in us has changed into darkness, as Scripture teaches us, The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it (John 1:5); where the apostle John calls mankind darkness."

Belgic Confession

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