Holman QuickSource Guide to Understanding Creation Book

This book is an easy read, with illustrations on at least every other page. It compares three scriptural models of creation: Scientific Creationism, Progressive Creationism, and Evolutionary Creationism, and it comes down in favor of Progressive Creationism. It advocates both the concordist (there is a correspondence between Scripture and science) and the accommodationist (God can and sometimes does accommodate his revelation to the limited knowledge of the recipients in order to communicate effectively) views of scriptural interpretation.

The authors emphasize the fact that the creation story is told a number of places in the Bible, with a matrix of six biblical creation accounts (Genesis 1, Genesis 2, Job 38-42, Psalm 33, Psalm 104 & Proverbs 8) on the horizontal axis and ten creation events on the vertical axis, with specific verses in the matrix, accompanied by some well-written commentary, particularly on Psalm 104.

There is a good discussion of the evidence for an old universe and an old earth, a local versus a global flood, and the anthropic principle. It was therefore surprising to see a very incomplete discussion of biological evolution. There is some minimal mention of the fossil record, but other lines of evidence for macroevolution and common descent, such as from morphological similarity, embryology, vestigial structures, biogeography, and pseudogenes are not even mentioned. The authors' conclusion is, "While there is overwhelming evidence of microevolution, the case for naturalistic macroevolution suffers from a lack of support from the fossil record."

On the positive side, the above shortcoming makes this a particularly good book with which to introduce Old Earth Creationism to Young Earth Creationists, since going directly from Young Earth Creationism to Evolutionary Creationism (a.k.a. theistic evolution) in a single bound is probably too big a leap for most Young Earth Creationists anyway.