10 What is the Gap Theory?

Christians have made many attempts over the years to harmonize the Genesis account of creation with accepted geology and its teaching of billions of years for the age of the earth. Examples of such attempts include the views of theistic evolution, progressive creation, and the gap theory.

Because of the accepted teachings of evolution, many Christians have tried to place a gap of indeterminate time between the first two verses of Genesis 1.

Genesis 1:1–2 states: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.”

There are many variations of the gap theory. According to the author Weston Fields, the theory can be summarized as follows,

“In the far distant dateless past, God created a perfect heaven and perfect earth. Satan was ruler of the earth which was peopled by a race of ‘men’ without any souls. Eventually, Satan, who dwelled in a garden of Eden composed of minerals (Ezekiel 28), rebelled by desiring to become like God (Isaiah 14). Because of Satan’s fall, sin entered the universe and brought on the earth God’s judgment in the form of a flood (indicated by the water of 1:2), and then a global ice age when the light and heat from the sun were somehow removed. All the plant, animal, and human fossils upon the earth today date from this ‘Lucifer’s flood’ and do not bear any genetic relationship with the plants, animals, and fossils living upon the earth today.”

-Fields, Unformed and Unfilled, 7

There are many different versions as to what supposedly happened during this gap of time, but most versions of the gap theory place millions of years of geologic time (including billions of animal fossils) between the Bible’s first two verses.

All versions of the gap theory impose outside ideas on Scripture and thus open the door for further compromise.