“God created the world, but the Dutch made Holland.” Find a map of the Netherlands in the Middle Ages and compare it with a map that reflects the current situation, and you will understand why these words became a popular maxim. Many areas which used to be water have been reclaimed. They became fertile agricultural grounds and have provided space for numerous smaller and larger towns. Until the early decades of the twentieth century there was a large body of water in the center of the country. It covered some 5,000 square kilometers (almost 2,000 square miles). It was salty, for it was in open connection with the North Sea. Today only about half of this Zuiderzee (that was the old name) is left and has been renamed IJsselmeer. It is presently a lake of sweet water, cut off from the salty water in the North by a heavy dam of 32 km in length, which is not only a safety barrier—to keep the salt water at bay—but also accommodates a four-lane highway.

The Afsluitdijk (literally: the “closing off dike”) was built in a little more than four years and was ready in 1932. It was the first major project to be completed after the Dutch government in 1918 passed a law that would serve as the blueprint for the reclamation of a major part of the IJsselmeer and for creating a new province in the heart of the country. A first section of the water that was cordoned off by a dike and pumped dry was the Noordoostpolder–today still a thriving agricultural district. Work on the new land, with a completely new infrastructure, continued during the second World War. After the war ten villages and towns were built, with a present population of just over 50.000.
Subsequently, a larger part of the IJsselmeer also became a polder. The work was split into two phases, the eastern polder (East Flevoland, 1957) and the southern polder (South Flevoland, 1968). Several major towns have been built in this part of our new province. Almere, with its more than 225.000 inhabitants, is now the seventh largest city in the country.

Four meters below the sea level
Since 2008 my wife and I live in an apartment in Zeewolde, a town in South Flevoland with 24,000 in habitants. Our town is currently celebrating that it now exists 40 years! We are quite happy to live here. It is very centrally located in the country, the town has a lot of green, and a lot of space—and parking is free. Sometimes people ask whether it is not scary to live in a polder, for suppose the dike will break. It is true that, if the dikes would break, or if the Russians would decide to destroy it, we would be in the midst of a lake of about four meters deep. I sometimes joke that we are not really worried, since our apartment is on the second floor, and our feet would therefore remain dry. Seriously, the dangers of living in a polder like ours are probably smaller than the risks of living in a big city. We hope we can live here peacefully, and in good health, for many years to come.

History: land – water – land
The other day, I wondered how it would be for Elder Ted Wilson to live in a place like ours. He would hear about the history of this new part of the Netherlands and would have to find some modus to fit the history of this part of the country into his beliefs about the “recent” origin of the earth and an even more “recent” global flood. Let me explain.
Before this huge project of creating areas of dry land, the body of water which was once referred to as the Zuiderzee did not always exist. In earlier times, before several major floods devastated the area, it was swampy land, with here and there some inhabited areas. Archeologists have discovered that in some places in our polder hunter-gatherers were already eking out their existence some 7,000 years ago. Near the village of Swifterbant, in eastern Flevoland, remains of old houses were found during the reclamation of Flevoland, eventually some fourteen in all. Archaeologists also found a skeleton in fairly good condition, the so-called “head man of Swifterbant.” More recently, it has been discovered that people were already working small fields at this time. This culture—which extended to the German states of Lower Saxony and North Rhine-Westphalia, and is related to other finds in the east of the Netherlands and in Denmark, with its specific kind of ceramics, is now usually referred to as the Swifterbant Culture.
For traditional, conservative Seventh-day Adventists (as Wilson) there is an obvious problem with the discoveries of the archeologist, for the experts date these remains as going back to around 5,000 BC, that is: seven thousand years ago. How can this fit with the conviction that the creation of our earth is “recent”, as number six of the Fundamental Beliefs insist. Admittedly, not all conservative Adventists will follow the chronology of bishop Usher and date the creation at 4004 BC. Many will allow for a somewhat longer period and stretch the meaning of “recent” to (at most) some ten thousand years.
Assuming that the archeologists who have studied the Swifterbant Culture know what they are talking about, this allowance for 10,000 years by young earth geologists does not really solve the problem. Even if life on earth started some ten thousand years ago with Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden, somewhere in present-day Iraq, it is quite a step to accept the idea that after a relatively short time their quite primitive descendants had reached what is now as the Flevopolder in the Netherlands. The more so, since we must also reckon with the global flood which, according to a literal interpretation of the Genesis story, covered the entire earth. Even if we do not accept Usher’s date of the Flood in 2350 BC as realistic, a literal reading of the Old Testament account demands, according to traditional Adventism, that a global flood destroyed everything, possibly four or five thousand years before Christ. Such a flood would not only have destroyed the people who lived near Noe, and saw him entering the ark, but must also have killed the people who were hunting and gathering food and experimented with growing food on small fields in Flevoland. And such a global flood of a magnitude that it covered even the highest mountains, would have left no trace of the Swifterbant Culture!

And what about the dinosaurs and the ice ages?
How would Wilson and other conservative Adventists respond to my questions about the original inhabitants of the area where I now live? They are actually very simple questions compared to the many problems with regard to the origin of the universe and our solar systems. And they are quite simple compared to, for instance, the many riddles that still surround the dinosaurs. As I write these lines, I have just seen a news items from Australia. A researcher by the name of Adele Pentland identified, with her team from Curtin University, a new species, after the discovery of the 100 hundred million years old fossilized remains of a new species of Pterosaur. This powerful flying predator had a wingspan of perhaps as much as 12 meters How do we account for such fossilized remains within the scheme of a “recent” creation?
But, staying closer to home, more complicated issues than the dating of the Swifterbant culture provide major challenges for the theory of a “recent” creation. Huge boulders of various kinds of rocks are found in several places in the northern part of the Netherlands. How did they get there, in an environment without any mountains or rocks? They were transported there by the thick crust of ice that covered parts of northern Europe in ages past. Geologists tell us that, in the past three million years, between twenty and thirty ice ages have occurred. Several of these reached parts of the Netherlands and played an important role in de the formation of the Dutch landscape.
Just this week ago an exhibition has opened that provides a panorama of what our province was like some 100,000 years ago—long before the Swifterbant people lived here. There were ice ages in the past, but there was also a period with a subtropical climate. From bones that have been found it is clear that there once were forest elephants, rhino’s, giant deers and mammoths. Besides animal remains, tools of Neanderthals have also been found, such as flint tools, worked antlers and bone remains.
I am certainly no expert on these things, but I have long ago stopped believing that we must find ways of fitting all of these discoveries in a scheme based on a “recent” creation and a global flood, just a few thousand years ago.
I believe that God is the Creator. Everything that exists has its origin in God’s creative activities. I have, however, no idea when and by what process God created. The biblical creation account is theology, not science. Numerous flood stories around the world suggest, together with the Genesis story, that there was, at one time in the distant past, a large flood with devastating effects. But we must depend on the scientific world for learning more about the details.

Thinking about Neanderthalers, ice ages, the Swifterbant culture, etcetera, I just wonder: Is it not time, also for conservative Seventh-day Adventists in 2024, to accept the consensus of the scientists who have studied these things, rather than clinging obstinately to theories that must accord with a literalist “plain” reading of the Bible? Too many people have already left Adventism because of the anti-intellectual attitude of influential persons and currents in our church.

Focus
My salvation does not depend on the dating of an earlier civilization in the area where I currently live, nor on the question whether and when Neanderthals may have lived there. My faith is built on the “recent” reality of the One whom we know lived and died on this earth just over 2,000 years ago. In the distant past He created life, and He guarantees future eternal life. It’s time the focus of all Adventist Christians is on what belongs to the core of the Christian faith—and not on elements that are at best at the fringe of our faith experience.