The Xenophile Historian

The Genesis Chronicles: A Proposed History Of The Morning Of The World

	No Compromise
	Evolution Undermines Faith
	Why Not Accept the Creation Account As It Is?
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About the only creeds not included in the above list are the fundamentalist forms of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Often an attempt to reach a common ground has been tried; they have called it many names, the most common being "theistic evolution." Whatever form it takes, theistic evolution says that God created us but used the evolutionary process to do so.

This so-called "common ground" is shaky ground. Followers of theistic evolution are trying to bridge together two diametrically opposed ideas. They are like the bystander who walks into the "No Man's Land" of a war zone, where he risks being shot at by soldiers from both sides. When Christians try to bridge the gap by making concessions ("Maybe the seven-day Creation really took seven ages"), the other side doesn't do likewise; if one of them suggests that something had a supernatural cause or refers to the Bible, he is immediately called a bad scientist.⁽¹⁾ The only thing evolutionists are willing to concede is that there may be a God, but He (She? It?) is irrelevant to the discussion. For example, toward the end of his life, Carl Sagan would admit to nothing more: "The evidence so far at least and from the laws of nature aside, does not require a Designer. Maybe there is one hiding, maddeningly unwilling to be revealed."⁽²⁾ No attempt at a compromise has convinced everybody, which is why new attempts have been tried, again and again.

It is also worth pointing out that while a compromise may bring peace, the solution may turn out to be dead wrong; we see this quite often in politics. Usually the compromise reached is a middle ground halfway between what the two main antagonists want. Donald W. Patten gives this example: Suppose two children are trying to add 5 and 5. One of them comes up with an answer of 15; the other writes 55. Both are wrong, but to prevent a fight, a third kid suggests the sum is really 35. Now 35 is right between 15 and 55, but if you accept that, you're no closer to the correct answer of 10 than you were before, and in the fields of scientific and historical research, this can lead to brand new problems.

Henry Morris, in The Remarkable Birth of Planet Earth, lists seven Biblical and theological objections to accepting any form of evolution. So far as we can tell, no "Christian evolutionist" has come up with a serious answer to even one of these objections.

1. Evolution contradicts what the Bible calls a "finished creation."

2. Evolution contradicts the doctrine that mankind, plants and animals are different.

Now look at what the Bible says: "All flesh is not the same flesh: but there is one kind of flesh of man, another flesh of beasts, another of fishes, and another of birds." (1 Cor. 15:39). In the previous verse, Paul wrote that God made all species different to begin with--and intended them to stay in the form He shaped. "God giveth a body as it hath pleased him, and in every seed his own body." (1 Cor. 15:38)

One way to see this is by looking at the most fundamental differences between plants, animals, and ourselves. Most animals can move, while most plants are stationary; most plants can make their own food by photosynthesis, while animals have to get their food by eating other forms of life. Plants have a form of life, and go through what we would call a life cycle, but it is usually done at a much slower pace than ours. Consequently many plants live longer than us and die more slowly; trees can live for hundreds, occasionally thousands of years, while there is not a verified case of any animal in the modern world--not even the tortoise--living to see its 200th birthday. Also, plants have a fleshy form that lives, but they don't have anything we would recognize as a personality or soul. Many animals do exhibit a personality, and possibly have a soul, but no religion calls for their salvation, so it appears they don't have a spirit to go anyplace when they die. Humans, however, have a spirit in addition to a body and a soul, so we need a savior, to keep from suffering a second (spiritual) death after the first death (see Revelation 20 for details). When Jesus promised us eternal life, he meant eternal spiritual life; some cult leaders have promised their followers eternal physical life, until their own deaths proved their teachings were false.⁽³⁾

3. Evolution gives the impression that God is not really omniscient.

4. Evolution goes against the idea that God is full of love and mercy.

5. Evolution contradicts entropy, also known as the second law of thermodynamics.

Because of that curse all of us are destined to grow old and die (Hebrews 9:27). This agrees with one of the most fundamental laws of physics, the second law of thermodynamics. The first law says that the amount of energy in the universe is constant; energy cannot be created or destroyed, so new energy cannot "come out of nowhere" to do work if the job cannot be done with the energy available now. The second law states that the amount of available energy in the universe is decreasing, not increasing. The universe is running down; it is not so much an old universe as it is a tired one. Any object left alone tends to become simpler, less orderly; it has always been easier to break things than to put them together. Neglected gardens fill up with weeds, food "goes bad" in the refrigerator, and even wine turns to vinegar when left unattended for too long. And anyone who is 30 years of age or more can testify that the body doesn't work as well as it used to!

A self-professed atheist and evolutionist, Isaac Asimov, explained the second law in better words than I could use myself:

"Another way of stating the second law then is, the universe is constantly getting more disorderly. Viewed that way we can see the second law all about us. We have to work hard to straighten a room, but left to itself it becomes dusty and musty even if we never enter it. How difficult to maintain houses and machinery, and our own bodies in perfect working order. How easy to let them deteriorate. In fact, all we have to do is nothing, and everything deteriorates, collapses, breaks down, wears out, all by itself. And that is what the second law is all about."⁽⁴⁾

What this means is that molecules and life forms cannot improve themselves on their own, they can only get worse. And if this is the case everywhere in the universe, then evolution is in a heap of trouble! Yet Asimov never forsook evolution, because that would imply there is a god after all. Which brings me to a very important point concerning the creation-evolution debate:

1. If you don't believe that God exists, evolution will prevail over creationism.
2. If you allow a place for God in the universe, the evidence will favor creationism.

Harold Hill, in his humorous book on creation, From Goo to You by Way of The Zoo, proposed an experiment in entropy which anyone can do. Just let yourself go--do nothing at all to take care of yourself. Here is what will happen:

Despite your best efforts you won't evolve wings, but others might--to get away from you! Contrary to what advertisers tell us, you're not getting better, you're getting older. Nothing gets better or more complicated without some form of intelligence directing it. I don't like to keep repeating myself, but where there is a design there has to be a designer . . .

6. Evolution teaches ethics which are incompatible with our Judeo-Christian heritage.

A well-known anti-creationist professor, Paul (P.Z.) Myers, is in agreement on the ethics issue, if not with anything else that creationists believe:

"First, there is no moral law: the universe is a nasty, heartless place where most things wouldn’t mind killing you if you let them. No one is compelled to be nice; you or anyone could go on a murder spree, and all that is stopping you is your self-interest (it is very destructive to your personal bliss to knock down your social support system) and the self-interest of others, who would try to stop you. There is nothing ‘out there’ that imposes morality on you, other than local, temporary conditions, a lot of social enculturation, and probably a bit of genetic hardwiring that you’ve inherited from ancestors who lived under similar conditions."⁽⁵⁾

From this point of view, evolution is also incompatible with the thinking of enviromentalism. For various reasons, most of them good, we want to protect endangered species, and have set up laws, national parks, etc., for that purpose. The most celebrated environmental case in recent years was that of the northern spotted owl, for which thousands of acres in the Pacific Northwest was set aside as a permanent habitat, causing many lumberjacks to lose their jobs in the process.⁽⁶⁾ If we took natural selection seriously, we would say, "Hey, it's survival of the fittest. If the spotted owl can't defend itself against the chainsaw, why should it survive? Let a more fit creature take its place." Or we might say, "Why all the fuss to save manatees and Florida panthers? The world's gotten along without dinosaurs." And where man has caused creatures to become extinct, like the dodo and the passenger pigeon, nothing has yet evolved to replace them.

7. Evolution produces ungodly behavior.

One of Darwin's old instructors, Professor Sedgwick, expected degenerate behavior to follow the acceptance of evolution. On December 24, 1859, less than two months after The Origin of Species was published, he wrote that:

"If Darwinism did what he thought it could do, humanity, in my mind, would suffer a damage that might brutalize it, and sink the human race into a lower grade of degradation than any into which it has fallen since its written records tell us of its history."

Monkey see, monkey do. Or is it human see, human do?

During World War I evolutionary ideas motivated the Germans. Their chief philosopher at the time, Friedrich Nietzsche, taught that man could become a "superman"; if that is true, they reasoned, then Germany can become a "superstate," and that "survival of the fittest" would soon weed out its rivals. Hitler had a similar outlook; to create a perfect human race, he saw it necessary to eradicate millions of Jews, Slavs, and Gypsies--"inferior races" he called Untermenschen. All the while he thought he was accelerating human evolution, practicing "survival of the fittest" on a national scale. When he wrote Mein Kampf, he drew upon the works of Darwin and Nietzsche for his ideas. In this manifesto, Hitler claimed that man had risen above the animal kingdom by fighting his way to the top. Likewise, communist leaders like Josef Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Pol Pot have claimed that their brutal acts would create supermen in record time, and even supported absurd science when it seemed to agree with them (Remember Lysenkoism?).

Karl Marx thought The Origin of Species was one of the greatest books ever written, and offered to dedicate his own Das Kapital to Darwin. Darwin refused--he was too much of a capitalist to accept Marx's militant communism and atheism--but can anyone besides God count the numbers of those who have suffered because individuals like Hitler and Marx tried to put Darwin's theories into practice?

"Since Darwin's death, all has not been rosy in the evolutionary garden. The theories of the Great Bearded One have been hijacked by cranks, politicians, social reformers--and scientists--to support racist and bigoted views. A direct line runs from Darwin . . . to the extermination camps of Nazi Europe."⁽⁷⁾

The reason why evolution degrades is that it assumes man is just another animal; the only thing that separates him from other beasts is an oversized brain. Because animals have no morals or values, it is considered unnecessary, and possibly detrimental, for humans to have them. Many intellectuals in fact endorsed evolution because it allowed them to get away with sexual immorality and other behaviors traditional Judeo-Christian ethics would not have tolerated. Paul summed it up by saying, "Professing to be wise, they became fools." (Romans 1:22)⁽⁸⁾ With violent crime and lawlessness growing steadily, a million abortions every year in America, epidemics of sexually transmitted diseases, and one out of every two marriages failing, the results of rationalizing away one's sins should be obvious to anyone with eyes to see. Guy N. Woods was correct when in 1976 he wrote, "Convince man that he came from a monkey and he'll act like one."

Those who favor atheistic evolution are fully aware of this. One of them, Jeremy Rifkin, wrote a statement to that effect a few years ago, a truly frightening declaration of rebellion against God:

" We no longer feel ourselves to be guests in someone else's home and therefore obliged to make our behavior conform with a set of pre-existing cosmic rules. It is our creation now. We make the rules. We establish the parameters of reality. We create the world and because we do, we no longer feel beholden to outside forces. We no longer have to justify our behavior, for we are now the architects of the universe. We are responsible for nothing outside ourselves, for we are the kingdom, and the power and the glory, for ever and ever."⁽⁹⁾

Finally, though its advocates do not like to admit it, evolution leads to outright racism. Many of its earliest champions, in fact, thought this was one of its strongest points. A German anatomist who was also an artist, Dr. Ernst Haekel, made exquisite drawings which claimed to show the inferiority of the black race. Now anyone who was prejudiced against blacks, Jews, Asians, etc., could claim that they were lower creatures on the evolutionary scale, invent scientific-sounding terms for his bigotry ("anti-Semitism," for example), and remain respectable.

Sir Thomas Huxley wrote this when the American Civil War ended and the black slaves of the southern states were freed:

" No rational man, cognizant of the facts, believes that the average Negro is the equal, still less the superior, of the white man. And if this be true, it is simply incredible that, when all his disabilities are removed and our prognathous relative has a fair field and no favour, as well as no oppressor, he will be able to compete successfully with his bigger-brained and smaller-jawed rival, in a contest which is to be carried out by thoughts and not by bites."

When people during the Reconstruction era asked whether the freedmen could be as successful as white Americans, the answer from those who had accepted evolution was a unanimous NO. To evolutionists the Afro-American was an inferior being, at best a missing link between ape and Caucasian. When individual black Americans showed talent and intelligence, they sometimes dismissed it as the result of white masters sleeping with their slaves, and passing on some "superior" white genes to their illegitimate children.

Evolution Undermines Faith

In October 1996, evolution got the endorsement of no less a person than Pope John Paul II. This was good news for those who believe in theistic evolution. Christians who try to straddle the middle ground between creation and evolution do so by saying that the creation record preserved in Genesis is inaccurate, and should not be taken literally; for instance, they interpret the seven days of creation as seven geological eras, instead of seven rotations of the earth. However they explain it, they are in fact calling God a liar, for keeping the true story of our origins a deep, dark secret. We also must remember that the account written down by Moses was good enough for Jesus, and he quoted from it often; He, if anybody, would have known if we really came from monkeys!

If we cannot trust the story of where we came from, can we trust anything else the Bible says? Can we trust the history, the prophecies? Most important, can we trust what it says about Jesus, salvation, and judgment? Jesus thought this was critical: "If I have told you earthly things, and ye believe not, how shall ye believe, if I tell you of heavenly things?" (John 3:12) There are plenty of cases where children were raised in a good Christian home, and they had faith until they went to school and were taught that science had disproved the story of creation, which caused them to backslide into the world's humanism; perhaps that includes you. Evolution also forces parents who want their children to love God to study harder so they can defend their faith right in the household. If you interview a young person who professes to be an enemy of Christianity, chances are that he or she will tell you they got that way because their parents could not answer all their questions about God. As I pointed out previously, evolution makes it possible to accept being alive and on earth without requiring a god to make it all.

The Bible predicted this would happen some day. In 2 Peter 3:3-4 we read, "Know this, first of all, that in the last days mockers will come with their mocking, following after their own lusts, and saying, 'Where is the promise of His coming? For since our fathers died, all continues just as it was from the beginning of creation.'" Here we have a prediction of the uniformitarian theory nearly two thousand years before it was thought up! Peter goes on to say that those who think "all continues just as it was" will deny the creation, the Flood, and the final judgment. And a thousand years earlier David wrote about God: "It is He that has made us, and not we ourselves" (Psalm 100:3, emphasis added). I consider it a compromise with evolution when some modern Bibles and prayer books translate Psalm 100:3 to say: "It is He that has made us, and we are His."

No creature, object, or person has been observed creating someone or something that is better than itself. You may remember a TV show from the 1970s about an astronaut who was critically injured when his spacecraft crashed, and they repaired him with bionic parts to make him stronger and faster than us ("We can rebuild him. We have the technology . . . "). The idea that man can turn himself into a "six million dollar man" is more appropriate for science fiction than for real life. We should take it no more seriously than the mad scientist who creates a super computer and then declares: "Yes, now there is a god!"

Why Not Accept the Creation Account As It Is?

In the nineteenth century, archaeologists were not willing to accept any part of the Bible as true history. They thought that ancient cities like Nineveh, Tyre, and even Babylon were myths, and that history began with the Egyptians and the Greeks. Then those cities they dismissed turned up under their shovels! A similar thing happened in the 1970s, when they uncovered the city of Ebla in northern Syria, and the clay tablets in its library mentioned Sodom, Gomorrah, and early patriarchs like Eber by name.

When it came to prophecies, skeptics--even in our seminaries!--taught that the prophetic books were written after the events they predicted, like the rise and fall of the Greek kingdoms in Daniel 8 & 11, because these predictions were amazingly accurate; not even Nostradamus was that good. Likewise they taught that the Book of Ecclesiastes was written sometime after 100 B.C., until an older copy turned up among the Dead Sea scrolls, and a few "scholars" even denied the existence of King David until an inscription from Hazor mentioning him was found in 1993. What all this boils down is that if the rest of the Bible has been proven to be accurate by the discoveries of Biblical archaeologists, why can't we accept the first eleven chapters of it, too?

At this point you may be asking, if evolution is so obviously faulty and unprovable, why do so many supposedly intelligent people still subscribe to it? After all most of the information I have given here has been common knowledge for over twenty years. The answer lies in what I would call "inertia in academia." Despite the talk about "freedom of expression" in places of learning, our schools do enforce conformity. I'm also sure that many professors are reluctant to give up teaching something they have believed in for most of their lives, out of fear that they wasted plenty of years. Finally, those who teach from an evolutionary perspective have a good thing going. They have endowed professorships all over the place, fat royalties from fatter textbooks, pretty young women in their classes, and the fringe benefits that come with tenure. Moreover, they plan to keep it that way; more than 20 scientific journals in the United States have policies in their bylaws which call for rejecting any articles submitted by creationists. Scientists who are creationists or sympathetic to creationists will often keep their opinions to themselves, out of fear of ridicule or reprisals.

Despite the academic blacklisting, research conducted from a Biblical perspective is going on, by those willing to do without the usual support and recognition. The only solution I can see for the un-brainwashing of people is to do it one step at a time, by sharing this on a one-on-one basis, until enough can see the poisonous fruits that evolution has produced. The situation we are trying to resolve will require much energy, effort and patience, because it reminds me what somebody once said about the relationship between fish soup and aquariums. It is easy to turn an aquarium into fish soup. It is a lot harder to turn fish soup back into an aquarium.

2. Sagan, Carl, The Pale Blue Dot, New York, Random House, 1994, pg. 429. Larry Vardiman responded to this by writing Sagan a letter in which he said, "Ask Him to reveal Himself to you. He is not hiding from you. Rather, He is waiting for you to see Him."

3. If my reasoning above doesn't completely make sense, try this analogy. Unless you're some kind of "vegetable rights" fanatic from California, you're not likely to object if somebody puts dead flowers in a vase, or decorates a living room with a dead tree at Christmas time. However, some of us never get over a basic feeling of "wrongness" at the sight of a dead animal head mounted on a wall. And a few years ago I read about somebody encasing the mummified body of an American Indian in lucite so he could use it for a coffee table. If I did something like that you would not enjoy visits to my house; you might even call the local insane asylum!

4. Asimov, Smithsonian Magazine, June 1970.

5. P.Z. Myers, "Morality Doesn’t Equal God," Pharyngula, August 24, 2009.

6. Rush Limbaugh went so far as to give the spotted owl a new scientific name: occupationus eliminationus.

7. Martin Brookes, "Ripe Old Age," New Scientist (vol. 161, January 30, 1999), pg. 49.

8. A conservative science-fiction writer, Poul Anderson, once remarked that "There are some ideas so stupid that only intellectuals can believe in them, particularly left-wing intellectuals." He probably had the same reprehensible behaviors in mind that Paul did.

9. Rifkin, Jeremy, Algeny: A New Word, A New World, New York, Viking Press, 1984, pg. 244.

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