Exposition by Max A Forsythe
I believe it was PT Barnum who said there is a sucker born every minute. We may very well guess that PT would have a field day hawking his greatest of shows in the later decade of this twentieth century. Harry Houdini who also made his living pulling the wool over people's eyes through magic became greatly agitated with the spiritualist movement in the same century and offered a large cash reward for anyone who could prove communication with the dead. He enjoyed quite a crusade exposing the fraud and flimflam of all challengers. Until a few years ago an Israeli illusionist claimed that his ability to bend spoons with mental powers alone was real. Many people believed him until he was finally exposed.
What is it about the human character that delights in manipulative magic and elaborate pranks? I believe we have to admit that we are fallen creatures. On occasion even I have taken advantage of a person's gullibility. Once I was taking a Junior High youth group to Baraboo, Wisconsin. As we were driving through the country we spied a large stone "M" high on a hillside which was obviously several hundred feet in length. The kids wondered out loud about that unique display. I casually mentioned that it probably wasn't an "M" but the "W" in Wisconsin that you would read on the road map.
There was silence as the group pondered the possibility. The charade lasted less than five minutes and only one of the young people finally believed that that was a sensible explanation. They announced that I would have to work harder than that to make monkeys out of them. Two weeks later I put a picture on the Church bulletin board that I had taken at the circus display. The caged circus wagon I persuaded them to have their picture taken in was labeled "The Monkey Wagon". They had not noticed because the sign was on my side where the picture was taken. In a similar vein, the early leaders in establishing the evolutionary theory of origins were persuaded to pose for a painting with the object of focus on the table in front of them being the skull of the Piltdown Man. Eventually, these fossil remains turned out to be a devious hoax. Those evolutionists who would make monkeys out of mankind were foolishly exposed to public ridicule.
However, their theories continued to multiply and evolve. Carnegie & Rockefeller applied the law of the jungle to business relationships. JD Rockefeller bragged that he had put over twenty- thousand competitors out of business as he observed that if they couldn't compete, they didn't deserve to survive. Sigmund Freud admitted to being profoundly influenced by Darwinian evolutionary concepts. So too did Karl Marx, who wanted to dedicate his monumental work Das Kapital to Charles Darwin who had influenced his thinking so greatly. In these ways did evolutionary thought become grafted into the rising industrial myth in which the majority of people today live and move and have their being. Just as assuredly as the ancient peoples had their myths which ordered their thoughts and life, so to does the 20th Century have its own Mythos.
This Mythos has become so central to the system that I doubt the present order could continue to exist without the evolutionary model at its center. For this reason especially we should rejoice in the continuing failure of the Marxist socialist materialistic camp in the late Soviet Union! Even as we see a resurgent Russian Church marching in the streets, desperately will the Western Industrial powers attempt to prop up what little is left of secular Russia.
Our western cultures do not want to admit that their own myths are futile. They do not hear that there are seven theories for how the personality functions. Instead, psychology reigns as the undisputed fact of human manipulation. One guidance counselor with a three inch file on one of my students almost dropped the whole thing when I told her I didn't believe in psychology and that was why her student was able to do what she thought was impossible!
Neither do we hear in public debate the fact that there are five theories for the origin of the cosmos. Evolution happens to be the dominant theory. Public debate is strictly limited because a denial of the central myth of evolution would undermine the whole secular humanist order. And like the Medieval Church which stifled the research of Copernicus, Karl Sagan boldly proclaims in the PBS series Cosmos that "Evolution is a fact". To insure the continuing study of that fact the power of the State is being increasingly used to coerce teachers and students to accept the theory. We may soon envy the freedoms enjoyed in the assorted Russian Republics, at least until their revolution against incompetence, enforced stupidity and wasteful spending comes to our own land. Until that time we within Christ's Church ought to set an example for the worldly. By that I mean that in our goal to discover true truth, we ought to be willing to engage in meaningful dialogue.
That sounds like a very liberal statement doesn't it? Generally the liberals who say that do not practice what they preach. In this series on origins in Genesis One, I will try very hard keep the door open for usable truths to help us understand what God began in Genesis One. I will condemn outright only one model. I will end up taking what some consider an extreme position on beginnings, but I will not insist that my understanding is the only orthodox view. We still have much to learn about the created order and like the earlier "scientific" models of a Babylonian Turtle swimming in a primeval soup to the flat earth model to the Copernican model, I believe that we still have much to learn even as we by theological necessity proclaim that God has created all that exists.
We will now turn our attention to the five theories of origins. They are:
1. atheistic evolutionPlease understand that I have lifted the ordering of these models from a very fine commentary: Genesis: An Expositional Commentary written by James Boice. Today I will focus my attention on the first which I consider to be a decidedly inferior view of how the world began. That is atheistic evolution. This theory must be rejected because God is left out altogether. Certainly, evolutionists, like psychologists have stumbled upon some grains of truth. And to an understanding of truth we must be committed. However, we must never let any "scientific" truth sit in judgment on the truthfulness of God's written word. Whenever "science" conflicts with biblical revelation we must carefully consider if we understand what the Bible really says or we must learn to admit that scientifically we cannot know everything.
2. theistic evolution
3. the gap theory
4. six-day creationism
5. progressive creationism
In the last century when Darwinian principles were argued by Thomas Henry Huxley, a part of the Church got carried away with the notion that the scientific word "species" was the same as the biblical "kind" in Genesis. An early biologist Linnaeus had insisted that these specific kinds could not change. His view became widely accepted and carried to absurd limits. Some extremists in this school even taught that there were sixty species of man, each of which had been separately created! Some members of the Klu Klux Klan, as did the Nazis, believe in a multiplication of separate human species. This excessive view of the fixed nature of species was a man-made tradition. This instead of biblical truth became the focal point of the scientific debate.
We cannot avoid the fact that some blame for the triumph of evolution falls upon the shoulders of the Christian debaters who fought the wrong battle and rightfully lost the debates in England. In our century it is time to reopen the debate about evolution again. Whenever I discuss the historic evolutionary debate in my class, very very many of the students appreciate the fact that evolution is not necessarily a fact. They in many cases are resentful victims of an oppressive Mythos whose time to die is long overdue. Was it Abraham Lincoln who said that you could fool some of the people some of the time, but cannot fool all of the people all of the time? If the Christian Church would capture the hearts and minds of this generation we must be willing to reopen the age old debate about origins without forging new human chains for the mind.
Evolution is indeed in trouble. It is a theory that increasingly will not hold water. Certainly Charles Darwin may have stumbled upon some truths about changes within species. He certainly can be credited for explaining how species may become extinct. But the atheistic model for natural selection and mutation into higher and more complex kinds is even being rejected by leading scientists in the biological fields. A century of research has not confirmed the naturalistic assumptions. The curator at a prominent British Museum of Natural History which has the world's largest collection of fossils has gone on public record denying the possibility of evolution in kinds. The Leakey team in Africa which has held the world spellbound with stories of their transitional form "Lucy" have now been largely discredited. But, their "evidence" will be twenty years disappearing from the text books.
Until the long struggle to publicly discredit atheistic evolution is successful we as Christians must unite around the first sentence of Genesis: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." All that we discover and teach must be brought into subjection to that statement even as we struggle to "take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ." May we in our studies remain faithful to that commitment.
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