Is cruelty normal?
by Carl Wieland
Is cruelty normal? The reason for this odd question is because today there are books
and ministries coming to prominence which urge evangelical Christians that they
can reject biological evolution yet still totally accept such ideas as the ‘big
bang’, stars evolving, billions of years of earth history, that the Flood
was not global, and so on.
It may be no coincidence that the leading lights in this movement, such as Hugh
Ross and Don Stoner, are in the fields of astronomy and physics. There is enormous
peer pressure to accept the billions of years inherent in popular cosmological and
radiometric dating theories.1
Part of the appeal of the Hugh Ross type (henceforth HR) position to many evangelicals
is that it claims to be based on a literal view of Genesis. Space forbids a detailed
rebuttal of their arguments which try to make Genesis fit their old-age beliefs.
Stoner2 lists the usual reasons given for 24-hour days, for example,
and attacks them one by one, trying to find any loophole. The combined force of
all the arguments in favour of 24-hour days is overwhelming, however. Even Stoner
admits that it is hard to read Genesis and ‘come away with any but the six
twenty-four hour-day meaning’.3 Therefore he is led to speculate
that maybe God was deliberately concealing the truth!
Actually, any claim that the days of Genesis were not intended to be understood
as ordinary days flies in the face of world-class Hebrew professors (see Quotable
Quotes on page 44). In spite of protesting explanations, HR proponents
frequently give authority to fallible scientific interpretations of facts over against
the plain meaning of the Bible.
This somewhat eccentric version of the usual day-age/progressive-creation scenarios
founders (like them) on the question ‘Is cruelty normal?’ HR proponents
accept, correctly, that a literal reading demands that Adam and Eve were created
only a few thousand years ago. However, because they totally accept the results
of conventional dating methods (as used by evolutionists) they also accept that
most of the fossils in the rocks represent animals and plants that lived and died
millions of years before Adam.
Groaning fossils
But these fossils show evidence of violence, bloodshed, suffering, disease and death.
If such things existed before there could have been any Adam, how did the Fall affect
the whole creation, as has been taught and believed to be the time-honoured, obvious
meaning of the eighth chapter of Romans? HR proponents are forced to insist that
Romans 8 cannot mean what giants of scholarship such as Calvin, for example, took
it to mean. For them, the creation must always have been groaning in bondage to
decay and suffering. But if this is so, what does the restoration/restitution of
all things promised in Scripture (e.g. Acts 3:21) mean? Will things be restored
back to billions of years of cruelty and disease?
Surely no one could claim that this is consistent with the Bible’s depiction
of the restoration of all things at the creation of the new heavens and earth. Biblically,
things will be RE-stored to a sinless, deathless state because
that is how it was before Adam sinned. What could HR enthusiasts possibly say when
confronted by a non-Christian with the problem of why a loving Creator’s world
is full of cruelty, death and suffering among men and animals? The straightforward
biblical world view permits an answer: these things are a temporary intrusion into
a once-perfect world because of sin—cruelty is not normal in God’s
economy.
However, the HR view, with its vast eons of suffering before Adam, cannot give sin
as the reason for ‘bad things’. All long-age compromising positions
mean that God has observed and allowed a reign of terror and cruelty for hundreds
of millions of years for no known reason. This would mean that cruelty is
normal for the world created by God.
The HR position runs across an especially obvious snag when it comes to early people.
Fossils of humans (some showing signs of disease and violence) are known which have
been dated (by methods HR proponents insist are authoritative) thousands of years
older than Hugh Ross’s current maximum age for Adam. So what do they do about
the embarrassment of having humans around before Adam, according to their system?
They relabel them as nonhumans!
Dr Ross writes:
Starting about two to four million years ago, God began to create manlike mammals
or “hominoids”. These creatures stood on two feet, had large brains,
and used tools. Some even buried their dead and painted on cave walls. However,
they were very different from us. They had no spirit. They did not have a conscience
like we do. [How does he know?—author.] They did not worship God or establish
religious practices. In time, all these man-like creatures went extinct. Then about
10 or 25 thousand years ago, God replaced them with Adam and Eve.4 (Note
the date for Adam’s creation, which becomes relevant later.)
Scant evangelistic impact
The HR position is being touted as having the ability to reach the scientifically
educated non-Christian more effectively than ever. However, it is highly unlikely
that it will have anything like the tremendous evangelistic impact on the scientifically
educated that the straightforward creation science position has had. Unbelievers
(I was one of them at university) are usually repelled by compromise, special pleading
and inconsistencies such as this. For instance, if you’re going to accept
that God created progressively more man like creatures before creating man, why
not just come out with it and align yourself fully with theistic evolution and liberal
theology? First Corinthians 15:21–22 teaches: ‘For since by [a] man
came death, by [a] man came also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all
die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.’ The connection between Christ’s
physical resurrection and the physical death
brought in by Adam is irrefutable. Tragically, the HR compromise position denies
that Adam’s sin brought anything other than spiritual death
to mankind.5
Also, consider the Neandertal skeletons. Most evolutionary authorities now consider
these to have belonged to a racial variant of Homo sapiens. Their remains
and artefacts, even according to many evolutionists, indicate speech, culture, religion
and art. By orthodox dating results, interpreted via Hugh Ross theology, none of
these would have had a human soul/spirit! There is excellent evidence in the skeletons
of modern European people that their forefathers included Neandertals. Skeletons
in Middle East caves indicate that Neandertals and other humans lived and bred together,
yet the contortions of HR theology demand that Neandertals be called ‘spiritless
animals’. Classic Neandertal anatomy has been uncovered in a sixteenth century
tomb along with chain-mail armour (see Nature, Vol. 77, 1908, p. 587).
Australian Aboriginal cave-paintings … definitely not painted by man-like
animals with no human spirit.
Any Australian Aboriginal or native American remains or artefacts, if radiometrically
dated as older than Ross’s Adam, would automatically be assigned to ‘non-humans’.
Consider cave paintings depicting animals in Kakadu National Park in Australia’s
Northern Territory. The local tribespeople acknowledge these as the work of their
ancestors, and still paint in that style. HR proponents could agree that those dated
at 10,000 years ago were made by real people, descendants of Adam subject to salvation
(or condemnation) after death. Yet paintings in that same park ‘dated’
at, say, 35,000 years, even though they are in the same style,
must (according to the Adam-dates in Ross’s leaflet #8909) have been made
by man-like animals with no human spirit who have no connection with Adam and no
hope in Christ!’6
All attempts to ‘harmonize’ secular teaching on origins with the Bible
while evading its clear teaching on recent creation and a global Flood must invariably
come to grief on this question—‘Is cruelty (and death) normal?’
The answer from Scripture is a resounding ‘No!’ Adam did not walk on
a graveyard of the bones of countless dead animals (the remnants of millions of
years of struggle), and certainly not on the bones of any ‘spiritless’
humanoid predecessors.
Footnotes
- Ross’s apologetics are so intimately tied to the ‘big bang’ theory
that one critic has earnestly wondered what Ross could possibly do if the secular
world abandons the ‘big bang’, as some physicists and astronomers of
repute have done. An impending new creationist cosmology (we will report on this
scientific alternative to the ‘big bang’ after the mid-year 1994 Pittsburgh
conference) looks set to eliminate any perceived necessity to torture the biblical
text to make it fit the assumed cosmological time-spans.
- Don Stoner, A New Look at an Old Earth, Schroeder Publishing, 1985. (Foreword
by Hugh Ross.)
- His counter-arguments are cleverly packaged to disguise their weaknesses. The arguments
for 24-hour days are often dismissed hurriedly with comments like ‘inconclusive’
or ‘decision must be made on some other basis’, giving the illusion
that they have been properly answered. An example of unfortunate exegesis (to put
it kindly) is seen when he uses the Romans 1:20 reference (God’s eternal power
clearly seen in nature) to argue that therefore science will show God’s creation
to be very old. Not only are God’s eternal qualities unrelated to the age
of his non-eternal creation, but it could be argued that the slow and gradual formation
of stars by natural processes over billions of years would exhibit far less of God’s
power than fiat creation.
- Hugh Ross, Leaflet #8909, as quoted in Bolton Davidheiser’s ‘A Statement
Concerning the Ministry of Dr Hugh Ross’—a very important document in
this matter, particularly regarding some scientific issues.
- Surprisingly, and somewhat incongruously, Stoner differs from Ross on this point,
agreeing that physical death to mankind was brought in by the Fall. Yet being a
long-ager, he has to accept that the same types of things that cause death in people
(e.g. cancerous tumours, which are abundant in the fossils) were around for millions
of years before the Fall.
- Perhaps this is why, in other writings, Ross has allowed as much as 50,000 years.
However, this:
- Stretches the genealogies, which, he claims to accept, beyond any reasonable limits.
Remember, the Australian Aborigines can only have arrived after the Flood (Ross’s
version covers only a small part of the world, but somehow manages to wipe out all
people in the process) and thus it is the post-Flood genealogies which have to accommodate
all that time.
- Doesn’t solve Ross’s problem with Neandertals.
- May even turn out to be an insufficient compromise anyway, because dates of 60,000
years and beyond have already been suggested for Aboriginal colonization of Australia.
|
