Paying homage to the stork
by Clifford Goldstein
Composite of images from stock.xchng and MorgueFile
Published: 18 November 2008(GMT+10)
When asked, ‘What would it take to get you to leave Christianity?’ I
responded, ‘Convince me that God doesn’t exist.’ After some musings,
I added, ‘Let’s lower the bar. Convince me of a scientific “fact”
that is, according to Richard Dawkins, supposedly as indubitable as “the earth
goes round the sun”. That is, the neo-Darwinian synthesis (i.e., simple life
starting billions of years ago, primitive genetic replication, natural selection,
ape-men, the whole dog-and-pony show). Convince me that’s true, and I’m
gone.’
How so? If Darwin were even close to getting origins right, God might as well have
told us that the stork brings babies as to inspire Genesis 1 and 2. If creation took 4 billion years, as opposed
to six days (off by a factor of only about 182.5 billion:1), why should I believe
anything God says? A fortune cookie from a Chinese restaurant would give better
odds of getting things right.
Concepts similar to evolution were known in the old world. God didn’t have
to dumb it down for the ancients
Also, concepts similar to evolution were known in the old world. God didn’t
have to dumb it down for the ancients. The Lord could have revealed the truth to
them, and us, instead of promulgating what some would call a fairy tale, one that
hardly parallels the evolutionary model anyway. Billions of years of false starts,
chance events and endless death allegorized as a six-day pre-planned creation, nothing
left to chance, and no death? In such a scenario, Genesis becomes satire, and God
a fabulist.
And the Sabbath day of rest, revealed to Moses and the children of Israel as a memorial
of a six-day creation that really took eons? Please! We might as well pay homage
to the stork.
How can death be the ‘last enemy’ if, as evolutionists assert, it was
one of God’s chosen means for creating humans?
Worse, what follows Genesis 1 and 2 in Scripture—unfolding from such antecedents—becomes
as dubious. The Lord Jesus incarnates, not as the unique Son of God, but into an
evolved ape created through the vicious and painfully murderous cycle of mutation
and natural selection, all in order to abolish death, ‘the last enemy’
(1 Cor. 15:26). But how can death be the ‘enemy’
if, as evolutionists assert, it was one of God’s chosen means for creating
humans? The Lord must have expended plenty of Australapithecus afarensis,
Homo heidelbergensis, and so on in order to finally get one into His own
image (Homo sapiens). So Jesus comes to save humankind from the very process
God used to create it in the first place?
Then there’s the altruism problem, one that troubles even atheistic evolutionists,
much less those who toss a loving God into the mix. If this vicious, dog-eat-dog
process of natural selection—in which the strong overpower the weak—were
the means by which we came into existence, why should we do differently? Are we
not following God, and the dictates of nature as He ordained it, when we advance
our own interests at the expense of the less ‘naturally selected’? Shouldn’t
we eliminate the weak, making way for those already closer to the ‘image of
God’—the process for which all this pain, suffering and death were ultimately
to lead? (One theologian argued that animals don’t really feel pain, a mind-bogglingly
brilliant attempt to get God off the hook for all the suffering evolution entails.)
Australopithecus afarensis didn’t become Homo sapiens by
following the golden rule. Why should we? Maybe this is God saying, ‘Do as
I say, not as I do.’
Image by Linnell Esler, stock.xchng
And then the ‘Fall’: how did this work again? Oh, yes. God used processes
of violence, selfishness and dominance of the strong against the weak in order to
create a morally flawless being who ‘falls’ into a state of violence,
selfishness and dominance of the strong over the weak—a state from which he
has to be redeemed or else face final punishment. Hardly sounds sensible, does it?
In an evolutionary paradigm, eschatology becomes problematic too, especially God’s
promise to make a new earth. Will that creation be by divine fiat, or will life
again endure the rigor and joy of natural selection and survival of the fittest
for billions of years until a new world, one ‘wherein dwelleth righteousness’
(2 Peter 3:13, KJV), finally appears?
For these reasons, and others, if convinced that Darwinian evolution were true,
I’d have to leave Jesus. Though I can’t judge the hearts of those who
see things differently, honesty and simple logic would allow me no option but unbelief.
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