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We
are about to embark on a study of the book of Genesis. This book is the part of
the Bible that has caused the most controversy—especially the first 3 chapters.
The difficulty has been arguments over the creation of the universe and the
time frame of the book’s claims.
It
must be said that in order to understand this book, one needs to have a belief
in the supernatural. The whole Christian faith hangs on this basic belief. Does
God exist? Did He create the universe and all that is in it, including mankind?
If He did, why? Where did such a complicated organism as mankind come from? How
old is the earth? Where did morality come from? Why do men insist on constantly
worshipping something or someone? How does God say that man should behave? What
is the ultimate significance of mankind, if, indeed there is any? What will
happen to us at the end of our lives on earth? (And on and on with more
questions!)
It
is important that before we begin this study we must, at least, make a stab at
answering these questions by establishing some basic presuppositions. Without
true basic presuppositions, we cannot frame our thoughts in a logical and
believable way. The following several paragraphs will attempt to help us form
some true presuppositions.
Regardless
of what you think about the age of the earth and the whole creation, you must
admit that mankind has been around for a long time. If you have ever looked at
recorded history, you must admit that mankind has developed a thinking pattern
over the last 300 years that is different from the thinking pattern he worked
with previously. In ancient times, man’s thinking was largely occupied with
what we call now-a-days as “superstition;” that thinking pattern was largely
worthless. As a matter of fact, is was a kind of thinking that led men to fear;
it had no hope or high quality about it. One thing, however, that the ancients
had in large quantity—a belief in the supernatural. For them, there were lots
and lots of gods—a god for about everything; and men were scared to death of
those gods. Their gods were thought to be dangerous and largely hostile to them.
That ancient form of religion is known today as animism. As time passed and
life became more complicated and crowded with an expanding population, the
agricultural revolution happened (about 10,000 years ago), urbanization began
to occur; and technology began to appear. As secularization occurred and the
activities of individuals became more specialized, priests appeared in society;
and people started to have more sophisticated ideas about religion.
Even
though religion began to differentiate in the thinking pattern of the ancients,
animism persisted; and even today it has proved to be very difficult to
eradicate wherever it occurs. Nancy and I saw animism in its full development
in West Africa among tribal peoples.
As
more time passed, at least one ethnic group moved out of animistic belief and
developed another kind of thinking pattern, e.g., monotheism—the belief that
there is only one God. That ethnic group was the Jews. Later, the ancient
Jewish belief system developed Christianity—a full blown revelation of what we
have now, a belief in a creative God who brought us all the blessings we enjoy
today, even a strong sense of right and wrong and all its implications of
morality. Christianity gave mankind a way of knowing the reason he is on the
earth in the first place. But…along with the basic tenets of the Christian
faith, came a sense of guilt and hell. Mankind became preoccupied with those
features of religion; he was frightened. However, as he really looked at the
Christ of the religion, he saw clearly that Christ had the answer to his guilt
and his fear of hell and death. This revelation was fully developed during the
Middle Ages.
Mankind’s
understanding of Christianity included a preoccupation with the above ideas;
later it began to center on the question of “What is my SIGNIFICANCE?” But the
Christian faith had the answer to all these several questions—Christ provided
significance as well as an answer to what man should do with the problems of
hell, guilt, and death. In sum, many blessings accrued to mankind as a result
of Christianity, e.g., freedom from the fear of death, hell, guilt, and the
lack of significance. This thing the ancients and the early Christians had
would have been called by the Apostle Paul—"the milk of the gospel.” But,
one thing went along with these early expressions of the Christian religion,
i.e., FAITH!. Many early Christians had a rock-hard faith that carried them
through hard times. That faith even allowed many of them to continue in the
religion and testify to the truth of Christ in severe persecution. And they had that faith even without the
reasoning and logic which we moderns so strongly appreciate. Their faith was strong. All during this long
time period of about 1500 years after Christ’s crucifixion, they maintained an
understanding of the supernatural—they did not entertain a lot of questions
about ultimate things; Christ was enough for them.
But,…later,
along came another stage in human development, the Renaissance and with it the
elevation of man’s thinking into the realm of pure thought. Mankind began to
look at his universe and see how the hand of God had made the whole thing.
Early scientists of the Renaissance such as Kepler, Bacon, Newton, Copernicus,
and many others began to study the universe to see how God had done it. They
were men of strong faith. They maintained a belief in the supernatural; but
they wanted to know the answer, WHY and HOW? So, they developed the basic tools
of modern thinking, i.e., the scientific methods of experimentation and testing
to see if their conclusions were right or wrong.
As
Renaissance thinking developed more and more, scientists began to discount the
role of God in the creation; all they were willing to see was the hand of man
in about everything wonderful in the world, all the technological gadgets from
the plow to the computer microchip. Yes, they invented lots of things that we
hold near and dear today. All the marvels of modern medicine, our cars,
airplanes, plastics, printing presses, etc., etc. but along with these marvelous
things we use daily came instruments of destruction, even culminating in such
weapons as the atomic bomb. We have seen that the scientific revolution has
contributed to some of the most horrific social, economic, technological,
effects imaginable. The 20th Century was marked by more war and
bloodshed than any other preceding century in man’s history.
We
need to step back from our view of mankind and his affinities and ask
ourselves, “What shall we do with all this wonderful modern thinking and all
the scientific accomplishments it has accrued to us?” We need to ask ourselves,
“What was the value of all the ‘blind faith’ of the ancients and of Medieval
man? Should we jettison all of our scientific thought in favor of living again
in the Middle Ages?” I don’t think so. But, at the very least, we need to
evaluate the development of scientific thought and ask ourselves why did
science fail us in developing a culture and a society that we can hardly live
with because of its concomitant war, violence, and intolerance. I strongly
suspect that the science-based way of thinking will ultimately be found to be
deficient—largely wrong in its ability to tell the whole truth about our
universe.
I
think we need to look back at the Middle Ages and early Renaissance and ask
ourselves if those times had anything we might be able to use in a constructive
way to understand our present dilemma.
Let’s
step back a moment and try to see where our modern system of thought might have
gone wrong. In 1830, a Scottish geologist, Charles Lyell, wrote a book titled Principles
of Geology. In this book, Mr. Lyell thoroughly outlined a principle called
“uniformitarianism.” Uniformitarianism is a principle that posits the idea that
the laws of physics, mathematics, and chemistry are immutable, permanent,
always existing, everlasting, and undoubtable. These uniform principles were
seen as the basic building blocks of human knowledge and ultimate truth. They
were all that really counted. Everything else worth knowing could be seen as
derivatives of these principles of physics and chemistry. On them, mankind
could supposedly build all his scientific and true knowledge of the universe.
This book had such an appeal to scientists, such as Charles Darwin that he took
a copy of it along with him on his voyage in the Beagle to study the islands of
the Atlantic ocean and the costal areas of South America in the mid-19th
Century. The book led many scientists to believe that they no longer needed God
to assure themselves of the significance of mankind and the way he should go.
All they needed was more and more science to tell all the truth; mankind could
do it all, himself. Evolutionary ideas arose from the basic tenets of
uniformitarianism to describe the whole universe. Objections arose to these
scientific ideas but scientists countered these objections with the claim that
the driving force behind the development of mankind and all life on earth along
with its geology, anthropology, and all the other “…ologies” was the passage of
time—lots of time. Time was the powerhouse.
One
question uniformitarianism did not answer was this one, “Who set up these
‘uniform’ principles of physics and chemistry in the first place? Somebody must
have done it!”
I
must tell you all that I do not believe in uniformitarianism; I believe that
there is something much larger than the laws of physics, mathematics, and
chemistry. I believe there is a Creator and a Law-Giver outside of the world in
which we live. The development of the human organism and other life
manifestations is far too complex to have come about by random distribution,
natural selection, and the passage of time. To believe that TIME did everything
takes a gigantic leap of faith—a leap much larger than the leap required to
believe in a supernatural God who did it all through His intelligence and
infinite power.
In
trying to decide on the question of “Which is right, uniformitarianism and its
attendant scientific accomplishments…or, supernaturalism, the belief that God
did it by His limitless intelligence and omnipotence?” In arriving at a
decision about this question, we should refer to a scientific principle called Ockham’s
Razor. Ockham's razor is the problem-solving principle that states,
"Entities should not be multiplied without necessity." William of
Ockham was an English philosopher of the 14th Century. Mr. Ockham
defined a principle that used a preference for simplicity to defend the idea of
divine miracles. To put this principle into understandable form, let’s think of
it in this way—when we are confronted with two conflicting explanations of how
something occurred, we should usually choose the simpler explanation. We will
be right most of the time.
We
are now confronted with two possibilities. On the one hand we can attribute the
universe and the creation of life to the idea of uniformitarianism and science.
On the other hand, we can attribute these things to the existence of a
supernatural being who did it all. I, personally, think that the better
explanation is supernaturalism; and that is probably the simpler explanation.
At least, supernaturalism certainly comports with the Ockham’s Razor principle
better than the explanation given by uniformitarianism.
What
I believe is that “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”
In
closing, let me say that I fully understand the arguments advanced by
scientists who do not agree with me on this issue. I not only understand their
side of the discussion, I understand that they have a cogent argument. They
have reason on their side, as I, also have. My request of my scientific friends
is that they allow me to participate in discussions with them without
discounting my side of the question and considering me a fool for holding my
opinion. Nobody, today, discounts the value of science; but many scientists
totally discount the value of supernaturalism. We must both remember that we
all have a right to our opinions; but…we do not have a right to “our facts.”
The true facts of the matter will ultimately vindicate one of these two points
of view.
(The part of this essay dealing with Charles Lyell
was derived from a book by John MacArthur, The Battle for the Beginning.)
Any effective
invitation to Hell will certainly appear in the guise of scientific planning.
C.S. Lewis
Ed and Nancy Manring
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