Richard M. Riss
Christian Evidences, Part II
THE DRIFT FROM CHRISTIAN CONSENSUS IN WESTERN CULTURE
George M. Marsden provided an interesting contrast when he
compared a few statements made about the status of Christianity
in American culture, two in 1873, and another only about fifty
years later. The first statement was made by Theodore Woolsey,
the retired president of Yale University: "In what sense can this
country be called a Christian country? In this sense certainly,
that the vast majority of the people believe in Christ and the
Gospel, that Christian influences are universal, that our
civilization and intellectual culture are built on that
foundation." On the same occasion in 1873, William F. Warren
agreed: "There was never a time when the leavening progress of
Christ's kingdom among men was so rapid and irreversible as the
present."1
Fifty-one years later, in 1924, H. L. Mencken remarked that
"Christendom may be defined briefly as that part of the world in
which, if any man stands up in public and solemnly swears that he
is a Christian, all his auditors will laugh."2
The Christian consensus to which Woolsey and Warren alluded
was a consensus that had been enjoyed by Western culture for
almost 1500 years, beginning with the Roman emperor Theodosius I,
who made Christianity the state religion in A.D. 380. To a
greater or lesser extent, there were always those who opposed the
consensus, either secretly or openly, but it was not until the
51-year period between 1873 and 1924 that the consensus itself
was broken down.
This recent shift in world view should give us pause for
consideration. Can we, as a culture, really be right that
Christianity is false, when we are, in the larger scheme of
things, the odd-men-out? Is it not arrogant of us to say that we
are right, but that all of the preceding generations for 1500
years were wrong?
The entire twentieth century has lived entirely apart from
its rich cultural heritage. John S. North has written:
Most of the great universities of the West were founded
with the conviction that theology is the queen of the
disciplines, and that the key to man's wholeness is the
pursuit of the truth of God through Jesus Christ. . . .
Now, in the latter part of the twentieth century, that
tradition has almost disappeared. . . . Religious
enthusiasm among students is an embarrassment; belief
in the authority of the Bible and the deity of Jesus
Christ is treated as naivety to be enlightened rather
than life to be nourished. Scholars in the arts,
letters, and sciences who show signs of Christian
devotion are likely to be shrugged off as simplistic
and eccentric. Coincidentally, truth itself has become
devalued, especially in the humanities and social
sciences and increasingly in the pure sciences, its
consequences and even existence a matter of doubt.3
True to the spirit of twentieth-century scholarship, many
revisionists have attempted to minimize the importance of
Christianity to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This is
particularly true of those who oppose the practice of
Christianity in the public schools, who blindly assert that the
U.S. Constitution prohibits prayer in the public arena. While
twentieth-century interpretation of the constitution may prohibit
such things, eighteenth and nineteenth-century interpretations of
it did no such thing. There was a paid chaplain to the U.S.
Congress even before the end of the Revolutionary War, and prior
to the founding of the national congress, all of the early
congresses of each of the thirteen colonies always opened with
prayer. From the very beginning, prayer has always opened the
national congress.
Many of those who came to America from Europe did so for
religious freedom. Most of them established their own civil
governments based upon the Bible. It was therefore obviously
totally foreign to the basic nature of America at the time of the
writing of the U.S. Constitution to have any separation that
would imply a secular state. The idea of a secular state is a
twentieth-century invention, common to the U.S. and the Soviet
Union.
The purpose of the first amendment was to prevent a single
sect from gaining pre-eminence, not to discourage religious
practices. Many of the individual states of the union had state
churches, supported by the state government, but this was not
considered to be in conflict with the first amendment. In all
but one of the thirteen states, people were taxed to support the
preaching of the gospel and to build churches.
The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 set aside federal property
in the Northwest territory for schools. Passed again by Congress
in 1789, it stated, "Religion, morality, and knowledge being
necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind,
schools and the means of learning shall forever be encouraged."4
In 1811 the supreme court of the state of New York upheld an
indictment for blasphemous utterances against Christ. In his
ruling, Chief Justice Kent stated, "We are Christian people, and
the morality of the country is deeply engrafted upon
Christianity."5 The same court gave a similar ruling in 1861:
"Christianity may be conceded to be the established religion."6
Joseph Story, in his 1829 inaugural address as Dane
Professor of Law at Harvard University, stated that "there never
has been a period in which Common Law did not recognize
Christianity as laying at its foundation."7 Thus, it is not
surprising that when the Pennsylvania state supreme court
affirmed the conviction of a man on charges of blasphemy against
the Holy Scriptures, it said:
Christianity, general Christianity is, and always has
been, a part of the common law of Pennsylvania . . .
not Christianity founded on any particular religious
tenets; nor Christianity with an established church and
tithes and spiritual courts; but Christianity with
liberty of conscience to all men."8
Most of the great educational institutions in Europe and
America were founded upon the great truths of Christianity.
Among the first of them were the Universities of Paris and
Oxford, founded in the middle of the twelfth century.
Universities became quite widespread in the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries, and they were ecclesiastical foundations
chartered by the Pope. While some, like the university of
Bologna, were best known for law, and others for subjects like
medicine, normally theology was an honored subject in all of
them.
In America, Harvard College was founded in 1636 for the
training of ministers. In New England's First Fruits (1643), we
read:
After God had carried us safe to New England and
we had builded our houses, provided necessaries for our
livelihood, reared convenient places for God's worship,
and settled the civil government; one of the next
things we longed for and looked after was to advance
learning and perpetuate it to posterity, dreading to
leave an illiterate ministry to the churches when our
present ministers shall lie in the dust.9
In his History of Harvard University, Josiah Quincy printed
excerpts from the diary of Increase Mather, one of the early
presidents of Harvard. His statements are full of devotion to
God and to the students in his charge. On September 3, 1693, he
wrote, "As I was riding to preach at Cambridge, I prayed to God--
begged that my labors might be blessed to the souls of the
students; at the which I was much melted."10
In 1693, Virginia secured a similar institution for the
training of its clergy, William and Mary College. Then, in 1701,
a college was established in Saybrook, Connecticut, which was
moved to New Haven in 1716 and named Yale in 1718. The purpose
of the college was to establish a school in Connecticut "so the
Interest of Religion might be preserved, and the Truth propagated
to succeeding generations."11 The founding of Yale was aided by
the Mather family shortly after Increase Mather's ejection from
the presidency of Harvard in 1701 due to the increasing influence
of less conservative Christians.
One of the early presidents of Yale, Thomas Clap, was also a
devout Christian. One of his biographers, Louis Leonard Tucker,
wrote of him as follows:
The stress on religion, an indigenous feature of the
Yale system, if not intensified, at least remained
constant during Clap's tenure. . . .
For the president, religion was the serious
business of the human race. A close friend recalled in
later years that Clap frequently told him that learning
was important but religion "is the great object of my
fear and concern." In his Annals of Yale, Clap
underscored the place of religion: "Above all, Care is
taken to instil into their [the students'] Minds, the
principles of true Religion, in Doctrine and Practice,
by publick and private Discourses and personal
conversations." It was more from conviction than force
of habit that he described Yale in his official
writings as a "Seminary of Religion and Learning." Nor
was the sequential order of these terms merely
accidental. . . .
In 1743, Clap drew up a general curriculum for his
students to which he appended this exhortation: "Above
all have an Eye to the great End of all your Studies,
which is to obtain the Clearest Conceptions of Divine
Things and to lead you to a Saving Knowledge of God in
his Son Jesus Christ."12
The College of Rhode Island (Brown University) was founded
by Baptists in 1764 as their major center for the training of the
ministry. Ninety years later, Rev. Dr. Cutting, in the New York
Recorder, Sept. 20, 1854, stated, "Never were men more decided in
religious faith than the settlers of Rhode Island. . . . We
suppose this to be the true spirit of Brown University."13 Two
years after the founding of Brown University, the pro-revivalists
among the Dutch Reformed obtained a charter in New Jersey for
Queen's College (Rutgers University).
With respect to Smith College, the third article of the will
of its founder, Sophia Smith, stated:
Sensible of what the Christian religion has done for
myself, and believing that all education should be for
the glory of God and the good of man, I direct that the
Holy Scriptures be daily and systematically read and
studied in said college, and that all the discipline
shall be pervaded by the spirit of evangelical
Christian religion.14
The list of colleges and universities founded in America for
similar purposes is almost endless. Even as late as in 1891,
Russell H. Conwell introduced institutional features in his
Baptist Temple in Philadelphia, leading to the establishment of
Temple University.
Yet, by the middle of the twentieth century, every single
one of these institutions was dominated by a world view that was
stridently and actively anti-Christian. Wilbur M. Smith wrote:
Going into the very center of Yale's religious life,
that is, the famous Divinity School, we state, with
sadness, that Dr. Douglas Clyde Macintosh, a member of
the faculty of the Divinity School since 1909, and the
Dwight professor of Theology in the same institution
from 1916-1933, is one who has repudiated all the
miracles concerning Christ, and has gone so far as to
declare, as we noted before, that "The Jesus of
Christian tradition must die that He may live." . . .
Concerning Smith College, . . . for eight years,
1923-1930, Dr. Harry Elmer Barnes held the chair of
Historical Sociology, and was allowed to drill into the
thousands of students that sat under him, his own
hatred for the Christian religion. He has said that he
is "unutterably opposed to all vestiges of the old
supernaturalism," and he wrote a whole book, not one of
great influence, but one of vicious bitterness,
significantly called, The Twilight of Christianity.
Elsewhere this prolific writer, an outstanding
historian, has said: "It behooves all honest and
informed friends of religion to construct the framework
of the new religion on a tenable superstructure. To do
so it appears to the writer that they will have to
surrender these essential characteristics of the older
religion: (1) the reality and deity of the biblical
God; (2) the uniqueness and divinity of Jesus and His
special relevance for contemporary religion; (3) the
belief in immortality." It is a long way from the will
of the founder, to such a position of antagonism to the
things which she considered fundamental.
Another famous school for young women is Bryn Mawr
College. President Rhoads, in his inaugural address,
spoke of the founder of Bryn Mawr, Dr. Joseph Wright
Taylor, in the following words: "It was his prayer that
Bryn Mawr should become in the highest and most blessed
sense a school of Christ, in which the student should
learn of Him under the training and gracious discipline
of His Holy Spirit, the lessons of His truth and love."
It was at Bryn Mawr, we remember, that Professor
William Lyon Phelps was told that he would not be
allowed to express his faith in evangelical Christian
truths, if he were a member of the faculty. It was at
Bryn Mawr that one of the outstanding antagonists of
even theism itself was a member of the faculty for
forty-four years, Dr. James Henry Leuba, the
psychologist, who, in his book, God or Man, devotes an
entire chapter to what he calls "The Evils Done by
Christianity." . . .
Amherst College was once one of the most markedly
Christian collegiate institutions in America, but the
President of Amherst College from 1912-1924 was
Alexander Meiklejohn, who, in his latest book,
Education between Two Worlds, has come out emphatically
as a denier of the existence of God. . . .
Columbia University began as King's College, in
the city of New York. The advertisement in the New
York Gazette for June 3, 1752, affirmed, "The chief
thing that is aimed at in this college is to teach and
engage the Children to know God in Jesus Christ, and to
love and serve him, in all Sobriety, Godliness, and
Righteousness of life, with a perfect heart, and a
willing mind." Columbia University today has the
greatest concentration of antisupernaturalists on its
faculty of any university in our country, including the
three famous men of the Department of Philosophy, John
Dewey, William P. Montague, and Will Durant, as well as
a great host of rationalists scattered in other
departments.
For over fifty years Mark Hopkins was a professor
of Psychology and Philosophy at Williams College (1830-
1887), and published in 1846 his famous Lectures on the
Evidences of Christianity, one of the most important
apologetic works to appear in the nineteenth century.
A successor, not his immediate successor, but the one
holding the same chair, for over a quarter of a
century, since 1905, was Professor James Bissett Pratt.
And it is this Professor Pratt who has said, "Men can
get on without the Bible."
And what of Princeton University? Its president
for twenty years, from 1868 to 1888, was Dr. James
McCosh, scholar, theologian, Calvinist, defender of the
faith; and for the next four years, to 1892, its
president was the distinguished philosopher, Dr.
Francis L. Patton, one of the outstanding apologists of
the last half century; both of them mighty servants of
God, glorying in the pre-eminence and the redemption
and the deity of the Lord Jesus Christ. All that has
gone in Princeton University. For example, as we have
noticed before, the one who for many years was the
distinguished head of the important department of
Biology, Dr. Edward Grant Conklin, in his last book,
just recently published, denies the supernatural,
denies the personality of God, and says that "The
religion of sciences leaves us to faith in the work and
dignity and almost boundless possibilities of
man." . . .
Dartmouth College was founded by Eleazar Wheelock,
an ordained clergyman, who wanted to establish a school
where Indians of New England could be trained in the
truth of the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ, and who
was the first president of Dartmouth (1769-1779). He
was followed by his son, John Wheelock, president for a
third of a century (1779-1815). As a later president
said, at Dartmouth's centenary celebration, "Dartmouth
College was conceived in the fervor of piety; born in
the throes of a great missionary zeal, dedicated at
birth to Christ; cradled the first year in a revival,
and stands wedded to religion--until death." One of
its greatest presidents, under whom Dartmouth
experience unusual growth, Nathan Lord (1828-1863), was
one who, says the latest historian of Dartmouth, "based
the entire philosophy of life upon a belief in the
literal accuracy and inerrancy of Holy Writ . . . He
was insistent that God should be the main spring of all
the activities of man." It was Nathan Lord himself
who, in a famous letter to the alumni of Dartmouth
College on its anniversary in 1869, said: "For Christ
the college was founded and has been administered. To
Christ all its influence in all time belongs." . . .
And what is the condition of Dartmouth today? In
the first place, chapel is not compulsory, nor any
religious meeting. Furthermore, no course in Bible is
compulsory. All of its religious courses are called
electives. Eight courses in the latest catalogue of
Dartmouth are designated in the Department of Biblical
History and Literature, one in Archeology and History,
one in Philosophy of Religion, one in the Great World
Religions, and one in Ethics. The catalogue would not
really indicate that any course is to be found in
Dartmouth College strictly devoted to the
interpretation of the Word of God. There are more
courses offered in Dartmouth College today in the one
subject of Biography than in the whole realm of
biblical history, religion, and religious literature.
These are what we might call only technical matters of
curriculum. There is more to be said than that.
In the student periodical published by Dartmouth,
and about Dartmouth, The Dartmouth, in 1927, the
following terrible statement appears: "Dartmouth has
always been considered a liberal college. Graduate and
undergraduate alike take pride in the freedom of
thought that is permitted here. . . . On the religious
question it is only to be expected that Dartmouth shows
a large percentage of atheists and agnostics.
Dartmouth is proud of her disbelievers." . . .
The famous Mexican artist, at that time, we
believe, a member of the faculty at Dartmouth, Jos‚
Clemente Orozco, was asked to paint a series of
fourteen panels setting forth an epic of civilization,
in the great Baker Library, for which he was given
three thousand square feet of wall space. The last of
these fourteen panels, photographs of which are
reproduced in an elaborate brochure on this particular
work published by Dartmouth College, is called, "Modern
Negation of the Spirit." Under it, at least in the
official description of it, is the following statement:
"Here a militant Christ figure is shown, axe in hand,
and his cross at his feet, symbolic of an aroused and
aggressive spirituality. He stands against a great
junk heap in which appear the destroyed symbols of
antiquated creeds and of the confessional forms of all
religions." The words hardly communicate what the
picture so dreadfully sets forth. It is actually a
picture of Christ with a hideous, ascetic, glaring,
almost satanic gaze, with an axe in His hand, having
chopped down His own cross, which rests on the ground
before Him. In other words, in our modern day we have
come to such a place of wisdom and freedom and
emancipation that these can only be represented by a
picture in which the cross itself is shown as a
despised symbol. To the voice that was heard from
heaven, saying, "This is my beloved Son, in whom I am
well pleased," Dartmouth answers, "This is one who in
His holy death we despise and reject." This is what
sixty years have done to one college in America.
A perfect illustration of the skeptical and anti-
religious influence which Dartmouth officially is
determined to exercise is given in a book published by
Dartmouth in 1924, Essays Toward Truth: Studies in
Orientation. These chapters, so the title page tells
us, were selected by Kenneth Allen Robinson, William B.
Pressey, James Dow McCallum, of the Department of
English, Dartmouth College. These essays, we are told
in the Preface, "Represent no one point of view,
advance no propaganda, and dispose of nothing
completely. Their purpose is rather to present many
points of view, some of them definitely conflicting.
Their purpose is to stimulate the student to develop
his own capacity for rational thinking and thereby
achieve for himself the beginnings of a social
perspective and a social philosophy." When, however,
one looks at the material in this book and the authors
whose essays are here brought together, one realizes
that what these professors mean by "rational thinking"
is thinking strictly apart from any divine revelation,
thinking that leaves out God, and thinking that centers
exclusively in man. Among the authors of these essays
are James Harvey Robinson, Alexander Meiklejohn, John
Dewey, Bertrand Russell, John Haynes Holmes, and James
Bissett Pratt. All these men are antisupernaturalists,
and some of them are pronounced atheists.15
__________________________________
1History, Essays, Orations, and other Documents of the Sixth
General Conference of the Evangelical Alliance, Held in New York,
October 2-12, 1873, ed. by Philip Schaff and S. Irenaeus Prime
(New York, 1874), pp. 527, 249-54, as quoted by George M.
Marsden, "From Fundamentalism to Evangelicalism: A Historical
Analysis," in David F. Wells and John D. Woodbridge, eds., The
Evangelicals (New York: Abingdon Press, 1975), p. 122.
2H. L. Mencken, Prejudices, Fourth Series (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1924), pp. 78-79, as quoted by Marsden, p. 123.
3John S. North, Introduction to Malcolm Muggeridge, The End of
Christendom (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing
Co., 1980), pp. viii-ix.
4Quoted by Terry Eastland, "In Defense of Religious America,"
Commentary (June 1981), p. 39.
5Quoted in Ibid.
6Quoted in Ibid.
7Perry Miller, ed., The Legal Mind in America (New York:
Doubleday, 1962), p. 178.
8Quoted by Eastland, p. 39.
9Quoted by Samuel Eliot Morison, The Founding of Harvard College
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1935), p. 432.
10Quoted by Josiah Quincy, The History of Harvard University
(Boston: Crosby, Nichols, Lee & Co., 1860), vol. I, p. 475.
11Thomas Clap, Yale Annals, p. 2, as quoted by Richard Warch,
School of the Prophets, Yale College, 1701-1740 (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1973), p. 20.
12Louis Leonard Tucker, Puritan Protagonist: President Thomas
Clap of Yale College (Chapel Hill, N.C.: Univ. of North Carolina
Press, 1962), pp. 78-79.
13Quoted by Reuben Aldridge Guild, Life, Times, and
Correspondence of James Manning and the Early History of Brown
University (Boston: Gould and Lincoln, 1864), p. 46, footnote 1.
14Quoted by Ernest Gordon, The Leaven of the Sadducees
(Philadelphia, 1926), p. 116.
15Wilbur M. Smith, Therefore Stand (Boston: W. A. Wilde Co.,
1945), pp. 113-120.
THE PROCESS OF SECULARIZATION
The developments of the early twentieth century were
actually the result of a long process of secularization that has
been taking place in Western civilization since the seventeenth
century. Of course, there have been infidels in all ages of
history, but the focus here is upon the state of the culture as a
whole at any given point in time. One excellent barometer of the
state of a culture is the readiness with which most of the people
will seize upon the expression of any given idea and run with it.
Books become best-sellers because the ideas within them strike a
resonating chord within the hearts and minds of the public at a
particular time. This was the case, for example, for the
writings of Voltaire in the eighteenth century and of Darwin's
works in the nineteenth. The ideas of these men had found
expression at earlier times, but the world was not yet ready to
accept them.
This readiness to accept ideas is not the result of
intellectual sophistication, as many secular historians assert.
Rather, it is the result of the spiritual climate of the age,
which, unfortunately, has been steadily deteriorating for the
past three hundred years. In the midst of this, there have
always been those who have maintained a clear conscience before
God and a sincere faith in the Bible as it presents itself. The
testimony of these people has been precious, but the wider
culture in which they have lived has been declining slowly.
The path of Western intellectual history is fairly self-
evident to any competent historian: simple Christian faith gave
way in the seventeenth century to a subtle epistemological shift.
Descartes, with his dictum, "I think, therefore I am," had
shifted the basis of authority from revelation to man's reason.
Although Descartes was a dedicated Christian who was attempting
to defend the faith against skepticism, he helped to set into
motion a rationalistic approach that eventually ended in atheism
three centuries later.
This rejection of revelation as the absolute authority for
the determination of truth led to the rejection of the complete
infallibility of the Bible, which in turn led to the rejection of
the Bible's authority on some points. In the mid-eighteenth
century, there was a secularization of science, such that
teleological explanations for natural phenomena, such as those
used by Sir Isaac Newton, were no longer considered acceptable.
A rejection of absolutes soon followed, along with a rejection of
divine purpose of any kind. During the first half of the
nineteenth century, there was a rejection of a universal flood
during the time of Noah, and a much more widespread rejection of
the possibility of miracles. With the publication of Darwin's
works in the late nineteenth century, the historicity of Adam and
Eve was rejected, and an explanation apart from that given in the
Bible was found for the origin of life. With these developments,
the rejection of Christianity, and of God's existence, soon
followed.
Descartes is not to blame for this downward spiral. Each
step of the way could have been checked if the culture as a whole
were not in rebellion against God. In fact, Descartes was
attempting to defend the faith against skepticism. The "new
pyrrhonism," beginning with the Jesuit theologian, Juan Maldonat
in the 1560s, was a movement among Roman Catholics who were
seeking to undermine Protestantism. They hoped to demonstrate
that Protestants were hopelessly at a loss for any understanding
of the Bible apart from the interpretive powers of the Popes and
the rest of the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church. They
sought to show that reliance upon the witness of the Holy Spirit
or upon regenerated reason was insufficient for a correct
interpretation of the Scriptures.
The efforts of these apologists for Roman Catholicism had
the effect of raising a cloud of skepticism among Catholics and
Protestants alike. People began to have doubts about being able
to know anything at all, let alone the doctrines of the Bible.
Then, in 1628 and 1629, Descartes believed that he had bit upon
the answer. He knew that he was thinking beyond all reasonable
doubt. And he therefore knew something, namely, that he existed.
And if he existed, then his creator must also exist. From this
chain of reasoning, he was able to demonstrate the existence of
all things. He wrote about his discovery of a method of
rebutting the arguments of the skeptics in his Discourse on
Method (1637) and Meditations (1641).
Descartes was thinking and writing in an era of crisis of
authority. The Roman Catholics were saying that the Roman Church
and the Pope were the authority, while the Protestants were
saying that the Bible was the authority. The "new pyrrhonism"
was saying that the Protestants, without the Roman Church, were
left with no way of determining what was authoritative, because
each person`s view of the Bible was different. In fact, nothing
could be determined with certainty. Descartes turned around and
said, "but I know that I think; therefore I know with certainty
that at least I exist. And from this I can derive everything
else."
Descartes did not intend to make man the measure of all
things, but his argument, unfortunately, made the individual the
source for epistemological authority rather than God himself.
His starting place was man rather than God, and Western culture
took this methodology and ran with it.
If epistemology has man as its point of departure, then man
is at liberty to choose whether to believe that the Bible is
really infallible. The door was opened for apostasy, and Western
culture began to take advantage of it.
Until about 1680 or 1685, it was commonly accepted in the
West that the Bible was infallible. But during the period 1680-
1715, a dramatic change took place in Western thought. Paul
Hazard has referred to this period as that of "The Crisis of the
European Mind." Suddenly, it was possible to entertain some
doubts about Biblical infallibility. Although Thomas Hobbes and
Baruch Spinoza had already gone much further than this, Western
culture as a whole was not yet ready for as blatant a form of
apostasy as these two men had advocated.
But debates at this time between Jean LeClerc and Richard
Simon shook the confidence of the intellectual leaders of
civilization in the complete infallibility of the Bible. Among
these leaders was John Locke. In 1661, Locke had written a
defense of Biblical infallibility. But by the 1690s, his
confidence had been shaken. His Essay Concerning Human
Understanding (1690) and The Reasonableness of Christianity
(1695) demonstrate this subtle shift in his thinking. John
Woodbridge wrote:
In one sense a Rubicon was traversed during the prelude
to the European Enlightenment (1680-1715). Savants
such as John Lock, Isaac Newton, and Pierre Bayle
participated in that last generation in which notable
European shapers of culture, who were not churchmen,
seriously entertained the premise of complete biblical
infallibility, at least for a time. The Voltaires, the
Humes, the Rousseaus, the Diderots, the Lessings, and
the Kants who followed them and who tended the
Enlightenment of the eighteenth century no longer found
that doctrine credible.1
With the rejection of the Bible's complete infallibility,
the door was opened for the rejection of the Bible's authority.
One by one, various Biblical doctrines came into question and
were ultimately rejected. For example, the idea that Christ is
the only way to salvation and that all of mankind is subject to
original sin came into question when, in 1703, Lahontan launched
the conception of the bon savage (noble savage) leading a moral
life by the light of "natural religion," i.e., apart from the
Bible ("revealed religion").
The eighteenth century was known as the period of the
"Enlightenment," a serious misnomer by Biblical standards. It
was a period of darkness in which Biblical authority was
progressively whittled away in favor of the authority of man's
autonomous reason. The works of infidels became increasingly
popular, and, to a greater and greater extent, belief in the
Bible came to be ridiculed as intellectually unsophisticated.
By the middle of the eighteenth century, there was a
rejection of teleology in science. That is, it became
meaningless to ask why natural phenomena are as they are.
Suddenly, any references to divine agency or divine purpose in
the explanation of natural phenomena was considered unscientific.
This was a serious departure from the methodology of Isaac Newton
(1642-1727), who believed that it was by the continual
intervention of God that celestial bodies were able to keep in
orbit without falling, and that it was by God's design that the
orbits of all the planets are on the same plane.
D'Alembert asserted that the conservation of motion could be
explained without resorting to the invocation of divine
intervention. Buffon pointed out that the formation of the solar
system by the collision of a comet with the sun was the kind of
natural occurrence that could account for the orbits of the
planets being in the same plane. A self-regulating universal
order had no need in it for any divine intervention.
The mid-eighteenth century was also a time of the rejection
of absolutes. In 1754, Condillac's Trait‚ des Sensations stated
that "the good and the beautiful are by no means absolutes; they
are relative to the character of the man who judges and to the
way in which he is organized."2 Along with this was a rejection
of divine purpose. In his SystŠme de la nature (1770), d'Holbach
wrote:
The whole cannot have an object, for outside itself
there is nothing towards which it can tend.3
It is important to note that these sentiments were not yet
universal; they were on the "cutting edge" of intellectual
"progress." Large numbers of people still believed in divine
intervention and divine purpose, but these things were no longer
part of the intellectual consensus. It should also be noted that
the existence of God had not yet been rejected. These people
still considered atheism to be unthinkable. Most of those who
rejected teleology in Science, absolutes, and divine purpose,
were Deists who still believed that God exists, that it is our
duty to worship Him; that the proper way to do so is to practice
virtue, that people ought to repent of their sins, and that
rewards and punishments will follow death.
Increasingly during the eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries, there was a rejection of miracles. Then, with the
publication in 1859 of Darwin's Origin of Species, there was a
fast waning of belief in the historicity of Adam and Eve and of
the creation story, and the process of secularization was almost
complete. Within a few generations, the existence of God Himself
had become an unnecessary "hypothesis."
__________________________________
1John Woodbridge, Biblical Authority (Grand Rapids, Mich.:
Zondervan Publishing House, 1982), p. 99.
2Quoted by Norman Hampson, The Enlightenment (New York: Penguin
Books, 1968), p. 113.
3Quoted by Ibid., p. 94.
THE ENLIGHTENMENT AND CHRISTIANITY
It is evident from the foregoing that the period of the
Enlightenment was the crucial step in the waning of civilization.
This was as true in the area of morals as it was in the
intellectual arena. Francis Asbury related that the spiritual
climate at that time in England was "a very dark, dark, dark day
and place."1
Historian Keith J. Hardman has described conditions at that
time as follows:
In the first half of the eighteenth century every area
of British life had large problems. Morality was at a
low ebb, and no class of society was untouched by
incredible grossness and bestiality. It was the "gin
age," when 506 of the 2,000 houses in the London area
of Holborn were gin shops. Gin was sold also from
wheelbarrows in the streets and secretly from attics
and cellars. The results of national drunkenness,
Bishop Benson said, had made the English people "what
they never were before, cruel and inhuman."
The case of Judith Dufour, recorded in the Old
Bailey Session Papers for February 1735, is similar to
many that could be recited to show the stranglehold the
liquor traffic had on multitudes. This woman took her
small child to the workhouse, where it was given
clothing. She then left the workhouse, strangled the
child, threw the body in a ditch, sold the clothes for
one shilling and fourpence, and immediately spent the
money on gin, which she shared with another woman who
had helped in the murder.
Vast fortunes were amassed from the manufacture of
cheap alcohol, and alcohol's effects were everywhere.
"Gentlemen" squires and judges boasted of being "five-
bottle men." Parliament, on numerous occasions, had to
adjourn early because "the honourable Members were too
drunk to continue the business of State." . . .
In any age the treatment of children is an
accurate index of morality or savagery. In the late
seventeenth and early eighteenth century in England,
the death rate of children and the indescribable
treatment toward them tells its own pathetic tale.
During that time the London Bills of Mortality reveal
that 74.5 percent of children of all classes died
before their fifth birthday, and the poor classes had
their children snatched from them even more than the
rich. A petition to Parliament in 1739 to create a
foundlings hospital tells of the constant "murder of
poor miserable infants," of the custom of exposing new-
born babies "to perish in the street," of the placing
of foundlings with "wicked and barbarous nurses" who
for a small sum allow them to "starve for want of due
sustenance or care," and of the few who survived being
turned "into the streets to beg or steal," some being
"blinded, or maimed and distorted in their limbs, in
order to move pity," thus being "fitter instruments of
gain" to "vile, merciless wretches."2
Fortunately, the Evangelical Awakening (known in America as
the Great Awakening) helped to bring about changes to these
serious conditions. Nevertheless, unbelief continued in its
progress, particularly in France.
One of the most effective popularizers of the ideas of the
Enlightenment was Voltaire, who wrote prolifically on almost
every subject. In his Philosphe ignorant (1766) he wrote:
Who are you? Where do you come from? What are you
dong? What will become of you? This is a question one
must put to every creature in the universe, but none of
them gives us any answer.3
Elsewhere, Voltaire had written (in Microm‚gas, published in
1752), a story about a voyager from Sirius, whose intellectual
faculties far exceeded those of man. He offered as a parting
gift to his European hosts a book of philosophy in which they
could read the ultimate meaning of life. This book was taken to
the Academy of Sciences in Paris, but when the secretary,
Fontenelle, opened it, he found the pages completely blank.
"Ah," he said, "that's just what I expected."
It is clear from these examples that, once the Bible was no
longer taken seriously, there were no longer any answers to the
meaning of life. As has been ably demonstrated by the great
Christian apologist of the twentieth century, Francis Schaeffer,
this state of affairs inevitably leads to despair and
hopelessness. If there is going to be any optimism at all, it
must come from a recognition of the truth of the Bible and its
claims. Apart from it, there is really no basis for optimism,
hope, or absolutes of any kind. Ultimately, the "Enlightenment"
led to this kind of despair.
__________________________________
1Francis Asbury, The Journal and Letters of Francis Asbury
(Nashville, Tenn.: Abingdon, 1958), vol. I, pp. 720-721.
2Keith J. Hardman, The Spiritual Awakeners (Chicago: Moody Press,
1983), pp. 75-76.
3Quoted by Hampson, p. 122.
THE HISTORICAL ROOTS OF SECULAR HUMANISM
While rationalism took hold as a result of the philosophical
work of Ren‚ Descartes, the tendency to make man the measure of
all things certainly did not originate with his philosophy. This
tendency characterized some of the leaders of the Renaissance,
who were also often anthropocentric, or humanistic, in outlook.
Even in the Middle Ages, Thomas Aquinas made a distinction
between nature and grace. This idea took hold and became the
basis for (1) the tendency in science to differentiate between
natural causes and secondary causes, (2) the distinction that
developed in theology between natural religion and revealed
religion, and (3) the distinction made by Immanuel Kant between
the noumenal and the phenomenal.
The idea that the natural world is in some sense divorced
from the supernatural world often quickly resolves itself into a
materialistic world view according to which there is no
supernatural at all. In other words, as Francis Schaeffer has
observed, "nature eats up grace."1
The distinction between nature and grace, unfortunately,
became one of the underlying assumptions of many of the leaders
of Renaissance humanism. And, as the word "humanism" implies,
very often man and his thinking were considered authoritative
rather than God and his revelation as given in the Scriptures, or
man's thinking guided by revelation. To a large degree, this was
done on an unconscious level by those who affirmed the complete
infallibility of the Bible and upheld its complete authority.
Yet, with the development of humanism during the Renaissance,
there was an increased emphasis upon man.2
Thus, Alexander Solzhenitsyn state in the commencement
address for Harvard University on June 8, 1978:
There are meaningful warnings that history gives a
threatened or perishing society. They are, for
instance, the decadence of art, or a lack of great
statesmen. . . .
The American intelligentsia lost its nerve, and as
a consequence thereof danger has come much closer to
the United States. But there is no awareness of this.
. . .
This means that the mistake must be at the root,
at the very basis of human thinking in the past
centuries. I refer to the prevailing Western view of
the world, which was first born during the Renaissance
and found its political expression in the period of the
Enlightenment. It became the basis for government and
social science and could be defined as rationalistic
humanism or humanistic autonomy: the proclaimed and
enforced autonomy of man from any higher force above
him. It could also be called anthropocentricity, with
man seen as the center of everything that exists. . . .
This new way of thinking, which had imposed on us
its guidance, did not admit the existence of intrinsic
evil in man nor did it see any higher task than the
attainment of happiness on earth. . . .
Two hundred, or even fifty, years ago, it would
have seemed quite impossible, in America, that an
individual could be granted boundless freedom simply
for the satisfaction of his instincts or whims.
Subsequently, however, all such limitations were
discarded everywhere in the West: a total liberation
occurred from the moral heritage of Christian
centuries. . . .
All the glorified technological achievements of
Progress, including the conquest of outer space, do not
redeem the twentieth century's moral poverty, which no
one could imagine even as late as in the nineteenth
century.3
__________________________________
1Francis A. Schaeffer, Escape from Reason (Downers Grove, Ill.:
Inter-Varsity Press, 1968), p. 9.
2Francis A. Schaeffer, How Should We Then Live? (Old Tappan, NJ:
Fleming H. Revell Co., 1976), p. 62.
3Alexander Solzhenitsyn, "The Exhausted West," in D‚tente:
Prospects for Democracy and Dictatorship (New Brunswick:
Transaction Books, 1980), pp. 10-15.
SECULAR HUMANISM: AN EVALUATION
How are we to evaluate the secular humanism which is quickly
bringing about the death of our culture? One of the tenets of
secular humanism is that Christian believers are credulous and
sentimental, and that one must be a materialist, a scientist, and
a humanist to have a skeptical mind. Yet the very opposite is
true. Those who retain simple faith in the Scriptures in an
environment of secular humanism are not credulous. Rather, they
are the careful thinkers. They are the ones who have considered
secular humanism and rejected it. They are the ones who have
better developed critical faculties. It is the secular humanists
who are credulous. Malcolm Muggeridge has written, quite
rightly, that the age in which we are now living "will go down in
history as one of the most credulous ever."1
Those who have had the courage to think for themselves, not
blindly following the leadership of the intelligentsia of the
twentieth century, can hardly be considered naive or simplistic.
It is precisely because people have not been thinking for
themselves that so many of them have fallen into the erroneous
world view of twentieth-century scholarship. Let us wake up! Is
it not evident by the end results that we in our culture are in
serious error?
Who is the naive one: the academician who blindly accepts
the Documentary hypothesis of the Pentateuch simply because he or
she is told that its results are assured, or the one who cares to
investigate the theory and subject it to careful scrutiny? The
believer in Christ's view of the authorship of the Pentateuch is
not credulous. Rather, he or she has the courage to disagree
with the consensus because it is found wanting, and because truth
is more important than academic respectability.
The same could be said with respect to the theory of
evolution, and Malcolm Muggeridge has expressed it elegantly:
I myself am convinced that the theory of evolution,
especially the extent to which it's been applied, will
be one of the great jokes in the history books in the
future. Posterity will marvel that so very flimsy and
dubious an hypothesis could be accepted with the
incredible credulity that it has. It think I spoke to
you before about this age as one of the most credulous
in history, and I would include evolution as an
example.2
__________________________________
1Malcolm Muggeridge, The End of Christendom, But Not of Christ
(Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1980), pp.
4-5.
2Ibid., p. 59.
GOD'S JUDGEMENT UPON SIN IN HISTORY
Throughout all of history, God has destroyed the wicked and
granted mercy to a remnant of people who have sought to please
Him in their thoughts and actions.
Nowhere is this principle more evident than in the Biblical
account of Noah's flood. When the Lord saw that the wickedness
of mankind was great upon the earth, and that every intent of
their hearts was only upon evil continually, He decided to blot
them from the face of the earth, with the exception of Noah and
his immediate family (Genesis 6:5-8). God brought a flood of
water upon the earth and destroyed all of the living creatures
except those that were upon the ark that he had instructed Noah
to build.
The Biblical account of Sodom and Gomorrah is another
indication of the principle of God's judgement. The Lord said to
Abraham that the outcry of these two cities was indeed great, and
that their sin was exceedingly grave (Genesis 18:20). He sent
angels to rescue Lot and his family from Sodom and then rained
fire and brimstone upon the two cities (Genesis 19:16,24).
God allowed the people of Israel to conquer the Amorites in
Canaan because of their wickedness. He did not allow this
judgement to be executed until the iniquity of the Amorites was
complete (Genesis 15:16). God stays His hand until there is no
way He can allow it to continue.
The principle of God's judgement upon sin is reiterated in
the book of Deuteronomy, where God promises blessings for
obedience and curses for disobedience: "The Lord will send upon
you curses, confusion, and rebuke, in all you undertake to do,
until you are destroyed and until you perish quickly, on account
of the evil of your deeds, because you have forsaken me"
(Deut. 28:20).
The Bible is full of examples of God's judgement upon
wickedness and His mercy upon repentant people and nations.
According to the Bible, this principle is applicable not only to
Israel, but to all nations and individuals. When Nineveh
repented because of Jonah's warning, it was spared from God's
judgement (Jonah 3:10). When Belshazzar did not repent, his
kingdom was taken over by the Medes and the Persians
(Daniel 5:22-31).
The fact of God's judgement is not restricted to the Bible.
It is evident throughout all of history. One of the greatest
testimonies to this principle is in the fall of Rome. The
decadence of ancient Rome is well known and well documented.
Infanticide and abortion were commonplace; the pursuit of
pleasure for its own sake was taken for granted; peoples' hearts
had been hardened. God used the Germanic "barbarian" tribes to
execute His judgement upon ancient Rome, but something very
significant happened. The Christian Church escaped unscathed.
It is impossible to overemphasize the significance of this fact.
In A.D. 410, Rome was sacked by the Goths under Alaric. The
Vandals took Rome in A.D. 455, and finally Attila the Hun invaded
the western part of the Roman Empire and conquered Rome in
A.D. 476. The entire Roman Empire fell, but the Church survived.
How is this possible? Many of the barbarian tribes had accepted
Christianity and respected the bishop of Rome. The Roman bishop
was able to protect the people, to a certain extent, from the
worst excesses of the barbarians, while the emperor had been
powerless to protect them. For example, at one point prior to
A.D. 461, the intercession of Leo I saved the city from complete
destruction. When the dust cleared, the only thing left standing
among the blackened ruins of the Western Empire was the Church,
which was ready to bless and educate the barbarians who had
brought about this ruin.
The institutional church itself, however, is not immune from
the judgement of God. When it apostatized, accepting as fact the
principles of the Enlightenment, it slit its own throat. The
downfall of the institutional Church is described in Malcolm
Muggeridge's book, The End of Christendom, But Not Of Christ. He
wrote that Blaise Pascal foresaw the danger that the
Enlightenment posed to the institutional church:
Because he understood how important humility is and
because he could recognize the arrogance that was
growing up among scholars and learned people, he
foresaw the dangers that the Enlightenment would bring.
. . .
He was the first and perhaps is still the most
effective voice to be raised in warning of the
consequences of the enthronement of the human ego in
contradistinction to the cross, symbolizing the ego's
immolation. How beautiful it all seemed at the time of
the Enlightenment, that man triumphant would bring to
pass that earthly paradise whose groves of academe
would ensure the realization forever of peace, plenty,
and beatitude in practice. But what a nightmare of
wars, famines, and folly was to result therefrom.1
Muggeridge's thesis is that, while Christendom is
floundering, Christ's Christianity is flourishing. This is just
what we should expect if the principle of God's blessings and
curses is true. Christendom is an administrative power structure
based upon Christianity and constructed by men. Christ's Church,
on the other hand, is invisible, and is a kingdom which is not of
this world. It includes all of those who are truly loyal to
Christ. Christ's Church consists of the obedient. The
institutional Church is a collection of ecclesiastical bodies
that collectively affirms the principles of the Enlightenment.
If the institutional church is able to humble itself and throw
off the yolk of the Enlightenment, then it, too, can flourish.
Nowhere is the principle of God' judgement upon sin more
evident than in the early history of America. In the history of
the early American colonists, one finds a continual cycle of
repentance and apostasy:
One finds long droughts broken by a settlement's
deliberately fasting and humbling itself, turning back
to the God whom they once trusted and had imperceptibly
begun to take for granted. One also finds instances of
one settlement being spared from Indian attack, while
another is decimated, when the only apparent difference
seemed to be in their heart attitude towards God and
one another.2
Prior to the colonization of the New World, the explorers
experienced another form of God's judgement. The crew that had
been with Christopher Columbus during the discovery of the New
World took native women for pleasure. Unknown to them, many of
these women were carriers of a strange and deadly disease which
would later become known as syphilis. The men infected became
subject to a lingering, excruciatingly painful insanity and
death. These sailors returned from their voyage, introduced the
new plague to Spain, and from there, to the rest of the civilized
world.
More than a hundred years later, the early Pilgrims in New
England found that obedience was necessary in order to avert the
judgement of God. In April of 1623, there were twelve weeks of
drought, the likes of which had never been seen by the oldest
native Indians. Edward Winslow wrote:
There scarce fell any rain, so that the stalk of that
was first set, began to send forth the ear before it
came to half growth, and that which was later, not like
to yield any at all, both blade and stalk hanging the
head and changing the color in such manner as we judged
it utterly dead. Our beans also ran not up according
to their wonted manner, but stood at a stay, many being
parched away, as though they had been scorched before
the fire. Now were our hopes overthrown, and we
discouraged, our joy turned into mourning . . . because
God, which hitherto had been our only shield and
supporter, now seemed in His anger to arm Himself
against us. And who can withstand the fierceness of
His wrath?
These and the like considerations moved not only
every good man privately to enter into examination with
his own estate between God and his conscience, and so
to humiliation before Him, but also to humble ourselves
together before the Lord by fasting and prayer. To
that end, a day was appointed by public authority, and
set apart from all other employments.
But, O the mercy of our God, who was as ready to
hear, as we were to ask! For though in the morning,
when we assembled together, the heavens were as clear
and the drought as like to continue as it ever was, yet
(our exercise continuing some eight or nine hours)
before our departure, the weather was overcast, the
clouds gathered on all sides. On the next morning
distilled such soft, sweet and moderate showers of
rain, continuing some fourteen days and mixed with such
seasonable weather, as it was hard to say whether our
withered corn or drooping affections were most
quickened or revived, such was the bounty and goodness
of our God!3
The other early settlers in New England also frequently
found that repentance was necessary to avoid God's judgement. In
the summer of 1646, after prosperity had begotten greed and
idolatry, there was a plague of caterpillars which was ruining
the wheat and barley crops. John Winthrop wrote:
Great harm was done in corn (especially wheat and
barley) in this month by a caterpillar, like a black
worm about an inch and a half long. They eat up first
the blades of the stalk, then they eat up the tassels,
whereupon the ear withered. It was believed by divers
good observers that they fell in a great thunder
shower, for divers yards and other bare places where
not one of them was to be seen an hour before, were
presently after the shower almost covered with them,
besides grass places where they were not so easily
discerned. They did the most harm in the southern
parts, as in Rhode Island, etc., and in the eastern
parts in their Indian corn. In divers places the
churches kept a day of humiliation, and presently
after, the caterpillars vanished away.4
According to the Roxbury church records:
Much prayer there was made to God about it, with
fasting in divers places, and the Lord heard and on a
sudden, took them away again in all parts of the
country, to the wonderment of all men. It was the
Lord, for it was done suddenly.5
At the end of the twentieth century, civilization faces a
choice: either genuine repentance or God's judgement. There are
no other alternatives. Either the world is quickly coming to an
end, or it will soon make an about-face unparalleled for
centuries. Alexander Solzhenitsyn put it this way:
If the world has not come to its end, it has approached
a major turn in history, equal in importance to the
turn from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. It will
exact from us a spiritual upsurge: we shall have to
rise to a new height of vision, to a new level of life,
where our physical nature will not be cursed as in the
Middle Ages, but, even more important, our spiritual
being will not be trampled upon as in the modern era.6
__________________________________
1Malcolm Muggeridge, The End of Christendom, But Not of Christ
(Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1980),
pp. 7-8.
2Peter Marshall and David Manuel, The Light and the Glory (Old
Tappan, N.J.: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1977), pp. 24-25.
3Quoted by Alexander Young, Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers
(Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1841), pp. 347-350.
4John Winthrop, The History of New England from 1630 to 1649, ed.
James Savage (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1853), vol. II, p.
277.
5W. DeLoss Love, Jr., The Fast and Thanksgiving Days of New
England (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1895), p. 181, as
quoted by Marshall and Manuel, p. 217.
6Alexander Solzhenitsyn, "The Exhausted West," in D‚tente:
Prospects for Democracy and Dictatorship (New Brunswick:
Transaction Books, 1980), pp. 17-18.
GOD'S PROVIDENCE IN HISTORY
It should be evident from the foregoing study of God's
judgement upon sin in history that Biblical principles have been
in effect, not just during the time that the Bible was written,
but at all times. Further evidence of this is available in any
study of the providence of God in history.
Some of the most astonishing examples that can be provided
of the operation of God's providence have to do with the early
exploration and settlement of America. One of many such
incidents took place in 1493, when Christopher Columbus and his
crew were first exploring the New World. When they departed from
C diz and sailed down to the Canaries, they had an incredible
landfall at Dominica, which became the navigating target which
mariners would recommend for the next four centuries. To aim
north meant the possibility of missing the strong trade winds,
while to aim south was to risk hitting dangerous reefs.1
The location of the Jamestown settlement in Virginia can be
cited as another example, either of incredible coincidence, or of
divine providence. In spring of 1607, Captain Newport and the
colonists with him sailed through the West Indies up the coast of
America, and into the Chesapeake Bay. On May 14, after sailing
about forty miles up the James River, they landed. Supplies were
very, very scarce, and, in the beginning, there was only a 10%
survival rate. John Smith, one of the members of the original
seven-man council that governed the colony, was very provocative
in his treatment of the Indians, whom he looked upon as savages.
In disobedience to the directives of the other council members,
he continually provoked the Indians. In view of these factors,
it is surprising that the colony survived at all.
In the providence of God, however, the neighboring Powhatan
Indians dealt very kindly in spite of Smith's hostility.
Concerning the location of the Jamestown settlement, Peter
Marshall and David Manuel have written:
Was it chance that guided the first settlers to
Powhatan's domain on Chesapeake Bay? The East Coast
was populated by some of the most hostile Indian tribes
in all America. We have already seen the ferocity of
the Seminoles, who kept the Spanish from any
significant colonization of Florida. And inland to the
north, the diabolical Iroquois precluded any thought of
French or English settlement for many years. On
Massachusetts Bay, the Massachusetts Indians were
sufficiently warlike to discourage all but the most
foolhardy, and south of them, the Narragansetts were
equally fearsome. Seen from this vantage point, the
entire East Coast of America seemed fairly to bristle
with arrows and tomahawks. Any one of these tribes
would have annihilated the little colony without any
provocation whatever, let alone the outrages that Smith
was routinely perpetrating.
Or was it the hand of a merciful God that had led
them to perhaps the only place on the Atlantic seaboard
at that particular time where there was any real
possibility of their putting down roots? Powhatan may
have been the only chief on the continent who would
have put up with Smith's behavior, let alone shared his
people's precious corn.2
Another miracle of divine providence took place in May of
1610, when there were only sixty starving settlers at Jamestown
out of 480 who had been there the previous August. Thomas Gates
and George Somers and their men arrived after being shipwrecked
in Bermuda, but when they saw the terrible condition of the
colony, they began to leave rather than use up their own
provisions on these starving people. As they were leaving,
however, Lord De La Warr arrived in a very large ship. At his
command, everyone turned around and headed back to the
settlement. According to Marshall and Manuel, "As soon as he set
foot on that desolate, hated piece of land, he knelt and gave
thanks to God for bringing them safely there and causing them to
arrive in time to save all lives. . . . The extraordinary
coincidence of timing was counted by the whole world as an act of
Divine Providence."3 William Crashaw wrote of this incident:
If God had not sent Sir Thomas Gates from the Bermudas,
within four days they had all been famished. If God
had not directed the heart of that worthy Knight to
save the fort from fire . . . If they had set sail
sooner . . . Brachium Domini: this was the arm of the
Lord of Hosts.4
New England was settled a few years later by both the
Pilgrims, who were Separatists, and by Puritans. In Britain, the
Puritans had wanted to see the Church of England purified much
more thoroughly than it had been by the Elizabethan Settlement of
1563. They wanted a spiritually minded pastor in each parish who
was able to preach, and end to clerical dress and an end to
kneeling at the Lord's supper. For each parish, they wanted
elders chosen to exercise discipline, and they wanted the
ministers to be chosen by the people, rather than by a bishop.
In fact, they wanted to abolish the office of bishop.
The Separatists had the same concerns, but they disagreed
with the Puritans about reforming from within. They therefore
separated from the Church of England, believing that each local
church is self-sufficient.
The Pilgrims who established the Plymouth Colony in 1620
were Separatists. In 1628, non-Separatist Puritans founded the
Massachusetts Bay Colony at Salem.
King James I of England had stated that he would force the
Puritans to conform to the rules of the Church of England or he
would "harry them out of the land." He made things so unpleasant
that a congregation in Scrooby, England, south refuge in Leyden,
in the Netherlands, in 1609. However, they did not feel at home
there, and they found it hard to make a living in a foreign
country. They saw their children "being drawn away by evil
examples into extravagant and dangerous courses," so they decided
to seek a new home in the New World. They sailed to Plymouth,
England, and from there they sailed in the Mayflower to Cape Cod,
where they arrived at Plymouth Rock toward the end of 1620.
These Pilgrims had a very strong faith in God, and believed
that He was leading them to America so that they could practice
purity in life and faith. They went through many very serious
struggles, but their lives were also ordered by a series of very
unusual coincidences which they recognized as the hand of God.
After the Mayflower arrived at Cape Cod, a sailing shallop
was assembled for use to explore the inner coast of the bay and
to find the right place for settlement. Those who went on the
expedition had a skirmish with the Indians, but escaped harm:
Yet by the special providence of God, none of [the
arrows] either hit or hurt us, though many came close
by us on every side of us, and some coasts which were
hung up in our barricado were shot through and through.
So, after we had given God thanks for our deliverance
. . . we went on our journey and called this place "The
First Encounter."5
After a few days of exploration, there was a remarkable
series of coincidences:
This was to be a day of discoveries, each more amazing
than the one before. The first was that the little
island they were on was in the middle of a perfect
natural harbor, almost completely enclosed. The next
was that the harbor was deep enough to take ships of
twice the draft of the Mayflower.
They rowed the shallop across to the mainland, and
their discoveries came in quick succession. The soil
was rich and fertile. There was a gentle open slope
that rose up from the water's edge which would afford
an ideal place to settle, with excellent drainage and
an open field of fire for muskets and cannon, in case
they had to defend it. There were not one but four
spring-fed creeks close at hand, with the sweetest
water any of them had ever tasted. . . . On the hill a
good twenty acres of ground had already been cleared
and were ready to plant, though there were signs
indicating that for some reason no planting had been
done for several years.6
The Pilgrims later discovered that this area had been the
territory of the Patuxets, a large, hostile tribe that had
barbarously murdered every white man who had landed on their
shores. However, four years before the arrival of the Pilgrims,
a mysterious plague had broken out among them, and killed every
one of them. The devastation had been so complete that
neighboring tribes feared the area. The cleared land which the
Pilgrims found therefore literally belonged to no one. Their
nearest neighbors were the Wampanoags, fifty miles to the
southwest. Their chief, Massasoit, had such wisdom that he ruled
over several other small tribes in that area.
It happened that, just when they were needed, two English-
speaking Indians, at separate times, came into contact with the
Pilgrims. Samoset, a chief of the Algoniquins in Maine, had
learned English from various fishing captains who had been
exploring the coast of Maine. Squanto, another English-speaking
Indian, had actually spent several years in Europe. A Patuxet,
he found his way back to his native land only to find that his
entire tribe had died of disease.
Because these Indians could act as interpreters,
facilitating communication, a peace treaty was concluded with
Massasoit, pledging mutual aid and assistance, which lasted for
forty years and became a model for many that were made
thereafter. Marshall and Manuel wrote:
Massasoit was a remarkable example of God's
providential care for His Pilgrims. He was probably
the only other chief on the northeast coast of America
who (like Powhatan to the south) would have welcomed
the white man as a friend. And the Pilgrims took great
pains not to abuse his acceptance of them. On the
contrary, the record of their relations with him and
his people is a strong testimony to the love of Christ
that was in them.7
Because Squanto formerly lived as a member of the Patuxet
tribe where the Pilgrims settled, and because he had spent many
years in Europe, he went to live with the Pilgrims. He once
again found a purpose for life, after losing his entire family
and tribe: he would teach the Pilgrims how to survive in the
wilderness. According to William Bradford, Squanto was "a
special instrument sent of God for their good, beyond
expectation."8
Another example of the operation of God's sovereignty can be
seen in the circumstances surrounding the reorganization of the
New England Company into the Massachusetts Bay Company. The
Puritans believed that the Kingdom of God could actually be built
on earth, in their lifetimes. While they knew they were sinners,
they were dedicated to living together in obedience to God's laws
under the Lordship of Jesus Christ. All that was needed, they
felt, was the right time, the right place, and the right people,
provided they were willing to commit themselves totally.
In 1628, under King Charles I, William Laud became bishop of
London and began persecuting English clergy who were Puritans.
This brought about the Great Migration, and many Puritans decided
to go to America. They wanted to remain loyal to the Crown and
to the Church of England, but they wanted to be able to live in
true obedience to God, and this was an opportunity to do so.
Therefore, they arranged to reorganize the New England Company as
the Massachusetts Bay Company. Marshall and Manuel wrote:
A new, enlarged charter was routinely processed through
Parliament and presented for His Majesty's signature.
But the King failed to notice that there was no mention
of where the Company's meetings were to be held. He
signed it and forgot about it. The wondrous timing of
God can further be seen in the fact that, less than a
week later, the King dissolved Parliament and took the
reins of the country entirely into his own hands,
thereafter jealously scrutinizing every document to
ensure that his authority was in no way diminished!
The Bay Company's partners were privately
jubilant. There was now nothing binding them to
England, nothing to prevent them from moving to New
England themselves--and taking their charter with them.
Once removed from the suspicious eyes of Church and
Crown, the Company could become a self-governing
commonwealth with the charter as its carte blanche.
Only now, they would be governed by the laws of God,
not merely the laws of men.9
__________________________________
1Samuel Eliot Morison, Admiral of the Ocean Sea (Boston: Little,
Brown & Co., 1942), pp. 404-405.
2Peter Marshall and David Manuel, The Light and the Glory (Old
Tappan, N.J.: Fleming H. Revell Co., 1977), p. 95.
3Ibid., p. 101.
4George F. Willison, Behold Virginia (New York: Harcourt, Brace &
Co., 1952), p. 120.
5William Bradford and Edward Winslow, Morte's Relation, as quoted
by Alexander Young, Chronicles of the Pilgrims Fathers (Boston:
Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1841), pp. 158-159.
6Marshall and Manuel, p. 125.
7Ibid., p. 132.
8William Bradford, History of the Plymouth Plantation 1606-1646,
ed. William T. Davis (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1908),
p. 111.
9Marshall and Manuel, pp. 154-155.
THE HISTORICAL EVIDENCE FOR NOAH`S ARK
Josephus (A.D. 37-c.100) stated that, in the country called
Carroe, there were "in it the remains of the ark, wherein it is
related that Noah escaped the deluge, and where they are still
shown to such as are desirous to see them."1 Elsewhere, Josephus
wrote:
However, the Armenians call this place ,
the Place of Descent; for the ark being saved in that
place, its remains are showed there by the inhabitants
to this day.
Now all the writers of barbarian histories make
mention of this flood, and of this ark; among whom is
Berossus the Chaldean. For when he was describing the
circumstances of the flood, he goes on thus: "It is
said, there is still some part of this ship in Armenia,
at the mountain of the Cordyaeans; and that some people
carry off pieces of the bitumen, which they take away,
and use chiefly as amulets, for the averting of
mischiefs."--Hieronymus the Egyptian also, who wrote
the Phenician antiquities, and Manases, and a great
many more, make mention of the same. Nay, Nicholas of
Damascus, in his ninety-sixth book, hath a particular
relation about them; where he speaks thus: "There is a
great mountain in Armenia, over Minyas, called Baris,
upon which it is reported, that many who fled at the
time of the deluge were saved; and that one who was
carried in an ark, came on shore upon the top of it;
and that the remains of the timber were a great while
preserved. This might be the man about whom Moses the
legislator of the Jews wrote."2
The existence of the ark on Mt. Ararat is also mentioned by
Theophilus of Antioch (c. 115-185), who stated, "and of the ark,
the remains are to this day to be seen in the Arabian
mountains."3 A similar statement is made by Epiphanius of
Salamis (c. 315-403), who said, "Do you seriously suppose that we
are unable to prove our point, when even to this day the remains
of Noah's Ark are shown in the country of the Kurds?"4
Chrysostom (c. 345-407), wrote, "Have you heard of the
Flood--of that universal destruction? That was not just a
threat, was it? Did it not really come to pass--was not this
mighty work carried out? Do not the mountains of Armenia testify
to it, where the Ark rested? And are not the remains of the Ark
preserved there to this very day for our admonition?"5
Isidore of Seville (c. 560-636) wrote: "Ararat is a mountain
in Armenia, where the historians testify that the Ark came to
rest after the Flood. So even to this day wood remains of it are
to be seen there."6
A thirteenth century Armenian prince, Jehan Haithon, wrote
as follows:
In Armenia there is a very high mountain--the highest
in existence--and its name is Ararat. On that mountain
Noah's Ark landed after the Flood. No one can climb
this mountain because of the great quantity of snow on
it winter and summer. But at the summit a great black
object is always visible, which is said to be the ark
of Noah.7
Sir John Mandeville (d. 1372), an English knight, wrote an
account of his travels between 1322 and 1356. In The Travels,
chapter 13, he writes:
From that city of Artyroun men go to a mountain called
Sabissocolle; and there beside is another mountain
called Ararat, but the Jews call it Taneez, where
Noah's ship rested, and still is upon that mountain;
and men many see it afar in clear weather. That
mountain is full seven miles high; and some men say
that they have seen and touched the ship, and put their
fingers in the parts where the devil went out, when
Noah said "Benedicte."8
Adam Olearus (1603-1671) also travelled extensively, and
wrote that "the Armenians, and the Persians themselves, are of
opinion, that there are still upon the said Mountain some
remainders of the Ark, but that Time hath so hardened them, that
they seem absolutely petrified."9
The ancient traditions of India and China include accounts
of a time when the ancient world was carried away by a flood and
re-peopled by a few who had been preserved miraculously.
According to Hindu tradition, Manu was warned by a great fish
that the earth was about to be engulfed by water. He was told to
build a ship and to put into it all kinds of seeds, together with
the seven Rishis, or holy beings. The flood came as predicted
and covered the whole earth. The ship was made fast to the horns
of the fish, which drew it on safely and finally landed it on the
highest summit of the Himalayas. Manu was then permitted by God
to create the new race of mankind.
There were seven companions of Manu, and, including himself,
eight were saved. Manu is called Satya, or "the righteous."
After the flood, he drank mead and became senseless and lay
asleep, naked. One of the three sons who had been born to him,
Charma, found him and called on his two brothers to witness the
shame of their father, and said, "What has now befallen? In what
state is our sire?" The two brothers were more dutiful than
Charma and hid him with clothes. When he recovered his senses,
and knowing what had happened, he cursed Charma and said to him,
"Thou shalt be a servant of servants."10
According to Chinese tradition, Fah-he escaped from a deluge
which destroyed the human race with the exception of himself, his
wife, his three sons, and three daughters, and from these, the
whole earth was peopled.
Manetho, who lived about 250 B.C., wrote the ancient history
of the Egyptians, according to which there was a worldwide
catastrophe in which a person called Toth was saved. Before the
cataclysm, Toth inscribed on a slab of stone in sacred language
the principles of all knowledge. Afterward, he translated it
into common language. The Egyptians connected the Deluge
tradition with their commemoration of the dead, which was done by
symbolic ceremony, in which the priest placed the image of Osiris
in a sacred ark and launched it into the sea and watched it
disappear from sight.11
In the ancient town of Apamea in Phrygia, there was pillar
upon which was carved an ark, which, according to tradition, had
come to rest on that very spot. A coin was also found on one
side of which was represented an ark with the door wide open and
a patriarchal figure receiving a returning bird into the ark. On
the other side of the coin is a man and his wife leaving the ark.
On the ark itself appears the name "Noe."12
The Roman Flood tradition was preserved by the well-known
Latin poet Ovid, in Metamorphoses, while the Greek writer Plato
preserved material on the flood tradition in his unfinished
dialogue, Critias. Another ancient writer, Lucian (A.D. 120-
180), renders the Greek tradition as follows in his Dialogues on
the Syrian Goddess:
Not one of us now living is descended from the original
race of men, who all perished. We, numerous as we are,
are no other than a second race sprung from Deucalion.
The aborigines were full of pride and insolence,
unfaithful to their promises, inhospitable to
strangers, deaf to supplicants. Hence they were
overtaken by a greater disaster. The earth suddenly
opened its sluices, heavy showers of rain fell, the
rivers swelled, and the sea arose until the waters
everywhere prevailed, and every mortal [perished]
except Deucalion, who on account of his virtue and
piety, was saved to give birth to a new race of men.
He put himself with his wives and children in a great
chest, and thereupon there came to him boars and horses
and lions and serpents and all kind of land animals.
He took them all in, and all the time they were with
him Zeus ordered it so that they did no injury, but
lived together in harmony.13
The native North American Kolushes of Alaska had an ancient
tradition that the father of the Indian tribes formerly lived
toward the rising sun. Having been warned in a dream that a
deluge would desolate the earth, he built a raft on which he
saved himself and his family, and all animals. He floated for
several months on the water. The animals, who could then talk,
complained against him. A new earth at length appeared, and he
then alighted with all the animals, which then lost the power of
speech as a punishment for their complaining.14
The native Mexican historian, Ixtilxochitl, wrote as
follows:
It is found in the histories of the Toltecs that this
age and the first world, as they call it, lasted 1,716
years; that men were destroyed by tremendous rains and
lightning from the sky, and even all the land, without
the exception of anything, and the highest mountains
were covered up and submerged in water fifteen cubits
(caxtolmolatlic); and here they add other fables of how
men came to multiply from the few who escaped from this
destruction in a `toptipetlocali,' which nearly
signifies a closed chest; and how, after men had
multiplied, they erected a very high `zacvali,' which
is today a tower of great height, in order to take
refuge in it should the second world (age) be
destroyed. Presently their languages were confused,
and, not being able to understand each other, they went
to different parts of the earth. The Toltecs,
consisting of seven friends, with their wives, who
understood the same language, came to these parts,
having first passed great land and seas, having lived
in caves, and having endured great hardships in order
to reach this land; they wandered 104 years through
different parts of the world before they reached Hue
Hue Tlapalan, which was in Ce Tecpatl, 520 years after
the Flood.15
Flood traditions of this kind are characteristic of just about
all ancient cultures. Dr. Richard Andree, a German scholar, has
compiled a collection of 88 different flood traditions from
various cultures around the world.16
There have been many modern sightings of Noah's ark. In
1905, a ten-year-old Armenian boy, Georgie Hagopian, went with
his uncle from Azerbajain in Old Persia to Mount Ararat and saw
Noah's ark.17 An interview with Mr. Hagopian is printed in John
Warwick Montgomery's book, The Quest for Noah's Ark, which refers
to him as George Tamisian.18
In 1916, during the First World War, a Russian airman, W.
Roskovitsky, flying over Mt. Ararat, stated that he had observed
on one of the slopes of Mt. Ararat the remains of an ancient
vessel. The Czar organized an expedition, which found the
remains in question and brought back a description of them which
was conclusive with respect to their identification. The report
was lost during the Bolshevik revolution in 1917.19
In the 1930s a New Zealander, Hardwicke Knight, stumbled
upon the remains of Noah's ark without realizing what it was
until some time later.20 Then, in 1952, George Jefferson Greene
took photographs of Noah's ark from a helicopter. These
photographs were lost ten years later, when he was murdered for
his gold.21
There have been many recent reports of sightings of Noah's
ark, including that of Chuck Aaron of Orlando, Florida, in
September of 1989. He and Bob Garbe photographed the ark during
a September 15 flight. These photos are available from the
Immanuel Expedition Foundation in Orlando, Florida.22
__________________________________
1Flavius Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, XX, ii, 2, in The
Works of Flavius Josephus, 2 vols., trans. William Whiston
(Philadelphia: J. Grigg, 1833), vol. II, p. 107.
2Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, I, iii, 5 and 6, in Whiston,
vol. I, pp. 17, 18.
3Ad Autolycum, book 3, chapter 19, trans. Marcus Dodds, in the
Ante-Nicene Fathers (1885), vol. II, p. 117.
4Panarion, I,i,18, trans. John W. Montgomery, The Quest for
Noah's Ark, 2d ed. (Minneapolis, Minn.: Bethany Fellowship,
1974), p. 77.
5John Chrysostum, sermon, "On Perfect Charity," trans. John W.
Montgomery, The Quest For Noah's Ark, p. 78.
6Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, in "Scriptorium Classicorum
Bibliotheca Oxoniensis," (1911), XIV,8,5, trans. Montgomery,
p. 80.
7Trans. Montgomery, pp. 82-83.
8Quoted by Montgomery, pp. 93-94.
9The Voyages and Travels of the Ambassadors, trans. John Davies
(London, 1662), Book IV, p. 187.
10Hugh Miller, The Testimony of the Rocks (Edinburgh: Thomas
Constable & Co., 1857), p. 290.
11John Urquhart, Modern Discoveries and the Bible (London:
Marshall Brothers, 1898), p. 175.
12Alfred M. Rehwinkel, The Flood (St. Louis, Mo.: Concordia
Publishing House, 1951), p. 144.
13Quoted by Byron C. Nelson, The Deluge Story In Stone
(Minneapolis, Minn.: Bethany Fellowship, 1968), p. 175.
14Ibid., p. 183.
15Quoted by Ibid., pp. 186-187.
16Richard Andree, Die Flutensagen, ethnologisch betrachtet, as
cited by Rehwinkel, pp. 129-130.
17Violet Cummings, Has Anybody Really Seen Noah's Ark? (San
Diego, Ca.: Creation-Life Publishers, 1982), p. 217.
18Montgomery, pp. 113-118.
19Ibid., pp. 119-125; Cummings, pp. 61-108.
20Montgomery, pp. 125-128.
21Montgomery, pp. 128-131; Cummings, pp. 143-148.
22"Yanks: We Discovered Noah's Ark," in The Home News, Friday,
September 22, 1989, p. A6.
EVANGELICAL AWAKENINGS
See excerpts from Richard M. Riss, A Survey of 20th-Century
Revival Movements in North America (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson
Publishers, 1988), as follows:
Introduction: pp. 1-7
Early Awakenings: pp. 7-11
The Great Awakening: pp. 11-12
The Second Evangelical Awakening
and other 19th Century revivals: pp. 12-14
The Revival of 1857-59: pp. 14-16
The Early Twentieth Century Revival: pp. 31-46
The Mid-Twentieth Century Revival: pp. 125-145
HAS SCIENCE DISPROVED THE BIBLE?
H. H. Price has stated that "a Deity who intervened
miraculously and suspended natural law could never be accepted by
Science."1 In his reply to Professor Price, C. S. Lewis
observed that you cannot discover a railway accident by studying
railway timetables:
To discover a regularity is by definition not to
discover its interruptions, even if they occur. You
cannot discover a railway accident from studying
Bradshaw [Bradshaw's Railway Guide]: only by being
there when it happens or hearing about it afterwards
from someone who was. . . . But surely this does not
mean that a student of Bradshaw is logically forced to
deny the possibility of railway accidents.2
Many people believe that it is unscientific to believe the
Bible. If this is true, however, then the following people were
unscientific: Isaac Newton, Johann Kepler, Robert Boyle, Lord
Kelvin, Louis Pasteur, Matthew Maury, Michael Faraday, Clerk
Maxwell, John Ray, and Carolus Linnaeus. All of these great
scientists believed the Bible, including the miracles recorded
within it. In fact, they were creationists, as were almost all
scientists before the time of Charles Darwin, whose Origin of
Species was not published until 1859.
Has the Darwinians revolution changed all of that? No,
there is nothing intrinsically unscientific about Sir Isaac
Newton's world view, according to which all of the miracles of
the Bible took place, including the creation of the universe by
God ex nihilo. However, with the acceptance of the Darwinian
theories, there was an acceptance of a new world view. Ernst
Mayr, Agassiz Professor Zoology at Harvard University, wrote as
follows in the prestigious British journal, Nature:
The Darwinian revolution was not merely the replacement
of one scientific theory by another, as had been the
scientific revolutions in the physical sciences, but
rather the replacement of a world view, in which the
supernatural was accepted as a normal and relevant
explanatory principle, but a new world view in which
there was no room for supernatural forces.3
According to Mayr, the implication of Darwin's thesis was
that "it is unscientific to believe in supernatural causation."4
If Mayr is correct, then the "scientific" world view, according
to which there is no supernatural causation, is relatively new to
science.
Science itself was built upon the foundation of a Biblical
world view. The great historian of science, Stanley L. Jaki,
asks in his book, Science and Creation,5 why it is that the
development of science took place in Europe between 1250 and 1650
and not in any of the great civilizations of antiquity, even
though many of them had long periods of relative stability, and
were able to develop technology to a considerable degree. Jaki
surveys the civilizations of ancient Babylon, Egypt, China, the
Hindus, the Incas, the Aztecs, and the Mayas, in an attempt to
determine what kept them from developing a true science.
Scientific research requires certain basic beliefs about
order and rationality. Jaki concludes that the elements needed
for the birth of science came into existence through the Judaeo-
Christian belief in an omnipotent God, creator and sustainer of
all things. Within such a world view it becomes meaningful to
attempt to understand nature, and this is the fundamental reason
why science developed as it did in the Middle Ages in Christian
Europe, culminating in the brilliant achievements of the
seventeenth century.6 Christianity's objective view of truth
made possible the rise of modern science. Jaki writes:
The scientific quest found fertile soil only when this
faith in a personal, rational Creator had truly
permeated a whole culture, beginning with the centuries
of the High Middle Ages. It was that faith which
provided, in sufficient measure, confidence in the
rationality of the universe, trust in progress, and
appreciation of the quantitative method, all
indispensable ingredients of the scientific quest.
. . .
The future of man rests with that judgment which
holds the universe to be the handiwork of a Creator and
Lawgiver. To this belief, science owes its very birth
and life.7
Science will not flourish in a world view which excludes a
creator and orderer of the universe. If there is no order in the
universe, there can be no science, because the very purpose of
science is to study that order. It the presupposition of
materialism persists, we can be certain that science as a field
will progressively become an unfruitful area of endeavor.
__________________________________
1H. H. Price, "The Grounds of Modern Agnosticism," Phoenix
Quarterly, vol. I, no. 1 (Autumn 1946), p. 25.
2C. S. Lewis, "Religion Without Dogma?" in C. S. Lewis, God In
the Dock, ed. Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B.
Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1970), p. 134.
3Ernst Mayr, "Evolution and God," Nature, Vol. 248 (22 March
1974), p. 285.
4Ibid.
5Stanley L. Jaki, Science and Creation (Edinburgh and London:
Scottish Academic Press, 1974).
6Marvin L. Lubenow, "Progressive Creationism: Is It A Biblical
Option?", a paper presented to the Midwestern Section of the
Evangelical Theological Society, twentieth general meeting, March
21-22, 1975, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Deerfield,
Illinois, p. 8.
7Stanley L. Jaki, Science and Creation (New York: Science History
Publications, 1974), p. viii.
THE CHRISTIAN ORIGINS OF SCIENCE
The Christian Origin of Science becomes quite clear when we
study the history of science, and we see that until very
recently, scientists interpreted the data in light of the Bible.
Until the time of Darwin, biologists were creationists, and until
the time of Charles Leyell, geological data were interpreted in
light of the Flood of Noah's time.
For example, Nicolaus Steno (1638-1686), the distinguished
scientist who discovered the circulation of the blood in the
human body and who discovered the law of crystallography known as
"the law of constancy of interfacial angles," also upheld the
Biblical story of Noah's Flood in his work, A Treatise on a Solid
Body Enclosed By Natural Process Within a Solid (1669).
The Flood was also upheld by Jacobus Grandius of Venice, who
wrote About the Truth of the Universal Deluge and the Remains
Which Are Found At Great Distance From the Sea (1676), in which
he stated that the remains of marine shells in the Alps were a
result of the Deluge.
In 1681, Thomas Burnet wrote A Sacred Theory of the Earth,
according to which the Deluge was largely responsible for the
present formation of the earth. Later, John Woodward wrote a
book on the Deluge, An Essay Toward A Natural Theory of the Earth
(1695), which observes that there are fossils of all forms of
life in many different places, and in many types of rock. There
are sea shells, teeth, and bones of fishes buried in different
sorts of strata, not only in chalk, clay, and marl, but even in
solid stone. Deposits of sea life are visible at the bottoms of
the deepest mines and at the tops of the highest mountains,
sometimes in unusual bulk and quantity. There are shells buried
in the earth that are not the product of neighboring seas, but of
seas a great distance away. The stratified rocks of Greenland
contain fossils of ferns, oaks, magnolias, cinnamons, ginkos and
breadfruits, even though these plants cannot grow in Greenland's
climate. Woodward's explanation for all of this is that a
universal flood at the time of Noah brought about this
distribution of the fossils.
John Harris wrote in 1697 that "all sober and judicious men
are now convinced that the exuviae of sea animals, so plentifully
found at this day in the strata of the earth, and in the most
hard and solid stone and marble, are the lasting proof of the
Deluge itself and of its universality."1
In 1708, J. J. Scheuchzer of Switzerland wrote a book
entitled Complaint and Vindication of the Fishes, describing and
providing good illustrations of fossil fish found in rocky layers
of the Alps, and arguing that they were entombed by the Flood.
He wrote that the bent strata of the Alps were originally
horizontal and much lower, and that they became bent when that
part of the earth was elevated to cause the waters of the Deluge
to run off. At that time the strata cracked in many places, and
the immense waters flowing away widened and deepened the cracks
to form the great Alpine valleys.
In Germany, D. S. Buttners wrote Signs and Witnesses of the
Flood (1710), and Fossil Corals (1714), in which he argued that,
entombed all over the earth as a result of the Flood were leaves,
shells, animal bones and fish. Buried trees had become coal, and
the earth before the Deluge was a beautiful thing.
In A New Theory of the Earth (1696), William Whiston of
Cambridge wrote that the destruction of the earth by the Flood
"is evident by the vast number of shells and other very strange
things buried at the Deluge and enclosed in the bowels of the
present earth and of its most solid and compact bodies."2
John Hutchinson, author of Moses' Principles (1749),
believed that the order in which the various kinds of strata
repose on one another in the earth is the result of the flow of
tidal waves flowing in varying directions and leaving the earth
bare at different times as the waters of the Deluge receded.
Patrick Cockburn, in An Enquiry Into The Truth and Certainty
of the Mosaic Deluge (1750), stated that there was certainly
enough water in the ocean and inside the earth to cover the
earth's surface, while Alexander Catcott's book, A Treatise on
the Deluge (1761), argued that the strata of mountain areas were
originally continuous, and formed level plains or plateaus.
Catcott compared the strata with the broken walls of a castle,
which, if partially demolished, would imply that the vacant
places in the walls were once filled up with similar substances
and were continuous with the rest of the wall. Because the
strata in some of the highest ridges of mountains are positioned
horizontally, some mountains were formed as a result of the
process of erosion, while others were formed by uplifting and
erosion. He maintained that the cores of some mountains are the
relics of the prediluvian earth, and that the features of the
landscape are just such as the waters of the Flood would cause in
a final retreat from the earth. He wrote:
You will find the moose-deer, native of America, buried
in Ireland; elephants, natives of Asia and Africa,
buried in the midst of England; crocodiles, natives of
the Nile, in the heart of Germany; shell-fish, never
known in the American seas, together with the entire
skeletons of whales, in the most inland regions of
England; trees of vast dimensions, with their roots and
their tops, and some also with leaves and fruit, at the
bottom of mines . . . The pyramids of Egypt are
reckoned to be some of the most ancient structures of
the world, and yet the stones of which these pyramids
consist about with fossil marine shells and coral.3
John Williams, in The Natural History of the Mineral Kingdom
(1789), said a great deal about the formation of coal during the
time of the flood. He wrote:
Coal has a very obvious and striking appearance of
being composed of vegetable substances. I have
frequently seen evidently the grain and other
characters of wood in several coals . . . the
antediluvian [pre-Flood] timber was the original
[origin] of coal.4
Williams noticed that the coal strata appeared to be "formed by
the flowing of successive tides."5 He wrote:
I have already made it pretty evident that the greatest
part of the surface of the earth, before the Deluge,
was covered with a luxuriant growth of tall timber,
that this antediluvian timber is the origin of our pit-
coal; and that it was a sufficient and an adequate
source of all coals in the world. I am of the opinion
that the antediluvian timber floated upon the chaos, or
waters of the deluge, until the strata of the highest
mountains were formed, with much of the other strata in
our sight, and that during the height of the Deluge,
and at the time when the greatest part of the strata
were forming, the timber was preparing and being fitted
for being deposited in strata of coal.6
The various strata were laid down by successive tides of the
waters of the Flood:
The very part of the globe where a particular part of
the stratum was made, began to be dry land before the
next tide brought with it the matter which produced
that stratum, and so on, stratum super stratum, tide
after tide, until all the strata were completed. And
perhaps higher and lower, stronger and weaker tides,
might have been the cause of thicker and thinner
strata.7
The pressure of the higher strata upon the lower strata then
forced the water out, causing breaks in the higher strata in many
places. "A great quantity of water forcing its way out would
make a large passage, and the violent manner in which this
passage was made would greatly disturb and distort the strata
about the rupture."8
Thus, by the time of the late eighteenth century, it was
considered a majority view that the geological phenomena were
best explained by a universal Flood in Noah's time. In England,
Brander wrote as follows in 1766:
Various opinions have been entertained concerning the
time when and how these bodies (fossils) became
deposited. Some there were who conceive that it might
have been effected in a wonderfully length of time by a
gradual changing and shifting of the seas, etc. But
the most common cause assigned is that of the Deluge.9
Byron C. Nelson refers to the early nineteenth century as a
period of waning for the Flood theory of geology, because the
control of education in Europe and America passed gradually out
of the hands of people of great religious faith, who believed
strongly in the Bible, and into the hands of those who were
either lacking in religious convictions, or who were secretly or
even openly hostile to the Bible.10
Similar statements could be made with respect to many other
disciplines. As a result, the leadership of Western culture fell
into the hands of those who presupposed that the Bible was not to
be trusted in its statements about the natural world.
__________________________________
1Quoted by Byron C. Nelson, The Deluge Story In Stone
(Minneapolis, Minn.: Bethany Fellowship, 1968), p. 51.
2Quoted in Ibid., p. 52.
3Quoted by Ibid., p. 66.
4Quoted by Ibid., pp. 74-76.
5Quoted by Ibid., p. 77.
6Quoted by Ibid., pp. 77-78.
7Quoted by Ibid., pp. 78-79.
8Ibid., p. 79.
9Quoted by Ibid., p. 81.
10Ibid., p. 83.
NOAH`S FLOOD
Until the nineteenth century, as we have seen, geologists
were aware of a great deal of evidence for a universal flood at
the time of Noah. For example, Benjamin Silliman, head of the
geology department of Yale University wrote in his Geological
Lectures (1829):
Respecting the Deluge, there can be but one opinion:
geology fully confirms the Scriptural history of the
event . . . Whales, sharks, and other fishes,
crocodiles and amphibians, the mammoth and the extinct
elephant, the rhinoceros, the hippopotamus, hyenas,
tigers, deer, horses, the various species of the bovine
family and a multitude more, are found buried in
diluvium at a greater or less depth; and in most
instances under circumstances indicating that they were
buried by the same catastrophe which destroyed them:
namely a sudden and violent deluge . . . a skeleton of
a whale lay on top of the mountain Sanhorn on the coast
of the northern sea. . . . [The mountain] is three
thousand feet high and there is no cause that could
have conveyed the whale to that elevation except a
deluge rising to that height.1
In 1833, James Parkinson discussed the formation of
petroleum by the Deluge in a work entitled Organic Remains of a
Former World--An Examination of Mineralized Remains of the
Vegetable and Animals of the Antediluvian World: Generally Termed
Extraneous Fossils. He wrote that the fresh vegetable matter of
the coal strata was cut off from air and covered over by a layer
of sediment in the Flood. This vegetable matter was converted
into a black pasty substance. In the case of coal this paste
eventually hardened and crystallized. In the case of petroleum
the fermentation went further and converted the vegetation into
liquid form. According to Parkinson, it was because of this
fermentation process in coals that all traces of leaves and
branches in the coal layers have been lost except on the upper
surface, or "roof" of the coal, where the imprint of the leaves
and branches, and sometimes logs, are often visible.
Near the city of Munden, Germany, at the top of a mountain
1150 feet in height, there is a large quantity of fossil wood,
such that tree trunks were lying massed together, flattened by
pressure from above. In the body of the same mountain are
specimens of marble containing bivalves and other marine shells,
including large shark teeth.
In 1837, George Fairholme published his New and Conclusive
Physical Demonstration of the Fact and Period of the Mosaic
Deluge, in which he describes some of the fossil remains at Big-
bone Lick:
That the animals did not perish on the spot, but were
carried and deposited by the mighty torrent, which, it
is evident, once spread over this country, is probable
from the circumstances of marine shells, plants, and
fossil substances having been found not only mixed with
bones, but adhering to them, and tightly wedged in the
cavities of the skull. "Those holes where eyes did
once inhabit" were often stopped up by shells or pieces
of coral, forcibly crammed into them. . . . Although
elephants are too unwieldy to climb the mountains in a
wild state, and have never been seen, even on the
lowest side of the hills that bound the plain, yet I am
assured that their fossil bones are found in the
highest elevations that man has attained in Tibet.
. . . The bones of many different elephants were
brought into contact; and on some oyster shells were
matted.2
Fairholme made reference to "Dry Rivers," which were great,
long, river valleys which now have only comparatively small
streams flowing in them, but which give the impression of having
contained vastly greater amounts of water at one time. He also
pointed out that the "gradual passage from one sedimentary
deposit to another as seen at the point of contact is perhaps the
strongest proof that can be advanced of the uninterrupted and
aqueous deposition throughout the whole formation of the earth's
strata."3 The upper surface of almost every formation was still
soft and moist when the superincumbent sediments were deposited
upon it.
Fairholme also point out that "ripple-marks," or irregular,
wash-board markings, which form on the sandy bottoms of streams,
lakes and oceans in storms and other disturbances, and which
disappear as quickly as they come, have been preserved in great
abundance in the stratified layers of the earth in many kinds of
stone. Some of these marks are small, evidently having been
formed in shallow water, while others are immense, sometimes
found to measure over twenty feet between ripples or waves.
Fairholme also considered the "reptile-tracks" in the
stratified rocks to be proof of the speedy deposition of the
sediments. So soft must the clay have been on which the steps
were taken, that had the tracks not been covered and filled in
almost instantly with a sedimentary deposit of some kind, they
would have disappeared.
In 1830, Charles Lyell published the first volume of his
Principles of Geology, advocating the uniformitarianism of Buffon
and Hutton, who, in 1749 and 1788 had attempted to advance
similar views, but had been met with little favor. However, by
the time Charles Lyell began advancing his views, the academic
world was ripe for them. Theological skepticism was gaining
rapidly over faith. The higher critics were successfully
undermining the authenticity of the Biblical documents, and
scholars were accepting their conclusions uncritically,
especially due to the prestige of many of the German schools that
promulgated these views. Therefore, when Charles Lyell
skillfully presented the old uniformitarian viewpoint, the world
was ready to hear.
In 1838, George Young wrote Scriptural Geology, in which he
pointed out that there were many unwarranted assumptions in
Lyell's work, which had stated that knowledge of modern changes
in the earth is the key that unlocks the door to knowledge of the
past. Young pointed out that geological or physical changes on
the earth may have been at times in the past of an entirely
different sort, and they may have taken place at an entirely
different rate. He opposed the idea, which was already spreading
rapidly, that the fossils in the lowest strata are most unlike
present, living forms, and that those in the highest strata are
most similar to living forms. Young observed that in the lowest
strata there were many forms identical with living types, and
that in the highest strata, there were many forms that could not
be matched with any living forms at all. These conditions would
be explained easily on the Flood theory.
The high state of the preservation of fossil fish was
another indication to Young of the Deluge, as opposed to
uniformity. He wrote:
It is well known that scarcely any substance decomposes
more speedily than fishes; so that when we find fossil
fishes in a high state of preservation, we may be sure
that the strata containing them were deposited so
rapidly as not to allow them time to become putrid,
till they were safely encased in their present matrix.
Now, the fossil fishes in the carboniferous strata, in
the magnesium limestones, in the lias, in the oolite,
in the chalk, and in some of the tertiary deposits, are
often found in the finest condition, with no part of
their structure injured; while we know that fishes left
dead on the beach, or on the banks of rivers, begin to
decay in a few hours. . . . The proper cause of their
fine preservation was their being so suddenly entombed
in the strata.4
Another indication to Young of the Flood was the way in
which the entombed remains of animals were pressed flat by the
weight of higher layers:
Thus, the great crocodile in the Whitby Museum has
evidently been crushed by the super-incumbent strata;
the effect of pressure being visible, both on the head
and the body, the bones of the one leg being
practically sunk into those of the other. A fine
specimen of ichthyosaurus in the Museum gives similar
indications of violent pressure, the whole being
crushed into a flat mass, and the ribs of the one side
pressed across the spine, so as to form an angle with
the ribs of the other side. . . . The elegant
curvature of the spine shows that it was not the dead
carcass of the animal that was embedded in the strata;
it was not in the flaccid state of a dead and stranded
fish, but must have been suddenly entombed alive; and,
writhing in the agonies of death, it has twisted its
body into its present handsome shape. . . . Similar
instances have been noticed among the fossil fishes of
Germany.5
In 1843, Robert Maxwell MacBriar wrote Geology and
Geologists, in which he discussed and opposed the theories of
Lyell, Smith, Cuvier, and others, and pointed out that their
theories of geological uniformitarianism could be explained
simply and without difficulties if one assumed the historicity of
the Biblical account of Noah's Flood.
Opposition to the newly arising modern theory proved
fruitless, however, since Flood geology was based upon the
Judaeo-Christian Scriptures and therefore upon the supernatural,
which is not the type of thing the world wanted. Therefore,
henceforth, Flood geology was ignored or ridiculed.6
It should be obvious from the preceding historical
discussion that the Flood geology of the early nineteenth century
differs with modern uniformitarianism, not with respect to the
factual data of geology, but with respect to the interpretation
of those data.
Objections to the historicity of the Biblical account
of Noah's flood often result from preconceptions about conditions
that existed before the time of the flood. However, climactic
conditions may have been different before the time of the Flood.
Morris and Whitcomb wrote:
Arctic and desert zones may never have existed before
the Flood; nor the great intercontinental barriers of
high mountain ranges, impenetrable jungles, and open
seas (as between Australia and Southeast Asia, and
between Siberia and Alaska). On this basis, it is
quite probable that animals were more widely
distributed than now, with representatives of each
created kind of land animal living in that part of the
earth where Noah was building the Ark.7
Some people have wondered if it could have been possible to
carry all of the known species of animals on the ark. In
addressing this issue, Morris and Whitcomb have pointed out,
first of all, that the Ark had a carrying capacity equivalent to
that of 522 standard stock cars of modern railroads.8 According
to the estimate of Ernst Mayr, probably America's leading
systematic taxonomist, there are a total of 3500 mammalian
species in the world, 8600 species of birds, and 5500 species of
reptiles and amphibians.9 If this is so, then Noah would have
had to bring two of each kind, or approximately 35,200 vertebrate
animals on the ark. Noah was not required to take the largest or
even adult specimens of each species, but even if he did, there
would have been more than three times the necessary space for
35,200 animals, if the average size was that of a sheep. Reports
of stock cars and railroads show that the average number of live
animals to the carload is 25 for cattle, 75 for hogs in single
deck cars, and 120 per deck for sheep. Thus, 240 animals of the
size of sheep can be accommodated in a standard two-decked stock
car. Therefore, 35,200 of them could be carried in 147 of such
cars, but as we have seen, the ark's carrying capacity was
equivalent to that of 522 stock cars of modern railroads.10
If it is objected that there are hundreds of varieties for
each of these species, it should be pointed out that a great deal
of diversification is possible within a species. For example,
over 200 distinct varieties of dogs as different from each other
as the dacshund and the collie have been developed from a very
few wild dogs.11 However, no amount of breeding has ever
brought about a new animal species.
Some people wonder how Noah and his family could have cared
for all of the animals during the time of the Flood. One
reasonable possibility is the remarkable factor of animal
physiology known as hibernation, which occurs in every group of
vertebrates except birds.12
Another objection sometimes raised against a universal flood
during the time of Noah is that there would not have been enough
water to cover the entire earth at that time. In answer to this,
Morris and Whitcomb have written:
For such an objection to be valid, we would have to
assume that there were no waters "above the firmament"
before the Flood, and that the earth's topography was
unaltered by the Flood. In other words, we would be
assuming the truth of uniformitarianism in order to
prove the impossibility of catastrophism! But if we
accept the Biblical testimony concerning an
antediluvian canopy of waters (Gen. 1:6-8, 7:11, 8:2,
II Peter 3:5-7), we have an adequate source for the
waters of a universal Flood. Furthermore, such
passages as Genesis 8:3 and Psalm 104:6-9 suggest that
ocean basins were deepened after the Flood to provide
adequate storage space for the additional waters that
had been "above the firmament" from the second day of
creation to the time of the Flood, while mountain
ranges rose to heights never attained during the
antediluvian era.13
Another problem is that of animal distribution after the
time of the Flood. For example, how do we explain that
marsupials are found only in Australia, and in the Western
Hemisphere? One possible explanation was given by A. Franklin
Shull, Professor of Zoology at the University of Michigan:
The marsupials spread over the world, in all
directions. They could not go far to the north before
striking impossible climate, but the path south was
open all the way to the tips of Africa and South
America and through Australia . . . The placental
mammals proved to be superior to the marsupials in the
struggle for existence and drove the marsupials
out . . . that is, forced them southward. Australia
was then connected by land with Asia, so that it could
receive the fugitives . . . Behind them the true
mammals were coming; but before the latter reached
Australia, that continent was separated from Asia, and
the primitive types to the south were protected from
further competition.14
Another possible explanation is that, in times of flood,
large masses of earth and entwined vegetation, including trees,
are sometimes torn loose from the banks of rivers and sept out to
sea. Sometimes these masses can be found floating out in the
ocean, far from land, still lush and green, with palm trees
twenty to thirty feet high. Land animals may have been
transported long distances in this manner. According to Mayr,
many tropical ocean currents have a speed of two knots, amounting
to 1,000 miles in three weeks.15
Frank L. Marsh has written as follows on this question:
One glance at a world map will show that, with the
exception of the narrow break at the Bering Strait, a
dry-land path leads from Armenia to all lands of the
globe except Australia. In the case of the latter the
East Indies even today form a fairly continuous bridge
of stepping-stones to that southern continent. As
regards the Bering Strait, there is no doubt that a
land connection once existed between Asia and North
America. With the strait closed, the cold waters of
the Arctic would have been prevented from coming south,
and the Japan Current would have curved around the
coast line farther north than today. The washing of
those shores by the warm waters of this current would
have produced a dry-land route that even tropical forms
could have used.16
One argument that is frequently raised against the idea of a
universal Flood is that the Flood waters would have moved
massively back and forth across the earth and that the Ark would
surly have capsized and its occupants would have been unable to
survive. However, the Ark was more like a barge than a ship:
A model was made by Peter Jansen of Holland, and Danish
barges called Fleuten were modelled after the ark. The
models proved that the ark had a greater capacity than
curved or shaped vessels. They were very seaworthy and
almost impossible to capsize. . . . The stability of
such a barge is great and it increase as it sinks
deeper into the water. The lower the center of gravity
the more difficult it is to capsize.17
__________________________________
1Quoted by Byron C. Nelson, p. 85.
2Quoted by Ibid., p. 93.
3Quoted by Ibid., p. 100.
4Quoted by Ibid., pp. 107-108.
5Quoted by Ibid., pp. 108-109.
6Ibid., p. 110.
7John C. Whitcomb, Jr., and Henry M. Morris, The Genesis Flood
(Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Book House, 1961), pp. 64-65.
8Ibid., pp. 67-68.
9Ibid., p. 68.
10Ibid., p. 69.
11Ibid., p. 66.
12Ibid., p. 71.
13Ibid., p. 77.
14A. Franklin Shull, Evolution, 2d ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill
Book Co., 1951), p. 60, as quoted by Ibid., p. 82. Shull is an
evolutionist.
15Morris & Whitcomb, p. 85.
16Frank L. Marsh, Evolution, Creation, and Science (Washington
Review and Herald Pub. Assoc., 1947), pp. 291-292, as quoted by
Ibid., p. 86.
17Bernard Ramm, The Christian View of Science & Scripture (Grand
Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1954),
pp. 230-231.
EVOLUTION AND CHRISTIANITY
If the theory of evolution is correct, then death did not
come by Adam as Paul states in his epistles; rather, death is the
mechanism by which man has evolved. The theory of natural
selection is dependent upon the assumption that there was death
in the world before the appearance of man and that death played a
part in the development of mankind, since man would have been the
product of the process of the survival of the fittest. Thus, the
theory of natural selection places the origin of death prior to
the existence of man. On the other hand, the Christian view of
redemption is that man's fall introduced sin and physical death
into the world and that Jesus Christ redeemed us from these
effects of the fall through his incarnation, crucifixion and
resurrection. According to the Christian view, death resulted
from the fall of man. If this is so, then how could man have
evolved through a process of natural selection, since death is
the mechanism through which the survival of the fittest must
necessarily occur?
Natural selection could not possibly have taken place apart
from the mechanism of physical death inherent in the process of
the survival of the fittest. If men evolved as a result of this
process, then physical death could not have resulted from man's
fall. Rather, man's tendency to die would have been inherited
from his immediate forbears. Yet, the Christian faith is based
upon the recognition that death took place as a result of the
fall of man. Man must therefore have existed before death. Paul
wrote in Romans 5:12 that, "just as through one man sin entered
into the world, and death through sin, so death spread to all
men, because all sinned." The Christian message is that Christ
has redeemed mankind from sin and physical death. If Adam did
not bring these things into the world, then Jesus Christ could
not have acted as the "second Adam" to redeem mankind from these
things. Paul wrote in I Cor. 15:21-23:
For since by a man came death, by a man also came the
resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, so
also in Christ all shall be made alive. But each in
his own order: Christ the first fruits, after that
those who are Christ's at His coming.
Thus, the theory of evolution cannot be reconciled with the
Christian view of redemption.
There are many categories of evidence that have been used in
support of the theory of evolution. The evidence from
classification, for example, is that animals and other life forms
can be graded from the most simple to the most complex,
indicating that there has been a development from lower to higher
life forms. It appears, also, that there has been an adaptation
of animals and plants to their environments. Their existence in
every conceivable set of conditions all over the world in many
different environments suggests that, though natural selection,
they became adapted for the circumstances in which they live.
However, there is no reason not to believe that all of the
animals were distributed almost everywhere after they dispersed
from Noah's ark, and that those life forms which survived in any
given place were the ones most suited for the particular
environment that they happened to inhabit. As far as the
evidence from classification is concerned, the evolutionary
biologist T. H. Morgan, in his book, A Critique of Evolution
Theory, does not consider the evidence from classification to be
a satisfactory indication that evolution has occurred. Although
it is true that there are varying degrees of complexity among
organisms, from the one-celled microorganisms to the higher
mammals, this in itself is not an adequate indication that
evolution has occurred.
Another form of evidence that has been advanced for the
theory of evolution is the homology of structure and function
that can be observed between different animals species. These
similarities seem to be distributed in a somewhat continuous
fashion throughout all species. There is a remarkable similarity
between how a human being is constructed and how monkeys and
other primates are constructed, down to the lowest forms. For
example, the monkey has the same number of bones in its foot as a
human. These similarities often do not jump from one species to
another, but seem to be very continuous. If you find two animals
that seem very similar, chances are that there will be another in
existence which is a living compromise between the two. This
struck Darwin in his travels as he encountered various unusual
species previously not known to exist.
Although the same biological structures, modified to varying
degrees, occur from species to species, evolution is not the only
possible explanation. An alternate hypothesis, that a common
environment necessitates homologous structure, is equally viable.
Since all species find themselves in a similar environment,
similarity in structure may exist simply because a given
particular structure is most efficient for a given environment.
Perhaps God did not create creatures with five feet, for example,
simply because it is not a convenient structure for the use of
creatures in our environment.
Moreover, cytochemistry has recently given confirmation for
the hypothesis that each species is independent of the others.
It has been discovered that if the cytoplasm of any cell is
centrifuged, the particulates of the centrifugate always differ
in chemical formula in differing species. Each species has its
own distinctive formula.
The fixity of the species, according to which God created
all life forms "according to their kinds" (Genesis 1:21, 24, 25),
is also evident in consideration of the fact that animals of
different species cannot cross-breed and bring forth fertile
offspring.
Another consideration often used in favor of the theory of
evolution is in the area of embryology. Haekel stated that
"ontology recapitulates phylogeny." In other words, the stages
of the development of an embryo repeat the various stages of
evolutionary development. However, as has been pointed out by
Julian Huxley, the well-known advocate of evolutionary theory, in
his book, Evolution In Action, "this is not strictly true; the
individual does not run through the adult stages of its
evolutionary ancestors. What is often does do is to pass through
ancestral developmental stages." Huxley's "evolutionary
ancestors" and "ancestral developmental stages," however, are
merely postulated. There is no fossil record of the hypothesized
ancestors or of their stages of development. More recently, the
evidence of embryology for the theory of evolution has fallen out
of favor among many biologists.1
Some people use as evidence for the theory of evolution the
very rare appearance of gills on some newborn babies. This is
sometimes taken as an indication that we have evolved from fish-
like animals that lived in the water. However, it should be
noted that small alterations in the genetic code, or mutations,
due to radiation, can cause problems of this kind. A mutation
can easily account for gill formation without the necessity of
presupposing that this could only occur if we evolved from
animals which had gills.
Others have proposed that the very fact that mutations take
place demonstrates that evolution has occurred. However, most
mutations are either lethal or nearly lethal. In fact, there is
real doubt that any mutations are really favorable. Furthermore,
the chance that a mutation will be preserved in the gene pool,
even if favorable, is remote. The evolutionary biologist Hampton
L. Carson has stated that one of the great dilemmas in modern
evolutionary theory is that most of the mutations found
repeatedly within such populations as those of the various
Drosophila (fruit-fly) species do not constitute the kind of
differences which distinguish species.2
Vestigial organs are also often cited as evidence for
evolution. The appendix in humans, for example, has no useful
function, but perhaps it is a vestige of an organ that had a
useful function for our earlier ancestors.
It is important to remember, however, that the fact that a
function has not been demonstrated for an organ is no real
evidence that it has no function. For many years the endocrine
glands were regarded as vestigial organs, but we now know that
they have a very important function in the secretion of hormones.
Sir Arthur Keith, the well-known anthropologist and
paleontologist, believed that the appendix is not a vestigial
organ, but an organ, the function of which is not known.3
The existence of marsupials in Australia, but no placental
mammals, seems to support the idea that evolution was at the
marsupial stage when Australia was cut off from the rest of the
world. But again, evolution is not the only possible explanation
for this situation, and, in fact, whether one postulates that
evolution has taken place or that marsupials travelled to
Australia from Noah's ark and arrived there ahead of the
placental mammals, who then found it inaccessible due to
geographical changes, one runs into the same problems in either
case. John W. Klotz has written:
If only those animals on the ark survived, how did they
achieve the present distribution? It is possible, of
course, that they traveled by means of land bridges
from Mount Ararat to the places where they are now
found. The development of a land bridge, however, is
not as easy as it sounds. It requires tremendous
changes in the earth's crust. Heavier rocks, it is
believed, must be replaced by lighter rocks if
submerged areas are to rise.
At the same time the evolutionist has this same
problem. He, too, wants land bridges to explain the
migration of animals from one area to another