| Why
is the biblical creation myth right?
QUESTION: So why is the
Biblical creation myth right and the Hopi or Navajo creation myth wrong?
Science doesn't have all the answers, but the scientific consensus
overwhelmingly supports evolution. When you turn on the light switch is it
God or science that makes the light turn on? If you say God then you are a
fool. I'll take logic and reason any day to the myth and superstition that
are the stuff of religion. Thanks to science we now know that the earth is
no longer flat. How much longer will the dogma of religion keep us bound in
ignorance?
RESPONSE: There are a few points in this that
need
a response: the author's attitude, the reference to the creations stories,
electricity, logic and reason, the place of science, and evolution
itself.
1. The author's attitude: We see this a lot. If creation
is simply a myth, and if religion is simply superstition, why the anger?
Certainly real knowledge and reality itself would easily override them,
would they not? No one is furious that some refuse to walk under a ladder.
It is laughed off and tolerated. Nor is it "religion" that seems
to provoke many to this kind of ire, but rather Christianity itself -- and,
in particular, the biblical Christianity that considers the Bible means
what it says and says what it means. I don't think fantasy is threatening
these people. I think their own rejection of God might be, however. It must
be awfully hard to look at the whole of creation and attribute it to time
and chance instead of intelligent design. It must be frightening, too, to
have that point of view in and of itself: it gives man no hope, no meaning,
no purpose, no outside reference point for his behavior or thoughts. It's
every man for himself and "devil take the hindmost." That would
frighten me, too.
2. The reference to the creation stories: mythology fascinates me. It is a
personal hobby of mine to read as much as I can in this field. I have found
there are certain elements which are "hallmarks" of a myth:
superhuman humans, exaggerated events and personalities, a "god's eye
view" of a situation, and, buried in there somewhere, the event or
person (or both) that the myth was created to remember. Because, actually,
myths are not spun out of whole cloth -- they are memories couched in
stories, legends if you will. And when you strip away the mythological
elements of legends from around the world, you keep coming up with a few
common things: a God who created from nothing; man after the animals; man
choosing his own way; painful consequences. Very few American Indian
legends concern creation, however. Most from the American Indians have to
do with re-creation after either the Flood or some other massive
catastrophe. Looking very seriously at these legends can be very
interesting and perhaps even instructive if one is not carried away by the
mythological elements. The Bible, however, does not have those mythological
elements. Genesis itself is told as simple history from eyewitnesses. There
are no super-heroes or exaggerated personalities. Even God is simply God.
Those who argue that the flood story of Genesis 6-9 is myth -- an
exaggerated event -- are arguing from incredulity, actually. They are
contradicted by the similarity of massive flood stories from cultures
around the world with the following elements in common: God is angry at man
and destroys the world by flood, with the exception of either one couple or
one family and a bunch of animals on a boat of some kind. The simple fact
is that there are no mythological elements in Genesis. It is presented as
straight history. And it needs to be looked at in that way, whether for
purposes of claiming it true or claiming it false. But it most certainly is
not myth. The second reason -- for a Christian -- to consider Genesis as
truthful history, start to finish, is that it is the foundation of every
major doctrine in the Bible: creation, man in the image of God, sin, the
promise of a Savior, world-wide catastrophes presaging God's right and
ability to judge, the creation of the Hebrew (Jewish) people, and their
place in the world. Genesis needs to be looked at very seriously.
3. Electricity: lights do not turn on because of science. Science means
knowledge. We found out enough about electricity to learn how to harness
it. Science did not invent electricity and science does not turn on lights.
A completed electrical connection turns on lights. Science discovered how
to do it. There is a difference. If the electrons did not have the charge
and the properties they do, science could never have done anything about
learning how to fashion an electrical circuit. But the properties and
charges within atoms are part of something that is intricately and
intelligently designed. Science cannot take credit for doing anything but
having scratched the surface of knowledge concerning this.
4. Logic and Reason: I don't suppose there has ever been
an age in which people didn't think they had things pretty well figured
out, or were at least well on the way. In the process, it has been declared
that four elements make up everything (earth, water, fire, and air), that
spontaneous generation was a fact, that the germ theory was bizarre
foolishness -- the list is really interminable. Each time, human logic and
reason held sway. And each time the facts contradicted us. Have we
learned nothing from history? Are we still so arrogant as to think we can
actually depend on what we know is true today not to be contradicted by
other facts tomorrow? To depend on logic and reason is to put one's faith
in man's limited and fallible knowledge. That seems a dangerous proposition
to me, especially when our Creator has given us some guidelines to work
within if we want to discover scientific truths. His truths never change,
whereas ours do, and radically, from generation to generation. (By the way,
it was known that the earth was round thousands of years before Columbus.
Suggest checking history.)
5. The place of science: Within its proper bounds,
science can only deal with what can be tested and worked with in one way or
another. Thus it is properly bound to naturalism. We cannot work in a
controlled way with the supernatural (this is the subject of witchcraft and
shamanism), nor can we adequately test it. Science can only discover what
already is, and learn how to use it, take care of it, appreciate it.
Because science is not in possession of ALL the facts, science is in no
position to make a final judgment on anything. This makes science a
changing thing, and rightfully so. In any field, you only need one new
contrary fact to force a rearrangement of thinking regarding the entire
field. It also might be noted that changing things are not stable
foundations. A good deal of what we consider fact today might not be fact
tomorrow and to presume this cannot happen it to be quite naive. Mankind
must find something outside of his own limited knowledge and
interpretations on which to base his life if he wants any security at all.
Science cannot define meaning in life, nor was it meant to. And it is
meaning -- purpose -- that must be found for a man to be satisfied and have
a direction in his life.
6. And now, evolution: The writer, I am sure, is
referring to the kind of evolution inferred from the fossil record.
Contrary to evolutionists' claims, this is quite different from the sort of
variation we see everyday: hair color, rose color, dog size, finches'
beaks. No one disputes these sorts of variations. But they do not change
the sort of thing the organism is: the person remains a person, the rose a
rose, the dog a dog, and the finch a finch. Evolution, as it is commonly
referred to, demands much more than this. It demands that there have been
enough directional mutations, one added to another, through the ages, to
change what was once a unicellular organism into the variety of life we see
today. This kind of evolution is lacking a mechanism, however, as mutations
are not known to do this. We see single mutations, such as antibiotic resistance,
malarial resistance (which, in its homozygous form, confers the deadly
sickle cell disease), and such, but we do not see mutations adding up
anywhere to produce a new form or function. Instead, the vast majority of
mutations we do see are negative, harming the organism involved. Those that
do not harm, such as antibiotic resistance changes, have the effect of
weakening the organism in any environment except the specific one in which
that change helped it survive. Change the environment and the original
form, if it still exists, proves strongest and takes over again. What we
see, what we can work with, and what we see as the results of tests, is
called biological stasis. No matter how many generations of E.coli bacteria
are worked with, they remain....E.coli. No matter how many generations of
fruit flies are subjects of forced mutations, they remain.... fruit flies.
We can get different types of mice for our lab experiments until we run out
of names for them. They remain mice. This is biological stasis. Variation
seems to exist within what Genesis refers to as the "kind," and
that is all. Does the scientific consensus overwhelmingly support
evolution? Yes, it does. The question is, Why? First of all, most areas of
science don't concern themselves with evolution or creation. Science tends
to be so incredibly technical today that it is the science philosophers who
have taken over the arguments concerning evolution and creation. The
scientists in the labs and in the field are, with the exception of some
geologists and paleontologists, not thinking about evolution. But that is
what they were taught in university as true. And so they accept it. And
they accept that anything else is some kind of weird religious doctrine.
But if you ask the scientist to point to something in his own field which
verifies the type of evolution that turns bacteria to bears, or even
supports it, you will get mostly silence. He may point to another field,
but very few are willing to point to something in their own field of study
which supports evolution especially if you ask them to support evolution to
the exclusion of creation.
Thus, to say that the majority of scientists
accept evolution may be true on the surface, but that is about as far as
their acceptance goes anyway. If a person wants to really find out which is
true, it is best to dig into the evidence and read what has been written on
both sides. When one meets those who have done so, one just might find a
few more creationists than one expected to find. And an even greater number
of anti-evolutionists. *Scientifically*, evolution is not something that
has been shown to work. Yes, plants and animals change. They can vary in
some possibly startling ways. But no breeder of horses, or dogs, or cattle,
and no parent, when they hear, "there seems to be a mutation..."
is going to excitedly ask, "Is it a good one?"
So I would humbly suggest that it is not the idea
of creation which is keeping us in ignorance. It is, rather, the idea that
evolution is proven and cannot be challenged that is begetting ignorance.
It has not been proven in thousands upon thousands of generations of E.coli,
nor has it been proven anywhere else. Remember we are not talking about
simple variations within kind, or type, but actual change away from that
type -- the type of change on which another change, or mutation, can build
so that something new is produced. We have never seen that happen. And
until students and researchers are freed from the nonsense that this idea
cannot be challenged in the classroom or professional literature, we will
remain bound in the kind of ignorance which has resulted in such low test
scores for United States students, much to our embarrassment.
Helen Fryman
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Matthew J. Slick, 2002
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