The Half Way House of Creationists
Unreservedly siding with the brethren by those secularists attacked, I must, however, confess that I consider the strength of the creationist position seriously flawed. The Bible is primarily concerned about things not seen, less about the temporal things observable in the present age. If you will: the Scriptures tell us how to go to Heaven, not how the Heaven goes. The Good Book takes for granted an Earth at rest with respect to God’s throne in that Heaven, and the celestial host therefore revolving around us. Details about the mechanics employed in this great design we have not been given. How its parameters are struck and the variables within it are circumscribed Genesis does not tell us. Hoyle, surveying the unending search for the “how” and “why” of the heavenly courses from the Babylonians to the twentieth century’s relativists, rightly remarks “that each generation finds the universe to be stranger than the preceding generation ever conceived it to be.”(1) For “veil after veil will lift – but there must be veil upon veil behind”.(111) Lifting those veils – that interesting task God has granted to the sons of men to be exercised therewith, Ecclesiastes informs us. God’s Message, after giving us the great outline, leaves further investigation to us.
“What should we believe, and how then should we live?” Answers given by wisdom to such questions Holy Writ offers. For evidences in the natural sciences, I agree with John Calvin, we have to turn to textbooks dealing with those matters. And when, as is the case, modern astronomy keeps our Earth still dethroned, we may confidently declare it to be wrong, but shall have to show this by means of experiments. For scientism, though knowing the heliocentric dogma to be actually overtaken by new insights, still preaches that dogma to the uninformed as a “fact”, to be accepted as gospel truth -and this, all logically valid evidences to the contrary. But when we, who frankly trust Our Maker’s lucid information “in faith”, with all those evidences on our side, hold on to a Universe called into being for the sake of us here on Earth… well, then practically even the staunchest believers in an inerrant Bible shake their heads. And when asked to show me the errors of my way, about nine out of ten do not even deign me worthy of an answer. Whilst the tenth refers me to Galileo. He has, hasn’t he…?
Endlessly during eighteen years I have had to repeat the truth. No, he has not “proven” the Earth to be just one of the planets circling the Sun. It is a piously adored untruth foremost among the many in the history of western mankind’s beliefs and disbeliefs. That Big Lie even they unreservedly still honour, who are skeptical about the truth-content of Darwinian theory old-style and all its out of embarrassments born modern reformulations. Many of those skeptics are clearly, or at least dimly, aware of the disastrous results to which “survival of the fittest”, and that slogan’s concomitant philosophical theses, have led. However, for one minute to doubt Copernican truth, after 1916 by the general theory of relativity effectively demoted to a simple illustration for the unlearned and no more – the possibility of doing that has not yet even dawned on them.
To quote a well-informed doubter, the molecular biologist Michael Denton, about the question of evolution: “The acceptance of the idea one hundred years ago initiated an intellectual revolution more significant and far reaching than even the Copernican and Newtonian revolutions in the 16th and 17th centuries:”(112) And fifty-two pages later: “It was because Darwinian theory broke man’s link with God and set him adrift in a cosmos without purpose or end that its impact was so fundamental. No other intellectual revolution in modern times (with the possible exception of the Copernican) so profoundly affected the way men viewed themselves and their placein the universe.(113)
I cannot see it otherwise: when making these observations this author is running with the hare and hunting with the hounds. Starting with Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle Denton titles the first chapter of his book “Genesis Rejected”. I declare this to be a myopic choice. Yes, Genesis has been rejected. Yet not just by Darwin, but already by Copernicus and his self-styled prophet Galileo Galilei. The latter opened Pandora’s box by brushing aside the clear information of Genesis 1:1-19. Small wonder that consequently the second half of the chapter in the long run had to suffer the same treatment. Denton comes close to realizing this when much later in his book he shows himself to be conscious of the impact that an obvious extrapolation of the basic heliocentric scheme would have if it were confirmed. If our Earth is not a unique creation, but just a sample of numberless likewise advantageously placed planets around other “Great Lights” in their millions, and hence life were to prove widespread, then this “would of course have a very important bearing on the question how life generated on earth. For it would undoubtedly provide powerful circumstantial evidence for the traditional evolutionary scenario, enhancing enormously the credibility of the belief that the route from chemistry to life can be surmounted by simple natural processes, wherever the right conditions exist.”(114) True enough, but may I reverse the direction of reasoning by asking if ever the chemical soup-to-ape fantasia would have been dreamt of in any man’s philosophy on an Earth, as our ancestors from before 1543 knew it to be, at the visible Heavens’ centre? Denton should remember John Donne’s well-know lines written in 1611. “And new philosophy calls all in doubt.. ‘Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone.”(115) Then already, and not only after 1859!
Of course I agree that the dethronement did not show its inevitable corollaries immediately. A stone released to roll down a hillside has to accelerate before it can do much damage. Traditional restraints delayed the death of Adam from Newton to Darwin(116), but did not stop the decline, and today there are many thoughtful men who openly acknowledge that the emergence of Holocaust and Gulag, of racism and breakdown of ethical norms, has been fostered, if not initiated, by Darwin’s monkey-to-still-evolving-monkey syndrome. God died in the 19th century, and man is dying in the 20th century”, Norman Geisler, a staunch defender of Biblical Inerrancy, declares.(117) I have no quarrel with this hyperbole: but would like to remind him of Schiller’s proverbial lines: