New Romanian Friends

I had a new life experience this weekend and a great time as well. I was given the privilege of teaching (the youth) and preaching (to the entire congregation) at a church in Portland that holds its services in Romanian.

I'm part of a team from Antioch that is going to Romania this July, and we visted the Portland church in order to get a feel for the way Romanian believers worship.

We spent Saturday with their youth, visiting (and hiking to the top of) Multnomah Falls, playing soccer and other games, eating (and I can tell you I'm going to enjoy Romanian food), and having a time of worship (at which I taught--without need for translation--on the obvious problems of postmodern epistemology, moral relativism, and religious pluralism). We divided up to spend Saturday night at the homes of various new friends, who come from all over the greater Portland metropolitan area to attend this church.

Sunday morning, we participated in the Bible studies and the morning worship service, at which our friend and Antioch intern Emi Popa (himself a Romanian and the organizer of our summer trip) delivered the sermon (on Galatians 5 and Christian liberty). We returned to the homes of our host families, where each of us was again lavished with traditional Romanian food. At the evening service, our team from Antioch sang two songs, and I spoke about the historical evidence for and the spiritual implications of the bodily resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth (with Pastor Nelo translating).

We not only got a taste of Romanian culture, but we established friendships that we anticipate will flourish in the coming months and years. It was a wonderful time getting to know some of our Romanian-American brothers and sisters.

Earth Day 09

For Earth Day (yesterday), I didn't dress up like a Siberian Tiger or a Nene (Goose) to take part in a parade. I didn't pay homage to Gaia or talk nonsense about the earth itself as a living thing.

What I did was pretty much what I do most days. I monitored wildlife in order to assess the optimal placement of wind turbines for generating cleaner energy than that upon which we are currently dependent.

Oh, but wait! At this point I also need to point out that I am not worried about anthropogenic global warming (or global climate change). As a reasonably rational being, I easily see through arguments that begin "there is no debate among scientists about..." As a scientist myself, I am well aware of the very intense disagreement among climatologists about whether the climate is changing at a rate and on a scale that should cause concern, as well as about whether what humans do has any significant effect on such things. I also recognize when issues like this one have left the realm of rational discussion in order to serve very specific political purposes. It is only when the solutions proposed are clearly far worse than the perceived problems that I start to get a bit upset. But I've gotten away from what I was saying.

I feel privileged and blessed to be able to--as my way of making a living--study the Earth and its inhabitants and to have a say in the wise stewardship of these things. Yes, I'm an ecologist (one who studies living things and their relationships with other living and non-living things). I'm also an environmentalist, if by that we mean one who feels called to care about the environment, to be conservative rather than wasteful, to be intentional and deliberate about the effects of our actions on the Earth and its inhabitants.

But relative to many who are more outspoken about these issues, I have a cogent and coherent rationale for caring about the environment. I'm a Christian, who recognizes the Earth and all life as the very good creations of a loving, transcendent God. For me, to be uncaring, unthinking, or wasteful when it comes to the creation is to dishonor the Creator.

But where I really part company with many modern environmentalists is with regard to humanity. Where they see people only as environmental problems, I recognize in our species the only hope of solutions. And that's because we are unique among God's creatures in being made in His image, as rational beings capable of caring, and of devising solutions to complex problems.

So, for very good reasons, I try to do my part (and more), and live in daily gratitude for the optimal universe and Earth that Christ designed and for the diverse and marvelous life with which He allows us to share them. In that regard, I spent Earth Day much as I do every day. I've found it's a good way to live.

Gap Not My Problem

In the last post, we were discussing spontaneous generation and how naturalistic origin-of-life scenarios constitute belief in this long-discredited idea (violating what one reader perceptively called a fundamental principle of biology).

The most common response--among naturalists and evolutionists--to the argument that the complexity of the simplest living cells implies that they were designed or created is to call such an explanation a "God of the gaps" fallacy. The idea is that what we currently have is a knowledge gap, an area of current understanding within which we are presently stymied. Whereas theists want to fill that gap with God, history has shown that, given enough time, Science has always found naturalistic explanations that adequately address such knowledge gaps. In the same way, Science will one day provide a complete and satisfactory set of naturalistic pathways to bridge the presently perceived gap between non-living chemicals and living cells.

There are several logical problems with the naturalist line of reasoning here. The first is that it involves the informal logical fallacy known as the ad futurum fallacy. It appeals for support to future, hypothetical discoveries to overcome or negate all of the presently-available contrary evidence. In abductive reasoning (which constitutes a good deal of scientific thinking) one must use the available evidence to arrive at the best explanation of it. It is fallacious to assume that future knowledge will overturn the conclusion to which present evidence leads.

A more basic problem, however, is that the "God-of-the-gaps" claim--in this instance, at least--involves equivocation, a change in the meaning of the term 'gap.' When theists or intelligent design proponents point to the origin of the first life as an empirical and evidential problem for naturalistic science, the gap being addressed is a real and a physical one. There is a vast, significant, and intractable physical gap between simple, non-living molecules and even the simplest independently-living cell. The "God-of-the-gaps" charge tries to turn this real, physical gap into a merely epistemological gap--a gap in our knowledge. This is fallacious and disingenuous.

The fact is that our knowledge of these issues is ever-growing; that is, the knowledge gap (as we have built better microscopes and enhanced our ability to see these minute things) is getting smaller. But the result is that the actual physical gap (between non-life and life) is rightly recognized as much greater than ever. Darwin largely discounted cells as unimportant little blobs of jelly. Even in the days of the Miller-Urey experiment (which lent to naturalists a temporary and now-unfulfilled promise of progress) scientists knew very little of what is now known about the complexity of the simplest living cells. In short, the knowledge gap has greatly decreased, but the physical gap (the thing that really matters) has as a result come to be recognized as much larger, and thus much more of a problem for any naturalistic explanations.

The bottom line is this... with regard to the origin of the first life, design/creation is the most plausible explanation, given the abundance of evidence available. When naturalists charge that this conclusion involves a "God-of-the-gaps" reasoning, they are guilty of equivocation and of the ad futurum fallacy. They are also being hypocritical, since the appeal to the future they are here making is itself a form of "naturalism of the gaps."

So as much as naturalists and evolutionists would like to continue to deceive themselves into thinking that the great divide between non-life and life remains susceptible to future explainations that don't involve God, the 'gap' that is really at issue is not a problem for we who are theists.

Birth of Biology

This post is a reprint (mostly) of one I published back in July. I offer it again so soon because I had a chance to teach this material in a class last night.

Looking for something to do to? I suggest sitting down with a copy of Giuseppe Sermonti's Why is a Fly Not a Horse? It was originally written in Italian, and its title, Dimenticare Darwin, means "Forget Darwin." A geneticist, Sermonti writes interestingly and persuasively about the need to dump Darwinism as completely out of touch with reality and with the latest findings of science. The rest of my post today comes from reading Chapter 1, "Achilles Inspires Redi."*

For many, modern biology had its start when Francesco Redi--in 1688--disproved the notion that the origin of maggots in meat was due to spontaneous generation. He showed experimentally that maggots came to be in meat only when flies were allowed to lay their eggs in it, and generalized his conclusions to all living things--"all life comes from the egg."

But the idea of spontaneous generation did not go away, and has had to be refuted over and over again. Louis Pasteur extended Redi's principle to include the very smallest microbes (which others of his day excluded from Redi's principle), demonstrating that adequate sterilization could prevent the origin of any life. According to Sermonti,

Biology has advanced in status with every new confutation of the spontaneous generation thesis.

Despite, however, the conclusive experimental evidence (of Redi with worms, of Lazzaro Spallanzani with protozoans, of Pasteur with bacteria), belief in spontaneous generation remains a necessary part of Darwinian (and neo-Darwinian) evolutionary theory. Sermonti again...

Darwin, though a great admirer of Pasteur, regretted that the Frenchman had denied spontaneous generation. "If it could be demonstrated," he was to write to Haeckel in 1873, "this would be very important to us."

This led, of course, to the field of origin-of-life studies, of efforts to produce living things in laboratory test tubes, of the zealous teaching of perceived successes (the Miller-Urey experiments) and relative silence about the overarching failures. To this day, however, the spontaneous generation of living things from non-living chemicals remains a necessary corollary of neo-Darwinian evolution, though all of the evidene would lead to an opposite conclusion. Sermonti:

There will be only one way to refute spontaneous generation. That is to take note of the astronomic complexity of the simplest organisms, and to show that the minimum conceivable life form calls for structures so elaborate that no fortuitous accident can bring them all together. But we had to wait until the second half of the twentieth century for the proof.

* The title of this chapter of Sermonti is interesting. What apparently inspired Redi to conduct his experiments was a passage from Homer's Iliad in which Achilles recognizes that maggots arise in a corpse only if flies are allowed access to that corpse. In other words, Homer understood what medieval and renaissance folks did not, and neo-Darwinists do not, that spontaneous generation is not an accurate understanding of the origin of living things.

The Central Event

The events that many commemorate this week--the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth--are together the very essence of Christianity. The primary propositional claim of Christianity is that the eternal Son of God became fully human, lived a sinless life, died by Roman crucifixion in order to pay the penalty for the sins of all humanity, and then was bodily raised from the dead. As the apostle Paul had it (in I Corinthians 15:17, 19),

if Christ has not been raised from the dead, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins... [and] we are of all people most to be pitied.

In modern times, there are those who nonetheless claim to be Christian while denying any supernatural events recorded in Scripture, including the resurrection of Christ. They are the ones most worthy of pity, because this denial arises from an assumption that science has somehow proven naturalism, and comes at a time when all of the latest discoveries have instead served to validate the historical and scientific claims of the Bible.

But the crucifixion and resurrection are not only the center of Christianity; they are also the central event in human history. They changed the course of Western history and continue to improve life for and give hope to people around the world. Upon his death, Jesus' disciples were a disheartened and disillusioned bunch, a rag-tag group of mostly uneducated men and outcast women, themselves members of an insignificant people group conquered and dominated by the mighty Roman Empire. But when they encountered the death-conquering, risen Messiah, they became the leaders of a revolution--the reconciling of people to their Creator--that lives on today, having outlasted the Roman Empire by more than 1500 years. In the two millennia since the resurrection, Christianity has spread throughout the world, and it has been Christians who have brought literacy and medicine, founding schools and universities, orphanages and hospitals, and launching modern science.

But it's even more than that. When it comes right down to it, the death and resurrection of Jesus are together the central event in all of cosmic history--the purpose behind the creation of the universe. Christ's substitutionary death was not an afterthought, a "Plan B" necessary in response to an unforeseen rebellion on the part of the free-will creature, man. No, Scripture makes it clear that the death and resurrection of Christ were planned before the creation. One of several examples is the introduction of Paul's letter to the Ephesians, in which we are told that God

chose us in [Christ] before the foundation of the world... according to his purpose, which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fulness of time (Eph. 1:3-10).

Moreover, in eternity future it will be these historical events upon which we will look back and focus our attention. For example, John's vision in Revelation show the heavenly host worshipping Jesus with the words

Worthy are you to take the scroll and to open the seals, for you were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation...(Rev. 5:9)

and

Worthy is the Lamb who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing! (Rev. 5:12).

The most fundamental and important thing about the universe in which we live is embodied in what we call Easter... Our Creator so loves us that He planned and executed the most wonderful sacrificial way of reconciling us to Himself, and validated the sufficiency of that sacrifice by demonstrating His power over death. My hope is that each of my readers can experience and live daily in the resurrection power made available 2000 years ago.

Strained Arguments

We've been examining the popular modern view among conservative Christians that the flood of Noah's day (recorded in Genesis 6-8) covered the entire globe and accounts for all of the geological and paleontological record. We began by applying basic hermeneutic principles, determining right away that that the intent of this account was to describe God's judgment on sinful humanity--not to give a geological treatise. Likewise, we saw that the context was all humanity, not planet Earth. We compared similar passages in the Old Testament and even in Genesis itself, and learned that the all-inclusive language used in this account (which causes modern readers to leap to a global conclusion) is rightly understood as applying only to the scope of the context--in this case, the geographical area occupied by humans, the Mespotamian plain.

We discussed the history of the global flood view, and learned that it is only a very recent idea, one not held by Christians throughout the millennia. We also saw some of its motivation, as a well-meaning but misguided attempt to refute naturalistic evolution.

We also took a little bit of time to show that a global intepretation of the flood is contradicted by all of the evidence from the natural world--from what theologians call general revelation, the creation itself. Indeed, we found--and find--that even a cursory scrutiny of this view yields overwhelming exegetical, theological, and scientific evidence refuting it. Its defenders generally resort to a position of fideism (faith defined as contrary to reason and evidence) and biblicism ("the Bible is the only reliable source of knowledge"). Both of these positions are, of course, contrary to the historical and orthodox understanding of Christian faith.

All that remains in this last post in the series is to bring to light some of the logical absurdities to which ardent proponents of the global flood view are forced. I'll limit myself to just a couple of such absurdities.

There is evidence for some half billion different species of animals having lived on Earth. Though the majority of these are aquatic species (and therefore not taken on board the ark), there remains nonetheless a significant problem with regard to housing and feeding pairs of every terrestrial species (if the flood were global and recent). Answering such skepticism yields the following sorts of arguments (taken from an article by John Woodmorappe on the Answers in Genesis website)...

It is still necessary to take account of the floor spaces required by large animals, such as elephants and rhinos. But even these, collectively, do not require a large area because it is most likely that these animals were young, but not newborn. Even the largest dinosaurs were relatively small when only a few years old.

Huh? But there's more...

Dinosaurs could have eaten basically the same foods as the other animals. The large sauropods could have eaten compressed hay, other dried plant material, seeds and grains, and the like. Carnivorous dinosaurs--if there were meat-eaters before the Flood--could have eaten dried meat, reconstituted dried meat, or slaughtered animals. Giant tortoises would have been ideal to use as food in this regard. They were large and needed little food to be maintained themselves. There are also exotic sources of meat, such as fish that wrap themselves in dry cocoons.

Exotic. That's exactly what such argumentation is. And that's just the problem. If there's one thing to be said for the global flood view (at least superficially), it's that it arises from a straightforward reading of the (English translation of) the Genesis text. But the ideas necessarily used to prop this view up are anything but a straightforward reading of Scripture. The author of this same article goes on to elaborate on complex systems of waste management and water storage that find no mention in Scripture, even though what is found in the Genesis account is quite detailed with regard to the ark's specifications.

But perhaps the most bizarre position to which global flood defenders are forced is this one--the view that the animal 'kinds' taken on board the ark were representative pairs of whole families of animals and that after the flood these pairs yielded (through a sort of hyper-evolution, though proponents would never call it that) the species we see today. On this view, a single pair of canids aboard the ark led to the post-flood "generation" of domestic dogs, jackals, wolves, dingoes, coyotes, red foxes, gray foxes, kit foxes, well, you get the idea. Thus (according to Todd Wood, also on the Answers in Genesis website),

Lions, coyotes, and dromedary camels were probably not on the Ark but were born to parents within the cat, dog, and camel kinds.

It's ironic; the young-earth view, of which a global flood is a necessary corollary, became dogma with the specific intent of refuting evolutionary theory. And yet, defense of the former leads to belief in an efficiency of evolution that far surpasses anything imagined by the staunchest proponent of Darwin.*

Recent discoveries from across the spectrum of scientific disciplines have led to the virtual demise of all credibility for Darwinism (though its disciples still hold the microphone and are unwilling to acknowledge this). Unfortunately, the most popular approach among conservative Christians for refuting this failed theory--positing a young earth and a global flood--is fraught with obvious exegetical, theological, scientific, and logical problems. It's high time we Christians recognize that truth, evidence, and reason are on our side, and that we need not make Scripture say things it never has. It's time for young-earth creationism and flood geology to die a quiet death; they only present (for many thinking people in our day) artificial barriers to considering the true claims of Christianity.


* The real reason that there were not kangaroos, penguins, and cougars on the ark is that none of these animals was or is found in Mesopotamia, the region occupied by humanity prior to the flood. The explanation for the sufficiency of the ark's capacity is that the number of species occupying Mesopotamia (of the rather specific types of animals described by the Hebrew words in the flood account) is actually quite finite.

First Date

I'll return in the next post to our mini-series on Noah's flood. Today, however, I thought I'd reprint a post (originally published on Valentine's Day a couple of years ago) that relates the uncensored, romantic story of our first date, Dawn's and mine. (I was reminded of that event just a couple days ago as together we worked to separate a batch of redworms from the compost they had been producing for us.)

We met at Boise State University, where we were both in a graduate degree program in Raptor Biology. It was my first semester, and I was taking Aquatic Entomology from Dr. Charles Baker (ultimately my favorite class of my entire academic career). I had missed a Saturday field trip (for a friend's wedding back in Oregon), and so hadn't been able to round out my collection of aquatic insects with an example of a syrphid fly larva. Fortunately for me, my good friend, Eric Atkinson, was willing (the next Saturday) to take me back to find this elusive grub. (Well, okay, "elusive" may not be the right word. They're certainly not quick, and perhaps not very rare. What I mean to say is that you've got to want to find them, and you have to know where to look--something Dr. Baker knew as well as anyone.)

At any rate, Eric and his fiancee, Melanie (still our good friends, now married and the parents of three of the neatest girls you'd ever want to meet), and Dawn and I left early for a morning of bird-watching and insect collecting at Fort Boise in Canyon County, Idaho.

Time has made some of the memories of that fateful day a bit cloudy. I do remember being impressed by the fact that Dawn was ready at the appointed time (6 a.m. or whatever it was, and this remains characteristic of her). I also recall that it was a foggy day, and so (reconstructing the event from what I know now) her long, beautiful hair would have had that curly, unruly look that humid mornings give it. I also remember that we saw some interesting birds, including the first Black-crowned Night-Heron I'd seen in awhile. But back to the story...

Like many of the true flies (the insect order Diptera), members of the family Syrphidae spend their larval stage as grubs in semiaquatic conditions, burrowing in the wet sediment at the botton of ponds and lakes. But whereas the grubs of other families (like crane flies, and deer and horse flies) must continually migrate through the sediments to the surface to breathe, some syrphid flies (like our quarry that day) possess an adaptation that alleviates this need. They have a slender respiratory siphon that extends up to two or three times the length of their body. They can thus stay submerged in the saturated muck and reach this siphon up to the surface in order to breathe. So, the larval form of this interesting creature is commonly known as a Rat-tailed Maggot, and it was the hope of acquiring examples of these that bound our hearts together on that first of many forays into the natural world that Dawn and I have shared.

Other lovers may keep a memento of their first date, a card exchanged, the pressed remains of a flower given, the label from a bottle of wine shared. For us, the tangible memento of our first date consists of four Rat-tailed Maggots preserved in a vial of 99% isopropyl alcohol and a label bearing the location and the date, the 7th of October, 1988.

Note: Should you wish to find Rat-tailed Maggots yourself, the procedure involves dredging up some of the saturated muck from the bottom of the pond, spreading it about an inch deep in a large tray, and then patting the muck with your open palm. The Rat-tailed Maggots will be the squishy-but-crunchy things. (As I recall, my bride-to-be's hands displayed just that certain sensitivity that made her adept at distinguishing fly larvae from the general muck.)

Science and the Flood

In our mini-series on the flood of Noah's day, we have so far discussed the context of the flood narrative, establishing two important things that are often misunderstood by modern Christians. One is that the account is not a geological treatise--that attempting to use it to explain away scientific evidence that one doesn't like is an illegitimate approach to interpreting the passage. (Instead, the purpose of the passage is theological; it reminds us--by recounting an actual, historical example--that God can and will punish sin and rebellion in the humanity that He created.)

We also established that the geographical scope of the flood narrative should not be assumed to be the entire planet. And once we removed this global preconception, we found (by appealing to other portions of the narrative itself and to other Old Testament passages) that the much better understanding of this text is that a flood covering the Mesopotamian plain was sufficient for accomplishing God's purposes.

In other words, we began with the text itself, and by using the most basic hermeneutic principles, reasoned our way to a localized--yet universal--flood and not one covering the entire planet. In another post, I might share some of the (logically and exegetically) bizarre lengths to which modern defenders of a global flood are forced. But it is probably best at this point to make explicit a fact that was hinted at in the discussion of the history of flood geology--that a global flood a few thousand years ago is completely incompatible with all of modern geological (and paleontological) knowledge.

The difficulty here is in knowing where to start. In The Genesis Flood, which made the case for a global flood that could explain the Earth's geology and fossil record, Whitcomb and Morris were forced to ignore or deny a host of evidence. And yet today, the same arguments are being made despite exponential growth of our knowledge about earth's history. Some creation science organizations continue to believe that the issue in geology is catastrophism versus uniformitarianism. That is, they accuse geologists of dogmatically asserting that only gradual, uniform processes have shaped the earth. But in the intervening years, geologists have come to grips with overwhelming evidence for catastrophic events.

Plate tectonic theory came after Whitcomb and Morris, and though that paradigm shift did not come without angst, today's geologists unanimously acknowledge that the Earth's crust is a series of moving plates, and that it is this movement that is raising the Himalayas, building Hawaii, and causing volcanoes and earthquakes worldwide. Moreover (and more recently), geologists and paleontologists alike have come to recognize the role of meteoritic collisions in shaping the planet and in causing mass extinction events. Central to this paradigm shift was the discovery of the Chicxulub crater (beneath the Yucatan and Carib) that caused the worldwide iridium layer that marks the end of the third and final (Cretaceous) dinosaur era.

No, modern geologists are not uniformitarians. They have come to understand not only those processes that work slowly over millions of years but also some of the many sudden, cataclysmic events that have left their mark on Earth. But they continue to deny the claim (and now with more reason than ever) that a single worldwide flood a few thousand years ago can account for all that we see on Earth.

Whereas the events connected with Noah's flood are quite simple, the geological record is quite complex. The flood involved a steady increase in water levels followed, eventually, by a steady decrease in water levels. This would cause very little in the way of geological change, and simply cannot expain Earth's depositional, structural, chemical, and thermal complexity.

The Green River of Utah shows annual depositional layers that alternate between calcium carbonate (laid down in summers) and organic matter (winters). These can be counted just like tree rings, and attest to 4 million years of such deposition.

At the Prudhoe oil fields in Alaska, ice cores demonstrate that the permafrost has remained frozen for the last 100,000 years. The top 2000 feet of this permafrost column were frozen before, during, and after the Genesis flood, which had no effect on the permafrost. In Antarctica, ice cores span 420,000 years.

Contrary to the claims of global flood proponents, a single, year-long flood cannot account for Earth's wealth of biodeposits. Oil, coal, natural gas, and limestone deposits all take vast ages to form, and require different thermal and pressure scenarios. Moreover, deposits of each are found at vastly different levels (and therefore ages) in the geological record, and with a variety of complex histories.

And the evidences go on and on.

With regard to the flood of Genesis 6-8, the clear conclusions from geology are at least three. First, that flood left no mark behind. That is, the geological record of the Earth is entirely independent of the events associated with the flood of Noah's day. Second, the flood played no role in forming Earth's abundant biodeposits. These deposits, upon which modern technology depends, are the result of billions of years of plant and animal death, of God's creating and recreating life as He prepared this planet for human beings. Third, the flood therefore cannot be invoked as proof for a young-earth interpretation of the Genesis creation account. Although a young-earth view requires a global flood, the geological record provides no support for such a scenario.

Perry's Posts

My blogging apologist buddy Bob Perry is in the middle of a great series on the sanctity of human life. Go here for some must-read, thoughtful blog posts.

Flood Geology

In the last post, I discussed the flood of Noah's day (described in Genesis 6-8) and showed that good, consistent exegesis leads to understanding the flood as covering only the portion of the earth that was occupied by humans, the Mesopotamian plain. This is, of course, in contrast to the understanding of many modern American Christians, who have been taught to see the flood as global. We began by acknowledging that correctly identifying the context of a Scripture passage is of first importance.

But in that discussion, we focused on only one part of context--the geographical scope. There is a more fundamental issue regarding the context of the flood, and it, too, plays into the modern Christian misunderstanding. The main context of the flood account--as all Christians ought to agree if they stop to think about it--is God's judgment on sinful humanity. Where global flood proponents err is in seeking to make the flood account a geological treatise. I know it sounds kinda silly when I write it out like that, but I'm serious. The reason many modern Christians defend a global (rather than localized, universal) flood is their belief that such a flood can somehow explain away a whole lot of geological and paleontological evidence that doesn't fit well either in their interpretion of Genesis or their view of God.

From a historical perspective, this view--flood geology--only goes back a short while. By the early 1800's, geological understanding of sedimentary stratification and the uncovering of fossils of extinct creatures led to the general recognition that the Earth was much older than Lightfoot and Ussher's interpretation of Scripture would make it. Nonetheless, this did not prove a problem for geologists and paleontologists who were Christians. But when Darwin's Origin of Species (1859) offered a naturalistic explanation for the diversity of life, many Christians came to see science as fundamentally opposed to Scripture.

The first publication attempting to defend the view that a global flood accounted for the fossil record and Earth's geology was Outlines of Modern Christianity and Modern Science (1902) by George McCready Price. Price, who had less than a full year of science training, was a disciple of Ellen G. White, the prophetess of Seventh-Day Adventism. She claimed to have been shown by God in a vision that all creation occurred in a normal Earth week and that the flood covered the entire planet and was responsible for all that modern geologists and paleontologists study.

This unusual view did not, however, become a significant part of the conservative Christian understanding until it was refurbished in The Genesis Flood, authored by hydrology engineer Henry Morris and theologian John Whitcomb in 1961. Despite the fact that Whitcomb could find not one geologist (Christian or otherwise) to help him defend this view, the book had--for the Christian layman--enough of the appearance of a scientific tome to lend to young-earth creationism and flood geology the scientific credibility that those views so desperately needed.

By that time, there were overwhelming scientific problems for the global flood view, as well as logical (common sense) objections. Moreover, though the strength of Whitcomb and Morris' view was that it resulted from a straightforward reading of (the English translation of) Scripture, the arguments they were forced to offer in defense of their theory involved anything but a straightforward reading of the Bible.

Today, modern defenders of the global flood view use the same stale arguments (or worse) even though geology has grown exponentially in the ensuing 50 years. Claiming that the Bible clearly teaches this view, "creation science" organizations are more numerous and stronger than ever, despite their view having absolutely no credibility within the scientific community, and despite the flawed exegetical process upon which it is based. For science-minded folks in our day, consideration of the claims of Christ upon their life is prevented by the incorrect view--so successfully promoted by these well-meaning but misguided groups--that the Bible teaches that the Earth is thousands of years old and that the fossil record and geological formations were laid down in a global flood. I can only echo the words of creationist Dudley Joseph Whitney, upon reading Whitcomb's views and by way of declining Whitcomb's request for collaboration...

Why, why, why should the saints be so prone to take positions which discredit the Bible?

Why See the Flood as Global?

If you've grown up in a good, Bible-teaching church in America, chances are excellent that you have been taught to believe that the Bible describes a global flood in Genesis 6-8. Illustrations of Noah's ark carrying kangaroos and penguins are etched in your memory, and you have never seen any reason to question the understanding given to you by your loving and well-meaning Sunday school teachers.

But did you know that this understanding is a very modern one, confined really to the globally-minded cultures of the 20th and 21st centuries? The original readers of this account (the people to whom it was first communicated) would certainly not have applied it to the entire planet, nor did people throughout the ensuing millennia. Indeed, the view that the flood of Noah's day covered the whole planet, and that it can be used to explain the fossil record and Earth's geology only arose in the late 19th century and only became popular among Christians beginning in the 1960's.

Of course, imposing our modern way of thinking upon Scripture written thousands of years ago is one of the big no-nos of hermeneutics (of rightly interpreting the Bible). For example, when moderns accuse one or more of the gospel writers of misquoting Jesus (because, say, Matthew and Luke do not agree word-for-word when recording the same teaching incident), it is wrongly imposing our standards for quoting someone (which involves word-for-word accuracy) upon a culture with a different standard (for Jews of Jesus' day what mattered was that one accurately record someone's thought or intent). In the same way, imposing our 21st-century, global perspective on the flood account of Genesis ensures that our conclusions will be wrong.

In coming posts, I want to reexamine the flood account theologically, logically, and scientifically, and will seek to show that a global understanding fares poorly with each of these assessment methods. But for today, let's examine together the words themselves to see whether they require believing that the flood encompassed the whole planet.

Superficially--and in English--the flood account seems to encompass everything. We read, for example, that God said "I will bring a flood of waters upon the earth to destroy all flesh in which is the breath of life under heaven" (Gen. 6:17). We find that "the waters prevailed so mightily on the earth that all the high mountains under the whole heaven were covered" (7:19), and that "all flesh died that moved on the earth, birds, livestock, beasts, all swarming creatures that swarm on the earth, and all mankind" (7:21).

Surely, say proponents of a global understanding of the flood, such all-encompassing language must mean that the context is the entire planet. But this shallow (albeit widespread) interpretation does not really do justice to the text itself or to a serious attempt at good hermeneutics. And the first clue that this is the case comes immediately following the flood, and in the same account. In Genesis 8:13 and 14, we read that after the flood "the waters were dried from off the earth," "the face of the ground was dry," and "the earth had dried out." If we take "the earth" that was flooded as referring to the entire planet, then we must also take these latter verses as indicating that the entire planet was subsequently dry.

So the context and scope of the flood is the real issue here. And indeed, accurately determining the context is arguably the first and most important step to rightly interpreting any Scripture passage. I expect to show--by examining other Old Testament passages that use similar language--that the context of Genesis 6-8 is more local than the entire planet, referring only to the rather limited portion of the earth that was inhabited by humans (the large Mesopotamian plain).

But first, a word about translation issues. Hebrew is a very small language, and nouns (especially) are required to serve much broader purposes than do the nouns of English. The Hebrew phrase kol erets, translated "whole earth" or "entire earth," is used 205 times in the Old Testament. The vast majority of these usages (some of which we will examine more closely) refer to a local region, and not the whole planet. In the same way, kol shamayim ("entire heavens") most often serves as reference to a limited region. The Hebrew phrase translated "high mountains" actually can refer to any elevated landscape. Conversely, the various Hebrew words translated "every creeping thing" and "all flesh" are much more specific than the English translations, referring to particular groups of terrestrial mammals and birds. These translational problems have certainly contributed to the modern misunderstanding of the flood account.

But in order to demonstrate the the "whole earth" of Genesis 6-8 does not require a global context, let's look at this same phrase in other Old Testament contexts. In I Kings 10:24, we are told that

The whole world sought audience with Solomon to hear the wisdom that God had put in his heart.

No one (ancient or modern) interprets this verse as saying that representatives from South America came to see Solomon. Instead, we rightly understand the context as the nations surrounding Solomon's Israel. Perhaps more relevant--since a part of the same book of the Bible as the flood account--is Genesis 41:56. It talks about the time when Joseph was second-in-command in Egypt, and people from surrounding lands were coming to buy food that he had stored up:

The famine was over all the face of the earth.

Again, no one understands this passage as teaching that there was a famine that extended all the way to New Zealand, Alaska, and South America. We naturally--and rightly--recognize the context of this famine passage as the Middle East, not the entire planet. And yet the phrase at issue, kol erets, is exactly the same one that in the flood account causes many to leap to the conclusion that the whole planet is in view. Now this next one comes only three chapters after the conclusion of the flood account. In the account about the tower of Babel, the text reads

the whole world [kol erets] had one language and one common speech.

In this case, we have no doubt that the context is a limited region; the point of the story is that humanity still occupied a very small geographic area, and God didn't like this.

As with God's judgment at Babel, His judgment in the flood was aimed at human disobedience, and in both cases part of that disobedience was man's failure to multiply and "fill the earth." The Creator gave this command to Adam and Eve (Gen. 1:28), then again to Noah (Gen. 9:7), and then again at Babel; in the latter case He also acted to ensure that people finally dispersed from the Mesopotamian plain.

In short, there is no scriptural, historical, or scientific evidence for humanity's spreading out from the Middle East until a time better understood as after the flood judgment described in Genesis 6-8. The belief that the context of that account is global is a modern and inacurrate one, and one which provides (to modern skeptics of Christianity) an artificial barrier to seriously considering the claims of the Bible, including its central claim of salvation in Christ.

Five Sacred Crossings

It's a small book, and a real easy read. I'd have read it in one sitting, except that I started it at a restaurant, and had miles to go before I slept. Funny, I had owned a copy for months, ever since the author, Craig Hazen, was one of the featured speakers at last November's Apologetics Conference here in Central Oregon.

I don't know why it took me so long to get around to reading it. I knew Dr. Hazen from my graduate studies at BIOLA; the program I was in, an M.A. in Christian Apologetics, was his brain child and he is still the Director. I knew him to be a gifted apologist, an expert in world religions, and a high-powered philosopher. If anything, I suppose I was worried I might be disappointed because this was his first venture into fiction.

I had nothing to worry about. Five Sacred Crossings delivers the goods, thoughtfully addressing some of the most important issues of our times (or any time) in a gripping narrative. I highly recommend it, and hope all my readers will procure a copy and find a couple of hours in which to enjoy this fascinating and relevant book.

14 Views

Tonight, in the Science and the Bible class I'm teaching this semester at Kilns College, I'll be sharing 14 different ways of understanding Genesis 1. I'll be assessing them exegetically (Do they do justice to the original Hebrew and to other relevant Scripture passages?), scientifically (Do they accord with well-understood evidence from nature?), theologically (Are they free of theologically-problematic implications?), and logically (Are the arguments offered in support of them sound?).

It should be fun and interesting.

First Owl Nest

I found my first owl nest of the year today. As expected, it was a Great-horned Owl (Bubo virginianus), the species that nests earliest in these parts. The first week of March is late, in fact, for me to be finding my first one. But I've been that busy lately that I haven't had a chance to check some of the likely spots near home, places where GHOWs have nested in years past. The one I found today is at above 6,000 feet of elevation, in an area where winter is still very much in control. The female was sitting tightly on her eggs while snow accumulated on her back.

Owls do not construct their own nests. So when an owl is found to be incubating on a nest of sticks, then that nest was originally constructed by another bird--raven, hawk, or magpie, perhaps--or by a pack rat. The early nesting by these owls often allows them to take over a previous year's Red-tailed Hawk nest (as in this case) before the hawks have returned from wherever they wintered. In my experience, if a pair of Red-tailed Hawks remains on their territory year-round, they generally are able to protect their favorite nest from use by a pair of Great-horned Owls.

At this point in the breeding attempt, I didn't dare approach the nest closely enough to photograph this particular female displaying the faithfulness of a postal employee ("Neither snow nor sleet..."). So instead I've shared below a photo of a different Great-horned Owl fom the same Oregon county and several years ago.

Sage Grouse Tracks

Since some of my readers don't get to see this in real life, here's a photo of the imprint made in snow of the spread tail of a Greater Sage-Grouse as it lands. Just doin' my job, bird-watching in remote and scenic places. Someone's got to do it.

Darwin's Proof

I'm reading Darwin's Proof, subtitled The Triumph of Religion over Science. It's by Cornelius G. Hunter, molecular biophysicist and science historian. Like me, he has a biologist's--an insider's, if you will--understanding of how meagre is the evidence in favor of neo-Darwinian evolution. And his contribution (in this and two other books) is to show how the vast majority of arguments offered in support of evolution are not scientific ones but religious ones, ones that presuppose a caricature of God that is little like the biblical portrayal.

I long ago came to see the modern acceptance of Darwinism as the real-life equivalent of the people in Hans Christian Andersen's story "The Emperor's New Clothes." I cannot remember whether I came to that realization independently, or whether I once heard an evolution skeptic draw the comparison. But now I've come across it again in Hunter's book (which I haven't read before), and so thought it worthwhile to share his version of the analogy.

The story is about an emperor who is fooled into wearing no clothes and the mob mentality that overtakes his subjects as they too are led to go along with the charade. All the people in the kingdom are told that the emperor has beautiful new clothes, and the emperor is convinced as well. When the people see the smiling emperor with no clothes, no one wants to point out the obvious.

More accurately, the people are told that only sophisticated people can appreciate the splendour of the new clothes, and so each of the onlooking mob dares not say that he sees nothing for fear of being labelled a rustic. Hunter continues...

When I first read the story, I was unimpressed. What was the point? The story certainly had no bearing on the real events of the world. Such an obviously false and absurd charade could never actually take place, and if it did, large numbers of people would never go along with it.

But now I appreciate Andersen's tale. It is indeed possible for people to go along with bizarre explanations. The problems with evolution are evident in nature itself. Biology is full of amazing designs whose evolution would apparently constitute nothing less than a miracle.

Yes, indeed. And those who look closely at the evidence will conclude--unless that have lost all use of a healthy 'baloney detector'--that the emperor is stark naked.

The Centrality of Miracles

In the last post, I tried to make two main points regarding miracle accounts in the Bible. The first is that, whatever else we do with them, it is illegitimate to explain them away as the naive, uncritical acceptance of the unnatural by the unsophisticated people of Bible times. The second is that the issue (of the possibility of miracles) really boils down to the metaphysical question of whether naturalism or supernaturalism (Christian theism) is a more accurate understanding of reality.

Today, I want to take on another modern claim made against the biblical miracle accounts. It goes like this...

There are miracle stories not only in the Bible but also in the sacred texts of other world religions, many of the latter of which you Christians would say did not actually happen. So isn't there a sense in which the miracle stories of all the world religions--including Christianity--cancel one another out? Or, to put it another way, if there's good reason to disbelieve the miracle claims of other holy books, aren't we equally justified in disbelieving the miracle claims of the Bible?

First, let me point out that this objection is not an argument. The move from the premises (such as "miracle claims of other religions are probably false") to the conclusion ("we are justified in dismissing biblical miracles") is not sufficiently supported. That is, the conclusion does not logically follow from the premises. So what we are dealing with here is mere opinion or conjecture, not logical reasoning of the sort that my regular readers like to see.

But let me also point out a couple of things that distinguish biblical miracles from those of other world religions. The first is this... whereas miracles are somewhat tangential or secondary to the truth claims of other religions, they are central and primary in Christianity. One can be a faithful follower of other religions while remaining skeptical of any of the specific supernatural elements in their scriptures. But miracles--especially the Incarnation and Resurrection of Jesus Christ--are foundational and necessary parts of the entire Christian claim. As the apostle Paul has it (in I Cor. 15:17, my paraphrase)

If Jesus was not bodily raised from the dead, then Christianity is a worthless undertaking.

This truth makes all the more incomprehensible the position of so many (in the past 100 years or more), those who claim to be Christian but who at the same time seek to divest the Bible of anything supernatural. They seek to find natural explanations for all biblical miracles, so that they can hold their heads high in a sophisticated, scientific age and culture. With Paul, I ask, "Then what's the point?"

A related distinction is this... The miracle accounts in the Bible (unlike those of other world religions) have a great deal of evidential value. They serve a purpose (or, in many cases, multiple purposes). Let's look particularly at the miracles Jesus performed--walking on water, multiplying loaves and fish, calming wind and waves, healing blindness, and raising people from the dead. For the Jews of the second-temple period (Jesus' day), the thing that distinguished the one true God from all other beings (real or imaginary, including humans, angels, demons, idols, and the false gods of the Greeks, Romans, and Canaanites) was His unique role as Creator and Sustainer of the universe. And what caused these strict monotheists (including the authors of every New Testament book) to make room in their concept of God for this man Jesus was his demonstrated power (in the miracles mentioned above) over the creation itself. The apostle John explains his reason for writing his gospel and, more particularly, for recording some of the miracles (signs and wonders) that Jesus performed (John 20:30-31)...

Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; but these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.

A Bit About Miracles

What are we to make of biblical miracle accounts? Take, for instance, the one about Balaam's Ass. You know, the one that in Numbers 22 speaks to its master, bringing to his attention the fact that a sword-toting angel was barring the path. The question is...

What's up with a talking donkey? What are we to make of stories like this one in the Old Testament that ask us to believe that an ass actually spoke?

It's a perfectly reasonable question, and I'd like to offer a reasonable answer. Though focusing on this particular miracle-story, perhaps we can learn something of how to approach the Bible's miraculous claims generally. After all, the greatest miracles--Incarnation and Resurrection--are the very heart of the Christian faith. So what we do with Balaam's Ass has far-reaching implications.

We need to recognize that many moderns attempt to divest the Bible of anything smacking of the supernatural. That is, it is fashionable to take a naturalistic approach to understanding the Scriptures. I find this unreasonable on at least two counts.

The first is that naturalism is a much poorer worldview than Christian theism. Though I cannot summarize it all here, let me just note that the latest scientific understanding from such diverse fields as astronomy, physics, biochemistry, and genomics has presented overwhelming problems for naturalism while comporting perfectly with the Biblical understanding. Naturalism does not provide the rational foundation for conducting science, has no explanation for the order in the universe, and provides no reasonable basis for trusting our reasoning capacities or our senses. (That is, reasoning one's way to naturalism is a self-refuting enterprise.) Naturalism cannot adequately account for the laws of logic or of mathematics, the existence of the universe, the design of the universe, the origin of life, the Cambrian Explosion, the origin of information (in the genetic code), the existence of irreducibly complex molecular machines, or the existence of consciousness.

Secondly, I wonder why those who take a naturalistic approach to Scripture would even bother. The Bible claims to be the Word of God, and this is what has always made it a runaway bestseller. If naturalism is true--if there is no God--than why would anyone read such a book? Those who approach the Bible naturalistically have failed to ask the most interesting question of all--is there a God? Or (perhaps I should say) they have answered it in their own minds a priori (before examining the evidence), and that in the negative. The reasonable position would be to be open to discovering the truth on this issue, rather than to rule out one of the possible answers beforehand.

You see, if there is a God--and by this I mean the exact sort of God of which the Bible speaks, one who both created the universe and acts in human history--then none of the miracle claims contained in His revelation to us can be rightly deemed unreasonable.

But for the sake of argument, let me be more open here. Let's neither assume that there is (or is not) a God nor that the Bible is His revelation to us. What is the most reasonable explanation for why this particular story is imbedded in this larger book?

One option is that the author (I'll call him Moses) intended it as fiction. But this doesn't cut it. The larger narrative reads like history, not like The Chronicles of Narnia (where talking animals were the norm). More importantly, wherever the accuracy of this (larger) historical narrative can be tested, it has been verified.

A second option (perhaps the most popular among naturalists) is that the author did not possess the discernment to recognize the silliness of the idea of a talking donkey. It is likely, they say, that this story simply shows that the people of Moses' day were not as sophisticated as we are, and therefore were not taken aback by the insertion of this outlandish tale. While Moses' overall credibility did not suffer during his (and subsequent) generations, surely this particular gaff (that is, including such a story) is proof against our believing any of it.

But again, this explanation doesn't deal honestly with the available evidence. We have absolutely no reason to believe that Moses or his contemporaries were any less startled than we at the thought of a donkey talking. This is the only record in the Pentateuch (or, indeed, in the entire Bible) of an animal speaking. To suggest that the author or his readers accepted this any more uncritically than we would is unsubstantiated inference. To be sure, Moses (on his own account) was privy to other instances of this same Creator-God intervening in human history, and so was predisposed to accept a supernatural explanation for this particularly odd event. But that only leads us to a third--and most reasonable--explanation.

It could just be--as the whole Bible claims, and as a great deal of reason and scientific evidence can be shown to support--that there is a God who is both transcendent to and immanent in this universe. If this is admitted as plausible, then the most straightforward explanation for why Moses included the story of a talking ass in an otherwise historical narrative is that--in this one instance in all of human history--God chose to reveal Himself through the medium of the voice of an otherwise dumb animal.

When Balaam's Ass talked, it got the attention of Balaam, and reminded him that there is a God to whom he was accountable. It also got the attention of Moses, who was every bit as aware as we are that donkeys don't normally speak, and who nonetheless faithfully recorded the event. It got the attention of Moses' contemporaries, of readers throughout the ages, and of readers today. But even today, it is only reasonable to reject this story if the larger claim--that there is a Creator God who acts in human history--is demonstrably false. But that is not the case.


(I originally published a version of this post on March 17, 2007.)

More Snow

We had a rather large, wet snow today, one of those after which every branch and twig remains etched in white. The result was truly lovely, and we still need all the moisture we can get. The photo above was taken during a similar event, that one when Dawn and I were living at Silver Creek Nature Preserve near Picabo, Idaho.

Kuhn and Truth

A few posts ago (here), I cited Thomas Kuhn (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions) as testimony against Francis Collins (The Language of God). In today's post, I want to identify a significant problem (elsewhere) in Kuhn's thinking.

In his cutting-edge treatment of paradigm shifts in science, Kuhn ends up denying the correspondence view of truth. That is, he cannot bring himself to say that a more recent scientific pardigm (say, oxygen chemistry) is more correct than the paradigm it replaced (phlogiston theory). For Kuhn, the newer paradigm is merely more practical, better at making predictions, or simply more popular, than the older one--it is not a truer understanding of the world in which we live.

Such a denial is not a necessary part of Kuhn's thesis, but an unnecessary addition. And I am not the first to notice and be troubled by this Kuhnian aspect. In fact, he apparently caught a lot of flack for this position, since scientists and philosophers alike think that correspondence to reality is a pretty important part of learning generally and of scientific advance in particular.

In response to criticism, Kuhn attempts (in the postscript to the second edition) to defend this quasi-relativism, in what I find to be a bizarre and illogical way... he draws the analogy of an evolutionary tree, this one containing not living things but scientific theories. (The idea that living things can be represented by an evolutionary tree has fallen upon hard times, even among committed naturalists, but that's beside the present point.) If we can come up with criteria that would enable us to distinguish a more recent theory from an earlier one--without appeal to correspondence to truth--

then scientific development is, like biological, a unidirectional and irreversible process.

In other words, if we can accept a non-teleological view of life, than it ought to be a simple task to accept that what makes a scientific theory better than a previous one has little to do with the reality of the universe it describes.

This will, of course, be unsatisfactory to those of us who do not accept a non-teleological view of the world, who--when faced with overwhelming evidence for design in the universe in general and in living things in particular--cannot kid themeselves into thinking of design as only apparent or illusion. But many non-theists (among scientists and philosophers) are likewise unsatisfied by Kuhn's reasoning here. There just doesn't seem to be any logical link (a link apparently assumed by Kuhn, since never spelled out) between a speculative (and now rejected) biological tree and the epistemological tree he would plant in the path of a serious question, to wit, "Why shouldn't we expect a scientific theory to better approximate reality than the theory it supplants?"