On Sharing Christianity

I'm too busy to blog most days. This is the main season for most of the field work I do, and I'm burning the candle at both ends to keep up. Add to that the fact that I have to get it all done before heading to Romania for three weeks in July. And then there's the little matter of preparing for the speaking engagements for which I'm slated once in Romania...

I'm scheduled to preach, speak, or hold a Q & A session a total of 22 times in Romania. That includes being the keynote speaker at an Apologetics Conference and the main speaker at a week-long evangelism camp for youth. I also have one engagement with the science faculty at a Romanian university--I'm looking forward to that one!

Much of the goal will be to strengthen the faith of Romanians who already follow Christ--helping them to realize how reason and evidence combine to make the Christian worldview the uniquely accurate understanding of the universe in which we live. But some of my time (at the university and the youth camp) will involve sharing the Christian message with those who are currently skeptical about it. I'll be "sharing the gospel" or "evangelizing."

Which reminds me of a claim made several years back by an elderly lady friend of mine, someone whose opinions and thoughts on most other subjects I had come to respect...

We were in a small group, and another gal was talking favorably (apparently as a fellow-believer) of some missionary friends who were helping members of a South American tribe leave their superstition and animism and embrace Christianity. My elderly friend remarked,

I would never do that. It's wrong to try to change someone else's religious convictions.

Now, there are several problems with this claim, of which I'll mention just two.

The first is that my friend could only say this because she didn't take Christianity seriously or believe it to be true. If, as the Bible claims, the only hope for human beings--for this life and for eternity--is being made right with their Creator through the work on the Cross of His eternal Son Jesus, then we who know this should be sharing it with those who don't at every opportunity. My friend was not able to fairly enter into the discussion by assuming for the moment that the missionaries' worldview might be true.

But there's a more basic problem with my friend's claim--a logical flaw, an error in thinking. And that is that her claim is....

[At this point, regular readers of my blog ought to be able to supply the hyphenated word that completes my sentence.]

That's right! Her statement is SELF-REFUTING, or self-referentially absurd.

To anyone who truly seeks to follow Christ, the call to share the good news about the reconciliation available only through Him is itself one of the most fundamental "religious" convictions. So when she said that it is wrong to seek to change another person's religious convictions, my friend was guilty of trying to do just that. She was sawing off the branch upon which she was sitting, disqualified by her own criterion, run through by her own spear. Her making the statement put her at odds with the content of the proposition she was seeking to convey. And she, of course, didn't realize it.

But you, dear reader, have by now learned to avoid making self-refuting statements yourself (they are, after all, necessarily false) and have finely-tuned your baloney detector to spot such absurdity from a mile off. Keep up the good work!

Variants in the NT

In a few weeks from now, I'll teach a couple of classes (Sunday mornings at Antioch) on New Testament textual criticism, the science that allows us to ascertain what the original New Testament writings said. As I began to think about that issue, I thought it might be a good idea to post a bit of what I'll cover.

I'll begin by asserting that there is overwhelming reason to conclude that the New Testament was reliably transmitted from the original writings to the copies (the Greek manuscripts) that still exist. I will be quick to acknowledge, however, that the thousands of manuscripts available to us do contain variants, places where they disagree with one another. Indeed, there are literally tens of thousands of such variants among these copies. That being the case, isn't the charge of tainted transmission a valid one?

No, not at all. For one thing, the vast majority of these variants are completely insignificant. They amount to nothing more than an alternate spelling or the fact that a single place or person was known by two different names. So the issue of the reliability of the copying comes down to approximately 2,000 places where variant readings that are not insignificant can be found among the manuscripts. Most of these will be identified (by footnotes or marginal notes) in any good study Bible.

Let me share two examples of significant variants, one accidental and one likely intentional. In Romans 5:1, the Greek word εχομεν or εχωμεν appears in the different ancient copies. The difference is the third letter--did the original contain an omega or an omicron (the two different Greek 'o's)? In English, the verse reads

Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.

Or..

Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, let us have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.

Is Paul telling us that peace is an accomplished fact or something that we should be striving to appropriate? In this case we have a very minor alteration that leads to a rather significant difference in meaning. The incorrect insertion of the wrong 'o' would have been an easy mistake to make, especially if the scribe were listening to someone else dictate the letter.

There's an example of an intentional error in the second verse of Mark's gospel. Some copies read, "As it is written in Isaiah the prophet..." This is followed by an Old Testament quote, a quote which can be found not only in Isaiah but also in Malachi. So other copies read, "As it is written in the prophets..." It would seem that some first or second century scribe, in copying Mark's written account of the events of Jesus' life, decided that Mark hadn't been on his game when he wrote "in Isaiah the prophet." The scribe 'improved' the text by changing it to "the prophets." Both variants, of course, are correct, but the first is likely what Mark actually wrote.

There is, therefore, an entire field of scholarship called New Testament textual criticism that seeks to recover the autographs by careful scrutiny of the wealth of copies in existence. Scholars in this field examine external evidence (including the dates and locations of the variants in the Greek manuscripts, in the early Latin, Coptic, and Syriac translations, and in the citations from the early church fathers) and internal evidence (such as 'which variant best explains how the other arose?'). The result is a level of certainty about the originals that exceeds 99% accuracy.

It is important to note that no Christian doctrine is undermined by any of the variant readings. If we were to ignore all of the passages in which variants are found--and use only those passages in which all the relevant copies agree completely--what would be the result? We would have the very same picture of Jesus--a miracle-working, divine Son of God who died by crucifixion and three days later was raised in a glorified physical body.

The existence of errors in copying--some of them significant--should cause us no concern with regard to the reliability of the New Testament. We do need to recognize, though, that the referent of the biblical doctrine of inspiration (and of the implied doctrine of inerrancy) is not a particular set of copies--much less a particular English translation--but the autographs. These we don't have, but--through the reasoned application of New Testament textual criticism--we have a great deal of certainty about what these originals contained.

High Intrigue

Last week, there was high intrigue in a little commune near our house. Indeed, what occurred was the culmination of days and weeks of mutinous plotting, the carrying out of a betrayal that left a kingdom (queendom, actually) divided.

It seems that some of the ladies-in-waiting, the monarch's most trusted and loyal subjects, grew tired of her ladyship or of the size of the castle (or whatever, I hadn't the chance to ask any of them). At any rate, they elected, secreted away, and groomed a replacement. Then one day last week, they revolted, openly declaring their change of allegiance.

Fortunately, it was all very non-violent. No blood was shed; in fact, the reigning queen was allowed to keep not only her life and wealth (mostly gold) but also her castle. Her only loss was half of her former subjects and army, as they chose to flee the castle altogether. The mutineers with their new queen were discovered (as pictured below) by our next-door neighbor. I called a friend who agreed to offer them amnesty, and toward nightfall we installed them in a new castle and drove them across town to his place.

It was undoubtedly a traumatic event for all concerned, but by nightfall peace reigned in both castles and everyone could look back on a good day's work.

Nate in Mexico

Our oldest son, Nathan, is in Mexico, playing in soccer tournaments with the Southern California Seahorses. The Seahorses are a Christian ministry that uses sport--specifically the "beautiful game"--as a vehicle for sharing Christ. Nate's giftedness in and passion for soccer will be put to good use, and he's also to lead worship (they realized at the last minute--and after he'd flown to L.A. without his--that he was the only one on the team who plays guitar).

Their tournaments are in fairly remote villages; as a consequence, he's been totally incommunicado since he left LAX.

It's not an apologetics mission per se, but it is an opportunity to share the central reality about the world in which we live... that God loves us and has provided reconciliation for us through His eternal Son, Jesus Christ. If a guy has to go to warmer climes to score a few goals or get kicked in the shins a couple of times to earn the right to share that wonderful truth, well then, Nate's the guy that's willing to do it. Pray for him if you have a moment.

de Tocqueville

I again came across a quote by Alexis de Tocqueville, written in the 1850's. This Frenchman was arguably the most objective observer of America and its experiment in democracy, and so his conclusions are well worth considering and remembering...

I sought for the greatness and genius of America in her commodious harbors and her ample rivers, and it was not there; in her fertile fields and boundless prairies, and it was not there; in her rich mines and her vast world commerce, and it was not there. Not until I went to the churches of America and heard her pulpits aflame with righteousness did I understand the secret of her genius and power. America is great because she is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.

(This is a repost from almost two years ago; I'm that busy these days that I'm having difficulty finding time to post something new. Sorry.)

Great Gray Day

Yesterday, my family took our annual daytrip to the Winema National Forest, where we monitor several nests of Great Gray Owls (Strix nebulosa), banding babies when found. This year, 4 of the 7 nests we checked were active, and we banded 3 young (shown above) at the first and 2 at the second.

I didn't have to do any of the climbing this year, and it was Jasper who felt the wrath--and the talons--of the defensive female at the second nest. After we banded them, Nate volunteered to take them back up to the nest, but he was spared any bloodshed or bruises when I caught the big female (below).


The third nest had just a single nestling, too young to band yet. And at the last nest we checked, the female was still incubating her three eggs, one of which was hatching at the time! (see below) It was a great day (no one was carried off by the ubiquitous mosquitos), and we'll long remember this year's trip.

A Couple of Thoughts on Moral Evil

[In this post, I share a response I made to a friend about the problem of evil...]

Dear S.

Obviously, I'm not going to satisfactorily address the whole problem of evil in a single email, but let me offer some suggestions that might further the discussion. It seems that you're asking a variation of the common question "Did God create evil?", and that you're specifically interested in the sin of pride with regard to Satan.

From at least the time of Augustine, an important part of the Christian answer to this question has been that evil is not a thing of itself. Rather, it is the privation or lack of good. Just as darkness is not a created stuff (but the absence of light), so, too, with evil, which is the absence of good.

The particular evil (or sin) of pride is likewise the absence (or twisting) of proper character or sentiment. For created beings (whether angels or humans), right character (righteousness) would be humility based on an accurate understanding of the glory, wisdom, and majesty of the Creator in relationship to the created. The lack of this proper humility and understanding is what we call pride, an elevating of self in one's own eyes. This sin came about as a result of a choice by Satan (and by Adam, as well as by each one of us). Thus pride (like other evil) was not created by God but came about as a result of the choices of created beings.

This leads naturally to the question of whether God couldn't/shouldn't have created a world in which creatures do not make sinful/evil choices. Today, philosophers of all stripes (that is, across the religious spectrum) acknowledge the credibility of the "free-will argument" offered by Alvin Plantinga (Dutch Reformed philosopher teaching at Notre Dame). He claimed that the existence of created beings with free will (and most agree that freedom of choice is a generally good thing, that a universe of puppets would be a dull one) necessarily entails the possibility that those free-will beings will make wrong choices (or "instantiate evil," as the philosophers would say).

So, God did not create pride or other evil, but He did create a universe in which pride and other sins would take place as a result of the choices of the sentient beings He made. For many, this still leaves God to be blamed for the pain and suffering of this world. And this complaint might be legitimate if this world were all there is. The other important part of the Christian answer is that there is another, better world waiting, one in which there will be no sin or evil. Passing through this world, then, is merely the necessary route to that eternal one. And Scripture repeatedly says that the suffering of this world will be as nothing compared to the joy, peace, and glory of that one.

Of course, another part of the Christian answer is that the only solution to the problem of evil that is both just and holy is the substitutionary suffering and death of Christ on the cross at Calvary. In a world of pain and suffering, God took his own medicine (as C.S. Lweis has it). What's more, the Bible makes clear that God had this solution planned from "before the foundation of the world," which I take to mean before the earth was created and before Adam sinned.

As a side note, there's seems to be a significant difference between angels and humans with regard to choosing sin. We sin, but God offers us redemption. For the angels who rebelled, there does not seem to be a possibility of redemption. Moreover, it seems that angels are all by now confirmed either in their obedience or their rebellion to God (there does not seem to be any more potential for good angels to choose evil). Thus, all of the angels (both good and fallen) are spectators to rather than participants in the events by which God has redeemed and is redeeming fallen humans.

I hope some of this moves the discussion along a bit. I'd be glad to continue the dialogue.

Rick

Apologetics Lineup

The second weekend in July, I'll have the privilege of speaking at an Apologetics Conference in Bucharest. The topics list is nearing its final form, and I'm pretty excited about the way it's shaping up.

I'll begin by talking about why it is reasonable to believe in the miracles recorded in the Bible. (This one is first primarily because it sets up a talk--delivered by a Romanian apologist--about the particular miracle of the resurrection of Jesus.)

Next I'll speak on Postmodernism, showing (among other things) that its epistemology (its view of truth and our ability to know it) is self-refuting, its moral relativism unliveable, and its religious pluralism logically absurd.

Then I'm asked to talk about worldview thinking, unpacking the important components and tests of any good worldview, and then comparing Christianity to other worldview systems.

The fourth talk I've been asked to give will be a critique of naturalism in science. I'll hope to show that there is no historical precedence for seeing science as constrained by a naturalistic worldview, that in fact naturalism cannot justify or account for the very assumptions that make science a worthwhile endeavor, and that with regard to the biggest questions for science the evidence leads verwhelmingly to theistic--not naturalistic--explanations. (I'm looking forward to this one.)

The subject for a fifth talk is still under consideration (and a professor from Moody will be tackling the Reliability of the Gospels), but my weekend will conclude with an entire hour (or a bit more) of Q & A.

It should be great stuff, and I'm really looking forward to it. I've a lot to get done, however, before I leave with the team from Antioch. I'd appreciate your prayers for this event, and you can start on that anytime now.

Nate to State

Our son Nathan capped off his high school golf season with an impressive round yesterday that earned him the number two spot in the Intermountain Conference tournament and a trip next week to the Oregon state championships.

In the 36-hole tournament that began on Monday, Nathan spotted most of his competitors several strokes by shooting a 45 on the front nine. He rallied with a 2-under 34 on the back, and his 79 left him six strokes back of the leader but with several golfers ahead of him.

The weather was a big factor on Tuesday, with howling winds making the Meadow Lakes course much more difficult and causing scores to balloon. The eventual winner, Damien Telles of The Dalles, led all scorers with a 78. Nathan matched his first-day score, but this 79 was stellar given the conditions, and his 158 total left him 4 shots clear of the third-place finishers.

Nathan's qualifying was a popular outcome--he is well-liked within the area's high school golfing community--and he received a host of hive-fives, "atta-boy"s, and even hugs prior to and during the awards ceremony. Several of his fans were on hand, including his mom, sister Aurora, his brother (and constant golfing companion) Jasper, his youth pastor Kip Jones, and his current swing coach, Spud Miller. Said Nathan,

Golf's an individual sport, but you also hope for success for all those who have helped you along the way. I've been fortunate to have the support of alot of people--Dan Hiatt, Dean Ditmore, Mike Mitchell, and Spud Miller to name a few. My teammates, Nick and Kasey, have been fun to play with, and Jasper's been a brick.

The state tournament is next Monday and Tuesday at Emerald Valley in Creswell.

Christians and the News

I'm somewhat amused by the media's fascination with swine flu-related panic promotion. It's hard to see what gain there is to be had by journalists for blowing such concerns out of all proportion.

Chuck Colson offers the suggestion that the secular worldview, in which science protects us from disease and capitalism ensures our economic stability, has taken a double whammy in recent months. It's only natural, he says, that this leads to a form of real uncertainty and panic among those most committed to this view.

More generally, I used to wonder why the media tends to be so opposed to Christians and their worldview. I think the answer is a related one. It used to be (some time ago now) that news was that information that was potentially life-changing, knowledge necessary to rightly ordering one's life. Announcement of such news was infrequent and sporadic--it only occurred when real newsworthy events took place.

Today, of course, the news is a multi-billion-dollar industry, and its success depends upon convincing us that we need to tune in hourly, subscribe to the daily paper, check our internet news source at every opportunity.

And this premise, in turn, is contrary to consistent Christianity. That is, we Christians serve a Lord who transcends time, who is the same yesterday, today, and forever. He is not surprised by swine flu, by financial down-turns, or even by horrendous terrorist attacks, much less by the sorts of things that fill the headlines most days. The God of Christianity is in sovereign control of all that goes on.

That being the case, we who follow Christ should be above the panic and the sensationalism that are used by journalists to sell their offerings. I'm not sure at what level of consciousness this understanding is held among jounalists. But I suspect that at some level, most journalists realize that if culture were filled with Christians who consistently lived with assurance of God's sovereignty over all things, it would be a whole lot tougher to find buyers for most of what passes for news these days.

Last Class

This week we put the wraps on a semester of discussing "Science and the Bible." It was a varied group of interested and enthusiastic folks, and I thoroughly enjoyed the whole experience. As a small sample of the great subjects we covered over the 14 weeks, here's the three (or so) topics with which we wrestled in the last 2-hour class...

The origin of human beings--We compared the evolutionary and biblical ideas about how to explain humanity, and assessed each idea with regard to the paleontological, archaeological, and genetic evidence.

Hebrew genealogies, with special attention to those in Genesis 5 and 11 and whether they can be used to arrive at a date for the creation of Adam.

The origin of consciousness and the mind/body problem--We looked at the materialist and the dualist understandings of consciousness, and examined the evidence for the existence of an immaterial mind and the existence and immortality of human souls.

Just a typical class, and the students hung with me all the way. I can't wait to teach this course again in a year or two.

Hebrew New Testament?

I've blogged quite a bit about the reliability of the New Testament, answering a variety of claims meant to undermine confidence in our ability to know the truth about Jesus. But I was recently asked to address a claim about which I have not previously blogged, the claim that the New Testament was originally written in Hebrew, and thus that much is lost in the alleged translation to the Greek.

The run-up to this argument involves a good deal of truth. The first premise is that the authors of the New Testament were Jewish, that they thought and conversed in Hebrew, and that the Greek New Testament reflects this.

I (in agreement with all New Testament scholars of whom I am aware) am perfectly willing to grant this. In fact, all of the authors of the New Testament were Jewish. The possible exception is Luke, the author of the gospel that bears his name and the Acts of the Apostles. But if Luke was a Gentile by birth, he nonetheless had affiliatd himself with Judaism, had become a Jew, as it were. Moreover, the vast majority of the sayings, teachings, and conversations recorded in the gospels were originally uttered in Hebrew (or Aramaic).

So the point--and it's an extremely important one--that we cannot understand the New Testament aright without an appreciation of its Jewishness, is perfectly true. This is not, however, a terribly new or original idea. While there have been times in church history when the Jewishness of Christianity's founders has been forgotten, ignored, or downplayed, this is not the case today. Theologians and lay Christians alike are embracing the need to understand the New Testament Scriptures in their 1st-century Jewish context.

The second premise involved in the claim at issue is that Hebrew was not--as used to be believed--a dead (or at least unwritten) language in the 1st century AD. The claimant points to the Dead Sea scrolls and to recently-discovered coins that verify the use of written Hebrew from this time period. I don't really know how to respond to this. Never having believed the contrary, I guess I fail to see what significance establishment of this premise carries.

In the claim to which my attention was called, the leap is made from these premises to the conclusion that the New Testament books were originally written in Hebrew. I say 'leap' because this conclusion simply does not follow from the premises.

First of all, the claim would seem not even to apply to the epistles of Paul. Paul was among the best-educated of Jews of his day, and was fluent in Greek. Since most of his letters were written to churches of mixed ethnicity or primarily Gentile believers, it is beyond dispute that they were originally in Greek. Thus it would appear to be the gospels themselves that are the focus of the written-in-Hebrew claim.

What is overlooked in this claim is the oral nature of the Jewish culture of Jesus' day. For the early church, it was the telling and retelling of them that served to pass on the sayings of Jesus and the stories of the events of His life, of His death and resurrection. At first, this recounting likely took place almost exclusively in Hebrew, the native tongue of the majority of believers. But as Gentiles began to convert to Christianity--and as Jesus Himself called Paul and others to carry the message to non-Jews, these events were increasingly communicated in Greek, the lengua franca of the region. It was only when the eyewitnesses to these events began to grow old, or to face imprisonment or execution, that they recognized the need to record them for posterity. By this time, the epistles of Paul (and others) were already circulating among the churches--and they had been written in Greek. Under these circumstances, it was only natural that the gospels were also written in the language accessible to people throughout the known world.

This is the traditional understanding of the writing of the New Testament, and the historical and manuscript evidence overwhelmingly supports it. Were there any evidence of manuscripts in Hebrew that predate the Greek manuscripts, then this traditional understanding might be called into question. But there is not. The existence in the texts of Hebraisms, of Hebrew idioms and thought patterns, is perfectly consistent with the traditional understanding (since it acknowledges the Jewishness of the NT authors).

In short, there is abundant evidence to support the well-recognized fact that the authors of the New Testament were Jewish in their thought, and that Hebrew was their primary language. It is imperative that we who would correctly interpret and understand their writings attend to the cultural and historical context of 1st-century Judaism. But the evidences that yield that conclusion are wholly insufficient to warrant the additional conclusion that the New Testament was first written in Hebrew.

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.