Creation

How you relate to animals is a revealing indicator of your worldview—even of your character. By virtue of our nearly unlimited powers over animals, how we treat them is no trivial matter. It is a litmus test of mind and soul.

We may note, on one radical fringe, those who speak of animal rights as if animals were superior to humans. Such people vandalize biology labs that experiment on animals in the interest of humans, throw paint on fur coats, and burn homes built in forested areas. Less maliciously, but just as tellingly, are those who wave mosquitoes away rather than slap them dead, tiptoe around ants, practice catch-and-release methods with mice found in their homes, and view the ingestion of animal meat as complicity in murder.

On the other radical fringe are those who torture and abuse animals. We witness this on the small scale when someone is exposed by the media for cruelty to a pet. On a grander scale, cruelty to animals has become a way of life at some farm factories.

One of the serious social implications of the demise of the family farm has been the rise of a few corporations that produce meat in the most cost-efficient manner. Here, executives in air conditioned offices pour over spreadsheets, pressing for higher profit margins. Their policies force workers, for instance, to confine millions of hogs to live out their days in 22 inch wide metal stalls in which they cannot turn around, never see the light of day, will never set foot on earth, and, due to medical “advances,” can now be raised in conditions that by all rights should kill them. And this is to say nothing of the genetic engineering quest to produce (and even clone) such hideous creatures as featherless chickens and stress-free hogs (zombies) to increase profit margins by minimizing farming hassles. (See Matthew Scully’s book, [amazon 0312261470], St. Martin’s Press, 2002).

Francis Collins, the former Director of the Human Genome Project (HGP) and now the Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has risen to national prominence in recent years. His scientific acumen combined with his rather public confession of Christian faith has garnered both excitement by Christians, as seen in these Christianity Today articles (here and here), and interest among unbelievers, as in this exchange with Richard Dawkins in Time.

But not everyone is excited about Collins’ recent appointment by President Obama to direct NIH. Sam Harris, the author of the atheistic diatribes against faith, The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation, questions Collins’ fitness for NIH due to the geneticist’s Christian faith in this NY Times piece. While I don’t question Collins’ fitness for his present position, I do question how much he should be viewed as an ally of Bible-believing Christians. His foreword in a new book exposes his disdain for anyone who would take the creation account in Genesis 1-2 as an accurate description of the beginning of the world. Collins pens a four-page foreword for Karl Giberson’s Saving Darwin: How to Be a Christian and Believe in Evolution (Harper One, 2008). In this rather strained attempt to harmonize Christianity and Darwinism, Giberson stretches the limits of reason and logic in an attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable. His book is introduced by Collins’ similarly tortured attempt to elevate science way beyond its boundaries and to denigrate anyone who supports Intelligent Design (ID), young-earth creationism or virtually anything regarding the early chapters of Genesis.

Collins describes ID’s challenge to evolution’s ability to explain irreducibly complex structures in living organisms as pressing on “despite the lack of any meaningful support in the scientific community” (p. v). This statement is simply not true and masks not only the many scientists who question Darwinism’s explanation of irreducible complexity but also the almost universal pressure on scientists to toe the party line concerning Darwinism.

On Saturday, November 21, I attended what is something of a rarity these days—a prophecy conference. Dr. John Whitcomb spoke from the book of Daniel, focusing on the prophetic visions of Nebuchadnezzar and Daniel himself. I was there because I wanted to interview Dr. Whitcomb and the conference location was just a few hours from where I live. So the event itself wasn’t the main draw.

This is the 13th and final installment of this series. See parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 & 10, and 11 & 12.

After his ministry in Athens, Paul journeyed west and south to Corinth, where he spent 18 months (Acts 18:1-11). Notoriously immoral, this city was also obsessed with the “wisdom” of the Greeks, though the Athenians would probably have viewed them as being on a lower level than themselves in this respect.

Now let us see Paul’s strategy in reaching people for Christ in this city. Did he confront the Corinthians with spectacular and undeniable “design” arguments to win them to the Savior? No.

And I, brethren, when I came to you, came not with excellency of speech or of wisdom, declaring unto you the testimony of God. For I determined not to know any thing among you, save Jesus Christ, and Him crucified. And I was with you in weakness, and in fear, and in much trembling. And my speech and my preaching was not with enticing words of man’s wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power: That your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God (1 Cor. 2:1-5, KJV).

(See Parts 9 & 10)

(See Part 7, Part 8)

Part 9: Logic and Evidences

Do we really think that we can change the hearts and minds of men by the overwhelming logic and evidences for the intelligent design of the living world and the universe around us?

Editor’s Note: This article is reprinted with permission from Doug Kutilek’s free newsletter “As I See It,” a monthly electronic magazine, and appears here with some editing. AISI is sent free to all who request it by writing to the editor at [email protected].

Lastly, I could show fight [vigorously advocate] on natural selection having done and doing more for the progress of civilisation than you seem inclined to admit. Remember what risk the nations of Europe ran, not so many centuries ago, of being overwhelmed by the Turks, and how ridiculous such an idea now is! The more civilized so-called Caucasian races have beaten the Turkish hollow in the struggle for existence. Looking to the world at no very distant date, what an endless number of the lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilised races throughout the world.
—Charles Darwin (Darwin, Francis. The Life of Charles Darwin. 1902. Ed. John Murray. London: Senate, 1995., p. 64).

The volume from which this quotation is taken is essentially an abridgment by the author (one of Darwin’s sons) of his own longer 2-volume work (which contained considerable autobiographical material by Charles Darwin). It is not a hostile, fault-finding attack on Darwin, or a “Mommy Dearest” exposé by an alienated child, but a strongly pro-Darwin account. Its casual revealing of Darwin’s inner thoughts and attitudes regarding the races of mankind is therefore most telling.

“Natural selection”—the death and genetic elimination and extermination of “inferior” individuals and races in the mad scramble for survival—is viewed by Darwin, the founder and proponent of this view, as a great good, not merely among fishes and ferns and ferrets, but among people. Naturally, and arrogantly, assuming the superiority of his own “Caucasian” race (and of course himself, especially), he views with mirth the absurdity of the fear the white Europeans had in the 15th century of being overwhelmed by the Muslim Turks, which he viewed as a decidedly inferior race of people. And notice, it was not merely white hegemony that Darwin gloried in, but victory in “the struggle for existence” (emphasis added).

Read Part 7.

At Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem, multiple thousands of Jews “began to rejoice and praise God with a loud voice for all the mighty works that they had seen” (Luke 19:37 KJV).

(See Part 6)

For more than three years, the Son of God, the true designer and creator of all things in heaven and on the earth, personally (and through the preaching of John the Baptist, the 12 apostles and the 70 messengers) offered to Israel the magnificent kingdom that had been promised to them for many centuries (i.e., Isa. 2, 11, 35 and 65; cf. Alva J. McClain, [Winona Lake, IN: BMH Books, 1959]).

This genuine offer was contingent on one thing only: repentance (i.e., a radical change of heart toward God) on the part of Israel. And no one had any valid reason for doubting His true identity. His claim to be Israel’s divine Messiah was overwhelmingly confirmed by hundreds of spectacular sign-miracles. None of the “fingerprints of God” that we see today, from microscopic flagella to the galaxies above us, can compare to the persuasive power of those supernatural works. The Lord Jesus said: “the works which the Father hath given Me to finish, the same works that I do, bear witness of Me, that the Father hath sent Me” (John 5:36 KJV).

Nicodemus, the outstanding theologian of Israel, confessed to Jesus: “Rabbi, we know that Thou art a teacher come from God: for no man can do these miracles that Thou doest, except God be with him” (John 3:2).

But the nation of Israel, with some exceptions, rejected these great Messianic sign-miracles. Our Lord told them: “If I had not done among them the works which none other man did, they had not had sin: but now have they both seen and hated both me and my Father.” (John 15:24). The Jewish leaders even attributed His miracles to the power of Satan (John 8:48, 52).