By Lee Duigon
January 12, 2012
NewsWithViews.com
Christian ‘intellectuals’ turn against the Bible
St. Paul wrote to the Christians in Rome, “[L]et God be true, but every man a liar” (Romans 3:4). In other words, folks, who are you going to believe—God, or a human being infected with Original Sin, possessing incomplete and only partly accurate information filtered through his personal prejudices, and subject to every temptation in the world?
Thanks to a heads-up from General T.C. Pinckney’s Baptist Banner, we have heard of a number of “Christian intellectuals”—why is it that every time you hear the word “intellectual,” you know the next thing you’re going to hear will be something really stupid?—who have decided that “science”—another badly abused word—is right, and Evolution is the truth, and that the Bible is hopelessly, totally wrong about the origin of the human race.
As Calvin College theology professor John Schneider put it, before the college sacked him, there never was an Adam, no Eve, no Garden of Eden, no serpent, and no Fall of man. “Evolution,” he told National Public Radio, invoking the magic word, “makes it pretty clear that in nature, and in the moral experience of human beings, there never was any such paradise to be lost.”
Don’t let the door hit you in the can on your way out, professor.
There are, of course, just a few little bitty things that Evolution does not make clear at all.
*How does non-living material suddenly start living in the first place? This has never been observed in nature, and although scientists have tried innumerable times to make it happen in the laboratory, all of those attempts have failed.
*If evolution is a force or a pattern permeating all of nature, why do so many forms of life—most of them, if you count bacteria—never seem to evolve at all? Horseshoe crabs, ferns, cockroaches, etc., have all had, supposedly, jillions of years to evolve into intellectuals, and yet stubbornly persist in being horseshoe crabs, ferns, and cockroaches. (And please, no nasty cracks about intellectuals evolving into cockroaches…)
*As, say, an animal’s forelimb gradually “evolves” into a flipper, at what point does it become useless as either a foreleg or a flipper? Wouldn’t such “halfway-there” animals be gravely handicapped? And if the change happens all at once, how does the mother animal with legs raise a bunch of baby animals with flippers? And where do they find mates so they can reproduce? Really, the whole thing is just too silly for words.
Meanwhile, Christian theology professors seem to be evolving into all sorts of foolish things—goddess worshippers, gay activists, and pathetic creatures who court the world’s approval by taking sides with Darwin. All they have to do, to win the esteem of “scientists,” is to jettison their Christian doctrine.
They call this “reconfiguring” the Christian faith—they have to make something up to replace the Book of Genesis. The reward is, you get to be on NPR and they don’t laugh at you until after you leave the studio. There may be another kind of reward waiting for these persons a bit farther down the line, but we’ll leave the wailing and gnashing of teeth till later.
At least Esau got a bowl of soup when he sold out his birthright.
Who is more likely to be telling the truth—Eternal God, or some guy who wants to be an intellectual? But you can’t be an intellectual if you believe in Adam and Eve! They’ll laugh you off the stage.
I will not stoop, here, to debate the truth of the Bible. I presuppose it to be the Word of God, and therefor true. I believe that God created Adam and Eve and housed them in a paradise, until of their own free will they chose to disobey Him—by which act sin and death came into the world, and from which curse we are redeemed by Jesus Christ the Son of God. These are truths, from which I reason downward and outward. They are true because God says they are, and God Himself is truth.
What is to be gained by selling out to a 19th-century scientific theory that’s only kept alive because an ungodly world has such a huge political investment in it? Darwinism made godlessness respectable—so much so, that today, Christian intellectuals try to win respectability by hopping into bed with Darwinism.
But they will never win this world’s unqualified approval until they stand in front of God’s people and declare, “There is no God, no Christ, no resurrection, no forgiveness, no commandment, no law, no eternal life, no answered prayer, no hope!”
They’re already halfway there.
Why do we argue with those who have no ground to stand on? Think about this: every day-and all day, evolutionists deny their own arguments.
God said: “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved,”(from the death penalty and more). This, my friend, is a cause and effect statement that has been proven true for centuries by millions of people.
Furthermore, this is, as evolutionists affirm all day, every day, a cause and effect universe. why else would they continue to say (and they cannot help themselves, “Because of this, because of that, because of something else,”?
This is so obviously true, who can deny it? This being a cause and effect universe; a cause and effect universe must have a “Causer”! How much clearer can it be?
When the evolutionists begin leaving out of their every day conversation that one word: “BECAUSE,” then they will begin to convince me they have at least one leg to stand on. But they cannot and never will be able to get that word, the word “because” (or its equivlalent) that condemns their every premise, completely out of their lives. Let them try!
Dorothy, here’s why I argue with evolutionists. I used to be one. And the reason I was an evolutionist was because I never, ever heard any arguments against it. It was handed down as something that was true and could not be questioned, and it never occurred to me, until I was over 50, to doubt it.
Dear Lee: amazing! God works in different ways. At 18 I was without any Bible knowledge and pretty naive. Of course, I’d heard about evolution but I could’nt understand all those “columns” and didn’t believe a word of it!
Dorothy, Laura, it’s possible they really do believe this humbug. “The fool hath said in his heart, ‘There is no God.'” (Ps. 14:1) In the academic world, including seminaries, you can’t throw a brick without hitting a nincompoop.
When I hear things like this, I think about the Witch in The Silver Chair. She knows full well that Aslan, the Overworld, the sun, etc. exist, but she still tries to argue and ‘reason’ the children out of believing in such things. These so-called intellectuals know that the Bible is true, but they still try to convince us that it is not.
Dear Laura: you are absolutely correct! Yes, they know better and refuse to admit it. Paul said the same thing over 2000 years ago in Romans chap. one! The more I read and study the Bible the more wonderful it becomes. I’ve been doing that for over 70 years (73 to be exact-when I became a Christian at the age of 18.)
A brilliant article, summarizing many cogent arguments in a few pithy observations — or, as Alexander Pope would put it, “What oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed.”
I, too, always took evolution for granted because I was taught it as dogma. But then I started realizing that too many “missing links” were in fact missing, as well as some of the problems you mention above. And that was before I became a Christian. The Bible account actually makes a lot more sense and accounts for more of what we know of history and geology, as well has human behavior, even though it, too, leaves some puzzles (e.g., where did all those people come from for Cain to wander among?). But even the Bible’s puzzles are solvable without resorting to the kind of denial and fabrication required to defend the theory of evolution.
There’s a lot of grist for the old mill when it comes to this subject. The arguments about creation vs. evolution are well known and other than agreeing with Lee’s three main pints of argument, I’m not going to weigh in. However, there is one point that really stands out to me and that a theology professor would state such things.
When I looked up John Schneider, I found a picture of a man holding a book entitled “The Good Of Affluence”. I doubt that this was a matter of chance. Like so many other areas, churches have, in far too many cases, decided to follow a path that guarantees popularity, such as the so-called Prosperity Gospel and have brought along some other non-biblical teachings for the ride, such as a relaxation of biblical moral standards and even evolution.
For my purposes, the danger here is in following human leaders as a guidepost. It’s fine to fellowship, and even commanded in scripture, but allowing human voices to override the information found in the bible is quite another matter. Quite simply, to follow human voices and allow them to contradict the Bible is an abandonment of our personal responsibility.
Illusionists employ a formula for bringing an audience to a state where they can be easily tricked by an illusion. They start small, with simple tricks and they keep up a patter, so that there’s no time for the audience to think about what they are seeing. Eventually, the audience is in a state which makes them susceptible to suggestion and a skilled illusionist can convince a room full of spectators that they just saw something happen which is impossible in the real world.
Religious figures can have the same effect on people, whether intentional of not. If a religious leader develops a following, it becomes quite easy for that leader to start believing their own patter. Once that happens, a scripture can be interpreted to mean the opposite of what it clearly states and the followers of that leader will not only believe said interpretation, but will promote it to others. However, in the final analysis, we as individuals are responsible for ourselves and we should not imagine that we can lay the blame at the feet of some spiritual leader. Matthew 32:9 And call no man your father on earth, for you have one Father, who is in heaven. 10 Neither be called instructors, for you have one instructor, the Christ.
I was raised by my mother to be a Christian (although my dad was an atheist until near the end of his life when he accepted Jesus’ gift) but the old Earth teaching convinced me the Bible cannot be trusted, so I looked elsewhere. A few years later I came across young Earth scientists and they made more sense. I could once again trusted the Bible as Truth. Who says God couldn’t have thrown the galaxies to their positions in the flash of a moment?
Evolution has never made sense to me. For one thing, if evolution were true, couldn’t we expect to find all phases of all creatures evolving all the time? Instead, we don’t even find leaps! For another, the fossil record doesn’t support it at all. A snail is now and always was a snail. People sometimes use the mistaken argument that for instance desert dwellers have ‘evolved’ and are able to dwell in the tundra, thereby mistaking adaptation for evolution. God’s version of ‘In the beginning’ makes so much more sense than anything ‘scientists’ can invent.
How come cockroaches never evolved into climbit scientists? (This is what they call a straight line.)
Exceptional comparison!