Contributions of Christianity: A Matter of Perspective?

Some regard suffering as a reason to disbelieve in God, while others have found a basis for belief within the same horrid conditions. Writer Paul Copan relates the experience of Canadian Broadcasting Corp journalist, Brian Stewart, and his “slow, reluctant conversion”:

• “I’ve never reached a war zone, or famine group or crisis anywhere where some church organization was not there long before me… I’m often asked if I lost belief in God covering events like Ethiopia, then called ‘the worst hell on earth.’ Actually, like others before me, it was precisely in such hells that I rediscovered religion.” (Christian Research Journal, Vol 37/Number 04, 46-47)

Often, the same events that turn some away from a faith in Christ, turns others in the opposite direction. In the process, some have attempted to denigrate the contributions of Christianity. Research Fellow Philip J. Sampson writes about how the same phenomenon can be interpreted in opposite ways:

• “Disappointed in not finding the field of licentiousness quite so open as formerly, they [the Western traders] will not give credit to a morality which they do not wish to practice or to a [Christian] religion which they undervalue, if not despise.” (6 Modern Myths about Christianity & Western Civilization, 111)

Consequently, this disappointment gave vent to charges that the missionaries were guilty of “cultural imperialism.” However, even Charles Darwin confessed that worthwhile fruit was born out of this form of “imperialism”:

• “Human sacrifice…infanticide…bloody wars, where the conquerors spared neither women nor children—all these have been abolished…by the introduction of Christianity.” (110)

Our oppositional opinions are often the product of oppositional worldviews. While some have insisted that the missionaries collaborated with the colonial powers, even to the extent of establishing plantations, historian Ruth Tucker places these appearances into an entirely different context:

• Missionaries in Africa were opposed to slavery from an early period, and they used a variety of means to oppose it, including buying slaves and establishing plantations for them to work on. (From Jerusalem to Irian Jaya,102)

• The missionaries insisted on treating native people as human beings who are entitled to the protection of the law, and this rubbed salt into the wound. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that colonists and traders often opposed missions.” (103)

• Traders and colonists resisted the evangelism of native people, seeing conversion as the first step to indigenous people gaining access to the resources of Western culture and hence to the power that colonists wished to keep for themselves…Native people who wished to break free of the settler’s stranglehold and worship God were immediately persecuted by the white traders. (103-104)

Many other historians credit the missionaries with opposition to the abuses of colonialism:

• The missionaries [to New Guinea] from the start found themselves in bitter opposition to the white traders and exploiters… [who] placed men sick of the measles on various islands in order to destroy the population through disease. (Stephen Neill, History of Christian Missions, 355

Our new brand of militant atheists compete among themselves to indict Christianity’s impact on society, even to the point of charging “child abuse.” However, there have been many non-Christians who also have noted the contributions of the much-maligned Christianity. Copan cites the example of the late postmodern atheist Jacques Derrida:

• “Today the cornerstone of international law is the sacred… the concept of crime against humanity is a Christian concept and I think there would be no such thing in the law today without the Christian heritage.” (46)

Copan also cites “one Chinese scholar representing one of China’s premier academic research organizations:

• “In the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity. This is why the West has been so powerful. The Christian moral foundation of social and cultural life was what made possible… the successful transition to democratic politics. We don’t have any doubt about this.” (46)

Copan calls atheist Jurgen Habermas “perhaps Europe’s most prominent philosopher.” However, even he admits:

• “Christianity and nothing else is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilization. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source.”

Clearly, our differing perspectives are our eyeglasses, determining what we see. However, this doesn’t mean that it’s all relative. Instead, Jesus taught that we walk around with logs in our eyes, making it easy for us to wrongly criticize. Yes, there is a reality to see out there, but first we have to deal with our blindness – that oft-invisible log (Matthew 7:1-5).

The Engine of Natural Selection

Darwin had argued that the engine of natural selection built the most complex organs one step at a time, each step conferring an adaptive survival advantage. However, design theorists have argued that this mechanism cannot produce. They countered that any organ or structure is irreducibly complex – that they could not be constructed one step at a time. Instead, many integrated parts had to be present before an organism could derive any profit from the gradual building process.

Michael Behe demonstrated the principle of irreducible complexity by comparing a new beneficial structure with a mouse trap. In order for the mouse trap to be functional and useful, it required a minimum of five parts. Without just one of them, the trap would be of no use.

There are millions examples of irreducible complexity. Arguably, every organ or structure is irreducibly complex. A spider web is a good example of this. Von Vett and Malone write:

• Spiders are capable of producing one of the finest filaments strands known to man. These threads can be 10,000 times thinner than a strand of human hair, yet the silk is five times stronger than an equivalent weight of steel cable. Scientists have yet to learn to synthesize an equally strong artificial silk nor do they know how a spider keeps from clogging its spinnerets as the emerging silk immediately solidifies upon exposure to oxygen. (Inspired Evidence)

Von Vett and Malone marvel how the pre-spider could have evolved such an incredible substance, but also have simultaneously evolved the mechanisms and instincts necessary to use it effectively without getting caught in its own web.

In order for the spider to derive any advantage out of his silk, he would also have required the ability to make a web out of it. And these abilities and organs had to exist simultaneously! To have the silk without the instinct and tools to make the web would not have given him any advantage. Instead, the silk would have been a useless encumbrance.

What the Fossils Say about Darwin

If common descent has taken place, it should most directly be demonstrated in the fossil record, as one paleontology textbook asserts:

• Fossils are the only direct record of the history of life.

However, the fossil record refuses to conform to evolutionary orthodoxy. Darwin even admitted his uneasiness about this evidence. However, he expected that future finds would eventually fill in the gaps by unearthing transitional forms, but these hopes have never been realized. Instead, the gaps have been further highlighted, as the finds have consistently lined up on only one side of the gap. One evolutionist acknowledged:

• Most of the animal phyla that are represented in the fossil record first appear “fully formed”…The fossil record is therefore of no help with respect to understanding the origin and early diversification of the animal phyla. (Barnes, et al., The Invertebrates: A New Synthesis, 3^rd Edition, 9-10)

Darwin had thought that the absence of predecessors – ancestral forms – was due to their not being fossilized because, being softer, they couldn’t be fossilized as easily. However, since Darwin, many tiny soft-bodied fossils have been unearthed below the “fully formed” phyla. Stephen C. Meyer explains the devastating implications of these finds for the theory of evolution:

• If paleontologists can find tiny fossilized cells in these far older and rarer formations, shouldn’t they also be able to find some ancestral forms of the Cambrian animals in younger and more abundant sedimentary rocks. (Darwin’s Doubts)

The late Stephen Jay Gould refers to this absence as “the embarrassment of a record that seems to show so little of evolution.” Casey Luskin points out that this same absence of predecessors is also found among flowering plants…:

• As one paper states, “Angiosperms appear rather suddenly in the fossil record…with no obvious ancestors”…Many mammals orders appear in a similarly explosive way. Paleontologist Niles Eldredge explains that “there are all sorts of gaps: absence of gradationally intermediate ‘transitional’ forms between species, but also between larger groups – between, say, families of carnivores, or the orders of mammals.” A prominent ornithology textbook observes the “explosive evolution” of major living bird groups.

Luskin summarizes the findings:

• A straightforward reading of the fossil record consistently shows a pattern of abrupt explosions of new types of organisms. (Salvo, Fall 2013, 51)

Evolution Did It!

How you ever heard scientific creationism or intelligent design (ID) disparaged as the “Goddidit Theory.” What does this mean? The evolutionist claims that ID is not science but a veiled way of saying “God did it. End of story!” as if ID refuses to engage the same evidences as do all other scientists.

However, this charge can just as easily be reversed into the “Evolutiondidit Theory.” Nobel laureate in physics, Robert B. Laughlin, wrote:

• Evolution by natural selection, for instance, which Charles Darwin originally conceived as a great theory, has lately come to function more as an antitheory, called upon to cover up embarrassing experimental shortcomings and legitimize findings that are at best questionable and at worst not even wrong. Your protein defies the laws of mass action? Evolution did it! Your complicated mess of chemical reactions turns into a chicken? Evolution! The human brain works on logical principles no computer can emulate? Evolution is the cause! (A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down, New York: Basic Books, 2005, 168-69)

Is there therefore no difference between ID and the theory of evolution? At its core, ID sets forth an adequate cause to explain all of the marvelous phenomena of this universe – life, fine-tuning, the laws of physics, DNA, consciousness, freewill – but evolution can only say “it just happened naturally!” Naturally? Where did the natural come from?

When God is eliminated, a God-substitute – the natural laws - must be found! However, what was so wrong with the original?

Theistic Evolution: Marrying off Jesus to Darwin

(This represents a response I made to a theistic-evolution blog, BioLogos)

Thanks for acknowledging that we encounter great problems when we try to put Jesus and Darwin together. It is vexing to dialogue with a Christian who pretends that they go together like peanut butter and jelly.

I think that we’d both agree that, despite the challenges, we must somehow seek to reconcile the physical world with the Bible, recognizing that they both represent God’s singular truth. We’d also agree that this endeavor is made even more difficult because we “see in part.”

We both probably work from what we know and try to apply it to what we don’t know. We take what is most certain and use it to illuminate what is less certain. However, I think we take divergent paths from this point. While you might start with the modern consensus of the community of science as certainty, I start with Scripture, as Scripture mandates (2 Cor. 10:4-5; John 15:5-8). It becomes my lens through which I see everything else.

You might regard this as putting my head in the sand and refusing to take an unbiased look at the real world. However, I see Scripture as a good pair of glasses that brings the world into sharp focus. In fact everyone wears his own lens. The question becomes this: “Does my lens obscure or illuminate what’s out there? Does Darwin blind or lead research in fruitful ways?”

Several esteemed archeologists have claimed that their diggings had been profitably guided by Scripture. Scientists have stated likewise. Karl Giberson even had an interesting post on this subject. (Please see my July post, “Christians can’t do Science!”)

Our paradigms exercise tremendous influence over our selection and organization of the facts. This helps to explain our variant ideas. While you regard evolution as an unassailable fortress, I see it as a tottering façade. Likewise, two people can write my autobiography; one will make me into a saint, while the other can have me looking like a rank sinner, all depending upon the facts they choose. This same principle pertains whether in regards to science, history, or any other discipline. (I don’t mean to relativize the facts, but merely the way we humans make use of the facts.)

Here’s one example out of many. While you, choosing certain supporting facts, may regard dinosaurs as having pre-dated humans by millions of years, Creationists point to other evidences—ancient drawings of people fighting dinosaurs, dinosaur recorded history, a footprint containing both species, DNA found in a dinosaur remains.

You write about how many disciplines are bringing together convergent evidence for evolution. Evolutionists point out the agreement between several systems or measures of dating the earth and its objects. However, we need to see this claim in light of the fact that there are literally thousands, even millions, of possible ways to date. Each object moves or deteriorates at its own formulaic way and rate. So each object becomes a possible source to assess dates, given certain presuppositions. Creationists have pointed to many of these—the movement of the moon towards the earth, the deterioration of Saturn’s rings, soil formation, sediment deposits. The list is potentially endless.

If all these possible measures exist, it becomes easy for us to cherry pick which measures agree with our hypothesis and forget the rest. It also becomes easy to find agreement for evolution between the various disciplines. Besides, there is a lot of energy, time and resources being invested to prove this very thing. I would be surprised if they didn’t find oodles of evidence in this unbalanced manner.

It’s like an insurance company going to court with their team of lawyers. How could they not build an overwhelming case for their client!