A Puzzle Piece in the Narrative: Evolution understood in its Context

Hello everyone, it's been a long time, and a crazy yet blessed year. I won't promise to return to regular monthly posts any time soon (that's the kind of thing you read in the most recent post... of a blog that hasn't been updated since 2013) but I have been pondering a lot of things these months and have several posts queued up. 

I had begun to write a post on evangelism, and part of it was going to be on how Christians from more traditional/Bible belt areas often fixate on the creation vs. evolution, and whether that was a critical component for helping more people know God's truth and decide to follow Him, or something that was best left until after people already saw scripture as an authority.

After I'd already written a good deal, I was listening to a podcast describing the development of humanity from the perspective of what we might call an "optimistic atheist." It occurred to me, as it often does here in Taiwan, that to most of the world, the worldview that evangelical believers and those raised in that subculture take for granted, is utterly marginal and not immediately easy to follow. We find ourselves talking at cross-purposes, with utterly different priorities, and not knowing how to get them to the point where they have lots of blanks that we can enthusiastically fill in with the answers we learned at church over the years.

So here I want first to look at evolution and how it forms a critical segment of the weltanschauung, the comprehensive worldview (a person's individual way of looking at the world and life and their place in it) of the modern secular world. I'll then explain why, although there are "theistic evolutionists" who believe God used evolution to get things to the state we see them now, I am not one of them, and I find evolution in the broad sense of the theory to be an impossible explanation of reality, though I also wouldn't introduce that debate as an evangelistic tool except in really specific and limited situations. Here we go!

1. The Tenants vs. the Landlord

Let us think of the modern scientific movement in this way: It is like someone who woke up one day in a huge house with multiple wings and many tenants, suddenly realizing it's a filthy wreck but could be otherwise, and set about putting everything in order and recruiting other people to help. First came the great task of figuring out categories for things and gathering some cleaning supplies, and then once the first few big rooms were swept and sorted (gradually attracting pleased and impressed tenants who didn't know the house could look so nice), there was the adventure of digging into dark closets and going into attics and finding all kinds of interesting bits of furniture and further impressing everyone by getting the lights to turn on and cleaning the moldy vents that were giving everyone the sniffles.

Christians are like people living in that same house who have received notice from the landlord that the foundation is compromised and the whole thing is going to be demolished, and that having violated the original rental agreement we are in fact now all illegal squatters. As the landlord is a generous man, however, he explains that if we are willing to sign an updated contract in good faith, sight unseen, we'll receive rooms in the new development that's taking its place. In the mean time, we don't know how much longer we'll need to live in this old house, so there's some value in keeping it decent until we move. Admittedly too, due to the efforts of the cleaners, it's a much more comfortable place than it had been before the cleaning revolution started. But in the grand scheme of things the house itself is not quite so urgent a priority as securing a spot in the new one that will take its place. The thoughts of these people, then, are much more concerned with the Landlord and the state of their agreement with him than with efforts to renovate new wings of the current house. They frequently neglect the house exploration projects, are lackluster in their praise of new renovation developments, and try to persuade more people to sign the new contract with the landlord.

But if you had found great meaning and joy in taking messy rooms and leaving them well-ordered and clean, had your imagination seized by the adventure of exploring the high attics and mysterious cellars of this house, and yet you found people kept refusing to help you on the basis of this landlord no one has actually seen, in your mind the task in front of you easily takes precedence over this hypothetical landlord, or whether a so-called demolition is impending or not. Increasingly, you will have a vested interest in convincing as many people as possible that there is no landlord, therefore the house must be kept clean and the explorations must continue because we are not illegal squatters but in fact the owners of the house who can make it into a palace if everyone can work together long enough. Perhaps even the foundations, which have shown signs of instability, can one day be repaired, once the deepest basements have been explored and cleared. But that would require everyone's help, and the more people who sign the new contract and give up on the house projects, the less resources they have for their work, the fewer willing hands.

Many residents find this convincing; it's hard to argue against investing more in this increasingly comfortable and impressive living space on the basis of an unseen landlord who apparently wants to tear the place down, and why should the legality of an outdated rental agreement take precedence over the reality of lots of people currently occupying the space? Their belief shifts from the priority of trusting the Landlord to the priority of working on the house as it is. And surely, if there is indeed a Landlord, he could only agree that they've done such a good job with the place that they don't need his promises of a better home to replace it.

(Indeed, some of them argue persuasively, if there is a Landlord, perhaps this was his real goal to begin with? An imaginary threat of demolition and imaginary motivation of a idealistic new home, all to get people to stop slacking, rise up together, and turn this house into a palatial estate that needs no replacement?)

2. Evolution as Narrative

Scientists, and perhaps even more so science groupies, the apologeticists of scientism who tolerate no doubts regarding its salvific power for humankind, don't like it when you use "belief" with regards to theories. Evolution is considered a theory, or a sort of meta-theory, which isn't seriously questioned by most scientists. (that fact is considered the end of the argument for people who think truth is determined by popular vote). For interested parties, problems with evolution as the best explanation of our planet teeming with life (while having not yet found a single alien microbe or bacterium anywhere else) are dismissed as "gaps" which subsequent information will fill. This is not really how science is supposed to work, but so long as it's humans who do science, story will reign supreme.

The idea of Story is important here because evolution is less a theory than a kind of scientific narrative; the story of how the biological world we see came to be, which takes the puzzle pieces obtainable by scientific research and puts them together in a coherent way. From early days (or at least since the days of Cuvier and the French Revolution), the rigor of the scientific endeavor has been accompanied by growing public interest in the "adventure of science" in figuring out the world; exploring the mysterious, beautiful, and dangerous house into which we find ourselves born as tenants. (I mention the French because they caught the science bug early and strongly; French authors Victor Hugo and especially Jules Verne, one of my favorite authors in middle school, wrote enthusiastically about the prospects of science to bring light to darkened humanity. Their well-written sentiments seem beautifully naive after the events of the 20th century)

This public interest which took place alongside the secularization of Europe (for interrelated reasons much too complicated to explore in depth here) came at the right time: the Bible presents a powerful and compelling narrative which explains the existence of the world and people, why people act as they do, and provides hope in suffering grounded in a higher and better reality than that which we see around us. As this narrative was displaced, a new one was needed. In an age where the divine right of kings was viewed with increasing cynicism and the idea of a free citizenry was developing, in opposition to a heavenly monarch who sent out orders via an earthly religious hierarchy arose the idea of man as free from divine fiat as well, self-existent and self-justifying. A new model for human history thus emerged--not a repeating vicious cycle where hope was in God and not temporal pleasures, but of steady advancement and self-ascension, from primitive savagery to enlightened civilization and then out to the stars.

Evolution, the idea that things can go from simple to complicated on their own through accumulated tiny changes, given enough time, and that they have in fact done so, is the absolutely critical component to this narrative. Without evolution, there is no explanation for the existence of life except "God did it," which takes us right back to God as Sovereign and humans as His subjects, a worldview modern people have been programmed to think of as ridiculous and impossible. With evolution, there is an explanation which can dispense with the necessity of God and thus free humanity to be their own saviors, not beholden to a Divine monarch or His laws, or (importantly) the depredations of those humans who claim to speak for him.

In my own discussions with atheists and some debates over evolution, this came out clearly. Ideas put forth by Creationists or Intelligent Design advocates like irreducible complexity (the observation that some biological systems could not have evolved step by step because they are useless until all the parts are working together) are resisted, at the end, because they simply must not be correct, because evolution must be true, because it is the only explanation secular science has come to consensus on that doesn't invoke "God did it." (This is the logical fallacy called "Begging the Question" - when your argument's premise assumes its conclusion. With neither the existence or non-existence of God able to be proved objectively (without requiring faith), both theists and atheists do this all the time)

So the compelling narrative of evolution, with its spoon-spork-fork fossil displays, with its colorful and almost 100% imaginary illustrations of fish crawling up onto land and cavemen getting a clue, all rests on the claim that somehow all the life we see happened by accident, by the slightest chance (in fact an impossibly small chance, except that we can see it did happen, thus it must be possible), but having emerged within it, and woken up to realize we are here, the best we can do is try to live according to the better angels of our natures, a phrase which makes less and less sense the more you think about it.

In this narrative scientists are our new pioneers, the explorers of this strange world where there is no divine revelation to grant truth to us or demand obedience from us, just very complicated chemical reactions suddenly aware that we are clinging to a tiny rock in the vast universe, the authors of our own destiny, or destruction.

Or... rather... they were. That was the prevailing narrative of the 19th and 20th centuries, one so initially impressive and conclusive that much of the Church was carried away by it too. But with the chaotic events of the 21st century, and more rapidly with each passing year, the story of man's self-ascension from primitive savagery to the stars, the narrative of the modern age, is collapsing all around us.

3. Revenge of the Gaps

When the gospel went out into a pre-modern world, people saw evidence for God in everything they did not understand, what is now called the "god of the gaps" argument. Given that there was an existing narrative to explain things which seem impossible or unknowably mysterious ("God did it" was an entirely respectable and mainstream answer at that time), it seemed reasonable, and indeed, appropriately faithful and obedient, to settle for that explanation and not push further. Also, pushing further required time and resources (and curiosity) that most people simply didn't have, and practically speaking there were not many useful ways to share anything you learned with people outside your immediate kinship group (except by popular story and myth, which is exactly how people did it) so the collective body of shared real knowledge about the world accumulated very slowly.

To talk about science or theology or anything else, it's good to first recognize that really ignorance is a central and enduring component of the human condition; not only do we exist in a state of mostly not knowing things (part of how your brain keeps you sane in our modern, information-saturated world is actually by not noticing as much as it can), we never even know how much we don't know. An ignorance-based argument for God, to someone who believes the triumph of humanity will not be found in faith but in the war against ignorance, sounds very similar to saying "Ignorance is God."

This atheist sums up what many atheists think about the god of the gaps idea fairly articulately, and also is a great example of how most secular thinkers feel the extraordinary burden of proof is on anyone who finds God as the answer, instead of the other way around, something I'll briefly address in part 5.

God is not a gap-god. My belief in Him does not hide in those parts of reality not yet explained, but flows out from what I do understand; that "I am a great sinner, and He is a great Savior." (John Newton)

But for those scientists who saw God as getting "smaller and smaller" as the guy in the video said, just as those gaps and potholes seemed all but filled in and smoothed over, as modern man seemed capable of reaching earthly paradise himself, via science--suddenly we had world wars. Massive, globe-spanning conflicts, where science produced weapons more destructive than anyone had ever imagined. Now in the 21st century, after nearly two decades of terror attacks, social media, and the rise of "privilege" and shame mentality, deep fissures are widening in all that smooth, gapless surface.
Post-modernism had eroded the mortar with which modernism had been constructing a new Tower of Babel, and having lost a uniting cultural narrative, science began to fracture as well. Now, with identity politics and neo-tribalism on the rise, those shiny bricks meant for a tower to heaven based on universal scientific principles are being fought over by competing factions who have no concept of the common good; post-modernism took away "the good", and now post-postmodernism is rapidly taking away "the common."

Belief is coming back in a big way; the Church had best be ready for that challenge, and not try to fight yesterday's modernist battles: in 2018, we haven't been back to the moon in over 45 years, but we have Louis Vuitton hiring shamans to keep their shows rain-free. (Yes really)

4. Distinguishing Science from Sciencism

To explain why evolution can be rejected without throwing out science altogether requires our look above at the secular perspective on human existence, because it's important to separate the process of "doing science" and the secular meta-narrative which tries to borrow the legitimacy of the scientific method as a trustworthy authority, just as a Christian narrative of history is based on the legitimacy of the authority of scripture. When the proponents of sciencism want to attack the Church and the societal legitimacy of belief in God, they sometimes do so by trying to sever the link between the Bible and what Christians believe now, usually by citing particularly violent or disturbing passages from the Old Testament out of context, and asking if we believe we're supposed to do that now.

But turnabout is fair play, so we can also sever the link between the scientific method and "hard science" and a narrative which borrows its authority and rigor but relies on imagination, crowd-think, and the insistence of a god-less explanation for reality. Science is a great way of discovering facts about the physical reality of the universe, like new puzzle pieces, but it doesn't follow that a particular narrative, a particular arranging of the puzzle, is right simply due to the discovery of these new pieces.

Sciencism tells you evolution means there is no need for God in explaining reality. When you bring up problems in evolution, they laugh and show you cool pictures of researchers using high tech equipment to measure things, and professional scientific conventions, and the space shuttle, and ream upon ream of peer-reviewed papers citing each other. (And the problems with the peer-review process are an increasingly open topic, though it's best to educate yourself on that before trying to wade into that debate) What you will be told, over and over, is that evolution is the established scientific consensus. There are no competing theories. (And if there ever are later, it won't be "God did it")

What I have tried to explain above in this post, is why that is. The grand secular narrative of how our world came to be, absolutely requires evolution. It fits the puzzle pieces together in a way that can be easily understood, and changes in animals over short-time frames (like the infamous white/black pepper moth example) can be observed as scientific fact. Humans being wired for pattern-recognition, it was inevitable that someone would extrapolate from the small changes we can see into a tree of life from the simplest forms of life up to us.

So I believe in science, in the sense that I accept the legitimacy of all the puzzle pieces discovered when science is done correctly, allowing time for self-corrections. When science says that at no point has water been observed being turned instantaneously into wine in a laboratory setting, it is affirming what we knew all along, that Christ performed a miracle. Science is in fact one of the greatest affirmations of biblical truth, because it objectively proves the world that the Bible describes, one in which things proceed as usual and people are brave and cowardly and generous and selfish, and then sometimes God intervenes and people are appropriately awestruck, which is precisely the world we see around us today. (It is atheists who must close their eyes to every miraculous recovery, every unbelievably-timed coincidence, etc. and insist they are each and every one frauds or simply coincidences, or else construct theories more elaborate than simply admitting God is there and sometimes chooses to intervene in the natural order of things)

What I don't believe, is the prevailing god-less narrative which insists the picture it paints is the only way the pieces fit together. That's simply not true, and when astute but unbelieving scientists try to lend their scientific prestige to the god-less narrative, they tend to wander onto shaky ground almost immediately. (One thinks of the late Stephen Hawking venturing outside astrophysics to make silly philosophical or theological-level pronouncements, as if his black hole theories entitled him to do so)

5. "Extraordinary Claims"

Evolution, from the standpoint of that narrative, cannot be untrue, or else "God did it." That is one reason you probably won't make much progress trying to debate it, and why I'd say its definitely best avoided as part of evangelistic strategy. It's almost impossible to make the argument from the theistic side without begging the question too, and you're trying to argue towards a conclusion they won't accept without first accepting your premise. And that argument isn't going to help them accept your premise. Sharing the love of Christ and inviting people to participate in a life lived joyfully in His presence will go much farther. When people have believed in God and recognized the truth of scripture, that's a good time to look at Genesis 1 again.

All that being said, like Keynesian economy theory, despite everyone granting it prestige status, the theory of evolution really does have some fundamental problems, fundamental enough that it will almost certainly replaced by something more interesting and impressive within the next couple of decades.

I mentioned irreducible complexity above; there is a youtube video of Richard Dawkins attempting to explain how an eye, often cited as an example of a thing that wouldn't be helpful without all its working parts, isn't irreducibly complex if we just think of something that has 1% of a human or hawk eye's capabilities, then the next step is 2%, and so on. The problem with this argument is that it's biologically meaningless. Yes, if the functionality of an eye were abstract, we could use his approach, but an eye is a very concrete thing. That functionality needs certain parts to be there, and they can't disappear in the next generation but need to stay, and have mutations which add to their usefulness and do not detract from it, and the animals with the lucky mutations have to survive, etc. Either that's simply impossible, and the puzzle pieces have been massaged into orientations that don't make any sense, or there is no God and that's the best explanation we can come up with. If it is, I choose to believe in God, who happens to answer some of my prayers too.

There are lots of good resources out there pointing out fatal problems with evolution as an explanation, and even as the scientific community mostly rolls along not troubled by the objections of some theists, evolution theory as traditionally explained is suffering death from a thousand cuts, not only from theists but from within the secular scientific community, and creative new twists on the idea are popping up, as one would expect. What you can be sure of is that as we slowly understand more about our universe, those new puzzle pieces will be fit into the pre-existing secular meta-narrative, whether to expand it or to replace pieces who were too obviously massaged into the wrong positions.

Here I just want to give my own short-cut answer whenever evolution comes up: the bat.

Picture a little tree mouse. Now picture it halfway to this, trying to run around.

You can't get to a bat via evolution. A flying squirrel, sure--the skin flaps for gliding make sense and could be increasingly helpful as they developed. But a bat's wings aren't skin flaps, those are its hands. Imagine countless generations of tree-dwelling mousy creatures, with fingers unhelpfully getting longer and longer. Maybe at first it's not bad, they can cling to bark better or something. But there's a point where flight is still far off, but with ridiculously elongated fingers the poor things can't maneuver around, somehow surviving and still doubling down on that increasingly unhelpful trait, because one day they're going to be wings? Evolution isn't working through unhelpful mutations toward specific goals, unless we go with theistic/guided evolution. (And, are there fossils of these poor creatures? Nope, only tree rats good at running and bats good at flying?)

Again, if you want to insist that I believe mutated mice that can't get around well are going to survive and thrive and reproduce themselves with even more severe mutations that cripple them even further, all to explain how we got bats without God, then I choose God instead of that ridiculous theory. We already have lots of other reasons to believe in God.

The extraordinary claim, to paraphrase Carl Sagan, is not the existence of God, but that something as impossible as that explanation for the world as we see it. (As I saw someone say recently: 'The claim that seawater will eventually give rise to Manhattan seems sufficiently extraordinary to require extraordinary evidence. So far evolution proponents can't demonstrate that ocean water can produce any life at all, let alone the New York Philharmonic.')

6. Secular Saints: The Real Galileo

So evolution may have unanswerable problems, but it's the best explanation secular science has come up with yet, so naturally it's the story they're sticking to. And that god-less narrative, the attempt by humanity to construct a coherent worldview that begins itself without Creation, saves itself without the Cross, and obtains for itself paradise without Heaven, like all good religions must also have its saints and demigods.

Galileo is one of the greatest in that pantheon; a brilliant mind who was "martyred" by recalcitrant, anti-science religious authorities, being forced to recant, but whose views ultimately triumphed and paved the way for the scientific enlightenment we enjoy today, without witch trials or blasphemy laws. (Unless you express certain political opinions in U.S. academia, or want to make public statements against Islam in Britain; then you'll find these are very much still around)

As it turns out, Galileo's story is not quite so simple. His theory challenged not only the non-phenomenological understanding of scripture of his time, but the consensus of most scholars of his day, without answering some legitimate objections (like parallax); after incurring censure he was still permitted to share it as a theory among others but went further to declare it as the only correct one; he jumped into theological debates on the subject and insulted the Pope; after the inevitable religious trial, he received what was a comparatively light punishment for the day, and was treated with respect.

Of course, today we can still look back at the treatment of Galileo as fundamentally wrong. In 2018, it's hard to imagine a time in which religious authorities in the West wielded the sociopolitical power to say which astronomical theories could or couldn't be published. Once we know the facts, however, Galileo comes across as less of a crucified scientific messiah and more of a gadfly genius who had some facts on his side and exercised poor judgment in his promotion of them.

To top it all off, Galileo was both very right and very wrong about the heliocentric model; it's true the earth orbits the sun and not vice versa, but the sun does move too, orbiting the galactic center, whereas Galileo regarded it as the fixed center of the universe. Ironically, then, he was making the same mistake about the sun as most scholars of his day were making about the earth. As the Catholic Church rather cheekily points out in the linked article above, the prevailing views of the day regarding astronomy were incorrect, but had the Church endorsed Galileo's view, they would have been endorsing a different erroneous view which would later be proven scientifically inaccurate. (I don't suggest they don't have their own bias, but how often have you heard their side of the story presented alongside the secular-saint version?)

It is undeniable that he was a central figure of his age, and his astronomical discoveries were of great value. However even the faithful of secular science caution that he is not quite the pivotal figure in the history of science as what we might call "popular sciencism" would have us believe.

That idea of "popular sciencism" is what's emerging in our post-postmodern world; science is a process we'll always need and will never disappear, but a real understanding and valuing of it is diminishing; sciencism is a subculture, a faction, almost a stance. Post-postmodernism, as I wrote last year, means we're no longer good scientific modernists, but they're still around, along with every other group that arises, laid out in parallel in the internet's eternal historical present. Increasingly, however, as political radicalism and societal instability and a scramble to scavenge the bricks of modern science's falling tower ensure, it is science itself that is running afoul of the counter-narrative.

Conclusion:

This is a rather long post, so let's see where we've been by way of summing up:

1. Evolution is the biological component of the secular metanarrative of How Things Came to Be, so in general people who don't already have faith in God aren't going to be persuaded out of it any more than Noah could be persuaded out of his ark. (Where else would he go?)

2. At the same time, evolution has serious problems and we do have a valid alternative explanation (the historically mainstream one, in fact), so believers need not feel compelled to accept that particular component of the world's counternarrative to the biblical explanation.

And now what I hope Christians can do, is recognize that this counternarrative exists, and is the underlying story of the modern world, the mythos which underlies a secular worldview.

Whole generations of Christian schoolchildren swallowed it in its entirety without realizing it, and grew up not recognizing its mutual exclusivity to the biblical account. Then upon reaching college they found that despite having perhaps made professions of faith at a particular point, they had already been standing on the secular boat for years, they just hadn't thrown off the moorings and let the winds of the world fill their sails and take them to places more fun and interesting than their church youth group. Many chose to do so; some repented later in life.

Note that this is not a conspiracy. We know from scripture we have a spiritual enemy who hates the Church, opposes the gospel, and controls the power systems of this world, and he is certainly driving the counter-biblical-narrative in every interesting new form it takes. But from the human standpoint, it's just the story the world has come to believe over the past two centuries, of how the world came to be. We who reject it are now the marginalized minority, but that shouldn't trouble us as long as we recognize the situation for what it is.

What should trouble us is the Church remaining blind to the idea of a parallel narrative, and thus having each generation of believers unconsciously absorbing it, or else hiding from it yet trying to take the gospel into a world without understanding the worldview of those they are trying to reach.

(And exactly how are we supposed to do it, then? I don't have all the answers, but some thoughts are coming in a future post. Thanks for reading, stay tuned!)

To Babel and Beyond: A Brief Early History of Man, Biblical Version

Intro: Alternative Histories

A lot of modern Christians exist in a weird sort of parallel universe, historically speaking. We basically take for granted accounts of modern history provided by secular historians, going back until perhaps the medieval era where we find some divergence. (Were the Dark Ages really a benighted era for Europe, or a tumultuous but progressive time of rapid growth for the Church and repelling of jihad, unfairly characterized by post-enlightenment scholars trying to emphasize the achievements of earlier and/or later eras?)

Beyond that, Roman history is pretty much agreed upon, with some A.D. quibbles about whether this or that persecution was accurately described by the church. Go back as far as the Bronze Age, however, and periods of history described in Scripture, and controversies erupt. Go back still farther, and completely alternate histories emerge, until eventually you have two entirely divergent explanations for the existence of humanity and human civilization, which are both rooted in and provide a basis for a deeply divided worldview which can be seen in every level of society today. (either God made us good and we went bad, and all that that entails, or we evolved from apes and are still progressing towards something greater, and all that that entails)

In this post, I want to lay out an example of what a history of early mankind might look like from a Biblical perspective, based on the authority of scripture and linked with the discoveries of modern archeology/anthropology. (There have been a number of serious attempts to match up Biblical history and chronology with the Bronze Age history and dates determined by scholars. I'm just broadly focusing on an earlier time frame than that, mainly to show how you can start from the Biblical account and find that much of the data lines up automatically with it)

Bear in mind, "antiquity" for people like the Romans was
as far back in history as the Romans are for us.

Early History of Man: Bible Version

With the supposedly overwhelming authority of "Science" preached at us every day, we can find it hard to give the events described in the Bible the same weight as we do the pronouncements of archeology or anthropology, even when they construct entire eras of proto-civilization from surprisingly scant pieces of evidence, evidence which sometimes itself was even faked. I'm not saying there is no real science taking place, but often the real artifacts, discovered and catalogued according to (actual) science, the method, are described using almost entirely imaginary scenarios according to Science, the secular humanist belief system for which many faithful atheists profess their love and devotion. These stories can be drastically revised with the discovery of a single new piece of evidence, and frequently are (or aren't, despite the contradicting evidence) but somehow we are expected to consider them as authoritative and the Bible as a book of myths. Lacking an authoritative scriptural narrative, that might be all we could expect, but it's both amusing and frustrating that we're expected to toss out the Bible which is continually found to be more reliable, historically, and instead bow to a secular narrative which changes with the wind and trends.

Scholarship being what it is, and theologians being who they are, my dream of one day seeing a solid attempt by the Church to put forward a coherent timeline of the early history of man (in keeping with the evidence and data we see around us, just separated from their surmised alternative secular explanations) is probably inherently impossible. It would collapse in heated arguments, mostly about minor details.

But here I'd like to at least lay out what we do know, from the Genesis accounts, and then flesh in some details based on things we've discovered, to paint a brief picture of the road from Adam to Babel and beyond.

1. Earliest history

I will begin with Adam and Eve having to leave the garden. (Despite the popularity of attempting it, there's not much point in trying to guess where it was; the great flood would certainly have altered the landscape and course of rivers too much to go by what we see now) After they were forced out, their descendents formed two rival camps; the descendents of Seth, and those of Cain. That we do know from Scripture. We have no reliable knowledge of what this period of history looked like, since nothing survived the flood and if it did we'd have trouble knowing whether it was pre or post flood. We have Scripture's account, however, that it was violent, lawless, and increasingly evil.

Humans had become very numerous before the flood (based on the numbers in Genesis, there were almost certainly hundreds of millions of people and possibly many more) and that global catastrophe had not yet restarted everyone around Ararat and then the plain of Shinar in Sumeria. Since everyone apparently spoke the same language up until Babel, and had hundreds of years of life to explore the world, it's probable some of the remnants of remote and ancient cities for which modern science has little explanation were from this time. (There's evidence to suggest Phoenicians got across the Atlantic, and we still don't know how the Egyptians and Romans managed some of their construction feats, so there's no reason to assume pre-flood people were less capable, especially if they had hundreds of years to master their craft.)

An important factor to remember is that while Scripture says that all human life on earth perished in the flood, and that the "fountains of the deep" opened, clearly a destructive event and probably related to this discovery, it doesn't say that every inch of the earth's surface was thoroughly pulverized. It's possible that in some places, the water would have simply risen rapidly and covered everything, leaving behind what had originally been there. Devoid of life, almost certainly heavily damaged, but not necessarily destroyed. (if a shipwreck can survive at the bottom of the sea for centuries, and a huge tsunami ravages but doesn't "disappear" a modern city, then an ancient city of stone would not vanish after about a year underwater or suddenly be reduced to pebbles when hit by incoming water either, though it might be buried under mud or rubble, as indeed people have discovered some were. It would be interesting if advances in technology reveal more deeply sunken cities around the world)

The picture of early human history currently presented by secular anthropology doesn't really fit what we see around the world, but a pre-ancient world full of cities of people who suddenly vanish, and civilizations emerging abruptly in the Middle East and then soon elsewhere around the world, each with stories of a great flood, does fit the picture rather well.

2. Post-flood

The flood narrowed the total human gene pool down considerably, to Noah and his three sons and their wives. Currently, genetic science claims human genetic diversity reflects the mixture of three "pre-human" contributing sets of DNA; I can't help but wonder if we're actually seeing the genetic legacy of the three sons of Noah. Or their wives, if you want to get mitochondrial. Conversely, since all of current human diversity is from those three sons and their wives, 6 people out of however many were alive at the time (probably a huge population, as mentioned above), it's not surprising we occasionally find some prehistoric (in the literal sense: before recorded history) human remains that look quite different than anyone on earth does today. The "hobbit" bones found in Indonesia, and all the "primitive" skulls (some with bigger brain cases than the average modern human) found in various places, make sense if you imagine the incredible human diversity that must have existed before the flood. What are now explained as pre-human ancestors probably are remains from those other humans.

In terms of the flood event itself, from Noah on there is much evidence of man's expansion from a new beginning. Fascinatingly, despite all the attention given to Sumer, there is quite a bit of evidence that much of "modern" human civilization started right near where the ark is thought to have come to rest in Southeastern Turkey; horses were first domesticated around there, and wheat and corn strains can be traced back to their ancestral cultivars around the same area. (For example, from Wikipedia: "Genetic analysis of wild einkorn wheat suggests that it was first grown in the Karacadag Mountains in southeastern Turkey.") That only makes sense, if humans got off the ark and started rebuilding what was lost in the flood, and planting crops and vineyards. There's also an amazing, very ancient ruin, described as possibly the world's oldest temple, less than 300 miles from the Mountains of Ararat, which features massive stone slabs covered with lifelike relief carvings of animals. Scholars are confused because they date it to a time supposedly before the existence of metal tools or even pottery. (Right.. that's the description of someone clinging to a false timeline)

Later, the account of Babel suggests that humans didn't spread out after the ark, but stayed together. (it would make sense; the task of rebuilding civilization would require everyone) Since God had told them to spread out and fill the earth, however, the idea of a pan-human civilization that clustered in one place and built a tower to the heavens was not in the plans. We don't know exactly what method God used to confuse and divide the languages (as a linguist I'm quite curious). I've seen creative theories on neurolinguistic viruses, given that the world's population were all concentrated in one place. It's impossible to know of course, but fun to think about, and it will be interesting to see if advances in neuroscience and linguistics don't provide explanations for how it could have occurred. Either way, we can see the division of Babel is still there today. You can observe language fragmentation happening naturally anywhere (to an extreme degree in places like Papua/New Guinea or the Caucasus Mountains), and the trend has only recently been overcome in the developed world by national education policies (China has an uncountable number of local dialects, Mandarin is just the artificially-enforced national language), and the prevalence of TV and the internet.


Shinar, where the tower of Babel was located, is in the Fertile Crescent (sometimes referred to as the "Cradle of Civilization"). Archeologists/anthropologists describe two basic centers of culture, one around what is now Eastern Turkey, and one down in modern day Iraq, between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers. The latter contains what some consider the oldest city in the world, Eridu, which is a very probable site for the Tower of Babel itself, with a very old, huge, and incomplete ziggurat. (Sumerian mythology even claims it to be one of the first 5 cities built -before- the Flood. Perhaps that simply a boast, or perhaps the name was remembered and used again)

One of the ancient mounds at Eridu

Another fascinating site, Çatalhöyük, is about 500 miles west of the "Mountains of Ararat" where the ark landed. It is one of the most ancient settlements ever discovered, has unique architectural properties, and is quite unusual in that there are no streets; houses are clustered together, honeycomb-style, and the roofs are used for travel. In the linked article, they comment that, unusually, the dozens of bodies buried under the floor of each house are unrelated to each other. Also the houses had white plaster walls, some covered in elaborate artwork. It makes you think... might those wandering out in the years after the flood have formed at least one memorial city for the countless lost lives? The corpses would not vanish into thin air, remember. If it's true that there were hundreds of millions to billions of people alive before the flood (as the Genesis numbers suggest), not to mention all the animals, you'd doubtless find corpses all around, left by the receding waters (or collected into drifts here and there, mixed with debris). The roof-walking habit might have been an adaptation to the post-flood period, to avoid the rotting vegetation and corpse-ridden ground as much as possible, or even be based on an ark-like idea of a common deck surface with hatches leading below to the various compartments, as there were only a few people alive at the beginning and Noah had spent a very long time building the ark and would have been the most experienced person around and in charge while he was alive (and sober).

See, it's easy to form plausible-sounding conjectures from the evidence available, going from what you believe the conditions of the time and context to have been. I have no idea if that's even close to the reality of that ancient city, but what I just did is no different from what secular anthropologists do, except I am basing my theory on a scriptural context. (Basically I have more reason to be confident in my hypothetical interpretation of the data than I do theirs)

But is it a coincidence that the "world's oldest temple" and "world's most ancient settlement" are located within a few hundred miles of the ark's resting place (and even closer to each other), and the "world's oldest city" is in Shinar with a huge, unfinished ziggurat nearby a natural supply of pitch? It's unreasonable to insist it must be, when it conforms so closely to the pre-existing Biblical narrative. (Unless you are like an atheist I once argued with, who said a certain thing couldn't possibly be true, because if so that means God did it.)

3. Post-Babel

With regards to the Flood and Babel, Sumerian mythology has such obvious references to these events that many scholars believe the Bible borrowed its accounts from them. (Since the content of what existed of the Old Testament was oral at that point, and there are some similarities of style between the two, it's just as reasonable to conclude that everyone knew these events had occurred in fairly recent history and had their own versions of the account. The Sumerian account is "aggrandized," however, and mixed with stories of their gods; the Biblical record reads like a very sober and straightforward account of the event by comparison. Entirely aside from faith in scripture, it very much reads like the Biblical account is the original, and the Sumerian account is the flowery, mythologized version)

The genealogies in Genesis 10 provide a tantalizing picture of humans spreading out after the Flood/Babel, though unfortunately we don't have enough information to put all the pieces together. Some people are specifically pointed out as the ancestors of certain peoples, mostly those relevant to the Hebrews, being in their vicinity. One clear example occurs for Greece, where one grandson of Noah (Javan) is used consistently in Hebrew scripture as the word for Greece. One of Javan's sons is named Tarshish, the name of a location referenced repeatedly in scripture (notably as the place to where Jonah tried to flee). It is not known for certain whether this is the city of Tarsus in modern Turkey (where the Apostle Paul was from) but it's likely, and the city is ancient enough for this to be the case. There is also a grandson named Cush, which is the ancient civilization of Ethiopia, also Ashur - Assyrians, and Aram - Arameans, whose language, Aramaic, was the common local language during Jesus' life.

Beyond the grandsons, whose nations can be identified, many further descendents can be as well.
(There is also much conjecture... for example some think the Sinites are the ancestors of China)

Based on the grandsons of Noah, one can basically populate the ancient world from SE Russia to the Arabian peninsula and Ethiopia, and from Greece and southeastern Europe to Persia, in other words the entire Near East stretched farther north and south. Every grandson corresponds to a known location. (Observe how different this is from the imaginary and mythical lands of other ancient religious accounts)

Of those groups that wandered off to further points of the globe, we don't know the account of their travels, but interestingly in the secular account of history you suddenly have the roots of the great world civilizations all popping up in different places in the same era. It works out that from Babel in the Fertile Crescent, the meeting place of Europe, Asia, and Africa, descendents spread out and traveled until they found good places to settle down and start working on a minor version of what everyone had been attempting in Sumeria, such as the Indus and Yellow River valleys. (There is a Great Flood story in ancient Hindu scriptures, and in Chinese legend as well)

Egypt, one of the oldest civilizations of all, was around basically from the beginning...

"Egypt is called Mestraim by the Hebrews; and Mestraim lived not long after the flood. For after the flood, Cham (or Ham), son of Noah, begat Aeguptos or Mestraim, who was the first to set out to establish himself in Egypt, at the time when the tribes began to disperse this way and that…" Eusebius, 4th AD historian.

(Of course Eusebius is writing many centuries after the event. As I mentioned at the beginning, antiquity has its own antiquity... the Greeks and Romans idealized the distant past as we sometimes idealize their time)

4. A word about Old Testament chronology

On the topic of Egypt, a problem arises: there is not enough time in apparent Biblical history for well-chronicled Egyptian history to have occurred. For a good treatment of that subject which basically assumes Ussher's dates (a very young earth), go here. That article acknowledges there is no way to get from Ussher's early date of the flood/creation to a reconciliation with Egyptian history, even as it holds to the very young earth theory, and suggests the minimum required missing years might be found here and there throughout the chronology.

However, the problem is resolved if we acknowledge the practice of "telescoping" in Hebrew genealogies, as described here in pretty good detail. Some have difficulty stomaching the idea that the Bible could be inerrant if the genealogies are constructed differently from their own ideas about them, but I think it's important to remember that the Bible is inerrant in the original texts, and those texts written not by modern people but by ancients who had some different literary habits than we do; being carried along by the Spirit to write inerrantly does not mean the end product would look exactly as it would look were they to be written in English today, and that is nothing that should make us nervous. Also, note that telescoping the genealogies only moves the date of creation back by a few thousand years, as compared to the trillions of years that evolution demands. It is not an attempt to accommodate secular creation theories, merely an acknowledgement of Hebrew chronological practices.

As a creationist who has studied linguistics and biblical languages, I have no problem with the idea that the Hebrew writers of the Old Testament followed their usual practice of 'arranging' genealogies, just as the gospel writers sometimes rearranged the chronology of Jesus' ministry to emphasize certain points. Putting back in the unselected generations adds in a satisfactory amount of time to allow for the development of modern civilization from antiquity -in accordance with the Biblical account, not springing from alternative, evolution-based secular theories- which means we don't have to pretend in faith not to see the pyramids, but also aren't conforming our biblical interpretation to secular chronologies, which see a 10,000 year earth as identically ridiculous to a 6,000 year earth, considering the vast depths of time needed for non-life to become life (no amount of time is enough) in their Creator-less models.

So although I am open to any valid evidence that does not go against the authority of scripture, as of right now, the creationist + expanded genealogy timeline is the opinion I hold and feel best interprets scripture in the light of what we know while holding it as inerrant. It also allows for the Great Flood being a global event, as scripture clearly attests, and not localized. If the flood was only local, then ancient civilizations like the Maya can be getting their start right alongside Hindu and Chinese civilizations, people already being over there, without needing extra time to populate Central America. If it was global, as the Bible attests, and humanity had to start over from Ararat, you need time after Babel for people to migrate all the way to the New World and build up enough population to begin thousands of years of Mayan city-building and civilization. The best dates for those civilizations in fact reflect the latter situation, with Near East civilizations being the oldest, followed by other Asian civilizations, followed by ancient New World cultures and others.

On the other hand, maybe they just sailed straight over... (Kon-Tiki)

5. In Closing

For more on the grandsons of Noah and their descendents and where they went/who they became, there are lots of different theories that can be found by googling, but not much of real value; many of the theories are pretty tenuous, based on guesses about names and place/people group names they sound like. The truth is that, beyond the grandsons in the genealogy, which can mostly be strongly identified with places within the ancient near eastern world, we can't say how the rest of the globe was peopled by their descendents. We do know that nothing took as much time as is usually demanded by secular scholars, who with long ages to fill, have people spending thousands of years without upgrading their flint points. (The Darwinian "long, slow, steady" evolution idea and its roots in gradualism, has influenced all of secular academia. A look at the real world reveals things are more like grains of sand falling on a pile, where steady change actually produces sudden avalanches and snowball effects on a regular basis.)

One good thing is that as we are increasingly able to catalog sources of ancient material and written documents (if the neo-caliphate doesn't blow them up first), and communicate those findings over the internet, we are able to uncover knowledge about the ancient world perhaps unknown since deep in antiquity. As we learn more, the Biblical account is proven more and not less reliable. It may be that in the coming days, even the mystery of people movements away from Babel and to the ends of the earth may begin to be solved.


I hope that was interesting. Feel free to leave a comment if you think I'm missing something or you know of additional info that would be helpful to throw into the mix.

3 Things I Wish Christians would Stop Doing

In this post I want to talk about 3 things I've noticed a lot of Christians doing (and of which I've certainly been guilty at times as well) which I submit aren't doing us any favors. I believe noticing them and trying to reign them in would strengthen the Church and our witness.

1. Being Careless with the Truth in our "Edifying Anecdotes"

Many of you have doubtless heard the story about the church in a persecuted part of the world where one day masked men broke in brandishing guns and demanded that anyone who wasn't a true believer and ready to meet their God should leave. Once a large portion of the worshippers had fled in panic, the leader removed his mask and said to the preacher something along the lines of "Ok, all the fakers are gone, you can keep going," and he and his team of not-actual-terrorists then joined the worship service.

This very well may be based on an original true story. (If you know the source, feel free to share) The problem is that I've heard it told as a true story many times, and the location seems to wander around. Africa, China, Russia, etc. Did anyone bother to verify the origins of the story before sharing it as true? "Oh, don't be such a stickler," you might think. "the important thing is that it's making a point."
But the same thing happens with miraculous stories...

Recently it has been in the news that a boy who told an amazing story about a trip to heaven while in a coma, having grown up a bit, recanted the story and chided Christians for believing his account which does not adhere to scripture. Lifeway has since pulled the book from its shelves. But these "trip to heaven," "trip to hell" stories which so many people marvel over and find edifying can usually be dismissed offhand early on, not because heaven or hell aren't real places, but because the stories in question describe a creative take on the pop culture version of heaven or hell. That's usually quite different from what we find in scripture, which is that upon dying one goes either into the presence of God or away from His presence to Sheol (Hebrew, "the grave"), and that the fiery place of torment of Matt 25 and pearl-gated golden city of Rev 21 are both descriptions of post-final-judgment destinations, not the immediate destinations of the departed.

(Another common mistake: while we don't know much about Sheol -the waiting place until judgment for those who die without Christ- from scripture, we do know the lake of fire was created for the punishment of satan and his fallen angelic allies (Matt 25:41), and they will suffer there too. Satan is not the ruler of hell, hell was created as his punishment. According to the book of Job, he is not enthroned in some fiery realm like Surt in the Muspelheim of Norse mythology, but apparently roams around the earth itself, which I find in some ways to be a more unnerving image.)

And speaking of angels, fallen or otherwise, there are innumerable stories about angels out there. Some are doubtless true. I've seen a weird thing or two myself. But note that the Bible is not very talkative about angels, at least not in the systematic way that would satisfy our curiosity (and lead to idolatry...). Angels are not the point- God is, and they are God's messengers. Scripture also describes angels as guarding us, though not to the extent that the "guardian angel" idea has been developed in popular thinking. (Psalm 91:11 is very general, Matt 18:10 is very interesting statement by Jesus but leaves us with more questions than answers, and it is unclear whether Hebrews 13:2's "some" is talking about people among his readership or referring to Old Testament accounts like Lot's angelic guests) 

How angels feel when you share questionable anecdotes about them...
("DespondentAngelMetCemHead" by Infrogmation -
Own work. Licensed under CC BY 2.5 via Wikimedia Commons.)

I like the story about the guy in the jungle being protected by angels from the people who were going to attack him, who said he was surrounded by armed guards (who were invisible to him), but it turns out that may not be true either.


I say "may not" because the writers at Snopes dot com (urban legend debunking site) are quite obviously antagonistic towards Christianity (even for faith-inspired stories they had to verify as true due to factual evidence, they feel necessary to interject that they don't think anything supernatural occurred). At the bottom of that article, for example, they include stories of missionaries receiving help just as someone far away felt led to pray for them as supposedly obvious fabrications. I don't know about those particular incidents, but I happen to know that does sometimes happen, because it's happened to me before. On the other hand, they raise some reasonable doubts about the details of the story as presented in print, based on multiple printed versions. My guess would be that the earlier Billy Graham book account is closer to whatever true event inspired the story. Of course it's possible the story is entirely made up, but these things definitely do happen on the mission field, and my guess would be it was in someone's prayer letter and unfortunately things proceeded loosely from there.

However, just because "these things happen" doesn't mean that particular story is true, or should be repeated as a true story, details being altered as time goes on. The snopes article itself ends like this:

Moreover, it's sadly ironic that so many tales contrived to display a particular belief system as The One True Way include fabrications tossed in to better carry the message.

While their sarcasm is unwarranted, there is an important point we can take from it- our willingness to accept and pass along any story because we live in a world where supernatural events can occur is not a good witness, making faith seem like mere credulity. And it's dangerous for us too, a little like building our faith not on the solid rock of God's faithfulness and work in our lives but on the shifting sand of anecdotes that "seem likely."

So should we be finding inspiration in unverifiable stories just because the content is beautiful or motivational? Should we be scared to share any story at all? At least, let's treat them as just that: inspirational but unverifiable stories, and be very, very careful what we pass along as "true." Truth should hold special value to those who believe in the Truth of God's word.

Supernatural events do occur in this world (I have fun stories), and we have real evidence for what we take on faith, but assuming every story, whether miracles, angels, trips to heaven, etc., you hear is true (or not bothering to consider whether it is or not) and passing it along, slowly but surely weakens our habit of testing what we hear. We have to be neither cynical nor naive, like the Bereans who were praised by Paul for not taking his words for granted, but searching the scriptures before accepting them.

2. Confusing Apologetics with Evangelism

(Yes, I know apologetics can be used in an evangelistic way, first hear me out:)

A. Evangelism is not arguing until the other side admits you're right

I think we all know this already, and I'm reminding myself as much as any of you reading this, but we can't debate anyone into the kingdom. So as a method of evangelism, a good debate, beloved by so many educated believers in the Western tradition (me too), serves at best either as a transition for sharing the gospel directly/sharing one's testimony, or to remove the false facades which people claim prevent them from believing, which are really smokescreens and excuses. Having removed those, someone will typically say something like "well I still just don't think God exists." Now they're being honest- all that other stuff was not the basis for their unbelief, it was the other way around. The assumption is "no God," and all the other stuff proceeds from that assumption. Which is why...

B. It is typically not helpful to argue with scientists about evolution

It pains me to say that, having been raised in the proud homeschooled evangelical tradition of "creationism vs. evolution" debates, and have years of experience doing so online and occasionally in person. Sometimes I've "won" the discussion and sometimes I've "lost" (at least, I did my best to learn from each discussion, so they were profitable in that sense), but what I would say is that unless you have a pretty good grasp of the scientific principles involved and some basic understanding of what the modern set of theories collectively described as evolution are in 2015, you may actually do more harm than good in trying to jump into the fray. One thing you have to realize is that the average non-believing scientist (or worse, 'science groupie') considers questioning evolution to be about as viable as proposing the earth really is flat. It doesn't matter if that's an unfair comparison, that's what it's going to sound like to them.

You may quickly discover you are at a home field disadvantage, because for decades most scientists have taken evolution as a given and worked from that basis. So if you do something like claim there is no evidence for evolution, they can just laugh and bury you under decades of scientific papers that all assume evolution. No one not coming from a religious background is going to question evolution at this point except real experts in those fields where it becomes obvious that evolution lacks some basic mechanisms to explain very specific phenomena they are qualified to speak up about.

In short, if you really can't help yourself, realize that you're going both against popular trends and against more or less the entire scientific community. Also recognize this is typically someone who has "there is no God" as their premise. You'd better have a pretty airtight logical case, be familiar with the normal counterarguments (the Socratic method of asking more and more difficult questions is a good way to learn these, and doesn't put you in the position of being the antagonist) and be prepared to explain exactly why you feel you can challenge the underlying theoretical assumptions of entire fields of research. And hopefully, you are praying for them and that the conversation will be edifying, not a triumph of your finely honed reasoning skills. As an INTP I face a frequent temptation to bring the logical smackdown on those who are clearly out of their league, forgetting that we are called first to be evangelists of Christ, not knights of reason.

Most actual arguments for evolution go like this: [In the chart above, let's say that "Some birds can't fly" = "God did it." Therefore, since "that's crazy" or "highly unlikely" (claims entirely outside the realm of science) all birds -must- be able to fly. Therefore, since Science can demonstrate with total confidence that penguins are birds, penguins -must- be able to fly, and you are just another naive believer in outdated superstitions who doesn't understand logic.] Ignoring the insults and countering this valid structure but invalid premise means you have to show them that their underlying assumption of "no God" is baseless. Therefore the rigorous science which demonstrates that penguins are birds is great and no problem for us either, but it has no bearing on the assumption that there are no birds that can't fly. But we believe, and have quite a bit of evidence that points to the fact that there are birds that can't fly. (That "God did it")
The argument then rests on whether you can demonstrate that convincingly.

Note: You can challenge their premises, with the method I outlined in the picture caption there. But I pick that kind of battle carefully these days. Only a few will be fruitful, and a good conversation about the gospel is so much better than lots of arguing which half the time ends up being over how you're using the same word in two different ways. I usually try to get the discussion over to my testimony, if I can.

A sad excuse for preparation:

(I rarely rant on this blog, so please excuse me while I do so for just a moment.) Back when I was in high school, we were taught as Christian students to challenge future college professors with "unanswerable questions" that would stump them. Personally I studied engineering which didn't require biology at my school, so topics like evolution only came up once or twice in chemistry class, and I didn't have any of those antagonistic sort of professors I read about.

But I submit that part of the reason so many students raised in the church get disillusioned and their faith shaken while in college is that some people are doing them the disservice of sending them into college thinking a) they will encounter Richard Dawkins-like antagonists who rant against God and use logical-fallacy-riddled arguments to promote evolution and other anti-scriptural ideas, and b) that their duty was to publicly call out these educated, experienced authority figures who could wipe the floor with them rhetorically, with the idea that this is "defending the faith" and their responsibility.

Instead they find that a) often their professors are of the shrugging agnostic or "I grew up in church but decided religion wasn't for me" variety, are sometimes even charismatic and dignified, and can make a student feel not that the gospel is false, but simply that they've lived their entire life in a broom closet, and the gospel might apply in there, but this is the big, wide world, and they're being invited to grow up and join it. Or, b) they do run into one of those antagonistic atheist professors, and trying to be a good witness, stand up to him/her in class, are then subjected to a good drubbing and public humiliation by the professor who has years of education and life experience to his advantage, and has perhaps polished his craft on the few unfortunate students who do this from time to time. At that point a crisis in confidence is almost certain, and without the right support a student will start to question what seemed so certain and straightforward "back in church."

And that "back in church" is where a lot of the trouble starts anyway. Getting plugged in both to a good local church and to a Christian fellowship at school can go very far to mitigate both of these dangers. Far from being bowled over and questioning their faith, students can come out of college strengthened in their faith and with some valuable ministry experience if they are active in a (good) Christian campus fellowship of some kind. (Be aware that there are one or two cult-ish groups that operate under this disguise)


So hopefully we can avoid the problem of setting students up for possible failure by making sure they'll have good spiritual fellowship and growth opportunities during their time at school, and not teaching them a vastly oversimplified version of what they're likely to encounter out in the world. Which leads me to my third plea, which is to please stop...

3. Simplistically Stereotyping other Belief Systems

I sometimes wondered, as a young Christian, how anyone could not be a Christian. It made so much sense, and none of the other religions I'd heard of seemed to make any sense at all. How could those people keep believing something so weird and nonsensical and obviously false?

But I found, around the time I started doing mission trips, that the beliefs of people I encountered overseas seemed fully developed too. Of course, many adherents of Chinese religion here in Taiwan don't even claim to believe the various major and minor gods to be real in the way we believe God to be real (more like "they might be out there, and if so it's better to be on their good side"), but developed in the sense that they had a worldview which explained things around them to a degree they found to be satisfactory. If a gap does occur, if a time comes when their religious system becomes unsatisfactory to them or their worldview can no longer adequately explain the reality they live in, then there is an increasing openness to new worldviews and metanarratives (which are something I'll discuss in my next post), and often a special spiritual hunger and the potential for gospel movements as well, like what happened in China during the turbulent years of communism when it was closed to outside missionaries and is happening in some other places as we speak.

But when reading about those other religions, in non-academic Christian materials, I have often found a strictly polemic attitude. That is to say, the main purpose was not to explain what other people believe, but to demonstrate the flaws and weaknesses in those belief systems, and perhaps reassure readers/listeners that only our own faith makes any sense at all. On the other hand, some explanations are not antagonistic but are simply such a watered-down, simplified version of those beliefs that one is left wondering how any adult could really believe that. Yes, some localized religions have degraded to more or less that point, and any contact with outside religions results in the locals hastening to drop their "old ways" and embrace what is clearly a more impressive belief system. But any major world religion has survived long enough that it's got to have some qualities which people find attractive, especially if it's spreading, like Buddhism or Islam. Prior to encountering the Perspectives course materials and then attending seminary with some great books on the required reading lists, the resources regarding other religions never mentioned what those might be.

Let me be blunt. That's bowling with the lane guards up. If we truly have faith, and if we are grown-ups, or even teenagers bumping into classmates with other belief systems, we need to recognize that people have reasons for what they believe, and if they're going to stop believing that and accept Christ, they're going to need reasons for doing that. That could be as simple as someone having grown up in a non-religious family and being curious about what you believe and asking you to explain, or as challenging as a need for deliverance from demonic oppression which only the power of Christ can effect through the prayer and fasting of His saints. But either way, if we're afraid that merely reading or hearing accurate depictions of earthly religions is going to tempt us away from the Living God, the effects of whose Incarnation changed not only our lives and the destiny of our souls but all of modern world history, then the problem lies not in those descriptions but in our own lack of faith.

Now obviously, I'm not suggesting you send a bunch of grade schoolers to Buddhist summer camp. And in the States, when teaching younger students about world religions I have always pointed out the differences between those and God's revelation to us. Anyone who feels their faith is weakened by exposure to other beliefs should pray for their faith to be strengthened, and take heart from the evidence that abounds, showing that though not seeing, we have believed, yet our faith is not blind.
But students who are mature enough, and certainly adults who are mature in their faith, should have a basic understanding of what other people in this world believe, especially if they intend to witness to them.

 For example: Paul was upset by all the idols in Athens, but he observed them carefully and when sharing the gospel before the Areopagus he used the example of one idol dedicated to an unknown god, and also quoted a Greek poet. He was not respectful of their beliefs (he got very quickly to attacking the idea of idolatry itself), but he made careful observations and tried to share the gospel in a way that had some connections to their worldview. He wanted to share the gospel in a way that would make sense, and used what he knew about Greek culture and had observed about their religion to do so.

A Taiwanese altar to an unknown god

Why does it matter?

It matters not only because if you don't understand what someone else believes, you will have more difficult sharing the gospel with them, but because when we are always surrounded by other believers it's easy to fall into the idea that the gospel is inherently reasonable or self-evidently true. Don't forget what Paul said:

For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. (1 Corinthians 1:22-24)

The gospel is not going to sound inherently reasonable either to people of other religions, or to people who think that a modern education puts them above "organized religion." But understanding that following another religion or belief system doesn't make them stupid or naive, but merely in need of the gospel that will sound a little strange to them, we can speak God's truth into their own context in an effective way. Some will never accept it, but "to those who are called," of all nations, tribes, peoples, and languages, it will be the saving message of Christ, the power and wisdom of God.

That's it for today. I hope by understanding these issues a little better, we can be a stronger Church and more effective disciples of Christ.