A Hill to Die On

The Strategic Problem

Over the years, I’ve heard it said over and over by old-earth creationists that a young earth is just “not a hill to die on.” They mean that other aspects of defending and preaching the gospel are much more important, and Christians don’t have the resources to waste defending a “side issue” like a young earth. Then one day I realized what was wrong with this approach. This realization came with memories of a place I once visited: a place with a strategic hill at first reckoned unimportant but which turned out later to be vitally important. That place still has a lesson to teach, and the lesson applies to the religious conflict raging around us.

That place still has a lesson to teach, and the lesson applies to the religious conflict raging around us.

To understand the strategy, first let me paint the scene. It is Fort Ticonderoga in upstate New York, which was important in the War for American Independence. It is a strong stone fortress on a beautiful high point overlooking the water strait between the south end of 100-mile-long Lake Champlain, which divides New York state from Vermont on the northeast end of Lake George, which angles about 30 miles southwest into the heart of New York. It commands a magnificent view of those waterways for many miles. No one could get by it on the water without being seen and easily fired upon by the fort’s cannon if determined to be an enemy. It was first a British fort, taken by Americans early in the war, but then retaken by the British later. How it was retaken is a lesson in wise versus unwise strategy, very applicable to the current war of words between creation and evolution, between Christian theism and its atheist critics.

When my wife and I toured the fort, the guide quickly and clearly stated the problem. The fort is on a high point, but it’s not the highest in the neighborhood. Only a few hundred yards away is an even higher point called Mount Defiance. At the time of the war, it was just an irregular steep rocky crag covered with thick brush and trees. It was not at all an attractive or desirable place. However, its summit is within cannon range of the fort, and that summit is high enough that if British forces were established there, they couldn’t be touched by American cannon.

After the Americans took the fort, army leaders debated what to do about the possible threat of Mount Defiance should the British return. Some urged that fortification of Mount Defiance be done. Others said the Brits couldn’t get cannon atop Mount Defiance because of bad terrain, so not to worry about it. In the end, nothing was done. But, sure enough, the British did come back via Canada. When they reached Ticonderoga, they immediately put cannons on Mount Defiance! Our guide explained, “General Burgoyne (the British commander) had a theory that wherever a mountain goat could go, a man could go. And wherever a man could go, he could drag a cannon after him. (This saying has also been attributed to Benedict Arnold in trying to persuade fellow American officers to fortify Mount Defiance).” Then Burgoyne threatened to level the fort if it wasn’t surrendered. Needless to say, due to American failure to address a strategic threat, the fort didn’t long remain in American hands. The Americans found out too late that Mount Defiance really was a “hill to die on.”

The Age of the Earth Connection

So what does this have to do with whether it’s important to defend a young earth? It boils down to this: the young earth with no human or nephesh (higher) animal death or suffering prior to Adam’s sin is the strategic equivalent of Mount Defiance. It’s not all that attractive or desirable in itself; it seems like a very peripheral esoteric scientific non-theological issue to nearly all Christian leaders. It doesn’t seem to directly affect the cross of Christ. Therefore, many see no need to defend it. This has allowed the enemies of God and his Word to occupy it for over 200 years now. They have placed cannon on it and rained critical cannonballs down on the fortress of Christian truth incessantly.

Who were these enemies? They were the philosophers and scientists of the so-called Enlightenment, which made man’s reason the standard of truth. Unlike most founders of modern science, those who later brought us evolutionism and long-earth ages were deists, atheists, and agnostics.1^,2 Many of them had obvious anti-Christian agendas and derived their old-earth ideas from ancient Greek philosophy rather than scientific facts.3^,4^,5 They denied (with much scoffing) biblical creation and Noah’s flood (as the apostle Peter predicted eighteen centuries prior with amazing accuracy, in 2 Peter 3:1–6).

How did they gain the high ground? First, evolutionary scientists used aggressive and bullying politics and a shield of fake science to advance their religious/philosophical agenda. Their invalid scientific conclusions have been well documented by creationists. Their hidden political and religious agenda should be more widely recognized. For instance, a group of their principal leaders in England, known as the X-club, who were active together from about 1860 to 1894, followed a coordinated strategy. They openly and viciously ridiculed church leaders and less well-known scientists who disagreed with them. They strove against top-level scientists who disagreed with them, such as Lord Kelvin, James Clerk Maxwell, and others, but they kept such genuine scientific disagreement as secret as possible so as to bolster their public campaign to make themselves the new voice of enlightened science. They commended church leaders who agreed with their evolutionism with compliments such as someone being “the thinking portion of the community”—of course implying that anyone who disagreed with them was old-fashioned and benighted, or even opposed to all science (does this sound familiar?). They self-servingly portrayed themselves as the priesthood of a new scientific religion that must inevitably replace Christianity for the good of all, as the new hope of England and all of humankind.6

All this amounted to an attack on the character of God and the integrity of Scripture by scoffing at and disallowing Noah’s flood. Evolutionary scientists maintained that the fossil record was not due to a worldwide flood but was rather an imperfect record of a very slow evolutionary process involving the suffering and death of millions of pain-sensitive living creatures. The rocks that contained the fossils showing death and decay must be very old, they argued—much, much older than a reasonable biblical timeframe would allow. Thus, it followed by seemingly irrefutable logic that there must have been a great deal of pain-sensitive animal death and suffering for long ages before humans (Adam and Eve or evolved people) came on earth’s scene. It further followed that, if there is a God, this animal death and intense suffering must have been part of God’s creative plan for the earth. Finally, these “facts” logically made the Creator God directly responsible for all this death and suffering, first among animals and then among humans. (The doctrine of the fall and the curse was largely lost in this shuffling.) The final step in this cascade of false reasoning was that our Creator God is not worthy of worship or respect. The blame for death and suffering in the world shifted from man to God. The impact of Adam’s sin was lessened greatly or denied completely. As Darwin himself put it to justify his own turning from God, “I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly [sic] created the Ichneumonidae [a kind of wasp] with the express intention of their [larvae] feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice”.7 This kind of anti-God thinking has multiplied fruitfully since Darwin’s time, largely through his influence.

Inflicting Pain and Death Is Not Part of God’s Character

If God made all things pure and deathless at first and then allowed suffering and death to follow man’s sin for redemptive reasons, then the cause of the suffering is man’s sin, not God’s creative character.

Why do so many Christian leaders not see the importance of the young earth? In part, because bowing to “science” is a bad habit that has become entrenched in seminaries and churches over the last 200+ years. Also, some Christians reason that God’s ways are higher than our ways and not always understandable to us. If he allows death and suffering in the present, then he must be okay with it in the past, especially if it didn’t involve humans during the creation process. However, this view ignores the importance of the fall. We can’t emphasize enough that Adam’s fall changed everything in nature from God’s “very good” original perfection to very bad imperfection—death, decay, and suffering throughout nature. Thus—and we must mark this well—if God made all things pure and deathless at first and then allowed suffering and death to follow man’s sin for redemptive reasons, then the cause of the suffering is man’s sin, not God’s creative character. However, if God used suffering and death to create life-forms, then such use—and allowance of it—becomes part of God’s character. So, when we teach young-earth creation, it’s really much more than that. It’s also in accordance with the following non-exhaustive list of verses:

No one is good except God alone. (Mark 10:18)

God is light, and in him is NO darkness AT ALL. (1 John 1:5, emphasis mine)

He is my rock, and there is NO unrighteousness in him. (Psalm 92:15, emphasis mine)

Our Father in heaven, hallowed [totally respected and honored] be your name. (Matthew 6:9)

Think of it this way. If an ethical, caring doctor is treating many patients who have the same deadly disease, he may have to use a painful and even dangerous remedy to save the most lives possible. He does this out of genuine love and concern for his patients’ welfare, not because he enjoys their suffering. He wants to bring them through their present distress to something better—to restoration of the full life and health they should have. If, on the other hand, he inflicts pain and even death on healthy people or pain-sensitive animals for reasons of his own, when he has options and power to achieve the same goals by non-painful means, then there is every reason to consider him a sadist (one who is pleased by inflicting pain on others).

To bring it up to the divine level, if God inflicts pain as part of a remedy for the disease of sin in his children, then he is being a loving father. (One could take the medical analogy even further and portray God as a doctor who not only ethically treats his patients but gets personally involved by selflessly giving his own blood as a transfusion for their healing.) But if God inflicts pain arbitrarily, without purpose, in either higher animals or man, as part of his nature as Creator, then he has a character flaw. If old-earth thinking is true, then it’s the obvious flaw of sadism. Sadly, most old-earth believers manage to ignore this appearance of flawed divine character, while it remains glaringly obvious to most old-earth unbelievers. They have used this false science to hurl slanderous names at God such as sadist, fool, narcissist, or even devil. To judge by the frequency and volume of these accusations, the problem is only getting worse, not better.

It is very sad that so many Christian leaders sidestep the obvious implications of death universally entering the world in Genesis 3. They make such arguments as the curse of death applying only to humans and not animals, or that the death mentioned in Genesis 3 is spiritual death and not physical death. The fallacies of these interpretations have been well refuted elsewhere. Suffice it for now to look at Isaiah 9 and 11, where it’s expressly stated that the complete rule of the coming Messiah as Prince of Peace will produce such complete and universal peace that the lamb will be safe with the wolf, the baby goat with the leopard, the calf with the lion, and the cow with the bear. Isaiah then equates the stopping of such hurting and destroying even among animals with knowledge of God filling the earth. These and other passages give Christian apologists ample reasons to proclaim that when atheists condemn God for bringing pain and suffering into the world, it is not the God of redemption clearly revealed in the Bible they are talking about.

Skeptics will still ask, “Why does a good God make animals kill and eat each other at all?” One reason which perhaps needs more attention is that observing violent animal behavior holds up to us as humans a mirror of our own sinful habits of violence and oppression towards each other. We allude to this by such expressions as “sexual predators” and “predatory lending.” Seeing animal violence and predation—and being in danger of it from wild beasts ourselves—also makes us aware of unseen spiritual predators who constantly seek our eternal souls. The Apostle Peter made this connection explicit, exhorting us to be always awake and alert, for our enemy Satan “prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour” (1 Peter 5:8).

People—especially those in power—are very good at rationalizing or hiding their oppressive, predatory tendencies. Even Christians must be careful in this area, as Paul exhorted the Galatian churches to practice neighborly love towards each other, emphasizing that love is the exact opposite of animal predation. To warn against the latter he even used an explicit analogy in Galatians 5:14–15: “For the whole law is fulfilled in one word: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ But if you bite and devour one another, watch out that you are not consumed by one another!” Simply observing predatory animal tactics and behavior helps strip away our rationalizing and expose our often-denied sinfulness.

Conclusion

Like the American army’s failure to defend Mount Defiance, it has laid the much more important fortress—the completely and utterly good character of God open to devastating artillery fusillades.

The strategic “hill” of the young earth is not an attractive objective. It is not for most Christians a point worth defending with hard work and personal loss. Many have said openly that it’s “not a hill to die on.” Though many young-earth apologists rightly see long ages as greatly affecting many important and foundational doctrines, not seeing the importance of defending God’s good name still shows some lack of strategic insight. Like the American army’s failure to defend Mount Defiance, it has laid the much more important fortress—the completely and utterly good character of God (and the blameless integrity of his Word) open to devastating artillery fusillades, day in and day out, year after year, for many decades now.

This strategic failure has resulted in not only allowing the ceaseless slander of God’s good name, but the loss of uncounted thousands of Christian young people, who have been led into atheism, agnosticism, humanism, and “none-ism.” The cannons of the skeptics have blown gaping holes in our fortress walls until our children reel away in mental shock by the thousands and look for safer religious territory somewhere else. However, it need not be this way. It is far past the time for Christians to retake the high ground, make a determined defense, and accept whatever sacrifices are needed to uphold the absolute holy goodness of our God.