Ape-Men and Spacemen

Not so long ago, newspapers around the world hailed the ‘Missing Link Found in Ethiopia’. In our June issue we pointed out what was actually found in regard to this creature, named Australopithecus ramidus—a few tiny, chewed-up bits of bone, some over half a kilometre from others.

It seems this ‘Missing Link’ has now lost its evolutionary status. It has been quietly shuffled off the ‘human ancestor’ list, and given another genus name (Ardipithecus).

This sort of thing just keeps on happening, but there are never headlines which shout ‘Missing Link Claim Debunked’.

Then there was the ‘life on Mars’ claim. Huge hype at first, with humanists gloating over their imagined evolutionary triumph. Reporters swooped on creationist ministries and other Christian groups to get their reaction. Yet when other secular scientists became increasingly skeptical, the media generally failed to report it.

This should not surprise us, since those operating the media are only acting consistently with their evolution-based world and life view.

They have been taught (in contradiction to all the experimental evidence) that life just forms from chemicals by itself. If on Earth, why not on Mars? So the Mars rock claims were seen as proof that life could create itself, and that the Bible was wrong.

For decades, most of the church, ostrich–like, has not faced up to the creation/evolution issue.

For decades, most of the church, ostrich–like, has not faced up to the creation/evolution issue. Many thought that it would be enough just to go on teaching Bible stories, without training folk to be able to defend their faith logically in an increasingly evolutionized world.

Thus, most of the brightest of the postwar generation, those who would go on to hold positions of cultural influence—in the media, or as judges and lawmakers—accommodated their thinking to an evolutionary foundation, essentially abandoning a Christian worldview. If you believe that the Bible’s claims about origins have been falsified, then it can be no more than a religious book about vague ideas and feelings.

Had more of the many churchmen interviewed about the Mars rock responded from a biblical worldview, we would have heard much more healthy skepticism of the claims. Instead, they mostly swallowed the ‘life’ claim uncritically, and began trying to accommodate their Christianity to this ‘find’.

For many, it seemed that no discoveries could conceivably matter to their brand of Christianity. Extraterrestrial life, even alien civilisations, would not cause them to question their ‘faith’.

However, rather than cause us to admire them as unshakeable spiritual stalwarts, we need to realise that for most, this is actually a sad indictment. Why? Because in order to accommodate evolutionary ‘fact’, they have already modified Christianity into something which exists only inside your head, with little connection to the real world.

Sadly, even in many conservative churches, there is a tendency in this direction—to see the Bible as just a ‘religious book’ which is not related to the real world of rocks, death, planets, trees, fossils—everything. They say, therefore, that creation/evolution ‘doesn’t matter’.

For those who have gone still further down this slippery path, it also ‘wouldn’t matter’ if the bones of Jesus were found. After all, the resurrection, like creation, only needs to be true in a ‘religious sense’, they claim.

A ‘faith’ removed from its anchor in revealed (biblical) truth about the real world is infinitely adjustable. This is why it seems to tolerate anything (except when a creation ministry wants to build a museum to proclaim that the Bible is true and can be trusted). At the risk of sounding too cynical, perhaps even the spectacle of ET hordes blowing up the White House, as depicted in the fictional movie Independence Day, would not threaten such an infinitely flexible ‘faith’. Such woolly beliefs have nothing to offer a dying world.

The apostle Paul, by contrast, taught that ‘if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain’ (1 Corinthians 15:14, KJV). All of Christianity is based on real, historical, factual events. If these are not true, then having good religious feelings about them is completely useless.

Christ’s resurrection is meaningless without His sacrificial death for sin, which in turn depends on Adam’s real, historical sin bringing in death and a cursed, fallen creation. All of these are denied by evolution and its long ages of death before man.

However, the Bible really is God’s Word, and can be trusted, so we will always find that it is not Christianity that needs adjusting to fit ‘science’. The raw facts about the ‘Mars rock’, as this issue shows, do not support evolution any more than the now discredited ramidus ‘link’. We invite you to enjoy it, and to share its contents widely to a hurting world which increasingly needs Christian reality—not evolutionary mythology.