The Story of Us

The History Channel’s new 12-hour mini-series, “Mankind the Story of All of Us,” will debut later this year. The project’s executive producer, Jane Root, says it will be a “real action-adventure” program starting with the big bang and tracing “the development of humans on a planet where the vast majority of species go extinct.” While offering educational supplements to schools, Root says the series will be like “a Hollywood superhero movie” revealing the ”real exciting story of how humans made it.”

Already Root has identified the worldview that will color the series. If the producers ignore God’s eyewitness account of man’s creation and the rest of the historical material in Genesis, they will not only present unverifiable ideas as if they were established facts but also rob the viewing public of the truth of human heritage. For instance, the Bible tells us early humans—Adam and Eve and their immediate descendants—were intelligent people engaged in animal husbandry, metallurgy, city-planning, and the making of musical instruments. Will this be the view presented? Root says the series will trace the “development of tools.” Will her series tell us primitive tools were made by animal-like brutes struggling to evolve brains big enough to think? We don’t know, but we can guess.

Since the series begins with the big bang, we bet the true age of the universe won’t get airtime either. The series will cover “astronomy, geology and other sciences” and “make liberal use of computer-generated recreations in its storytelling.” Therefore, the producers, if they choose, will be able to convincingly blur the distinction between observable science and evolutionary interpretations.

The series will try to show how humans survived on a planet where most species go extinct.

The series will try to show how humans survived on a planet where most species go extinct. Will it explain the massive graveyards in the fossil record correctly as a result of the global Flood? Will it reveal that God who created mankind has had a plan for mankind and man’s salvation since before the world was created (1 Peter 1:20)?

The series will also discuss “construction of the pyramids.” Will it make clear that they were built by a civilization that developed in the post-Flood world after the dispersion from Babel? Will the chronology used for Egypt in the program be the flawed chronology—now being discarded by even secular Egyptologists—which denies biblical facts?

Root says she was surprised to learn about “connections among cultures in ancient times.” From a biblical worldview we understand that intelligent people spread out after God confused their languages at the Tower of Babel. Thus we are not surprised to learn that ancient Chinese writing reveals an awareness of many facts from Genesis. The discovery of over a hundred lengthy bilingual vocabularies on cuneiform tablets at Ebla in Syria, probably dating shortly after the dispersion from Babel, reveals mankind’s necessary preoccupation with linguistic pursuits in the years after the dispersion from Babel. Archaeology corroborates many facts presented in Scripture, as a stroll last month through the British Museum confirmed for this writer.

The Bible begins with the history of all mankind in Genesis. The focus eventually narrows to center mainly on Abraham’s descendants through whom God’s Word would be preserved and through whom Jesus Christ, the Savior of the world, would come. Nevertheless, the Bible contains a great deal of historical documentation about other people groups. Acts 17:26 even tells us God planned for the nations of the world. After all, God not only cares about the salvation of all people (2 Peter 3:9) but also has had a hand in human history from the beginning.

When the series airs, we as Bible-believing Christians would be wise to be “up” on the real history of “us” so we can share the truth with our friends and our children. We cannot expect the secular world or the History Channel to portray all the history we know to be true, for they see it incorrectly through a worldview that glorifies humanity while ignoring God, but we dare not leave God out. We know better.