I don’t have to go any further than my inbox to find some of the smartest people out there. Example: Dave from Dallas whose intellectual curiosity and keen observations of life could fill a book. And might one day.
Today, he broached the topic of Creationism. I invite you to read it and see if you also think this is one great explanation of the differences between those who value life, and those who don’t.
One of the first things I understood about Creation, when I finally got around to examining Christianity at age 26, was the evidentiary nature of parts of Genesis.. God made animals, birds, fish, etc., “each according to its kind”.. but when it came to man, it was “in His image and likeness”. This is the biblical explanation for the fact that man knows right from wrong and animals don’t. Man isn’t just better (further along the evolutionary scale, etc.), He is DIFFERENT, fundamentally so, from animals, different like 1 from 0, like black from white. Not just degree but a difference of essential nature. He has God’s nature in him, the “image and likeness”, or as another page puts it, He has signed His name across our hearts.
This is the biblical explanation, and of course it fits the facts about our own observable human nature far better than evolution does.
The famous “talking gorilla” (sign language) understands all sorts of emotions… it will tell you when it’s sad, happy, etc, and it shares with humans many of the stimuli for feeling strong emotions. I have seen a video in which the gorilla watches a scene from an old movie, and when the child gets on board the train to leave his mother in wartime London, the gorilla turns its back to the screen, refusing to watch, and signs “sad sad sad”. Very intuitive, very sensitive, high comprehension. But it does not know right from wrong in the abstract. There is no “ought” on its mind. I ought to do one thing and I ought not to do another… these ideas are simply not present in the animal kingdom. The gorilla can tell you what it wants, what makes it happy.. but it can’t verbalize abstracts, can’t approach ethics or morals. It has a working intellect but not a working morality.
The difference between human and animal intellect is a question of degree. The difference between human and animal morality is the difference between one and zero. Not degree but more like an infinite difference. The universal human knowledge of morality is in my view strong evidence of Creation, and one must bring a bias to the argument in order to dismiss this.
That bias is the anti-God bias, which is born of pride and bitterness and jealousy in the human heart, not of intellectual analysis.
And anti God is anti human, as you say. This explains why the mass graves are always filled, the gulags are always built, in the totalitarian states that oppress religion and churches– because they don’t like the competition for the loyalty of the citizens.
Dave in Dallas
From Tom Kovach:
“The fool has said in his heart, ‘There is no God.'” — Psalm 14:1 and Psalm 53:1
“This is not merely a ‘Russian’ experiment—it is the end of all peoples who remove God from the center of life.” — Alexander Solzhenitsyn, about the gulags
Dave in Dallas, that is the most astute explanation I have ever read that is this brief. You have captured the truth and put it in context ANYONE can understand and no scientist can refute. Thank you!
“This is the biblical explanation, and of course it fits the facts about our own observable human nature far better than evolution does.”
Some questions about Dave in Dallas. What are his scientific credentials? What has he contributed to biology? What scientific discoveries has he made? How many DNA sequences has he compared? How does he explain lanugo which is found on human and whale fetuses? How does he explain the predictions made about human chromosome two? How does he explain ERVs? How does he explain Dorudon? How does he explain Tiktaalik? How does he explain Ardi and Kadanuumuu?
According to the Encyclopedia Britannica (the best encyclopedia in the world): “There is probably no other notion in any field of science that has been as extensively tested and as thoroughly corroborated as the evolutionary origin of living organisms.”
The world’s biologists call evolution the foundation of biology. Does Dave think he knows more about biology than all the world’s biologists? Does Dave think he knows more about biology than the Encyclopedia Britannica?
Human Ape– you could not have missed the target more if you were a French artillery officer. 🙂
The point of my email was that our own knowledge that there is such a thing as right and wrong, our own sense that we, I, “ought” to do one thing and not another, is evidence of a part of human nature that animals do not have. They have intellect, but they do not have morality. In Genesis, we see a clear explanation for that. In evolution there is no explanation. The gradual onset of advancements in the life forms should yield a human history of a gradual advancement in morality along with intellect. But there never was a time when, say, stealing was “sort of” wrong, somewhere between wrong and not wrong, evolving. It’s a silly idea to even try to formulate. Morality appeared in the human animal complete and did not evolve. However our physical form might have ended up being what it is, the presence of morality in us – and not in the animals – makes us utterly different from them, not biologically but spiritually. It is proof of God’s role in making us. This really is not that difficult to understand.