Pulpit Reflections

Pulpit Reflections By Rev. Robert Grossmann As the world commemorates the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin, the originator of the modern theory of evolution, it might be well to take stock of where we are scientifically with respect to the question of the origin of the earth and its inhabitants, especially in the light of the Bible's teaching that God "created heaven and earth, and all that is in them," as the Fourth Commandment puts it. Evolutionary teaching has become the orthodoxy of the modern educational establishment in the United States and England (though not in many other nations), and no deviation from it is allowed. Evolutionists, like Muslims, want their teaching with no competing teachings allowed at all, and want every other teaching outlawed. This in itself should make us supicious. If a religion or theory cannot stand to be questioned, its holder must be gun-shy for some reason. Maybe it doesn't really hold water. Well, where are we today? I should, perhaps mention that I have some scientific credentials, having graduated with training in chemical engineering from the University of California and immediately gone to work in cancer research. To this day I am an avid reader of theoretical physics by some of the world's greatest physicists, such as Steven Hawking and Andrei Linde (a top Russian physicist now teaching at Stanford University). Well, where are we? According to these great physicists the world is amazingly designed to harbor life, including human beings. Dr. Hawking in his book, A Brief History of Time, remarks, "It's as though the universe was designed to create us," and Dr. Linde, in the December 2008 issue of Discover Magazine (available at the Vermillion library) is quoted as saying, "We are not adapted to the universe, but the universe to us." "Call it fluke, mystery, a miracle. Or call it the biggest problem in physics. Short of invoking a benevolent Creator…" a "multiverse" is the only possible explanation (a multiverse is envisioning trillions and trillions of universes with ours accidentally favoring life). This, of course, is pure speculation, which one scientist in the December Discovery article says is not worthy to be called "scientific theory" because it explains nothing by making every explanation equally probable. Proving everything, proves nothing. Darwin created a theory of the origin of life without God because, as Bernard Carr, a cosmologist at London's St. Mary University remarks in the Discovery article, if you don't want God you have to come up with another miracle to explain life, the miracle of evolution being vast periods of time. The illogical assumption here is that over vast periods of time, things happen that we cannot, and never have seen happen now or in our past. The cubic miles of coal and other fossilized material in the earth come not from eons of time that evolutionary theory proclaims, but from flood catastrophes. The earth has a perfectly good garbage disposal system that deals with all plant and animal matter that dies. None is fossilized! Evolutionists are particularly wary of the idea that "intelligent design" is the only reasonable explanation for the complexity of life for the simple reason that it rings true. Evolutionary scientists have been fishing for years for a factual basis for evolution, but so far, as a famous evolutionist biologist of the 20th century, Stephen Gould, said, "evolution is the one fact of science about which we know virtually nothing." Now you know why the trumpets blow so hard for evolution this year. Like the preacher's sermon notes say next to a paragraph, "weak point, pound the pulpit!" Bible-believing Christians do not have to be afraid of modern science; it has given us many good things (like the computer on which I am writing), but like every other human endeavor it sometimes throws us a mud pie.