Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

Genesis and Human Origins

Janssen

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781498291415
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Church tradition has long held that humanity arose from two people living in a garden of paradise in the Mesopotamian basin roughly six thousand years ago. Scientists now have abundant evidence that the human population never numbered less than ten thousand, originated out of Africa hundreds of thousands of years ago, and descended from ancestors that we share in common with several other species (some now extinct, some still living). Is it possible to make these two starkly different worldviews agree, or do we have to choose one and discard the other? This book will summarize the fossil and genetic discoveries that support the scientific view, and then address the impact that this has upon many Christian theological tenets. In the process, it presents many examples of the church adjusting long-held traditions and teachings in the face of scientific advances, as well as examples of how we often hold two seemingly contradictory ideas together without feeling a need to discard one of them. Many theologians have written on this topic without adequately incorporating the scientific aspects. Many others have addressed the science without exploring the impact on theology. This book accomplishes both.

1

It’s All About How You Look At It

As a university professor, part of my job involves marking long assignments from students. Sometimes my reward is seeing evidence of brilliant, original thought. Other times, not so much.

Let’s just say I’m marking essays on American history. Admittedly, this is a strange thing for me to do, given that I’m a professor from a department of medicine in Canada teaching a practical physiology lab course. But bear with me: the reader will relate to this form of the analogy better than if I turned it into one of marking pharmacology lab reports.

One student writes on the Civil War: the circumstances that led up to it, the main details of the war itself, and the societal changes that followed after it. Another student goes through a similar exercise around the Great Depression. A third student steps back and takes a bigger picture approach by covering two hundred years of American history, which means it includes many of the same points and details found in the first two essays. But I’m not concerned: there’s bound to be some overlap in the essays if they’re all dealing with basically the same set of historical facts.

It’s the next two essays that make me feel really uneasy. The fourth essay covers yet a different aspect of American history, but bounces back and forth through the historical timeline, sometimes in directions you wouldn’t expect, and even draws a bizarre parallel with a particular episode of the TV series The Simpsons, and has two unfinished paragraphs where the student started developing something but didn’t finish.

Sure, I’m going to have to be harsh with this fourth paper, but that’s not what unsettles me. Instead, it’s the fact that essay number five does exactly the same thing. Same historical event. Same hop-scotching around the timeline, and in the same sequence. Same reference to The Simpsons episode. Same half-finished paragraphs. It even has the very same spelling and grammatical mistakes in the very same places.

What am I to conclude? I could be open-minded and nonjudgmental, and say to myself: “Perhaps by chance they just happened to pick the same topic, and when you’re dealing with a limited number of historical facts, they’re bound to include some of the same points. Besides, it might hurt their feelings too much if I actually accused one or both of copying from the other. And it might take too much effort to prove that one of them did: I’d have to interview the students, ask them for their early drafts and preparatory notes, and look into their computer hard drives and recycle bins.”

I could choose to ignore my suspicions and try to convince myself of what I might hope is true: it’s entirely possible that these two just happened to be on the same wavelength and wrote two very similar papers completely independently.

On the other hand, I could be realistic and principled: I should stand up for what is right and not be meek or cowed into complicity. The facts speak for themselves: clearly one of these two authors copied from the other. Agreed: this is a serious matter with major consequences for the students, ranging from having to rewrite the entire essay, to getting a failing mark to even getting expelled. But that shouldn’t cause me to dance around the undeniable inference, or deter me from concluding the obvious.

This analogy sets the stage for one of the main goals of my writing this book: there’s been some plagiarism going on which now calls into question a number of fundamental theological tenets that the Christian church has held for millennia. But you’ll have to wait till chapter 6 to find out what plagiarism I’m talking about. First, I need to cover a few important concepts.

Escaping the Matrix

In the 1999 blockbuster movie The Matrix, a character named Cypher (played by Joe Pantoliano) speaks to the star of the movie (Neo, played by Keanu Reeves) about life in the Matrix. (For those who aren’t familiar with the story, the “Matrix” is a simulated reality created by sentient machines to imprison humans and extract their heat and electrical energy.) Cypher holds up a piece of steak and says, “I know this steak doesn’t exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize?” [Cypher bites into the steak and savors it.] “Ignorance is bliss.”

We all do it. We allow our worldview to dictate or at least color our interpretation of the facts before our eyes. Sometimes we’re conscious of it; other times, not so much.

We deny factual evidence because it doesn’t fit our understanding of things, or at least how we want to believe things should be. When watching a news report on television about a crime committed by an old high school friend or a colleague at work, the response is, “No, it can’t be true. They’re not like that.” Sometimes the family of a loved one who died will deny that the latter is actually dead: they’ll cling to the belief that one day their loved one will return home and all will be well.

We interpret data presented to us according to our preconceived bias. Lawyers on both sides of a case they’re defending or prosecuting may call for the replacement of a potential juror simply because their experience tells them that two different people can see the same facts quite differently. A certain event in the Middle East can be interpreted completely differently by the ethnic groups involved.

We grow up for decades with a certain sense of propriety, only to be told by our teenagers that “it’s not like that anymore”: hairstyle, clothes, lyrics in music, sexual norms. What is plain and simply true in one era isn’t necessarily the case in another era.

Sometimes the consequences for getting it wrong are insignificant. I still don’t understand why it’s such a faux pas to wear socks with sandals or white after Labour Day, and I’ve even been known to flaunt these rules. But other times the stakes are enormous, particularly within those subjects that one should never broach during a dinner party: religion and politics.

This book addresses the former of those two taboo subjects. In particular, it focuses attention on our tendency to allow our theology to drive our interpretation of the world around us, even to the point of believing things which defy the facts. Mark Twain is credited for defining faith as “believing what you know ain’t true.”

“–isms”

No matter who you are, where you live, or how you’ve been raised, you have a carefully defined worldview. A set of values, and a way to understand the world around you. Sometimes we don’t really know what our “–ism” is, and so we have to go out and “find ourselves”: this is especially the case for teenagers who have grown up for almost two decades under the –ism(s) of their parents and they’ve reached the stage where they’re ready to be their own person. Often, we hold several of these worldviews simultaneously. –isms have all kinds of dimensions:

• Religious: Buddhism. Catholicism. Zoroastrianism.

• Social: Feminism. Humanism. Libertarianism.

• Economic: Capitalism. Communism. Socialism. Materialism.

• Political: Liberalism. Republicanism. Conservativism.

• Perspectival: Optimism. Pessimism. Nihilism.

The problem with –isms is that we can allow them to become too rigid. The –ism doesn’t allow the facts to speak for themselves: it colors the interpretation of the facts. There will be stark differences in how the actions, motives and life story of a successful white male CEO are assessed from the perspective of a feminist, a capitalist, a devout Buddhist monk, and a poor person from a non-Caucasian non-Western background.

A different problem, but one equally as bad, is that we allow our community and peers to define our –ism and how we should interpret the world. To impose a zeitgeist upon us. We may feel strongly about a certain topic—say, gun control—and that automatically defines how we are expected to feel about gay rights, national fiscal responsibility, and international policies. Choosing to support the Republican candidate crystalizes my stance about global warming. And as we navigate our way through life, and start to see things from a new angle, –isms seem to force us to have to choose a side.

The Eyes See Only What the Mind Is Prepared to Comprehend1

I grew up with a very distinct Christian worldview. One which allowed the Bible to define and evaluate everything around me and about me. One phrase I heard repeated many times was: “If the Bible says it, I believe it, and that settles it.” Another one which I’ve come across far more often, especially in the more recent past when reading or listening to a discussion about some aspect of apologetics, is: “a plain readi...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Chapter 1: It’s All About How You Look At It
• Chapter 2: A Precedent-Setting Case
• Chapter 3: Other Duels between the Church and Science
• Chapter 4: A Basic Understanding of the Science
• Chapter 5: Origin of Humanity
• Chapter 6: Origin of Humanity
• Chapter 7: Christian Objections to the Evolutionary Model
• Chapter 8: Adjustments to Theology
• Chapter 9: Various Responses from the Church
• Chapter 10: Atheist Worldviews Also Color Their Belief Systems
• Chapter 11: Standing on the Shoulders of Giants
• About the Author
• Bibliography