Christians conquering the Babylon of proud scientists?
The evening of the night that Babylon fell to the Medes and the Persians, the prophet Daniel recorded that Belshazzar the king made a feast for a thousand of his lords. He was so proud that he commanded the gold and silver vessels be brought that Nebuchadnezzar had taken from the temple in Jerusalem. And then he and his lords drank wine from them.
Similarly, non-Christian scientists are having a party these days boasting about the wonders of modern science. They attribute these wonders to their own powers and scoff at religion. For example, famous cosmologist Stephen Hawking once stated, “There is a fundamental difference between religion, which is based on authority, and science, which is based on observation and reason. Science will win, because it works.” Figuratively, they are getting drunk by drinking out of the goblets of Christianity. That’s because modern science was founded on a biblical worldview.
In particular, modern science developed from belief in: 1. a Creator Who is eternal, omnipresent and rational and therefore not capricious; 2. a Creator who made us in His own image and therefore we are capable of understanding His creation; and 3. our fallen nature inherited in Adam that therefore requires us to check scientific theories by peer review and observations.
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Many proud non-Christian scientists behave like Harvard geneticist Richard Lewontin, who wrote, “we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.” They protect themselves from God by living in something like Babylon. Their figurative Babylon is surrounded by the wall of biological evolution.
Unbelievers cleverly erected that wall to try to keep God out of their lives. For example, Richard Dawkins claimed that Darwinism made him an intellectually fulfilled atheist. Just as in Babylon at the time of Daniel, many people of God have been taken captive there also. They are theistic evolutionists.
How can one break down that wall? Why not just point out its many problems? While mainstream scientists are sure we got here by evolution, they have no idea of the supposed mechanisms for the origin of life or of sexual reproduction, for example.
Good. But outside the wall of biological evolution is a big moat, representing billions of years of cosmological and geological evolution. Because of that moat, one cannot get weapons close enough to the wall to do much damage. Even if one could cause some damage to the wall, the moat would still be in the way. For example, people arguing for Intelligent Design haven’t gotten very far. They argue against theistic evolution, but generally do not see the problem presented by billions of years.
Nevertheless, an astute observer would notice something similar to what the Medes and Persians noticed about ancient Babylon. The same river Euphrates that supplied water for the moat also flowed under the wall and through the city to supply the water needed for everyday life. According to Greek historian Herodotus, the Persian Cyrus the Great diverted some of the Euphrates River upstream of Babylon into side channels so that it was only about thigh high when it entered the city. Then at night his soldiers could enter the city through the river while Belshazzar and his lords were partying. Could one conquer the Babylon of proud scientists similarly? Surely biological evolution has no defense without billions of years.
One could divert billions of years by citing many physical evidences for a young earth (available, for example, at answersingenesis.org, icr.org, and creation.com) and by appeal to the Bible itself. For example, one can point out that the early accounts in Genesis are historical narrative, not poetry, and are clearly meant to be understood literally. In the grammatical context of Genesis 1, the Hebrew word “yom” also can only refer to an ordinary day. Almost all Hebrew scholars agree.
However, non-Christian scientists and philosophers have been shouting from the walls of their Babylon and demoralizing the armies of Christians outside. They have convinced most theologians and Christian intellectuals that the study of science must be separated from the Bible. That was the claim of 17th century philosopher Baruch Spinoza, who developed a type of pantheism that inspired Einstein, Hawking and modern humanists.
If Spinoza were right, only scientists could know the truth about the physical origins of the universe. As a result, theologians for the past 250 years have been inventing various schemes to make Genesis 1 conform to the speculations of non-Christian scientists. Those schemes have included the gap theory, the day age theory, the framework hypothesis, the Cosmic Temple idea, as well as literal days separated by hundreds of millions of years.
Correspondingly, theologians and intellectuals have generally ceased to attack speculations about billions of years. They also discourage other Christians from trying to mount such attacks. They sometimes cite Christians such as Augustine, Bacon and Galileo who cautioned in various ways against using the Bible as a source of scientific theories without checking them with observations. Nevertheless, all these Christians maintained the infallibility of revelation in the Bible concerning origins. On the other hand, speculations by non-Christian scientists about inherently unobservable origins use non-theistic presuppositions to interpret evidence left from the past.
Belief by Christians in long ages undermines the character of God. If the fossils were hundreds of millions of years old, then they were buried, not in the Flood of Noah’s time, but before the Fall of Adam. Biblical genealogies only allow for thousands of years between then and now. So the disease, violence and death seen in the fossil record would have begun and continued under the direction of God. On the contrary, Genesis 1:31 states that God’s creation was “very good” at the beginning. And 1 Corinthians 15:26 states that death is an enemy, surely not part of God’s work of creation.
Let us divert the streams of billions of years and march with God’s help into Babylon to end the partying of proud scientists drinking the wine of evolution from stolen Christian goblets.
John Doane received a bachelor's degree from Yale, a PhD from MIT, and worked in microwave technology for Bell Laboratories, Princeton University and General Atomics. He served on the Board of Directors of Jesus to the Communist World (which later became Voice of the Martyrs). His recent articles have been published in the Creation Research Society Quarterly and The Christian Post.
