Book Review: The Lie

Wes Bredenhof

The Lie: Evolution/Millions of Years (25th Anniversary Edition), Ken Ham.  Green Forest: Master Books, 2016.  Paperback, 236 pages.

When I was growing up in Edmonton, one of the biggest things that helped me stay convinced of the biblical view of creation was attendance at a number of presentations organized by the Creation Science Association of Alberta.  One in particular stands out in my memory:  Dr. Steven Austin at the Jubilee Auditorium in about 1985.   I remember because his name struck me:  I thought I was going to go and listen to the Six Million Dollar Man.  I also remember because, even though I was only 12 years old, his presentation on Mt. Saint Helens drove home how drastic geological changes can take place in a brief period of time.

Since coming here to Australia, our church has been invited to a couple of similar presentations.  One was from Answers in Genesis, an organization which has its roots here Down Under.  As they usually do, AiG had a table of books for sale and among them was the 25th anniversary edition of The Lie, by AiG founder Ken Ham.  The book was deeply discounted and I do have Dutch roots, so I couldn’t resist.

There are a few things that really stand out to me about The Lie.

One is that Ken Ham rightly construes the debate.  It’s not ultimately about creation versus evolution.  It’s about God’s Word versus man’s word.  It’s about revelation from God versus the pretension of autonomous human reasoning.  There are really two different religions at war with one another.

Because he gets the debate rightly framed, he also understands that our starting point as Christians has to be the Word of God.  In other words, he’s a presuppositionalist.  He demonstrates how it’s not enough to throw evidences and reasoning at evolutionists without challenging what’s at the core of their belief system:  a commitment to independence from God.  This illustration lays out the problem that often exists with regard to Christian efforts to defeat evolution:

We spend too much of our time taking potshots at the consequences of unbelief, when we should be barraging the foundations with concentrated fire.

That brings me to another stand-out feature of The Lie:  great illustrations.   Anyone who’s been to an AiG presentation would remember them.  Illustrations can really help to drive home unfamiliar abstract concepts.

Another important element of the book is its value for educators.  Earlier in his life, Ken Ham was a science teacher in Queensland, Australia.  He made some blunders in his early efforts to teach creation versus evolution.  His honesty about those and his elucidation of better ways deserve the attention of every Christian teacher, especially those who teach science and/or Bible.

Finally, I also really appreciated the way Ham argues that millions or billions of years is foundational to evolutionary thinking.  You can’t have one without the other.  At the same time, he points out that the key issue is not the age of the earth.  He writes, “Believing in a relatively young earth (i.e. only a few thousand years old) is a consequence of accepting the authority of the Word of God over fallible man’s word” (p.126).

Toward the end of the book, Ham notes that Answers in Genesis has heard from many people about how their ministry establishing the creation/fall foundation has been instrumental in opening doors for the gospel.  It’s true.  I have a colleague in New Zealand who became a Christian after listening to a talk by Ken Ham.  His unbelief, using evolution as an excuse, was challenged to the core and the Holy Spirit used that to bring him to faith in Christ.  Buy The Lie for someone like that – it may just be something God uses to bring them the invaluable gift of eternal life!

2 free films tackle evolution from different directions

Video Jon Dykstra

Human Zoos (1 hour)

Are we made in the very Image of God? Evolutionists say no, and Human Zoos explores some of the implications of their beastly thinking.

The Programming of Life 2: Earth (1/2 hour)

Our planet is incredibly fine-tuned for life, and yet amazingly robust in its provision for that life. This film explores how unlikely it is that the Earth would just happen to have everything that we need in exactly the proportions we need. This is a fantastic sequel to Programming for Life which explored just how impossible it would have been for life to have come about by chance. You can watch that one for free too, right here.

The cautions I would add are that the scientists consulted run the gamut from six-day creationist to intelligent design proponent to theistic evolutionist, and there seems a sort of “scientism” at work here (Science as the sole arbitrator of truth). That said, the overall argument they make – that the evidence shows that the Earth is uniquely and clearly designed for life – is one we can endorse wholeheartedly.

Why haven’t we heard from ET?

Jon Dykstra

cowalienSome 70 years ago physicist Enrico Fermi looked up at the stars and wondered where everyone was at. With billions of galaxies, each with billions of stars, it seemed inconceivable to him that ours would be the only planet to evolve life. So where was everyone?

His query is now called Fermi’s Paradox, and on March 18 a group of about 60 scientists met in Paris to share their latest theories as to why we haven’t heard from any of our galactic neighbors. Live Science’s Mindy Weisberger shared some of their creative ideas:

  • The “zoo hypothesis” – Earth is like a galactic animal reserve where aliens are leaving us alone to be observed in our natural habitat.
  • We’ve been quarantined – aliens know about us, but don’t like us.
  • Aliens are trapped by their superplanets’ intense gravity and they can’t come out to meet us.
  • Aliens have come and gone, dying off before we had a chance to connect with them.

Three days after the Paris conference Cosmos dug deeper into Fermi’s Paradox with an even more vexing question: where are all the “von Newmann probes”?

What’s a von Newmann probe, you ask? Well, back in the 1960s, mathematician John von Newmann argued that a sufficiently advanced civilization would be able to build a space probe that could mine raw materials on other planets and use those to make replicas of itself. These replicas would, in turn, build other copies. And as the process repeated, the number and spread of these self-replicating “von Newmann probes” would expand exponentially until, as Cosmos’ Lauren Fuge put it, “in a relatively short space of time – perhaps as little as 10 million years – the galaxy would be teeming with these exploratory machines.”

But there are no hordes, teeming or otherwise. So, again, where is everyone?

The Cosmos article offered, as a possible explanation, astrophysicist Duncan Forgan’s “predator-prey hypothesis,” soon to be published in an upcoming issue of the International Journal of Astrobiology. Forgan argues that “self-replication could result in encoding errors” and that maybe some of these coding errors could lead to some of these probes taking a predatory turn. If they did, then perhaps the reason we don’t see these teeming hordes is because the predatory probes are hunting down and destroying the other probes.

Hmmm….

While these various hypotheses make for incredibly creative speculation, they all share one thing in common: there are no facts to back them up. In fact, the only “evidence” for any of these theories is that aliens haven’t contacted us.

So why did scientists bother meeting to swap what amounts to untestable, unverifiable, just-so stories? Why did Live Science and other media outlets bother covering the Paris event? And why did Cosmos think Forgan’s theory worth sharing? 

They covered them because these stories – to the undiscerning – seem to offer an explanation to Fermi’s Paradox and the problem it presents to evolutionary theory. But they’re just stories. And what does it say about the theory if its defenders are willing to hype stories that the public will mistake for scientific, factual, or evidence-based?

Here’s a different sort of hypothesis to consider: what if ET just isn’t out there? What if life, instead of being easy to come by, only happens via miraculous means? And God only did so here on Earth?

It’s worth noting that there is nothing in the Bible that speaks against the possibility of life being on other planets. But while the Bible allows for life on other planets, evolution would seem to demand it – if life can just happen, then someone else should be out there. It’s only when life is miraculous that it becomes understandable that it might be rare.

Now here’s a question for our evolutionary friends: if we suppose that dumb, unplanned, undirected luck can create life, why can’t the world’s most brilliant minds, using available blueprints (from living creatures), and working with quadrillions-of-calculations-per-second supercomputers, in laboratories staffed with every device and chemical they could possibly want, manage to make even a single living cell? If living things can come about by chance, why hasn’t anyone created them on purpose?

Looking at evolutionists’ still-lifeless labs we can’t help but ask again: where is everyone?

*****

In 2013 cartoonist Zach Weinersmith crafted a cartoon and gave the talk below on his “Infantapaulting Hypothesis” in which he theorized that the reasons babies are so aerodynamic is because they used to be catapulted into neighboring villages, to increase their chances of finding a mate among a more genetically diverse population. He was satirizing the tendency among evolutionists to indulge in “just-so stories” – to indulge in creative hypotheses that might fit the available evidence but which are not testable. If a fellow who still believes in Darwin’s theory can be this brilliant, insightful, and hilarious in exposing evolutionary flaws, can creationists take this further and be even funnier?   

The limits of the “two-books” metaphor

Jon Dykstra

The Bible and the "book" of Nature

There is an idea, common among Christians, that God has revealed Himself to us via “two books”: Scripture and the book of Nature. The Belgic Confession, Article 2 puts it this way:

“We know [God] by two means:

  1. “First, by the creation, preservation, and government of the universe; which is before our eyes as a most beautiful book, wherein all creatures, great and small, are as so many letters leading us to perceive clearly God’s invisible qualities – His eternal power and divine nature, as the apostle Paul says in Rom 1:20. All these things are sufficient to convict men and leave them without excuse.
  2. “Second, He makes Himself more clearly and fully known to us by His holy and divine Word as far as is necessary for us in this life, to His glory and our salvation.”

But what happens when these two “books” seem to conflict? This happens in the Creation/Evolution debate, where the plain reading of Genesis 1 and 2 conflicts with the evolutionary account of our origins. So, as Jason Lisle notes, that has some Christians thinking that since:

“…the book of Nature clearly reveals that all life has evolved from a common ancestor….we must take Genesis as a metaphor…. we must interpret the days of Genesis as long ages, not ordinary days.”

ANALOGIES HAVE THEIR LIMITS

But that’s getting things backwards. While the Belgic Confession does speak of Creation as being like a book, metaphors and analogies have their limits. For example, In Matt. 23:37 God is compared to a hen who “gathers her chicks under her wings” – this analogy applies to the loving, protective nature of a hen, and should not be understood to reveal that God is feminine. That’s not what it is about.

Clearly Nature is not a book – the universe is not made up of pages and text, and it’s not enclosed in a cover or held together by a spine. The Belgic Confession is making a specific, very limited, point of comparison when it likens God’s creation to a book. How exactly is it like a book? In how it proclaims “God’s invisible qualities – his eternal power and divine nature.” It does so with book-like clarity, “so that people are without excuse” (Romans 1:20).

But in the Creation/Evolution debate some Christians extend this book analogy in a completely different, and entirely inaccurate, direction. It has been taken to mean that Creation can teach us about our origins with book-like clarity. This misunderstanding then presents us with a dilemma: if we have one book saying we were created in just six days, and another saying it took millions of years, and both are equally clear on this matter, then what should we believe?

We need to understand that this dilemma is entirely of our own making. Creation is not like a book when it comes to teaching us about our origins. As Dr. Lisle has noted, it does not speak with that kind of clarity on this topic.

ONLY ONE ACTUAL BOOK HERE

In contrast, the Bible is not merely like a book, it actually is one! It is there, and only there, that we get bookish clarity on how we, and the world around us, came to be.

So, yes, the two-book analogy remains helpful when it is used to illustrate the clarity with which God shows “his eternal power and divine nature” to everyone on the planet. But when it comes to the Creation/Evolution debate, the way the two-book analogy is being used is indeed fallacious. God’s creation simply does not speak with book-like clarity regarding our origins.

We can be thankful, then, that his Word does!

Jon Dykstra also blogs on at www.ReformedPerspective.ca