The major tenet of the scientific method is that one cannot
presume the outcome while doing the experiment or research. No matter what your opinion of
the subject is, you must begin all research projects or experiments from an
objective point of view – set your prejudices aside, verify all your
assumptions, and start completely from scratch.
This
subject, this research, re-taught me that principle, to my chagrin.
I warn you now: this conversation will undoubtedly cause disagreement. Please proceed with an open mind and the Spirit of God to guide you.
I warn you now: this conversation will undoubtedly cause disagreement. Please proceed with an open mind and the Spirit of God to guide you.
†
After
graduation from high school, I was a student at the California Institute of
Technology in Pasadena, perhaps the most difficult entry for American math and
science majors. Caltech is home to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where all of
NASA’s satellites are managed, as well as Palomar Observatory, one of the
finest deep space telescopes in the world. It also has an entering
undergraduate class of only 210 freshmen each year from around the world, over
half of whom had a perfect SAT score in math the year I was accepted. I say all
of this not to boast, but to point out that for the formative years of my life,
I was richly steeped in (A) the scientific method, from one of its foremost
practitioners, and (B) treating the Bible and all other non-scientific treatises
with skepticism, although I considered myself a Methodist Christian at the
time. But years later, having left Caltech during my sophomore year to care for
my dying mother, and then following in her footsteps teaching for thirty years,
I was born again as a true Believer in Christ, and have since become as
vehement for the Lord as a few of my Caltech classmates were against
Him.
So
today, when I approach the subject of evolution within the Biblical framework, I do so with
full comprehension of the volatility of the subject, and of my rare position
situated as I am as both a trained research scientist and a fiercely
devout Christian determined not to undermine God’s Word. I
approached it the same way an earlier Vignette about Genesis 1 and the Big Bang
(and in fact every such topic) was addressed: by starting and ending with the
Scripture itself. I use the ESV, KJV, NASB, and NIV versions, utilizing
BibleHub.com, the MacArthur and several other study bibles to help with as much
reference to the original Hebrew (and Greek and Aramaic, when appropriate) as a
non-linguist can get; and while I read and consider the input of as many
learned commentators as possible, the actual Bible verses in question are always
the Alpha and Omega of my research. (As
Charles Spurgeon said in his book on commentary, “Sometimes, I find that the
Bible can shed a lot of light on the commentaries…”)
†
Born-again
Christians have the reputation of blindly treating “evolution” as a nine-letter
swear word, and a large percentage on non-believers see creationists, frankly,
as myopic fools who simply parrot what their pastors tell them. Needless to
say, the range of opinions held by reasonable men and women spans from
“evolution doesn’t even exist”, to “Darwinian mutation is the power
behind all change in all forms of life”, and a host of more
reasonable points in between. In order to prove a particular viewpoint, one of
the most common and effective methods is to assume the opposing perspective and
prove a contradiction exists. That’s not exactly my methodology here, but it’s
close: what I started with in this research is to assume the hardline
Creationist viewpoint and then examine the Bible to see where verses might
contradict it, particularly in conjunction with proven facts of nature. But I
also found that I started looking for evidence in either direction:
something that demanded one viewpoint or the other.
While in a previous essay I went
to some trouble to demonstrate that multiple possibilities exist regarding
God’s creation of Adam and his bride in the Garden of Eden, let’s assume (for
the sake of the investigation) the traditional “dust and rib” origin of our
ancestors, full-grown adults not born of woman (hence the classic brain-teaser,
Did Adam and Eve have navels?). Dive
into Genesis 1 with me, won’t you?
“Then God said, “Let the earth sprout vegetation, plants
yielding seed, and fruit
trees on the earth bearing fruit after their kind with seed in them”; and it
was so. The earth brought forth
vegetation, plants yielding seed after their kind, and trees bearing fruit with
seed in them, after their kind; and God saw that it was good.” (Genesis 1:11-12,
NASB)
Key
in this pair of verses is the phrase “yielding
seed/bearing fruit after their kind”. The implication by many strict
creationists is that these phrases, along with “And God saw that it was good”, demand that God created the plant
life as it was and it never changed. Rubbish.
All that demands is that apples made
some kind of apples, oranges made some kind of oranges, and so on. “After their
kind” doesn’t even imply “identical to” – in fact, it really sounds more
like God expected variations in what grew from His creations. Certainly,
the humans that came from Adam and Eve were not all identical to Adam
and Eve, and if someone is going to insist that all humans came from
these two (and in fact, from Noah and his wife, a few generations later
post-Flood), they’re going to be hard-pressed to look at a deep-skinned African
and a near-translucent Scandinavian and argue that “after their kind” includes no
significant variation at all! In the lifetime of most European cultures, the
evolutionary changes in plant life have been well documented – even apart
from what geneticists and other scientists have done separate from God in their
greenhouses and university labs.
Notice in Genesis 1, the author
(although Moses was probably the one who put pen to scroll, the actual information had to have
come from God, the only sentient Being present at the time) carefully uses the
phrase “after their kind” in verses 21, 24, and 25, specifically for His
creation of the animals in their herds and flocks, and does NOT use that phrase
when He tells the creatures to procreate in verse 22 (or to “be fruitful and
multiply”, to be precise). Nothing in
here implies that every one of the creatures in Genesis 1 are the same
creatures on earth today. Certainly, the “evidence” in verse 25 that I’ve
heard Mace Baker and a few others fall back on as their rejection of evolution
is at best inferential and at worst ludicrous: “And God saw that it was good.” In a Bible filled with florid
descriptions of God’s perfection in
so many other instances, “good” seems if anything to be an argument for
evolution: God saw that it was a good
start, and He would continue to guide their improvement over time. (And
don’t try to prop the argument up by pointing to verse 31 where He calls it
“very good”. That’s just sad.)
As
I went to great length to say in that previous essay, we are absolutely
required to read what the Bible
actually says, and NOT read into it what it does NOT say. What the
first book of Genesis does NOT say, is that God created every creature exactly
as it would stay for the rest of eternity. While it also does NOT say that He didn’t,
there is another, decisive factor when Biblical evidence is at a stalemate.
Scientific evidence.
God
gave us brains for a reason. He gave us the ability to read and
write and communicate and deduce and derive and observe our universe. In
Genesis 1:28, He specifically said to the first man, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the
earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over
the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” He gave us the scientific method for a reason,
and I am firmly convinced that reason is to give man a way to discover the beauty
of what He created. I’m all for siding with the Word of God over the scientific
evidence of man, since the first is infallible and the second is not. But where
the Word is silent, I side with the scientific community, which
laughs at the segment of creationists who never get it through their heads that
when science uses the word “theory” (as in “the theory of gravity” or “the
theory of evolution”), it does not mean what they think it means. In science, “theory” means it’s derived
from real evidence. (As opposed to a “postulate”, which is an assumed trait
of a system. Believe me, if it were the “postulate of evolution”, we’d be right
in shoving THAT word down the scientists’ throats!) A theory is just
about the strongest term science has. In fact, theories are often stronger
than laws, in the sense that the “laws of nature” have been overturned
more often as we discover more about the case we’re studying – cf, quantum
physics, for example.
But I digress. Failing to find a
definitive answer in God’s Word (and “it was very good” hardly qualifies as
proof that evolution doesn’t exist), I believe the tons of evidence which shows
the progress of evolution over the course of time from the Garden of Eden until
the present day. Failing to find a Biblical answer virtually demands
that we include the scientific evidence, rather than making up our own
preferences and inserting them into God’s Word.
Consider the number of species that have
gone extinct. Were they “very good”? Is it a mistake of
God’s that the dodo bird no longer roams the earth? If you respond that it’s man’s doing, that the animal is extinct
simply because of man, are you saying that God failed to take that into account
ahead of time? Or, if that was indeed part of God’s master plan – for some
animals to go extinct – why then would you deny the possibility
that God’s plan might also include the post-Genesis creation of some animals?
†
Now,
here’s where I got in trouble as a scientist. I had held
certain beliefs about evolution before I was born again, and as a Christian I
studied this topic incessantly to see if I was wrong or right; the Holy Spirit
led me to see that I needed to change some of my stances, but that the
traditional conservative creationist position was also in error, and that the
Biblical truth was in between.
But in the process of that study, I
ran across some animals whose evolutionary background “helped my position”
immensely…at the cost of my long-held
beliefs about those animals. Those beliefs were more tightly ingrained than
my thoughts about evolution, and I struggled to eliminate them from my
prejudices entering into this examination, mostly because it wasn’t the
original focus of my study. But the Biblical evidence is solid (even though,
ironically, much of it was mistranslated originally, as we’ll see soon), and
although it rocked my own opinion on one subject, it proved it on another.
†
So, one of my initial
questions was this: Was there evidence
of evolution within the text of the Bible itself? Were there animals
that either changed or died out and were replaced that wouldn’t be explained
away through Scripture? The first step was to establish what it was that God
created in Genesis 1, and follow those
animals as best as I could.
From
that point, I started tracing the animal life in the Bible, to see if I could
find evidence one way or the other about animals that changed – either died out
(perhaps, animals that are talked about which no longer exist) or were
different than described Biblically (for example, if the Bible described a
plant or animal or something that was not the same as we know it today). If so,
that would be a start to my Biblical proof of the existence of evolution. As is
true of almost everyone, I had my own opinion on this and a number of connected
topics coming into my research, but as a firm proponent of the scientific
method, I was judicious in not allowing those opinions to distort my study.
But
another point that hides beneath the surface of Genesis 1:20-25 shows up when
we consider the original Hebrew terms for the animals being created by God.
Consider Genesis 1:24…
“And
God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kinds
– livestock and creeping things and beasts of the earth
according to their kinds.” And it was so.”
So,
here we see three categories of animal. In the original Hebrew, the English
word “livestock” comes from “be-he-mah” (Strong’s #929) often translated into the words “cattle” or
“beasts” or “beasts of the field”, and is generally inferred to mean not just
bovine but goat, sheep, and other such semi-domesticated beasts of the farm and
ranch variety. “Creeping things” comes from the Hebrew “wa-re-mes” (Strong’s #7431), and is understood to encompass all the insect
and spider and other critters that make your skin crawl and sitcom housewives
jump onto chairs screaming.
The
third phrase is the most problematic: “beasts of the earth”, which reads in the
original Hebrew as “we-hay-tow-e-res” (Strong’s #2416 and 776, together), and in more recent phonetic translations as
“chayah ertz”, implies the “wild, carnivorous animals” (per Mace Baker) we
think of as “jungle” animals: lions, tigers, and bears (“oh, my!”), elephants and giraffes, wolverines and zebras, and so
forth. This interpretation is (I’ve been told) fairly straightforward, although
I don’t read ancient Hebrew to verify that for you myself, and its definition
is essentially unquestioned. You’ll see in a minute how that will complicate
matters for us.
Now,
back up a bit, to Genesis 1:21…
“So
God created the great sea creatures and every living creature that
moves, with which the waters swarm, according to their kinds, and every winged
bird according to its kind.”
“Winged
bird” is pretty easy – “o-wp-ka-nap” (Strong’s #5775 and 3671), which is translated very consistently throughout
the Old Testament as such. The Hebrew word for “fish” is “bid-gat” (Strong’s #1710),
which frankly I don’t see in my Hebrew interpretation of verses 21 or 24, but
it does appear in the follow-up phrases in both verses 26 and 28, where
God designates them to be under the dominion of Man.
The
phrase in question, then, is at the start of verse 21, referring to “the great
sea creatures”. The original Hebrew word in this place is “hat-tan-ni-nim” (Strong’s #8577),
which appears uniquely in this one verse within the entire Bible, and is
alternately translated as “whales”, “sea-monsters”, “magnificent marine
creatures”, and (oddly) just “sea” in a couple of more obscure Bible
translations. (The “Jubilee 2000”
translation has something different, which we’ll get to in a minute.) Now,
because we didn’t have a word for “fish” elsewhere in God’s list of creations
in verses 21 and 24, it would be natural to assume that “hat-tan-ni-nim” meant all
of the swimming creatures in the oceans: fish, sharks, whales, krill, and so
forth.
But
that’s not what “hat-tan-ni-nim” means; not in the slightest. God seems
to have covered that category in verse 20, with “Let the waters swarm with swarms
of living creatures…” , and in verse 21 with “and every living creature that
moves, with which the waters swarm…”. No, “hat-tan-ni-nim” implies size: hence, “whales”,
“monsters”, and “magnificent” in the last paragraph. Does it seem likely that
the whale would have been singled out, when all forms of livestock
were lumped together into one word? Or when all forms of “wild creatures” were
jumbled together as “chayah ertz”? Whales, to the ancients, were as described
in Jonah 1:17 – “dag ga-do-wl”, or “great fish” (technically, “fish great”, and modern
scholarship is now leaning towards the possibility that Jonah was really
swallowed by a “great fish”, not a whale). Not “hat-tan-ni-nim”. Matthew refers to
the creature in Jonah’s adventure (at 12:40 of his Gospel) with the Greek word
“ketos”, which does precisely mean “whale”.
I
teased with the Jubilee 2000 translation earlier. I’ve never read that version
of the Bible, but I have seen how it translates Genesis 1:21 – “And
God created the great dragons and every living soul that moved, which
the waters brought forth abundantly…”
Whales wouldn’t need a separate
category. But dragons surely would.
†
The
word “hat-tan-ni-nim”, it appears, is basically an adjective extension
of either “hat-tan-nin” or “hat-tan-nim” (and
someone who understands ancient Hebrew, please correct me if I’m
mistaken!), which do show up elsewhere in the Bible. Both of those
two shorter versions mean dragon, unquestionably, every time they’re
used. “Hat-tan-nim” is used in Ezekiel 29:3 (“Behold, I am against you,
Pharaoh king of Egypt, the great dragon that lies in the midst of his
streams”) and “hat-tan-nin” occurs in Nehemiah 2:13 and Isaiah
27:1; we’re going to look at this last one in a minute.
There
are several shorter variations of hat-tan-ni-nim listed under Strong’s word #8577, besides the two listed a
moment ago:
Ø
“Kat-tan-nim” is used in
Micah 1:8, translated in the KJV as follows: “Therefore I will wail and
holler, I will go stripped and naked; I will make a wailing like the dragons,
and mourning as the owls.” Oddly, there are several versions which
translate this word as “jackals”, others that translate the word for “owls” as
“ostriches”, and one as “daughters of an ostrich”, which absolutely fascinates
me.
Ø
“Le-tan-nim” is used in
Job 30:29 as dragon as well: “I am a brother to dragons, and a companion
to owls”. (KJV) Again, we
have some of the same translation conflicts as kat-tan-nim, with some versions
using “jackals” instead (and ostriches instead of owls for “lib-owt”…and the
same obscure version has “and a companion to daughters of the ostrich”, which
would certainly make me reconsider my translation...).
Ø
The most interesting variation,
because of where it appears, is “le-tan-ni-nim”, which shows up in
Exodus 7 when Moses and Aaron are confronting the Pharaoh and demonstrating the
power of their God. Verse 10 (KJV) says, “And Moses and Aaron went in unto Pharaoh,
and they did so as the Lord had commanded: and Aaron cast down his rod before
Pharaoh, and before his servants, and it became a serpent.” (It
translates universally as either ‘serpent’ or ‘snake’, both here and two verses
later when it ate up the Pharaoh’s sorcerers’ creatures.) Imagine how
Pharaoh would have reacted if it had been a WHALE that the rod became! No,
it seems fairly apparent that the “tannim” family of words has more to do with
a family of animals that I had believed belonged more to mythology books than
historical texts, which we know by the Word of God the Bible to be.
Ø
(And it’s worth noting that the
rod which Moses threw down, in Exodus 4:3, became “le-na-hash”, which is the
same creature that tempted Eve to eat from the tree of knowledge in Genesis 3,
but NOT the same one Aaron’s rod turned into three chapters later. If Aaron’s
rod transformed into something more dragon-like, I don’t doubt that it DID
swallow up the Pharaoh’s sages’ creatures!)
So,
what’s the point of all of this? OK, the Bible believes in dragons. Great.
Why should we care?
Look
at the time frame of the examples we showed.
Dragons co-existed with
people. And since
then, they’ve apparently gone extinct.
†
But,
was there any evidence outside of the Bible that dragon-like creatures
existed in comparatively modern times? Or were they consigned to the times of
the dinosaurs, if they existed at all? There is certainly no indication that
dragons exist today, outside of the occasional Weekly World News tabloid report and other checkstand
fodder.
So,
did dragons indeed live in human times and then go extinct? Modern
science doesn’t give us a definitive answer.
Well,
how about examining some not-so-modern science?
In
79 AD, Pliny the Elder wrote what is considered the benchmark for
encyclopedias, Naturalis Historiae. His methodology of studying and
crediting original citations, along with his vast resources as a confidante of
Roman emperors Vespasian and Titus, made this lone surviving work of his
seminal in its authority. It included this tantalizing sentence: “Africa produces elephants, but it is India
that produces the largest, as well as the dragon.”
Claudius
Aelianus’ De Natura Animalium, a seventeen book collection of
information about nature and its creatures written in the general neighborhood
of 220 AD, includes this sentence: “The
Phrygian History also states that dragons are born which reach ten paces (25-30
feet) in length.”
The
Oakland Museum (CA)’s Discoveries Relating To Prehistoric Man, published
in 1924, and Prehistoric Indians, by Barnes and Pendleton around the
same year, both refer to cave drawings clearly implying the artists were
depicting living brontosaurus-like
creatures.
It’s possible.
Turn
back to Job 40, and start reading in verse 15, where the Almighty Lord
describes Behemouth (in the present
tense), up through verse 24:
“Behold, Behemouth, which
I made as I made you;
He eats grass like an ox.
Behold, his strength is in
his loins, and his power in the muscles of his belly.
He makes his tail stiff
like a cedar, the sinews of his thighs are knit together.
His bones are tubes of
bronze, his limbs like bars of iron.
He is the first of the
works of God; let him who made him bring near his sword!
For the mountains yield
food for him where all the wild beasts play…
Behold, if the river is
turbulent he is not frightened;
He is confident though
Jordan rushes against his mouth.
Can one take him by his
eyes, or pierce his nose with a snare?”
I’ve
read several interpretations of that passage which try to make Behemouth into a
hippopotamus. Does that description sound like a hippo to you? It’s not
a dragon, either – re-read Job
41 to see what a dragon looks like in a Biblical description. This is a perfect
description of a brontosaurus-like dinosaur.
So,
what’s our conclusion following all of this research?
Species
change over time, both in characteristics and in existence. Therefore, just like the cosmos, God did not
design a static, stagnant system, but one which evolves over time
(yeah, I used that dirty word!). Even more miraculous than having created a
stagnant world, He created a world in which the ingredients changed over time,
and STILL He is able to micro-control every detail of the world so that it
works out exactly as He has described it to us all the way through Revelation. From
my perspective, that’s even MORE amazing than the traditional frozen-in-time
“creationist” model!
Secondly,
incidentally, I found that creatures which I had thought died out millions of
years ago (dinosaurs) or which I’d thought never actually existed (dragons)
apparently DID indeed exist, and existed during human time periods. For
me, this was the more revolutionary discovery, since I’d already derived the
first conclusion independently before beginning this research.
So,
to the creationists trying to rewrite Texas’ textbooks…to the science teachers
refusing to acknowledge the possibility of divine intervention…Lighten
up. Allow for the possibility that the world may be more wondrous than you’re
giving it (or Him) credit for.
