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OF MONKEYS AND MEN #7
WHY CAN’T SEABISCUIT FLY?
I don’t know if you got caught up in the Seabiscuit craze this summer – either the Tobey Maguire film or the huge bestseller by Laura Hillenbrand – but it’s a fascinating story. An unlikely racehorse takes on the great, unbeatable War Admiral in a one-on-one race . . . and wins.
One thing that strikes the reader is that, the more things change, the more they stay the same. The Seabiscuit saga is set during the Great Depression, mid- to late 1930s. But racing then was pretty much what it is now. Rich owners. Clever trainers. Light-as-a-feather jockeys. And of course, thousands of people packed into the stands, holding their parimutuel betting tickets and hoping their horse wins by a nose. When the two horses had their famous meeting, millions – including FDR in the Oval Office – listened on the radio; now it’s a TV and Internet thing. But not much was different when Funny Cide took the first two races in the triple crown, then came in third on a muddy track at Belmont.
And something else. The times for racehorses are just about the same now as they were 70 years ago. Oh, good training and increased knowledge of nutrition and breeding can shave off a tick of the clock here and there, just as our Olympic athletes imperceptibly knock fractions of seconds off the various world records every four years. But it takes about as long to run the Kentucky Derby today as it did a century ago. Horses are still horses.
As we keep on studying the theological issue of creationism, and explore what the Word of God says about our beginnings – both horses and those who ride on them – we generally get the sense that all scientific knowledge is the enemy of the Christian. Are the Bible and the geological researchers simply at odds – always? The answer, perhaps surprisingly, is no. Some of the key laws governing our universe lend powerful support to the idea that an intelligent force designed the intricacies of our world.
For instance: Luther Burbank, the great genetic researcher, coined an expression or law called the Reversion to the Average. Most organisms, he reports, stay true to type. They don’t stray from the blueprint; variations tend to be very minor. In other words, monkeys seem to stay monkeys, and horses are still horses. In all the centuries and millennia where there have been horses around us, they’ve never turned into unicorns or centaurs – half horse, half man – of Greek mythology, or even the legendary “super horses” like the fictional Shadowfax that Gandalf rides in the “Lord of the Rings” saga. Horses have had all these many years to get better, and it just hasn’t happened.
I remember back at the beginning of the 2002 baseball season, when Barry Bonds started off the year with two homers in the first game and two in the second. Wow! And unfortunately, all off the Dodgers, a team some of us at the Voice of Prophecy kind of pay attention to. Extrapolating off of that, in a 162-game season, you figure he could hit 324 “dingers” a year. But no . . . he came up with 46 – just about like always. His home run bat did get the Giants into the World Series where they missed the crown by just one game, but in terms of home runs, by the time you’ve played 162 games, and criss-crossed the country and argued with umpires, and had to get to bed at 1:30 in the morning for six straight months, most players do just about the same year after year. That same season, 2002, a scrawny little second-baseman, again, for the Dodgers, hit something like five homers in the first week. Unbelievable! But it didn’t last; he drifted right back down and ended up with about ten for the year. Just like always. Little pops of excitement happen here and there, but when all is said and done, the Reversion to the Average always happens; when you get to October, most Dodgers are batting about .223, and the team is in third place. Every year without fail. You fans at Wrigley Field and Fenway Park know all about it. And it’s the same in the scientific world around us.
We’ve gotten some helpful insights from the recent Christian bestseller, How Now Shall We Live?, by Chuck Colson and Nancy Pearcey. And in writing about the possibility that various life forms can just suddenly swerve upwards into a great new vista of hitting more homers, or being faster horses, or horses that sprout wings and learn to fly away, these two writers suggest the following:
“The most obvious inference is that the universe appears to be designed because it is designed – powerful evidence for the biblical worldview that a loving God created the world.” Then they add, in considering the possibility that upward evolution can just supervise itself, these words: “Life can be created only by an intelligent agent directing, controlling, and manipulating the process.”
Speaking of horse racing, let me pose another issue with you, linked to this idea that life forms can mutate and evolve into better and more complex creations. If you take ten thousand dollars to Pimlico or Hollywood Park, and begin to play the various trifectas, two days from now you’ll probably be carrying around a wad of nine thousand. Then eighty-five hundred. Then seven, six, five . . . and say bye-bye to your bankroll. Those parimutuel track odds of 17% biting into your wallet begin to take their toll, and soon you’re tapped out.
Well, what’s that got to do with evolution? Just this. Most mutations that do occur in nature – whether to horses or fruit flies or the tiniest of life forms, are like typos in a report, or bugs in a computer program, or the casino’s house edge in a roulette game. They don’t make things slowly better; instead, you have a downward spiral into mistakes and nonsense. In fact, that’s the Second Law of Thermodynamics: that our universe is slowly wearing down, disintegrating, not spiraling upward into higher levels of complexity. Colson writes in his book:
“The same is true of errors in the genetic code. Most mutations are HARMFUL, often lethal, to the organism, so that if mutations were to accumulate, the result would more likely be devolution than evolution.”
You know, segueing over to the spiritual realm for a moment, don’t we find the same to be true there too? Without God, a person’s life usually spirals down. How often do people “pull themselves up by the bootstraps” and get to a higher moral plane on their own? The Old Testament is replete with tragic stories where the Children of Israel, as they chose to ignore God, just stayed constantly on the DOWN escalator. We live in a world, friend, that is physically and morally wearing out. Only when our heavenly Father actively intervenes can healing and growth and a heavenly journey begin. By themselves, birds and bees can’t turn into men, and lost men can’t turn into regenerate men.
Here’s one more arena where Christians find themselves hard-pressed to answer the evolutionists: carbon dating, and the half-life of radioactive material, or layers in the Grand Canyon, where a scientist will say: “There you are. According to this time line, if you extrapolate mathematically, the world is X number of millions of years old.” In June, 2003 scientists from Berkeley said they had found the oldest-ever human skulls. According to the archeologists, we all came from the shores of a freshwater lake in Ethiopia, where they discovered remains of people they claimed were 160,000 years old. How does it square with the Genesis account and what evangelical Christians claim about Eden and a couple named Adam and Eve?
I’ll be the first to confess that I don’t have all the answers, and that it does take an expression of faith to trust in God’s Word over the theories in the geology labs. But the wonderful Christian writer C. S. Lewis once had a dialogue with a friend, and he said to him: “Okay, look. If you put sixpence into a drawer today, and then sixpence again tomorrow, and then the day after you look inside . . . what are you going to find? One shilling, right?” And his friend picked up on the point. “Yes,” he said, “unless someone else has gotten in there and tampered with the drawer.” And – boom! – Lewis nailed the lesson home. “It’s the same in science,” he said. “The laws work a certain way unless there’s interference. Or upheaval.” Or . . . let’s say, for instance, a flood that devastates the planet and throws the numbers off. It’s just something to think about.
Well, friend, the clock says we’re done here, but you know and I know that life itself isn’t simply this random float in an ocean of chance. Have you ever felt the faint tug of Lucifer’s gravitational pull, leading you into discouragement and sin? The mutations in our lives are anything BUT random. It says in Jeremiah 17:9:
“The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?”
There’s no way that “upward evolution,” a mountain of good typos, can make us into heavenly creatures. Only outside intervention in the form of a Calvary cross can do that. I’m thankful that heaven, and a home in God’s forever kingdom, doesn’t depend on chance. For the child of God, it’s the surest bet there is.
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