P.O. Box 53055    
Los Angeles, CA 90053   

SHUFFLING CLUBS INTO SPADES

In the category of “It’s not the size, but the sincerity,” a basketball player named Tyrone Bogues concluded a successful career a few seasons ago, playing brilliant hoops for NBA teams like the Toronto Raptors. What made his achievement so amazing is that “Muggsy,” as he liked to be called, was just 5’ 3”. That’s right – just 63 inches high. Players like teammate Manute Bol towered almost two feet over him. Bogues once starred in a television commercial for Sprite, which proclaimed that “Height is nothing, thirst is everything. Obey your thirst.” And he cheerfully told the devoted members of his fan club that he got the nickname “Muggsy” because, as short as he was, his best –and almost only – weapon was to “mug” or steal the ball from the giants lumbering past him. You have to wonder how a 5’ 3” guard could ever get a shot off in the NBA, except by endlessly saying, “Look, Shaquille, your shoelace is untied,” and then letting it fly. That trick must have been a temptation for Bogues, who capped off his basketball career by writing a book entitled In the Land of Giants.

Let me tell you why I bring it up today. We’re enjoying a two-week “shoot-around,” in a manner of speaking, on the topic of creation. Did players like Tim Duncan and Ming Yao just evolve to be seven-footers, or did God personally design a big center named Adam on the sixth day of Creation Week?

One issue that divides the creationist from the evolutionary scientist is this: can life forms slowly evolve and get much, much taller, or wider, or smarter, or just DIFFERENT? Do radical transformations happen? We already suggested the reality that in the last century or so, we see that horses are always just horses. Back when FDR was President, Seabiscuit ran a mile-and-three-eighths at about the same speed as Funny Cide.

Speaking of basketball, I’m sure there’s been many a high schooler, topping out at maybe 6’ 1”, who had as his greatest dream to slam-dunk a basketball. Have you ever wished you could do that? To soar through the air a la “Air Jordan” and then just mash those two points home? “In your face,” as they say? And so this high school freshman thinks: “If I train hard for the next month, I can certainly add an inch to my vertical leap.” Which . . . he probably can, with some good weight training. Well, if he can add an inch in one month, can he add nine inches in the nine months of his freshman year? By the time he’s a junior can he add 18 inches? Because if he can, he’ll soon be a 6’ 1” slam-dunking sensation, won’t he? And if he can add an inch a month all the way through high school and college, he’ll go into the NBA being able to jump clear over the backboard. And you see the obvious fallacy there. Most life forms are limited to minuscule improvements, slight adaptations, a plateau-ing of their ability to change themselves into something new. Despite the worldwide prayers of Voice of Prophecy’s global radio audience, I can tell you that Lonnie Melashenko’s golf scores over the years absolutely have bottomed out. The only way I can break 85 is to skip the last three holes of every game.

Back in 1986, it stunned the world of sports when a basketball star named Spud Webb won the annual slam-dunk contest. Because this player was down there in Muggsy Bogues’ Pee Wee League level – just 5’ 7”. That’s right. A player five inches UNDER the very low threshold of six feet was able to fling himself into the air, barely get above the 10-foot hoop, and drop the ball through. Not with authority, but at least a whisper. And again, it points out that even with the spectacular gains a man or a butterfly might exhibit, you don’t really find evidence that monkeys can become men.

This goes back to the business of extrapolation, where biologists and zoologists consider the minute changes that they do see, and then presume that if X grows to be 1.05X in a century, why, that rate of metamorphosis will steadily turn a horse into a unicorn ten centuries from now. But there’s a thought-provoking line in Chuck Colson’s recent book, How Now Shall We Live?, casting some doubt on that idea. Here’s what he writes:

“To make a reasonable extrapolation, we must have good grounds for believing that the process being extrapolated will continue at a steady rate. And therein lies the fatal flaw in Darwin’s theory. Centuries of experiments show that the change produced by breeding does not continue at a steady rate from generation to generation. Instead, change is rapid at first, then levels off, and eventually reaches a limit that breeders cannot cross.” And then this soundbite is really good; listen: “Breeding does not create new genes, any more than shuffling cards creates new cards.”

Colson then borrows an argument from the late Christian apologist Francis Schaeffer.

“Suppose a fish evolves lungs?” he asked. “What happens then? Does it move up to the next evolutionary stage? Of course not. It drowns.”

Thoughtful scientists have conceded that the same argument dooms the idea that the miracle of an eye could just spin itself into place over ten thousand years. Suppose at least the iris appeared somehow. There’s no retina yet, no lens, no rods and cones. But there is an iris. Would the retina pop itself onto the stage a few centuries later. No, because by then – according to the “survival of the fittest” – the iris, being useless and unused and obsolete those many years, would have already phased itself out and become extinct. The only way a human eye can develop is if the iris, lens, cornea, optic nerve, retina, macula, extraocular muscles, rods, cones, vitreous fluid, eyelashes, EVERYTHING . . . all show up simultaneously on a Friday afternoon. Say, in a garden named Eden, and in the two eye sockets of a basketball center named Adam.

Well, friend, that’s how it appears from our courtside seat on this Thursday. I’m a Christian, and so I believe in the power of Christ to BE a Creator. It’s as simple as that. Have some horses learned to run faster, and have streams carved out some interesting rock formations? Sure. But fish have never turned into birds, and the only way lost men are turned into saved men is through the redeeming power of Jesus’ blood.

An evolutionist named William Provine, studying under Cornell University’s academic umbrella, once observed that:

“Darwinism is not just about mutations and fossils; it is a comprehensive philosophy stating that all life can be explained by natural causes acting randomly – which implies that there is no need for the Creator. And if God did not create the world, then the entire body of Christian belief collapses.”

And what’s really at stake here is this: the entire framework of what’s BEHIND the universe’s hidden curtain. There’s either a creative Designer behind what we see in the surging ocean and the vast reaches of space . . . or there’s nothing but the random jiggling of atoms and a one-in-a-trillion flinging together of a world where people just start growing.

And if there’s nothing here but accidents, then what happens to right and wrong? Is there any such thing as pure morality, or just what 51% of us, or the strongest 2% with weapons of mass destruction, can muscle onto the law books? Is there a “Law behind the law”? Are some things evil or holy despite what the Supreme Court may say? Believers – and senators and congresspersons who are believers – have always searched carefully for the “transcendent moral order” that can serve as a kind of framework for man’s own laws, even in a wisely secular nation like the United States, where we appreciate our First Amendment. As President Coolidge once observed:

“Men do not make laws. They do but discover them.”

But other national leaders, who hold to the Darwinian point of view, instead craft legislation simply based on what will hold the random elements of society together. Oliver Wendall Holmes, who operated effectively in that camp, suggested that:

“Laws are merely a codification of political policies judged to be socially and economically advantageous. Law is reduced to a managerial skill used in the service of social engineering – the dominant view in the legal profession today.”

What else does the worldview of Darwin give us? That Cornell scholar, Dr. Provine, concludes with these chilling words:

“Consistent Darwinism means: ‘No life after death; no ultimate foundation for ethics; no ultimate meaning for life; no free will.’”

That’s from a videotaped debate, dating back to 1994, held at Stanford. And friend, if we came FROM nothing, then it’s certain that we’re heading TO nothing – nothing but two faded dates carved on a tombstone. Colson puts it in five words:

“Our origin determines our destiny.”

Friend, I’m humble enough to say: evolution may be how we all got here. Maybe so. And if that’s what happened, then the Christian faith – and our 75 years here on the radio – have been an interesting but random exercise in spiritual futility. But I’ve seen the face of a newborn baby. I’ve seen Banff National Park and Lake Louise. I’ve seen adulterers become sainted men of God, faithful husbands, because they were touched by the hand of the Designer. I’ve not only read how the Bible promises a victorious conclusion to this very real experiment we call sin, but I already see the inexorable movements as God’s family draws closer and closer to the moment of rescue.

Yes, there are two worldviews out there. And this is mine.