Linguistic Diversity

Today’s Reading:

• Genesis 11:1-26
• 1 Chronicles 1:24-27
• Genesis 11:27-31
• Genesis 12:1-14:24

Faith-Stretching Verse(s):

• That is why the city was called Babel, because that is where the LORD confused the people with different languages. In this way he scattered them all over the world. – Genesis 11:9, NLT

Thoughts:
In an interesting article/bulletin put out by the Linguistic Society of America, Stephen R. Anderson says that one source puts the number of languages in the world at 6,809, and these languages are broken into 250 families of languages. But from a biologist’s perspective, he says, the similarities of all these human languages far outweigh their differences and distinguish them as a class from any other organism’s communication patterns to the extent that a biologist could say that they’re really just one language (http://www.lsadc.org/info/pdf_files/howmany.pdf, pages 3 and 10).

This seems to me to make the best sense if the Bible’s account of the Tower of Babel is true.

As the Bible tells it, all mankind originally came from one couple, Adam and Eve. And then, after a while, there was a flood that wiped out all mankind except Noah, his wife, and their children. They were all speaking the same language. And that continued until the Tower of Babel.

Whether you believe in Creation or not, doesn’t it make sense that humanity would begin by all speaking the same language? I mean, no matter what theory you believe, how many humans would there have been at the beginning? 1? 5? 10? And they would have needed to exist in the same part of the world, or humanity would have died out within the first generation. So you would think that they would have to communicate with each other.

And the benefits of communicating with each other outweigh the advantages of being unable to understand one another by far. Just look at what’s happening to our world today. The biggest languages are growing stronger because people are finding that communication leads to mutual success and prosperity, so everyone wants in on the world’s most widespread and useful languages. And the smallest languages are dying out as fewer and fewer people find them to be worth spending the time to learn.

So why would humanity start off with a united language and then divide into so many individual languages, let alone dialects, when being unable to communicate leads to misunderstandings and mistrust and war rather than to prosperity?

It would be one thing if all these languages seemed to be clearly related to each other. You might then be able to argue that the original humans just split into different groups and spread apart, then developed different accents, and over time the accents got to be too strong for mutual understanding. But there are around 250 language families. They share the same basic underlying linguistic foundation, but the language families themselves are completely different and unrelated in their sounds and grammars. Within this common human linguistic capacity that makes it possible for any human baby to learn any human language as it grows up, there are very real differences that are completely unrelated to each other. How do you get so much unity and so much diversity at the same time?

The Tower of Babel. God created man, as the Bible says. They all shared one language. But then one day God saw that they were not filling the earth as He had commanded them to do (Genesis 9:1). Instead, they were banding together to keep from being scattered (Genesis 11:4). So God decided to make humans become foreigners to one another to force them apart. The result? A history filled with different languages and scattered throughout the earth by their differences. A modern day where humanity is abandoning linguistic differences and seeking linguistic unity for the sheer benefits that come from mutual understanding and cooperation. Considering how important the ability to communicate is, why else would humanity have ever given it up besides the events that took place at the Tower of Babel?

How can I believe it? It just makes sense to me. How about you?

For an overview of this year’s blog, please see http://threequartertank.blogspot.com/2011/01/why-do-believers-believe.html.

The Ark Could Preserve the World’s Life

Today’s Reading:

• Genesis 7:1-10:5
• 1 Chronicles 1:5-7
• Genesis 10:6-20
• 1 Chronicles 1:8-16
• Genesis 10:21-30
• 1 Chronicles 1:17-23
• Genesis 10:31-32

Faith-Stretching Verse(s):

• Take with you seven pairs—male and female—of each animal I have approved for eating and for sacrifice, and take one pair of each of the others. Also take seven pairs of every kind of bird. There must be a male and a female in each pair to ensure that all life will survive on the earth after the flood. – Genesis 7:2-3, NLT

Thoughts:
When you think of all the varieties of life forms that exist, and then imagine trying to fit a pair of each species (seven pairs of some of them) onto one boat, it seems impossible. But could it have been do-able?

After reading some thoughts on this from an article on the Answers in Genesis website (http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/am/v2/n2/two-of-every-kind#fnList_1_10), I have enough clarity to at least be able to give you one scientist’s (Todd Charles Wood, Ph.D.) explanation of how it was possible. It does require me to eat a little bit of humble pie as I admit that in my very first post of the year I was using scientific terminology (species) imprecisely, and should probably have gone up the biological classification system two steps to the “family” level to argue my case about plants and animals reproducing their own kinds. So, that done, let’s look at this Wood’s ideas.

What Wood does is return to the idea that we have already examined, the Bible’s declaration that God created life to reproduce itself within created kinds. He also returns to the notion that mutations and variations exist within various created kinds of life, as also agreed to above. And Wood, a published biochemist, has done about a decade of preliminary biological research whose results are beginning to show a pattern. He suggests that, when the Bible describes God creating life forms to reproduce their own kinds, those “kinds” correspond to what biology now calls “families.”

For instance, the coyote, wolf, jackal, dog and fox all share the Canidae family name. So without arguing for evolution in the sense that all today’s dog varieties spring from a common single-cell organism which itself sprung from non-life at some point way back in history, Wood argues that varieties within biological families probably came from a micro-evolutionary process following the flood. He says it would not have been necessary for Noah to have two dogs, two wolves, two foxes, etc., on the ark with him, but just to have had one pair of Canidae. If Noah’s ark simply included a pair of animals from each biological family, Wood says that as few as 2,000 individual animals may have been on the ark, probably a few more than that. And for that number of animals, he claims that “there would have been plenty of room to house these and their food, plus Noah and his family.”

This is not a new idea. In his article, Wood records that as far back as 1559, 1675, and 1668, scholars were arguing the same kind of thing. Humans have understood the concept of micro-evolution for a long time, far prior to Darwin’s claim that the process of evolution could be responsible for life itself.

I know that I have only addressed one challenge to believing that the story of Noah’s ark is factual. Other challenges include the concept of a global flood and the length of time that Noah and his ancestors lived (which would be required if one man like Noah was going to have time to build a massive boat). Also, to believe the story of Noah’s ark requires being willing to believe that God exists and cares enough about His creation to be concerned with whether men are living morally or immorally and to intervene through both a flood and an ark. Thankfully, there are plenty more people who are writing and have written volumes and volumes of books helping anyone who is willing to read them to understand why faith in these things can be and is reasonable.

I’ve only had time to re-explain an argument that shows how the ark could preserve the world’s life. This modern look at the story of Noah’s ark is one of the reasons that I can believe the Bible. I’m well aware that there are plenty of stories that don’t even try to appeal to the laws of the natural world, though, stories of God’s miracles. And yes, I still have reasons for believing them, even if scientists can’t help me out the way they can with the Flood. We’ll get there. But for now, part of the reason that I can believe the Bible is that stories like this can still be understood through modern science. To be a Christian does not require me to ignore my experience of the world around me.

For an overview of this year’s blog, please see http://threequartertank.blogspot.com/2011/01/why-do-believers-believe.html.

I Believe Because Sin Is Real

Today’s Reading:

• Genesis 4:1-5:32
• 1 Chronicles 1:1-4
• Genesis 6:1-22

Faith-Stretching Verse(s):

• You will be accepted if you do what is right. But if you refuse to do what is right, then watch out! Sin is crouching at the door, eager to control you. But you must subdue it and be its master. – Genesis 4:7, NLT

Thoughts:
The Bible teaches that sin is real. For some of us, that’s not too faith-stretching a concept. But there is a fairly large group of people that believes humanity is inherently good, good by nature.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t believe that every person in the world is an obvious sinner. It’s not like we’re all stealing all the time, or cheating on our spouses, or killing everyone like Cain does in this passage.

But since Adam and Eve disobeyed God and took the fruit He commanded them to leave alone, we’ve all been sinful and vulnerable to sin’s control in our lives. Think of the kindest, gentlest person you know, the white-haired saint of a grandmother you have who never seems to do anything wrong. And ask her (or him, whoever you’re thinking of), “You never seem to do anything wrong. Have you ever sinned? What’s something bad that you’ve done?” And even that elderly saint will have an answer for you. You might think that their sin is so insignificant that you personally wouldn’t worry about it. You might wish that your life contained such minute sins instead of whatever it is you’ve done. But still, they’ve sinned. Sin crouches at the door of every human heart and, at some or many points in life, every human heart is mastered by it. Sin is a pervasive human reality.

And since the Bible teaches us that sin is a reality in this world, sin itself is another reason to trust that God knows what He’s talking about. God is in touch with reality, and reality includes sin. So if God says that there’s sin, and life proves it, maybe we ought to listen to God a little more when He talks about other things, too.

For an overview of this year’s blog, please see http://threequartertank.blogspot.com/2011/01/why-do-believers-believe.html.

Why Creationism? Why Not Evolution?

Today’s Reading:
• Genesis 1:1-3:24

Faith-Stretching Verse(s):

• The land produced vegetation—all sorts of seed-bearing plants, and trees with seed-bearing fruit. Their seeds produced plants and trees of the same kind. And God saw that it was good. – Gen. 1:12, NLT
• So God created great sea creatures and every living thing that scurries and swarms in the water, and every sort of bird—each producing offspring of the same kind. And God saw that it was good. – Gen. 1:21, NLT
• God made all sorts of wild animals, livestock, and small animals, each able to produce offspring of the same kind. And God saw that it was good. – Gen. 1:25, NLT
  

Thoughts:
In Hebrews (I’m jumping ahead, I know) we’re told that it’s by faith that we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command so that what is seen was not made out of visible matter. That was true around 2,000 years ago when Hebrews was written and it’s still true today; creationism has always been a faith-based understanding of our origins.

But I’ve always loved science, especially biology. And one of the questions that scientists seek to answer is the question of where all us living beings came from—the question of origins. Modern science has some pretty amazing tools at its disposal, tools that help us to observe our world in more detail than ever before and, we hope, to therefore to understand it better. And modern science has been largely developed around the theory of evolution—the theory that life as we know it developed and mutated over millions of years from life as it once was, that organisms which exist today have not existed since the earth’s formation.

So why would a science-loving, reason-based, intellectual (at least intellectual wannabe) like me believe that the world’s life forms were created rather than that they evolved?

Faith. Reasonable faith. Genesis, like all Scripture, claims to be authored by God. Written through men (in this case, Moses, for instance), but authored by God. And one of the counter-evolution notions in the verses above (besides the idea that God made the things mentioned) is the notion that God created plants and animals to reproduce themselves rather than to produce new types of creatures.

It’s a claim that seems trustworthy. For one thing, I see exactly this sort of thing going on today. I see pine trees bearing pine cones which lead to more pine trees, guppies reproducing guppies, rabbits reproducing rabbits, etc. Are there variations within these species? Yes. Mutations? Yes. Microevolution? Yes. It’s observable. But microevolution does not oppose the Bible’s account of creation; it fits this biblical teaching that species reproduce themselves.

‘What about the fossil records?’ someone might ask. After all, there used to be other species alive, species similar to today’s species, but that no longer exist today. Didn’t today’s life forms come from at least some of these now-extinct species? Similarities make it seem possible. The fossil records supposedly support the theory of evolution.

Fossils are observable. But they also need to be interpreted. And they do not require an interpretation that favors evolutionary theory. They can be interpreted to support creationism. For instance, as a creationist I happen to agree that there used to be many species alive that are not alive today. Extinction is still occurring. According to http://www.petermaas.nl/extinct/lists/mostrecent.htm (today, Jan. 1, 2011) at least six species have become extinct since the year 2000. And yet no one claims that any new species have arisen from any of these recently extinguished gene pools. Their similarities to other creatures are documented and can be used to speculate on what their evolutionary history could have looked like. But the fact is that none of them can be proved to have come from any other species. To come to this conclusion requires an interpretation of the observable data. And interpretations can be wrong.

So we have two interpretations of the data that I think are worth considering. One interpretation says that life has evolved over time and that current species arose from prior species. This interpretation agrees that species generally reproduce themselves; it simply argues that, over time, mutations and variations can and do lead to new species. And the other interpretation says that the reason we observe species reproducing themselves is because that is precisely how God created the world to work.

Which one’s right? Which one’s wrong? Do I go with the interpretations of mortal men like me who have previously unimaginable capacities to observe life’s structures and whose interpretations have the support and trust (faith) of most of the scientific community? Or do I go with the interpretations that are scorned by most of the scientific community but that claim to come from God? Either way, I have to trust someone.

Here’s why I choose creationism: I trust God. God exists. I know that I can’t prove to everyone that He exists, but I am personally convinced that He does (and possibly at some point this year, I’ll talk a bit about my reasons for this). The God who exists has an advantage over every single one of today’s scientists—and not just today’s, but history’s. He observed what we can’t observe. Science begins with observation. So if I’m going to choose to trust in a scientific theory, and one scientist’s theory is based on fewer observations than the other’s, I’m going to trust the scientist who has observed more so long as his theory can still fit with the data.

In this case, that scientist is God. What He teaches about creation (not that the Bible was written to be a scientific manual) fits today’s observable data just as well as the evolutionary theory, or better. It simply offers a different interpretation. But that interpretation is based on God’s own observations and experience of history.

So I follow the theory of creationism because it fits the data I can observe today while evolution seems to oppose it (teaching species arising from other species) and because it follows the interpretation of the One who has experienced and observed more than any human scientist. It seems reasonable to me to trust Him. How about you?

Why Do Believers Believe?

In this New Year, I’ll be reading the Bible chronologically, and I invite you to join me. As I read, I hope to keep my thoughts focused on the question, “How can I believe this?” It seems to me that we’re living in a time when a growing number of people who know the Scriptures have come to the conclusion that the Scriptures simply aren’t credible. My hope is to show that those of us who believe do so reasonably, and to invite those who are struggling to believe or who don’t believe at all to join with us believers in standing firmly in our reasonable faith. I invite all readers into a dialogue. I do not claim to be a genius, so I doubt that my reasons for believing the Scriptures will always be unassailable. Feel free to show me where my logic falters. But also feel free to add your reasons for faith to mine. Let’s see where this journey leads as we pursue the truth together.

To review the Bible reading plan options, please visit http://tinyurl.com/yj2o7jz.

You’re Invited!

ALL – Psalm 150:1-6
ALL – Proverbs 31:25-31
OT – Malachi 3:1-4:6
NT – Revelation 22:1-21

Interesting passage for the day: The Spirit and the bride say, ‘Come.’ Let each one who hears them say the same, ‘Come.’ Let the thirsty one come—anyone who wants to; let him come and drink the Water of Life without charge. – Revelation 22:17, The Living Bible

Thought: It’s always nice to be invited. Especially to be invited by someone important. I think God and His kingdom might possibly fit into that category.

When someone important invites you over, don’t you usually do everything you possibly can to go?

With God, there’s no excuse for rejecting His invitation. He sent His Son to die so that we could accept His invitation. He’s sending His Son again to escort us home. His final words in the Scriptures are words of invitation and grace, and He’s so serious about the message getting across that He leaves a stern warning for anyone who tries to change things up.

If you’re reading this, you’ve received an invitation from God: “Come.” Come to Jesus. Come to His Spirit. Come join His people. Come home with Him. Come.

Question: Are you coming?

To review the Bible reading plan options, please visit http://tinyurl.com/yj2o7jz.

Prayer-Fueled Wrath

ALL – Psalm 136:1-26
ALL – Proverbs 30:7-9
OT – Nahum 1:1-3:19
NT – Revelation 8:1-13

Interesting passage for the day: And the perfume of the incense mixed with prayers ascended up to God from the altar where the angel had poured them out. Then the angel filled the censer with fire from the altar and threw it down upon the earth; and thunder crashed and rumbled, lightning flashed, and there was a terrible earthquake. – Revelation 8:4-5, The Living Bible

Thought: Often when I wake up in the morning, part of my prayers to God include these lines from the Lord’s (or disciples’) prayer: “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

Those prayers are beginning to be answered. In the hearts, souls, minds and strength of thousands upon thousands and even millions upon millions of people, our Father’s name has begun to be reverenced, His kingdom has come, and His will is being done.

But when will these prayers be answered fully? Why are some of our prayers going unanswered? Why do men and women get away with wickedness and evil? Where are all our prayers (and I’m talking about the godly ones, not the foolish and selfish prayers) going?

In Revelation, we see that they are being stored up to be poured out before God’s throne, mixed with incense. Our prayers for God’s righteousness to overwhelm the wickedness around us and finally reign supreme will be brought before God and presented as an offering that pleases Him. And in imagery that cannot help but communicate the connection between our prayers and God’s wrath on our rebellious world, the very censer that was once the container of our prayers, now emptied before God, becomes the tool by which fire from heaven is poured down upon this sinful earth in wrath.

Our prayers matter. God hears them. He sees our suffering. He knows our misery. He hears our sobs. He hates the injustice, oppression and wickedness that we endure. As we cry out to Him through His pure and wonderful Son Jesus Christ, God is preparing to act. He will save us completely and finally from the pains of this life, and His answer to our prayers will be a wrath against sin that makes us wonder why we ever doubted that God cares about our troubles. He cares, and in His love for us, He will respond to our prayers in His wrath.

Question: Instead of asking what you pray for, I’d like to ask: What do you pray against? Have you grown impatient because God hasn’t dealt with it the way you wanted Him to deal with it yet? When you read Revelation 8 and see the results of your prayers, are you willing to wait for God’s timing?

To review the Bible reading plan options, please visit http://tinyurl.com/yj2o7jz.