Sunday, April 16, 2023

Creation Moment 4/17/2023 - Christianity Today no longer "Christian"

"One doesn’t have to live long in this world to recognize that it’s a
groaning creation. Animals eat one another, parasites infect and slowly kill their hosts, and natural disasters wreak havoc with no regard for life or property. Why is it like this? Well, the Bible gives us the answer—but
Christianity Today magazine doesn’t like that answer!
In a recent cover story for Christianity Today, John R. Schneider, professor emeritus of theology at Calvin University laid out the problem of a groaning creation and animal suffering, stating:
Modern science tells us that heartworm is just one source of animal suffering in nature among scores of others. Together, they confront Christians with a disquieting question: How could such horrific suffering exist within the good creation of the omnipotent, omniscient, and morally perfect Christian God? How to answer this question has become the center of intense controversy among leading Christian and non-Christian thinkers of our time.
But pay attention to Schneider’s next statement:
 
 It was not always so. Premodern Christian theologians did not find this question hard to answer. Most major Christian thinkers taught that the causes in nature that harm human and nonhuman beings did not exist until the first human beings sinned against God.
Predation, disease, deadly parasites (like heartworm), and violent terrestrial events were viewed as products of the Fall. But revolutionary new developments in the natural sciences have made it difficult to accept that traditional answer. In the 18th and 19th centuries, pioneering geologists made an unexpected discovery that still causes consternation among Christians. The unveiling of an unfathomably long epochal, prehuman history of animals calls the chronology of creation in Genesis into question. More importantly, though, it seems to subvert the traditional explanation that savagery among animals originated as a consequence of the Fall.
According to ancient rocks and fossils, predation and other sources of animal pain reach back seamlessly throughout the entire prehuman history of species as they gradually evolved. Recent studies of amber from the Cretaceous period (150–70 million years ago) provide perfectly preserved specimens of biting flies, ticks, mosquitoes, a host of parasitic worms (ancestors of the heartworm), microbial diseases, and viruses that preyed upon the dinosaurs, afflicting them with horrific physical harm that possibly hastened their demise. The additional discovery that successive cataclysmic mass extinctions of entire biomes of species have occurred periodically on Earth further complicates Christian explanation for animal pain. It seems that 99 percent of all species that ever existed are now gone, most without so much as a genetic trace left in the genomes of species existing now. On the surface, this sequence of catastrophes, followed by evolutionary restarts, does not exactly evoke a sense of divine providential design. A third development in science makes it still harder to discern the Divine in both the history of animals and the conditions of their existence in nature now . . . during hundreds of millions of years, the law of natural selection guided the creation of all species. It is this relatively random, uneconomical, and inherently brutal means of creation that causes intense animal suffering. The lawlike “hand” of natural selection literally inscribes animal suffering by design into the conditions of existence for animals. Since Darwin’s time, philosophers and theologians have debated whether the God of the Bible could have employed such an inherently inefficient and brutal means of creation.
 
*But mankind sinned against God. Because man was given dominion over creation, when Adam fell all of creation was cursed (Genesis 3:17) and now groans, awaiting liberation (For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. Romans 8:22). But Schneider must reject the biblical, and historic, explanation for animal suffering because of “revolutionary new developments in the natural sciences.” In other words, God’s Word is not his ultimate authority—man’s ideas are, and he will subject the Bible to man’s ideas!" AIG