Anyone who picked up this month’s National Geographic would have found a fascinating read on human evolution; and the somewhat shocking discovery of human remains from over 4 million years ago.
Of course, there are those that also argue the world is only 6000 years old; plus change.
Apparently it is some sort of test of faith to believe that the definition of “truth” is severely limited to being written down in history.
I had a High School history teacher who once told us that history is recorded by the victors. By which he was trying to say that the people who sit down and write the history books only tell one side of the story, theirs...
The Bible does in fact contain “a history.” That history has to be understood in two ways, however; first, it is a history told for a reason, it is the history of our religious development as Christians... so a lot is left out. Secondly, it is a history written by the people who saw everything from one side, theirs. One would get a very different history of the Middle East by reading anything written by Canaanites, or Egyptians, or Romans.
I mention this because that whole 6000 year thing comes from the fact that the Bible records, give or take, some 6000 years of the desert trials and tribulations of a particular band of nomads who trace their roots back to the probably real Abraham and Sarah and the mythical archetypes of Adam and Eve.
The only thing that is actually six thousand years old is our ability to write.
And since most of us do not have very long memories, no one wrote about Ardi, the slightly shorter than four foot female of the “Ardipithecus Ramidus” branch of humanity. She wasn’t that far away from Israel, after all, being born and living out her short life in northern Ethiopia.
Evolutionary history can now be traced back conclusively through three periods of human development over 6 million years. For the last two million we have been Homo Erectus, pretty much what we are now, large brain, tool using mammals with opposable thumbs. For the two million before that we were Australopithecus with longer legs, larger chewing teeth, and a bit more facial hair. And then, for as far back as we have discovered before that, we were Ardipithicus and hung out in trees as well as walked, lived in the woods, and ate plants and animals.
As near as they can tell, it was 8 million years ago that humans and chimps diverged.
By the way, it was as far back as 160,000 years ago that we became religious, thought about death, and earned the title Homo Sapiens... the thinking person. They know this because they have found a child’s grave in which the body was prepared for death rather than just disposed of.
So, a whole group of people out there will tell me that I am just believing stuff that was made up by scientists with some bizarre plan to discredit religion. But seriously, why would they do that? What is there to gain in saying that we have been here a long time? What is there to lose in saying we have been religious and believing in God for some 154,000 years longer than the Bible talks about?
The Bible is not a science textbook; and science and religion are not at odds. In fact, religious scholars were the only scientists for most of the history of our planet; and most scientists today are religious.
Those that say they are atheists are probably just so fed up with people who read the Bible wrong and try to enforce their views through violence... unlike the person they are supposed to be following Jesus, who believed in everything the Jews, Greeks and Roman’s knew; and just realized there was more we did not know.
Religion will die out or become irrelevant if it continues to fight against the truths that God has opened up through scientists. It is time to start seeing the world for what it really is, and living faithfully in it.
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