Efforts to Undermine the Bible

“Everyone that hears these sayings of mine and does them will be likened to a discreet man, who built his house upon the rock-mass. And the rain poured down and the floods came and the winds blew and lashed against that house, but it did not cave in, for it had been founded upon the rock-mass.”—Matt. 7:24, 25, NW.

THE quickest way to destroy a building is to knock its foundation from under it. Gravity will do the rest. The quickest way to destroy Christian faith is to knock its foundation from under it. Doubts and skepticism will complete the ruin. The foundation of our faith is a book. That book is the Bible. Today there is an avalanche of knockers trying to sweep that foundation out from under Christianity. In times past Bible writers were killed, Bible believers were tortured, Bible translators were burned at the stake, and copies of the Bible were fed to the flames. Yet the book lives today. It is still under attack, but the assaults are more varied, more subtle. They converge upon the Bible from many quarters: from science, from atheism and, surprisingly enough, from those who pose as its friends, the clergy of Christendom.

² Do you have faith in the Bible? Is your faith founded on fact? Do you both hear and heed the Bible’s words, or is your faith shown to be dead by the absence of works in harmony with it? Many do not build a Christian life on a rock foundation, but base their religious life on the sands of superstition and tradition, on credulity and ceremony. Faiths based on such false foundations will not survive stormy assaults, but the true faith that is founded on knowledge of and obedience to God’s Word will stand like a house on a rock-mass. Neither will attacks by men that try it severely undermine it, nor will judgments from God that weigh it in the balances find it wanting. Both the faith that endures and the kind that collapses are embraced in Jesus’ illustration: “Everyone that hears these sayings of mine and does them will be likened to a discreet man, who built his house upon the rock-mass. And the rain poured down and the floods came and the winds blew and lashed against that house, but it did not cave in, for it had been founded upon the rock-mass. Furthermore, everyone hearing these sayings of mine and not doing them will be likened to a foolish man, who built his house upon the sand. And the rain poured down and the floods came and the winds blew and struck against that house and it caved in, and its collapse was great.”—Matt. 7:24-27, NW.

³ Science has sought the collapse of the Bible, and it has made the creation account its chief target and evolutionary theories its flaming arrows. These burning missiles have reduced to ashes the unfounded faith of multitudes, but they have not penetrated the shield of true faith. (Eph. 6:16) Why, even advancing scientific knowledge quenches evolution’s fiery darts! Evolutionists at one time held strange ideas about spontaneous generation of life, but new knowledge forced them to abandon such theories. They claimed characteristics acquired from environment were passed on to offspring, but had to relinquish this attractive theory when modern genetics proved such were not inheritable. In arguing for the survival of the fittest, Darwin failed to explain the arrival of the fittest, which is the key problem. Hugo de Vries explained the arrival of small, inheritable changes in life forms by mutations, but now science is saddened to discover that these rare mutations are harmful instead of helpful, and could possibly account for a degeneration or deterioration, a devolution downward, but not an evolution upward. But if science allowed itself to be stripped of these past contentions its theory of evolution would be bankrupt, and such state of bankruptcy it will not honestly declare. So propagandizing evolutionists still offer these falsehoods as fodder for a gullible and uninformed public.

⁴ During June in New York city an International Symposium on Anthropology was held, and in reporting on one session the New York Times of June 12 headlined their conclusion, “Evolution of Body Is Declared at End.” This matches the opinion of Lucien Cuénot, one of France’s outstanding biologists, who, in discussing the evolutionary tree, said in his book L’adaptation, “The evolutionary sap no longer circulates.” Incidentally, before he died last year Cuénot abandoned the evolution theory as untenable, to the great consternation of his scientific colleagues. It is very convenient for evolutionists to declare that evolution has ended. They do not have to show it taking place now. They are not embarrassed by their inability to show it in operation now.

⁵ Another interesting point was disclosed by this meeting of anthropologists in New York city. The New York Times of June 10, under the headline “Age of Cave Man Is Cut 35,000 Years”, reported their belief that “the ancestors of modern man in Europe are perhaps 35,000 years younger than has been previously believed”, that “new study indicates that the cave man was extinct in Europe by the year 13,000 B.C.” This slash in the cave man’s age, from 50,000 years to 15,000 years, was forced by the newly developed radiocarbon clock. It was the advent of this clock that caused the Chicago Sun-Times of May 27, 1951, to report that evolutionists had cut the age of modern man from 1,000,000 years to 50,000 years. Science shaves the figure ever nearer to the Bible’s 6,000-year age for man. That the present carbon clock figures may not be final was recognized by the symposium, for the Times reported: “Carbon dating techniques may be subject to revision later if differences in the natural rate of formation of the radioactive isotope can be detected or if anomalies in the rate of carbon utilization by growing materials are discovered, it was suggested.”

ARCHAEOLOGY DENIES EVOLUTION

⁶ The science of archaeology contradicts instead of supports evolution. Note the following: “Strangely, in view of the consistent demands of the evolutionary school, we find no evidence of human evolution in the land of Egypt. More than this, the doctrine that man began with a brutish intellect and gradually developed his high and peculiar culture is refuted by the evidences from this country. In fact, the contrary is strikingly the case. Instead of proving a process of evolution, the history of man as found in the archaeology of Egypt is a consistent record of degeneration. The eminent Sayce, one of the ablest archaeologists in the whole history of that great science, expressed his wonder and amazement at the high stage of culture met with in the very earliest records of the Egyptian people. Other authorities, such as Baikie, have written voluminously upon the subject. It had been hoped that when excavators finally reached undisturbed tombs of the first dynasty, they would find themselves in the dawn of Egyptian culture. . . . Through the first tombs, we peer back into an older preceding culture that dazzles and amazes the human understanding. Instead of finding the dawn of a developing humanity, we see mankind already in the high noon of cultural accomplishments. . . . Egypt, as elsewhere, shows us no dim, brutish beginning, but a startling emergence of this people in a high degree of culture. . . . It must not be presumed that this condition is unique in Egypt, or peculiar to any one race or country. The same queer discrepancy between the fallacious theories of the philosophy of organic evolution and the facts of human history is observed wherever archeology has been able to hold the torch of discovery over a given area.”—Pages 41, 42, 49, 50, Dead Men Tell Tales, by H. Rimmer.

⁷ Notwithstanding the continuing vindication of the Bible by advancing knowledge, some of the clergy of Christendom oppose the Bible to side with science. On May 3 the Morning Call of Allentown, Pennsylvania, reported the “Reverend” Joseph B. Mohr as saying: “It is regrettable that the doctrine of the infallibility of the Bible has been interpreted by many to mean that the Scriptures in all their parts, even their pre-scientific parts, are of equal value to us today, and equally binding.” What this cleric is trying to say in his roundabout, flanking attack on the Bible is that God’s Word is not reliable, that if the men who wrote it had known science they would have written it differently, that if God who inspired it had known what today’s scientists know he would have caused it to be written differently, that when we must choose between science and the Bible, we should choose science. This is only typical of so many clergy in Christendom today. They build on the shifting sands of science, not on the immovable rock of God’s Word.