CARLTON BYRD
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Cliff’s Edge<br />
A Self-refuting Phrase<br />
Funny how you can read a text for years, then read it again<br />
expecting nothing new but finding something new.<br />
“And the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of<br />
life; and man became a living soul” (Gen. 2:7, KJV).<br />
The Hebrew reads that God formed “the man,” as in one person. The words “his nostrils” reflects the<br />
singular again, as does the phrase “and the man became a living being” (NIV). The relevant verbs and nouns<br />
and possessive pronouns in Genesis 2:7 show that one man, the man, was created.<br />
In contrast, Genesis 1:26 reads: “Then God said, ‘Let Us make man in our image, according to our<br />
likeness; let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air’ ” (NKJV). In this verse<br />
“man” comes without the definite article “the.” The word “man” refers here to humanity, plural, as<br />
revealed in the clause that immediately follows: “and let them [plural] have dominion over the<br />
fish of the sea.”<br />
In Genesis 2:7 “the man,” this one man, is created first; then afterward God breathed into<br />
“his nostrils the breath of life” and that man became “a living being.”<br />
Now, what good are nostrils without lungs? And human lungs are useless without blood.<br />
And human blood demands a heart. And a heart needs (among many things) a sophisticated<br />
nervous system, which in a human means a brain. If the man had nostrils, he had<br />
a face, and if he had a face, he had a head, which means a skull, and so forth.<br />
Everything about that text implies that the man was created as a whole entity first, but a<br />
lifeless one. Only after having a complete human body did he become a “living being.”<br />
Thus, if I take at face value my theistic evolutionary friends’ claims to revere the Scriptures, I<br />
ask them in all sincerity, How can evolution be harmonized with this text? Can’t you see an irreconcilable<br />
contradiction between it and even the broadest evolutionary scheme? Why would the<br />
Lord have inspired the writing of this creation model when, in fact, He used an entirely different<br />
one? What good is the text if the opposite of what it teaches is true?<br />
Because science points to the evolutionary model, we have no choice but to meld the two. Yet evolutionary<br />
science is at best—what? Twenty percent of hard-core empirical evidence stretched and extrapolated<br />
into 80 percent speculation shaped by metaphysical assumptions constructed around<br />
culture, peer pressure, psychology, philosophy, and other variables that have little to do with<br />
immediate science. Why pit such subjectivity against an explicit biblical text?<br />
Also, evolutionary theory is based on natural selection and random mutation. That’s natural, as opposed<br />
to supernatural, selection. And random mutation? How random could that be if God was guiding it along? The<br />
names of these processes themselves rule out divine intervention, making the phrase “theistic evolution”<br />
self-refuting.<br />
Richard DeWitt, in Worldviews: An Introduction to the History and Philosophy of Science, writes: “So if one adds<br />
a supernatural involvement into the account of evolution by natural selection, say by allowing a God to<br />
meddle in the evolutionary process, then it is no longer natural selection. One is no longer taking natural<br />
science, and evolutionary theory, seriously. In short, taking natural science seriously means that an account<br />
of evolutionary development that is importantly influenced by a supernatural being is not an intellectually<br />
honest option” (p. 313, Kindle edition).<br />
He said it, not me.<br />
Usually at this point I begin to snort, chortle, and rail. I don’t want to now. Instead, I humbly ask someone<br />
to explain to me how you can, with a straight face, meld Genesis 2:7 with an evolutionary model of<br />
origins.<br />
We all have to put our faith in something. What I don’t understand is how those who claim to believe in<br />
the Bible can put their faith in what is, in light of Genesis 2:7, so contradictory to it. n<br />
Cliff<br />
Goldstein<br />
Clifford Goldstein is editor of the Adult Sabbath School Bible Study Guide. His latest book, Shadow Men, is available from<br />
Signs Publishing in Australia.<br />
www.AdventistReview.org | February 21, 2013 | (149) 21