Knowledge
One of the benefits of living here in Britain, AD 2012, is the sheer volume of information most of us are privileged to have access to. Our age may be defined by two things — information and global commerce.
This observation was foretold in the book of Daniel 12:4, some 500 years before the Lord’s birth. Writing in 1991, the same year in which the very first internet ‘web page’ came online, Dr Henry Morris wrote: ‘ “knowledge shall be increased” could well be translated “science shall be increased”, for the two words are synonymous in meaning and derivation’.
Just two decades have passed since this was written and yet the internet is now estimated to contain almost one yottabyte (1YB) of information — much of it scientific. To give some idea of how large a quantity this is, you would need at least a trillion terabyte hard-drives to carry this volume! And yet not a day goes by when the internet doesn’t grow even larger! The mind literally boggles!
Quality
When we dig deeper, however, a remarkable fact emerges. It is not the quantity of information that matters, nor the speed with which it can cross the globe to us. Rather, it is the quality of information — the small gems of truth, the hidden pearls of faithful knowledge — that really matter. And in many instances, these are very difficult to obtain, even today!
This struck me recently through a number of learning experiences. First, I came to realise just how far modern historical scholarship has led us away from the true history contained in God’s Word, the Holy Bible.
Recently, attempting to seek out and read some Protestant histories of the world proved totally impossible, simply because they have lain neglected for centuries and have not been translated from their original languages.
This taught me that, although we may seem to have come far in knowledge since the Reformation, in many cases virtually no progress has been made, due to the relentless juggernaught of unbelieving ‘scholarship’ which swept across the world during the 16th-19th centuries.
This juggernaught continues unabated today. Countless gems of historical and scientific truth have no doubt been crushed under its persecuting wheels and long since forgotten. We need a new Renaissance!
Censorship
Second, It came as rather a shock to find that my small, fully referenced addition to a Wikipedia article on the structure of the Genesis creation narrative was repeatedly deleted (almost immediately after uploading) by other editors.
This relentless censorship of a small, seemingly uncontroversial, fully referenced insight awoke me from my dogmatic slumber regarding Wiki’s value as a repository of knowledge. Thankfully, there are many treasures now freely available on the web encyclopaedia Creation wiki and I would encourage readers with expertise to add to this fantastic resource to make it even more polished and valuable.
My final learning experience is a sad and burdensome tale concerning wilful ignorance over Genesis 1-11 in the visible church. A number of books were published last year (by theologians and apologists) which have muddied the waters over creation and could easily lead to future dissension, through their unfaithful approaches to biblical interpretation.
This is nothing new, of course; it has continued for decades this way. Yet the point was hammered home to me late last year through a debate in Westminster between a famous Christian apologist and an atheist professor from Oxford.
When the apologist was challenged about the sheer volume of evil, pain, suffering and violence in the world, he had no biblical answer. The most he could muster was that the billions of creatures he took as massacred, torn, drowned, burnt and hurled to their deaths, over hundreds of millions of years — presumably so-called ‘hominids’ included — would not have been ‘consciously aware’ of their torment and agony; so God’s name was in the clear.
Purity
Such an answer clearly twists the Holy Scriptures, which declares Eden a very good vegetarian paradise (Genesis 1:30), all flesh to have corrupted itself after the Fall (Genesis 6:13), and God’s permission for restricted human omnivory only after the cataclysm of Noah’s time — when a nutritious vegetarian diet was no doubt hampered by climate, soil and floral biodiversity loss (Genesis 9:3-5).
This isn’t reading too much into Scripture. It is simply drawing on the straightforward reading adopted by the vast majority of readers before Darwin’s seeds of doubt were sown.
During 2012, therefore, as we continue to do fierce battle with atheists, humanists and liberals over the duties of state education with regard to the biblical worldview, let us remember that only in the triune God, and Christ the mediator of the new covenant, are found ‘all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge’ (Colossians 2:3).
Let us strive against iniquitous knowledge (falsely so-called) confident that God’s Word is pure and Christ has secured certain victory through his glorious death and resurrection!
J. Charles Lee Powell
Edited from Origins (issue 56), the journal of the Biblical Creation Society (with permission)
