Joseph’s Alabaster Box

God created Adam and Eve in the way He wanted them to be. The way He wanted them to be was perfectly happy and immortal. For their happiness He did not create them as co-gods, or assistant gods. There can be only one God. He created them as innocent subjects with a free will. They sinned and then God had to make certain changes in them in order that they could survive in the world that they would now have to live in until they died. The changes God made in man are pointed out in verses 17,18, and 19 of Genesis 3.

“And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree of which I commanded thee saying, Thou shalt not eat of it; cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life. Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field; In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.”

Adam now had to deal with a cursed soil. This included having to pull weeds, many with stickers; he would have to eat vegetation like an animal; he would sweat, not perspire, sweat; finally, he must decline, and die, and decay.

Man’s lot is to work. Not the joyous work he did before he sinned. Now he had to break his back battling the adverse soil. Dr. Scofield well says, “It is better for fallen man to battle with a reluctant earth than to live without toil.” Woman would bring forth many children in sorrow, and man in sorrow would eat of the fruit of the dirt beneath his feet. Adam’s next meal would be the fruit of plants that would henceforth resist his efforts to coax them to bear fruit. He would now eat the herb of the field, which meant that he would now have to bow himself to the earth to gather his food. All of his life, man would have to labor to eat.

Here in America, it seems that medical science has dispelled the sorrow of childbearing for women, and work-saving devices have reduced man’s work to play. It is also evident that the more man can get himself out from under the punishment of God, that the more rebellious man becomes. I am thankful that the big truck I had to drive for a living for the last few years of my working life had power steering on it. I am thankful that my wife had the comfort and help of medical science to bring forth our sons into the world, but I have not lost sight of the fact that God has been gracious to us in allowing man to discover things to make life easier, or at least, what we think is easier. I personally do not believe that life is better now than it was a century or more ago.

The work Adam would have to do now would be hard labor. He would discover metal and make tools. He would discover how to harness animals to pull things for him. He would build a comfortable house, and furnish it. He would rest on the Sabbath because God had sanctified that day. (And, incidentally, God has never de-sanctified the rest day.) Adam would learn to glean joy and happiness and satisfaction from his work. What joy he doubtless had as he went out into the fields in the early morning with his two young sons beside him, to till the fields. The grind of toil, though, would take its toll.

This is not the story of evolution philosophy. Evolution tells us that man slowly developed over great periods of time. Man at first walked bent over like an ape, according to evolution, then he gradually straightened up until he was bipedal, or walked upright like a man. There are heated discussions over these creatures among evolutionists, and they take sides with their favorite paleontologist and the words fly thick and fast. They talk of hominids, huminoids, and pongids; Australopithecus, Ramapithicus, dryopithecines, Zinjanthropus, Homo habilis, Homo erectus, Neanderthals, and on and on. How do we know that life is evolving upward rather than downward? A certain law says that everything is decaying. Nobody is much more than a hundred years old. “There are many fossils of true apes and many of true men, but nothing in between. There have never been any man-apes, according to the real fossil evidence, and this is exactly what the Bible teaches, too.”¹

Professor Marvin Lubenow has researched the fossil issue for 25 years. He is qualified to speak. He says, “The human fossil record is strongly supportive of the concept of Special Creation. On the other hand, the fossil evidence is so contrary to human evolution as to effectively falsify the idea that humans evolved. This is not the message we hear from a hundred different voices coming at us from a dozen different directions. But the human fossils themselves tell the real story.”² Nary a fossil after nearly 150 years of diligent search.

God fitted Adam both physically and emotionally for his new life in the cursed earth. Adam must be able to cope with the frustration of battling thorns and thistles which were the only thing that would volunteer to come up in his vegetable patch. His nervous system was about to be shocked to its limit by the sight of the earth when he was thrust out of the garden. It would be the equivalent to stepping out onto the moon. He would have to take great care about what he ate, for there would be toxic plants now, and there would be creatures with venomous bites. Other animals would be his enemy. Dinosaurs, saber tooth tigers, boa constrictors, bears, all sorts of ravenous animals trying to cope with their new environment.

Adam must quickly learn how to make bows, and spears and other weapons for the defense of his little family. Adam would have to quickly learn how to kill in self defense. We can be sure that the animals did not become an immediate threat to Adam and Eve because God did not give them permission to eat flesh until after the flood, but we do know that the plants in no more than one generation became hostile to man and animals for we are told as much in our text. It is reasonable to think that some animals could have become predators in one generation, but I do not think so.

We know that man became a predator in one generation for Cain, the firstborn of Adam and Eve was a killer. Man was not given divine permission to eat flesh until after the flood, but are we to believe that man, who disobeyed God in the matter of a fruit tree, would not jump ahead of the LORD and help himself to the animal tissue that was all around him when he was in such need of protein?

Did a man ever have such good grounds for a divorce? Few women have ever done to their husband a thing as awful as Eve did to Adam. Hosea married a harlot, and she remained a harlot, but he remained faithful to her. Job’s wife told him to curse God and die, but he remained faithful to her. Moses’ wife almost caused him to be killed by the Lord because she resisted the circumcision of their sons, but Moses remained faithful to her. Joseph’s betrothed wife was found with child before they came together, but after God spoke to him, he remained faithful to her. A man ought to be faithful to his wife regardless of what happens. A wife is a woman, and she is the weaker vessel. A wife is the husband’s own body, he should care for it.

Different cultures have different ideas about what a man should be. In our nation, the ideas abroad about what a man is are very immature. A boy who wants to be a true man must study the life of Jesus, Who was the ideal man. Jesus displayed the characteristics of genuine manhood all through His life, and in everything He did. I think Jesus’ manhood can be summed up in the words of Matthew in 20:28, “Even as the Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many.” I choose this as my ideal, and may God help me to live this way. To minister and give my life. That is the life work of a man.

Proverbs 20:5: “Counsel in the heart of man is like deep water; but a man of understanding will draw it out.”

Psalm 128:4: “Behold, that thus shall the man be blessed that feareth the LORD.”

Proverbs 20:7: “The just man walketh in his integrity: his children are blessed after him.”

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1. Henry M. Morris, The Biblical Basis for Modern Science (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Book House, 1984), p. 393.

2. Marvin L. Lubenow, Bones of Contention (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Books, 1992), p. 7.

It is safe to say that every criminal and every abuser of mankind, such as Rockefeller and Carnegie, were evolutionists. The fact that Hitler was an evolutionist is well documented from his own writings, speeches, and behavior. Karl Marx, too, was a rabid evolutionist, and his economic theory, the basis of communism, was evolution in motion. All evolutionists are a threat to mankind because they teach a dogma that develops the worst behavior in man. When man considers other men animals, then he is more prone to treat him like an animal. Belief in evolution is a gross sin because it contradicts the LORD God, and makes His Word of no effect. It also robs Him of His glory as the Creator of all things.

Eve had an extraordinary mind, just as Adam did, but there must have been something in her that made her more naive than Adam because it was she that Satan went after. What she thought or did not think is not revealed to us in the Word, and so we cannot know, but we have evidence from her behavior to give us an idea of what she thought. Surely, if she had believed, or remembered, that God was her Creator, she would not have disobeyed Him so readily. Females are still more naive as we can detect in their propensity to believe commercials. A commercial can use the word “save” instead of the word “spend,” and the ladies don’t seem to know the difference.

If my idea is true, then Eve was the first evolutionist. Certainly, what she did indicates that she had rejected the LORD as Creator. The Lord at that time was not, in fact, her Redeemer, because she did not need a Redeemer, but God had certain rights to her life, body, soul, and spirit just the same. And so Mr. Darwin was not the first evolutionist, Eve was. Evolution sin goes all the way back to the garden of Eden.

Eve’s desire to be as God also indicates her evolutionary bent. The notion that man is as good as God, and just as deserving to be god as God, is the reason evolution theory survives all the scientific and common sense evidence that disproves it. Dr. Henry Morris writes: “…a professor of history at Calvin College … a witness for the evolution side at the 1981 Arkansas creation law trial, admits, ‘In any case, creation scientists are correct in perceiving that in modern culture evolution often involves far more than biology. The basic ideologies of the civilization, including its entire moral structure, are at issue. Evolution is sometimes the key mythological element in a philosophy that functions as a virtual religion’.”1

Let’s read our text, Genesis 3:6,7: “And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat. And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.”

Humans living under sin cannot restore themselves to their innocent state by going naked. The human body may be beautiful to innocent eyes, but the human body is not beautiful to eyes that can lust, for nothing sinful is beautiful, and lust for something unlawful is sin. Ham’s son Canaan was cursed because Ham looked on the nakedness of his daddy. God forbade his priests to go up to the altar by steps because of the possibility that their nakedness might be seen. In Leviticus 18:8 the Jews were commanded, “The nakedness of thy father’s wife shall thou not uncover: it is thy father’s nakedness.” Of all the changes that must have taken place in the total human when he sinned, this is the only thing that is recorded. Nakedness reduces a human being to the state of an animal more than anything else. The shame of modern civilization is nakedness.

A handful of cloth is not sufficient to clothe a person. Nakedness is not freedom, as some have mistaken it. The Supreme Court may not know what pornography is, but most people you meet in church know what it is.

Eve’s decision helps us to realize how dangerous it is for us to make decisions. I feel sorry for young people who must make a decision about whom to marry. Getting engaged is more dangerous than a bungy jump. It is very difficult today to decide what to believe about eternal matters. The devil has stirred up such a mass of religions that the average person on the street is completely confused. I spend much time thinking about how I can persuade people that I am telling the honest truth. The best way I know of to convince an unbeliever that I am telling him the truth is to convince him that my own salvation was perfected, completed, by Christ Jesus on the cross of Calvary. We don’t have to win souls to go to Heaven. As an individual member of the human race, it is none of my business whether a person gets saved or not. That is a matter strictly between the individual and God. I am going to Heaven whether anybody else goes or not. It’s not nice to say it, but if a sinner doesn’t get saved, it’s no skin off my nose. I must admit, it is some skin off my heart, though, because Jesus Christ died for that person, and the suffering of my Saviour is wasted on that sinner’s account if he goes to hell.

Eve made the wrong decision. Like all such decisions, her decision did not affect her alone, “For none of us liveth to himself, and no man dieth to himself.” according to Paul in Romans 14:7. Eve was about to hurt her husband more than she could ever have imagined. The greatest harm she was about to do him was to put him in the position where he had to choose between her and the Lord. After Eve bit into the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, the devil didn’t need the serpent anymore. If he faced Adam at all, which he probably did not, he probably stepped out of the serpent, and faced Adam with sneers and scorning when Eve revealed to Adam what she had done.

Can you imagine how Adam must have felt when Eve approached him with that fruit in her hand? I can just see the scene. There she is so happy and proud of what she had done, holding her half eaten fruit in one hand, and holding out a fresh fruit to Adam. Adam had no choice but to eat. The Apostle Paul said, “For I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh:. . . .” What a shocking thing to think about. If Paul would be willing to go to Hell for his brethren, how much more would Adam be willing to go to Hell for his wife? There may have been no Hell at that moment, and certainly Adam would not have known about it, but he chose to give up his Creator for his wife, and that was the same thing. Adam had to make a choice. His wife had transgressed the law of God. He knew the penalty, and he knew God would carry it out. It was Eve or God. I have known people to choose the devil rather than their spouse. I know a man who was wealthy and popular, good looking and witty. He and his wife were socialites. They partied and lived according to the good times of the world. But he got saved. Suddenly, he was no longer a party-goer. He was a church-goer. No more pleasures of sin for him. His wife gave him an ultimatum. Give up this stupid religious fanaticism, or I go. This man did his best to win his wife, but she decided for the devil rather than the LORD Christ and her husband. She divorced him. To make his pain even worse, many Baptist preachers would not allow the man to speak in their churches because he was a divorced person. He had not divorced his wife, she had divorced him. He was not the criminal – she was. But prejudice is irrational, and this man was treated worse that a robber, even though it was he who had been robbed.

Adam’s rib, Satan’s fib, women’s lib. Adam’s sin, Satan’s win, women’s men. That combination can never equal anything but misery. Adam and Eve sewed fig leaves together. We cannot know how many trees of knowledge there were in the Garden, but it is possible that the tree of knowledge was a fig tree. People are still sewing fig leaves. Baptism, good works, church membership. Anything but the blood. Deliver us from a bloody religion, they say. Fig leaves hide no shame, and works hide no shame.

Regret can be indescribable agony. How many poor souls on this earth suffer regret! Words that can never be recalled. Deeds that cannot be undone. Thoughts that linger to haunt and accuse. Regret is like the gloom of a damp cavern where nothing lives. Regret is such an awful word, it isn’t even found in the Bible. Regret can whittle down one’s will to live. Regret must have haunted Adam and Eve till their dying day. Their inability to forgive themselves may have been the worst curse of all. Remorse stands in dark corners like apparitions waiting to pounce on you if you have a happy thought. Remorse chilled poor David in his final hours. All the Abishags on Earth cannot warm a soul frozen by remorse.

1. Henry M. Morris The Long War Against God (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Book House, 1989 (quoting George M. Marsden, “Creation versus Evolution: No Middle Ground,” Nature 305, [Oct. 13, 1983]): 574.

The human race has lost something. The human race doesn’t know that it has lost something. People in the western world think that the people of the eastern world are not very intelligent. It is the western world that has sent man to the moon, and discovered how to mend sick hearts in the hospitals. We may discover how to cure cancer – or better yet, prevent it. We will probably discover how to cure colds and flue, providing the western world can escape the clutches of Islam which will set the world back to the black ages. What the western world has lost is its faith. The eastern world continues to believe that there is a God in the universe that man is responsible to. We can know that because the eastern world still worships what they think is God, while the west worships nothing.

The eastern world continues to hold religion as an important element in their life. This is seen in the faith of Islam in which people die for their faith. It is seen in other religions in India, and other countries. China and Japan have come under the influence of the western idea of Darwinism, and have lost their faith. Faith is something man can have that is based on a false assumption, like Darwinism and Allah. It is the eastern world, and the pre-Christian world of the west that has left us countless idols. These idols are the evidence that eastern people had faith that there is a God. They just took a wrong turn in trying to find Him or learn the truth about Him. Since eastern peoples could not believe that God was bigger than the creation around them that was obviously the work of a Creator, they reduced God to stone or wooden images, and imagined that He lived in those things.

Oddly enough, their gods were hideous, evil, and angry. This is not because they were unable to carve, chisel, or fashion things of beauty. The reason their gods were more like devils than gods is because man has had a sense of his sinfulness ever since Adam disobeyed God. They could not explain their guilty feeling; yet they knew that they were responsible to God. They did not know how to be prepared to stand before Him. They knew God was angry with them, but they did not know how to make Him happy. I am not discussing people with little intelligence. I am thinking of people who built the tower of Babel. the pyramids, the temples of South America, Even people who existed in jungles and frost had their gods made by their own hands.

The peoples of the western world living as they did in forests, also had their gods. That is, until the truth of the Gospel entered Europe about two thousand years ago. Then things began to change, though for more than a thousand years the Catholic church, actually the decayed Roman empire, withheld the Bible from the populace. The church lost control of the Bible, and the people when the printing press was invented. The Catholic church has left us its gods, too. All the great cathedrals they built are filled and covered with their idols.

The inventiveness of Islamic scholars was limited because Allah was a false god who could not lead man to the truth that God had created all matter, and the laws that govern it. If God could not command matter, then matter could not be controlled. If matter did not obey certain laws, then it could not be made into a thing that would print words on paper, or fall to the earth when it came loose from a tree limb. If matter were as lawless as man, then it would be impossible to make it into a hoe to chop weeds, or an airplane that could life hundreds of people. If you put an atom or molecule somewhere, you had to depend on it staying there.

The fact that matter is under the control of God, and God has given part of this control to man, was not learned by accident. It was learned from the Bible. The scientists of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries who established the disciplines of science were men who believed God, and believed that He was the Creator of all matter and physical laws. These were the greatest scientists of all time. Newton learned that matter did nothing. If matter were not under a law, it could go up as well as down when it came loose from the limb. He knew matter could do nothing because it could not move or stop moving unless something moved it or stopped it. Matter is inanimate. It does nothing of itself. Only matter with life in it can do anything. Only the Bible can explain life in a rational manner. Newton and his sort knew this. They were men of faith as well as science. They understood the basic fact of science: matter is created stuff that is governed by laws. Matter does not possess any intelligence at all.

Then a character comes along who can no more be compared to Newton than I could. In fact, he had only a M.A., whereas I have a doctorate. Newton was president of the Royal Society of London even after he had given up science for Bible study. Darwin decided that he would not believe there was a God because God judges people, and he didn’t like that. He decided that Christianity was evil because if what Christianity taught were right, most of his drinking buddies were in Hell, and he didn’t like that. His granddaddy Erasmus was a physician, and he wrote much stuff about evolution, but nobody had paid any attention to him. Darwin plagiarized much of this stuff into his book, and people paid attention to him.

Darwin did not reject God because his observations on his “hound dog” trip around the world demanded it. He twisted his observations of nature to prove what he believed before he got on the Beagle. He was not a scientist, and what he did was not very scientific, but what he did gave unbelieving men a foundation for what they believed. Men don’t believe there is no God, or that God didn’t create the universe the way He says He did, because science proves it or even suggests it. Men reject God because their very concept of God is like the frowning idols found all over the world. Their idea of God is exactly what that ancient artisan had in mind while he made that idol god. How do I know that? Listen to this from a leading evolutionist: No god can (or will) save us, we must save ourselves. Save ourselves from what? Why won’t God save us? This is the mind-set of the world today. The western world has rejected the ancient prophets who knew God, and swallowed Darwin hook, line, sinker, rod, and reel.

What the western world has lost is their natural-born belief that there is a God. The contemporary wester world is too dumb to realize how much priceless knowledge it has eschewed. The western world celebrates, not Christmas, but “Shopfrenzymas.” Mankind seems to have no longer the capacity to think, or reason. Matters of lasting importance are alien to the mortal brain. We have given up reason for the mind-opium of t.v. and sports.

We use the word “God” without thinking about what it means. Dictionaries give definitions of “god,” but they don’t capitalize the word as they do “Adolph Hitler,” and others. Their definitions are not much better than the infantile thoughts of the ordinary man on the street. Some do use words like “omnipotent,” and the like. God can be anything to anyone. According to the dictionary definitions, God can be anything you choose to worship as God. We can know about God by reading His Word, but western Christianity has just about destroyed God’s Word as an authority on anything. But since God is bigger than the universe, how can we visualize Him? How can we know Him personally. How can we meet Him? These questions stop humans in their tracks.

And that’s where Christmas fits in. God knew we could not conceptualize Him. He knew we could not understand Him. God was so gracious that He took upon Himself human flesh, like putting on a pair of coveralls, and entered the world with the shadow of a cross over Him. In Him we can see clearly all the marvelous things God has revealed in His book abbot Himself. He helps us see into the mysteries of the universe, time, matter, and space. The things that matter after all, are made clearer to us. We can give up our silly ideas for His eternal truths. I am not just 239 pounds of matter. I am that, but more than that, the matter contains the greatest mystery of all – life. I don’t profess to know what life is, but I do know where it came from, and I know it is of inestimable value. We generally call it the “soul.” If man valued his soul as God does, he would do something to save it, for he can’t save it himself.

Christmas? Glory to God in the highest, and on Earth, peace and good will to men. Christmas is a celebration of God loving man, and dying on a cross for him.

GENESIS 3
Dr. Stephen J. Gould is a professor of biology, geology, and history of science at Harvard University, that great fortress of truth. He is a prolific, and excellent writer with a seemingly unlimited store of knowledge. If anyone can be torn away from his faith in the Bible, and made an evolutionist, Dr. Gould is the man who can do the tearing. Dr. Gould is a master of sleight of pen. He can relate a story in which an evolutionist does an absolutely inexcusable act of deception, and then turn that thing around to make the evolutionist look like a solid gold hero.

A case in point is found in his book, Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History. Dr. Gould relates the story of Nebraska man and the relationship between Dr. Henry Fairfield Osborn and William Jennings Bryan. Dr. Osborn was a theist, whatever that means, who despised Bryan and the Bible he loved. Incidentally, no one could have been less qualified to prosecute an evolutionist than Mr. Bryan because he was uncertain about when the earth was created. (It should be pointed out that Mr. Bryan did not have the information provided by creation scientists in the last fifty years.) On March 14, 1922, Dr. Osborn received a tooth found in Nebraska by a rancher, and consulting geologist, Harold J. Cook. “Within a week or two, he was ready to proclaim the first momentous discovery of a fossilized higher primate, perhaps even a direct human ancestor, in America. He honored our hemisphere in choosing the name Hesperopithecus, or “ape of the western world.”1

This was just three years before the Scopes trial in Dayton, Tennessee, and Mr. Bryan was crusading for the elimination of evolution teaching in the schools of the states. Dr. Osborn used this tooth to ridicule Mr. Bryan, and publicly embarrass him and damage his credibility. Evolutionists enjoy using words from the Bible in their attacks on creationists, and Dr. Osborn did that with a vengeance. He used Job 12:8 as a challenge to Mr. Bryan. “. . .speak to the earth, and it shall teach thee:. . .” Later Dr. Osborn used part of this verse as the title of a book in which he attacked Bryan. The title is The Earth Speaks to Bryan.2 In a magazine article, Dr. Osborn went so far as to refer to his precious tooth fossil as Bryopithicus, since the thing had been found in Bryan’s home state. Mr. Bryan must have suffered a great deal of consternation and anguish because of all this rude and unscientific treatment. It was probably some relief when it finally leaked out that the Nebraska man fossil (the tooth) was just a pig’s tooth. Hesperopithecus was not a name to honor this continent, after all, it was a wicked hoax. Not the first, and by a long shot, not the last. Mr. Bryan died soon after the trial, and one is left to wonder if this treatment may not have contributed to his demise.

But Dr. Gould’s magic pen can make it all come out to make Dr. Osborn a knight in shining armor. Here is how he does it: “The story of Hesperopithecus was certainly embarrassing to Osborn and Gregory in a personal sense, (of course, it didn’t matter what it did to Mr. Bryan, Ed.) but the sequence of discovery, announcements, testing, and refutation – all done with admirable dispatch, clarity, and honesty – shows science working at its very best. Science is a method for testing claims about the natural world, not an immutable compendium of absolute truths. The fundamentalists, by ‘knowing’ the answers before they start, and then forcing nature into the straitjacket of their discredited preconceptions, lie outside the domain of science – or of any honest intellectual inquiry. The actual story of Hesperopithecus could teach creationists a great deal about science as properly practiced if they chose to listen, rather than to scan the surface for cheap shots in the service of debate pursued for immediate advantage, rather than interest in truth.”3 Of course, Dr. Osborn’s attacks on Mr. Bryan were not “cheap shots” based on “scanned surfaces.”

I don’t believe I have ever read anything to equal that statement for sheer hypocrisy, given what happened. Dr. Osborn uses a pig’s tooth as an instrument to forge a blatant lie, and then uses it to embarrass a great American, and then when he is caught red-handed, he is suddenly the honest scientist brimming over with integrity, using “dispatch, clarity, and honesty” to confess he had made a colossal blunder. No apology was offer Mr. Bryan. Is the evolution hypothesis so unimportant that such a monumental proclamation can be made on the basis of one worn tooth? Then, Dr. Gould lectures creationists about their ” ‘knowing’ the answers before they start,” and “scanning the surface for cheap shots.” It’s enough to dehydrate you. This is the same intellect that called Dr. Henry Morris a “yahoo.” This thing, as well as Piltdown man, were used in the Scopes trial, and evolutionists expect Christians to deny their faith and embrace a notion that can’t detect the difference between truth and falsehood.

Dr. Scott Huse is a scientist. He wrote: “Years after the Scopes trial, the entire skeleton of the animal from which the initial tooth came was found. As it turns out, the tooth upon which Nebraska man was constructed belonged to an extinct pig. The ‘authorities’ who ridiculed Mr. Bryan for his supposed ignorance, created an entire race of humanity out of the tooth of a pig! Needless to say, little publicity was given to the discovered error. Surely, there is a lesson here for us concerning the reliability of so-called ‘expert testimony,’ which is so often used to manipulate and intimidate the layman.”4

Dr. Gould goes to some lengths to justify this whole affair, and make it appear that pure science was at work, but never does he give any evidence that anything was ever done by anyone to apologize to Mr. Bryan, or to make any effort to reduce the damage they had done to him, and the pain they had caused him.

Gould expresses considerable contempt for Dr. Osborn, going so far as to call him an expletive.5 But in the interest of defending evolution, he proceeds to list five episodes which he offers as justification for the errors made, and to illustrate how well science worked in correcting them. Number three in the list states that if Dr. Osborn “had been grandstanding” he would have locked up the erring tooth, and kept it secret. That won’t hold water for two reasons. First: Dr. Osborn knew the history of what happened when Dr. Eugene Dubois did exactly that same thing with Java man. (See Ian Taylor, In the Minds of Men, p. 223ff. Order this book by calling 800 628 7640). You can’t keep a dead dog hidden under the noses of people who are sniffing fo the truth, not even your own colleagues. Second: This “pompous, self-assured . . . ,” as Dr. Gould called Dr. Osborn, would have been so certain about his conclusion about the tooth that he would have challenged the world of paleontology to prove him wrong.

Creationists and evolutionists obviously have different ideas about what science is. A creationist does not consider what Dr. Osborn did as science. Dr. Osborn held a tooth in his hand, and made certain conclusions about it based upon unfounded preconceptions. Creationists would suspect that God indeed “spoke from the earth” to Dr. Osborne who ignored Him, rather than to Mr. Bryan, and that God’s wrath abides upon those who use the laboratory coat as a high priest’s robe while they preach their religious philosophy. Dr. Gould may be interested in the truth, but he never will find it while rejecting the Source of Truth. Everyone must choose between truth and evolution, for that is the basic question. Truth is perfect and never changes. “Thy word is truth.” Jesus Christ is truth (John 14:6).

I Timothy 6:20: “O Timothy, keep that which is committed to thy trust, avoiding profane and vain babblings, and oppositions of science falsely so called:.. . . .”

II Peter 3:4: “And saying, Where is the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation.”
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1. Stephen J. Gould, Bully for Brontosaurus (New York: W.W.Norton & Company, 1991), p. 434.
2. Ibid., p. 434.
3. Ibid., p. 437.
4. Scott M. Huse, The Collapse of Evolution (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Book House, pg. 98, 1983. [Available from ICR, 800 628 7640])
5. Gould, p. 439.