Our secularized culture teaches a strange history. We are told that we were once dumb brutes in an evolutionary past—no different from animals—but over the millennia we got a little smarter and came out of Africa and learned how to be farmers instead of hunters and gatherers.
Then we began building basic settlements and then civilizations and finally empires. So here we are sitting on top of the food chain because, unlike “other animals,” we have become smarter and smarter to become masters of our domain.
Okay, so this is a bunch of hogwash—man is made unique from animals and created in the image of God! But people believe these lies because this is what has been imposed upon them in secular schools, secular media, secular museums, and so on. Do you realize this alleged evolutionary history is not recorded by ancient historians in any culture? It is a modern fairly tale. It is a story that comes out of religions like secularism (including atheism and so on).
But as a result, kids of the next generation look at technology today and misunderstand it. They presume that, since we have more technology, we are “getting smarter” just like the evolutionary story says.
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After the Flood, a godly worldview dominated. As cultures deviated at Babel and down through the ages, man abandoned a godly and biblical worldview (of what had been revealed from Adam down through Noah) in favor of man’s flawed ideas (i.e., forms of humanism). As they began worshipping ancestors and false gods, their general worldview deteriorated into many various paths of paganism.
This affected science and innovation in a general pattern. It caused technology to remain nearly stagnant—with a few exceptions of course. A mind and culture with little hope has little desire to grow in the knowledge of God’s world (albeit sin-cursed and broken). Many worldviews even deter science and technology because of their very nature (e.g., animism). Animism, for example, has spirit beings that help or harm human interests in the physical world. Thus causality, which is the basis for observable and repeatable science, is meaningless because aspects of nature are controlled by the spirits rather than by a God who has promised to uphold things in a consistent fashion. (For more on world religions read World Religions and Cults Volumes 1–2.)
As Christianity began to explode in Europe prior to AD 1400, people began returning to a godly, biblical worldview leading up to the early modern period. This gave them the proper understanding of the world around them. Acknowledging that our all-knowing (Psalm 147:5) and all-powerful (e.g., Jeremiah 32:27) God upholds the world (Hebrews 1:3) and that He has promised to do so in the future until the end (e.g., Genesis 8:22) gives us the basis for doing observable and repeatable science. This presupposition is vital to make science possible.
As a result Christians began systematically studying the world and how it works (operational science). Most fields of science were developed by Bible believers—even the scientific method was developed by a young-earth creationist, Sir Francis Bacon!6
As Biblically based science erupted, technology, knowledge, inventions, and innovation built one on top of the other. This brings us to the world in which we live, built on centuries of technology.
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I humbly suggest that as the culture moves away from a biblical understanding of the world, so will they also miss out on certain scientific advancements—or at least delay them. Consider the unbiblical worldview of millions of years: researchers never thought oil could be produced quickly because they had been indoctrinated with the idea that oil production took vast ages. Yet oil can be made in 30 minutes from algae.12
Imagine if researchers in the 1960s had been thinking correctly (i.e., a younger age of the earth and thus rapid oil production at the time of the Flood) and had developed technology based on that truth. It could have revolutionized the oil industry in our current age! Instead, researchers only recently figured it out.
I want to encourage you to think biblically. The Bible makes sense of the world and makes sense of science and technology. Even so, we are in a world where the Bible comes under increasing attack, and secular scientists want to divorce science from the Bible (see “Is Science Secular?”). Science exists because the Bible is true. There is no reason to suppress this knowledge (Romans 1:18–21).
According to the Bible, man has always been brilliant—both in the past and in the present. The difference today is that we have more accumulated knowledge and technologies.
— Bodie Hodge, Answers in Genesis, Is Man Getting “Smarter”?, October, 2016
This Bodie Hodge is reminiscent of a talking dummy, who says how stupid his ventriloquist is.
Man can, indeed, be brilliant; Roger Penrose, Laurence Krauss, Stephen Hawking, Jerry Coyne, to name just a very few.
Man can also be incredibly stupid; Answers in Genesis, to name many.
I think Bodie is Ken Ham’s son-in-law. Keeping the ignorance in the family.
Wow. Just… wow. Christianity led to the Dark Ages, when European people forgot the great technological successes of the Mediterranean world, and had to re-learn them painfully in the Renaissance.
The notion that prehistorical evolution should be somehow recorded by historians is also mind-blowing. Homo Habilis, Homo Erectus, and early Homo Sapiens were far too damned busy trying to keep food on the spit and fight off dangers to invent writing… though our H, Sapiens ancestors were big on recording hunts (or perhaps prayers for hunts) on cave walls. Even much later, the people who managed things like, say, Stonehenge didn’t feel the need to write anything down about it. I suspect writing came about as a way to tally crops and whatnot in civilizations that were organized around some hierarchical structure. But once people figured out they could write about bushels of wheat, what’s to keep them about writing about other things?
So, so much cluelessness in one passage.
I think you’re on to something. IIRC, human brains got bigger when hunters were able to hunt large enough creatures for food sources. (Of course this would have taken many, many years of evolution.) So there was an increase of intelligence. Then when humans were able to stay in one place and farm, agriculture changed everything. And yes, then is when scientists believe writing began, due to the complexity of humanity’s new lifestyle.