Are you just a “monkey’s uncle”?

If I were a monkey's uncle, I would imagine that I would have a brother who gave birth to a monkey. This seems like what a Creationist might think evolution works like, but hopefully AiG has a better grasp on science than that. I was laying in bed last night, all excited for the newsletter they would send me today, and it does not fail to disappoint.

A: Perhaps the most bitter pill to swallow for any Christian who attempts to “make peace” with Darwin is the presumed ape ancestry of man. Even many Christians who uncritically accept evolution as “God’s way of creating” try to somehow elevate the origin of man, or at least his soul, above that of the beasts.

Why do Creationists have an obsession with Charles Darwin? He was indeed a smart man and contributed much to the science of biology, but we have come much farther in the last 150 years than he probably ever even dreamed. I think they like to pick on him because he provides a nice punching bag that can never retaliate (since he's dead). Or maybe he looks just a little bit too much like the image of Yahweh they have in their heads. In any case, it's funny that they accuse some Christians of "uncritically accepting" evolution, because that's EXACTLY how Creationism works. The easiest way to be a Creationist is to ignore all of modern science, claim that radioactive dating doesn't work, quote a few frauds that nobody bought, claim that we don't have any transitional fossils, and quote Genesis like it's the unadulterated literal truth. People like myself who decided that they could think and look at the facts for themselves with an open mind came to realize that by deciding so, it's inevitable that you stop being a Creationist. But this is too much for some people - thinking openly like that could almost be seen as blasphemy by some believers.

God tells us that on the same day He made all animals that walk on the earth (the sixth day), He created man separately in His own image with the intent that man would have dominion over every other living thing on earth (Genesis 1:26–28). From this it is clear that there is no animal that is man’s equal, and certainly none his ancestor.

Did he have dominion over crocodiles, elephants, rhinos, and... oh yeah... dinosaurs? I'm sure he would have liked to have think so. One can only wonder what would have happened the first time Adam tried to steal food right out from under a T-rex's nose. This passage certainly makes more sense when you understand that it was written long after dinosaurs died out and the writers had no idea that they ever existed and assumed that man could just dominate everything. Those pompous goat-herders.

Thus, when God paraded the animals by Adam for him to name, He observed that “for Adam there was not found an help meet for him” (Genesis 2:20). Jesus confirmed this uniqueness of men and women when He declared that marriage is to be between a man and a woman because “from the beginning of the creation God made them male and female” (Mark 10:6). This leaves no room for prehumans or for billions of years of cosmic evolution prior to man’s appearance on the earth. Adam chose the very name “Eve” for his wife because he recognized that she would be “the mother of all living” (Genesis 3:20).

Well, according to Genesis 2:18, in the beginning God just created them male - as it pertains to Adam. Because he (or they in 1:26?) forgot to make a pal for him in the beginning, God conjured up a woman from one of his ribs and a bit of special sauce he had laying around from when he forgot to use all of it on his most absent-minded work, the platypus. It is kind of interesting that God paraded all of the animals to Adam, considering that there are billions of different species (or hundreds/thousands/whatever of however you define "kinds"), many of which wouldn't have been able to come to him. What about polar bears, kangaroos, and koalas? Each of these would have been on different continents, not to mention ALL of marine life. Though I would like to personally thank him for the name of "llama." That's always a fun one to spell, and it even looks like the animal itself. How clever!

The apostle Paul stated clearly that man is not an animal: “All flesh is not the same flesh: but there is one kind of flesh of men, another flesh of beasts, another of fishes, and another of birds” (1 Corinthians 15:39).

This is exactly why people at AiG don't understand science. It's because they give a man who lived in 1st century Rome (supposedly as a pharisee) a soapbox for talking about science and it just doesn't make sense. Do all beasts have the same flesh? Are there only four fleshes? In context, Paul was talking about how flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God. Which is interesting, because didn't Elijah ascend into heaven in his physical body?

Actually, never mind that question, it's not important. What we godless heathens should realize is that there are really two ways of acquiring knowledge about our universe. One is with sound reason, evidence, testing, and peer review, and the other is with one hand on the bible while the other reaches toward the sky. Or, if our hands aren't in that position, they'll probably be in our ears, chanting bible verses until the evidence goes away. But that's OK, because then you'll know that, once you can forget the science that challenges your worldview, you can go back to believing in Creationism, having thoroughly investigated the evidence while not relying on supernatural presuppositions that only find their basis in one book in all of history. Right?