Homo Adorans and the Big Bang
“All those who hate me love death.” Proverbs 8:36
Ralph Smith notes that Western culture, particularly the United States, is suffering from a clash of two worldviews, two competing narratives that “vie for the right to define our world.”
A review of the biblical story already sets the biblical worldview against much modern thought. The theory of evolution, of course, contrasts sharply with the miraculous creation of the world in six days and man’s special creation as the image of God. The story of Adam and Eve as the original family stands in stark, if implicit opposition to all forms of racism, feminists’ denial of different sexual roles for male and female, homosexuality, and polygamy, to name only a few areas in which contemporary thought clashes with the Christian worldview.
Theories of man that see the basic problems of human life as psychological or sociological are undermined by the truth that man is homo adorans by nature, and that all of his problems trace their source to Adam’s sin. Denying that the human body is good or asserting that our problems arise from our animal past also contradict the biblical narrative. The simple story of the creation of the world and man’s place in it has profound implications for the way life should be lived. These unfold as the biblical story continues. To build our worldview in terms of the Bible’s teaching requires us to stand firm against most of the thinking of our day, especially in the academy, where opposition to Christianity is deep and widespread.
The story of the Big Bang—in the West the “scientific” alternative to the biblical story, which posits initial conditions, an explosion, and a process of development, all enshrouded in unfathomable mystery—tells of a world of impersonal forces that by accident or by some deterministic formula produced the world we live in today. There is no special meaning in the big-bang world, no special purpose, and no explanation for the way things are, including all the misery and suffering of the world. What we see is what is, nothing more and nothing less. Why should men choose this view? Because of the inescapable demand of science? Hardly. Men choose to anchor their souls in the sands of nothingness and despair rather than turn to the God who created them. They are just what the book of Genesis and the rest of the Bible shows us all to be, sinners who prefer their own false and empty hopes to the divine promise of eternal life through faith in the God of all grace.
The biblical story of creation, fall, and redemption in a story that exalts man above the animal kingdom and gives him the astonishing quality of godlikeness. Personhood makes evil possible, for persons have the power to choose, and Adam chose to pervert the covenant relationship. Because of man’s sin, the history of the world includes profound tragedy, but the story of God’s grace in redemption is the story of victory over tragedy. It is indeed the greatest story ever told. It is the story of the Son of God who became a man and died for our sins in order to save us from sin and the devil and remake us into a new covenant in a new creation. The biblical story finds its climax in the story of the incarnation of God and the saving work of Jesus, which ushers in a new world, the kingdom of God.
Ralph Allan Smith, Trinity and Reality: An Introduction to the Christian Faith, pp. 108-110.
