What is man? Neo-Orthodoxy states "man has always been his most perplexing problem" and today, more than any other time, "what is man?" is at the center of all Scientific, Theological, and Philosophical questions. If you ask any number of people "what is man?" you are likely to get a number of answers. Some think that man is anything that has the ability to express will and purpose. Others consider man a depraved animal, a thinking animal, an animal that has evolved from a lower state to where he is now. Science offers this view of man - the evolved being - and in so doing lumps us in with the other animals, primates, no more and no less. A hairless monkey, just another creature.

John Calvin said "It is certain that man never achieves a clear knowledge of himself unless he has first looked upon God's face; and then descends from contemplating Him to scrutinize himself.."

The classical historic view of man was that he is dualistic, composed of two parts - body and soul. The body was considered to be evil, the house or prison of the soul, and the soul was considered to be sinless and eternal. The medieval Church viewed man as dualistic, body and soul, and believed that man was created in the image of God. Adam, the first man, introduced sin into the human race, and caused himself to lose that image of God. Man could return to a proper state of righteousness with God of his own free will, for the Fall of Adam was not fatal, but only wounded the human race. The Protestant Reformers modified the theological view of man somewhat. Martin Luther believed that the image of God extended to the whole of the creation of man, and believed that salvation through Christ would restore this image to the created being.

Colossians 3:9-10 "Lie not one to another, seeing that ye have put off the old man with his deeds;  And have put on the new man, which is renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him"

John Calvin, unlike Luther, did not believe that man lost the image of God as a result of the Fall of Adam. He believed that that image was still there, mauled or mutilated, but still there in all men. One thing is constant between all the different "brands" of Christianity in the world today, whether it be Catholic or Protestant, and that is that theology universally recognizes that man was created in the image of God. Man may be fallen into sin because of Adam, and man may or may not be mortally wounded by this fall. Man may come to God of his own free will, or man may be elected to salvation. Man may be eternally secure in that salvation, or man may freely fall out of salvation by a random act of sin. Theology often argues on all the external points of anthropology, but one thing it never argues on: man was made in the image of God.

Why is this so important? Because, as history has proved time and time again, perceptions do, indeed, matter. When Hitler took over leadership of Germany he started a propaganda initiative telling the people that the Jews were sub-human, non-people, less than man, animals - just animals. He told the people that the Jews were responsible for the economic decline of Germany as a nation, that they were responsible for the high jobless rate, that they were responsible for disease. He told the people this over and over again, and after a while the people began to accept what he was saying. After all, someone was to blame for good German people not being gainfully employed. You can say, all you want to, that the German people never knew about the concentration camps. You can say that, delude yourself if you will, but these camps were known. You can't get within 15 miles of a paper mill and not smell the stink. There is no way you can get within 15 miles of a concentration camp and not know that people are being killed, murdered, and burned. They knew.

People have asked over and over again how one little pompous clerk could deceive a whole nation, but here's your answer. If you devalue a human life, if you cheapen it, if you rationalize that this life is only an animal, a lower form, then you free up your conscience to slaughter it. After all, it's not in the image of God, it's animal, evolved. Kill it, burn it, who cares? The same thing happened in America, to our terrible shame, during our era of slavery. Blacks were dragged from their homes, cast into the holds of ships chest to chest - and if a few died in the voyage, who cared? After all, people of color aren't human - they're animal. They weren't created in the image of God, they're only monkeys that have lost their fur. So imprison them, make them work for nothing but food and cast off clothing, rape their female animals. After all, they're not in the image of God, are they?

Genesis 1:27  "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them."

Genesis 9:6  "Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made he man."

No need to uphold the death penalty for murderers. Let's keep them in prison, justify holding them for a full lifetime. So what if that man chained another person of color to the back of a pickup truck and drug him to pieces on a country road. So what if the police pump over 40 bullets into an innocent black because they "thought" he had done something wrong. That's not excessive force, because he's only an animal - not in the image of God.

Genesis 25:23  "And the LORD said unto her, Two nations are in thy womb, and two manner of people shall be separated from thy bowels; and the one people shall be stronger than the other people; and the elder shall serve the younger."

Judges 13:5  "For, lo, thou shalt conceive, and bear a son; and no razor shall come on his head: for the child shall be a Nazarite unto God from the womb: and he shall begin to deliver Israel out of the hand of the Philistines."

Psalms 22:10  "I was cast upon thee from the womb: thou art my God from my mother's belly."

Psalms 127:3  "Lo, children are an heritage of the LORD: and the fruit of the womb is his reward."

Jeremiah 1:5  "Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations."

That which is in your womb, it's not human. Certainly not in the image of God. Never mind that John the Baptist leapt in his mother's womb when she met Mary, Jesus' mother. That thing in your stomach is only a growth, a mistake, an error in judgment. Not in the image of God, but an unformed animal - really, lower than an animal. Scrape it out, get on with you life. Animals deserve no tears, because they're not in the image of God.

I tell you this plainly, life is cheapened today because we have allowed non-Biblical thought to creep into our concept of man. The Bible, if you'll notice, never makes a distinction on race when it says that man was created in the image of God. Most people automatically assume Adam and Eve were white people - and they well may have been - but I know for fact that the Savior, Jesus Christ, was a Jew and dark skinned as all proper Jews are. When you look in Scripture I defy you to find any reference that a certain color of person is not made in the image of God. Yes, God had some races of people entirely destroyed. God demanded that Israel drive out the Canaanites when they entered the land:

Numbers 33:53  "And ye shall dispossess the inhabitants of the land, and dwell therein: for I have given you the land to possess it."

And warned them that, if they refused to do this, they would later regret it. Driving out the people had nothing to do with the color of their skin, but with the fact that these people were literally wallowing in depravity. The Canaanites often murdered their own children in the fires of false gods, and skinned children alive to use their skin as leather for drums. These people were sick, and this is why they were driven out. Not because they were of a different race, or because they were not in the image of God.

The fact is, all that humanism has done has devalued human life. When man was considered to be in the image of God, there were certain things that you could and could not do. Life was precious, sacred, and man was special because he was in that image. Yes, the Adamic fall caused us to be sinful. But unlike what humanism teaches, we were not one with the animals. We were above the animals, and only the most criminal of people would treat someone as less than human.

Genesis 2:19  "And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof."

Adam named the animals. An animal didn't name the animals, but a man did this, a man created in the image of God. Animals were placed on the earth for man to rule, eat, and enjoy - not for man to be lumped in with them. Animals were never made in the image of God. But man - man alone - he was formed in that image.

Psalms 139:7-14 "Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence?  If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there.  If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea;  Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.  If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me; even the night shall be light about me.  Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee; but the night shineth as the day: the darkness and the light are both alike to thee. For thou hast possessed my reins: thou hast covered me in my mother's womb.  I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvelous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well."

The theory of evolution is humanism's best and brightest child. It teaches that man, rather than created in the image of God, was created in the image of animal. Evolution started as an atheistic concept: All life today has developed from a single simple cell through natural processes over billions of years. God was not involved in the process. So convincing are the arguments that some within religion's reach have proposed a method of Theistic Evolution, evolution guided by the hand of God. After all, He didn't create the Heavens and the earth in six literal days, did He?

Evolutionists use several means to prove their theories. They use "comparative anatomy", comparing man to the apes, and try to show how man looks like a hairless ape. Since we look about the same (?), we must certainly be the same. Yet looks can be deceiving. Things often look similar in nature, and yet are still radically different. I can take an envelope full of headache powder and swallow it, and that medicine will ease my misery. Or I can take an envelope of the same size filled with cocaine, swallow it, and die a drug induced death. I can fry up some mushrooms to go with my steak and have a fine meal. Or I can go outside and get mushrooms out of the yard that look exactly like the safe mushrooms, eat them, and have anything from hallucinations to death. I can play with a cute tree frog and have a blessing that God made such a wonderful creature for my enjoyment. Or I can play with the bright red Amazonian tree frog, commonly called the "Poison Arrow Frog", and die a painful death in a matter of hours. The same is not always the same.

Evolutionists also study the embryo's of human babies and note that it goes through a type of evolution as it grows in its mother's womb. At one stage the embryo has something that looks like gills. "Obviously, this is a throw back to when man was an animal in the ocean". What about the child that is born with a third nipple? Is this a throwback to when he was a cow? The evolutionists failed to realize that this so called gill was no more than folds of skin on the developing child. These folds have no ability to process oxygen. To say that these are gills is the same as saying a Ford and a Rolls Royce are the same because they each have four tires.

Evolutionists have enlisted geologists, who in turn find fossils that prove evolutionary thought. Evolutionists used to say that man lived millions of years after the dinosaur became extinct - at least, they did until the fossilized footprint of a human was found next to a fossilized footprint of a dinosaur in Paluxy, Texas. Evolutionary geologists use carbon dating methods that are shaky at best, often outright ludicrous at worst. When a living mollusk is proved to be thousands of years old, it's time to rethink these dating methods.

There are seven basic assumptions made by evolutionists. The first six assumptions are usually not made publicly, with the seventh being most published. First, there is the assumption than non-living things gave rise or led to living material - that there was some sort of spontaneous generation of life. Once this spontaneous generation occurred, it was strong enough to survive and proceed down the evolutionary chain. Second, the assumption is made that this spontaneous generation only happened once. This started the chain reaction. Life started from a single point, then spread to different species. Third, the assumption is made that all life forms - be they virus, bacteria, plant, or animal - are all somehow interrelated. Fourth, they assume that the protozoa gave rise or evolved into the metazoan. Fifth, they assume that all of the various invertebrates are interrelated, and, Sixth, that these invertebrates gave rise to the vertebrates. The Seventh and most public assumption made is that, within the realm of evolution, fish evolved to amphibians, amphibians to reptiles, reptiles to birds, birds to mammals, and all of these animals are of common ancestral stock.

Now, of these seven basic assumptions of evolution, not one - again, NOT ONE is subject to verification. These assumptions all bear a striking resemblance to a creed of faith, and well they should. For evolution is not, again - it is not - verifiable using proven scientific methods. Therefore evolution is a faith, just as Christianity and Judaism are faiths, and it's time we started recognizing it as such. To call it science is to malign science and scientists everywhere.

There are several difficulties when you consider evolution as a scientific fact and not the faith that it is:

Law of Thermodynamics: Evolution repudiates the first two laws of thermodynamics. The first law states, "Matter or energy cannot be created or destroyed but it can be changed from one form to another". In other words, nothing can only come out of nothing. Evolution teaches that something came out of nothing, that inanimate materials suddenly and naturally spontaneously generated life. Science itself repudiates such claims. The second law states, "Energy tends toward entropy. In all energy transformations, some energy is transferred into non-reversable heat energy. Thus, energy tends toward a state of equilibrium when it is no longer available to do work. In all organic structures within a closed unit, the tendency is toward increasing disorder and randomness." Evolutionary thought teaches that, as time passes, the forces of evolution grow in order and progression. Things move from the simple to the complex. Though the second law of Thermodynamics teaches that the universe is slowly winding down, evolutionists would have us believe that the clock is winding itself.

Genetics, Mendel, and Mutations: Evolutionists claim that "natural selection" causes good genetic mutations to be preserved, and not just be preserved but to grow. These mutations cause lower forms of life to naturally evolve into higher forms of life. Yet Gregory Mendel, the father of genetic science, showed that the laws of heredity prove that organisms can only re-shuffle characteristics already present in their genes. There is no proof that genes can suddenly gain new characteristics. In fact, the history of scientific research has shown that genetic mutations are, almost without exception, harmful and degenerative, rather than helpful and higher evolving. The probability of something coming from nothing is exactly zero, scientifically speaking. Even if man were able to take dirt and make a man, then the only way you could duplicate God's act in the Garden would be for to first make your own dirt out of nothing.

So evolution is a faith, just as Christianity is a faith. Not science, but faith. And Christianity has several historical proofs (see part 1 of this study) that give credence to Christ and His claims, whereas evolution only has seven assumptions and no scientific proofs. On top of this, evolution cheapens man into an animal, whereas Christianity raises man to the image of God. Me, I prefer the higher plane of existence.

Genesis 1:1  "In the beginning God ..."

Scripture starts out, in it's first four words, to repudiate atheism, agnosticism, evolution, paganism, polytheism, dualism, and fatalism. It makes it very simple: "In the beginning God". The creation of earth and mankind was not thousands or millions of years long:

Genesis 1:5  "And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day."

In fact, the Scripture makes it plain that "the evening and the morning were the first day". All things were supernaturally created and arranged, with each stage of creation being in one earth solar 24 hour day. You can take the word "day" and say it was millions of years long, but if you do you are adding that yourself. God made it plain. Creation was in a matter of days by a supernatural God.

John 2:9-10 "When the ruler of the feast had tasted the water that was made wine, and knew not whence it was: (but the servants which drew the water knew;) the governor of the feast called the bridegroom,  And saith unto him, Every man at the beginning doth set forth good wine; and when men have well drunk, then that which is worse: but thou hast kept the good wine until now."

When Jesus turned the water into wine, His first miracle, He did this is a matter of moments. Imagine this: water was molecularly changed to where is was, in fact, an alcoholic beverage. No man pulled grapes off of the vine, no man stomped them then put the juice in wooden caskets to age and ferment. No, it was instantaneous - a matter of moments. If Jesus demonstrated this, then why should be have problems believing that a supernatural God created the world and all that is in it in just the same way. Quickly, instantaneous. Visitors to the Grand Canyon assume that it took millions of years for the water to cut it's way through the rock. Yet water fermented into wine in a minute. Could not God have created the Grand Canyon at it's present depth, instantaneously, without the need of millions of years?

Evolution teaches that life spontaneously generated, naturally, without outside force. Why is this so much easier to believe than the fact that a supernatural outside Force created the inanimate, then gave life to it and called it Man?

Genesis 2:7  "And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul."

Someone who is Life Himself breathed life into man, and man became alive. God chose to make both animal life and man on the same sixth day. Both man and animal have some things in common: both were formed from the inanimate by God, but only one had life breathed into him by God. Both were given mates and the ability to reproduce. Yet man was given the image of God and animals weren't. Man was allowed to name the animals (Genesis 2.20) to show his superiority in creation over them. When God made animals, He made them in the image of the earth:

Genesis 1:24  "And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so."

The "earth" brought forth the animals, creeping or crawling, slithering or jumping, running or standing still. The earth brought animals forth, but God brought man forth. The creation of animals seem nearly to be a type of mass production, whereas the creation of man was something that required specific attention and time.

Genesis 1:26-27 "And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them."

The faith that we who are in Him follow, Christianity, believes that man is distinctly created by God in the image of God. This perception of man leads us to believe certain things, the foremost of these things being that man is of great value. Every man, not just the white or black man. Every person, whether female or male. Every child, whether born or still in the warmth of its mother's womb. All humans have value:

Matthew 5:43-47 "Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbor, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust. For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same?  And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others? do not even the publicans so?"

Here then is the distinct differences between the faiths of evolution and Christianity. Christianity sees all people to be of value - Christ died for all mankind, and wants all to come to Him for salvation. Evolution sees man as a higher form of animal, a primate, destined to die after a certain time span and become fertilizer. Christianity teaches love for all who possess the spark of human life, whether your enemy or your friend, because they, too, were created in the image of God. Evolution teaches observation of the human animal to see what great "spontaneous generation" it will make next. Christianity teaches that the life in the womb is important, but evolution uses scraped out, aborted and murdered life for experimentation to study in a vain effort to justify its creed. Our children have been taught that life is animal, evolved, and have responded by killing one another in school, by rutting with one another like rabbits, and by ingesting drugs to "see what it's like". Our courts have outlawed the teaching of Biblical thought and the sanctity of life, life created in God's image, in order to appease evolutionary faith. What has it gotten us?

Hosea 8:7  "For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind: it hath no stalk: the bud shall yield no meal: if so be it yield, the strangers shall swallow it up."

Sowing the wind, the nothingness of evolution, has harmed our society by cheapening life. They have sown the wind, but they'll reap the whirlwind of destruction. Will you be the next parent grieving for your murdered child? Will you be the next husband, bitterly weeping because someone murdered your wife for about three dollars? Not too long ago a precious older woman who sat next to me at Church was robbed. Someone broke into the house of this precious Saint, threw her to the floor, pulled her nightclothes over her head and then raped her. He then kicked her so hard in the head that her dentures were driven through the roof of her mouth. You see, it was obvious this person, whoever he was, thought that human life was only animal, evolutionary, cheap. He only got a few dollars from this woman, shamed her, then killed her. He will burn in hell one day, just as will all those who have spread the disease of non-Biblical thought throughout our society, unless ...

John 3:16-20 "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.  For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved. He that believeth on him is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. For every one that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved."

Unless he repents. Unless he accepts Jesus Christ as his Savior, and is transformed into the Kingdom of God. That's the only hope for you, and for our society. Sodom and Gomorra cheapened life until it was utterly destroyed by God. The Canaanites killed their children, just as abortionists are doing today, then played with the bodies just as fetal researchers want to do. After all, it's only animal, isn't it? Keep playing that tune, and see how it plays when you stand before the Judge, the Creator of all.

Repent, for judgment is at hand!