4 minute read
A Tale of Two Fish
By Rev. Dr. Nathan R. Jastram
Darwin makes a lot of sense. I found myself thinking this several times as I read through The Origin of the Species and On the Descent of Man. You simply can’t deny that living things are like each other in many ways. Once the likenesses are seen, it doesn’t take much imagination to suggest that the reason for it is a common ancestry. It is fascinating to see supertree charts like the following, showing that all living things are like each other, and suggesting that they have been separated from their common ancestors only by time.
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The main problem with Darwin is not that he noticed the likenesses that living things share. The main problem is that he imagined that the likenesses came from having a common ancestor. He didn’t believe in having a common Creator.
The chart shown above can be a helpful method of showing the common characteristics of living forms. At the same time, it doesn’t imply that the simplest life forms evolved into more complex life forms, even over billions of years. Just as one potter makes many different pots that share characteristics and also bear his style, so God made many different life forms that share characteristics and also bear His style.
Creationists often are astounded that evolutionists continue to believe in common ancestors for all living things. After all, fossils have not yielded the expected “missing links.” What they don’t understand is that many evolutionists aren’t bothered by the “missing links.” Once you grant that likenesses must come from common ancestors, then, as Darwin explains by quoting Sir J. Lubbock, “Every species is a link between other allied forms.” 2
The likenesses are seen as undeniable proof for evolution against creation. By Darwin’s logic, likenesses disprove creation; in his words, there is an “arrangement of all the forms of life in groups subordinate to groups, all within a few great classes, which has prevailed throughout all time. This grand fact of the grouping of all organic beings under what is called the Natural System is utterly inexplicable on the theory of creation.” 3
One of the ways evolutionists fight against creationists is by parodying the Christian fish symbol. The Greek word for fish is ΙΧΘΥΣ, rendered in English letters as Ichthys or Icthus. Already in the first century, Christians understood the word as an acrostic, with each letter standing for a complete word, spelling out a confession of faith: Ιησους Χριστος Θεου Υιος Σωτηρ, “Jesus Christ, God’s Son, Savior.”
“When threatened by Romans in the first centuries after Christ, Christians used the fish to mark meeting places and tombs, or to distinguish friends from foes. According to one ancient story, when a Christian met a stranger in the road, the Christian sometimes drew one arc of the simple fish outline in the dirt. If the stranger drew the other arc, both believers knew they were in good company.” 4
The evolutionist parody of this fish was developed in the 1980s. Darwin’s name was inserted as a substitute for the acrostic confession of “Jesus Christ, God’s Son, Savior,” and feet were added to the fish to symbolize the evolution of all species from a common ancestor.
These two fish tell very different tales. According to the Darwin fish, we are “no better than chickens, redwoods, fireflies, earthworms, goldfish, algae, or infectious salmonella.’’ 5
According to the Christian fish, we were created to be like God: “God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, in our likeness,’ (Genesis 1:26); and we have a glorious future to anticipate: “Christ...will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body” (Philippians 3:20-21). It really does make a difference which you believe.
Rev. Dr. Nathan R. Jastram is a professor of Theology at Concordia University Wisconsin. He can be reached at Nathan.Jastram@cuw.edu.
1 David M. Hillis, Derrick Zwickl, and Robin Gutell,“Tree of Life,” (University of Texas, 2003), n.p. [cited 8 August 2008], online: http://www.zo.utexas.edu/faculty/antisense/ DownloadfilesToL.html. “This tree is from an analysis of small subunit rRNA sequences sampled from about 3,000 species from throughout the Tree of Life.”When the Tree of Life is seen in full size, the fuzzy outside of the circle becomes the individual names of the three thousand represented species.This chart has only four end nodes for mammals, and just a few for birds, reptiles, and fish, going clockwise from the “You are here” marker for homo sapiens. Many of the other animals are worms and beetles.
1 David M. Hillis, Derrick Zwickl, and Robin Gutell, “Tree of Life,” (University of Texas, 2003), n.p. [cited 8 August 2008], online: http://www.zo.utexas.edu/faculty/antisense/ DownloadfilesToL.html. “This tree is from an analysis of small subunit rRNA sequences sampled from about 3,000 species from throughout the Tree of Life.” When the Tree of Life is seen in full size, the fuzzy outside of the circle becomes the individual names of the three thousand represented species. This chart has only four end nodes for mammals, and just a few for birds, reptiles, and fish, going clockwise from the “You are here” marker for homo sapiens. Many of the other animals are worms and beetles. 2 Charles Darwin, The Origin of the Species, 2d ed. (Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica, 1990), 160. 3 Darwin, The Origin of the Species, 235. 4 Elesha Coffman, “Ask the Editors,” n.p. [cited 8 August 2008], online: http://www.christianitytoday.com/history/ features/ask/2001/oct26.html. 5 Survey respondent quoted in Thomas M. Lessl, “The Culture of Science and the Rhetoric of Scientism: From Francis Bacon to the Darwin Fish,” Quarterly Journal of Speech, 93 (2007): 140–141.
