Evolution or Creation? (#12 in a series)

I will be blunt.  Creationism is a fact in the Biblical Worldview.  There is no room for debate on this.

In the beginning, God created...

And when it comes to the pets-in-heaven question, no mechanism in evolution is capable of assuring that your pet gets into heaven. Because—

In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth.

Do you see the problem? The Bible indicates two distinct direct objects of creation, (a) heavens, and (b) earth, moreover, heavens is plural.  Strictly speaking, if it is true that the heavens are distinct from the earth, and if evolution were also true, then heaven and earth would have necessarily evolved separately.  Of course, the evolutionists believe that earth evolved within or inside the astronomical heavens-construct, so for them, that solves the problem with nothing more to discuss: the phrase "heavens and earth" is used to indicate the whole universe, and that is that.

The evolutionists are half-right; heavens and earth can indicate the whole universe. But if God's throne is in a spirit-realm heaven and our pets are in a physical-realm earth, then we have to go further if we are going to make sense of this spiritual/physical interface.

In #5 of this series, we used Paul's letter to the Corinthians to identify three heavens, (a) one with God's throne room, (b) an interstellar/outer-space heaven, and (c) our atmospheric sky. In the footnotes today, I've added some Old Testament references which correspond with that view.¹ The usual Hebrew word for heavens, however, and the one used in Genesis 1:1 is shamayim, a plural form meaning heights and/or elevations. This is good news for those who hope to see their pets in the afterlife because historically, Earth's geographical 'high places' and 'heights' have a connection to the unseen spiritual realm. Moses had his "portal experience" connecting with the supernatural on Mount Sinai, Exodus 33:22; and Jesus has his on the Mount of Transfiguration, Mark 9:2-3.  Additionally, the earliest written histories of any culture record traditions of 'high places' as the location for communication between mortal man and immortal God or gods.

Unfortunately, my next-best examples for "heights" being a place where the physical meets with the spiritual describe events on "the dark side." Yes, there are plenty of other "light side" examples—
   The LORD has established His throne in the heavens. Psalm 103:19
   Who is like the LORD our God, the One who sits enthroned on high? Psalm 113:5
   He sits enthroned above the circle of the earth. Isaiah 40:22
—but unless you are very new to Christianity and can approach these verses without preconceived ideas, these examples tend to get varnished over (or perhaps clouded?) by the notion that the psalmist or prophet was "just praising God," (more on that later). It is easy to be blind to the idea that the psalmist was engaging in intimate contact with his Creator. 

But the dark side examples make this natural-to-supernatural communication plain.
♦ The history of the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11 has the people plotting to build themselves a city with a high tower that communicates with the heavens. Having rejected the true God's directive to replenish the earth, they banned together to contact the small-g gods and make pacts with fallen angels.
♦ In Numbers 33:52, before the Israelites ever entered into the Promised Land, Moses had instructed them to tear down all the high places. The Canaanites had a pantheon of over two dozen lower-case-g gods that were worshiped at open-air altars on hills and high knolls outside their towns. The Canaanites were trying to connect with evil spiritual entities for 'blessings' on their fertility, good weather, abundant food crops, and so forth, even to the point of appeasing them with child sacrifice. These gods required perverse sacrifices that they knew would be an affront to Yahweh-God.
♦ In Luke 10:18, Jesus tells 72 of his followers that He saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven. This is God breaking off access and communication that Satan had in the heights of heaven. 

What these have in common is the the making or breaking of communication between the physical and the spiritual. And it is this last example with Satan that is the only place evolution is hinted at in scripture.

Isaiah 14:13-14 has Satan saying, "I will ascend to heaven; I will raise my throne above the stars of God, And I will sit on the mount of assembly In the recesses of the north. I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will make myself like the Most High." He is a created being who believes he can evolve to the level of the Most High. 
Cross-referenced to the New Testament, there is 2 Thessalonians 2:4, who opposes and exalts himself against every so-called god or object of worship, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, proclaiming himself to be God.  This is Satan attempting to progress, essentially evolve, to a level above his created station. This is evolution, and it does not work.


It is the Creation account, not evolution, that provides your pet with a soul that can connect the natural with the supernatural.  Evolution leads only to death. It is evident in the core of Darwin's theory that it required death to function, and Carl Sagan, pop-scientist of the 1990s said, "the secrets of evolution are time and death."²  Evolutionary theory requires billions of years of mutations and false starts ending in death; the idea that God might have used evolution to create is insulting and anathema.  Jehovah God, Life Himself, would never create by death. He resurrects from death, but He does not use death to create. Death is an enemy, for cryin' out loud!

Praise and Worship — Have these terms become religious jargon that obscures?  (And, yes, I am still on-topic.) Five paragraphs ago, I said that people who are 'churched' can become so familiar with using words such as praise and worship in the context of an arranged religious practice, such as a song service, that a blindness can set in. Praise and Worship are actually two forms of communication between the physical and the spiritual realms, and this is significant because a better understanding can give us insight to our pets-in-heaven question. I will develop this more deeply in a future post, but for now I am asking you to accept that praise happens in the body and can be guided by one's soul, while worship functions in the spirit, but can also be guided by the soul. In regard to evolution, we have only a single focus:  Can the evolution mechanism evolve the capacity for praise, which requires a soul as well as a body?  Or the capacity to worship, which requires spirit?

The short answer is no.  Darwinian evolution applies only to the physical.  You can find 'evolution of the soul' articles, but for the most part they devolve into psychobabble.  Evolution cannot account for developing a spirit of life without acknowledging God, who is Life. And once it is acknowledged that God is the source of the spirit of life, there is no need for evolution anymore. Those who want to believe in evolution are limited to a theory of biological life with physicality, not a Creator who has made provision for pets in heaven.
 



🚫 God did not Choose Cloning as His Go-To Method for a Sustainable Earth.
He could have; but He did not. Why does this matter? Because we are looking for ways to support the premise that our uniquely individual pet, personality quirks and all, has the capacity to make the jump from this mortal earth-life to a heavenly one.

Trying to recreate an exact copy with no mutation is practically the opposite of evolution, which would require change, but I'm tacking this on here because it is too short for a separate post. God choose male/female reproduction to fill the Earth. He wanted a controlled mixing of the DNA to produce unique individuals after their own kinds!  Our individuality is a part of His plan. No one person can ever replace another as a clone could. Everyone has a distinctive and irreplaceable position in God's creation.

This is true for our pets as well. They are individual procreations. It would flow against God's creativity to make a duplicate copy³ of our pets for heaven. Original artwork is always of a higher value than the copies, and heaven should have the best.

Beginning at conception, the one-of-a-kind animal embryo is capable of containing the spirit of life⁴ in a physical body designed for life on earth.  This is procreation of an individual being because God's Creation ended on the Sixth Day and was judged 'very good.' Genesis 1:24 tells us that these physical bodies are produced from elements found in soil, and yet they are animated with life.  Obviously, there is more to our pets than elements extracted and reassembled from the dirt, and we will explore that aspect in a future post.

To summarize today's post: The evolution model does not address the formation of a spiritual realm.   Only the Creation model has a Creator who cares and provides for His creation. He created both the heavens and the Earth to be inhabited by uniquely individualized beings. He is the God of Life in both realms. These facts, although only a tiny sliver of a much larger issue, are consistent with a Creator who would want life begun on Earth to continue in Heaven.

This blog will never have a single slam-dunk answer about pets being in heaven, but by adding a few bricks at a time, we can build a sizable edifice of support for them being there.





Footnotes

¹ Old Testament view of the heavens — Psalms 8:8 the birds in the sky, Jeremiah 8:2 sun and the moon and all the stars of the heavens, Psalm 115:16 The highest heavens belong to the LORD, but the earth he has given to mankind.

² C. Sagan, Cosmos Part 2: One Voice in the Cosmic Fugue, PBS series

³ The Bible is largely silent on cloning. When we do get a few nuggets on manipulated genetics, they show up as either (a) a curse, referencing the seed of Satan, (b) a forbidden act such as the breeding of Nephilim, or (c) at least involving scheming and trickery, such as when Jacob 'put something in the water' (Genesis 30) to boost the fertility of his flocks. Amongst all the stranger-than-fiction cyborg technology and transhumanism that one hears about these days, cloning is often a men-trying-to-be-gods pursuit.  Even though the Bible does not say a lot, it says enough for us to know that cloning is a counterfeit of God's design, and therefore it would be out-of-character for God to give us a cloned reproduction of our pet for our heavenly mansion. 

⁴ The the breath of the spirit of life or the breath of life of ALL flesh is mentioned three times in Genesis, in 6:17, in 7:15, and finally in 7:21-22,  All flesh that moved on the earth perished, birds and cattle and beasts and every swarming thing that swarms upon the earth, and all mankind; of all that was on the dry land, all in whose nostrils was the breath of the spirit of life.  All these animals are capable of containing the spirit of life. This lends support to the premise that these kinds of animals could live in a spiritual dimension as well as the physical one.