The Other Questions Answered
The answer to how we got here determines the answers to the other questions: Why are we here? Where are we going? Do our lives have meaning?
BY ITS very nature, evolution proceeds willy-nilly, without purpose or goals. If we arrived through evolution, we are here for no reason, we are going nowhere, and our lives are meaningless.
Fortunately for us, evolution is not true. It never got started, much less reached down to us. The scientific evidence is unanimous: A living cell packed with thousands of purposeful functions could not originate by undirected, accidental changes. When reason prevails over evolutionists’ desires, this is obvious. As Francis Crick said: “An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle.” And as Professor H. S. Lipson, Fellow of the Royal Society, reluctantly said: “We must go further than this and admit that the only acceptable explanation is creation.”
Such honesty by evolutionists, however, is rarely expressed. The usual approach is dogmatism, such as: ‘Evolution is a fact. It no longer needs to be proved. No competent scientist doubts it. All educated people believe it. Only the ignorant reject it.’ On a NOVA telecast, Stephen Jay Gould said that science “often reflects the largely unconscious biases of those who do the work.” Two minutes later he demonstrated his own bias when he said that Darwin did more than any other human to “establish the fact of evolution.”
Darwin believed that life was “originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one.” His belief in evolution by inherited gradual changes is collapsing. The fossil record he relied on for proof has failed him. Gould himself has abandoned all these positions of Darwin because they are not founded on fact. To rescue the theory, Gould has switched from slow changes to big fast jumps to get from one form of life to another. There is no basis for this. It is an arbitrary maneuver to eliminate the need for the intermediate fossils that are lacking in the fossil record. Not only is evolution unproved by science, it is disproved by science.
So it is as a last resort that evolutionary writings are peppered with intimidating propaganda. By such tactics evolutionists herd millions of brainwashed converts into their revivalist tent. Lacking factual support, they resort to the same tyranny of authority used by desperate Pharisees against Jesus:
“The Temple police who had been sent to arrest him returned to the chief priests and Pharisees. ‘Why didn’t you bring him in?’ they demanded. ‘He says such wonderful things!’ they mumbled. ‘We’ve never heard anything like it.’ ‘So you also have been led astray?’ the Pharisees mocked. ‘Is there a single one of us Jewish rulers or Pharisees who believes he is the Messiah?’” When one of their own number protested, they derided him: “Are you a wretched Galilean too?” (John 7:45-52, The Living Bible) Similarly, evolutionists today brand as incompetent any scientists that reject evolution and heap vitriolic ridicule upon them if they dare to espouse creation!
Creation is far more scientific than is evolution. It accounts for the purposeful design we see in heaven and on earth, in plants and animals, in our own bodies and in our amazing brain. The information content we see in DNA certainly testifies to an awesome intelligence at work. Einstein never liked the God of Christendom’s religions, but he was profoundly impressed by “the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection.”
Creation also opens the way to answer the ultimate questions.
Why Are We Here?
Jehovah told why when he created the first pair of human creatures. “Let us make man in our image,” God said to the Logos (who later came to earth as Jesus), “according to our likeness, and let them have in subjection the fish of the sea and the flying creatures of the heavens and the domestic animals and all the earth and every moving animal that is moving upon the earth.” God also made a garden in Eden and “proceeded to take the man and settle him in the garden of Eden to cultivate it and to take care of it.” Moreover, he gave a mandate to the first pair in Eden to “be fruitful and become many and fill the earth.”—Genesis 1:26, 28; 2:8, 15.
As offspring of Adam and Eve, we are here to populate the earth, to care for and cultivate it, and to exercise a loving stewardship over its plants and animals. We are equipped by God to do this by being made in his likeness—not in any physical appearance but in being endowed with certain attributes of his, such as love, wisdom, power, justice, and a desire to do purposeful work and feel achievement. It is being in the likeness of God in this way that sets us apart from all animals and causes us to ponder the ultimate questions that never occur to any other earthly creatures.
Atheists, however, contend that we are not created in God’s image but that we created God in our image. Not so. The gods created by men are in the image and likeness of sun, moon, stars, trees, thunders, lightnings, mountains, animals, rulers, money, sex, belly, plus whatever else man is pleased to deify. (Romans 1:25; Philippians 3:19) Man’s image does not reflect God’s attributes in balance. Rather, in our fallen state we are urged to return to his image. (Colossians 3:9, 10) Evolution does not explain the tremendous gulf between man and animal, nor would it produce or preserve as useful our inner urge to raise the ultimate questions. Being in God’s image and likeness does explain this.
Where Are We Going?
No animal raises this question. Animals have no conscious sense of time, past or future. But man does. God made this additional gulf between man and animal, as stated in Ecclesiastes 3:11: “He has also set eternity in the hearts of men.” (New International Version) Man is therefore aware of the millenniums past and knows that future time will continue on. It concerns him. What will happen to him when he dies? Does he have an immortal soul that will live on? Will he go to heaven’s bliss or to hell’s torment or to the grave’s oblivion? Or will he perhaps transmigrate to another life?
He certainly does not wish to face the thought of his extinction. It is devastating for him to think that time will continue on endlessly without him, the earth and people continuing on without him, while he is consigned to eternal oblivion. To avoid this unacceptable thought, he clings to the idea of an immortal soul—a doctrine taught nowhere in the Bible.—Ezekiel 18:4.
The Bible does say that when man dies he returns to the dust. “In that day his thoughts do perish.” He is “conscious of nothing at all.” (Psalm 146:4; Ecclesiastes 9:5) But there is to be a resurrection for billions: “The hour is coming in which all those in the memorial tombs will hear his voice and come out.” Those who then love God and neighbor will hear the words of the King Jesus Christ: “Inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the founding of the world.”—John 5:28, 29; Matthew 25:34.
From the beginning it was Jehovah’s purpose for the human family to dwell on earth forever in a paradise. Now the time draws near for obedient mankind to inherit that Kingdom. It is described in Revelation 21:3, 4: “Look! The tent of God is with mankind, and he will reside with them, and they will be his peoples. And God himself will be with them. And he will wipe out every tear from their eyes, and death will be no more, neither will mourning nor outcry nor pain be anymore.”
That is where obedient mankind is going. But the incorrigibly wicked will be going to sleep forever. “Just a little while longer,” the psalmist writes, “and the wicked one will be no more; and you will certainly give attention to his place, and he will not be. But the meek ones themselves will possess the earth, and they will indeed find their exquisite delight in the abundance of peace.”—Psalm 37:10, 11; Romans 6:23.
Do Our Lives Have Meaning?
There are billions of galaxies in the universe and billions of stars in each galaxy. In the vastness of space our solar system is reduced to a speck, and the earth becomes microscopic. The five billion humans on earth shrivel to less than nothing. But it is not simply our smallness in space that makes us feel insignificant. Our fleeting existence in the eons of time also makes us feel that our lives lack meaning. Nevertheless, our minds demand meaning. We were created to feel this way.
We may seem less than microscopic in this vast universe, and we may be as a fleeting moment in the endless stream of time, but our position on earth is unique, and our lives are involved in the most meaningful issue in the whole universe. Not only were we put here by Jehovah God the Creator of the universe but we were given work to do: Fill the earth, take care of it, exercise loving dominion over its plants and animals. And even more meaningful than this—we may share in declaring Jehovah’s Kingdom under Christ that will cleanse the earth of wickedness, vindicate God’s name and Word, and remove demonic rule from the earth.
Lives lived like this have meaning. They will last forever. God’s people are as the pupil of his eye. (Deuteronomy 32:10) They are at rest, for the ultimate questions deep within them have been answered.