Claiming Christianity existed before Christ is insane

What about those who have never heard the Gospel?
That is a good question. The Bible says that God is a just God. We know that whatever He does is right. When it comes to those who have never heard the Gospel, He will do what is right, whatever that is. But as for you, you have heard the gospel and He will judge you according to how you respond. He is calling you to repentance, to turn from sin and come to Him.
In Romans 2:11-16 it speaks about those who have never heard the Law of God and how they will be judged according to the law that is written in their hearts. The Law written in their hearts is the knowledge of right and wrong. Perhaps God's judgment of those without a proper knowledge of Him is included there where it says that they will be judged according to their own consciences that "bear witness, and their thoughts alternately accusing or else defending them." All I know is that God will do what is right and the only way to have your sins forgiven is through Jesus.

Are there apemen in your ancestry?
by Russell Grigg

Apemen have long been the stuff of science fiction. For example, in 1912, Arthur Conan Doyle1 wrote The Lost World, a novel in which four male explorers search for dinosaurs in the Amazon valley and find a whole tribe of apemen/missing links. In 2001–2002, the BBC’s adaptation of this, with computer-generated dinosaurs and a star cast, was shown on TV screens around the world.

In an apparent attempt to vilify Biblical belief, the BBC added a mad priest (played by Peter Falk) to the explorers’ team; also his nubile niece (for romantic interest). Falk’s character tries to kill the explorers to stop them taking news of the apemen back to the world, lest this discovery destroy faith in the Genesis account of Creation!

So what is the truth about so-called ‘apemen’?2

Scientific implications
Scientifically, the concept of apemen implies the following.

That evolution is true and that it produced a line of semi-human creatures from some original non-human ancestor.
That the process which ultimately produced man was death of the less fit along the way.
That the millions of years necessary for this process did occur.
That the fossils claimed to be relics of such creatures constitute a reliable record, i.e. have been interpreted correctly in anatomy, age, and presumed evolutionary relationships.
What is the evidence?
There are many differences between humans and apes that can be seen in fossil remains. These include the fact that humans walk erect and so have appropriate/distinctive knee and hip joints, backbone, toes, etc. Humans also have an opposable thumb, make and use sophisticated tools as well as fire, and engage in diverse creativity. They have a larger brain capacity than apes, smaller teeth set in parabolic or V-shaped, rather than U-shaped, jaws, and they sometimes write, paint or make and play musical instruments.

Communication by language is another crucial difference, as is the ability to do mathematics. Other differences include the exercise of reason and free-will, rather than just instinct. However, evidence of these capabilities is not usually observable from fossil fragments.

The spiritual dimension
Christians would add to this list that man was made in the image of God. God is spirit (John 4:24), therefore this ‘image’ cannot have anything to do with man’s physical form. Rather, humans have a spiritual dimension.3 This means that they can communicate with God and receive answers to prayer. ‘God is light’ (1 John 1:5), so humans have moral consciousness—i.e. an understanding of right and wrong, and so the capacity for either holiness or sin. ‘God is love’ (1 John 4:8), so humans can know the love of God in experiencing forgiveness for sin, which brings peace of mind, and a love for God and fellowship with Him on our part.

Humans can also be filled with His Holy Spirit through a right relationship with God. The fruits of this are love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control (Galatians 5:22–23).

No animal worships God, or gives evidence of having moral consciousness, or concern for spiritual behaviour. Spiritual qualities are not things that can be seen in the fossil record. However, the spiritual dimension of man includes belief in life after death, and this is often shown by evidence of religious burial ceremonies.

A fertile field for hoaxers
Evolutionists looking for evidence of apemen search for fossils that show anatomical features that look ‘intermediate’ between those of apes and humans, or that show some but not all of the above bodily characteristics. This has provided a fertile field for hoaxers.

The most notable hoax was Piltdown Man, ‘discovered’ in England from 1908 to 1912. This comprised a human skullcap plus the lower jaw of an orangutan, the teeth of which had been stained and filed to make them look human and match the size of the teeth in the upper human jaw. Although the hoax was poorly done, it fooled the establishment and was probably the most quoted ‘evidence for evolution’ for around 40 years, until 1953, when the fraud was exposed.

Another huge hoax field has been the way in which scores of deformed humans were exhibited as ‘apemen’ or ‘apewomen’ in circus sideshows from the early 1800s for over a century, with no known scientific refutation of the frauds so perpetrated.4

The desperate need of evolutionists to find a missing link has also contributed to some inexcusably gross scientific boo-boos. The most notable of these was Nebraska Man. A pig’s tooth, found by Harold Cook in 1922, was proclaimed by the eminent evolutionist Dr Henry Fairfield Osborne5 to belong to the first anthropoid (man-like) ape of America, which he named Hesperopithecus (‘western ape’). The Illustrated London News for June 24, 1922, printed an artist’s impression of the tooth’s owner as an upright-standing apeman, showing the shape of his body, head, nose, ears, hair, etc., together with his wife, domestic animals, and tools.

This highlights the fact that fossils of so-called ‘hominids’ are often only fragments of bones which, when combined with a huge dose of imagination, are transformed into apemen. Another factor is that ‘hominid’ fossils are sufficiently rare that many researchers have never actually handled one, so that many scientific papers on human evolution are based on only casts or published photos, measurements and descriptions.

So where does all this leave the matter of the evidence for apemen?

Australopithecines.
Australopithecus (‘southern ape’) is the name given to a number of fossils found in Africa. These are claimed by evolutionists to be the closest to the alleged common ancestor of apes and humans. However, Dr Fred Spoor has done CAT scans of the inner ear region of some of these skulls. These show that their semi-circular canals, which determine balance and ability to walk upright, ‘resemble those of the extant great apes’.6

The most well known australopithecine is ‘Lucy’, a 40% complete skeleton found by Donald Johanson in Ethiopia in 1974 and called Australopithecus afarensis.7 Casts of Lucy’s bones have been imaginatively restored in museums worldwide to look like an apewoman, e.g. with ape-like face and head, but human-like body, hands and feet. However, the original Lucy fossil did not include the upper jaw, nor most of the skull, nor hand and foot bones! Several other specimens of A. afarensis do have the long curved fingers and toes of tree-dwellers, as well as the restricted wrist anatomy of knuckle-walking chimpanzees and gorillas.8,9,10 Dr Marvin Lubenow quotes the evolutionists Matt Cartmill (Duke University), David Pilbeam (Harvard University) and the late Glynn Isaac (Harvard University): ‘The australopithecines are rapidly sinking back to the status of peculiarly specialized apes … .’11

Homo habilis.
Next up is Homo habilis or ‘handy man’, so named because he supposedly was handy with tools. The most well known is called KNM-ER 1470,12 comprising a fossil skull and leg bones found by Richard Leakey in Kenya in 1972. Spoor’s CAT scans of the inner ear of a Homo habilis skull known as Stw 53 show that it walked more like a baboon than a human.6 Today most researchers, including Spoor, regard Homo habilis as ‘a waste-bin of various species’, including bits and pieces from Australopithecus and Homo erectus, and not as a valid category. In other words, it never existed as such, and so cannot be the supposed link between australopithecine apes and true man.

Homo erectus.
Next up is Homo erectus or ‘upright man’. Excavations of many of these fossils show evidence of the use of tools, the controlled use of fire, that they buried their dead, and that some used red ochre for decoration. Their brain size, though smaller on average than modern humans, was within the human range. Recent research on Flores has shown evidence of seafaring skills.13 Spoor’s CAT scans of their inner ear architecture show that their posture was just like ours.6 Even some evolutionists concede that they should be put in the same species as modern man, i.e. Homo sapiens.14 Creationists can thus legitimately regard them as distinct variants of true humans.

Neandertal man.
This is a group that once lived in Europe and the Mediterranean lands.15 The researchers who first reconstructed these fossils gave them a bent-over (i.e. ape-like) appearance. However, the early reconstructions suffered from a heavy dose of evolutionary bias, along with the fact that some specimens suffered from bony diseases such as rickets, which is caused by vitamin D deficiency from childhood and can result in bowing of the skeleton. One cause of this is a lack of exposure to sunlight, consistent with their having lived in the post-Flood Ice Age.

Modern reconstructions of Neandertals are consistent with the creationist contention that they are fully human. Their minor skeletal variations from the modern average, including a larger braincase volume on average, are no different in principle from the minor physical differences between people groups today, which have been shown to be consistent with the genetic unity of humanity.

Despite attempts made on the basis of mitochondrial DNA fragments in one set of Neandertal bones to try to assign them to a separate species, even some evolutionist authorities claim that they should be regarded as Homo sapiens.16 [Ed: A forthcoming article will deal with Neandertals in much more detail.]

So how did these and other extinct human fossils originate?

Answer: Creationists say that the early human fossils are of various groups of people who lived post-Flood. The reason the oldest ape fossils are found below the oldest human fossils in many locations is that, after the Flood, animal migration happened more quickly than human migration, which was stalled until Babel.

Conclusion
How fossil bones are interpreted depends on the worldview of the researcher. The theory of human evolution requires one or more missing links, so in the post-Darwin era many candidates have been put forward. Not one has stood the test of honest, rigorous investigation, as all have turned out to be from either an extinct ape or an extinct human. The fossil evidence does not compel belief in the existence of apemen, nor that man is the product of evolution. Man was directly created by God and in the likeness of God, not in the likeness of an ape.

Christians who flirt with the evolutionary idea that apemen once roamed Earth and that God chose one of these to be ‘Adam’ are flying in the face of both true science and the Word of God.