By: Dr. Jerry Bergman
Montpelier, Ohio
It has often amazed me how many people are anxious to convey the appearance that they know just about everything about everything.
On almost any topic, the profound profundities that flow from their lips sound as if they just completed an extensive study on whatever topic that happens to come up in conversation.
Many people are so anxious to tell everyone everything that they know that they often do not listen carefully to what others have to say.
While riding in the elevator at the medical school where I was teaching, I had the good fortune of meeting someone who had just returned from an extensive stay in Russia (this was before the Russia-Ukraine war), who expounded on life and culture there.
Ironically, another passenger who had never spent a day there, rather than listen to someone who obviously had extensive firsthand experience, chose to display what he thought was his vast store of knowledge about the country.
At a faculty get-together, a teacher friend of many years (and extremely well-read) was asked what he did for a living. His answer, that he was a public school teacher, was met by a barrage of solutions to both real and imagined problems in the public schools!
This lady, who had not been inside a public classroom for over a quarter of a century, probably knew as much about nuclear physics as she did about education.
Yet she had all the answers (sarcasm alert!), like we need to teach spelling by repetition. However, research studies have constantly found that there is little relationship between the time spent studying spelling and one’s spelling ability.
Spelling ability appears to be related more to one’s innate memory ability for words and symbols instead of study time.
In the past couple of years, I have written several dozen articles about the creation/evolution controversy. I recently received a nasty note from a colleague who severely chastised me for what I thought was a minor point in one of my monographs.
The main thrust of his letter seemed to be, I didn’t take a solid stand on the side he knew was correct (the anti-creation side), so obviously I didn’t know what I was talking about.
I may have overreacted, but I tried to convey to him the following: “I used to think I knew a lot, but I know enough now to know what I don’t know. There is simply so much I have yet to learn that I find it difficult to take a firm position except on the few narrow areas that I have carefully looked into, including the problems of the origin of life and of the universe.”
I now have about four thousand books on this topic in my library, many of which I have read. And there are many others which I have not yet read. Actually, ideally, someday I will know as much as everyone around me thinks that they know.
My position on teaching about creation and evolution in the schools is that it should be openly discussed, talked about, and even debated, with neither side censored, as is often the case now.
I have some good ideas on the topics in this area that I have looked into, including vestigial (allegedly useless) organs cases of atavism (the reappearance in individual species members of a single generation of a character that is present in all ancestors within the lineage, such as a reptile brain), and nascent organs (an organ that is supposedly on its way to evolving into a functional organ).
After extensive research and several years of study, I have concluded that there is no clear-cut, irrefutable example of a vestigial, atavistic, or nascent organ in the human body. We are truly fearfully and wonderfully made! (Psalm 139:14)
Although I have a position emotionally and philosophically, what my affective domain concludes, though, does not really matter to anyone except me. Someday, maybe I will be able to fully understand and comprehend reality—but not at this point in time. Unfortunately, witch hunts are common, even in academia, and the hunters are often not more knowledgeable than the hunted.
There should be more tolerance on all sides, and I find that, unfortunately, defense mechanisms surface far too easily everywhere, especially when discussing such topics as creation-evolution.
Many scientists are theistic evolutionists of some sort, and obviously, all of us fall somewhere between the two extremes—and I have a feeling that most of us are not all that far away from each other, even though the labeling process seems to create chasms out of what are actually comparatively small differences on this continuum.
The basic question is, “Is there a creator?” If so, exactly how did He create? The Bible is clear that God created by speaking creation into existence (i.e., by divine command or fiat).
In short, I am trying to say that, “When I was younger, I thought that I knew all the answers, but now that I am a little older, I know I don’t.” 1 Corinthians 13:11 states, “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things,” emphasizing spiritual maturity and leaving immature ways behind as believers grow in faith.
There is a lot out there we don’t know. And the more we learn, the more we realize just how much we have yet to learn! One way is to read, read, and re-read both sides of the areas of interest. And carefully listen to what others have to say.
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Dr. Bergman is a multi-award-winning professor and author. Has 9 degrees and has taught at both the graduate and undergraduate level for over 40 years. His over 2,100 publications are in both scholarly and popular journals. Dr. Bergman’s work has been translated into 15 languages. He has spoken over 2,000 times to college, university and church groups in America, Canada, Europe, the South Sea Islands, and Africa. He lives in Montpelier and is available to present in churches and schools. Jerry can be reached at JerryBergman30@yahoo.com