By Lee Duigon – bio
By Don Landis, general editor, with Jackson Hole Bible College
(Green Forest, AR: Master Books, 2012)
Reviewed by Lee Duigon
We might almost call this a coffee table book. It’s large (8 ½ by 11 inches) and chock full of glossy color photographs. You can probably read it in a sitting; but it’ll take you a lot longer than that to think it over.
Researchers at Jackson Hole Bible College traveled all over North and Central America, visiting archeological sites and museums, interviewing archeologists, curators, and historians, to put this book together. The scope of the book is worldwide, however, mustering evidence from every continent except Antarctica.
Evidence for what? That human beings, from as far back into history and prehistory as you’d care to go, have created buildings, art, and artifacts that could never have been created except by high intelligence and technical know-how.
But the book’s thesis can be stated more simply than that: The Bible is God’s Word, and therefore true in all particulars; and the archeological evidence is exactly what we should expect to find, according to the Bible.
Biblical vs. Secular Presuppositions
Ancient Man presupposes the literal truth of the Bible, and the book has much to say about that presupposition. It’s necessary to state this very strongly, because the world has a very different set of presuppositions.
A discovery in Turkey too recent to be included in this book, billed as “the world’s oldest temple,” has been making the news lately. This remark, from a mainstream “scientific” source, sheds light on the secular world’s presuppositions:
Each T-shaped pillar varies between 40 to 60 tonnes, leaving us scratching our heads as to how on earth they [the ancient builders] accomplished such a monumental feat. In a time when even simple hand tools were hard to come by, how did they get these stone blocks there, and how did they erect them? With no settlement or society to speak of, with farming still a far cry away in a world of only roaming hunter-gatherers, the complexity and developed blueprints of these temples represented another enigma for archeologists …[i]
It sounds like the scientists are trying to deny the testimony of their own eyes: because, according to the world’s presuppositions, this impressive monument has no business being there. People who were hard up for even simple hand tools, who had yet to develop a society, who had no settlements, hadn’t yet invented farming, and were nothing but mere hunter-gatherers … couldn’t possibly have built this temple complex! And yet there it is-meaning that either the temple itself or the presupposition is unreal. My money’s on the presupposition. The very existence of the monument proves that someone could and did build it.
Ancient Man introduces us to a plethora of archeological enigmas. Collectively-in my opinion, at least-they demolish the image of prehistoric man as an ignorant, impoverished savage without the imagination or the intellect to set one stone atop another. But it will take more than physical evidence to disabuse the secular world of this notion. “Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools” (Rom. 1:22).
A Few Foibles
We are a little leery of some of the text. For instance: “This book seeks to provide evidence that supports the truth of God’s Word and confirmation to your Christian faith” (p. 7). This might be taken to read, “We have seen A and B and C and D, and therefore God’s Word is true.” It opens the door for someone else to come along and explain the same evidence differently. But we can see this is not what the authors mean to convey.
“Through an apologetic method of presuppositions, openly claiming to believe the historical record of the Bible, fully embracing a bias in which we start with a Creator God, this book [the Bible] provides the only plausible explanation of ancient man and his intelligence,” we read on page 6. And on page 9, “God’s Word is the ultimate starting point for all knowledge and therefore the first place we should be looking for answers to any of our questions.”
The authors might have taken greater pains to avoid any suggestion that the strength of one’s Christian faith depends on the quantity and quality of physical evidence found in the world by scientists or other seekers. Who wins arguments with unbelief by “proving” the existence of God, or the truth of God’s Word? Such debates have been going on for centuries, and there is no profit in them. Faith, after all, is a gift from God: although it is not unknown for God to pry open a closed mind with a little piece of eye-opening data as the lever.
Meanwhile, two minor errors in the text jumped out at me. (click)
