The creation versus evolution controversy is ubiquitous—it’s virtually everywhere. Evolutionists routinely and repeatedly provide the public with a counterfeit history of human origins, and that tall tale is so pervasive that it is literally hidden in plain view.¹

What if I Had Never Been Born?

Before we look at a couple of examples, let’s consider first how God’s creation is the most basic blessing that He has given to each one of us. If God did not make us to start with, no other blessing would matter. He created each one of us as unique individuals. Each human being was deliberately planned, foreknown, and provided for by God as the exact person He intended him or her to be.

While I was touring the World War II museums in Fredericksburg, Texas, recently, I considered this contingency: What if the two atomic bombs had not been dropped on Japan, catalyzing a quick surrender by the Japanese emperor and thereby ending World War II?² The Allies would have invaded the Japanese homeland with several hundreds of thousands of troops. In fact, hundreds of thousands of Purple Heart awards were already authorized for manufacture in anticipation of the expected casualties. Many hundreds of thousands would likely have been killed and/or wounded, with a million deaths, counting both sides, expected during the year to follow such an invasion. But Japan chose surrender rather than risk any more atomic bombs.

Had the war continued, my father would have been one of the U.S. Marines sent to invade Japan’s shores. As my wife and I viewed the museum exhibits, I considered the possible end result of this scenario. My father may have been killed, so my siblings and I might have never been born. There are many such what-if scenarios that our minds cannot fully comprehend, but they pose no problem for God.³

Evolutionist Teaching Illustrated in Military History

During World War II, the Allies exerted great efforts to learn the military secrets of their adversaries. They monitored radio transmissions from Germany, Italy, and Japan, and then tried to decipher the encoded messages.⁴ Japanese officials stationed in Germany and in Italy reported military information to Japan, so the interception of their military transmissions—if and when the content could be accurately and timely deciphered—often provided military secrets not only of the Japanese, but also about the war machines of Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy. Consequently, American and British code-breakers carefully scrutinized whatever they could learn from military messages sent from Germany or Italy to Japan.

Allied researchers also sought intelligence from non-coded sources, such as local newspapers. One piece of intelligence displayed the strategic team spirit that was then developing between Japan and Italy. This intercepted information contained an evolutionary theme that should be familiar to readers of Acts & Facts:

The Foreign Office had no need of codebreakers to interpret many of the Japanese and German moves towards a grand alliance with Mussolini’s Italy. Sujimura [a Japanese ambassador in Rome] was regarded as a moderate in Japanese terms, but in an interview with the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, he spoke of an “identity of ideas” between Japan and Italy: “We consider ourselves to be in the same condition. Overpopulation creates for obvious reasons the right to occupy more territory and the rights of civilization demand that people install themselves in those areas where the inhabitants stand in need of human evolution.”⁵

This quote shows that the Japanese leadership was using human evolution to rationalize Japan’s ongoing conquest of Pacific and Indian Ocean countries. The “need” for human evolution made unprovoked military conquest acceptable; the supposedly under-evolved peoples of Korea, China, Indochina, and the Pacific islands needed to have their territories evolutionarily improved by being conquered by the Japanese, who, of course, were “superior” in their own human evolution.

Most Americans know that Adolf Hitler argued evolutionary science to justify his genocidal mass murders of Jews and Slavs, but many do not know that Japanese propagandists sang the same social Darwinism song before and during World War II. Evolutionary thinking is not limited to academics, television documentaries, and television ads selling insurance. Even Japanese military codes demonstrated the pervasiveness of evolutionist teaching.

Evolutionist Teaching illustrated in Cuisine Literature

Evolutionary storytelling even taints cuisine literature. Consider this quotation from a recipe book featuring favorites from the Alpine countries:

Since the beginning of time man has been preoccupied with obtaining meat for his daily meals. At first he was limited to the hunting of wild animals, but with the birth of civilization the flesh of domesticated cows, pigs, and sheep also became available.⁶

This recipe book assumes an early history of humanity that clashes with the Genesis record. Genesis negates the myth of primitive cavemen limited to hunter-gatherer food acquisition. Cain, the first man born on earth, was a farmer; his younger brother Abel was a shepherd.⁷ Agriculture is as old as the first human family. Also, eating the flesh of animals—domestic or wild—was not a part of God’s food program for humans until after the Flood.⁸ Yet, how casually secular literature assumes and portrays the mythology of human evolution in every form of literature—even cookbooks!

The True Nature of Nature: Testifying to Truth

Secular military politics and cookbooks aside, what is the real story of creation concerning the kind of world we live in and the kind of people we are? The Holy Bible provides true answers to these important questions about the real world and life itself. Jesus said, “Thy word is truth” (John 17:17). And it is the truth of the Scriptures that satisfies because it is really true! This life only makes sense when the Bible’s answers are accepted and relied upon. It is only God’s truth that satisfies the big questions about life, as Joe Macphee, a happy Hebridean man, learned:

I was born in the Hebridean island of Barra, one of a family of nine children.…My father, who was in the merchant navy, died in 1967 and my mother was left with nine children to attend to. It was a hard upbringing but a happy one.…In early 1988 I was beginning to notice things about the creation—it was suddenly becoming so beautiful that it would bring tears to my eyes….In the Lord’s providence I was directed to purchase a house in an area surrounded by Christians, who witnessed of their faith in Christ. Some of the stories they would tell me I would initially dismiss as lies but gradually I found myself believing them and in a strange way wanting to hear more and to have what these people had.⁹

The good news is that Joe Macphee learned what the Bible teaches about redemption in Christ Jesus, so he acquired real truth about God’s creation and about his own life, including his need for Christ as his personal Savior. That was more than 20 years ago.¹⁰

There are many others like Joe who seek true answers—biblical answers—for questions to which our humanistic culture provides only deceptive distractions, like human evolution stories. Whether theistic or atheistic, such stories fuel unbiblical imaginations about human life, sometimes condoning immoral conduct in the name of needed evolutionary improvement. Evolutionary stories—the counterfeit history of God’s creation—are propagated everywhere around us. Evolutionary teaching is so ubiquitous that we often don’t recognize it when we read military history or a recipe book, because the false story of evolution is so casually, confidently, and constantly “hidden in plain view.”

But God’s truth is present everywhere for those with eyes to see it (Romans 10:17-18; Psalm 19:1-4). For more than 41 years, ICR has been showcasing and clarifying biblical answers about human life and God’s creation. God’s wonderful truth is only “hidden” from those who refuse the truth that He has freely provided in His Word.

References

1. Things can be “hidden in plain view” due to camouflage or familiarity; we ignore those things, focusing more on what attracts our immediate attention. See Jonathan Sarfati’s “Colourblind squid camouflage” in the January-March 2012 issue of Creation magazine.
2. What is planned doesn’t always occur. The two atomic bombs, dropped on August 6 and 9, 1945, were planned for Hiroshima and Kokura, respectively, but the Kokura bomb (“Fat Man”) was dropped on Nagasaki instead. Six days later, Japan announced its unconditional surrender to the Allies.
3. Matthew 11:21-24. Christ spoke confidently of contingent cause-and-effect scenarios that humans could not know about.
4. Coded information is useless unless the recipient of that coded information has the capacity to both receive and recognize the coded message’s meaning within a timeframe that permits useful action to be taken. See Johnson, J. J. S. 2011. DNA and RNA: Providential Coding to “Revere” God. Acts & Facts. 40 (3): 8-9.
5. Smith, M. 2000. The Emperor’s Codes: The Breaking of Japan’s Secret Ciphers. New York: Arcade Publishing, 51, emphasis added.
6. Nelson, K. S. 2005. Cuisines of the Alps: Recipes, Drinks, and Lore from France, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Italy, Germany, and Slovenia. New York: Hippocrene Books, Inc., 89.
7. Genesis 4:1-4.
8. Compare Genesis 9:2-3 with Genesis 1:29.
9. Macphee, J. 2001. Testimony (of Joe Macphee). The Bulwark (Magazine of the Scottish Reformation Society). Oct.-Dec. 2011: 12-17, quotations from pages 12 and 15.
10. Ibid.

* Dr. Johnson is Associate Professor of Apologetics and Chief Academic Officer at the Institute for Creation Research.

Cite this article: Johnson, J. J. S. 2012. Hidden in Plain View: Evolution’s Counterfeit History Is Everywhere. Acts & Facts. 41 (2): 8-9.