A Christian teacher tells his class that the
white rhino is extinct except for a few individual rhinos being guarded day and
night. I am sad, because the rhino is my
favorite animal. My former students will
remember that we had our Potter’s Rhino shirts for track and field and
kickball. Yet, the loss of rhinos is not
the complete truth.
The vanishing rhino is part of a narrative
being spread around the world that in part has to do with Noah’s Ark. There are too many species to have fit on the
Ark. The world is made of millions of
species that man is destroying. Both of
these ideas are based on faulty science and against the Christianity of the Bible.
It is true that many African species were more abundant in 1900 than today, but the numbers stopped shrinking for most in the 70s. Since then the numbers have grown. In fact, white rhinos make up 66% of the 30,000 rhinos in the world today. The Javan and Sumatran rhinos are in the danger zone with less than 100 of both species, but the other three species are growing. The story about the white rhino decline is only partially true. In South Africa, the numbers are growing, over 20,000, while in Kenya they are down to just a handful.
I am all for animal preservation, but science today is becoming a religion. You are expected to believe it without question. If scientists say rhinos are on the verge of extinction, you are expected to believe them unswervingly, even if the facts show their numbers are rising.
I was told I would never see a bald eagle in
the wild when I was younger. Today, the
bald eagle has been taken off the endangered list. And I saw one this past December in Bristol,
Texas. On the hill between Bristol and
Alsdorf, just past the bridge is a small pond.
I was startled to see what looked like a bald eagle. I backed up my jeep and there it was, sitting
on a dead tree, looking into the pond. I
jumped out of my jeep and fumbled for my phone.
About that same moment, he dived in the pond and came out with a fish
and flew away. Just across the river, is
a wetland sanctuary that has a breeding pair of bald eagles. I am guessing this guy was one of them.
The scare that the world is experiencing about animals dying off goes along with the idea of mass speciation. In my lifetime, scientist have redefined what a species is. At one time, a species meant it could interbreed with others of its specie. Today it is no longer accepted that species cannot interbreed, since many do in captivity, and sometimes in the wild. Scientist have labeled the white rhino as two species. They ignore the fact that the southern white rhino is increasing, and scare you that the northern white rhino is about to become extinct. The same could be said of cougars (pumas, mountain lions, panthers, etc.) It some areas they are almost gone, like Florida, but in other areas they are a pest. Elephants are declining in West Africa, but on the rise in South Africa. It is easier for scientist to tell you that the “forest” elephant is vanishing than to tell you it is basically the same specie as the African elephant, that regularly has members of its population culled in South Africa. If you are scared the elephant is going to vanish, you will more likely allow drastic measure to preserve them.
Scientist will often scoff at Noah’s Ark, saying it would be impossible to fit all those species on the ark. Yet the Bible never uses the word specie. This is a word invented by scientists in recent centuries. The Bible uses the word kind, a term that implies these animals can produce young. Horses can breed with donkeys and produce mules. Donkeys and some breeds of ponies have been bred with zebras too. Likely, there were two members of the horse kind on the ark. What did it look like? Who knows. Today’s modern horse is the result of domestication and selective breeding for millennia.
Domestic dogs can breed with wolves, coyotes, dingoes, jackals, and foxes. Chickens can breed with guinea fowl and peafowl (think peacock). Lions and tigers have produced ligers in zoos and circuses, as well as lions and leopards, and lions and jaguars. Asian and African elephants have bred too (Motty born in the Chester Zoo in England in 1978). Pumapards, a cross between a puma and leopard, were the rage in German zoos of the 1800s. Almost every specie of goat and sheep, wild and domestic, have interbred, creating a wide variety of breeds. The same has happened with cattle, bison, yaks, and water buffalo. The list could go on and on.
Still there are literally tens of thousands of kinds, right? How did they all fit on the Ark? A fact rarely mentioned by flood detractors is that most species are aquatic or invertebrate. Aquatic species were not on the Ark. Invertebrates, like insects and spiders, would have survived in debris floating on the ocean, buried under mud, in the larval stage in the water, or among the food Noah was commanded to bring with him. Amphibians are aquatic as young and many species of reptiles and mammals are aquatic, so would not necessarily be on the Ark. There were no blue whales or dolphins on the Ark.That leaves us with about half of all reptiles, most mammals, and all birds. I imagine that full grown elephants were on the Ark, but who is to say they weren’t babies. If dinosaurs did not go extinct in the Flood, which I believe they didn't (oops that just made me crazy), those dinosaurs might have been babies. The average mammal is about the size of a sheep (though more than half of the species of mammals are mice and bats). The average bird is the size of a sparrow and the average reptile about that of a lizard. If we consider the idea of kind, that can interbreed, the Ark could have been easily filled with sheep, sparrows, and lizards, as well as the occasional giraffe, rhino, ostrich, and Galapagos tortoise. The Ark easily had room for about 20,000 animals.
Most of us are reasonable people. We think we would never be lied to. We think the science community, politicians, and the media are honest. We don’t think they could possibly have an agenda. What if the agenda is they don’t believe in God and will skewer any evidence to prove He does not exist?
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