adapted for use. – Apocalypse Explained 1191:2) And the more we learn from
God about creation, the more clearly we understand that it is not a one-time
event but an ongoing process. As the familiar hymn puts it: “Amid all change,
One changing not, yet making all things new.”
And that, in fact, Bill Bryson, is “the short history of nearly everything.”
(BMH)
the missing link
Part of Bill Bryson’s sweeping study of creation is devoted to evolution and
the quest to confirm that we are indeed descendants of chimpanzees. Much as
many an anthropologist is convinced of the progression, no one has been able
to bridge “the missing link” and prove a direct connection.
Bryson quotes Ian Tattersall, Curator of Anthropology at the American
Museum of Natural History in New York City: “One of the hardest ideas for
humans to accept is that we are not the culmination of anything. There is
nothing inevitable about our being here. It is part of our vanity as humans that
we tend to think of evolution as a process, in effect, that was programmed to
produce us.”
Bryson adds: “Indeed, as recently as 1991, in the popular textbook The
Stages of Evolution, C. Loring Brace stuck doggedly to the linear concept,
acknowledging just one evolutionary dead end, the robust australopithecines.
[These were ancient primates who left traces in volcanic ash discovered by Mary
Leakey in Tanzania in 1976.] Everything else represented a straightforward
progression – each species of hominid carrying the baton of development so
far, then handing it on to a younger, fresher runner. Now, however, it seems
certain that many of these early forms followed side trails that didn’t come to
anything.”
The real “missing link,” of course, is not only understanding the creation
of human beings but the one unique reason for mankind’s creation by God: a
heaven from the human race.
(BMH)
‘forget not all his benefits’
Bryson ends his book with a mix of optimism and concern. “We have been
chosen,” he writes, “by fate or Providence or whatever you may wish to call
it. As far as we can tell, we are the best there is. We may be all there is. It’s an
unnerving thought that we may be the living universe’s supreme achievement
and its worst nightmare simultaneously.”
We see the “supreme achievements” in science and medicine, technology
and invention. The nightmares play out in self-love and wanton inhumanity,
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