An Historical Perspective
By Graham Parkhouse
In these bewildering times when greatly treasured former British values are being eroded yet further, when a slip of the tongue can end your career, when our culturally liberal country is being told – by a small vocal minority – that we should be ashamed of our history, and that simply by virtue of the pale colour of their skin they are racist, we need some understanding. Our values have been eroded shockingly since the sexual revolution of the 1960s, driven by promiscuity, promoted as being progressive, “moving with the times.” Serious Christians, like that brave woman, Mary Whitehouse, and her supporters, who complained at the growing lewdness on television, were mocked and derided. The homosexual act between consenting adults has been legalised, abortion has become practically free on demand, sometimes for children without their parents’ knowledge, same-sex marriage has been introduced without it appearing in the government’s election manifesto, and divorce is being made yet easier.
The children, the ones suffering most from their parents’ libertarianism, are then taught about newly conjured gender issues in infant school, putting doubt in their minds about whether, deep inside, they really are a boy or a girl. None of these developments has been politically motivated: both our major parties have been complicit in supporting them. These changes that nobody voted for are a purely cultural phenomenon. No wonder we are bewildered. We have been caught napping.
There has been a Marxist agenda infiltrating academia since before the Second World War, which has recently been described in Marc Sidwell’s new book The Long March, subtitled “How the left won the culture war and what to do about it” – a book I recommend. It can be bought or downloaded free from the New Culture Forum’s website. Sidwell’s thesis is that a Marxist ideology, devised to “reset” our society by focusing on minority discontent, has already spread through academia, the media, the civil service, and our major institutions, supported by people who are intent on creating a new world order. This optimistic, unrealistic undertaking requires the destruction of the old order. In the process it has smuggled in our progressive modern “British values” and is now giving us this new “woke” culture.
While many were being caught napping, psychologist Prof. Jordan Peterson was active in resisting a parliamentary act in Canada in 2017 requiring people to use a person’s preferred pronouns, those chosen as appropriate to their gender speciality. “Compelled speech” was a new phenomenon that, had it not been for Prof. Peterson, could easily have slipped into law without the benefit of the critical publicity he provided. It takes courage to challenge our powerful institutions. Prof. Peterson had already earned a reputation as an eloquent defender of free speech through publishing his university lectures on YouTube, which may have prepared him for making such a bold stand.
In 2018 he embarked on a world tour to publicise his best-selling book 12 Rules for Life, about facing life’s challenges, a tour that lasted for about 18 months, which gave him opportunities to be interviewed by the mainstream media. One of the most remarkable of these interviews was that with Kathy Newman of Channel 4, which opened the eyes of many people to how hostile the mainstream media is to ideas not fitting its politically correct agenda (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMcjxSThD54). This interview has had 21 million views. Freedom for dissenting voices to be heard on the internet has helped to reveal the left-leaning bias of the mainstream media. Other right-leaning commentators have played a major part: Melanie Phillips, Douglas Murray, Peter Whittle, founder of the New Culture Forum, Peter Hitchens and David Starkey are just a few.
But one thing that all commentators, left- and right-leaning, have in common is a shyness about religion, less so for Jordan Peterson and Peter Hitchens. Jordan Peterson admits to behaving as if there is a God, and he has an immense respect for the Bible, with several of his lectures on Genesis being published on YouTube. Believing in evolution, he considers that these stories were fashioned by the accumulated wisdom of hundreds of generations so should be taken very seriously. But these commentators have in common a respect for our history and are appreciative of our heritage and are appalled at the pulling down of statues and the unreasonableness of left-wing hysteria.
But if I were to suggest to them that the Bible might be an accurate account of the history of the world, including how the world began, I would expect my suggestion to be dismissed as fantasy. For me, the effects would be almost as bad as it was for Dr David Starkey who recently carelessly used the words “damn blacks” in a podcast and practically lost his livelihood. But for me, this would be at the hands of the people who I greatly respect. They might be scarcely able to discuss my suggestion, an idea so alien to them that they might wish to cancel me, just as the far-left wish to cancel them. This is another example of group identity, a group where “we are all agreed upon science and evolution, aren’t we?” However open minded they may think they are, there will always be the potential for these serious thinking people to wish to cancel those with unacceptable ideas.
Here is the problem: intelligent, educated people, observing the disintegration of our culture, are only able to point out the sheer foolishness of what the left are doing, only able to say “Stop! Stopping is not a solution; we cannot remodel our lives by restraint. The Bible says where there is no vision the people perish (Proverbs 29:18a). What kind of vision could these intelligent educated people offer? It is frightening even to imagine what their vision might be. Whatever their vision, it would entail re-education, i.e. indoctrination, or, left to our own devices, after partial destruction of our civilization, we might naturally revert to a more primitive style of life where survival becomes the overriding incentive. With the loss of our history how could we avoid becoming savages in such a hostile damaged world, which is why our history is so particularly important, just as our right-leaning intelligent educated people affirm.
Long before Marxism made its contribution to the present predicament, the enlightenment of the 1700s laid the foundation. It put a premium on rational thought, which is a wonderful thing, but then it idolised it and put it in the place of God, then constructed an over-rationalised view of the world. They chose classicism for their history, beginning with Greece and Rome, and took the Renaissance as their model for exploring the world, modelling the world as mechanistic, particles interacting with each other according to the laws of nature, such that the whole universe is governed by cause and effect. This model of the world implies that once the universe is set in motion, all future events are inevitable, so that people’s choices are dictated by brain chemistry and the firing of neurons governed by the laws of nature, i.e. our choices are illusory and we cannot be held responsible for them. The spiritual void created by this fatalistic belief system has caused much pain and heart searching.
People could have been spared this terrible pain, and still can be spared it, if they are willing to search further back into history. Rome was founded at about the same time as the Northern kingdom of Israel went into captivity, which the founders of the enlightenment well knew, so they deliberately chose to ignore earlier history. There has always been a fierce reluctance to accept the Bible as history, just as there has always been a divide between church and state. The Bible is dismissed as religion at our peril because it is the world’s most precious history book. It recounts four facts that are essential for our physical and psychological welfare:
1. God created the world supernaturally, by his word.
2. He created the first man, Adam, without blemish, in his own image, i.e. we are eternal spiritual beings, having spirits which do not go back to dust when we die.
3. Adam sinned, thereby bringing death and decay into the world.
4. The Ten Commandments.
These facts need to be well publicised as coming from the Bible. People may not believe them, but the ideas associated with them should be sown as seeds, because if this knowledge is not promoted, why should people even know that the Bible exists? The prevailing view today is that science has the answers, that the world is billions of years old, and the Bible is from a more primitive age and should therefore be disregarded.
The way to rebuild our society is to turn to history, to go back beyond the Greeks and the Romans, to Moses and Abraham, Noah, and the flood. Yes, the flood, what modern secular scholars grudgingly admit happened, but not according to the details contained in the Biblical account; instead they prefer a local flood, not a cataclysmic event that not only destroyed the world’s features but all the animals and birds. Two hundred years ago the Biblical account was not seriously contested. Today, a geologist who confessed to believing in a worldwide flood, would be risking his career. Yet, how can they explain the fossils in the “geological column,” the fossil order roughly perceived in the multiple rock strata, with fossils of primitive forms at the lower levels leading up to larger “more advanced” life forms at higher levels, except by evolution?
The answer is simple: Noah’s flood. To begin with, fossils can only form when life is buried rapidly and under considerable depth of material, saturated with sufficient water to allow the mineralisation of the fleshy parts that is necessary for fossilisation. Noah’s flood could have provided these conditions, with its worldwide scale, an inundation of geological proportions, over a relatively short time-scale, short enough for the candidate fossils not to rot before they fossilised, which is the fatal flaw in the currently orthodox uniformitarian theory: no fossils will form at the orthodox timescale. For a column as tall as 1000 metres to be formed in as short a time as a million years, i.e. faster than these strata are assumed to be formed, the deposition rate is 1 mm per year, slow enough to ensure every dead creature decays totally. No fossils could be formed at that slow rate and, for the same reason, none are being formed today. Conditions do not allow it.
Then, continue further back in history to Adam and Eve and the creation. The wonderful memorial we have for a supernatural six-day creation is the week. The week has been a standard measure of time in all parts of the world throughout history. I remember being stirred in my heart many years ago, visiting the British Museum, when I happened to notice an old Chinese calendar marked out in groups of seven days, with every seventh day in red. Our creator God, who gave us the year, the month and the day by his ordering of the rotations of the earth and the moon, also gave us the week, by command, embodied in the fourth commandment, as a creation memorial. How wonderful that these monuments are not so easily removed as the statue of Edward Colston in Bristol! Let us be careful to take the fourth commandment seriously, because Sunday is being regarded more and more as just an ordinary day. Let us be careful to honour it ourselves.
Truth has come to be looked upon as the province of the scientist. Covid-19 has done us the favour of showing us that scientists do not have all the answers, nor do they agree amongst each other. That they took a wrong turning following Charles Darwin’s publication of his popular book On the Origin of Species in 1859 needs to be recognised. His ideas on evolution by natural selection caught the popular imagination of the intellectuals, at a time when science and technology were gaining immense standing, allowing scientists to unravel the secrets of electricity and magnetism, enabling people to travel faster than ever before on the many railways spreading across the country, improving living standards by providing fresh water and hygienic sewerage, and now, apparently by this same science, showing the Bible was wrong at the very beginning!
If it was wrong at the beginning, it had surely lost its authority. A little after 1859 this began to sink in. Ten years later Charles Spurgeon began noticing a change amongst the churches, what is now referred to as the “Downgrade,” when the Bible came under attack, both by people like Thomas Huxley, Darwin’s “bulldog,” who saw Darwin’s theory as a weapon to use against Christianity, and by liberal theologians who were endeavouring to criticise the Bible’s Hebrew and Greek texts, criticising them and introducing doubts about their authenticity.
These new revelations provided ammunition to those in rebellion against the nation’s highly Christian society, solidly Protestant, with a significant proportion of the population being devout believers in the Lord Jesus Christ. The downgrade has continued, dovetailing in with enlightenment thinking, rationalistic materialism, making gods of ourselves.
But science is not the authority on the past, history is, provided it has not been corrupted, which is why the Bible is so precious; it is the oldest book in the world, and it is a history book and it has not been corrupted. God has made sure of this, by protecting it through all generations. It is the testimony to the faithfulness of God and the rebellion of man. Those who heed it and act upon it are the wise men who build their houses on the rock, as our Lord Jesus preached at the end of the Sermon on the Mount.
This message, that we need to turn to the Bible for our history, for our understanding of our origins and for understanding God’s purpose for mankind. It will be most offensive to liberal minded people. The arrogance of the Enlightenment was to think that all necessary truth was accessible without recourse to history. That arrogance is as powerful today as ever.
How can I claim that the Bible is the oldest book in the world? I am not claiming that the oldest piece of ancient writing around today is a piece of Bible text. My claim is based on consistency. If the Bible is God’s holy word, then it contains a message that every generation has needed to know, because personal salvation depends on believing in the work of our Lord Jesus Christ, done 2000 years ago, and prophesied beforehand in the Old Testament. God would have ordained that the scriptures would be self-authenticating in a world so full of deception. “Hath God said?” has been the challenge right from the Garden of Eden. God’s word does not change, so he would have ordained that it would be preserved in the hands of honest God-fearing people. Adam was not a primitive man. He talked, he counted so that dates could be recorded. It is reasonable that he should have been able to read and write. What was there to write about? The very things that are recorded in the early chapters of Genesis. Enoch, before the Flood, wrote what is quoted by Jude in the New Testament. Yes, so Moses compiled the first five books, but his material was older. My argument is consistent with what we read in the Bible.