Two articles appeared some time ago about monkeys and their supposed similarity to humans. In the first article, we learned that when monkeys were given keyboards and computers, they made a mess. Based on testing the Infinite Monkey Theorem, researchers at Plymouth University in England reported that monkeys left alone with a computer attacked it and failed to produce a single word. They seemed to like or dislike the letter “s.” ((“Monkeys Don’t Write Shakespeare,” Associated Press at WIRED (May 9, 2003).))
Maybe it looked like a snake, which might explain the actions of the lead male. He showed quite a bit of tool-making ingenuity by using a rock for a hammer, possibly to pound the snake to death.
Eventually the six monkeys—named Elmo, Gum, Heather, Holly, Mistletoe, and Rowan—did produce five pages of “text.” However, that “text” was composed primarily of the letter S, with the letters A, J, L, and M added on rare occasions. Mike Phillips noted, “They pressed a lot of S’s.” He went on to state, “obviously, English isn’t their first language.” ((Brad Harrub, “Monkeys, Typewriters, and Shakespeare,” Apologetics Press (2003): https://bit.ly/2Tc1HNl))
The Infinite Monkey Theorem states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type any given text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare.
Or maybe it was a display of humanness. How many of us have wanted to pound our computer with a rock after we got the “blue screen of death” or a message that told us we had just performed an “illegal operation”? A very human trait indeed.
It was the evolutionist Thomas Huxley is said to have believed, given enough time, monkeys would produce literature. But alas, the computer monkeys were just being monkeys. The scientists were most disappointed when our simian “relatives” viewed the computers as indoor toilets. It seems that they spent most of their time defecating and urinating all over the keyboards.
The scientists have not given up on the monkeys. One of the observing scientists said that the experiment showed that monkeys “are not random generators; they’re more complex than that. They were quite interested in the screen, and they saw that when they typed a letter, something happened. There was a level of intention there.” A scientific observation meant to imply that research dollars will continue to flow.
In the second article, we were told that “chimpanzees are closer to humans than gorillas and other apes—so close that scientists say they should be sharing space on the same branch of the family tree.” ((Mike Toner, “Welcome Chimps into the Family of Man,” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (May 2003).)) The genetic similarities are said to be around 97 percent. Apparently, the scientists who came to this conclusion had not read about the defecating and urinating computer monkeys.
No doubt there is some correspondence. But it is the three percent difference that makes all the difference. We should expect to find similarities among living things since they were designed by the same Designer.
But do chimpanzees act 97 percent like humans? Where are their houses, libraries, hospitals, charitable organizations, roads, various forms of locomotion, grocery stores, or Kwik-E-Marts? Where is chimpanzee art and music? The 97-percent homo sapiens have not even figured out indoor plumbing or the concept of an outhouse. For them, the world is their toilet.
It is not that chimpanzees have created some of what humans have created; they haven’t created anything that resembles civilization.
There are only two operating starting points on the origin and definition of what constitutes a family. Either the family is a God-ordained covenant between a man and woman and their children or it’s an ever-evolving social contract.
In terms of modern-day evolutionary science that predominates in our nation’s universities, the family is not a God-ordained covenant structure:
Early scholars of family history applied Darwin’s biological theory of evolution in their theory of the evolution of family systems. American anthropologist, Lewis H. Morgan, published Ancient Society in 1877, based on his theory of the three stages of human progress, from savagery through barbarism to civilization.
Given the operating assumptions of evolutionary theory, the family, like evolution in general, came into being via savage struggle: “when the young male grows up, a contest takes place for mastery, and the strongest, by killing and driving out the others, establishes himself as the head of the community.”
Of course, this is not the origin of the family. “In classic Christian social thought,” Nancy Pearcey writes, “it was God who established marriage, family, church, and state, and who defined their essential nature—their tasks, responsibilities, and moral norms.” ((Nancy R. Pearcey, Love Thy Body: Answering Hard Questions About Life and Sexuality (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2018), 233.))
With Darwinism, the classic biblical definition of the family has been discarded for a more “scientific” definition that is pure materialism. According to science, following Newtonian physics, “[c]ivil society was pictured as so many human ‘atoms’ who came together and ‘bond’ in various social relationships.” ((Pearcey, Love Thy Body, 233.)) There is no purposeful design in something from nothing evolutionary theory.
Atoms don’t care about such things. They just are. Plow deep in an atom’s structure and you will not find a moral code, love, compassion, hope, or any of the qualities that are attributed to human beings. German paleontologist Günter Bechly, former curator of the Stuttgart State Museum of Natural History, commented, “If humans originated from the animal realm by a purely unguided process, there is no real reason in nature to treat humans differently from stones. It’s just a different aggregate of atoms.” ((Quoted in Jenny Lind Schmitt, “If Rocks Could Talk,” World Magazine (March 2, 2019), 29.))
As a result, like matter, the family can be shaped into any form by those doing the manipulating. Because there is no fixed definition of something we call “family,” we are seeing its near-complete disintegration through redefinition. Traditional sexual roles based on creation norms no longer exist. Men are marrying men and women marrying women. Sex roles have become fluid. There are now more than 60 manufactured genders. We are seeing everything redefined and protected by the State to force compliance to every redefinition.
This is not a new development. There are, what Alvin Toffler in 1980 called, “a bewildering array of family forms: homosexual marriages, communes, groups of elderly people banding together to share expenses (and sometimes sex), tribal grouping among certain ethnic minorities, and many other forms coexist as never before.” ((Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave (New York: William Morrow, 1980), 212.))
These counterfeit families attempt to restructure the creational family around an evolving order rather than a biblical model. Whoever defines the family controls it. The State is in the definition business.
Transgenderism is growing. Parents are raising their children as “gender neutral theybies.” For example, Charlie Arrowood does not identify as male or female…. When a New York City law took effect in January of 2019, they plan to modify the sex recorded on their birth certificate to one that fits: “X,” a gender-neutral option.
You might be confused about the use of the pronouns “they” and “their.” You see, Charlie Arrowood, who is transgender, “uses the pronoun ‘they’ and the courtesy title ‘Mx.,’ a gender-neutral alternative to Ms. and Mr.” ((Andy Newman, “Male, Female or ‘X’: The Push for a Third Choice on Official Forms,’ The New York Times (September 27, 2018): https://nyti.ms/2CdMKSx)) This is all logical considering an atomistic understanding of reality. The conglomeration of atoms (an evolved human being) determine their own identity.
Instead of being in covenant with God, conglomerations of atoms randomly joined together in any way they please because that is their materialistic origin. “In the beginning was the atomistic individual. [Thomas] Hobbes even asks us to ‘look at men as if they had just emerged from the earth like mushrooms and grown up without any obligation to each other.’ Like Newton’s atoms, individuals come together and bond in various arrangements when they find that doing so advances their interest.” ((Pearcey, Love Thy Body, 234.))
This is nihilism, as depicted in the second installment of Love, Death, and Robots, titled “Three Robots.” Three robots traverse a post-apocalyptic world trying to determine how humans ended it all. The first robot, an Xbot 4000 asks: “Who even designed them?”
Robot number two, “Little Bot,” responds, “It’s unclear. We checked their code … no creator serial number.”
The third bot offers an explanation that’s typical of where we are academically and philosophically:
That’s because they were made by an “unfathomable” deity that created them for no apparent reason out of dust. Just kidding. They came from a very warm soup.
By “warm soup,” it means the impossibility of unguided chemical evolution. This is not science; it’s science wishful-thinking fiction.
The late R.C. Sproul (1939–2017) wrote, “God’s existence is the chief element in constructing any worldview. To deny this chief premise is to set one’s sails for the island of nihilism. This is the darkest continent of the darkened mind — the ultimate paradise of the fool.” ((R. C. Sproul, The Consequences of Ideas: Understanding the Concepts That Shaped Our World (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2000), 171.))
The determiner of new family relationships is civil government (the State), that is becoming less civil as it attacks the biblical family. Richard Page, formerly a magistrate in the United Kingdom, was blocked from returning to a non-executive director role at a National Health Service because he “expressed his view that, wherever possible, children do best with a mother and a father.”
Despite having served as a magistrate in Kent for 15 years with an exemplary record, Richard was reported for his comments, and, following an investigation, was disciplined by the Lord Chancellor and Lord Chief Justice. He was told that his views about family life were “discriminatory against same-sex couples” and was barred from sitting as a magistrate until he had received “equality training.” ((“Judge appeals punishment for saying children do best with mom and dad,” WND (March 10, 2019): http://bit.ly/2TteJIw))
David Brooks, a New York Times Op-Ed columnist who writes about politics, culture and the social sciences, declared in The Atlantic that the “nuclear family was a mistake.” ((David, Brooks “The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake,” The Atlantic (March 2020): https://bit.ly/3cICHVx )) Not to be outdone, there’s Sophie Lewis’ book Full Surrogacy Now: Feminist Against Family, “a polemic that calls for abolishing the family” ((Marie Solis, “We Can’t Have a Feminist Future Without Abolishing the Family,” Vice.com (February 21, 2020): https://bit.ly/2yZF0VT)) and “open-sourced, fully collaborative gestation.” How would this be accomplished? Reproduction would be controlled by the State.