Will Obama Celebrate Lucy Today?

As Google has reminded us all today, November 24, 2015, marks the 41st anniversary of the discovery in Ethiopia of the australopithecine popularly known as Lucy. Today’s Google Doodle honors the supposed human ancestor, and the drawing illustrates the worldview that believes in a supposed gradual evolution from ape to modern man, with Lucy in between. (Interestingly, November 24 is also the anniversary of Darwin’s Origin of Species.)

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According to evolutionists, Lucy walked on two legs, and the group she represents is a distant ancestor of humanity (though how closely related is disputed even in their camp). US President Barack Obama even recently “met” Lucy and commented, almost reverently, on how she shows how all mankind is related to one another.

Obama stated, “We are reminded that Ethiopians, Americans, all the people of the world are part of the same human family, the same chain. And as one of the professors who was describing the artifacts correctly pointed out, so much of the hardship and conflict and sadness and violence that occurs around the world is because we forget that fact. We look at superficial differences as opposed to seeing the fundamental connection that we all share.”

And as I said in my post then, “We do not need to look to Lucy to unite us as part of some evolutionary human family. God’s Word makes it clear that we are all one family, not because of some alleged evolutionary connection, but because we’re all descended from Adam and Eve, who were specially created by God. We do not all belong to different races. We’re all one race—the human race.”

Sadly, this evolutionary influence is creeping into the church and being promoted by groups like BioLogos.

Really, this Google Doodle highlights where our culture is headed. Our supposed evolutionary ancestry is increasingly being celebrated—but it’s nothing more than a major tenet of the religion of naturalism. Google isn’t promoting science—they are promoting an interpretation of the past that is a key idea in the atheistic religion of naturalism. But as our culture moves farther and farther from biblical authority, we can only expect this kind of celebration of our alleged evolutionary past to continue, even creeping into the church.

But Lucy wasn’t a human ancestor. She’s just an extinct variety of ape. There is nothing about her to suggest that she’s a transitional form between ape-like and human-like. It’s simply an interpretation of the fossils from an evolutionary worldview.

Now, the Google Doodle shows Lucy (the one character that is drawn in color in the doodle) walking upright, very much like humans. But Lucy didn’t walk upright! That’s an interpretation based off a reconstruction of Lucy’s leg and hip bones and some fossilized footprints—clearly human footprints—found in Tanzania, far from Lucy’s resting place. Because these footprints are considered by the evolutionists to have been made too early to be humans, it’s assumed that a creature like Lucy must have made them. But Lucy (and others of her species that were later discovered) had ape hips, ape shoulders, ape wrists, ape fingers, and ape toes—they didn’t make those footprints! It’s an interpretation imposed on the fossils because of an evolutionary worldview. You can learn more about the idea that Lucy walked upright in “Lucy: Did She Walk Like Us?”

We have a world-class hologram exhibit here at the Creation Museum that features Lucy. It shows how evolutionists and creationists come to the evidence—Lucy’s bones—with completely different starting points, and so they reach entirely different conclusions because of those starting points. From a biblical worldview it’s clear that Lucy is just an extinct variety of ape, amazingly designed for a tree-dwelling, knuckle-walking existence, and that she tells us nothing about human ancestry. She does, however, point toward a time after the Flood when there was more variety in the ape kind that has slowly died out.

You can learn more about Lucy and other supposed human ancestors in “Did Humans Really Evolve from Apelike Creatures?,” or in Dr. David Menton’s DVD Lucy—She’s No Lady!

By the way, it’s no wonder Obama has such a shifting worldview. Instead of anchoring his worldview/morality to the absolute authority of God’s Word, he anchors it the bones of Lucy—to the ever-shifting beliefs of man—to a man centered religion! That’s why we see moral relativism permeating the nation more and more. We need to pray for our leaders that they will turn to the God of Creation and believe His Word and anchor their worldview to one true God—the Creator God of the Bible.

You know, November 24 is a day that my family celebrates for a completely different reason. Today is my first grandson Malachi’s 16th birthday. We celebrate that God gave us this special gift—a grandson made in God’s image—on this day, and we think that’s a much better reason to celebrate November 24. And Malachi praises God too because he has put his faith and trust in the Lord Jesus Christ. And that’s more important than anything else in this life. Even more important than being President of the United States.

Thanks for stopping by and thanks for praying,
Ken

This item was written with the assistance of AiG’s research team.