Just So

Romans 1:25
“Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen.”

I used to love it when my elementary school teacher read stories to the class. She had some favorite stories. One of her favorite collections was Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories. The idea of each story was to give a fictional account of how certain features of various animals came to be. Of course, Kipling was not presenting a scientific thesis. He expected his stories to be received as works of imagination. So in his “The Elephant Child”, we learn about a button-nosed young elephant who was bothering a crocodile. The crocodile caught the Elephant Child by his nose and pulled, and his nose stretched into the long trunk we have today.

What has always struck me since I became a Christian is how similar many evolutionary ideas are to Kipling’s imagination. For example, there are those zoologists who maintain that giraffes developed gradually longer necks in order to be able to get food from higher branches of trees. The idea is that of a multi-generational “Just So” story, and it does not account for the many extra features found in a giraffe’s neck and anatomy – not just the neck’s length.

A recent academic account has suggested that flight developed in therapod dinosaurs by the creatures flapping their arms, and that is how their arms eventually became wings as they evolved into birds.

Of course, the evolutionary articles are much more sophisticated than I have suggested here. But, in kind, they are really not much more than clever “Just So” stories. We do not need such stories because the Bible explains clearly how God put life on this Earth.

We pray, Father, for freedom from the need to believe Just So stories. Instead, Lord, we pray that people will give You the honor You deserve for all that You have done. Amen.

Author: Paul F. Taylor

Ref: Kipling, R. (Candlewick edition 2004), Just So Stories. Image: Public Domain.