There was a discussion in the Australian edition of the Spectator about how this doyen of British broadcasting has slipped ever more into an anti-human stance, even stating that the planet would be better off without us.

The guy has had an immensely charmed life and while he is not the only one to be blessed, what you can say about those who are greatly blessed is that they fall into roughly three camps.

1. The So-Whatters. Those who seem to take it for granted and see no need to be thankful. Frankly I find such people equal and opposite to the handwringers and equally wrong.

2. The Hand Wringers. People who feel guilty about about the fact they had it better than others and feel as though it would be better if everyone was engulfed in equal misery. Communism is where that ends.

3. The Thankful. People who believe in and worship God understand that He gave them the blessings they have. They examine their lives and say, I was blessed here, I was challenged there, God sometimes took away. I regard myself as blessed and bless God’s name. I read that where much is given, much is required, and so I do what I can, but simply giving it all away to all comers cannot be the right answer, as God could have done that in the first place if that’s what He had in mind. My job is to turn ten talents into ten more, and not be surprised if one-talent guy even has to give me his one.

At the outset of his career we might have thought Uncleborough was a 3 but he seems to have found his way into the 2 camp and this does tend to happen with those whose faith in a creator and Redeemer is weak.

If you wanna be a Job, you gotta know that your Redeemer liveth. Job had a lot, lost the lot, accepted the sovereignty of God in giving and taking, and then got back everything he lost and more.

But while he and his mates got into a mode of whining about environmentalism and other guilt-trippy tropes, God came along in a whirlwind and slapped them all verbally about the head.

I don’t want David Uncleborough to die, despite him chucking Spicer off a bannister and trying to get the lovely Carol Marsh to shoot herself as a kid, and then chucking a bunch of walruses off a cliff in his dotage, I want him to be thankful to God, faithful and believing, and then to live forever in paradise which I fully expect to have even more new species in it than the old one had.

It is not possible for this universe to have been a better place without humans, for, as shown in John’s gospel and other parts of the Bible, without the fact that this was to be the home and stage for the history of salvation, where God the Father would give to God the Son all those souls He had appointed for Him, God the Son, our blessed Jesus Christ would never have made this world and this universe in the first place. Yesterday’s blogpost on this Channel should have made it clear to you why that can be stated unequivocally.

They don’t evolve from one kind to another in observable time. There is some speciation since the flood, but it’s only in short generation animals. They cannot change from kind to kind, the variety within the Kind just gets bigger. Usually taxonomic families of vertebrates which have huge numbers of species in, or species with huge numbers of subspecies and races are short generation animals and those with few are long-generation animals. If you look at that and see where the lines all converge we can conclude that the Flood could have been about 7,000 years ago.

None of that though is particularly relevant to the question of whether humans are animals. This depends on how you define animals. That there is an analogy in Creation between humans and a series of specieisdered notional forebears is not necessarily relevant to that question either. It is all down to the philosophical stance one takes, especially with regard to the finest spiritual revelations that we have, namely the Bible.

I do not have a problem when atheists start wittering on about how great apes and we have all got a deficiency in the gene to make our own vitamin C, this and other things have no bearing on the fact that God could have made us last Thursday, but for the fact He tells us it was a few thousand years earlier than that. Before that you have 14 billion years of universe production, a spurious and impossible in fact start to life and living cells, and then a chain of evolution, culminating in a standing naked ape which gets language and thought in a conundrum not less impossible to understand than the first living cell coming from soup, all of which of course happened only in the eternal foreknowledge of God the Son, who wrote this in His own mind as a plan, so as to make a home and set the stage for those whom the Father was set to give to Him. (John 17 has all of this information if you look carefully, especially John 17 v 24). Once the Logos sets this plan or Logos in motion, bringing even light and the other laws of physics as we know them into being by speaking that which is in His Plan, then we see it does not take 14 billion years, it takes six days. Six like the six wine barrels at the wedding in Cana, Galilee, which were also filled with vintage wine from water and not wine that appeared to have been made a few minutes earlier. It is a mature creation, it looks partly like it could have evolved, but we are told the real truth, which explains the things that are in it which by no means could have evolved.

Atheists are a bit like some folk who have autism, they have if you like a kind of spiritual autism becuase they look at this world and try to understand it without reference to the Creator. In fact, they really don’t want to know Him.

This is of course very sad, because knowing Him is really all there is, all there is that lasts.

You know what I am talking about.