Ten Lies and Ten Truths (Second Edition) Read online

  My sense is--most people today don't want to be challenged to think. If that describes you, don't read this book! But if you enjoy being confronted with new perspectives, and truly desire to know the truth--this book is for you.

  Jim Reimann, Editor of the #1

  Best-Selling Updated Editions

  of My Utmost for His Highest

  and Streams in the Desert

  Several recent books have described the modem day lies that are the foundations for today's beliefs and behavior. Lies about truth, God and faith. But Parker Hudson puts flesh and blood on these lies. His stories explore the inevitable results of living outside of truth. While Parker makes it clear that the stories and the dialogues are fiction, they grip the reader because we already know all the characters: they are our family, friends, neighbors and colleagues. This well written fiction is more real than reality.

  Michael Youssef, Ph.D., Author of

  Divine Discontent

  Parker Hudson's book TEN LIES AND TEN TRUTHS is must reading. Brilliant and insightful, it teaches using contemporary parables that are fun to read and convicting. Read it today and give it to your friends.

  Dr. Ted Baehr, Publisher of

  Movieguide ( r)

  TEN LIES AND TEN TRUTHS

  Second Edition

  The stories herein are the same as in the original edition, but the references at the end of each chapter have been expanded and updated.

  TEN LIES AND TEN TRUTHS

  Second Edition

  Copyright © 2005 and 2016

  Parker Hudson

  Edited by Suzan Robertson

  Cover design by Marshall Hudson

  Printed in the United States of America

  Electronic Edition: 978-0-9968665-1-4

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission, except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles.

  For information:

  www.parkerhudson.com

  And for free download updates:

  www.parkerhudson.com/blog

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  FOREWORD

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  AFTERWORD

  ALSO BY PARKER HUDSON

  FOR OUR GRANDCHILDREN

  AND THEIR

  GRANDCHILDREN

  That they may love, seek and defend the truth

  FOREWORD

  These stories have been three years in the writing and refining, and it is our hope that they will linger in the reading.

  We hope that you are touched by each of the stories, and that they cause you to ask among your family, friends and colleagues, "What really is the truth?"

  Second Edition

  Truth does not change with the passage of time, but how we view, analyze, and report the truth does.

  With this second edition we have returned to the original sources used for the truths described in these stories and have updated their current references. And we have added new resources that were not available ten years ago.

  We encourage you to read a story, examine your thoughts and beliefs in that area, and then go on a quest of your own to better understand what is the real truth.

  1

  The Problem

  Pamela Stevens hung her wet overcoat behind the office door and glanced out her fourth floor window, noticing that the Washington Monument had disappeared in the fog. She walked to her desk and deposited her bagel and coffee right next to the problem.

  I guess this is the day I gotta see Sam.

  The file. She had started it three months earlier. As the lead reporter on Public Television System's "Salute to Darwin," a celebration of the 200th anniversary of the scientist's birthday scheduled for later in 2009, Pamela had traveled to several unusual places. She'd visited the Galapagos Islands and the Andes, as well as London, where she and her husband had taken a week away from their two small boys. She'd shot remarkable footage of animal habitats and interviewed some incredibly intelligent people on what Darwin's theories had proven about evolution, natural selection, and the origin of life. She knew that almost every corner of science was indebted to Darwin and his followers for proving that life is constantly changing and evolving to higher and more complex species and structures.

  As she sipped her coffee, Pamela ran two fingers along the pendant hanging from her neck. It was a small piece of fossilized bone given to her in Africa, believed to be from an antelope-like creature millions of years old.

  It would be an awesome two-hour celebration of the great man and the truths that he had proven. The special, scheduled to air in three months, would probably win Stevens and PTS another award, like the many that hung throughout her office.

  Not bad for only being ten years out of school.

  She focused again on the inch thick file, and frowned.

  Picking it up, she turned toward the window and opened it. Inside were many pages-some she'd written by hand, others she'd typed. Some pages had just a few notes. Others were full. And there were photocopies of several articles.

  Pamela sighed and typed a message on her computer requesting a meeting for that afternoon.

  Sam Hollis, Pamela's boss, had been a fixture at PTS for twenty-five years. An icon of the documentary industry, Sam had been everywhere and done everything. Twice. A brilliant African-- American from New England, he'd begun his career tracing ancestries in western Africa and making vivid documentaries about the slave trade. His natural gift for video reporting had landed him at PTS, where he had risen quickly and was now the senior producer. Which was why Pamela needed to see him.

  That afternoon Pamela entered Sam's large corner office, which was stuffed with memorabilia, photos and artifacts covering two tables and most of the floor from decades of traveling to the far corners of the earth. Sam smiled at his protégé and motioned her to join him at his desk, half-covered with unfinished projects. They shook hands.

  "How was your New Year's?" the older man asked, pointing Pamela to a chair and moving several stacks so they could see each other.

  "Fine." Pamela sat down, the file in her lap. "We had a few friends over. But then I had to leave on the third for Santiago. We taped the Andes segment for the Darwin documentary. I just got back yesterday."

  "How was it?"

  "Incredible. We got great shots of places where Darwin took long treks away from the ship in 1835. He was only 26."

  "How is the video quality?" "Excellent."

  "Then you should be close to final editing." He smiled. "This may be another award winner."

  Pamela knew Sam's compliment was genuine and intended for the whole team.

  "Yes." She paused. "Actually, that's why I wanted to talk with you."

  "What's up?"

  "Well." Pamela took a deep breath. "We've produced a great documentary on Darwin, edifying his theories of Evolution and Natural Selection." She gently twirled the pendant with her right hand. "The problem is that I'm not sure his theories make any sense."

  Sam's eyes widened. "What do you mean?"

  Pamela slowly opened her file. "As I've gone through this process and traveled to all these places and interviewed all these people, the same thing keeps happening. Each of these brilliant people repeats some version of the 'fact' that Darwin's theories are well proven and beyond doubt. But when I ask them even the simplest question, there always seems to
be a problem."

  Sam scratched his head. "Problems with evolution? Like what?"

  "Well, I'm talking about macro-evolution-they call it speciation. Not just that later generations of the same species are larger or slightly different. But the idea that one species actually changes into another. Take as an example the fossil record.

  Wouldn't it make sense that if all of the species we see on earth today evolved from earlier species, we would find the fossil remains of those in-between creatures? Like the ones that would be half way between a dinosaur and a bird, or between almost anything and something else?"

  "Yes, of course."

  "Well, there aren't any."

  "Impossible," Sam said. He knitted his brows and swiveled in his chair.

  "That's what I thought, too. But there really aren't. Well, there are a couple that Darwinists hold up as possibles. But compared to the tens of millions of fossils of species that existed earlier"-she raised the pendant slightly-"and either still exist today or are extinct, there really are none of the 'tweeners."'

  "How can that be?"

  "I don't know. It even worried Darwin. He had to devote a whole chapter in Origin of Species to try to explain the problem away. I'm sure he thought that by 150 years later, we'd have found many of these fossils. But we haven't. Evolutionists today still call it a 'mystery."'

  The older man leaned back, accompanied by a creak from his chair. "I've never heard that. I find it hard to believe."

  Pamela nodded and turned a page. "And here's a related one. There may have been life on earth for four or five billion years, but mostly it was bacteria. Then, about 550 million years ago, all of the basic body designs for all animals today suddenly appeared over a short period-about 20 million years. The first little animal traceable to us, through fish, amphibians, reptiles and mammals, suddenly showed up, fully formed. And then all through the fossil record, there are these disjointed 'jumps,' where nothing changes for a long time and then suddenly there is a new creature present, with none of the transitions that Darwin's theory would require."

  "What do the scientists say about this?"

  "They just repeat that the missing fossils will surely be found, as Darwin predicted."

  "But I'm sure I've seen textbooks-when I was a kid, even-with those intermediate forms clearly displayed." Sam made an upward motion with his hands.

  She nodded. "That's what I'm talking about. Everyone says that they 'must' exist. So far there are tens of millions of scientifically catalogued fossils, but few if any of the in between ones."

  He sat in silence as Pamela continued. "And that's not all. In fact, there's lots more. Do you want to hear them?"

  Sam nodded. He leaned forward and offered her a chocolate candy from a glass jar on his desk.

  She smiled. "Thanks." Each unwrapped a candy and let it dissolve in a few moments of silence.

  Pamela continued. "Okay. Here's one of my personal questions. It's the eye thing. How does vision evolve? I mean, how and why do all of the incredibly complex pieces-nerves, receptors, lenses, the optical part of the brain-all of that-start to fit together, long before there is any vision, to create what you eventually need for an eye to function? What's the 'natural selection' going on, if there's no payoff of actual vision for a zillion years, to keep the process going? How does a lens 'learn' to focus, if there's nothing yet connected to it? And then how could this near miracle happen over and over again in so many different species and so many different places?"

  Sam shook his head. "I don't know. I never thought about it.

  What do the scientists say?" He reached for another chocolate, unwrapped it and popped it into his mouth.

  "They're not sure. They just say that it must have occurred over a long time. I mean, how would some blind thing just happen to develop all of the myriad parts necessary for vision while still blind? What trait would it have that would make it better, and therefore dominant, when it was still as blind as everything else?

  I don't get it."

  Sam sat in silence, pondering her words. "Anything else?" He seemed to have lost the chipper spirit with which he'd greeted his friend.

  Pamela turned a few pages. "As a sort of an aside, Darwin assumed that small building blocks, like bacteria, would be simple organisms from which more complex life forms evolved. But with modem microscopes, we now know that bacteria and other tiny creatures are actually incredibly complex, fine tuned, well-oiled machines. In fact, it's difficult to find any form of life on earth that isn't very, very complex. That suggests to me that everything started out complex, rather than evolving from something simpler. There just aren't any simple life forms anywhere."

  Sam frowned and leaned forward again, his hands on the desk. "So what are you saying?"

  Pamela's eye fell on a page in her folder. "Oh, here's one you should particularly like. Did you know that Darwin thought Negroes were 'tweeners,' a link between apes and humans? By higher humans he and his followers always meant Caucasians."

  "What?" Sam took the page copied from Chapter 6 of The Descent of Man and read aloud.

  At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked, 18 will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the Negro or Australian and the gorilla.

  He looked up at her, perplexed. "So Darwin was a racist?"

  "Sort of, but not out of hate. Just 'science.' He predicted that whites would annihilate the 'savage races' in a few generations. Not because he wanted it-he was opposed to slavery-but because that would be the result of natural selection. How do you like being a link in the chain to better white people?"

  Sam slammed the paper down. "That's absurd!"

  Nodding and holding up her hands, Pamela said, "But that's the theory that we're about to celebrate in our documentary as being a proven fact."

  "It's not true." Sam's anger had risen, along with his voice.

  "And he said the same thing about women. Let me read from chapter 19 of the same book."

  The chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes is shewn by man's attaining to a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than can woman- whether requiring deep thought, reason, or imagination, or merely the use of the senses and hands. If two lists were made of the most eminent men and women in poetry, painting, sculpture, music (inclusive both of composition and performance), history, science, and philosophy, with half-a-dozen names under each subject, the two lists would not bear comparison. We may also infer, from the law of the deviation from averages, so well illustrated by Mr. Galton, in his work on Hereditary Genius, that if men are capable of a decided pre-eminence over women in many subjects, the average of mental power in man must be above that of woman.

  "Ridiculous!"

  "Can you think of any other white male we would honor who 'proved' that blacks and women are inferior to white males?"

  Sam scowled his answer.

  Pamela continued. "It's all part of evolutionary 'fact.' And everyone thinks evolution's true. So is it, or isn't it?"

  "That part isn't."

  "Are you a scientist?"

  "No, but I know I'm not some link between apes and white people!"

  "So with Darwin saying Negroes and women are less than human, and we can find no fossils of any in-between animals, and complex creatures appear almost at once, and no logic fits the evolution of something complex like vision, or flight, then which part of Darwin's theory of evolution do you agree with?"

  Sam stood up and paced toward the window. His hands cut the air as he answered. "I don't know. I never thought about it. I just always thought that evolution was obvious."

  "Right. M
e, too. And if it's not? If it's wrong?"

  Sam stopped and looked out the window. "Then...I don't know. Maybe we just 'happened.' Or something or someone created all of it." He turned back to Pamela. "I can't think of a good answer right now."

  "But if someone or something created us, isn't that kind of defining?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "I mean," Pamela stood up and moved behind her chair, "that if all of this very complex world were created by someone, then wouldn't he, she or it have some ideas on how it ought to work? And what we ought to do and not do?"

  Sam shook his head as he moved back to his desk. "Don't edge toward God and religion. Evolution sounds easier and better to me."

  "But if it's clearly not true?"

  "That may not matter. And how do we know, anyway? Maybe it is true."

  "Well, maybe it is. But in ten minutes we shot it full of major holes, and no one out there seems to have answers that will plug them. Surely we ought to at least give equal time to other theories, when this one is so lame."

  She could see the fury in her boss. He pointed his index finger as he spoke, "Listen, Pamela. You and I are not going to produce our own little show to question two hundred years of proven facts about evolution. Who are we to do that?"

  "But they're not proven facts. That's what everyone thinks, because they don't ask the simplest questions. There are no evolutionary fossils, Sam!"

  "Maybe there are, and we just haven't found them yet." "Come on. You're starting to sound like a preacher, not a reporter, urging me to 'believe' in non-existent fossils. Maybe Darwinism is more of a religion than most religions. Just believe, and it's true."