The habit of fixing upon a dogma and calling it “settled science” is a kind of idolatry that places “science” in the seat of God, appoints certain scientists as priests capable of giving answers no fallible human can offer, and feigns certainty where real questions remain. The great irony is that this image of scientist-as-infallible-priest makes them seem like the caricature of medieval monks charging their hero Galileo with heresy for his dissent from the consensus. As challenges to Darwin mount, we should be able to articulate why “settled science” makes such a poor god.

In 1973, evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky wrote that “nothing in biology makes sense except in light of evolution.” Almost 50 years later, an increasing number of scientists are asking whether evolution makes any sense in light of what we now know from biology.  
A recent long-form essay in The Guardian signals just how urgent the problem has become for the most dominant theory in the history of the sciences. In it, author Stephen Buranyi gives voice to a growing number of scientists who think it’s time for a “new theory of evolution.”   
For a long time, descent with slight modifications and natural selection have been “the basic” (and I’d add, unchallengeable) “story of evolution.” Organisms change, and those that survive pass on traits. Though massaged a bit to incorporate the discovery of DNA, the theory of evolution by natural selection has dominated for 150 years, especially in biology. The “drive to survive” is credited as the creative force behind all the artistry and engineering we see in nature.   
“The problem,” writes Buranyi, is that “according to a growing number of scientists,” this basic story is “absurdly crude and misleading.” For one thing, Darwinian evolution assumes much of what it needs to be explained. For instance, consider the origin of light-sensitive cells that rearranged to become the first eye, or the blood vessels that became the first placenta. How did these things originate? According to one University of Indiana biologist, “we still do not have a good answer. The classic idea of gradual change, one happy accident at a time,” he says, “has so far fallen flat.”  
This scientific doubt about Darwin has been simmering for a while.
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The Bible is clear.  In the opening account of the beginnings of human history we learn that our earliest forbears disobeyed their Creator and suffered punishment, as they had been warned.  That punishment is death – cruel, ugly, horrible, unnatural death.  That is our inheritance from that beginning to this day. Death is the consequence of sinful disobedience.  Trivialise death and you trivialise sin. 

I do not fear death.  There are reasons why I would welcome it, but I definitely have no thought of ending my present life.  I want all that to be clear.
Like most people, I have never been pre-occupied with thoughts of death or dying.   However, also like most people, death has been no stranger in my life.   I was a teenager when my sister died and later my mother.  My mother’s death, in tragic circumstances, deeply affected me. I had thoughts then about there being some deeper meaning to life.  Mum had taught me prayers as a child, and I had been to Sunday School, but I had more questions than answers on life.  Dad died the year after I was married, and one brother a few years later.   My closest brother died later still, and after sixty-eight years together, my dear wife departed last year.  I am acquainted with death.
A dictionary definition of ‘death’ says:
1/ Final cessation of vital functions;
2/ Event that terminates life.
This turns us to the meaning of ‘life’ where the definition is not so simple.  In fact, it is lengthy and complicated.  Personally, I think of words like ‘being’ and ‘existing’.  Briefly, one has to know about life to understand death.
In this enlightened age we tend to ‘go online’ for more information about most things.  So, I searched ‘death and dying’, and wow!  I was surprised.  What I had always understood to be a taboo subject was up front there.  I was presented with many options as to where I could go for information:   ‘Goodreads.com’ offered me 1,347 quotes on death and dying.   Among other options were ‘Death is nothing at all’, ’82 death quotes that comfort and inspire you’, ‘119 death quotes that will bring relief’, and there were many others.   Those that I sampled were generally upbeat about death, and I was supposed to feel warmed and reassured after reading them.
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Written by T. M. Suffield |
Friday, June 17, 2022
Early on in the Torah we find “land” referring to all that God has made unless it is modified, for example, the “land of Egypt.” Later the “land” without reference is more likely to refer to Israel as originally given to the Hebrews by Yahweh, “The Land” as though it has capital letters. It’s almost a proper name.

“He’s no longer in the land of the living,” we say with great solemnity as we pronounce that our friend has fallen asleep on the sofa.
It’s a phrase we use fairly commonly, either to mean prosaically, “they’re dead”—which is actually uncommon because we prefer cleaner euphemisms that hide the reality entirely—or to refer to someone who is asleep.
We get that idiom of death and sleep being related from the Bible, though it plays the other way around in the Old Testament, with the dead being referred to as asleep. Like all idioms it hints at more than it shows, because only a culture with a profound ungirding belief in the resurrection of the dead would refer to the dead as sleeping.
We also get the phrase the “land of the living” from the Bible. I count 15 Old Testament occurrences of the word land (אֶ֫רֶץ) with the word living or alive (חַי). Which is not that surprising, the Authorised Version, which most of us know as the KJV, has had an incredibly large impact on the English language over the last 400 years.
Here’s the kicker, I’m not convinced the phrase “land of the living” means the same thing in Hebrew as we take it to mean in English.
Which is always a thought worth exploring. In fact, as those 15 references cross five different books of the Bible it’s possible that they don’t all use the term the same way, but we should always assume that those written later would be very aware of how the term was used in earlier parts of the Bible.
Why am I not convinced?
Hebrew has plenty of ways to say ‘alive,’ without the poetic flourish about the land added in. Which on its own we could dismiss as poetic language, especially in the Psalms, that is then picked up by Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. We could, but we shouldn’t. The Bible’s authors are often poetic and use the heights of rhetoric available to them to express the heart of God in beautiful language, and every flourish has purpose and meaning. There are no spare words.
So, what does it mean? My contention is that the land of the living is the New Jerusalem, and that it is us who live in the land of the dying.
We will need to nuance this a little along the way, but the first thing that should clue us in is the use of the word land. A very common word in the Old Testament, from the first sentence onwards (literally: from the head God created the sky and the land), and a word that as the story develops seems to change meaning.
Early on in the Torah we find ‘land’ referring to all that God has made unless it is modified, for example, the ‘land of Egypt.’ Later the ‘land’ without reference is more likely to refer to Israel as originally given to the Hebrews by Yahweh, “The Land” as though it has capital letters. It’s almost a proper name.
So, we have it modified by ‘living,’ where is this place? The place of the dead in the Old Testament is never referred to as a ‘land,’ which is of course because it’s under the ground. It’s the grave, even if ‘Abraham’s bosom,’ while the part of it for the righteous dead is not specifically unpleasant, even that is a place of waiting.
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