Monkeys Using Tools?

Every so often, another story comes up in the news about animals that are supposedly demonstrating a more human intelligence because of their ability to use tools. On the Answers in Genesis website alone, we’ve collected and commented on a variety of reports about animals using tools. From spear-making chimpanzees to crows that can use tools to their advantage, evolutionists love to use these as alleged proof that animals are closer to human intelligence than we think. 

For example, in 2005, we wrote about widely circulated stories of gorillas in the wild using tools in an article titled Gorillas and Tools? And do you know what the observers found so impressive then?

A female gorilla crossed a pool of water by using a detached stick to test the water depth and then trying to use it as a walking stick. The second case involved another female gorilla who picked up a dead shrub and used it to lean on while looking for food in a swamp. According to the BBC report, she then placed the trunk down on the swampy ground and used it as a bridge.

You can read two more stories on apes using tools from our weekly News to Note publication at the links below:

• News to Note, “BBC News: ‘Ancient Chimps Used Stone Tools”
• News to Note, “BBC News: ‘Chimpanzees “hunt using spears”’

In another example from 2009–2010, there were a few stories about the intelligence of crows.    Continue at Ken Ham

Psychiatric Medication and the Image of God

Watch any daytime talk show with an expert medical guest or flip through Time magazine's colorful diagrams, and you'll see that the latest emphasis in neurology, the brain's causal influence on human behavior, has leaked down to the popular level. Many of these experts consider the human being primarily as a physical creature whose actions, feelings, and thoughts for the most part simply manifest neurological activity. Undesirable feelings or behavior, then, should be addressed by ever-more-precise medical methods.

Many Christians have correctly seen the incredible danger such an understanding poses to a biblical worldview, which involves realities beyond what can be seen, touched, or medicated. In other words, we know that a human being involves more than the body. But we also know that the body is a vital aspect of our being as designed by God. So we begin to answer this question---How should Christians think about psychiatric medication?---by considering at least two aspects of what it means for people to be made as the image of God.

1. The Image of God as Union Between Soul and Body

 

The immaterial soul does not function independently of the material body. The soul is not a "ghost in the machine" whose function is autonomous of corporeal mechanisms. God intentionally designed humankind to represent himself in the physical world---a psychosomatic unity comprising both a soul that reflects the immaterial God and also a body that grounds him in material creation.

The keystone passage introducing the image of God is Genesis 1:26: "Then God said, 'Let us make man in our image, after our likeness'." Biblical scholar D. J. A. Clines has pointed out that this phrase is better translated, "Let us make man as our image" for grammatical reasons as well as for historical-contextual reasons. Man, as the image of God, is the physical representation of God's presence in creation.   Continue at Jeremy Pierre