Today I was sad to learn that the BE’ER SHEVA FRINGE-FINGERED LIZARD was on the critically threatened species list. These beautiful creatures are struggling to deal with climatic and social changes, but unfortunately they are not the only ones. There are over one million different kinds of animals on the threatened species list. It's a little depressing to imagine so many innocent animals facing extinction, and this is only the tip of the iceberg.
There is no doubt that a million species seems like a lot, but this only represents a small fraction of the animal kingdom we share the world with today. Even more daunting is that throughout history, man has cataloged hundreds of millions of other ancient animals that once roamed the earth but had plummeted into extinction. Why so many extinct animals? Why didn’t they survive?
Of course the question that should be asked is, if you believe that God created all of these animals, why did He kill them all off…completely? Did they sin? Did they present a moral dilemma to the world? Perhaps He is making up ideas for animals as he goes, experimenting with them to see how long they will last? The trash heap of failed animal species is much like a writer’s wastebasket who can’t figure out how to start his story…filled with crinkled papers full of bad ideas.
Now fathom this: Over 99% of all animal species that once inhabited the earth are now extinct. That means that God has a 1% success rate. An abysmal percentage when considering this is supposed to be the most powerful and perfect being ever known. Even if we take into consideration that humans may have had a hand in the extinction of thousands or even millions of animal species, this is still insignificant to the vast amount of species that have met their demise-permanently without any help from you or me. So again, you can see where a curious mind might want to know why there have been so many mistakes. And if they weren’t mistakes, why did God decide to go through the morbid exercise of creating and destroying animals wholesale when he knew they wouldn’t work out in the end anyway.
Perhaps the world wide flood accounts for the 99%. But wait…if we assume the flood story is true, at least two of every animal was saved on the Ark. So according to the Bible, no animals became extinct during the flood. In fact, God was trying to prevent it-that was the whole point (of course he could have just conjured up some new ones, but that’s a story for another day). So why did they die out?
Ponder the two different explanations we have today for life’s origins. There is creationism which states that a perfect God created all living creatures. If this is true, we have to conclude that he either planned for nearly all of them to be extinct (for what purpose?) or he didn’t know what he was doing. Either way, I think it paints a much different picture of God than what Christians normally perceive of him. Alternatively, we have evolution which explains in natural terms why extinction does and should take place. The “survival of the fittest” logic fits quite nicely here. We know that life experiments with different genetic combinations that can sometimes enhance a species’ probability for survival. If a species can no longer remain viable in it's environment, it will eventually die out. The animals we see active today are the “survivors” from a long line of animal “experiments” that happened to work. So why is evolution so hard to accept?
Fast Facts
*Extinction is a necessary aspect of the evolutionary process.
*Earth has seen an estimated 5 mass extinctions during its history.
*A mass extinction wiped out the dinosaurs approximately 65 million years ago.
*Approximately 50% of mammals that have become extinct since the 1800s lived in Australia.
*Studies show that smaller mammals are less vulnerable to extinction than larger ones.
Human Involvement
Fossil records show that the overall number of species on Earth has generally increased over time. However, recent increases in species extinction are believed to have been caused by human interference.
