Darwin was offended at the prospect of himself or his friends and family one day standing before their Creator in judgment. But the existence of a creation implies a Creator. This is the great problem of the Christian faith. Shame is essentially the fear of rejection, and the judgment of an all knowing God is the ultimate form of rejection. The most common psychological response to such potential rejection is to reject another before being rejected oneself. The Christian faith teaches an all knowing God who knows the innermost thoughts of every man and woman, a God who will judge every man and woman. (Hebrews 4:12-13; 2 Corinthians 5:10-11; Rev. 20:11-15.) Nietzsche concluded that such a God was dangerous because He knew too much. So Nietzsche killed Him. Darwin was one of the many assassins motivated by the same passions as Nietzsche. The assassination that Nietzsche would perpetrate on the philosophical level would be corroborated by Darwin on the biological level. And by their own words, their motivations were the same: the elimination of a God who had the power to reject us, or as Darwin put it, to "everlastingly punish" us. The theory of evolution was Darwin's means of eliminating such a God.
It is interesting to weigh the above quotation of Darwin against the conservative and liberal wings of contemporary Christian society. "Fundamentalism" or evangelical Christianity is a grace-based religion. It teaches that the free gift of forgiveness and eternal life is available to any person who believes on the Christ regardless of how wicked or depraved they may be. Liberal Protestantism is essentially a morality-based religion. It preaches the social gospel of Reinhold Neibor. When one surveys the attitudes of these various religious groups on the question of evolution, one consistently sees grace-based evangelicalism embracing the doctrine of creation. With no fear of one's Creator, there is no motivation to eliminate Him. Yet liberal main-line Protestant denominations consistently come out in vocal support of the doctrine of evolution. This is the logical outgrowth of a morality-based religion. One is not certain if they have lived up to the demands of one's Creator, and with that fear is motivation to reduce Him in sovereignty and stature. Scientists, philosophers and religions that fear the rejection of the Christian God uniformly hold to the evolutionary theory. Evangelical Christians who have no fear of judgment by their Creator are uniformly creationists.
This connection between evolutionary theory, the denial of moral accountability to one's Creator, and its corollary%u2014a profound hostility to the Christian faith%u2014 are clearly evidenced in evolutionary literature of today. The Humanist Manifesto states that the very first tenet of humanism is an adherence to the evolutionary theory. "First: Religious humanists regard the universe as self-existing and not created." If one examines the philosophical underpinnings the humanist manifesto however, one sees clearly that it is not science, but moral philosophy that drives it %u2014 what might be called the "politics of sex." The Humanist Manifesto I states: "Fifth: Humanism asserts that the nature of the universe makes unacceptable any supernatural or cosmic guarantees of human values." The political firestorms surrounding, for example, abortion and homosexuality - the politics of sex - are assertions of values. Humanism rejects as "unacceptable any supernatural or cosmic guarantees of human values." These "philosophical" and "social" (political) aspects of the evolutionary theory are also acknowledged by Jacques Barzun:
Clearly, both believers and unbelievers in Natural Selection agreed that Darwinism had succeeded as an orthodoxy, as a rallying point for innumerable scientific, philosophical, and social movements." (Italics added.)
And again, we see this connection between the "new morality" and evolution illustrated by George Marsden in prestigious Nature magazine.
In any case, creation scientists are correct in perceiving that in modern culture %u2018evolution' often involves far more than biology. The basic ideologies of the civilization, including its entire moral structure, are at issue. Evolution is sometimes the key mythological element in a philosophy that functions as a virtual religion.
Julian Huxley, one of the most prominent evolutionary proponents (and atheists) of modern time echoes this connection between the evolutionary theory and the reformulating of western values and morality.
"The beliefs of this religion of evolutionary humanism are not based on revelation in the supernatural sense, but on the revelations that science and learning have given us about man and the universe. . . A humanist religion will have the task of redefining the categories of good and evil in terms of fulfillment and of desirable or undesirable realizations of potentiality, and setting up new targets for its morality to aim at. . . The humanist goal must therefore be. . . the Fulfillment Society."
Obviously the reordering of social values and morality %u2014 the creation of the "Fulfillment Society" is only possible if one does not face the grim prospect of facing Nietzsche's God in judgment. The world must join with Nietzsche in assassinating such a God. Because of this logical necessity, the Humanist Manifesto II affirmed: "As non-theists, we begin with humans, not God, nature not deity. * * * But we discover no divine purpose or providence for the human species. While there is much that we do not know, humans are responsible for what we are or will become. No deity will save us; we must save ourselves. Promises of immortal salvation or fear of eternal damnation are both illusory and harmful." This disdain for the Christian faith expressed by Darwin and Nietzsche is thus central to the Humanist Manifesto. It is also central to the evolutionary philosophy of Julian Huxley.
In the evolutionary system of thought there is no longer need or room for the supernatural. The earth was not created; it evolved. So did all the plants that inhabit it, including our human selves, mind and soul, as well as brain and body. So did religion.
Evolutionary man can no longer take refuge from his loneliness by creeping for shelter into the arms of a divinized father figure whom he himself has created, nor escape from the responsibility of making decisions by sheltering under the umbrella of divine authority, nor absolve himself from the hard task of meeting his present problems and planning his future by relying on the will of an omniscient, but unfortunately inscrutable providence."
This same union between radical evolutionary thought and disdain for the Christian faith can be seen time after time by prominent evolutionists. Consider the statement by Richard Bozarth in American Atheist:
[E]volution destroys utterly and finally the very reason Jesus' earthly life was supposedly made necessary. Destroy Adam and Eve and the original sin, and in the rubble you will find the sorry remains of the son of god. Take away the meaning of his death. If Jesus was not the redeemer who died for our sins, and this is what evolution means, then Christianity is nothing.
The engine that drives the Darwinian philosophy is clearly not the quest for absolute truth. This anti-theistic bias of modern evolutionary theory was nowhere more evident than in 1967 at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia. Mathematician D.S. Ulam presented his conclusions that the eye could not have evolved to its level of complexity in the amount of time available. A French mathematician named Schützenberger concurred, observing: "there is a considerable gap in the neo-Darwin theory of evolution, and we believe this gap to be of such a nature that it cannot be bridged within the current conception of biology." The theological implications were too much for the neo-Darwinists to bear. They clearly saw the mathematical evidence as an attack on their core religious values. Finally, C.H. Waddington broke the uneasy silence and said what all of them were thinking. "Your argument is simply that life must have come from special creation." Schützenberger and several anonymous voices in the audience shouted "No!" It was the most damning counter-attack one in academia could level at another. After all, everyone knows that the special creation is an anti-intellectual religion, and naturalism the intellectual one. In effect then, the mathematical argument was anti-intellectual. Of course, what Waddington's statement really showed was not that mathematics was anti-intellectual. What his statement demonstrated was that evolution is not a science, but a religion%u2014and a religion that its devotees will defend with religious fervor.
The leading evolutionists in attendance were perturbed by Ulam's math, and demanded it be reverse-engineered to fit their religious beliefs. Looking at Ulam's math, neo-Darwinist Ernst Mayr shamelessly insisted, "Somehow or other by adjusting these figures we will come out all right. We are comforted by the fact that evolution has occurred." The unswerving faith and religious zealotry of Mayr and other leading evolutionary scientists is both amusing and revealing. Nevertheless, such statements do little to encourage the critical mind about the mathematical objectivity of current models which have "discovered" that mitochondrial DNA is mutating at the exact rate necessary to coincide with the point in time man and his ancestral primates were alleged to have diverged. It would be naive indeed to receive such models with an uncritical acceptance as if they held no hidden agenda, nor any reverse-engineering of data to fit the preconceived theory of evolution.
When a creationist seeks to advance valid scientific data that might support creationism, the evolutionist is threatened not so much because they are competing scientific theories, but because the creationist theory advances core beliefs very much in conflict with the core beliefs of the evolutionist. The magnitude of the reaction against creation science therefore is a pretty good indicator of how closely a person's evolutionary views are tied to fundamental core beliefs about the non-existence of God.
Is evolution simply a neutral paradigm dispassionately advanced by men of science in their quest for truth? Darwin, Huxley, the Humanist Manifesto, and the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia %u2014 the leading scientists, proponents of evolutionary theory, and their literature, have not left this option open to us.
The engine that drives the Darwinian philosophy is not the quest for absolute truth. The great proponents of evolutionary theory have been uniformly driven by a profound disdain for an omnipotent Creator who makes moral demands of his creatures. Their theological agenda is reflected in their literature and in their scientific conventions. The God of the Christian faith was killed by Nietzsche because He was dangerous%u2014He knew too much. The God of the Christian faith is dangerous as the Humanist Manifesto warns us, because a God who holds the power of granting eternal salvation is also capable of sentencing one to eternal condemnation. "Promises of immortal salvation or fear of eternal damnation are both illusory and harmful." (Humanist Manifesto, supra.) Evolution is the engine for destroying or eliminating such a dangerous God. It is mankind's attempt to reject and eliminate that God before He can reject and eliminate mankind.
The atheistic statements are not ancillary conclusions, they are the moral and theological impetus for advancing the theory. The evolutionary is not a neutral scientific theory that "evolved" (to borrow a phrase) out of sincere scientific inquiry. It is an artifice of neutrality reverse-engineered to advance a naturalistic (atheistic) world view, which has itself been purposefully selected to sustain a vast array of beliefs on theology, morality and philosophy.
Many scientific questions, particularly the question of origins (both cosmological and biological) hold profound metaphysical, theological and philosophical implications. Scientists, like all men, hold opinions on these all important questions. It is only natural therefore that their biases and presuppositions should undergird their theories and drive their supporting paradigms. Indeed, we have seen this to be the case, from Einstein to Hawking to Darwin to Huxley to the congress at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia in 1967. This then is the current status of the scientific community. The womb that bore the theory of evolution is not a neutral one. Neither has it nursed at the breast of neutrality. Evolution is not a neutral scientific theory that coincidentally yields profound theological implications. It is a carefully crafted artifice that has been reverse-engineered to give the appearance of scientific neutrality to a system beliefs. Humanity's autonomy from a sovereign Creator is the religion of the leading scientists and evolutionary thinkers of our day. Their beliefs are fundamentally religious and philosophical in nature, and derive from a world view that seeks to establish man's autonomy, removing him from a position of accountability to the Creator of the universe. Evolutionary theory is the currency used to support these religious beliefs by draping them in the garb of scientific legitimacy.
Why do the nations rage,
And the people imagine a vain thing?
The kings of this earth set themselves,
And the rulers take counsel together
Against the Lord, and against His anointed, saying:
Let us break their bonds asunder
And cast away there cords from us. Psalm 2
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Chapter 6: Continued |
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