Issues Tearing Our Nation's Fabric The Center for Reclaiming America

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Evolution
Chapter Five*

The theory of evolution conceived by Charles Darwin and published in 1859 in his book On the Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection or, The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, represents the most fundamental challenge to the Christian faith in 2,000 years. Darwin’s ideas, which provoked laughter and lampoons in virtually every newspaper of his own day, and a theory for which to this day there is virtually no reliable scientific evidence, have become the cornerstone of modern humanism. Society’s faith in the evolutionary hypothesis is the clearest indicator of the gulf that separates secular humanism from the Christian faith and the "special revelation" contained in the Bible.

There is virtually no scientific evidence, even in the fossil record, to support Darwin’s hypothesis, yet science, education, the intellectual elites, virtually everyone—including some Christians—claim that evolution is the only realistic explanation of creation. Why? The answer may be found in this statement from an article published in the American Atheist magazine:

Christianity is—must be—totally committed to the special creation as described in Genesis, and Christianity must fight with its full might against the theory of evolution. And here is why. In Romans we read that ‘sin entered the world through one man, and through sin, death; and thus death has spread through the whole human race because everyone has sinned.’ (5:12) . . . the whole justification of Jesus’ life and death is predicated on the existence of Adam and the forbidden fruit he and Eve ate. Without the original sin, who needs to be redeemed? Without Adam’s fall into a life of constant sin terminated by death, what purpose is there to Christianity? None.

And so it is. These words of an atheist explain very well the enormous consequences of believing in Darwin’s theory. The motivating principle of all Darwinian evolution is to demonstrate how life on earth could be produced by natural or spontaneous generation without the need of God’s transcendent power. Evolution denies God. Either the Bible is true and God created the heavens and the earth, or evolution is true and the biblical account is false. You cannot have it both ways.

Dr. L. Harrison Matthews, a noted evolutionist who wrote the introduction to the 1971 edition of Origin of the Species, said,

The fact of evolution is the backbone of biology, and biology is thus in the peculiar position of being a science founded on an unproved theory—is it then a science or faith? Belief in the theory of evolution is thus exactly parallel to belief in special creation—both are concepts which believers know to be true but neither, up to the present, has been capable of proof.

The Faith of the Unbeliever

The German scientist Max Planck, who won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1918, said it even more graphically. In his book, Where Is Science Going?, Planck says:

Anybody who has been seriously engaged in scientific work of any kind realizes that over the entrance to the gates of the temple of science are written the words: Ye must have faith. It is a quality which the scientist cannot dispense with.

The faith of the unbeliever is more rigid and less tolerant of disagreement than the scientists would have us believe. Ernst Mayr, professor at Harvard and one of our country’s leading evolutionists, has written: "Man’s worldview today is dominated by the knowledge that the universe, the stars, the earth and all living things have evolved through a long history that was not foreordained or programmed." And René Dubós wrote in American Scientist magazine, "Most enlightened persons now accept as a fact that everything in the cosmos, from heavenly bodies to human beings, has developed and continues to develop through evolutionary processes." Julian Huxley said, "Evolution is the totality of reality."

It is shocking that so few Christians today grasp the significance of this debate, for it is nothing short of a declaration of war on God. The totality of reality is God, not evolution or any other theory; but for true believers in Darwin, evolution has become their God. Charles Darwin wrote in the conclusion to The Origin of the Species, that,

Man with all his noble qualities . . . with his godlike intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system . . . still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.

What kind of a view of man is this? Is the human species godlike or ape-like? Is man a noble creature with a noble origin and destiny, or a base creature destined to dissolve into a barren and empty eternity of dust? Consider the appraisals of man given by some of the leading proponents of the evolutionary theory.

Schoenberg said that man is merely "a hairless ape." DuMaurier said we are "a fungus on the surface of one of the minor planets." Nietzsche said humanity is "a rope stretched over an abyss." Rudyard Kipling said mankind is "small potatoes and few." W. D. Thornbury claimed human existence is "a jest, a dream, a show, bubble, air;" while F. P. Church said that even the most noble individual is "a mere insect, an ant."

This philosophy that denies not only the Word of God and the role of God in human affairs, but the worth of human life, is what boys and girls are being fed from kindergarten through graduate school. As Dr. Paul Blanshard, a leading humanist, evolutionist, and a vigorous critic of religious education, has said:

I think the most important factor leading us to a secular society has been the educational factor. Our schools may not teach Johnny to read properly, but the fact that Johnny is in school until he is 16 tends to lead toward the elimination of religious superstition. The average child now acquires a high school education, and this militates against Adam and Eve and all other myths of alleged history.

The Great Collapse

Phillip Johnson points out in his book Darwin on Trial that the major pillars upon which evolution has rested are falling down before our eyes. In 1992 it was announced that pictures taken by the infra-red astronomical satellite launched in the mid-eighties, which has been traveling around the earth for several years now, have given us the best view of the universe we have ever had. And now that those pictures have been analyzed, the results are shocking. As one writer put it: "It would appear that the Big Bang has gone bust."

The Big Bang theory claims that something smaller than an atom contained all the matter in the universe and at one point, fifteen billion years or so ago, it exploded and sent everything out into space. If that were so, you would expect to find matter spread evenly in every direction from the source of the explosion. But now that we have the best pictures of the cosmos ever taken, we discover there are not only clusters of galaxies in space, there are structures of galaxies, and there are superstructures of galaxies. Worst of all, right across the middle of the universe there is a great wall of galaxies—billions of them—in the most complex structures, five hundred billion light-years long and twenty billion light-years high and so complex it could not have been formed by a "big bang."

Facts and Fictions

If that isn’t enough, scholars at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology provided another shocking bit of news not long ago. Meteorologist Dr. Hyman Hartman said that life did not emerge from amino acids in a primordial slime. Dr. Hartman reports that the crucial reaction was between carbon dioxide and a substance called montmorillonite—in other words, common clay. Shades of Genesis 1 again!

Sir Fred Hoyle, former professor at Cambridge University, discoverer of Steady State cosmogony, and a great mathematician, along with the Indian mathematician Chandra Wickramasinghe, made a fascinating study. They decided to find out what were the probabilities of an entire cell—the simplest living cell—coming into existence anywhere—not merely on the earth, not merely in 4.6 billion years, but in the entire history of the universe. That figure, by the way, keeps changing from year to year and is now estimated to be roughly 15-20 billion years.

What did these men (both atheists) discover? They concluded that the chances of a living cell coming into existence spontaneously anywhere in the cosmos would take 10 to the 40,000th power years. Anything with less probability (which means a higher number) than 10 to the 50th power is never going to happen in the entire universe, we are told by probability experts. "The chances," he said, "of a tornado blowing through a junkyard, and creating a 747 are vastly greater."

"Where did we come from?" asked former atheist Sir Fred Hoyle. There is no other universe to appeal to. He concluded that the only explanation for the existence of any life anywhere in this universe is that there must be some sort of gigantic mind which has eternally existed and which, if we wish, we may call God! Science forced him reluctantly to that conclusion, for which he has received an enormous amount of persecution and threats of various kinds.

Ultimate Truth

No, God is not dead. Those who have come to know Him have come to know that He is very much alive, dynamic, powerful, loving, and involved with mankind. God has placed immortality in the heart of man and we cannot get around it. There are those who deny it, but what do they have? What are their lives like?

Every new advance and every step taken by science confirms, not evolution, but the Genesis account of creation. Yet evolution is still being taught as fact. It is no wonder so many young people are defeated by problems and doubts. No wonder their feelings of self-worth have vanished. Millions are trying to discover some suitable image, but they’ve been told they’re merely the long lost cousins of the apes, with no greater value than that. The place of honor God gave us in nature has been aborted and we’re being dragged into the slime.

George Washington Carver, the brilliant black scientist and educator, once said, "I love to think of nature as an unlimited broadcasting station, through which God speaks to us every hour, if we only will tune in." God is speaking to us today, calling us to resist the alien doctrines of this world. Will we do that? If so, there is hope. We know our origin is of God, and through faith in Jesus Christ we can know we have a glorious destiny. Let us resolve to share that Good News with the world and avoid the diagnosis of death the evolutionist offers that condemns all mankind to destruction.

You can contact these organizations:

Christian Research Institute
Post Office Box 7000
Rancho Santa Margarita, CA 92688
(714) 858-6100, Ext. 0

Institute For Creation Research
Box 2667
El Cajon, CA 92021
(619) 448-0900

For additional reading:

Phillip Johnson. Darwin on Trial. Washington, DC: Regnery, 1991.
J. P. Moreland. Christianity and the Nature of Science: A Philosophical Investigation. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1989.
R. C. Sproul. Not a Chance: The Myth of Chance in Modern Science and Cosmology. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1994.
Henry M. Morris. The Twilight of Evolution. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1963.

On the World Wide Web:

Origins.org: http://www.origins.org
Access Research Network: http://www.arn.org
Creationism on the Internet: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Delphi/4881/
Reasons To Believe: http://www.reasons.org
Christian Answers.net: http://www.christiananswers.net/menu-ac1.html
Leadership University: http://www.leaderu.com
Creation Science Home Page: http://emporium.turnpike.net/C/cs/index.htm
Institute for Creation Research: http://www.icr.org/

* This essay is taken from a sermon by Dr. D. James Kennedy presented at Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church. Copyright © 1996, D. James Kennedy, Coral Ridge Ministries, Post Office Box 40, Fort Lauderdale, FL 33308. All rights reserved.

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Copyright 1997, Coral Ridge Ministries. All rights reserved.