Lesson 2 – The Impact of Evolutionary Thinking on Society

… the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelieving, that they might not see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. - II Corinthians 4:4

In her most recent book, Total Truth, Nancy Pearcey makes the compelling argument that Darwinism is supported more by atheistic philosophical assumptions (evolutionism or naturalism) than by scientific evidence. Every worldview starts with an account of the creation and whoever has the authority to shape a culture’s creation account is its de facto “priesthood” with the power to determine what the dominant worldview will be. Witness the fact that most people in the United States believe in God and do not believe that we evolved from monkeys. Yet the public does not have the authority to determine the societal worldview – only the cultural elite do. If Darwinian evolution is true, then both religious and philosophical absolutes like Truth, Goodness and Beauty are false. Holding on to them is merely symbolic of human hopes and ideals.

Virtually every part of society has been affected by the naturalistic worldview. In order for Christians to be effective worldview missionaries we need to be prepared to show why it is mistaken and offer a credible alternative. If you want to know whether the Christian worldview is fact or fancy, evolution is the logical place to start because if creation is not true then the biblical worldview is fantasy. More than any other factor, evolutionism is the reason Christianity is marginalized and dismissed in mainstream academia.

Daniel Dennett in his book, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, calls Darwinism the universal acid that eats through every traditional concept and leaves in its wake a revolutionized worldview. In the eight-part PBS series, Evolution, Dennett informed the viewers that Darwin’s great accomplishment was to reduce the design of the universe to a product of “purposeless, meaningless matter in motion.” This clearly is not a scientific statement -- it can’t be tested or observed. It is merely a statement of the authors’ personal philosophy. Carl Sagen substituted his mantra, “The Cosmos is all there is, or ever was, or ever will be,” for the Church’s Gloria Patri, “As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be.” Even the Beranstain Bears declare: “Nature is you, Nature is me.”

Scientific half-truths and equivocations are common place in sources that the public trusts. The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) published a booklet on evolution for teachers on “Darwin’s finches” calling it “evolution in action” (see Lesson 6 for details). In one research project, finch beaks grew longer in a drought since it was necessary for them to dig bugs out of hard tree trunks in order to survive. This was simply an adaptation to a climate change. But NAS remarked that what might happen if the change were to continue indefinitely for some 200 years – a new species of finch would be produced! It never mentioned the fact that the average beak size returned to normal when the rains returned. Phillip Johnson responded in a Wall Street Journal article saying, “When our leading scientists have to resort to the sort of distortion that would land a stock promoter in jail, you know they are in trouble.”

The PBS Evolution series explained how the HIV virus becomes resistant to certain drugs due apparently to mutation. This was given as evidence for evolution in action. It never mentioned that once the drug was removed the virus returned to normal becoming drug sensitive again. Limited, reversible change is (mis)used as evidence for a theory that requires unlimited and directional change. Another Evolution episode featured a fruit fly mutation that produced four wings instead of two, implying that this is evidence for evolutionary advancement. It didn’t mention the fact that the mutations are not an advancement but rather a degeneration. The extra wings don’t work and they weigh down the fly making it less likely to survive in the wilderness.

What one discovers scientifically about evolution, in breeding experiments for example is that change is not limitless, but bounded. Eventually one reaches a bound that cannot be crossed, and the closer one gets to the boundary, the progressively weaker the organism becomes until it eventually it becomes sterile and dies out. This has been known for centuries to animal and agricultural breeders. The evidence for Darwinian evolution is limited to change within fixed boundaries.

The “peppered moth story” is another showcase example of “evolution in action” and is pictured in many textbooks. As the industrial revolution produced smoke and soot in 19th century England it darkened the tree trunks where moths allegedly perched. This made the light colored moths easier for predatory birds to see and eat. Over time evolution led to a larger proportion of darker moths. But in recent years it was discovered that peppered moths don’t actually perch on tree trunks in the wild, but in the upper canopy of the trees. How then did we get those photos in our biology textbooks? The moths were glued to the tree trunks and presented as scientific evidence! Even though this fraud has been exposed, the moths continue to appear in our kid’s science books. One textbook writer said that he knew the photos were faked but used them anyway. Apparently falsified evidence is acceptable as long as it reinforces Darwinian orthodoxy.

The “common ancestry” theory of Darwinism (everything has descended from a common ancestor) has long been supported since Darwin’s time by showing the similarity of embryo development among the vertebrates. The fish, tortoise, chicken, pig, rabbit and human embryos at the same stage of development are shown side-by-side in textbooks apparently demonstrating how each is similar and each “replays” all the prior stages of evolution in its development. German scientist Ernst Haeckel first came up with this chart in the 19th century and Darwin called it, “by far the strongest single class of facts in favor of his theory.” Shocking as it may sound; Haeckel fabricated his sketches to make them look similar. Science magazine now acknowledges that Haeckel's drawings are “one of the most famous fakes in biology.” Yet these same or similar drawings continue to be used in our children’s biology textbooks. Haeckel, by the way, was a racist German scientist and supporter of race-based eugenics. His views were based on the Darwinian progression of the species. Even when many evolutionary scientists are confronted with the debunking of their icons, they close ranks to defend the use of these falsified stories. Those who do no longer qualify as unbiased seekers of truth but rather propagandists ready to employ useful lies to defend their agenda.

Ever since 1980 paleontologists have concluded that the fossil record does not and never will support Darwinism and told that to biologists at a landmark conference. The conclusion after more than 100 years of digging for evidence in the fossil record was that the rocks show a pervasive pattern of gaps. New life forms appear suddenly and with no transitional forms. Darwin acknowledged that the most damaging evidence to his theory was the discontinuous nature of the fossil record – the lack of intermediate forms. But he hoped that someday the fossil record would reveal otherwise. The paleontologists told the biologists that it was irrational to keep hoping that someday the gaps would be filled in. Most species appear suddenly in the fossil record and then disappear looking much the same.

With the school board controversies regarding the science curriculum across the country, many of these examples and “evidences” of evolution are dragged out as facts. This is a deliberate trick. They present cases of micro-evolution (adaptation of a species within boundaries) and use them as factual evidence for macro-evolution (origin of a new species). The issue is fundamentally not a matter of evidence at all, but of a philosophical pre-commitment to evolution. The proponents believe that evolution must be true so any evidence they garner is seen through that lens.

How did the view, “evolution must be true” originate? Since the Enlightenment the cultural elite were looking for ways to eliminate God from having any role in creation. Even though evolution was considered a plausible theory for centuries, Darwin was the first to give a plausible mechanism to the theory – chance variation and natural selection. Within 10 years after publication of the Origin of the Species, his theory was almost universally accepted by the cultural elite and any theory that had God a role was discredited. The game then shifted to keep God out from re-appearing and that was accomplished by re-defining the method of science. The only explanations allowed to be proposed involved “natural mechanisms” (naturalism). Any theory that involved “intelligent design” or any transcendent involvement was arbitrarily ruled out of order. Therefore, even if one could prove God existed he would not be allowed to formulate that a theory about it! One could not offer evidence for a Creator -- he could only explain things with naturalistic theories. Since you are forced to think that way, only something like evolution must be true. There is no other way to explain the diversity of life on the planet.

Philosophy gained primacy over facts. Scientists were, and continue to be, taught not to ask whether something is true, but rather can it be explained by naturalistic mechanisms. They cannot ask whether life evolved by natural forces, but only which natural processes were at work. There is no debate. Evolution wins by default. Darwinism is not so much an empirical finding as it is a deduction from a naturalistic worldview. Harvard biologist Richard Lewontin has admitted that scientists “have a prior commitment to materialism (naturalism)”. They are committed to anti-supernaturalism and this commitment must be, “absolute, for we cannot allow a divine foot in the door.” By making this pre-commitment to naturalism, scientists have unwittingly made evolution a religion – a religion proclaimed in the classroom today – Naturalism disguised as science. Historian Jaques Barzun admitted, “The so-called warfare between science and religion should really be seen as the warfare between two philosophies and perhaps two faiths.” To promote one faith in the public school system at public expense while banning the other is an example of viewpoint discrimination, which the Supreme Court has declared unconstitutional in a wide variety of cases.

Historically speaking it was Darwinism more than anything else that has barred the door on any consideration of Christianity as objective truth. If you want to believe in God, that’s fine as long as you don’t claim it is objective truth. It’s fine as long as it remains private and subjective. Darwinism removed the whole idea of God as the Creator and in doing so removed God from the sphere of rational discussion.

How can Christians fight this? American evangelicals have not historically had a robust intellectual tradition. In the last 10 years we can thank Berkeley law professor Phillip Johnson for helping organize a scientific way of presenting the alternative to evolution. It has been labeled “Intelligent Design.”

Intelligent Design

Is the universe the handiwork of an Intelligent Agency or is it the result blind, non-cognitive forces? Either the universe is a closed system of cause and effect, or it is an open system -- the product of a Personal Agent. Everything that follows stems from that fundamental choice. If we can show that a non-personal starting point fails to account for the world, we can eliminate a vast variety of secular worldviews without having to investigate the myriad of details that distinguish them.

We must learn how to bring back God into the sphere of rational discussion – to win a place at the table of public discourse. We must find a way to talk about Christianity as objective knowledge, not just personal values. We must stake out a cognitive territory and be prepared to defend it. The assumption today is that Christianity only deals with values and not facts – faith not evidence. This is even taught at many Christian schools and colleges. When Christians are willing to reduce their religion to non-cognitive categories, unconnected to truth or evidence, then we have already lost the battle. By providing evidence of God’s work in nature, we can restore Christianity to the status of a genuine knowledge claim, giving us the means to reclaim a place at the table of public debate. However, we must go beyond the negative critiques of naturalistic evolution; lay out the positive evidence from intelligent design; and put forward a viable research program. This will be more fully developed in Lesson 9.

Impact on society

The most important reason Christians need to study evolution and learn how to respond to it is because of the perverse ideological impact naturalism has had on society. Since naturalism is the reigning creation paradigm, it is just assumed to be the legitimate scientific basis from which to explain all human behavior without God. Until recently, evolution was just studied and argued by scientists in a relatively small community. Now evolution has reached into the “soft” and social sciences, e.g., psychology and sociobiology, and that is where the cultural impact is being incubated. Without an opposing Christian viewpoint, naturalism has become the prevailing worldview in our post-Christian culture.

These social “sciences” have become some of the “hippest” fields today, and all claim their foundation in evolution. The “gay gene,” the “fat gene,” etc. are given as the explanations as to why people are gay or fat or whatever. They say we are genetically “hard-wired” by our genes to behave in predetermined ways as social “animals.” “If the theory of natural selection (evolution) is true,” writes Robert Wright in his 1994 book, The Moral Animal, “then essentially everything about the human mind should be intelligible in these (evolutionary) terms. The basic ways we think about each other and what we say to each other, are with us today by virtue of their past contribution to genetic fitness.” The modern view of our humanness is that the Darwinian-evolved gene has replaced the God-given soul. Harvard evolutionary biologist E. O. Wilson argues in his book Consilience, that religion and moral values are determined by genetics. “We are no longer free, moral agents,” in Wilson’s view. “We are but automatons, acting out our genes’ instructions to believe in God, to act altruistically, [and] to seek justice.” The concept of an inner person, an individual with a God-given soul and free-will vanishes in the overpowering glare of the evolutionary derived genome.

My genes made me do it

This genetic imperative is now used as the overarching excuse for all sin. “It’s not our fault.” “We lust because our ancestors’ lust helped pass their lustful genes on to us,” says evolutionist Richard Dawkins. Commentators argue that the genes of “alpha males” like President Clinton have been honed through Darwinian natural selection to push such men to infidelity. Erica Jong says that, “we’ve forgotten that the alpha male of the tribe gets the youngest, most nubile females, with or without foreplay. It’s like that with chimps, gibbons, and even presidents of the United States.” Hillary Clinton, in talks about the book Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence[i] said that, “naughtiness is wired into males of all species.” She and many others are believers in evolutionary biology. This is nothing more than attempting to explain away personal responsibility for sin, expunge personal guilt, and ultimately explain away the existence of a God who will judge his creatures someday.

Parenting under evolutionism

Evolutionary biology is used to explain away parental responsibility with the hopes of ridding us of any guilt in child-rearing. Judith Rich Harris in her best-selling book The Nurture Assumption says that natural selection and not nurturing parents are what forms a child’s personality. “Just look at the chimps,” she writes, “Socially, chimpanzees are a lot like us … the fact is that children cannot learn to behave by imitating their parents, because most of the things they see their parents doing – making messes, bossing other people around, driving cars, lighting matches, coming and going as they please, and lots of other things that look like fun to people who are not allowed to do them – are prohibited.” The truth is, she contends, that kids are “socialized” by other kids, just like the chimps! In other words, parents don’t matter, but your evolutionary heritage does.

People are beginning to look at the parents of a Down syndrome baby, for example, as people who either unwisely chose to bring the child into the world or were too ill-informed to have prenatal diagnosis to abort it. Either way the child is viewed as an avoidable (evolutionary) mistake. One father told The New York Times Magazine about an insurance company adjuster who grumbled that parents like him expect society to spend millions to keep these “mistakes” alive. In reality, these are remarkable children, full of love and wonder, teaching their parents and all who meet them profound lessons about what really counts in human life.

Researchers are now proposing parents perform gene therapy on their unborn. At first this was a positive use of the technology -- to correct fetal defects. Now it is being proposed to give couples a “test-tube child” of their own desired formulation: sex, eye color, (and eventually mental capacity, looks, etc.); bearing a child will become like ordering a la carte. Many parents, informed only by an evolutionary worldview will be placing their “order” and aborting those “unlucky” children who do not meet the specification. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World is right on the horizon. Without a biblical worldview informing such a debate, how can we hope to see eugenics not becoming common practice?

Ethics under evolutionism

We need only look at our recent past to project where sociobiology could lead. Many destructive twentieth century ideologies have found their scientific support in Darwinist thinking: racism[ii], Marxism and communism[iii], genocide, infanticide, abortion, euthanasia, and most recently cloning and embryonic stem cell research. All advocacy assumes that man is nothing more than an evolved animal; certainly not a unique being made in the image of God as believed by most (not just Christians) for thousands of years before Darwin.

There are neither moral absolutes nor timeless transcendent values for a society that is allegedly evolving to a higher plane. Consistent with evolutionary philosophy, our schools teach that humans construct ethical truths that evolve as their human needs evolve. The result is that there are not any absolute truths to discover, either from the prescriptions of the Bible or from any enduring moral source. Philosophers of science Michael Ruse and E. O. Wilson clearly express this view:[iv]

The time has come to take seriously the fact that we humans are modified monkeys, not the favored Creation of a Benevolent God on the Sixth Day…We must think again especially about our so-called ‘ethical principles.’… As evolutionists, we see that no (ethical) justification of the traditional kind is possible. Morality, or more strictly our belief in morality, is merely an adaptation put in place to further our reproductive ends. Hence, the basis of ethics does not lie in God’s will … In an important sense, ethics as we understand it is an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to cooperate. It is without external grounding ... Ethics is illusory inasmuch as it persuades us that it has an objective reference. This is the crux of the biological position. Once it is grasped, everything falls into place.

“Falling into place” ultimately leads to the conclusion that there are no moral differences between Hitler and Mother Teresa. Both had been consistent with the system of ethics they constructed. In fact, the “survival-of-the-fittest” ideology guarantees Hitler to be the ethical winner! Genocide (the systematic extermination of an entire people) becomes a legitimate option for any society that sees natural selection as the primary mechanism for cultural development. It is just one “superior” gene pool replacing an “inferior” one.

The euthanasia debate informed by evolutionism

If humans are nothing more than modified monkeys; if our species has been created by nothing more than the “survival of the fittest;” and, if human ethics is just “an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes,” why would we want to keep old and sick people alive who are ready and wanting to die? The euthanasia debate reached a sensationalistic level in September 1998. Dr. Jack Kevorkian, who had helped more than 130 persons commit suicide, injected a terminally ill man with lethal drugs for a national television program and millions of viewers watched the man die second-by-second.[v] Kevorkian said he did it to force authorities to arrest him. He wanted to go on trial in hopes of getting euthanasia legalized -- six times before prosecutors had failed to make the charges stick. This time, however, he was convicted of second-degree murder. Many are there to pick up his mantle, so many in fact that states are beginning to legalize euthanasia. Oregon was the first; others are not far behind. Our nation is deciding fundamental moral issues, like euthanasia, without any appeal to a higher moral law that transcends evolutionary utilitarianism.

The abortion debate informed by evolutionism[vi]

The abortion issue is being elevated to a new and horrific level with the help of evolutionary psychology. MIT professor Steven Pinker’s evolutionary worldview says we can’t morally judge people like the “prom mom” who delivered and killed her baby in the public bathroom during her prom; or the young couple who killed their baby and left it in a dumpster outside a motel, because there are no moral standards by which to judge. If humans are mere evolutionary by-products (“meat puppets” as Pinker is fond of calling them), programmed and guided by natural selection, then human behavior can be judged only in terms of survival value, not in terms of right and wrong. According to Pinker these mothers were in the grip of “emotions [that], fashioned by the slow hand of natural selection, respond to the signals of the long-vanished tribal environment in which we spent 99 percent of our evolutionary history.” In other words, the circumstances stirred those old genetic urges, so they killed their babies. Pinker says that our immature neonates (newborns) don’t possess moral judgment, nor have the ability to reflect on themselves, or form and savor plans for the future, “any more than mice do.” The implication being they are not yet even “meat puppets” so they can be killed and thrown in the trash like a mouse. Princeton ethicist Peter Singer is of the same mind and argues that a newborn isn’t a person for the first several weeks (perhaps up to 24 months) after birth and should be subject to extermination at will.

University of Colorado philosopher Michael Tooley used this argument to give a 400 page tightly reasoned argument for killing babies. We are starting to hear neonaticide (killing of newborn babies) euphemistically referred to as “postpartum abortion.” In attempting to justify his views Pinker writes, “Neonaticide has been practiced and accepted in most cultures throughout history.” Practiced? Sure by pagan cultures. Accepted by civilized cultures? Hardly. Evolutionary psychologists Martin Daly and Margo Wilson say that women, thanks to evolution, have a genetically programmed capacity to kill their babies if it seems reasonable to do so. They write, “Whatever our moral sympathies in the matter, we should recognize that the rejection of a newborn could be an adaptive parental response.” Harvard historian William Langer responds, “The willful destruction of newborn babes has been viewed with abhorrence by Christians from the beginning of their era.” And the Christians, Langer noted, were following the Jews, whose Rabbinical Law saw infanticide as straight-forward murder. Their logic was quite different from that of the evolutionary psychologist, but just as inexorable. Human beings are persons from the start, endowed with a soul, created by God, and infinitely precious. The Bible is unequivocal on this matter. The new evolutionary “science” means to undo the ethical norm of thousands of years of civilized culture. That is precisely why Christians must become knowledgeable about evolution and engage the culture with a defense of this worldview.

Who is next on the list to be killed?

If we are nothing more than very lucky meat puppets, when will we start denying “personhood” to children, senior citizens, the sick, and the handicapped? In 1973, when Roe vs. Wade legalized abortion, pro-lifers were labeled absurd when they warned that legal acceptance of abortion would send our culture down a slippery-slope that would someday lead to the out-and-out acceptance of infanticide. Now that day is on the horizon! In fact, the speed down the slippery-slope is accelerating as any moral reasoning underlying our traditional Judeo-Christian heritage is being undermined with evolutionary science provided by its “scientific” underpinning. Just follow the recent debate and the judicial rulings regarding partial-birth abortion.

Our return to barbarism

On April 20, 1999, Littleton, Colorado became the scene of “Dante’s Inferno” as two middle-class teenagers went on a killing rampage of their fellow students at Columbine high school. The headlines of a local newspaper read: “City, nation, recoil.” Children from middle-class white families and neighborhoods, the epitome of suburban America, murdered other children in cold blood, and this episode is not an isolated event. Politicians, educators, psychologists and reporters can only offer up trite explanations as the blame can no longer be attributed to race and poverty. Now the blame has moved to gun control. The one explanation, however, they cannot seem to bring themselves to use is the dreaded “M-word” -- Morality. The truth is that Americans are rapidly losing their moral recognition of the universal dignity of human life. Following the logic of the evolutionary theorists to their unavoidable conclusions, we have dehumanized our species and seem unable to give any firm moral direction to our children. Parents, pastors, teachers too often buy the myth of relativism -- that they should refrain from teaching kids right from wrong, and instead let them discover their own values. Other adults are busily producing and selling entertainment that glorifies violence in movies, music, and computer games. Parents are allowing their children to identify with Adolph Hitler -- wearing clothes with Nazi insignia. We are raising a generation of children conditioned to kill. When kids kill kids, I would hope we would start to be intolerant of the evil and chaos created by moral autonomy. The bill on evolutionism is coming due. Either we will pay its bloody price, or find our way back from our growing barbarism to the biblical truths that made civilization possible in the first place.

The sexual revolution informed by evolutionism

Having lost our vocabulary of moral virtue, we now defer to evolutionary psychologists to tell us what behavior is “normal.” In 1973, the American Psychological Association (APA) removed homosexuality as a category of mental illness. By 2004, the APA was endorsing and lobbying for same-sex marriage. APA psychologists now consider homosexual behavior as normal, healthy, and just as legitimate as heterosexual behavior – a position that it is spreading throughout the culture. In 1998, the APA proclaimed that psychologists should no longer treat homosexuality as a problem, even if the patient wanted help to change his or her orientation. That same year the APA took a giant step in the sexual revolution which would have been unimaginable just a few years prior. The Journal of the American Psychological Association published an article maintaining that sex between children and adults is not harmful. It said that it could have a positive experience on the child.[vii] The study concluded that we should not be so judgmental. It said that classifying a behavior as abusive, simply because it is generally viewed as immoral or defined as illegal, is problematic. It also said that science is supposed to avoid value judgments. Therefore the “science” of psychology should stop using negative terms like “child abuse,” “molestation,” and “victims.” The study went so far to suggest that a “willing encounter” between a child and an adult be labeled simply “adult-child sex”, a value-neutral term. Obviously an insistence on being value-neutral is not neutral at all, but advances the ideology that children are fair game for sexual predators. According to the APA’s latest diagnostic manual, a person should not be considered to have a psychological disorder simply because he molests children. A diagnosis of disorder should only be made if the pedophile feels “anxious” about his behavior or if it interferes with his work or impairs his social relationships.

Facing life’s deepest issues as an evolutionist[viii]

Consider a person who views himself without a soul and without a Creator as assumed by evolutionary ideology. In a remarkable 1991 address given to the American Academy for the Advancement of Science and entitled, The Saving Grace of Noble Lies, Dr. Loyal D. Rue, an evolutionist, mused that to fulfill one’s quest for personal wholeness (self-fulfillment) and his quest for social coherence, one must embrace a “Noble Lie” that will inspire him to live beyond his own self-interest. “We must deceive ourselves into thinking that we and the universe have value. A ‘Noble Lie’ is one that deceives us, tricks us, and compels us beyond self-interest, beyond ego, beyond family, nation, (and) race.” It is a lie, because it tells us that the universe is infused with value, which is fiction to the evolutionist. It makes a claim to universal truth and tells us not to live for self-interest, which is repugnant to the committed naturalist. “But without such lies we cannot live,” Rue says. The alternatives to the Noble Lie are worse: The “madhouse option,” where self-fulfillment is pursued regardless of social coherence, i.e., everybody just does what is right in his own eyes; or, the totalitarian option, where social coherence is imposed at the expense of personal wholeness. Even the Noble Lie, however, is unworkable in the end because the more you believe in the necessity of it; the less you are able to believe it. Like a placebo, it works only on those who believe in its truth. But once you’ve seen through it, it loses its power over you. The Noble Lie option affirms what it denies thus the logic of it self-destructs. Eventually this mindset will lead to an elitist group-think that will deceive the masses.

This is the dreadful verdict pronounced on modern humanity by evolutionism: In order to have wholeness, one must live in self-deception.[ix] Consider the personal and existential implications. What is the evolutionist’s response to the deeper questions of her existence, “How did we get here and why?” “What is the purpose of life?” “Where did I come from and where am I going?” “Does God exist, and if so, how does He relate to me?” The Darwinists’ pitiful answer is: “We no longer (after Darwin) have to resort to superstition when faced with (these) deep problems (of life),” says Richard Dawkins. Or, “all attempts to answer (those) questions before 1859 (the year of the publication of Darwin’s Origin of the Species) are worthless and we would be better off if we ignored (the questions) completely,” says G. G. Simpson. With evolutionary dogma at the foundation of our thought, and with no theistic options allowed consideration, we are trapped into reaching the conclusions that evolutionary dogma guarantees that human-beings are nothing more than “meat puppets,” ethics is an illusion, and God and religion are self-deceptions. This is what Ruse and Wilson attempt to console us with in their statement, “Once it (evolutionary theory) is grasped, everything falls into place.” Quite the contrary! Once it is grasped the bankruptcy of evolutionary ideology is exposed for what it really is. Only if God exists does life take on meaning. And, only when the God-hypothesis can be readmitted into the realm of public and scientific discourse will people be able to relate rationally on the fundamental issues of life. It is only from a transcendent perspective that we and our universe find meaning.

Evolutionism’s impact on traditional values

Phillip Johnson (1997) observes that “the triumph of Darwinism implied the death of God and set the stage for replacing biblical religion with a new faith based on evolutionary naturalism. That new faith would become the basis not just of science, but also of government, law and morality. It would be the established religious philosophy of modernity.” Before the 1960’s most Americans assumed that the traditional family was instituted by God and operated on moral and legal principles that came ultimately from the Bible. But when God’s existence and biblical authority disappeared, so did its moral authority. The sanctity of marriage, premarital sex, radical feminism, homosexuality, and now same-sex marriage are all becoming redefined by the new faith and legal system based on evolutionary naturalism. First came the divorce revolution, then the sexual revolution, then radical feminism, and currently, homosexual liberation. Johnson continues, “The moral and legal reversal was unstoppable once the crucial change in established religious philosophy was made.”

What’s a Christian response?

“Without God, anything is permissible,” Dostoyevsky wrote in The Brothers Karamazov. Without God, there is no One to be accountable to because there is no Creator and no Judge. There is no hereafter and no final judgment. The best society can do to separate good from evil is to postulate a morality of relative values. For a time that system seemed to work. But, only because we were living in the shadows of our Christian heritage where there was still an “echo” of biblical truth. People had some vestige of the knowledge of God and His absolutes. Since the 1960’s, however, America has been hopelessly sliding down the slippery-slope of lost morality and it is increasingly impossible to discern evil. Within this turmoil the Christian is called to engage the culture and not retreat. The Christian is called to be light in the world and dispel the darkness. There has never been a more important time for Christians to mount a defense as well as an offense – both through prayer to combat the spiritual forces of darkness, and through intellectual discourse in the public square, and in the educational and professional institutions.

Evangelicals have been living on the periphery of responsible intellectual existence. The average Christian needs to understand that societal problems don’t just suddenly appear out of nowhere. The ideas behind moral collapse start among intellectuals within a professional discipline, or within the university or scholarly society. In those venues the previously-held Christian ideal is attacked as irrational or outmoded, and millions of students and other followers who become our future generation of leaders, absorb that point of view. Evolutionary ideology based on naturalism quickly became accepted as the (pseudo)scientific basis for beginning the post-Christian movement. Evolutionism (Naturalism) has become the largest contributor to our moral collapse because it has developed an intellectually acceptable way to remove God from being an active force in the world.

Princeton theologian J. Gresham Machen clearly foresaw what was happening way back in 1913. He said in, Christianity and Culture, (Princeton Theological Review), that if we lose the intellectual war then our evangelism is immeasurably more difficult in the next generation. He wrote, “False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the reception of the gospel. We may preach with all the fervor of a reformer and yet succeed only in winning a straggler here and there, if we permit the whole collective thought of the nation or of the world to be controlled by ideas which, by the resistless force of logic, prevent Christianity from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion. Under such circumstances, what God desires us to do is to destroy the obstacle at its root.” T. S. Eliot put it this way, “If Christianity goes, the whole of our culture goes. Then you must start painfully again, and you cannot put on a new culture ready made. You must wait for the grass to grow to feed the sheep to give the wool out of which your new coat will be made. You must pass through many centuries of barbarism.”

In 1924 Duke University was founded. At the center of the campus is a plaque which says, “The aims of Duke University are to assert a faith in the eternal union of knowledge and religion set forth in the teachings and character of Jesus Christ, the son of God.” Today, Christianity is all but forgotten to the main business of the university. Duke is now known not for its commitment to Christ but for its basketball championships and its postmodernist literary theory including higher criticism of the Bible which discredits its supernatural origin. All efforts to assert Christianity in most any American university today (even ones founded in the 20th century to assert faith in Jesus Christ) have ended in futility because of Christians’ inability and/or unwillingness to challenge the evolutionary ideology of naturalism and its monopoly over the production of knowledge. If we continue to lack the nerve or the intellectual will to challenge the cultural assumption that knowledge comes only from a science based on naturalism (“nature is all there is”), we are to blame only ourselves for the continuing moral collapse of society.


Questions for consideration

1. Should public school teachers be allowed to give disconfirming evidence for evolution? Allowed to offer an alternative explanation? How about if it is a religious explanation? How about if it is a non-religious explanation but offered by a religious person?

2. Why do you think Darwinism been called the “universal acid that eats through every traditional concept and leaves in its wake a revolutionized worldview?”

3. What was Carl Sagan promoting?

4. Do you think that adaptation of the species to environmental conditions and artificial selection proves Darwinism?

5. Doesn’t the fossil record prove Darwinism?

6. Should science be limited to explaining only natural phenomena (naturalism)? Is a limitation like that scientific?

7. What do you suppose the term “intelligent design” means?

8. Do you think human beings are only a product of our genes (heredity)?

9. What’s would be wrong with gene therapy? Gene selection? Embryonic stem cell research?

10. Why do you think that 19th and 20th century Darwinism might lead to racism? Marxism and communism?

11. What is the difference between evolution and evolutionism? Between evolutionism and naturalism? Between Darwinism and evolution?

12. How do you think naturalism supports euthanasia (mercy killing)?

13. How do you think naturalism supports abortion?

14. What sort of Ethics do you suppose naturalism breeds?

15. What impact do you think naturalism would have on our sexual mores?

16. What impact do you think naturalism would have on one’s view of the purpose and meaning of life?

17. How do you think Christians should respond to all this? How about Christian scientists?

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[i] Richard Wrangham, Dale Peterson (Mariner Books).
[ii] Darwin founded much of his evolutionary thinking on racist ideas. In The Descent of Man (1871) he said that the Negro races were more closely related to the apes than to white people and that, “at some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace the savage races throughout the world."
[iii] Karl Marx wrote to Lassalle in 1861, “Darwin’s book is very important and it suits me well that it supports the class struggle in history from the point of view of natural science.” At Marx’s gravesite his colleague, Fredrick Engels said, “Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history.”
[iv] The Evolution of Ethics, in Religion and the Natural Sciences: the Range of Engagement, (Harcourt Brace, 1993).
[v] CBS aired this on 60 Minutes on 11/22/98. In their statement CBS News said, “(they) believe this program performed a valuable public service.” Critics said this was just a gimmick in the ratings race.
[vi] See Steven Pinker’s 1997 book, How the Mind Works. It received rave reviews from the secular media and was the No. 1 recommended book on the New York Times Web page. Daly and Wilson’s views can be found in their 1988 book, Homicide to the Murder of Infants. Tooley’s 1983 work, Abortion and Infanticide may be the “creepiest book published since Gutenberg (invented the printing press).” Langer’s analysis may be found in, Infanticide: A Historical Survey.
[vii] A Meta-analytic Examination of Assumed Properties of Child Sexual Abuse Using College Samples, (APA Psychological Bulletin, 1998, Vol. 124, No. 1, pp. 22-53), Bruce Rind, an adjunct instructor at Temple University; Philip Tromovitch, a graduate student in education at the University of Pennsylvania; and Robert Bauserman, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan.
[viii] This section was adapted from Reasonable Faith, Christian Truth and Apologetics, William Lane Craig.
[ix] Pinker, when challenged to justify infanticide as the inevitable consequence of evolutionary self-interest, disavows he is doing that. “Ethical theory,” he writes, “requires idealizations … and its conclusions can be sound and useful even though the world, as seen by science, does not really have uncaused events.” In other words, overcoming self-interest is based on a pretense, i.e. a Noble Lie. It says that something does exist beyond science (e.g., ethics), but it is not capable of true knowledge production.