On December 20, 2005, U.S. District Judge John Jones ruled that it was unconstitutional for a high school in Pennsylvania to teach “intelligent design” as an alternative to evolution. Jones condemned as “breathtaking inanity” the policy of the school board which had attempted to cast doubt on the theory of evolution. Needless to say, the reactions of the public were mixed. One of the plaintiffs who had sued the school district over the matter said she was “ecstatic” about the judge’s ruling. She told the news media, “This is a victory for education, a victory for science and a victory for science education.” Another woman remarked that freedom of religion included the right of freedom from religion, and thus nothing to do with God should be taught in schools. On the other hand, Richard Thompson, one of the lawyers who represented the defendants, commented, “The founders of this country would be astonished at the thought that this simple curriculum change [was] in violation of the constitution that they drafted.”
Coinciding with all this is a Darwin exhibit that opened recently in the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and which will travel to Boston, Chicago and Toronto before ending up in London in 2009, the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth. The exhibit details the history and artifacts of his life and reveals something of the painful journey he made from moral certainty to doubt. It seems that two things strongly influenced Darwin’s thinking in his younger years. He was troubled by the problem of evil and how a benevolent God could permit so much suffering in the world. Then, when his beloved daughter Annie died at the age of ten (possibly from TB), he was driven into greater despair. In 1859 he published his well-known book, The Origin of Species, which appeared to undercut the very basis of Christianity. People grabbed onto his theory immediately, with the result that when he died in 1882, Darwin was buried with honor in Westminster Abbey.
An Old Idea
The fact is that Darwin was not the originator of the theory of evolution, for since the beginning of man’s existence he has tried to solve the riddle of life apart from God. Many theories have developed, including such things as the idea of the transmigration of the soul, which is found in most false religions. A fairly well-defined theory of evolution was propounded by Aristotle (who lived several centuries before Christ), and suggestions of such an idea are even found in Babylonic and Egyptian monuments. More recently a man named Jean Baptiste Lamarck published at least two books on the subject in the early 1800s, and thus he must be regarded as the real father of modern evolutionary teaching. Some years prior to this, Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, had also published material and must have greatly influenced his grandson. However, it was Darwin who brought all of this together, and at a time when people were ready for it. As someone once remarked, when the Lord is working, Satan is working too. When God raised up men like Luther and others to lead the way in the Reformation, Satan raised up a Shakespeare to occupy men’s minds and provide a distraction from Christian thought. When God raised up men like J. N. Darby and others to bring back the truth of the church, Satan raised up Darwin and others to turn men’s hearts away from it. Darwinism in England sought to destroy God’s glory as Creator, while the so-called “higher criticism” that began about the same time in Germany under men like Julius Wellhausen sought to destroy God’s glory as Redeemer.
Darwin was strongly opposed by Christians, starting out with Samuel Wilberforce in England who led an attack on him in 1860. Many are familiar with the so-called “monkey trial” of 1925 in Tennessee, where teacher John Scopes was tried for violating a state law banning the teaching of evolution in schools. However, in more recent years, some believers have tried to bring the Word of God and Darwinism together. Some have tried to argue that the Genesis record of creation is merely a general account and that God allowed His creation a certain amount of autonomy to develop on its own. Others have tried to solve the problem by saying that it is the role of the Bible to say, “Why did this happen,” while it is the role of science to ask, “How did this happen?” Strangely enough, the late Pope John Paul II said in 1996 that there was no essential conflict between Darwin’s theory and Catholicism.
The Nagging Conscience
It is true that the Word of God is meant to be God’s revelation of Himself to man, and thus it gives us what pertains to life and godliness. It is written to reach man’s heart and conscience, not to satisfy every curious question that he may ask. However, we must be clear that there can be no common ground between true Darwinism and the Word of God. Carried to its logical conclusion, Darwinism postulates the spontaneous appearance of life and a progression from one-celled animals up to man himself. The Word of God is sublime and clear: “In the beginning God” (Gen. 1:1). The real reason for evolutionary thought is ultimately man’s fond wish to avoid his responsibility to his Creator and the fact that one day he must answer to Him. If he can persuade himself that God does not exist, then he can get around the ever-present nagging of his conscience that he must stand before God someday. Because “they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind” (Rom. 1:28). As British biologist Richard Dawkins famously wrote, Darwinism “made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.” This is why the teaching of intelligent design is so repugnant to the natural mind, and why a judge would rule against bringing it into a school curriculum. All of the ridiculous ideas and quantum leaps connected with evolution can be tolerated, but not the teaching that God exists.
Hebrews 11:3 says, “Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God,” and we must bear this in mind. It is not the fallacy or otherwise of the theory of evolution that reinforces our belief in God’s Word, but rather faith in the One who wrote that Word. God has given us a revelation from Himself that bears the marks of its own inspiration, and it does not need man to authenticate it. However, we can confidently say that the theory of evolution destroys itself. To any honest mind there are numerous barricades to its viability, any one of which is a hopeless hurdle that cannot be crossed. It is beyond the scope of this article to consider these in detail, but let us look at one “barricade” that goes all the way back to Darwin.
A Genetic Barricade
On his visit to the Galapagos islands in the years 1831-1836, Darwin was impressed with the variations in the beaks of the finches there. Each group had a unique beak tailored to its specific diet. Not only were their beaks different from one area to another, but they would vary over time, depending on various factors such as the amount of rainfall. Darwin called all of this “natural selection” and postulated that it could cause various mutations that would eventually result in the emergence of an entirely new species. Of course, natural selection is well recognized and happens all the time in the world. What the theory of evolution fails to state is that natural selection can get rid of genetic information, but it cannot create any. Gene pools have only a certain amount of information for any particular trait. Mutational change might cause the loss of a particular trait, but no creative evolutionary process exists to overcome the limit by adding a new one. In the case of the Galapagos finches, the genes for all of the different beak forms were obviously contained in their gene pool and could lead to adaptation by the various conditions under which they lived. But no Galapagos finch ever developed, for example, the hooked beak of a bird of prey, as that was not in their gene pool. Thus the various beak forms on the Galapagos finches have indeed probably come from a single ancestral population, but no one has been able to see a crossing over from one species to another.
Nothing New
In conclusion, we may say that the theory of evolution is really nothing new, but has been in men’s minds for thousands of years as he sought to eliminate God from his knowledge. It remained for a man like Darwin to step forward and pull it all together about 150 years ago. Sad to say, his ideas caught on like “wild fire,” as men sought to resist the bright testimony God was bringing out. May we be kept from any compromise on the truth of God as contained in His Word! There is not, nor has there ever been, any conflict between God’s Word and true knowledge, but Darwinism is Satan’s attempt to overthrow not only the Word of God, but God Himself. W. J. Prost