Molehills: The Theistic Evolution Dilemma, Part One

 

It is debatable if the battle for the book of Genesis is considered a molehill. But for the interest of this series, I constitute it as such, since Christendom should be standing harmoniously on the truth of God’s word about how our universe, planet, and conscious life came into being. Sadly, most of the church, fearing the “truth” as it is found in Darwinian Evolution, has capitulated, compromised, and abandoned Genesis as a fairy tale.

It is an allegory that no genuine, studious, or intelligent Christian takes seriously. Why? Because science has empirically disproven the Genesis account, and clinging to it as a literal testimony of God’s creative power is to demonstrate religious mania, fundamentalism, narrow-minded ignorance, and a blind faith that clings to disproven tradition in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence.

 

But is Genesis a fairy tale? Is the account of the universe’s creation, as well as humanity’s, folklore, meant to be taken as symbolism and not with the same Biblical scrutiny Christians put toward the rest of God’s word? One thing is certain: what one believes about ultimate causation has a profound effect on how we view morality and value life, both our own and that of others. Furthermore, many contemporary advocates of Darwinism, such as William Provine, Chris Hitchins, or Richard Dawkins (the two former now deceased), have elegantly pointed out that compromising the Biblical account and mingling it with Evolution is tantamount to implicit surrender for the church. Why? Because Darwinian Evolution, by definition of its proponents, is a directionless, purposeless mechanism that exploits natural selection and mutation. It does not need guidance, or an external catalyst (read in: God) to justify its processes. If one concedes that Darwinian Evolution is an empirically proven scientific fact (which it is not), then God is an unnecessary feature, relegated to a place of imaginary glory in the deluded minds of church faithful; some kind of panacea to spiritual ills that do not exist. They primarily do not exist (and neither would the God that heals them) because Darwinian Evolution explicitly champions naturalism, or materialism: meaning that that which is physical exists, while that which is immaterial (anything defined as spiritual) does not. It is the invention of superstitious men from older times, before the light of modern science shown to reveal the fallacy of such thinking.

 

Darwinism has pioneered numerous paradigm shifts in human thought, perhaps none of which have had a genuinely beneficial effect on the culture.

 

Theistic Evolution posits the notion that God implanted a soul within a hominid long ago, thus birthing modern humanity. Since fossil finds the likes of Lucy have appeared, the bridge, so claimed, between ape and man has shortened. Man is just another product of Dawkins’ blind watchmaker, who does not know or care; neither of which evolution itself could possess, because such attributes define personhood. So a man is the sum of his molecules. Francis Crick famously wrote that our minds (read In: our physical brains) are nothing more than neurons and nerve bundles. In short, our thoughts are the consequence of chemical interactions and that free will and thought itself have no immaterial or spiritual quality. Thoughts are a physical affect of a cause located in the human brain. More recently, this theory has been tweaked in some quarters, claiming that humanity’s consciousness is derived from a quantum wave, and that the human brain is a quantum system. Perhaps this quantum wave is posited as a rebuttal to the argument about thought being abstract, and therefore immaterial. Rather, it sounds like a sensational effort to avoid supernatural causality.

 

Sex is a tool in evolution to propagate the species, with the hardiest specimen, with the fittest genes, mating more frequently and passing such genes on. Our “sex-drive” stems back to a bygone era of our hunter-gatherer days, when men found mates, sometimes by force, to continue advancing their bloodline and the species as a whole. Sex is not something special; neither is it romantic, or to be shared in the bedroom between husband and wife. These are conventions man devised as we evolved culturally, and determined somehow that the hunter-gatherer way of doing things (which must have been rather successful) was no longer necessary. Darwin turned sex into a tool of advancement for the fittest, with nothing of greater attachment to it when it was shared in marriage. Freud, who went a little farther, made sex a liberating catharsis. Man was to indulge his hedonistic urges, rather than suppress them, because religion (an old cultural narrative in need of abandonment) taught self-control and created misery. Sexual freedom—with its rape, pornography, homosexuality, bestiality, pedophilia, etc.—was what man needed. Freud’s theories would never have survived in a largely Christianized culture, prior to Darwin’s theory.

 

Eugenics, practiced famously by Adolph Hitler and Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, is another child of Darwinian Evolution. What evolution did “naturally,” so would its devotees artificially. Darwin himself was a racist, and his theory provided the legitimately perfect mechanism for justifying systemic racism. Animals fought for territory, for food, for mates. Humans are animals with a greater capacity for outwitting their rivals. The weak would perish, and the strong would endure to contribute their genetic potential to a selective pool filled with admirable, selfish, self-centered, violent traits that bolster only those that recognize that superiority in life means asserting oneself above and at the cost of others. Altruism is not a byproduct of evolutionary creation. Kindness, charity, welfare, and even love, are antithetical to evolution’s purpose, if one may attribute that word to a mindless process void of direction. Specimens that produce weak-minded, selfless spawn would be weaned out as unfit; such behavior is contrary to the overarching picture of species survival.

 

Eugenics, envisioned initially by Sanger, was a tool employed in part to sterilize blacks and Hispanics, and from such a worldview inspired by this insidious theory, who could fault her? It appears difficult and tenuous for anyone outside of evolution itself to determine who is fit, by virtue of natural selection, or the law of tooth and claw. But this theory promotes a materialistic and amoral worldview. Amoral? Yes, morality is as unreal as God in a naturalistic worldview. The propagation of favored species has nothing to do with morality, and Darwinian Evolution has nothing to do with God, who, by His existence, posits objective morality. To pause briefly, one must understand that morality is objective, or it must be viewed externally as something objective to be recognized as something moral. If is internal and subjective, it is not morality; it is preference and opinion. Morality defines what is right in terms of human behavior; opinion voices someone’s personal view of a moral issue, right or wrong. In a naturalistic worldview, there is no morality, as mankind would traditionally define it.

 

The hunter-gatherer of yesteryear is now constrained by the cultural normative, but what is normal, or deemed acceptable in a culture’s mutating tradition still falls short of speaking to morality. Was Sanger wrong? Was Hitler? Not according to Darwin’s theory, because wrong, which implicitly states that right exists, suggests an external authority's arbitration. There is preference, as the thoughts our brains produce allow, but there is not morality. Good and evil collapse in the vacuum religion’s death affected. What I consider good is not necessarily what my neighbor does, and who is right? The argument is circular, because by asking who is right, I’m implying there is a source to resort to that can arbitrate the matter, which there is not, when man arose from a hominid, scratching and clawing his way to our current state.

 

Morality then, as the term could be applied, is a blanket word, a catchphrase for what the current society views as normative. A generation ago sodomy was not acceptable. Now it’s en vogue, among other sexual preferences, contrary even to evolution’s utilitarian use of the tool, since reproduction is sex's purpose, if we can grant anything an objective purpose in a world where morality does not exist and relativism (individual preference determining truth on a microscopic level) reigns. Evolution goes hand in hand with Atheism, itself a religious belief. Atheism is not evolution’s child—at least not Darwinian Evolution. Rather, one might say Atheism is it’s grandparent, and Darwin made evolution its legitimate heir. Here is one major reason why Christianity and Darwin’s brainchild cannot coexist. Evolution is man’s answer to supernaturalism.

 

If evolution is true, then there was no Eden, no Adam, no original sin, and no Savior to come and redeem us from it. Death existed prior to mankind, or hominids, or mammals in general. The Bible is a lie, and Christ Himself believed that lie, preaching that, ”from the beginning of the creation, God ‘made them male and female,” Mark 10:6. Likewise, Jesus taught that there was a worldwide Flood, Matthew 24:37-39. Darwinian Evolution does not require supernatural intervention; in fact, the theory predicates itself on a mechanism (natural selection) working in a closed system, void of outside influence. By accepting this godless and unproven theory (macroevolution has never been demonstrated in human history), Christians implicitly accept Darwin’s substitute for divine agency in the creation, God’s ability to intercede in human affairs, and even Christ’s life and resurrection. Jesus came because He was restoring lost humanity to a right relationship with God, that Adam by his sin had lost. Without Adam and sin, resulting in death, Christianity is a pointless collection of some wisdom sayings given by fallible men woefully disconnected from reality. Death, according to Darwin, is both natural and beneficial. It is not the result of sin, as the Bible claims, but a process, or rather, another effective tool in the arsenal of evolution.