Molehills: The Theistic Evolution Dilemma, Part Two

 

Like reproduction, which passes along the choicest genes to the worthy heirs of tomorrow, death cycles the old into the new, making things incrementally better, step by minute step. Death is a blessing (if such an absurdity exists in a materialistic, relativistic worldview) endowing future generations a greater aptitude for survival. That is, until death takes them as well, and the cycle repeats. 

This brings us to another nihilistic issue with evolutionary thought. Purpose does not exist. Solomon once bemoaned about the nature of life under the sun, that is, without acknowledging God’s presence and purpose, both for material existence and for us individually. He found it to be vanity, and that man ought to pursue whatever hedonistic urge seizes him, because death will come soon enough, and then our ultimately pointless lives will end, and it will be as though we never were. Like society must fabricate artificial morality to appease the culture, purpose outside of ultimate meaning must be sought after, or rather, created by, those who embrace Darwin’s answer to life.

 

The answer is: your life serves no purpose, save to make the next generation just a little bit more adaptively versatile than you. The purpose we make in life is ultimately lacking any significance, because in a world where reproduction and death are how human progress is defined, our contributions to art, music, literature, medicine, even science itself, become fruitless diversions to distract from the fatalistic reality that our life, and reality itself by extension, are the product of a long chain of purposeless accidents, and ultimate reality, with its attendant answer that religion sought to provide, are placebos. Solomon was apparently much more correct than even he may have realized. Life is a vanity of vanities, or grasping after the wind. The purposes we find could more adequately be described as purposes man fabricates, because purpose is not objective reality; man invents this in the chemical reactions of his brain to sustain himself once the reality of our insignificance really sinks in.

 

Psychology is another child of Darwinian Evolution, having gained traction in the early portion of the 20^th century under the auspices of Jung, Freud, Maslow, etc. Psychology largely explores human experience from a mechanical, pragmatic direction. More plainly, if human thought and consciousness is nothing more than chemical reaction inside the brain (as Francis Crick insists), then specialized doctors of the mind are necessary to fine tune our thoughts when things go far afield. Enter psychotropic drugs and therapy as mankind’s new savior, dispensed—for a fee—by a naturalistic priesthood. Once again Christianity and Darwin collide with terrible results. If man is a spiritual being made in God’s image, then our brain does not think; our brain processes our thoughts while the spirit that operates the mechanism does the actual thinking. If the physical brain suffers impairment, doctors, not psychologists, ought to be consulted. If we suffer from anxiety, depression, etc., the matter is a spiritual one, because it is not the brain that is depressed, but the person. God, being a Spirit, is perfectly capable of leading the sufferer to the liberty we each crave. Psychotropic drugs alter brain chemistry in unknown ways and can mask the symptoms of our suffering, but cannot cure it. Why? Because such drugs can’t reach a person’s spirit, where the seat of the matter lay. But since Darwin’s day, man is viewed as a glorified animal, and the “science, so called” of psychology was raised up to contend with the “mental issues” this evolved animal suffers from. If Christianity is true, then psychology and Darwinism is wrong. If Darwinism is in fact the genuine picture for existence, mankind will need more than therapy to swallow the bitter pill of a material existence, victimized by one’s own thoughts, while we in turn victimize others. Accountability, self-control, even reason itself is lost in the system of healing oneself: a process that for most will last until death. Freud commended indulgence in the flesh; Skinner went about treating man as a stimulus response machine. Who is right? The answer cannot be found, because the idea of “right” is absurd and irrelevant in modern relativism.

 

Life’s value is relegated to a subjective, case-by-case pragmatism in Darwin’s world. Hitler justified genocide on this principal. Women’s rights activists justify murdering their unborn children under the banner of freedom of choice. The old or ailing justify it likewise. If man is made in God’s image, then it is the highest insult to the Creator that man kills fellow man on a whim. But if Darwin is right, then human life has essentially no value outside of a personal, subjective attachment some may have to the individual in question. Certainly it has no intrinsic or objective value greater than a fly, a dog, or any other living thing. When objective reality is removed, and the transcendent reality of a Maker is denied, subjective relativism fills the void. It is “what works for me.” For abortionists, human life rests in the hands of the mother, who may keep or kill her child as she sees fit, for the sake of her sexual liberty. Here we see how sex, meant in evolution to procreate, and in the Bible to do likewise ironically, is turned into a pastime, with unborn children being an inconvenience, termed a fetus, which may be jettisoned at leisure. The value of human life disintegrates beneath the lens of Darwinian Evolution.

 

The argument could be made, from an evolutionary standpoint, that if women abort their children, those children were unfit to survive, because only the fittest adapt to pass on their genetics. But how is the fittest determined, exactly? Those that survive long enough to reproduce and pass on their genetic contribution to succeeding generations. Individually, human life means pathetically little; the species as a whole means nothing, either. No matter our vaunted greatness, we have, step by painful step, been brought to this platform in modernity, only to be pushed off by those who come after in the struggle for survival. Quoting Solomon, we read, “I returned and saw under the sun that—the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to men of understanding, nor favor to men of skill; but time and chance happen to them all,” Ecclesiastes 9:11. In a world without God, Solomon declares, all that really is left is time and chance. It sounds like a mockery toward the theory of Darwinian Evolution. The swift, strong and wise have no more hope ultimately than their opposite, when time and chance reign as the guiding force of human growth. And bear in mind that Darwinian scientists insist that time and chance operating in a closed system for billions of years is what alone produced our universe, and us in particular. When human life has become entirely disposable for the convenience of others, one can see the ramification of Darwin’s theory played out in human experience.

 

Evolution, by implicit admission, denies supernatural causation. There is no God, no Eden or Adam, no Redeemer to pay for Adam’s sin, no Heaven for the saints that have believed. It is a farce created in the weak and superstitious minds of yore, when man explained nature by invoking divinity rather than science. Darwinian Evolutionists claim that, due to their theory, God’s essential existence is demonstrably false, and the universe could have begun (and indeed did begin) with entirely natural, scientifically verifiable, causation. Although ultimate origins certainly fall out of the realm of empirical scientific demonstration, this is the assumption upon which the scientific community operates. Nietzsche once said, “God is dead, and we have killed Him.” Modern science touts that its progress demonstrates that God never existed, except in the deluded minds of the faithful, whose brains apparently had not evolved enough to shed the genetic material of religion and superstition. If you, a professing Christian, do not believe the Genesis account of creation, but have cast your lot in with Darwinian Evolution as the explanation for all that is, you have undermined and sabotaged your own faith. You believe a quaint (perhaps harmless?) white lie.

 

You have capitulated to the secular power, whose bias lies in naturalism, with a priesthood whose doctrine is evolutionary advancement, and whose sacraments include psychology, abortion, and moral liberty to pursue what was formerly considered sin. Rather than sitting on the victorious side, such people fall into the camp of what Paul describes, saying, “although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools,” Romans 1:21, 22. This passage describes man exchanging the truth of God for naturalism, or the worship of the creation in place of a divine, supernatural agency as the universe’s First Cause. As Solomon wrote, there is nothing new under the sun, and Darwinism is no exception. From a wrong premise came wrong conclusions, leading into spiritual darkness and bondage. We are not, we are told, to be unequally yoked with unbelievers. By espousing such a doctrine, untested and untestable, and patently false by the very predictions it makes about life, Christians yoke themselves with materialism, naturalism, relativism, subjectivity, fatalism, and the Satanic spirit that inspires it’s continuance. God is witness to creation in general, and man’s inception specifically. We may take Him on His word, as children who believe the Heavenly Father, or we may be blown about by every wind of doctrine cunning men fabricate under the ennobled title of science, falsely named, 1 Timothy 6:20, 21, KJV.