Ditching Darwin

A growing lineup of the “faithful” are questioning Darwinism. In “Evolutionary Mechanisms: Darwinian Biology’s Grant Narrative of Triumph and the Subversion of Religion,” Robert Shedinger explained his disenchantment with Darwin. He had “fully accepted the idea that Charles Darwin had essentially solved the problem of the origin of species.” However, because of his science background, he had been asked to teach a course on Science and Religion. Consequently, he began to bone-up on Darwinism but was surprised about the great degree of skepticism coming from Darwinists. He explains:

·       I was shocked when I began to recognize just how ambiguous and tentative so much of this literature is. It is littered with caveats, inconsistencies, unsupported assumptions, grand claims backed by a dearth of empirical evidence… (Terrell Clemons, Salvo Magazine, Spring 2020, 8-9)

Shedinger was also surprised at the evolution establishment’s glib and non-evidential dismissal of ID. This led him to wonder about their militant dogmatism. To explain this, he offers three possibilities to explain their dogmatism:

·       Serves the guild interests of the biological establishment.

·       Subjugates the disciplines of religion and theology, requiring them and other branches of knowledge to adjust accordingly, thus shoring up the naturalist paradigm in the academy and beyond.

·       Provides a litmus test for intellectual acceptability. Espouse the narrative and you pass. Dissent at your own risk…ensuring philosophical naturalism in all things by providing a backup safeguard against any would-be rogue nonconformist. (9)

Consequently, evolution is wielded as a God-substitute as some evolutionists, like atheist Michael Ruse, have admitted:

·       Evolution came into being as a kind of secular ideology, an explicit substitute for Christianity…an ideology, a secular religion--a full-fledged alternative to Christianity, with meaning and morality…Evolution is a religion.

Erasmus Darwin, Charles’ brother, admitted that he had found his brother’s theory so satisfying that the facts didn’t matter to him:

·       In fact, the a priori reasoning [for evolution] is so entirely satisfactory to me that if the facts won’t fit in, why so much the worse for the facts. (The Journey, Os Guinness, 154)

Erasmus admitted the evolution suited him. Philosopher Thomas Nagel admitted that he didn’t want there to be a God. Therefore, even though he had written against evolution and in favor of ID, he was still holding out for a better naturalistic theory. However, this was enough to damn him by the establishment.

DOUG AX, BIOLOGY, AND THE BELEAGUERED THEORY OF EVOLUTION

Even from a biological perspective, evolution is unable to bridge the gap between reality and any naturalistic explanation of it. In his new book, Undeniable: How Biology confirms our Intuition that Life is Designed, Douglas Ax argues that “functional coherence,” like “irreducible complexity,” argues against gradualistic evolution. How? Ax argues that many coordinated biological components have to be in place before the organism can have an “adaptive advantage,” before a trait can confer any survival value or even survive. Ax provides the example of photosynthesis within a single celled organism:

·       The photosynthetic apparatus in relatively simple single-celled organisms called cyanobacteria has hundreds of molecular parts that are precisely positioned to enable the apparatus to gather photons from the sun and convert their energy into the chemical energy in sugar. The photosystem’s overall function depends on an extensive hierarchy of subfunctions, all “contributing in a coordinated way to the whole.” (Jonathan Wells, Salvo Magazine, #39, Winter 2016, 45)

Ax concludes that this “makes accidental invention fantastically improbable and therefore physically impossible,” and that these designs “can only come from deliberate, intelligent action.”

Biologist Jonathan Wells observes:

·       Natural selection has never been observed to produce anything more than minor changes within existing species, but higher forms of life contain many more inventions than we find in cyanobacteria. (45)

Ax concludes that because such inventions involve high levels of complex additions, explaining them is like the problem of explaining the origin of life:

·       “Because each new life form amounts to a new high-level invention, the origin of the thousandth new life form is no more explicable in Darwinian terms than the origin of life.”

Consequently, the problems seem to be overwhelming the beleaguered theory of evolution.

HITLER’S GOD

In his new book, “Hitler’s Religion,” historian Richard Weikart attempts to pinpoint the beliefs had been central to Hitler’s worldview and his genocidal rampage. He identifies Pantheism:

·       In Mein Kampf, for instance, he often deifies nature.  This is so obvious that most translators often capitalize the word “Nature” therein.  Indeed Hitler on several occasions referred to nature as eternal, which means that it was not created, but in the same passages he refers to God as a Creator.  This seems rather contradictory at first, but it makes sense if you understand nature itself to be his God.  For this reason Pantheism seems the closest position to Hitler’s views.

But doesn’t Pantheism show respect for nature and living things? Isn’t it antithetical to genocide? If god is the entirety of nature, and nature contains many horrific elements like bubonic plague and the survival-of-the-fittest, then it would seem that this god sanctions genocide, among everything else that nature contains. What then would be the morality of this nature god? Anything that nature contains becomes a moral model. Therefore, anything goes. https://www.mercatornet.com/features/view/hitlers-religion-the-twisted-beliefs-that-drove-the-third-reich/19078

It is therefore easy to understand how the god of Darwinism fits comfortably alongside of Pantheism:

·       Since Hitler thought that nature was God, he believed that morality was defined by conforming to nature’s laws.  One of the natural laws he thought most important was the Darwinian struggle for existence, which produced evolutionary progress.  Since the struggle in nature was vicious and resulted in the strong destroying the weak, Hitler considered it good and right to viciously destroy the weak.  He thought this would bring about a better world with superior humans.  He thought he had divine approval for annihilating the allegedly inferior races and people with disabilities.

Consequently, Hitler became a faithful servant of his beliefs.

THE DEATH OF GOD AND HOW IT HAS CHANGED THE WORLD

 The German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, had argued that once we reject the Christian God, we have also rejected Christian values – equality, human exceptionalism, and an entire array of values that go along with them. However, the West naively thought that they could retain Christian values after “killing” the Christian God. Os Guinness wrote of Nietzsche’s disdain for such blindness:

• Nietzsche was a self-proclaimed “anti-Christ,” yet he had no time complacent middle-class thinking that could say, “God is dead” and go on living as before. If God was “dead” for Western culture, then nothing was the same. It was time to face the consequences. (The Journey, 136)

What were the consequences? Anything would now be permissible! With God in the grave, our only moral rudder would be our desires and fears.

However, as in Nietzsche’s day, so too in ours! Few can perceive the consequences of their rejection of God. Atheists confidently explain:

• We need not sink into a morally relativistic quagmire once we reject God. We still have absolute moral principles to guide us. For example, drinking water is absolutely good because it promotes survival and survival is absolutely good.

However, what makes survival absolutely good? There no longer exists an absolute principle that makes human survival more important than the malaria-bearing mosquito. Besides, is there anything that establishes that survival-is-good apart from our own subjective judgment? If the mosquito could talk, he might say that his survival is just as important to him as ours is to us, and who can mediate between those two opinions with any authority if God is dead! But should we have laws that equally protect the survival of the mosquito? A growing number would now argue, “Yes!”

This brings us back to moral relativism where morality is entirely relative to how I think and feel on any given morning. In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche wrote:

• They are rid of the Christian God and now believe all the more firmly that they must cling to the Christian morality… When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet.

Truly, Christian morality rests upon an absolutely immutable and universal standard – God - but does it really matter? Yes! Our beliefs have consequences. The German Jewish poet, Heinrich Heine noted these consequences back in 1832:

• It is to the great merit of Christianity that it has somewhat attenuated the brutal German lust for battle. But it could not destroy it entirely. And should that taming talisman break – the Cross - then will come roaring back the wild madness of the ancient warriors.

What would happen once the Cross was broken? Heine continued:

• And laugh not at my forebodings, the advice of a dreamer who warns you away from the Kants and Fichtes of the world, and from our philosophers of nature. No, laugh not at the visionary who knows that in the realm of phenomena comes soon the revolution that has already taken place in the realm of spirit. For thought goes before deed as lightening before thunder. There will be played in Germany a play compared to which the French revolution was but an innocent idyll.

It is inevitable that, without God, there will be little to restrain the madness. The late psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, Victor Frankl, reasoned:

• I am absolutely convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek, were ultimately prepared not in some ministry or other in Berlin, but rather at the desks and the lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers. (The Doctor of the Soul)

Thoughts and philosophies precede plans and actions. Historian Richard Weikart, California State University, wrote in From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany about how the anti-God worldview of Darwinism impacted thought and action:

• By reducing humans to mere animals, by stressing human inequality, and by viewing the death of many "unfit" organisms as a necessary—and even progressive—natural phenomenon, Darwinism made the death of the "inferior" seem inevitable and even beneficent. Some Darwinists concluded that helping the "unfit" die—which had for millennia been called murder—was not morally reprehensible, but was rather morally good. 

Darwinist thinking brought about policy and behavioral change:

• Those skeptical about the role Darwinism played in the rise of advocacy for involuntary euthanasia, infanticide, and abortion should consider several points. First, before the rise of Darwinism, there was no debate on these issues, as there was almost universal agreement in Europe that human life is sacred and that all innocent human lives should be protected. Second, the earliest advocates of involuntary euthanasia, infanticide, and abortion in Germany were devoted to a Darwinian worldview. Third, Haeckel, the most famous Darwinist in Germany, promoted these ideas in some of his best-selling books, so these ideas reached a wide audience, especially among those receptive to Darwinism. Finally, Haeckel and other Darwinists and eugenicists grounded their views on death and killing on their naturalistic interpretation of Darwinism.

Heine was clearly right. In the same way that lightening precedes thunder, thought precedes deed. In Markings, the later Secretary General of the United Nations, Dag Hammarskjold, wrote:

• God does not die on the day when we cease to believe in a personal deity, but we die on the day when our loves cease to be illuminated by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder, the source of which is beyond all reason.

Perhaps not beyond all reason! In his Epistle to the Romans, the Apostle Paul had written that humanity is without rational excuse for rejecting God:

• For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. (Romans 1:18-20)

Consequently, rejecting God is not a morally neutral choice.

WHY MACRO-EVOLUTION IS A FICTION

The atheist Daniel Dennett called Darwinism a corrosive “acid” because of its power to dissolve away competing beliefs. I have found this to be very true of the hundreds of dialogues I have had with “Christian” evolutionists, who have consistently compromised the Bible’s teachings, wherever they clashed with evolution. This has occurred so extensively that their opinions are almost indistinguishable from the secular community.

Because of this, I welcome those who can present reasonable and coherent critiques of this theory. The following is a part of Robert P.Crowner’s critique of evolution:

“Geoffrey Simmons, M.D. in his book What Darwin Didn’t Know points out the incredible complexity of the human body and the interdependence of its parts. He points out many examples in the body that illustrate irreducible complexity:

• “Every significant change in the male’s reproductive system had to have been met with a reciprocal change in the female’s (or vice versa).”[11] 

• “The egg knows when it’s time to ovulate, how to pop out, how to travel through the fallopian tubes, how to receive a single sperm and close out other sperm, and how to eventually implant in the uterus.”[12]

• “A cell resembles a miniature industrial complex that is much more complex than a General Motors or Boeing plant.”[13]

• “The brain can store between 100 trillion and 280 quintillion bits of information in a mere three pounds of matter.”[14]

• “Eyes are like antennae for the brain. Millions of cells lining the interior of each eye function as photochemical receivers, converting light waves into a myriad of electrical impulses that are forwarded at a speed of about 200 miles per hour to the brain. There the impulses are sorted, organized and analyzed in holograph ways. All of this is accomplished in milliseconds.”[15]

• “Many hormones work in parallel or tandem, some compete, and some have double and triple functions.”[16]

• “Every action involves a complex array of interacting nerves, muscles, ligaments, tendons, joints, soft tissues, blood vessels, and bones. Millions to billions of cells work in unison.”[17]

In his chapter “Purposeful Design,” Simmons lists 81 facts that he believes point to design rather than chance as postulated in Darwin’s theory of evolution. Simmons points out that Darwin had little knowledge of genetics, physiology, and conception. So how could his theory still be accepted as valid?”