Why I Feel that I don’t Need to Sit under Darwin

Below is a response I wrote to a theistic evolutionist who insisted that I had to be more acquainted with the arguments of the evolutionists before I could reject evolution:

Since you’ve mentioned the 9/11 conspiracy theory, let me mention to you my friend Bob, who is a strong believer in this. Upon his strenuous insistence, I watched a DVD laying out the conspiracy case. I found that there were many things that I couldn’t answer—how the buildings came straight down, the presence of molten metal that could only result from implanted explosives….. Bob might think me close-minded, but despite all of the “evidences,” I must reject this theory. There are just too many over-riding considerations against the notion that “Bush did it!”

Thank you for your generous offer to re-consider the evidences, and under other circumstances, I’d be inclined to take you up on it. I’m intensely interested in science, but also intensely uneducated in it. As with the above conspiracy theory, I trust that there would be many details that I would be unable to answer. Nevertheless, there are so many other over-reaching considerations that make it totally implausible to me—as implausible as spontaneous generation—even though I had once believed it in.

This brings us to your challenge regarding “belief”:

“…it's clear that in every age and in every culture, nothing causes people to shut down their rational faculties more quickly than the sincere belief that God endorses their interpretation of his revelation.”

We all have our interpretations, whether regarding a holy book, spirituality, or even science. All facts require interpretation, and all interpretations are subject to our culture and our heart’s commitments. You seem to be suggesting that because of my Biblical commitments, I am more inclined to “shut down rational faculties more quickly.” Are you leaving yourself out of this equation? Are the evolutionists also above this warning? Are you suggesting that people who believe in God are more narrow-minded?

Some of us have come to a faith in Christ after years of struggling with doubts and adopting all forms of philosophical or therapeutic systems. I had come from a Jewish background and had been highly dysfunctional, so wracked by various life-controlling emotions that I couldn’t think straight. I was left back in school and had dropped out of college three times, unable to cope. I was a walking time-bomb, but Jesus has become my Savior. He promised,

• "If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free." (John 8:31-32)

Among other things, he has set me free from my driving psychological needs—free to think, to enjoy, to weigh evidences. He has also given me confidence in who He is. This has meant that I no longer have the over-riding need to prove myself or to retaliate or become defensive when confronted with oppositional ideas. I am confident that it’s no longer about me and my righteousness or performance, but His alone (Gal. 2:20). Therefore, I can now see as I never have been able to before. C.S.Lewis had said something like this:

"If don't believe in the sun simply because I see, but by it, I can see everything else!"

Christ opens the eyes of the blind!

Spirituality

For the vast majority, religion or spirituality equals self-improvement, an extension of our own ambitions to write the iconic novel, achieve the PH’D or to own a house with a swimming pool and a three-car garage. However, spirituality merely flips our horizontal, materialist aspirations vertically to the heavenlies. It adopts the idea that we can climb the “ladder of success” in a spiritual sense through our good deeds, our loving relationships, enlightenment, or just simply by learning how to be in-touch, whether with ourselves, others or with a universal consciousness.

I had tried to climb this ladder with a series of highly recommended psychologists, therapists, and psychiatrists, each leaving me worse off than I had been before. Finally, I adopted a new faith – I would move to Israel and find the meaning I so desperately desired through my identification with my ancestral people. However, after this failed, I moved in with an ultra—orthodox Hasidic sect, the Lubavitchers, for a week, verticalizing my quest.

I asked many questions about this road and its promise of meaning and peace, but received few tangible answers. One evening, a young American approached me:

“Danny, I know exactly what you are experiencing. Last year, I felt the same way as you do now. However, there is a Tzadik (holy man) in Tel Aviv who can open up for you the Hebrew Scriptures and prove to you, beyond any doubt, that it is truly the Word of God!”

My heart leap! I needed to know that this – the way of fulfilling Torah – was the right path. By knowing that it came from God seemed like a big first step. Ben arranged a private audience for me with the Tzadik, and off we went. I found myself sitting opposite the holy man at a small table, as he studied me carefully and as his followers waited expectantly for him. They regarded their Tzadik as the ladder, the intermediary between God and their hopes and desires.

The Tzadik began to shake his head gently, almost apologetically, and it wasn’t in the vertical direction.

“You are not ready to study Torah. There is too much confusion in your life. You need to first find a measure of peace. Go live in a good observant Jewish community, and then come back to me in a few months, and we’ll talk again.”

“Talk again?” I hadn’t uttered a syllable! But what hurt most was what was implied. God couldn’t help me until I improved myself, and I knew that I couldn’t. Everything in my life had communicated this disheartening measure to me. I had tried for years, in many different ways, to climb out of my malaise, and nothing worked. My one hope was that, perhaps, there was a God who could do it for me, but the Tzadik had indicated that God wouldn’t climb down the ladder. Instead, I would have to climb it myself.

In desperation and also out of a sense of divine rejection, I screamed at the stunned holy man. However, in my heart-of-hearts, I believed that he was right, and that I was a flawed individual, beyond remediation, and I too was right.

Only much later did I come to see that this was true for all of us members of the human race. The only difference is that most people believe that they can climb the ladder to freedom, merit, self-worth, the divine, or enlightenment. However, this trek requires a trunk-load of denial. In order to believe that we can ascend, we have to deny the fact that we don’t have spiritual wings. It’s also to deny what should be so obvious to all of us – our self-righteousness, bitterness, jealousy, lovelessness, self-centeredness, and selfishness, often masked by our self-exalting identity as a good person, or a loyal friend, or any number of other veneers.

However, in the Messiah Jesus, I found a God who has descended the ladder for the helpless, even for His enemies. He promises that it’s no longer about us and our supposed abilities, insights, spirituality or virtues, but about His alone (Gal. 2:20; Romans 8:31-32)! Consequently, I’ve ascended the vertical, but it wasn’t alone; He carried me!

Should Sexuality be a Matter of Choice?

A Liberal MP of Canada, Charles Hubbard, warned that there is no logical reason for restrictions against incestuous marriages if same-sex marriage is permitted.

Well, Hubbard’s warning wasn’t fanciful. On December 17, 2010, LifeSiteNews.com reported,

• The attorney for David Epstein, a Colombia university professor charged with incest with his adult daughter, is defending sex between family members by appealing to homosexual “rights” as a precedent…Epstein’s lawyer, Matthew Galluzzo, told ABC News that “It’s OK for homosexuals to do whatever they want in their own home. How is this so different? We have to figure out why some behavior is tolerated and some is not…If we assume for a moment that both parties are consenting, then why are we prosecuting this?”

Same-sex marriage is a triumph of choice over principle – the consideration of right and wrong regarding sexual behaviors. If sexuality is simply a matter of choice between consenting adults – like choosing between spaghetti or ziti – then Epstein has every “right” in the world to have sex with his daughter and to even marry her.

However, in a world where “choice” determines sexual norms, the doors will swing open to more than just incest. As far as I can tell, during this entire sex-sex marriage debate, the Islamic community has remained silent. Perhaps they perceive acceptance of same-sex marriage as the removal of any possible argument against polygamy, which has been a major vehicle in Muslim evangelism. According to Shariah law, Muslim children must remain Muslim, and children born to a Christian mother and a Muslim father must be Muslim.

Therefore, we have heard that in Malaysia, a “moderate” Islamic nation, there is a saying among Muslims: “This first wife is for dachwa [evangelism – bringing more Muslims into the world]; the second is for love.”

The supremacy of “choice” opens the doors to other problems. By virtue of what, can there be a law that prohibits a man from marrying multiple, poor, third-world women in order to secure for them USA citizenship with all its benefits? By virtue of what, can society prevent humans from marrying their animals to get them health benefits?

And then there is the question of the age-of-consent! Why must it remain at 18 years? Why shouldn’t pubescent children also have the right to choose? Why should their families be allowed to exercise control over their decision making? In most places, the family has already been marginalized when it comes to school sex education and even decisions about abortion.

Should society leaving sexual choice up to the individual, like choosing the color of your shirt? There seem to be far greater implications to our sexual conduct than to our fashions. As adults, sexualized children have reported the disastrous impact that an early seduction has had on their lives. Clearly, sex impacts lives far more profoundly than eating a hamburger! In this regard, John J. Davis (Evangelical Ethics) writes of the work of British Anthropologist, J.D. Unwin:

• After a comprehensive study of both Western and non-Western cultures throughout human history, Unwin concluded that the record of mankind “does not contain a single instance of a group becoming civilized unless it had been absolutely [heterosexually] monogamous, nor is there any example of a group retaining its culture after it has adopted less rigorous customs.” Unwin observed that a society’s adoption and maintenance of heterosexual monogamy as a social standard “has preceded all manifestations of social energy, whether that energy be reflected in conquest, in art and sciences, in extension of the social vision, or in the substitution of monotheism for polytheism.” (p. 116)

Sexual experimentation degrades its pioneers. No wonder, we universally find taboos against it:

• “Flee from sexual immorality. All other sins a man commits are outside his body, but he who sins sexually sins against his own body. Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own.” (1 Cor. 6:18-19)

Marriage, Yuk?

A recent Pew Research Center survey found that,

• about 39 percent of Americans said marriage was becoming obsolete. And that sentiment follows U.S. census data released in September that showed marriages hit an all-time low of 52 percent for adults 18 and over. In 1978, just 28 percent believed marriage was becoming obsolete.

This growing skepticism about the marriage institution is associated with changing attitudes and beliefs about the definition of “family”:

• About 34 percent of Americans called the growing variety of family living arrangements good for society, while 32 percent said it didn't make a difference and 29 percent said it was troubling.

However, before we allow the vast array of alternative “family” groupings to prejudice us against the surpassing viability of the traditional marriage, I think we need to take a look at some statistics. In The Case for Marriage, Linda Waite & Maggie Gallagher assemble some impressive figures:

• HEALTH: “Both married men and married women feel healthier that those who are divorced, separated, or widowed, according to research. In their study of the health of men and women nearing retirement age, Waite and Hughes found that wives were about 30% more likely to rate their health excellent or very good than the same-aged single women were and 40% less likely to say their health is only fair or poor. Husbands showed similar advantages over unmarried men. Married men and women are also less likely than singles to suffer from long-term chronic illnesses or disabilities.” (49)

• SUICIDE: “Married men are only half as likely as bachelors, and about one-third as likely as divorced guys, to take their own life. Widowers face about the same suicide risk as divorced men do, except for younger widowers who are up to nine times more likely than married men to commit suicide.” (52)

• MH: “40% of the married said they are very happy with their life in general, compared to just under a quarter of those who were single or were co-habiting. The separated (15% very happy) and the divorced (18% very happy) were the least happy groups. The widowed were, perhaps surprisingly, just about as likely to say they are very happy as singles or as co-habitors—22%.” (67)

• SEX: “Married people have both more and better sex than singles do. They not only have sex more often, but they enjoy it more…Only cohabitors have more sex than married couples, but they don’t necessarily enjoy it as much.” (79)

• DV: “A large body of research shows that marriage is much less dangerous for women than cohabitors…1987-88 National Survey of Families and Households: married people are much less likely than cohabiting couples to say that arguments between them and their partners had become physical in the past year (4% of married people compared to 13% of the cohabiting).” (155) “Cohabiting women are 8 times as likely as to be unfaithful than married women.” (157)

• CHILD ABUSE: “A preschooler living with one biological parent and one step-parent was forty times more likely to be sexually abused than one living with two natural parents.” (159).

• IMPROVEMENT: “86% of those who rated their marriage as unhappy in the late eighties and who were still married five years later said their marriages had become happier.” (75)

• “COHABITATION [trial marriage] provides some but not all of the same emotional benefits of marriage, yet only for a short time and at a high price. Breaking up with a live-in lover carries many of the same emotional costs as divorce but happens far more frequently. People who are cohabiting are less happy generally than the married and are less satisfied with their sex lives. In America, long-term cohabiting relationships are far rarer than successful marriages.” (74)

Interestingly, many talk approvingly of the “wisdom” of cohabitation as a means to test future compatibility. The New Oxford Review also reports that,

• “One in ten survives five or more years…The divorce rate among those who cohabit prior to marriage is nearly double (39% vs. 21%) that of couples who marry without prior cohabitation.”

• “Men in cohabiting relationships are four times more likely to be unfaithful…Depression is three times more likely…The poverty rate among children of cohabiting couples is five-fold greater…and 90% more likely to have a low GPA…Abuse of children is 20 times higher in cohabiting biological-parent families; and 33 times higher when the mother is cohabiting with a boyfriend.”

• “Cohabitation is bad for men, worse for women, and horrible for children. It is a deadly toxin to marriage, family, and culture.” ()

It seems that the Bible might have a point:

• And the LORD God said, "It is not good that man should be alone; I will make him a helper comparable to him." (Genesis 2:18)

Unsurprisingly, Jesus endorsed the Bible’s teaching to retain the marriage union at all costs, acknowledging that marriage is part of God’s wise and gracious design.

• "Haven't you read," he replied, "that at the beginning the Creator 'made them male and female' (Genesis 1:26), and said, 'For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh' (2:24)? So they are no longer two, but one. Therefore what God has joined together, let man not separate." (Matthew 19:4-6)

Darwin: The Evidence

In response to my recent essay on Evolution and the Fate of the Church, one Christian friend responded, “Asking intelligent people to ignore sound evidence of [evolution] is nonsense and damaging.”

I’m not ignoring the evidence, and just to prove it, I’m citing below the testimony from leading evolutionists regarding just one problem of evolution – the fossil record:

• “The impression that microevolution is limited in its scope is confirmed by the comments of Wesson and others to the effect that the fossil record gives no good examples of macroevolution.” (Lennox, 110).

• “The number of intermediate varieties, which have formerly existed on the earth, [should] be enormous. Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such graduated organic chain.” (Darwin, The Origin of Species)

• “The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as a trade secret of palaeontology…The history of most fossil species includes two features particularly inconsistent with the idea that they gradually evolved:

1. Stasis. Most species exhibit no directional change during their tenure on earth. They appear in the fossil record looking pretty much the same as when they disappear…
2. Sudden appearance. In any local area a species does not arise gradually by the steady transformation of its ancestors; it appears all at once and “fully formed.” (Stephen Jay Gould, 111)”

• Palaeontologist David Raup, Field Museum of Natural History: “We are now about 120 years after Darwin and the knowledge of the fossil record has been greatly expanded. We now have a quarter of a million fossil species, but the situation hasn’t changed much. The record of evolution is still surprisingly jerky and, ironically, we have even fewer examples of evolutionary transition than we had in Darwin’s time.” (Lennox, 111)

• Niles Eldredge, American Museum of Natural History: “We palaeontologists have said that the history of life supports [the story of gradual adaptive change] knowing all the while it does not.” (111)

• Eldredge: ”I tried in vain to document examples of the kind of slow directional change we all thought ought to be there every since Darwin told us that natural selection should leave precisely such a tell-tale signal…I found instead that once species appear in the fossil record they tend not to change very much at all. Species remain imperturbably, implacably resistant to change as a matter of course – often for millions of years.” (113)

• “All Paleontologists know that the fossil record contains precious little in the way of intermediate forms; transitions between major groups are characteristically abrupt.” S.J.Gould

• “No real evolutionist…uses the fossil record as evidence in favor of the theory of evolution as opposed to special creation.” Mark Ridley

• Dr. Colin Patterson, British Museum of Natural History: “I will lay it on the line – there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument.” His response when asked why he didn’t include anything about transitional forms in his book, Evolution: “If I knew any, I certainly would have included them.”

• Dr. Gareth J. Nelson, American Museum of Natural History: “It is a mistake to believe that even one fossil species… can be demonstrated to have been ancestral to another.”

If the evolutionists themselves are skeptical of the evidence, why should not the Christian also be skeptical?

Experiencing Meaning without Knowing Meaning?

What is the substance of the meaning of our lives? Sean D. Kelly, chair of the department of philosophy at Harvard University, thinks that we can find it in the “small-scale commitments”:

• “…to find happiness and meaning, in other words, not in some universal religious account of the order of the universe that holds for everyone at all times, but rather in the local and small-scale commitments that animate a life well-lived. The meaning that one finds in a life dedicated to “the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fire-side, the country,” these are genuine meanings. They are, in other words, completely sufficient to hold off the threat of nihilism, the threat that life will dissolve into a sequence of meaningless events.”

Kelly feels that life can be lived meaningfully by virtue of our day-to-day experiences without a contextualizing, unifying belief system. It’s like living in two-dimensional space – enjoying a sunset apart from seeing its relationship to purpose, truth, and the fullness of our relationships. It’s being left alone with feelings, which sometimes might raise us to lofty places, but more often confront us with fears, failures, and disappointments. From where do we derive a philosophy that can ennoble and meaningfully contextualize life’s downside? How can we find hope in the midst of brokenness and our inadequacies? How can we love our spouse, after we come to realize that he/she isn’t the answer we had envisioned?

There are certain higher truths that we need to know – God is our answer (Romans 8:31-32); He works all things for good, even our failures (Romans 8:28); We’ll be blissfully with Him forever (Psalm 73). Despite his many unanswered questions, King Solomon also came to a different conclusion than did Kelly:

• Now all has been heard; here is the conclusion of the matter: Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. (Eccles. 12:13)

We were made for this ultimate relationship. Rejecting it is to reject all hope of meaning.

We can’t Logically Deny God’s Existence

The vast majority of atheists acknowledge that science can’t disprove God, but they’ll add that science can’t prove God either. Theistic evolutionists also join in on this chorus. However, some atheists do believe that they can prove that the God of the Bible – all-good and omnipotent – can’t exist.

They reason like this: The creation is sub-substandard (characterized by evil and suffering), therefore its creator must also be sub-standard (weak or sadistic).

However, this argument suffers from a fatal logical flaw. In order to say that God has failed the test – that He hasn’t measured up to certain standards of creation – their standards have to be more than just a matter of feelings or chemical-electrical reactions. Instead, the standards must be objective, based upon certain higher and unchanging truths. However, such standards are only possible if there is a higher Being – transcendent, omnipotent, omnipresent and omniscient.

In other words, the atheist uses the absolute God to disprove the absolute God. If such a God doesn’t exist, then we can’t make use of His “non-existent standard” to disprove Him! To use His standard is to acknowledge His existence!

Instead, the Bible insures us that we can know God through the things that He has made:

• The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities--his eternal power and divine nature--have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse. (Romans 1:18-20)

There are also other things, like sub-atomic particles, that we can know based on their effects or “footprints.”