Darwinism is Poison, and You’ve Probably Drunk Some
You haven’t escaped all of the toxic effects of Darwinism. Like seed oils or BPA or Taylor Swift, it’s gotten into everything. Even if you’ve been a solid young earth creationist your entire life, you’ve likely seen a Star Wars movie, or one of the Avatar films. If you’re over 40 you might remember the TV show Dinosaurs, if you’re over 30 you certainly remember the GEICO cavemen commercials, and if you were ever a kid you’ve probably seen The Good Dinosaur, The Land Before Time, or Jurassic Park.
The assumed story of human and animal life, of the planet God put us on and everything that’s ever happened on it, is that after millions of years of non-life followed by billions of years of genetic mutation personified as “evolution,” earth eventually had us crafty bipeds as tenants. That’s the received text of the modern narrative of life, at least in the West, and none of us is totally free of its influence. Our science fiction movies assume the evolutionary paradigm on other planets, where perhaps evolution is cute enough to produce an Ewok or obnoxious enough to produce a Jar Jar Binks. Our history books assume “civilizations” as we know them gradually emerged as humans moved further from their primate beginnings and slowly learned speech and toolmaking. Our practice of medicine assumes that our human bodies are the product of tens of thousands of years of mutation and natural selection, “natural selection” being the more polite way of saying the weak and deformed died without successfully reproducing themselves so that you and I could inherit better genes and opposable thumbs.
Why does your son call a T-Rex a “dinosaur” but doesn’t call a crocodile a dinosaur? Because “dinosaurs” aren’t just all big reptiles, and they’re not even just all extinct big reptiles; rather they’re a particular set of extinct reptiles that all died out 60+ million years ago. So even if I know the world isn’t 60+ million years old, somehow because of all of the books and movies and science classes I had that told me it was, I still can’t shake the idea that somehow the T-Rex and the velociraptor and the compsognathus are a separate category from the, say, also extinct Delcourt’s Giant Gecko, or the alive and well Komodo dragon.
Assumptions matter. Assumptions about how human beings got to look the way they do, have the parts and capabilities they do, matter. Do we have wrists and noses and two kidneys because God made us that way, or because natural selection weeded out the less effective makes and models? Assumptions about what biological life is, and why there are different forms of it, matter. Do butternut squash and bananas and okra exist for us and animals to eat, or do they exist by the same evolutionary processes that produced us, and therefore with a reasonable claim to being left alone? Are we guests on a planet that already has too many of us, or are we the ones the planet’s Maker says it needs more and more of in order to subdue it?
Where Darwin Leads
Abortion nests very nicely within Darwinian assumptions. After all, the weak are naturally selected for death, which yielded the aspects of modern life most pleasing to our secular sensibilities, like good-looking movie stars and the highly advanced screens we can watch them on during our hours and hours of leisure time. Nature selecting the strong and weeding out the weak got us here. And, after all, human beings are merely one of millions of species of living things on earth, all of whom have equal claim to the planet, and we’re dirtying up the place too much as it is. Letting women choose, one might even say “select,” to end a human life inside them, is a very natural conclusion to reach from Darwinian premises. No doubt about it: The philosophy that attributes the diversity of life on earth to choice breeding is a philosophy that has housed abortion quite comfortably.
Contempt for human beings generally, and especially any humans of a different shade or culture from one’s own, also finds good soil in evolution. It isn’t coincidental that Adolf Hitler’s views found such an organic connection with Darwin:
An essential of Hitler’s conclusions in this book [Hitler’s ‘secret book’] was the conviction drawn from Darwin that might makes right. It led to a vital link between self-preservation and Lebensraum [the doctrine that nation needs territory]. ‘The compulsion to engage in the struggle for existence lies in the limitation of the living space; but in the life-struggle for this living space lies also the basis for evolution.’ The consequence was an eternal battle between nations which could only be won by a people dedicated to strict racial, folk and blood values. Once standards were lowered and pure blood was mixed with inferior blood the end was in sight. ‘Then the Jew can make his entry in any form, and this master of international poisoning and race corruption will not rest until he has thoroughly uprooted and thereby corrupted such a people.’ This was the first time Hitler not only defined his terms but interwove race, folk and blood values with his hatred of Jews.
Adolf Hitler, John Toland; p. 226, 230
Hitler is a reminder that a world which refuses to see human beings as made directly and intentionally by God for dominion of the world He gave them is going to find it quite easy to hold humans in contempt, the way you or I might be annoyed by a bat or a raccoon in our respective garages. It will find it especially easy in light of the fact that we are already sinful and prone to malice towards our fellow man. And so a West drunk on Darwinism, refusing through its evolutionary way of looking at humanity to see us for what we are and to see God’s creation for what it is, produces organizations like the WEF that plainly and simply want there to be less humans.
Darwin Poisons Everything
Even for the mind that has dismissed evolution as a historical reality, a mind that knows Darwin was wrong, evolutionary assumptions that persist in our intuitions can feed and breed this kind of contempt. Do you view Sub-Saharan Africa or Southeast Asia as backward or undeveloped because neither benefited from the centuries of Christian light the West did? (A very legitimate reason to believe it.) Or is it because the evolutionary song of dark people who must be closer to our supposed primate past is still playing somewhere in your mind at an intuitional level? Darwin was wrong; no one is descended from any animal. Every human being on earth is a descendant of Adam, a man who was made directly and perfectly by God, a man smarter and more intact than you’ve ever been. But your intuitions and the assumptions, things that run in the background like apps you forgot to close out, might need regularly re-taught that and re-shaped by it.
Darwin poisons everything. And putting a denial of evolution on a statement of faith that then goes in a drawer in our minds isn’t a strong enough antidote. At the level of what we feel when we see a family with eight kids, when we see a nursing home filled with 80-year-olds, what blooms up in our hearts when a greeter at the store with severe autism starts an awkward conversation with us, at that level we have to start diluting the toxin called Darwin. What is that guy? The autistic one starting this awkward conversation? What is he?
In 1859, John Murray’s publishing house in Scotland published a book that told the world a lie, and the world believed it. And lies, especially big ones, have a way of digging way down into the tissue of humanity. Lies like evolution are rarely mere surface wounds. 164 years later everything from medicine to philosophy, from the study of language to the cartoons on PBS Kids, all of it bears the subtle stamp of this falsehood popularized by a naturalist from Shrewsbury, England.
Repent and Believe
It wasn’t merely the plausibility of the lie that gave it such power and popularity; it was also the willingness of humanity to be deceived. And the only antiseptic for either that willingness or the deception is repentance and a desire for the truth. Particularly in our nation, in our American society, we need to repent for digesting and distributing the lie that genetic mutations did what in reality God did, that a quirk of chemistry and the billions of years we made up to give it time to be quirky enough produced your Aunt Rita and her green eyes and her opposable thumbs. We shed what we once knew about the world and the Adams and Eves who people her and the whys of it all and we put in its place a thin, obscene fairy tale about how finch beaks proved that “evolution” made us, not God.
Well over a century has gone on with that assumed obscenity, enough time for a great-grandfather and his great-grandson both to be sitting on a couch together now believing they’re descended from earthworms, and for both to have been taught it by their elementary school teachers.
Darwinism is a poison the West willfully ingested, and the world is now staggering under its effects. We need to return to the Great Physician and ask for His healing. Thankfully the Good News entails that He is our true Creator, and having given us life the first time He is more than capable of reviving us.