Where the Evolutionary Story Leads

 Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”

So God created man in his own image,
    in the image of God he created him;
    male and female he created them.

And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” And God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the heavens and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.” And it was so.

Genesis 1:26-30

Every human being who has ever lived is descended from Adam and Eve. And both Adam and Eve were made by God in His image. And because of that, we can know that every human being has inherent worth, and that no skin color or physical condition makes any one human being any less valuable than another.

And so evolution, currently conceived, is false, but it is not merely false. It is a dangerous falsehood. It contends that humans arrived through the process of genetic mutation followed by certain subsequent animal organisms being more fit for survival than others (natural selection), and that this “process” has, at least for now, produced what we are as the most intelligent and powerful of the animal species.

This falsehood, a “process” with no processor, a “selection” with no selector (because in a godless framework “nature” cannot “select” anything, it is merely a word of description for the physical world around us), is folly. But it is a folly with serious consequences, one of which is that if undermines human worth.

In the evolutionary worldview, certain variations of this two-legged hominid that we are that “evolved” in one part of our planet may very well be more fit, more intelligent, more resourceful than others. Why shouldn’t that be acknowledged? Why shouldn’t it be embraced? And whether you do anything with that truth, if evolution were a valid explanation for human existence it would still just simply be true. Certain versions of this animal we are would be more fitting and, in a sense, human, than others.

You have to look downstream of a worldview to really see what the quality of the water is. The evolutionary worldview’s delta is nihilistic, despairing, utilitarian. It reeks to high heaven of contempt for the human being, or at least other human beings.

The little boy who’s been taught by his parents that God made the world and then made humans to be special, and even a special kind of special, will know intuitively that it is wrong to think of babies as a burden, to treat a poor person with contempt, to be rude to someone with a disability. Humans are special, and that will never change. The 30-year-old man who learned at university that humans are the result of blind genetic mutation and adaptability will intuit the randomness of human life and will have no ground (or at best very fragile ground) for any love or respect for humans as humans. He will think there should be less of us so that salmon and flowers and dragonflies can have their planet back. He will see the world as something we stole, rather than a garden we were made to tend and enjoy. He will invert reality, for the reality is God made us special and called us to a special task. We are, in the words of Jesus, worth more than many sparrows. Each has worth, humans and sparrows, but humans are vastly more precious. Darwin might disagree, but Darwin is wrong.

Look downstream. Abortion and racial hatred and suicide and the general sense that humans are a problem, these are the outworkings of the falsehood of evolution. Nihilism is the fruit, evolution the root.

But the church has a better an truer story to tell.