“I speak as concerning reproach, as though we had been weak. Howbeit whereinsoever any is bold, (I speak foolishly,) I am bold also. Are they Hebrew? So am I. Are they Israelites? So am I. Are they the seed of Abraham? So am I. Are they ministers of Christ? (I speak as a fool) I am more.”
Last Thursday, the birthdays of two important men were celebrated, both born exactly 200 years ago: Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln. They were born on the exact same day. Both men affected the world in unexpected ways, though they were both clear failures in their younger lives. And they were both thought to be fools, and are today considered wise. Which were they? Abe Lincoln was not a Christian when he was first elected our 16 th President. Only in office did his faith emerge a necessary and profound anchor in a stormy time of office. Darwin, on the other hand, began as a man of faith and resolved to be trained an Anglican priest at college. It was only after he established his theory of evolution that his faith slipped away from him.
The Psalmist said, “The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God. They are corrupt, they have done abominable works, there is none that is good.” Psalm 14:1 Solomon wrote: “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge; but fools despise wisdom and instruction.” Prov. 1:7 Using a scientific theory to get rid of a troublesome God is like holding your hand up in the sky to destroy the sun. It does effectively remove the sun from view, but your arm will eventually tire, and the sun is naturally still there. Some say Darwin returned to faith new death and repented of having started all this about evolution.
Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves and fought a hard, bitter battle to save the union. He led the United States through its darkest hours, seeing half a million young men die on our own fields. By the time of his second inaugural address, the man in office stood, a tower of faith in God. He spoke of the two sides in the war. “ Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes his aid against the other... The prayers of both could not be answered--that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has his own purposes... Fondly do we hope--fervently do we pray--that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn by the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, ‘The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.'”
This is a man whose heart has been broken by the terrible things he's had to perform in his office. But no such task was thrust on Charles Darwin. I won't vilify him. He was a man of his age, the Age of Reason, when science was supposed to resolve every mystery and solve all unknowns, finally freeing mankind from superstition, religion and mythology with truth. He saw some animals on South Sea islands and began spinning his theory of origins. A purely naturalistic explanation of all we see of life forms in our world was the result and our schools teach it as fact, though it's never been scientifically proven. Their theory: life began as a single cell and through eons of time, and environmental pressures, simple life became more complex, diversified, and resulted in plants, animals, squids and people, all from the same parent species. There was no divine hand forming these living beings, but a blind process called Natural Selection, where forces of survival made the stronger mutants succeed and flourish. Millions of selective moments later, human beings stood upright and became dominant over their ape ancestors.
The theory of evolution actually bolstered racist attitudes that subjected blacks to slavery, at the same hour Lincoln was drawing up the Emancipation Proclamation. One man found God at a time of trouble. The other lost God in the details of his theory that began a great deal more trouble. Today, evolution's proponents proudly denounce faith in God. Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion , mocks Christians and those who still hold faith in a Creator of this world. In a brilliant documentary of last year, Expelled, No Intelligence Allowed, Ben Stein interviews Dawkins twice. In the first interview this same hateful attitude is given. In the second, after Stein has exposed the impossibility of evolution from non-life to a single cell ever happening on this planet, he poses the question to Dawkins, who finally gives his honest belief: we were planted here by aliens who evolved somewhere else.
St. Paul wrote 2,000 years ago, “The invisible things of him since the creation of the world are clearly seen, being perceived through the things that are made, even his everlasting power and divinity; that they may be without excuse: because that, knowing God, they glorified him not as God , neither gave thanks; but became vain in their reasonings, and their senseless heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools .” Romans 1:20-22
Paul also wrote the Corinthians, who while his back was turned, gave themselves to new teachers who had never suffered for the faith and had spun lovely new theories that perverted the truth. He then spoke of his sufferings, telling them, “I speak foolishly” mocking himself, because he doesn't like to boast in his scars and harrowing experiences. Nevertheless, they are his proof against the liars who haven't paid their dues to become experts of faith.
It's hard to speak against the prevailing wisdom of your own day, especially when it may cost you dearly. Science instructors across the country have lost their teaching positions, been black-balled from other posts for even mentioning any theory but Darwinian evolution for our origins. In a country where 63% of our population believes God made us, a dark force of political correctness is attempting to crush us into submission and admit that a monkey is our uncle.
We needn't go to mere fundamentalism or bibliolatry—a belief that only the Bible may speak to such matters—in order to have something to say to the evolutionists. There is good science behind the concept of Intelligent Design . We can't insist that people listen to Genesis as an account of our beginnings. That would be enforced religion and we don't see the point or need of that. But there are facts that shout the existence of some conscious intelligence behind the setting of the spheres in space, and the intricate molecular patterns in us.
Irreducible complexity is a study that shows how our design delicately balances many complex functions and structures that, were even one of them missing, nothing would work or make any sense. The explanation of a human eye in evolutionary terms causes a dreaded silence—for there can be no intermediate steps resulting in a ball of liquid, with focusing lens and millions of nerve cells gathering light stimuli, sending these billions of information impulses to the brain that unscrambles the signals and creates a mental image that moves, in full color. The eye evolved in steps to that? From what? C'mon.
Specific complexity is another term that studies the genius behind DNA, who blueprint of genetic order, recently mapped by the Human Genome Project—whose director was a Christian. Random chance cannot result in 3 billion pairs of chemical codes that, missing just one piece at a certain point, will not result in life at all.
The Fine Tuned Universe study says that every physical system from gravity, to atomic structure, the freezing attributes of water, electromagnetism, all make our universe possible, when only the very slightest variation of any of these many physical constants would make it all impossible. It is nearly impossible, yet because of intelligence in its design, it exists.
We can and we must speak of things that trouble this world. We can read and learn and comment on them. We're not stupid to think that God made our universe. We don't have to say the world is only 5,000 years old. It may be, but it would still be consistent with our faith to believe it might be older, perhaps much older. But we also don't need to fantasize millions of years just to force our theory of origins into the realm of possibility. There are clocks in the earth's systems that tell of a younger world. There is evidence that carbon dating is very flawed when it looks back in time any real distance. The speed of light is constant, but was it always? And many scientific disciplines are coming to the same conclusion: we are made of light. Don't be ashamed of your faith. It may be the greatest science of all. In classical higher learning, the Queen of Sciences was Theology, the study of God.
A sower went out to sow his seeds. Jesus is so simple in His teaching, so straightforward and true: every word has weight. Throw the seeds, see the crops grow, learn the lessons. What kind of ground is it? Look at the fruits borne out of our current fad of a godless science. A world without God, without a creator, is a world with no purpose, no past and no future, in which we are no more than biological freaks. Our lives count for nothing more than we attribute to them, and no one survives.
T. S. Eliot, an Anglican, famous poet, and philosopher once wrote: “The Universal Church is today, it seems to me, more definitely set against the World than at any time since pagan Rome. I do not mean that our times are particularly corrupt; all times are corrupt… The World is trying the experiment of attempting to form a civilized but non-Christian mentality. The experiment will fail; but we must be very patient in awaiting its collapse; meanwhile redeeming the time; so that the Faith may be preserved alive through the dark ages before us; to renew and rebuild civilization, and save the World from suicide.”
Saving the world, one child at a time, from suicide is reason enough for us to speak as fools, braving the consequences, facing the fire, but telling the truth for truly we are in those dark ages Eliot speaks of, and we must eventually renew and rebuild our civilization and save the world from suicide. It has to be us. There's no one else here.
PFH+