Announcing the publication of my latest booK: Evolution’s Fatal Flaws. It is now available on Amazon as a paperback or ebook.
But I am very aware that many people, including Christians, regard the issue of evolution as largely irrelevant to Christian faith. In fact, in my discussions with people on the topic of evolution, the attitudes that I most commonly encounter tend to fall into two broad categories.
The first is the view that evolution is an established scientific fact. People with this view respond to me in a variety of ways, ranging from hostile vitriol (in the case of aggressive atheists) to bemused condescension and even polite but awkward embarrassment. How could I possibly believe that evolution is not true? It’s as if I have declared my belief that the moon is made of cheese or that gravity causes apples to fall up instead of down.
This book is written for people who hold this view: the belief that evolution has been proved beyond doubt and that anyone who disputes it is a science denier. I will let the rest of the book address this viewpoint.
But there is a second broad category of responses to the topic of evolution that I want to briefly address here. Some people simply don’t care and think that the issue is a complete irrelevance. Why waste time discussing something that may or may not have happened in the past? Surely there are more important issues to be grappling with in the present rather than running around ‘tilting at windmills’?
Perhaps this is your opinion. In my experience, many Christians hold this view. They regard those who argue against evolution as an unfortunate and embarrassing distraction: as people who are making a mountain out of a molehill and are obsessing over an issue that is largely irrelevant to the Christian faith.
I disagree.
Since the advent of evolutionary theory, particularly the rise of its popularity in the mid 20th century, belief in God has plummeted and secularism has skyrocketed. Research by a variety of organisations consistently indicates that among those who reject religious beliefs, the overwhelming majority believe that science (and evolution in particular) has disproved God. The evolutionary narrative that life developed by random natural processes has become one of the foundational underpinnings of atheism because it provides an alternate story of origins to the biblical narrative of an all-powerful Creator.
As the noted atheist, Dr. Richard Dawkins, once wrote:
“Although atheism may have been logically tenable before [Charles] Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.”1
There is no doubt in my mind that the theory of evolution, initially championed by Charles Darwin and subsequently developed by others, has been the most significant factor in society’s movement away from religious beliefs over the last century and a half.
Christians who believe that the topic of evolution is an irrelevance and a distraction simply aren’t seeing what I am seeing at the coalface. In my regular engagement with atheists and unbelievers, evolution is the substrate upon which their unbelief is built. Underlying their many arguments against God’s existence, evolution is the unassailable and immovable foundation upon which their atheism rests.
Make no mistake about it, the secularism that now pervades the developed world is strongly rooted in the alternate story of origins that evolutionary theory provides. It is a story of a purely mechanistic universe, without purpose or meaning. It is a story of a universe without either intentional causality or ultimate accountability. In the evolutionary universe, humans are no more than highly evolved animals who arose from nothing, who may live as they wish, and who will return to oblivion when they die. In this sense, the story of evolution is the direct antithesis of the story of the Bible.2
There are profound issues at stake here. Evolution is not an irrelevance.
Neither is it true.
If you haven’t thought much about this issue, you might to like to check out my new book. Just jump on to Amazon and either type in my name or the title of the book, Evolution’s Fatal Flaws.
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FOOTNOTES:
1. Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (New York: W.W. Norton, 1986), p. 6.
2. See my book, “No More Monkey Business: Evolution in Crisis”, 2019, SmartFaith Press.