The Case for a Creator (4 page)

Not everyone, however, believes that Darwinian evolutionary theory and God are incompatible. There are some scientists and theologians who see no conflict between believing in the doctrines of Darwin and the doctrines of Christianity.

Nobel-winning biologist Christian de Duve insisted there’s “no sense in which atheism is enforced or established by science,”
¹¹
while biology professor Kenneth R. Miller of Brown University declared that evolution “is not anti-God.”
¹²
Philosopher Michael Ruse, himself an ardent naturalist, answered the question, “Can a Darwinian be a Christian?” by declaring, “Absolutely!” In his view, “No sound argument has been mounted showing that Darwinism implies atheism.”
¹³

Biologist Jean Pond, who formerly taught at Whitworth College, proudly describes herself as “a scientist, an evolutionist, a great admirer of Charles Darwin, and a Christian.”
¹⁴
She elaborated by saying: “Believing that evolution occurred—that humans and all other living things are related as part of creation’s giant family tree, that it is possible that the first cell arose by the natural processes of chemical evolution—neither requires nor even promotes an atheistic worldview.”
¹⁵

Personally, however, I couldn’t understand how the Darwinism I was taught left any meaningful role for God. I was told that the evolutionary process was by definition
undirected
—and to me, that automatically ruled out a supernatural deity who was pulling the strings behind the scene.

One recent textbook was very clear about this: “By coupling undirected, purposeless variation to the blind, uncaring process of natural selection, Darwin made theological or spiritual explanations of life processes superfluous.”
¹⁶
Other textbooks affirm that evolution is “random and undirected” and “without either plan or purpose” and that “Darwin gave biology a sound scientific basis by attributing the diversity of life to natural causes rather than supernatural creation.”
¹⁷

If this is how scientists define Darwinism, then it seemed to me that God has been given his walking papers. To try to somehow salvage an obscure role for him appears pointless, which Cornell’s William Provine readily concedes: “A widespread theological view now exists saying that God started off the world, props it up and works through laws of nature, very subtly, so subtly that its action is undetectable,” he said. “But that kind of God is effectively no different to my mind than atheism.”
¹⁸

Certainly Christians would say that God is not a hidden and uninvolved deity who thoroughly conceals his activity, but rather that he has intervened in the world so much that the Bible says his qualities “have been clearly seen . . . from what has been made.”
¹⁹
Cambridge-educated philosopher of science Stephen C. Meyer, director of the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute in Seattle, put it this way:

Many evolutionary biologists admit that science cannot categorically exclude the possibility that some kind of deity still might exist. Nor can they deny the possibility of a divine designer who so masks his creative activity in apparently natural processes as to escape scientific detection. Yet for most scientific materialists such an undetectable entity hardly seems worthy of consideration.
²⁰

Even so, Meyer stressed that “contemporary Darwinism does not envision a God-guided process of evolutionary change.”
²¹
He cites a famous observation by the late evolutionary biologist George Gaylord Simpson that Darwinism teaches “man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind.”
²²
The ramifications are unmistakable, according to Meyer: “To say that God guides an inherently unguided natural process, or that God designed a natural mechanism as a substitute for his design, is clearly contradictory.”
²³

Nancy Pearcey, who has written extensively on science and faith, insists that “you can have God
or
natural selection, but not both.”
²⁴
She pointed out that Darwin himself recognized that the presence of an omnipotent deity would actually undermine his theory. “If we admit God into the process, Darwin argued, then God would ensure that only ‘the right variations occurred . . . and natural selection would be superfluous.’ ”
²⁵

Law professor Phillip Johnson, author of the breakthrough critique of evolution
Darwin On Trial
, agrees that “the whole point of Darwinism is to show that there is no need for a supernatural creator, because nature can do the creating by itself.”
²⁶

In fact, many of the evolutionists who have felt the sting of Johnson’s criticism nevertheless find themselves in agreement with him on this particular matter. For example, evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr emphasized that “the real core of Darwinism” is natural selection, which “permits the explanation of adaption . . . by natural means, instead of by divine intervention.”
²⁷

Another leading evolutionist, Francisco Ayala, who was ordained a Dominican priest prior to his science career and yet refused in a recent interview to confirm whether he still believes in God,
²⁸
said Darwin’s “greatest accomplishment” was to show that “living beings can be explained as the result of a natural process, natural selection, without any need to resort to a Creator or other external agent.”
²⁹

When an attorney asked the outspoken Provine whether there is “an intellectually honest Christian evolutionist position . . . or do we simply have to check our brains at the church house door,” Provine’s answer was straightforward: “You indeed have to check your brains.”
³⁰
Apparently to him, the term “Christian evolutionist” is oxymoronic.

Pulitzer Prize–winning sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson was adamant on this issue. “If humankind evolved by Darwinian natural selection,” he said, “genetic chance and environmental necessity,
not God
, made the species.”
³¹
No ambiguity there.

Characteristically,
Time
magazine summed up the matter succinctly: “Charles Darwin didn’t want to murder God, as he once put it. But he did.”
³²

DARWIN’S UNIVERSAL ACID

I wasn’t aware of these kinds of observations when I was a student. I just knew intuitively that the theories of Darwin gave me an intellectual basis to reject the mythology of Christianity that my parents had tried to foist on me through my younger years.

At one point, I remember reading the
World Book Encyclopedia
that my parents had given me as a birthday present to answer the “why” questions with which I was always tormenting them. Reading selectively from the entry on evolution served to reinforce my sense that Christianity and Darwinism are incompatible.

“In the Bible, God is held to be the Creator, the Sustainer, and the Ultimate End of all things,” the encyclopedia said. “Many Christians believe that it is impossible to reconcile this conviction with the idea that evolutionary development has been brought about by natural forces present in organic life.”
³³

Everything fell into place for me. My assessment was that you didn’t need a Creator if life can emerge unassisted from the primordial slime of the primitive earth, and you don’t need God to create human beings in his image if we are merely the product of the impersonal forces of natural selection. In short, you don’t need the Bible if you’ve got
The Origin of Species.

I was experiencing on a personal level what
philosopher Daniel Dennett has observed: Darwinism is a “universal acid” that “eats through just about every traditional concept and leaves in its wake a revolutionized worldview.”
³⁴

My worldview was being revolutionized, all right, yet in my youthful optimism I wasn’t ready to examine some of the disheartening implications of my new philosophy. I conveniently ignored the grim picture painted by British atheist Bertrand Russell, who wrote about how science had presented us with a world that was “purposeless” and “void of meaning.”
³⁵
He said:

That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and beliefs are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius are destined to extinction . . . that the whole temple of man’s achievement must inevitably be buried—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.
³⁶

Rather than facing this “unyielding despair” that’s implicit in a world without God, I reveled in my newly achieved freedom from God’s moral strictures. For me, living without God meant living one hundred percent for myself. Freed from someday being held accountable for my actions, I felt unleashed to pursue personal happiness and pleasure at all costs.

The sexual revolution of the ’60s and ’70s was starting to dawn, and I was liberated to indulge as much as I wanted, without having to look over my shoulder at God’s disapproving gaze. As a journalist, I was unshackled to compete without always having to abide by those pesky rules of ethics and morality. I would let nothing, and certainly nobody, stand between me and my ambitions.

Who cared if scientific materialism taught that there is nothing other than matter and therefore no person could possibly survive the grave? I was too young to trifle with the implications of that; instead, I pursued the kind of immortality I could attain by leaving my mark as a successful journalist, whose investigations and articles would spur new legislation and social reform. As for the finality of death—well, I had plenty of time to ponder that later. There was too much living to do in the meantime.

So the seeds of my atheism were sown as a youngster when religious authorities seemed unwilling or unable to help me get answers to my questions about God. My disbelief flowered after discovering that Darwinism displaces the need for a deity. And my atheism came to full bloom when I studied Jesus in college and was told that no science-minded person could possibly believe what the New Testament says about him.

According to members of the left-wing Jesus Seminar, the same impulse that had given rise to experimental science, “which sought to put all knowledge to the test of close and repeated observation,” also prompted their efforts to finally distinguish “the factual from the fictional” in Jesus’ life. They concluded that in “this scientific age,” modern thinkers can no longer believe that Jesus did or said much of what the Bible claims. As they put it:

The Christ of creed and dogma, who had been firmly in place in the Middle Ages, can no longer command the assent of those who have seen the heavens through Galileo’s telescope. The old deities and demons were swept from the skies by that remarkable glass. Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo have dismantled the mythological abodes of the gods and Satan, and bequeathed us secular heavens.
³⁷

By the time I was halfway through college, my atheistic attitudes were so entrenched that I was becoming more and more impatient toward people of mindless faith, like those protesters I would later encounter in West Virginia. I couldn’t fathom their stubborn reluctance to subject their outmoded beliefs to that “universal acid” of modern scientific thought.

I felt smugly arrogant toward them. Let them remain slaves to their wishful thinking about a heavenly home and to the straightjacket morality of their imaginary God. As for me, I would dispassionately follow the conclusions of the scientists and historians whose logical and consistent research has reduced the world to material processes only.

THE INVESTIGATION BEGINS

If I had stopped asking questions, that’s where I would have remained. But with my background in journalism and law, the demanding of answers was woven into my nature. So five years after my adventure in West Virginia, when my wife Leslie announced that she had decided to become a follower of Jesus, it was understandable that the first words I uttered would be in the form of an inquiry.

It wasn’t asked politely. Instead, it was spewed in a venomous and accusatory tone:
“What has gotten into you?”
I simply couldn’t comprehend how such a rational person could buy into an irrational religious concoction of wishful thinking, make-believe, mythology, and legend.