CREATION
SCIENCE: A World without God
Has the popularity
of evolution made an impact on our society? Michael Denton1
thinks so. Here is a longer extract from the conclusion of his book ‘Evolution:
A theory in crisis’:
The twentieth
century would be incomprehensible without the Darwinian revolution.
The social and political currents which have swept the world in the
past eighty years would have been impossible without its intellectual
sanction…today it is perhaps the Darwinian view of nature more than
any other that is responsible for the agnostic and sceptical outlook
of the twentieth century…
The influence
of evolutionary theory on fields far removed from biology is one of
the most spectacular examples in history of how a highly speculative
idea for which there is no really hard scientific evidence can come
to fashion the thinking of a whole society and dominate the outlook
of an age. Considering its historic significance and the social and
moral transformation it caused in western thought, one might have
hoped that Darwinian theory was capable of a complete, comprehensive
and entirely plausible explanation for all biological phenomena… That
it is neither fully plausible, nor comprehensive, is deeply troubling.
One might have expected that a theory of such cardinal importance,
a theory that literally changed the world, would have been something
more than metaphysics, something more than myth.
Previously
we have spoken at length of one possible outworking of evolutionary thinking:
The proposition that evolution ‘proves’ that God does not exist. Ravi
Zacharais has more to say about the effects of this in his book ‘Can man
live without God?’. At this point he is attempting to answer "the
oft repeated but ill-understood charge: what about the thousands who have
been killed in the name of religion?"
… The
attackers of religion have often forgotten that these large-scale
slaughters at the hands of antitheists (Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini,
Mao, et al.) were the logical outworking of their God-denying philosophy.
Contrastingly… those who killed in the name of God were clearly self-serving
politicisers of religion, an amalgam Christ ever resisted in His life
and teaching. Their means and their message were in contradiction
to the gospel. Atheism, on the other hand, provides the logical basis
for an autonomous, domineering will, expelling morality. Darwin himself
predicted this slippery slope of violence if evolutionary theory was
translated into a philosophy of life. Neitzsche (an atheistic philosopher
who greatly influenced Hitler and Stalin) talked of the enshrouding
darkness that had fallen over mankind - he saw the ramifications.
The Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevski repeatedly wrote of the hell
that is let loose when man comes adrift from his creator’s moorings
and himself becomes God - he understood the consequences. Now, as
proof positive, we witness our culture as a whole in a mindless drift
towards lawlessness - we live with the inexorable result of autonomies
in collision.
1. Michael
Denton is a non-Christian medical doctor and molecular scientist.
Becky Conolly
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For
more information and resources contact:
AFRICA CHRISTIAN ACTION
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