Jay Hall
Some atheists treat Darwin as an infallible god. Evolutionists often regard Darwin as little short of deity. Was Darwin there at the beginning (cf. Job 38:4)? Did he witness the six days of Creation Week?
Evolution even has a creed: “Evolution is a fact, but we don’t exactly know how it happened and the evidential links are still missing.” If Darwinists don’t worship Darwin, then who do they idolize? Well respected Darwin critic and mathematician David Berlinski (who appeared in the film Expelled) provides the answer, “… evolutionary dogmatists [Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens] …have conjured up a kind of god. Unlike the God of old, who ruled over everything, this god rules over lapses in argument or evidence. … He may be called the god of the gaps.”1
Don’t bow down to the Darwin idol. Consider again the words of Berlinski:
In talking of the mathematician’s skepticism, I mentioned Von Neumann [a Darwin skeptic and leader in the early development of computers] because his name was widely known. I might have mentioned [mathematician] Gian-Carlo Rota. He despised the enveloping air of worship associated with Darwin; he thought biology primitive and dishonest.
Here is an enlightening and fun video on Darwin worship.
“Little children, keep yourselves from idols” (1 Jn. 5:21).
Note:
1) “The God of the Gaps” by David Berlinski, Commentary, Vol. 125, No. 4 (April 2008), p. 37.
Read Jay Hall’s book:
YES – Young Earth Science and the Dawn of a New World View
What is Young Earth Science (YES)? How old is the world? Are radiometric dating methods reliable? Is Darwinism substantiated by scientific evidence and valid arguments? How does the Renaissance of Catastrophism relate to the age of the Earth? Has plate tectonics occurred more rapidly in the past? These and other queries are answered in this exciting new fully documented work. This widely illustrated book features support from history, philosophy, geology, biology and physics. Discover this creative and multidisciplinary approach which provides affirmation that this planet is thousands of years old and not billions . . . (continue reading)
Evolutionists may “idolize” Darwin in the colloquial sense, and many do promote “Darwin Day” to celebrate evolution(ism). Still, I haven’t encountered any evolutionists whom I would describe as worshiping Darwin. In fact, when I have pointed out that even other evolutionists quickly realized that Darwin was wrong about the nature of biological inheritance and in attributing the major force of biological change to a multi-generational form of Lamarckism he called “use over time,” his sexism, his racism, and the fact that his idea wasn’t all that original, evolutionists have always dropped Darwin like a hot potato. Suddenly it doesn’t matter that their hero borrowed his idea, published before he was ready because Wallace had sent him a letter outlining the same basic idea, was wrong about the major processes that were supposed to be responsible for evolution, and didn’t rise above the sins of his time and may have contributed to making them worse. Oh no, that was all in the past, so… so what?
“Evolution is a fact, but we don’t exactly know how it happened and the evidential links are still missing.” I don’t think you’ll ever find an evolutionist claiming this as their “creed.” They do often enough admit they might be wrong about the exact mechanism (there’s a growing number trying to modify the theory) but they won’t think even to themselves “the evidential links are still missing.” Oh no, although they can’t deny it when you point to things like the “Cambrian explosion,” they won’t come right out and admit it — instead it’s always, “But there are MOUNDS AND MOUNDS of evidence for evolution” and “It’s a theory but it’s just as sound as the heliocentric theory or the theory of gravity” or “There’s a perfectly good reason why those fossils are missing” and “We are finding intermediates all the time so we just haven’t found those YET.”
It’s true, evolutionists (and I think a large number of “theistic” evolutionists may be included) have substituted a new God in their minds, but it is Nature, and Science is its prophet. Science was designed to study nature, so when Hutton and others decided to apply science and science alone to figuring out the past, some form of eternal natural evolving and recycling was the only possibility. The formation of life from non-living things must be an ordinary part of nature, and living things must be relatively simple “plastic” bags of chemicals that could easily morph into new forms over generations.
It was only after this essentially atheistic and authoritarian concept of science was firmly established that it could withstand the discoveries that nature as we know it could not have always existed, that life does not spontaneously arise from raw chemicals under any known natural (or artificial) conditions examined or created over decades of attempts, and that even “simple” bacteria are full of marvelous molecular machines, motors, coding and decoding systems!
Evolutionists accuse us of having faith in a Creator when we cannot observe Him creating, but they believe in the power of Nature to create all the marvels of life in all its forms even though we can observe it and do not see it demonstrating such power!