David Rives
Evolutionary ideas are all around us. Every time you turn on the TV, watch the news, or read a science magazine you will likely find evolutionary content.
How did this philosophy become so popular that it took over science?
Evolution owes much of its popularity to a guy you’re probably familiar with — Charles Darwin. While he wasn’t the first person to develop evolutionary ideas surrounding the development of the species, he did popularize these ideas.
In 1859 he published his famous book: On the Origin of Species. The book was based on his observations while serving as the naturalist on board the ship, the H.M.S. Beagle. If you’re familiar with Darwin’s studies, you know that he observed finches on the Galapagos Islands that had different-sized beaks. Eventually, he would interpret this to mean that these finches all had a common ancestor and from there he inferred that all life had a common ancestor.
Of course, that’s a pretty big leap! We’re talking frogs, giraffes, and YOU, all coming from the same prehistoric ancestor!
Most people think of Darwin as a dispassionate observer who simply reported on what he saw that led him to draw the conclusions that he did. But that’s not accurate.
Long before Darwin ever set foot in the Galapagos, he’d already rejected the Bible as an authoritative source of truth and the idea of a God who interfered with His creation. Building on the ideas of his grandfather and others, he was seeking to explain life without God — actively looking for a way to push a creator out of the picture.
It wasn’t just Darwin who had a low view of God. Many in both the church and the scientific community had accepted the idea of millions of years and uniformitarianism, which is the idea that slow and gradual processes account for what we see in the world. They didn’t trust God’s Word as the authority in matters of history and science, but instead relied on human reasoning. in other words, they ignored an actual historical account, choosing to rewrite history using nature as the supreme authority.
At the same time, many in the church had also accepted an idea called the “fixity of species.” This is the idea that God created the species exactly as they are today and that species don’t change. This idea doesn’t come from the Bible, but rather from the ancient Greeks. At the time of Darwing it was a popular idea many people read into the Bible. In The Origin of Species Darwin clearly showed that this was wrong — species do change. And they change a lot!
Once Darwin showed that species do change, the idea of the fixity of species was proved wrong. To many, it seemed like the Bible had been proven wrong, and since people had already added millions of years into the Bible, it didn’t take much for them to accept Darwin’s new idea and relegate the Bible to just a religious text that didn’t have much to say about the origin of life.
But it wasn’t the Bible that Darwin proved wrong. It was the unbiblical idea of the “fixity of species.” As believers, we need to be careful that popular ideas of our day aren’t used to interpret the Bible. Instead, when we use the Bible to interpret what we see around us (the natural world), we find that science fits perfectly with the Biblical historical accounts.
I’m David Rives. Truly, the heavens declare the glory of God.
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The Dark Side of Charles Darwin | Book | Jerry Bergman
A single man stands behind the greatest deception in history. Charles Darwin’s ideas still penetrate every aspect of our culture, including science, religion, and education. And while much has been made of his contribution to the evolutionary hypothesis, little has been publicized about the dark side of the man himself and how this may have impacted the quality and legitimacy of his research.
