Tom Shipley
The Western world today typically divides itself into one of two camps in a multitude of arenas, identifying themselves either as “liberal” or “conservative.” The question is to be asked, “What do these words actually mean and denote in terms of the actual, real underlying ideological forces animating and driving them?”
The inner essence of modern “liberalism,” political, religious and otherwise, is philosophical atheism. This philosophical atheism is not rationally derived as its proponents would like everyone to believe. Rather, it is the outworking and manifestation of a psychopathology–original sin.
Original sin in the Biblical sense is, at its root and core, the drive and impulse to autonomy (i.e., “auto” = self, and “nomos” = law), that is, the will to be a law unto one’s own self, which is, practically speaking, the drive to be one’s own God in place of the only true and eternal Law Giver.
Modern conservatism, in its essence, is grounded in the proposition that there is a God (“We deem these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created…”), the Creator, and that He is the ground and source of all objective morality and ethics. Virtually all of the conflict within the Western world (and much of the rest of the world, for that matter) is the outworking of these two opposing forces. There are a multitude of variations and shades and places along the spectrum, but never doubt that this is the core of all the conflict.
The favorite dogma of the faithful devotees of Liberalism (notice I have now switched to a capital “L”) is Evolution. Next to the proposition of atheism itself, Evolution is their most dearly beloved Article of Faith. Make no mistake about it, Liberalism is a religion, and Evolution is veritably an Article of Faith. It is founded on unproven and unprovable philosophical presuppositions about the ultimate nature of reality and is at variance and conflict with all empirical knowledge.
There are many deceivers among the faithful of this religion who actively try to subvert the faith of theists. You run into them in almost every corner saying, “I believe in God and I also believe in Evolution.” When you hear a man say such a thing, mark that man as a liar. Such a man is dishonest to the core.
It behooves every Christian, at some point in life, to devote a significant portion of time to the study of the Creation/Evolution issue to the point where the highlights of the issue can be accurately articulated to others.
For example: every Christian should be aware that the fossil record emphatically does NOT give evidence in support of the evolutionary religion, a fact many evolutionists themselves confess. Charles Darwin’s prediction that the (in his day) fairly young discipline of archaeology-paleontology would in time uncover the multiplied thousands of minute variations that supposedly lead from one species to another has failed – and failed miserably. All that can be found in the fossil record are distinct species. Period. And absolutely no one, especially any paleontologist, now holds out any hope at all that any line of nearly infinite gradations ever WILL be found.
Consider this extraordinarily revealing admission from Niles Eldredge, the preeminent paleontologist who, along with Steven J. Gould and Steven M. Stanley, brought the evolutionary establishment into the new age of “punctuated equilibrium”:
“We paleontologists have said that the history of life supports [the story of gradual adaptive change], all the while really knowing that it does not.” –quoted by Philip E. Johnson in “Darwin on Trial,” pg. 59, from Eldredge’s book, “Time Frames.” —emph. supp.
Advertisement Below:
[UPDATE: Since posting this article, I have been accused by evolutionists on multiple occasions of taking Eldredge’s statements in “Time Frames,” out of context. I have Eldredge’s book in my own personal library and only used Johnson’s quote in order to give Johnson’s book, “Darwin on Trial,” some promotion. Evolutionists who made this accusation against me probably assumed I quoted Johnson because I did not have Eldredge’s book in my possession and could therefore safely make such an accusation without concern of rebuttal. Here is an expanded version of Eldredge’s comments. Let the reader judge whether I distorted the meaning of Eldredge’s accusation:
“Scenarios about giraffes attaining their long necks and the like are a truly commonplace in biology…The ASSUMPTION , (and it seems a perfectly reasonable one) is that artificial selection in the lab and barnyard mirrors a process in nature pretty well. But we cannot test the hypothesis…
“Creationists and skeptical evolutionary biologists alike have seized on the latter point, the latter content with the more modest conclusion that selection cannot be invoked to explain the grosser features of life’s evolutionary history. Both camps, in my opinion, are wrong. Yet, the conventional neo-darwinian explanation of how it all happened is hardly comforting…
“And one might ask why such a distortion [i.e., the neo-Darwinian explanation] of the grosser patterns of the history of life have come about…a theory of gradual progressive, adaptive change so thoroughly rules our mindsand imaginations that we have somehow, COLLECTIVELY, turned away from some of the most basic patterns permeating the history of life. We have a theory that…is out of place with the actual patterns of events that typically occur as species histories unfold. And that discrepancy seems enlarged by a considerable order of magnitude when we compare what we think the larger-scale events ought to look like with what we actually find. And IT HAS BEEN PALEONTOLOGISTS—MY OWN BREED–WHO HAVE BEEN MOST RESPONSIBLE FOR LETTING IDEAS DOMINATE REALITY…
“(T)he certainty so characteristic of evolutionary ranks since the late 1940’s, the utter assurance not only that natural selection operates in nature, but that we know precisely how it works, has led paleontologists to keep their own counsel…(w)e have proffered a COLLECTIVE acceptance of the story of gradual adaptive change, a story that strengthened and became even more entrenched as the synthesis took hold. WE paleontologists have said that the history of life supports that interpretation, ALL THE WHILE REALLY KNOWING THAT IT DOES NOT.”—Time Frames, pgs. 142-144, END OF UPDATE]
Dear reader, did you get that? This is a candid admission from an evolutionary insider at the very top of the evolutionary academic establishment, an evolutionist of evolutionists, that the entire evolutionary establishment has not been honest about the facts of their profession!!! There is no apology here, just a simple reporting of the fact!
Eldredge elaborates further:
“Each new generation, it seems, produces a few young paleontologists eager to document examples of evolutionary change in their fossils. The changes they have always looked for have, of course, been of the gradual, progressive sort. More often than not their efforts have gone unrewarded–their fossils, rather than exhibiting the expected pattern, just seem to persist virtually unchanged…This extraordinary conservatism looked, to the paleontologist keen on finding evolutionary change, as if no evolution had occurred. The studies documenting conservative persistence rather than evolutionary change were considered failures, and, more often than not, were not even published.”–emph. supp.
Advertisement Below:
Bear in mind, this is not a biblical creationist speaking but one of the high priests of the evolutionary academic establishment. Eldredge’s oblique reference to the studies that never were published refers, in many cases, to the fact that the paleontologists were not able to get their studies published due to the stringent and pervasive censorship mechanism in place in the academic world. It starts with self-censorship motivated by fear: if you are able by some miracle to get past the strict peer review process, publication of such studies places one in jeopardy of being refused application for Ph.D. programs, loss or denial of tenure, or de-funding of their departments if one is brash enough to publish studies contrary to evolutionary dogma in defiance of the evolutionary establishment.
It cannot be stressed too strongly that this total and complete lack of any intermediate forms is not a guess, it is not speculation, it is not deduction; it is empirical fact. Those who continue to adhere to the evolutionary religion are painfully aware of this reality. This is why since the 1970’s more and more of those of this religion have converted in droves to the “Punctuated Equilibrium” model of evolution. For those not familiar with all of this, basically, Punctuated Equilibrium says that biological organisms go on for thousands and millions of generations without changing very much until —voila!, rabbits out of the hat!–suddenly, and without any recognizable cause, virtually miraculous transformations take place over a relatively short period of time, leading to all sorts of new species. Evolutionists call it “adaptive radiation”—as if giving the concept an academic-sounding name somehow bestows more credibility upon the concept.
It should be noted that this new brand of evolutionary thinking did not come about due to any additional evidence. It is simply a reinterpretation of the existing fossil and geological data on the part of evolutionists trying to explain why there is no indication of evolution in the fossil record (or among living organisms, for that matter: why don’t we see any existing sequential spectrum of life among living organisms?). This is true even if the strata containing fossils is interpreted as representing long geological ages in the millions of years.
The evolutionists have been struggling with this lack of evidence all along and the proposition of some kind of rapid evolution was proposed, to my knowledge, as long ago as 1940 by renowned geneticist Richard Goldschmidt, whose theory was self-dubbed as the “hopeful monster” theory. Goldschmidt was ridiculed and ostracized by his contemporary evolutionists, the scientific and educational establishments, for introducing this heresy into their religious dogma. After all, everyone “knew” that evolution happened by innumerable gradations over millions and billions of years.
Ironically, what the proponents of Punctuated Equilibrium have done is to introduce magic and the miraculous into their schema! There are some who balk but the inertia within the ranks of the evolutionary religion is definitely in this direction. They would rather believe another lie, or a variation of the lie, than embrace the obvious truth that there never has been any evolution of one species into another. The sheer weight and magnitude of this empirical and factual consideration, and its obvious relevance to the issue, and the nature of the schema to avoid the obvious meaning and implications of the lack of transitional forms, reveals the nature of the denial as a psychopathology. There is simply no rational reason to believe in evolution on the part of anyone actually acquainted with the science of the matter. The underlying cause of this evasion of reality is a moral and ethical sickness, the manifestation of original sin.
Featured Image credit: Benjamin West (1738 – 1820)
“The Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise” (1791)
In my next article, “THE SEARCH FOR ET & THE DISCOVERY OF EXTRASOLAR PLANETS,” I will discuss the discovery of extrasolar planets, the search for extraterrestrial life and the “Fermi paradox.”
