Cowboy Bob Sorensen
Every once in a while, someone will say to a biblical creationist something along the lines of, “What’s the big deal? Evolution is just biology”. Wrong. For that matter, such a remark is mighty suspicious, because the individual should know full well that evolution is intrinsically tied to many other areas of science, including geology, cosmology, astronomy, and more. In fact, evolution is not even science, since scientific theories need to be tested, repeated, observed, and so forth. Evolution is a worldview, and a way of life.
Charles Darwin book, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, was praised by Karl Marx for Darwin’s naturalistic view of origins, and the book’s compatibility with Marx’s own view of economics. For that matter, Adolph Hitler was an ardent evolutionist, and wanted to accelerate the process. Evolutionary views were not confined to totalitarian regimes, however. Social Darwinism was gaining ground, and this philosophy had a part to play in World War I. Eugenics was flourishing in the United States, and it, too, played a part in the Nazi regime.
Evolution has been used as a rationale for laissez-faire capitalism . It has also been a “scientific” justification for racism, where darker-skinned people were perceived as less evolved and inferior to white Europeans. (If you study on it, you might notice that those drawings of the evolutionary parade show the white guy at the head of the line.) Further, evolution has been used to justify abortion. Sure, why not? It’s just a blob of tissues, “conceptus”, and is showing our evolutionary past. Not hardly!
To go further, evolutionary thinking has influenced the Christian church. The biblical worldview was conducive to establishing modern science, but Christians ceded science to naturalists. After all, a backslidden theology student and a lawyer (Darwin and Lyell) allegedly showed that evolution is true and that the Earth is old, so the Bible must be wrong. Theological compromise ensued. It is interesting that many old Earth advocates and theistic evolutionists side with atheists in attacking biblical creationists! (For more about this, see my 2-part article that begins with “Waterless Clouds, Wandering Stars“.) Fortunately, many of us don’t cotton to compromising, and hold fast to the authority of Scripture.
Evolution is not just a viewpoint about science and origins. We have work to do in not only showing that science refutes evolution and affirms Creation, but that the Bible is true from the first verse.
