Darwinism I

Preface

I grew up in a small Southern Baptist Church, the son of the Head Deacon and Choir Leader. We were at 'church' every Sunday morning, Sunday night, and Wednesday night, minimum. Sunday school, children's church, youth group, read the Bible, etc., etc., etc.

I also grew up a committed evolutionist. No kidding.

For many years I saw no contradiction in those things at all. I was into dinosaurs since third grade (not unusual today, but a notable peculiarity in 1974) and my grandmother was interested in archeology and anthropology (she and I went to see Richard E. Leakey, son of noted anthropologist Louis Leakey, speak at the Cobb County Civic Center when I was about 13 – it was Louis Leakey who sent Diane Fossey, Jane Goodall, and Birute Galdikas out into the wilds to study Gorillas, Chimpanzees, and Orangutans, respectively, for the very Darwinian purpose of learning what these primates could teach us about our own evolutionary origins) so as you might imagine evolution was the default world view around our houses. My father – the Head Deacon – explained the Genesis creation account to me as equivalent to African savages who were doing their best to describe the explosion of an atom bomb, but were simply far too ignorant and illiterate for the task. No kidding.

And I am afraid to say that the Pastor of the 'church' wasn't any better. He saw no reason that evolution and creation couldn't all just get along, or, for that matter, why you couldn't disbelieve the virgin birth and be a Christian too. Nor could he see why those pesky and mean-spirited 'fundamentalists' kept trying to take over the Southern Baptist Convention. No kidding.

So after God came, when I was thirty years of age, I still at first believed what I had walked in for all my thirty years. Fortunately for me, one of the three immediate things that God told me to do was to open the Bible and read it from the beginning to the end. So I did. And an amazing thing happened: I saw for the first time in my life that the Bible – a collection of 66 different books written by somewhere around 40 authors over a period of roughly 1600 years – was actually one great continuous story of unfolding revelation from In the Beginning to the end of the Revelation. That is an amazing thing, and one which could never happen from merely human means. Though I had learned the Bible and read much of it from a young age, my understanding of it was very poor and the impression I had was that of a collection of disjointed "Bible Stories" like David and Goliath or Jesus Feeds the Four Thousand. That is how Biblically ignorant I was despite my 'strong' 'church' upbringing. No kidding.

But as I obeyed God and my understanding of His Word was transformed, although at first still a dedicated evolutionist, in time I began to see that there were problems with that position if one was a true Bible believer. The more I read and learned and understood the Bible, the more difficulty I had fitting evolution in. About this time I discovered a book at a yard sale called Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds by Philip Johnson. Long story short, God had laid the groundwork, and when I put the book down I was solidly on the other side: an Anti-darwinism Creationist. No Kidding.

Bob Chastain, if you're reading this, yes, you told me so :-)
Later I read Michael Behe's Darwin's Black Box and that really helped to cement my thinking.
And if you haven't seen it, you really ought to see Ben Stein's Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.

Now, I cannot explain to you all the discrepancies these two religious views (yes, Darwinism amounts to a religious view) and how to answer all the claims of Darwinism, but I can tell you this for sure: Evolution never showed up in power, uninvited, in somebody's office late at night, made the world spin in silence while it laid out their whole life in a moment of time and offered a helping hand, and touched them down to the very core of their being; never saved a shipwrecked marriage; never defeated anyone's sin and cleansed their heart; and never healed the lungs of their severely asthmatic wife who was drowning in the useless best that medical science can offer. And if it should somehow turn out in the end that Scientific Naturalism is right and the Bible is wrong, nobody is going to stand before Charles Darwin and have to give an account of why they didn't believe that the earth was billions of years old. In fact, no one will even 'know' because we'll all just be mouldering in the dust anyway and it won't matter a lick what you believed in your brief, futile, pointless, vain years before the candle flickers out and you disappear forever, because there won't be anyone or anything for it to matter to.

How's that for Bible Believing?

Anyway this is just the preface to my actual point in the next entry.