One of our goals with Arming the Saints Ministries is to help people who follow Jesus and believe in the Bible not to be discouraged by the pervasive naturalism designed to chip away at any idea of God. Some of that naturalism is fostered by a puzzling phenomenon of people clinging to Darwin’s theory of evolution despite the overwhelming evidence against it. Most of the evidence against it, by the way, is scientific evidence. When Darwin posited his theory, he expressly noted that it might not hold up through scientific examination. It hasn’t.
Nevertheless, there is an overwhelming acceptance of what I call “Darwin speak,” which is when people casually use words like “evolved” (even though, apparently, Darwin liked “descent with modification”), “adaptation,” and “natural selection.” Sometimes it’s kind of silly. I read an article about men with fat bellies, and the writer suggested that this was some sort of evolutionary modification designed to attract women to people who were seemingly good dads. Others are more nuanced and complex. But the words, phrases, and the concepts behind them all have three things in common, which are that: (1) they were first thrust upon us in our early learning; (2) they were reinforced in one-sided presentations through our high school and college years; and (3) they have, since then, been used casually but relentlessly in virtually everything we see or hear.
By the way, the problem with having this one-sided debate over such a monumental topic (how we became us, with Darwinism historically leading people away from God) occur so early in our lives is unfortunate because research seems to indicate that once we form beliefs, we rarely change our minds. In a fairly recent Boston Globe article, Joe Keohane wrote about some Michigan researchers who took some truly misinformed people – objectively wrong about various topics – and then exposed those people to corrected facts. The result? The people not only didn’t change their minds, they doubled down on their wrong beliefs. The whole thing leads to what the researchers called “backfire,” or a desire never to admit you’re wrong so as to avoid the incredibly threatening state of cognitive dissonance.
So in this blog, I won’t pretend to try to change the position of anyone already unwilling to accept the supernatural, just like I suppose they’d find it pretty difficult to change my views on naturalism, despite being educated with a healthy dose of Darwinian evolution when I was young. But to help eliminate any nagging doubts from you followers of Jesus and the Bible, I will occasionally give you two quotes. The first will be a quote that I might happen upon in the news or on television that casually uses “Darwin speak.” And the second will be a quote from somebody about Darwinism. At the very least, seeing the two quotes together will show you how pervasive the naturalist vocabulary has become in America. But hopefully, it will also give you the perspective needed to eliminate any doubts you might have about the Truth of Jesus and the Bible.
“Darwin Speak” Quote of the Day:
In explaining why our neural circuits of rage react faster than other circuits, the writer said, without source, “We evolved these neural circuits for survival in the wild. We still need them.”
(Doug Fields, writing for Time Magazine. I am assuming that the author really meant “evolved,” and not “adapted,” so that he meant that our neural circuits triggering rage at one point either never existed or existed to a significantly lesser extent and changed over an extremely long period of time for survival of the race).
And on the Other Side:
“I suppose that nobody will deny that it is a great misfortune if an entire branch of science becomes addicted to a false theory. But this is what has happened in biology; for a long time now people discuss evolutionary problems in a particular “Darwinian” vocabulary . . . thereby believing that they contribute to the explanation of natural events. They do not, and the sooner this is discovered, the sooner we shall be able to make real progress in our understanding of evolution.”
(Biologist Soren Lovtrup, Darwinism: The Refutation of a Myth (1987), quoted in James Perloff, Tornado in a Junkyard (1999)).
for crossing the finish line first. Likewise, there are certain things that God finds deserving of rewards, such as winning souls, developing your spiritual gifts, showing love and sacrifice to others, etc., but there are also things that you might think would be deserving of a reward and aren’t. So when you think of the distribution of rewards for “good and bad” things done in the body, think of it simply as receiving rewards for eligible things that you actually did in the world. If those things weren’t eligible, or if you didn’t do them even if they were eligible, then you don’t get the additional rewards.
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