Evolution as presented today, is a myth. Surprised? Small wonder. The modern myth-makers have worked hard to muddy the waters, and overall, they’ve done well. It isn’t easy to see through the muck, when it’s all that’s been taught for decades. Over the past 200 years, the concepts of philosophical naturalism have become hopelessly entangled with science to the point of creating a scientific Gordian knot. Where is Alexander the Great when we really need him?
Today we have evolution, a word that should mean simple change, normally an improvement, now defined as the process by which all living things emerged on Earth from a single living organism. But something is amiss.
Science prides itself, in following closely the scientific method. That method is a series of steps beginning with an observation, proceeding to a hypothesis, then to experimentation, from which data are drawn that either support or falsify the hypothesis.. But that cannot be done in the case of evolution. Evolution, because of its entanglement with naturalism, becomes evolutionism, a quasi-scientific philosophy that skillfully evades the scientific method.
Evolutionism, you see, squats atop a mountain of presuppositions, assumptions, and extrapolations. The science behind the all-important time line is thus not empirical, is not testable, and cannot be falsified. It is, instead, strained through the biases scientists bring to the laboratory, emerging as an oxymoron, something called historical science. Try cramming history into a test tube, or sliding it under a microscope, and you begin to see the problem.
History cannot be observed. We can study it, reach reasonable conclusions about it, or even guess at it if we must, but we can’t go back and watch it happen. Science, on the other hand, demands greater rigor. We can, of course, observe the present and apply it to the past, but only by using presuppositions and assumptions. Those, in turn, lead to extrapolations that, if we aren’t careful, become fanciful to the point of ludicrous. Once there, we are no longer doing science. We have become myth-makers.
So, where did this all begin? With Charles Darwin? Nope. Darwin got into this conga line a bit late. But considering it offered everything he needed, he was right on time. According to Dr. Terry Mortensen, the real problem traces back to two creation scientists, Galileo Galilei and Sir Francis Bacon.
Galileo is, of course, a darling of evolutionists because, as “everybody knows,” he was persecuted for his scientific views. You can buy that if you like, but you might want to research it. Galileo’s persecution, it seems, had less to do with his astronomical brilliance than with his other qualities, such as being an egotistical moron and a social swamp rat. And it didn’t help that he ticked off Pope Urban VIII, either. If you go into the lion’s den and pull his whiskers, don’t whine if you come flying back out with tooth marks on your posterior. Amazing how often “everybody knows” only what everybody wants to know.
Mortensen writes that both Bacon and Galileo opposed the combination of the church and science. Both held that the church had no business telling scientists what to discover, a valid concern indeed. What they didn’t realize was that, at the same time, they also kicked open a door that led to a takeover of science by philosophical naturalism.
Beginning toward the end of the 18th century, a long line of scientists and churchmen began offering up their own theories of the age of the earth, wending their way into the 1830’s, where Charles Lyell produced his geological theory of uniformitarianism. According to Lyell, Earth’s strata had been formed from the beginning by the same forces, and in the exact same manner, that we see today. Earth, therefore, was millions of years old, not thousands as was previously taught.. And just where was the church while this was all going on? Why, enjoying itself at the very same party.
“In 1804,” Mortensen writes, “the gap theory began to be propounded by the 24-year-old pastor … Thomas Chalmers … who became one of the leading Scottish evangelicals.” His theory proposed that Genesis 1:1 revealed a creation that, for some reason, was destroyed. Beginning in Genesis 1:2, God then recreated the world as we know it today, leaving a convenient gap between the two verses that could be as long as anyone wanted. The gap theory was followed in turn by catastrophism, then by the day-age theory in 1823, promoted by Anglican churchman George Stanley Faber. These theories preceded Lyell’s, and together with his, set the table for Charles Darwin.
Hence, Darwin isn’t the bogeyman many Christians believe him to be. Nor, for that matter, are the other scientists of his day. Lack of fidelity by clerical speculators to their creeds and beliefs, and the Bible those are based on, did more damage than anyone else. Naturalism got the boost it needed, ironically, by the very church it rejected.
So today, we are faced, not with a scientific showdown, but with a conflict between two world views, evolutionism and creationism/intelligent design (ID). The complaint that God cannot be proved scientifically means nothing, because neither can old-earth evolutionism. The latter is built on presuppositions and assumptions, and being forensic in nature, is anything but conclusive. In reality, evidence for one viewpoint, is evidence for the other. The only difference lies in interpretations, and those proceed from the interpreter’s world views.
Nor does it matter much that evolutionists claim a virtual lock on the scientific community – upwards, they say, of 95% to 98%. No truth, scientific or otherwise, is arrived at by popular vote. It would be surprising if the numbers weren’t overwhelming, given that most scientists have been drilled in evolutionism, and nothing else, for decades. Even so, when it comes to the general public, at least in America, the story changes dramatically.
Americans, by comfortable margins, reject evolutionist dogma, opting instead for belief in special creation. Evolutionists, for their own part, seem bewildered by every report that comes out. They can’t understand why average people just don’t get it. The reason is, there is nothing to be gotten. The public seems to know instinctively that evolution as taught today is modern mythology. To the average man in the street, science is represented by the various technologies it has created, not by molecules-to-man nonsense. And, he knows that, even if the myths had never been taught, those technologies would still be here. Airplanes, for example, would still fly without monkeys in the pilot’s family. Evolutionism, it turns out, is not just bad science.
It’s also a philosophical waste.
