Who is Winning The Evolution vs. Creation War
by Rick Strange
It is late January as I'm writing this, and like every
year at this time, my thoughts are on the preborn
children, some 47 million and counting, who have never
seen the light of day in this great country of ours.
But I am departing from my usual column about abortion
to address an issue even more foundational to the
moral fabric of American culture. That issue is human
origins, and it finds expression in American public
life through the debate between the opposing
worldviews of evolution and creation.
And this debate is an emotionally charged one. One
case in point is the recent Kitzmiller v. Dover (Pa.)
School District decision. Backed by the American
Civil Liberties Union, eight families in Dover,
Pennsylvania filed a lawsuit in federal court
challenging the validity of a school board resolution
which required the reading of a statement at the
beginning of each ninth grade biology class. In part,
the statement said:
"Because Darwin's theory is a theory, it continues to
be tested as new evidence is discovered. The theory
is not a fact. Gaps in the theory exist for which
there is no evidence. Intelligent design is an
explanation of the origin of life that differs from
Darwin's view. With respect to any theory, students
are encouraged to keep an open mind. The school
leaves the discussion of the origins of life to
individual students and their families."
On December 21, 2005, U.S. District Judge John E.
Jones rendered a decision on this case. In his
ruling, Judge Jones declared intelligent design a
religion and ordered the school board to remove the
159-word statement. He also went on to provide
special protection for the theory of evolution,
stating that the school board could not require
teachers to denigrate the theory.
In other words, he placed the theory beyond all
National Geographic magazine did the same thing in its
November 2004 issue. The cover story, "Was Darwin
Wrong?," starts off answering its own question by
saying "No. The evidence for evolution is
overwhelming." The writer then spends about thirty
pages proudly declaring that there is a vast body of
supporting evidence for it.
While space doesn't permit me to address the article's
numerous fallacies, the magazine unknowingly presented
a major piece of evidence disproving Darwin's theory.
In a one-page article about robotic vehicles that
appeared on the page before the Darwin article, writer
Joel Achenbach contrasts these devices with a
two-year-old toddler. Listen to his conclusion: "the
autonomous vehicles, despite being loaded with lasers,
radar, stereoscopic cameras, gyroscopes, advanced
computers, and GPS guidance, had trouble figuring out
fast enough the significance of obstacles that a
two-year-old human recognizes immediately." He went
on to admit that the toddler is "more advanced, even
in diapers, than any machine humans have devised."
Sadly, the magazine's editors missed the logical
implications of the research presented. Even though
the toddler is more advanced than any machine humans
have ever intelligently designed, the magazine
attempts to explain how this toddler arose by a series
of random mutations and chance processes over millions
of years, and all without the aid of any intelligent
force or mechanism! What's wrong with this picture?
Many other intellectually dishonest and logically
inconsistent arguments litter the landscape which
supposedly supports evolution. Here's just one
example: look at Mount Rushmore, and any thinking
person would say it is not the result of random wind
erosion, but rather the result of intelligent design.
No one debates that, but evolutionists claim with a
straight face that the DNA molecule, which contains
all the genetic information required for life, came
into being by mere chance. Yet the amount of
information that could be stored in a pinhead's volume
of DNA is equivalent to a pile of paperback books 500
times as high as the distance from the Earth to the
moon, with each book having a different yet specific
content! Even leading atheistic evolutionist Richard
Dawkins has admitted that "there is enough information
capacity in a single human cell to store the
Encyclopedia Britannica, all 30 volumes of it, three
or four times over."
While I am extremely passionate about abortion, I am
even more passionate about this, because it is
foundational to all the other great moral issues.
What we believe about where we came from determines
what we believe about everything else. When we get
the issue of our origins right, we will then get the
issue of life right.
By the way, Francis Bacon, credited with formulating
and establishing the scientific method and widely
regarded as the father of modern science, was a
Christian, and he believed that science should not be
bound by philosophical restraints, but free to pursue
truth wherever it leads.
As the Dover case demonstrates, evolution is a
philosophy whose gatekeepers are getting increasingly
desperate. But make no mistake about it, this false
god will not remove its tentacles from American
culture without a fight, because it is a jealous god
that demands full allegiance from its adherents.
Ultimately, however, God, whose name is Jealous
(Exodus 34:14), will win the day, because He maintains
an intellect far superior to the combined sum of all
human intellect. As a lover of true science, I rest
in Him.