What is the Evolutionary World View?
A. It is a Non-Theistic Conception of Reality.
Classic evolutionism is essentially atheistic or pantheistic. This is not to say that all evolutionists are atheists or pantheists, or that no evolutionist sincerely professes the Christian Faith. People are very inconsistent and harbor the most incompatible ideas in their minds. But evolutionism as a self-consistent system of thought is inherently incompatible with Biblical Theism.
A popular writer on science has said that psychologists do not believe in God except on Sundays. This is not true of all psychologists, of course, but it is true of many. And the same could be said about the great majority of evolutionists. Indeed, it is difficult to avoid concluding that much of the appeal and popularity of evolutionary thought has been its seeming effectiveness in eliminating God from man’s understanding of his world.
It is recorded that the entire first printing of Darwin’s Origin of Species was sold on the day of publication. Darwin seemed to the public of his time to have found a way to explain living organisms without needing belief in God.
Gregor Mendel lived at the same time as Darwin, and published his epoch-making. discoveries in the field of Genetics in 1865. six years after Darwin’s book appeared. Unlike Darwin, Mendel was ignored by the scientific. scholarly and popular world of his time. Mendel was a Theist and a Christian believer, and his work has stood the test of time and research far better than Darwin’s, but Darwin was applauded and Mendel was ignored. As a matter of fact Mendel’s work, although duly published in a scientific journal at the time, was simply ignored—indeed, was virtually unknown—until 35 years later. when his principles were independently re-discovered by three other investigators.
Who can believe that pure zeal for scientific truth has been the chief motivating force which has made evolutionary thought the dominant world view today? A truer explanation may be suggested by Romans 1:28: “And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge. God gave them over to a reprobate mind . . .”
That the much-boasted zeal for pure truth is not the real or main motive which actuates evolutionists is demonstrated by the way they act when someone dares to challenge the validity of the evolutionary scheme. In the science departments of university faculties it is considered virtually academic suicide to be known as a non-evolutionist. There are many biologists and other scientists who do not accept evolution, but nearly all of them, in the fields of biology and geology at any rate, are employed by the government or by private business corporations. So complete is the dominance of the evolutionary world view that it is often difficult for a non-evolutionist to obtain a position as a high school teacher of science. Academic freedom and tolerance are ideals which vanish when a scientific scholar is critical of evolution. Evolution is a loaded world view. It involves a built-in emotional and popularity appeal.
The late Samuel G. Craig in his book Jesus of Yesterday and Today raised the question of wherein the offense of the miraculous lies. In answering this question he wrote: “We are sure that the real offense of the miracle lies in the fact that it is an event that posits God as its only adequate explanation, and so an event that thrusts God, as it were, directly on the attention of men. It may seem strange, that men do not like to retain God in their knowledge. They do not object to admitting that God exists as long as it is confessed that He acts always and only through general laws; for in that case these ‘general laws’ stand between the individual and God and more or less effectively blunt their consciousness of God as a living reality to whom they are personally responsible. They do object, however, to admitting that God acts in a miraculous manner; and that because a miracle, being an event that posits the direct activity of God as its only adequate explanation, obtrudes God, directly and immediately upon their attention” (p. 142).
The offense of the Biblical doctrine of Creation is of course equally real , and for precisely the same reason. Direct creationism explains origins in terms of acts of God , and this is deeply offensive to the sin-darkened and rebellious human mind. A scheme of things which purports to remove God from direct action in origins and to place Him far in the shadows of the background, or to eliminate Him entirely, is welcomed by the fall en human intellect as a relief from the intellectual and spiritual discomfort which direct facing of God causes. It was not without reason that Adam and Eve “hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God amongst the trees of the garden” (Gen. 3:8).
B. It is on Irrational Conception of Reality.
Belief in the ultimacy of what men call “chance” is essentially irrational. It stands opposed to the view that the universe is rational because it is based on mind –the infinite, absolute mind of God. Evolutionistic science regards the term teleology as a sort of scientific blasphemy. A recent writer on the philosophy of science, Ernest Nagel, rejects traditional ideas of teleology and cooly informs us that any apparently teleological functions in nature can be re-formulated in terms of non-teleological explanations (The Structure of Science, pp. 402–3).
To hold that nature or the universe embodies a plan and manifests design or purpose implies, of course, that there must be a Planner, Designer or Purposer, and this can be no other than God. But this is regarded as a very objectionable concept from the scientific point of view, so teleology is dismissed as a pre-scientific concept, or re-defined in non-teleological terms. Any apparent design in nature is regarded as merely the fortunate result of chance. Martin Gardner in The Ambidextrous Universe says:
“Given a billion years of time, a chemical mixture as large as the earth’s seas and atmosphere, and various energy sources more intense than today, and who can say that no self-replicating molecules can have formed fortuitously? For all we know they may have formed by the billions . . . In a few thousand million years (all of this is sheer guesswork) the primordial soup may have swarmed with these primitive, half-living organisms. The great epic of evolution would then have been under way” (pp. 152–3).1
This same author says: “Evolution is simply the process by which chance (the random mutations) co-operates with natural law to create living forms better and better adapted to survive” (The Ambidextrous Universe, p. 145).
This author who frankly admits that what he is setting forth is “sheer guesswork,” nevertheless lampoons the Biblical doctrine of direct creation by referring to it as “a series of stupendous magic tricks” (ibid., p. 144).
One evolutionist has said that the chances were two billion to one against the original primal cells ever evolving to mankind, but the human race was amazingly lucky, so here we are!
The evolutionary world view holds that chance, not mind, is the ultimate basic principle of explanation. Belief in chance, I would repeat, is essentially irrational. To say that something is caused by chance is to say that it has no cause. Chance is the denial of a cause, it is the negation of all causation. It is the opposite of law, it is the enthronement of utter chaos. So nature becomes a book without an Author, a composition without a Composer, a building without an Architect. It was not planned—it just happened.
Billions and billions of years of time, plus oceans and oceans of chance, are supposed to account adequately for the existence of such unfathomable examples of complexity as the human brain. Time plus chance equals organism, is the equation involved. A popular newspaper commentator recently dismissed some of the nonsense with the terse comment: “Go make a seed!”
C. It is on Immoral Conception of Reality.
It is no wonder that we face unprecedented moral evil today. The only real basis for any morality worthy of the name is belief in God. When God is removed from people’s understanding of themselves and their world, they will inevitably lose their sense of moral responsibility, with the result that selfish, criminal and anti-social tendencies will reign unchecked.
Adolf Hitler was an enthusiastic evolutionist, and the horribly evil practices of German National Socialism under the Third Reich were theoretically grounded in evolutionary ideology which had, supposedly, cut the ground out from under the Biblical view of a moral law and Lawgiver. Let the fittest survive; let the defenseless and weak perish in concentration camps and gas chambers.
Here in America our public educational system, from kindergarten to university, is deliberately being made more and more rigidly secular. At the. same time our sages and experts stand aghast at the boldness and increase of evil. These men pontifically tell us that mankind’s moral or ethical sense has not kept pace in development with his technological achievements. Of course they never suggest a return to the God of the Bible and the moral absolutes of the Decalogue. Rather, the new religion of scientific research is supposed, by emphasis on the need for ethical development, to come up with the answers. Alas, it is a vain hope, and doomed to disillusionment and failure. When men have cut themselves off from the Source of all righteousness, they are certain to live in violence, selfishness and hatred.
Just because evolutionism is more than a biological theory—just because it is a comprehensive world view –its general and uncritical acceptance by the public, and the utter pervasiveness of its penetration through our educational system, from the university level down to the elementary grades, is bound to bring an increasing harvest of crime, lawlessness and moral evil of all kinds. There is nothing in this world view which can provide a corrective. Our public educational system is in an intolerable predicament. Supposed to turn out a product which will be honest, law-abiding, mutually helpful citizens, the educational system is on the one hand rigidly prevented from inculcating the Biblical world view which is the only real ground for morality, and on the other hand it is given over almost universally to the anti-theistic, idolatrous, man-centered false world view of evolutionism.
Public and private morality will never thrive again until the Biblical world view once again becomes dominant and the evolutionary world view is rejected for what it really is a mere hypothesis, resting on unproved assumptions, which all too effectively removes God from a relevant place in people’s thinking about the world and human society.
The evolutionary world view is no mere harmless technicality of academic biological theory. It is a comprehensive philosophy of life which is at the crucial points antithetic to the Biblical and Christian world view.
With God all things are possible, but it seems unlikely that the Christian believers of the world, divided and confused as they are, can in the forseeable future reverse this all-but-universal trend of human thinking. Martin Gardner says: “Today it is hard to find a single biochemist or geologist, even among the most devoutly religious, who has the slightest doubt about the essential soundness of the theory of evolution” (The Ambidextrous Universe, pp. 144–5). In this state of affairs, it becomes our solemn duty to witness for the truth and agains t the dominant lie. And especially it becomes our duty to guard earnestly and jealously all Christian educational institutions lest the tares be planted while men sleep, and Christian education become hospitable to, and tolerant of, this anti-biblical system.
Wh at is the Relation of Theistic Evolution to the Evolutionary World View?
Theistic evolution, as a matter of fact, is held by only a very small minority of evolutionistic scientists. It is a view held and promoted chiefly by religious scholars. Scientists and philosophers who accept evolution and at the same time profess belief in God are frequently found, upon closer examination of their positions, to hold a non-theistic view of God—either a Deistic or a Pantheistic view.
Theistic evolution is essentially a compromise view. It did not originate with the scientists, most of whom have little use for it. Classic evolutionary science came first, then afterwards came the attempt to adjust Christian belief to the evolutionary scheme of things. Religious scholars who have been impressed, not to say frightened. by the confident assertions of scientists about evolution being not a theory but “proved fact” have reacted to their embarrassment by the attempt to adjust their interpretation of Scripture to the evolutionary scheme.
Theistic evolutionism has been and is embarrassed by attempting adjustment of Christian belief to a scientific variable. Evolutionary thought has been and is fluid. It has moved from phase to phase. Darwin, Lamarck, DeVries, Spencer—they have all had their day and been passed by. Christianity can be adjusted to such a scheme only with serious sacrifice and loss.
The common disjunction between the Who and why? and the When and how? of origins, as set forth by theistic evolutionists, is false and illusory. We are told that evolutionary science can tell us the “when” and the “how” of creation, or of origins, while only Scripture can reveal to us the “Who” and the “Why.” This disjunctive formula is often presented in a very plausible manner. Yet it is basically misleading and false.
When we begin to speak of God’s “method” or “how” in His work of creation, we have already assumed that it was not really a work of creation at all. When we say “method” or “how” we say process. By any sound definition of creation it is not a process but an act and does not involve the use of methods or means. “By faith we understand the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear” (Hebrews 11:3). Like miracle, creation is an act of God’s direct supernatural power. It is an act of omnipotence. It is an event with no cause except the will of God. “For he spake, and it was done; he commanded, and it stood fast” (Psalm 33:9). Shall we interpret this last text as really meaning, “For he spake, and a chain reaction began which ultimately produced what we see in nature today”. . . ?
The tendency to speak of God’s method of creation betrays an unconscious but real denial of the reality of creation—it reduces all creation to the category of a providential process. Creation means God’s act of producing the truly new new as to matter, new as to form, or new as to both form and matter. God used dust to create Adam’s body , but the creative act did not involve process. It was an act of the divine will, a “fiat.” Some philosopher once said, “What is mind? No matter. What is matter? Never mind.” In like vein we may truly say, “What is creation? No process. What is process? Never creation.”
(To be concluded next month)
1 This and the following quotations are used by permission from The Ambidextrous Universe by Martin Gordner, Basic Books, Inc. Publishers, New York, 1964.
This material is reprinted from the December 1966 issue of Torch and Trumpet (as our periodical was then called), after it had been presented at the previous annual meeting of the Reformed Fellowship. Johannes G. Vos was a veteran missionary minister in the Reformed Presbyterian Church, professor at Geneva College in Beaver Falls, PA, editor of Blue Banner Faith and Life and editor of the works of his father, professor of Biblical Theology, Gerhardus Vos. Johannes Vos’ address to the Reformed Fellowship meeting of the previous year entitled, “Surrender to Evolution: Inevitable or Inexcusable,” had appeared in the February 1966 issue of this magazine and several thousand reprints have been distributed. His writings on the subject are as timely today, when evolution is still aggressively promoted in spite of the collapse of evidence for it, as they were twenty years ago.