The Darwinists and Atheists are the Problem! Creation versus Evolution...
Then I will post at the end an article entitle "Atheism, evolutionism and families" from Creation.com that asserts that Atheism is ruining society but is not quite as commonplace among scientists as you may have been told.
Image above from this site
Darwinism/Evolution is an important tenet of Atheism because it ostensibly provides an explanation for the existence of the Universe and the myriad organisms that live on Earth. But there is a basic problem with their underlying premise: That everything came from nothing by no means and no reason in direct opposition to physical laws!
I've challenged Darwinists to provide a first cause for the Universe, for information, for life, for the Solar System...How did time starting ticking? Who or what created this Universe, which is like a clock that has been wound and is inexorably ticking down?
There is no free lunch, people! You do NOT get everything from nothing. Sorry.
We know that the Universe is not eternal, because the Laws of Thermodynamics have been firmly established. We (should) know that life was designed because of the Law of Biogenesis states that life only comes from life and this Law has never been observed to be broken. Information comes from intelligence, this is also what we have observed. We also have observed that all mechanisms and devices are designed and built. Therefore all the organisms of the world had to be designed and built. What is great about organisms is that they not only exist, they reproduce themselves and also have the ability to vary to adjust to changes in their environment. This ability is part of the construction of the creature. All creatures have the same kind of coding mechanism to oversee the second-to-second operations that keep the organism alive but also oversees the mechanism of reproduction. DNA is the signature of God within all living creatures. Why can't you see it?
We keep finding new varieties of life all over the Earth, from high above us in the atmosphere and on mountainsides and from far below us in the depths of the oceans. We find them deep in jungles. Often we find "lazarus taxa" aka living fossils. Yes, we find organisms that supposedly evolved into other organisms that are actually still around!
What we see in the Universe is design and purpose and also artistic expression. Butterflies and birds and fish and other varieties of animals are often remarkably beautiful or at least interesting in ways that seem to be for the sake of beauty rather than survival. The grandeur of the Universe as revealed more perfectly by the Hubble Telescope seems like an art gallery and not just a scattering of stars.
By the way, this morning I was watching a program on SCIHD channel called "Medicine From The Sea" that involves finding medications from organisms that live in both shallow and deep waters, medications that could be the answer to cancer, for instance (You need to watch such channels with discernment, filtering out all the evolution and climate change nonsense and concentrating on the evidence only lest you get a headache from the idiocy)! If only all the scientists trying in vain to prove Darwinism were working on worthwhile projects like the scientists in that program, people seeking to find medicinal uses for sponges, bacteria, "pond scum" and so on rather than vainly trying to prove the unprovable! Perhaps cancer would have already been an easily treatable medical problem rather than a life-threatening plague on mankind? Most of the great medicinal finds of mankind have been found in nature rather than cooked up in labs. The great fever cure we now take for granted, aspirin, is an extract of tree bark. I take an extract of a plant found growing on German riversides that is called "Petasin" that cures migraine headaches.
It stands to reason that the Universe and all in it had to be designed by an Intelligence Who is outside of the material world, in fact the Creator of everything - God. God is supernatural, He is intelligent, He created time and material and is in fact a logical First Cause for the Universe and all within it. But He is far more than that, God also is in relationship with millions of people all over the world. You call us Christians. We who have received Christ as Savior are led by God by reading the Bible and also by a inner still small voice from within us, the whispers of God that seek to be heard above the cries of the sin nature to be selfish and do wrong. I am not saying God audibly talks to believers, that is a very rare occurrence. But He does change the nature of the inner desires we have. God within us provides an alternative to the cries of the sinful nature and, when we agree with God we are able to get victory over the urges of sin and do what is right rather than what is wrong. God tends to change the things we desire to do and also the means and methods by which we do them.
The Darwinists challenge the Creationists to tell them how God created. But God does not even try to explain how He did most of His creating and I suspect that one reason is that we could not comprehend it anyway. Beyond that, God expects His creatures to observe the magnificent Universe and all that is in it and reason and meditate and seek to understand Who did it all, and in the end find God by faith. God does not descend and identify Himself to every person. Only a very few people have had the honor of being in the presence of God in a material form - God appeared to Abraham and Moses, for instance, to establish covenants with mankind and to build our faith and establish a people who would believe in Him and preserve His Word. God's intention was to freely converse and commune with Adam and Eve, but they sinned and broke the fellowship by bringing sin into the world. He gave mankind the chance to have both free will and relationship with God. We know this by reading the ultimate history book we call the Bible. The Bible is God's message to mankind.
Free will comes with a catch - in order to have the freedom to do anything, mankind had to have a choice to both obey or disobey. Adam and Eve only had one thing that they couldn't do, to eat of the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Before they disobeyed God with the coaxing of Satan in the form of a beautiful serpent, they could do anything else because they did not know what good and evil was and could not discern between them. They were innocent. They did not have a sin nature because sin had not entered into them. Adam and Eve had paradise on Earth and relationship with God and they blew it. Did God know it would happen? Of course, but He had to give us our chance to fail or succeed.
This failure by mankind led to the eventual coming of Jesus Christ, the Son of God in human form who was observed by multiple thousands of people. So for a time, anybody in the region of Israel had the chance to meet and interact with God in human form. God's plan to redeem mankind from it's plight required God coming to fulfill the Law for us as a man. Jesus, the Son of God born to a virgin, Mary, growing up to be a man while doing exactly what He should do for thirty years as a child becoming a man, then for three years as a minister. The Jewish tradition was that a man could become a Rabbi (teacher) of the Word at age thirty and qualified to read the Word to the congregation and teach from that passage. When Jesus was thirty years old, He announced to all the nature of His ministry in Luke 4:14-19:
Jesus Begins His Ministry
And Jesus returned in the power of the Spirit to Galilee, and a report about him went out through all the surrounding country. And he taught in their synagogues, being glorified by all.
Jesus Rejected at Nazareth
And he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up. And as was his custom, he went to the synagogue on the Sabbath day, and he stood up to read. And the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written,
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives
and recovering of sight to the blind,
to set at liberty those who are oppressed,
19 to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.”
The reaction of the people was to realize that Jesus was proclaiming Himself to be the Messiah. They immediately decided to throw Hm off a cliff to His death!!! From Luke 4:20-30:
And he rolled up the scroll and gave it back to the attendant and sat down. And the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. And he began to say to them, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” And all spoke well of him and marveled at the gracious words that were coming from his mouth.
And they said, “Is not this Joseph's son?” And he said to them, “Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb,‘Physician, heal yourself.’ What we have heard you did at Capernaum, do here in your hometown as well.” And he said, “Truly, I say to you, no prophet is acceptable in his hometown. But in truth, I tell you, there were many widows in Israel in the days of Elijah, when the heavens were shut up three years and six months, and a great famine came over all the land, and Elijah was sent to none of them but only to Zarephath, in the land of Sidon, to a woman who was a widow. And there were many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed, but only Naaman the Syrian.”
When they heard these things, all in the synagogue were filled with wrath. And they rose up and drove him out of the town and brought him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they could throw him down the cliff. But passing through their midst, he went away.
If you would read through the Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) and the beginning of Acts, you would know about the ministry of Jesus Christ.
He was born to take all the sins of the world onto Himself and then be crucified unjustly after three years of ministry. For three years Jesus taught all over the area, from the very Temple itself in Jerusalem to the area of Samaria among people the Jews considered beneath them socially. For three years Jesus eluded capture and attempted murder with ease as He fulfilled His mission to preach the gospel and do good, healing the sick, raising the dead and giving hope to the hopeless.
When the time had come, Jesus allowed the Roman soldiers to take Him through a conspiracy hatched by the Jewish leaders (Sanhedrin) and be illegally tried and convicted on false charges. The Jewish leaders, fearing that Jesus threatened their place in society and their power and income, called upon the Roman ruler of the Jews, Pilate, to kill Him ( the Jews did not have the power to crucify people, only the ruling Romans could do that). Pilate was not willing, but after Christ was brought before the titular head of the Jews, King Herod, and brought back to Pilate then Pilate realized that even a severe beating, humiliation and torture inflicted upon the apparently innocent Jesus Christ would not satisfy the Jews. The Jewish leaders threatened to contact Rome and accuse Pilate of allowing a threat to Roman rule to go free. Pilate went so far as to offer the traditional Passover pardon to a prisoner, offering up Jesus versus the known hardened criminal named Barabbas. But the people collected by the Sadducees and Pharisees to condemn and accuse Jesus of wrongdoing called out, "Give us Barabbas!" Pilate washed his hands of the blood of Christ and the people went so far as to claim that the blood of Christ would be on their heads rather than Pilate's and then Pilate ordered Jesus Christ to be crucified. Jesus took the sins of all mankind upon Himself, causing His Father God to look away from Him and be separated from the Godhead, a fate he had called "this cup" when praying in the Garden of Gethsemane. He was referring to the "cup of wrath" which consisted of the sins of mankind and the wrath of God towards sin. See Isaiah 5:16-18 for one reference, there are a few in the Old Testament that make this quite clear.
Jesus hated sin and had to become it. Jesus could not conceive of being separated from the Godhead and had to experience it. Jesus had created life on Earth and yet would have to experience death. He did all this to undo what Adam and Eve had done by disobedience. He did all this to be able to take our place and present us as cleansed from sin before the Father, so that all Christians have already been declared righteous and free from judgment at the end of all things. He did all this to conquer death and Hell and take away the rule of the Earth from Satan, the title Adam had ceded to Satan through sin.
Three days later He rose up from death, having conquered it and He spent some time with the disciples and other believers before finally leaving the material world in human form. But, while the Spirit of God left the Temple at the point of the death of Jesus on the cross, He now comes to live within those who believe in Christ for salvation. Adam and Eve died spiritually when they disobeyed God. But those of us who believe in Jesus and call upon Him in repentance to save us from our sins and be our Lord? We are reborn spiritually and, thus, the term born again (as Jesus Himself explained to Nicodemus in John chapter three).
A thorough understanding of the Bible through years of study has prepared me to understand why Darwinism exists. There are always enemies of the Creator God who seek to elevate man to the throne that belongs rightfully to Jesus Christ. Pagans and various false religions (such as Islam) and superstitions and myths existed in one form or another very early in human history. Ungodly worldviews inevitably lead to great sin and sin multiplies like mold on rotting fruit. Take a look at our society in America today and you see that sin is multiplying and often being celebrated. Homosexuality, sex outside of marriage, sex with children, violent crimes and pornography are becoming more commonplace in our society as Godly morality is being legislated against and being constantly attacked by the media, academics and unbelieving science. Scientism has taken over a great deal of science. Scientism is being taught to our children in place of science. Movies and television programs are filled with Darwinist and Humanist propaganda. No wonder that genuine faith in God is becoming watered-down even within churches. There is a constant drumbeat of Darwinist mythology being taught as fact when it is actually Atheist/Humanist propaganda.
Darwinism is preposterous, unscientific and unreasonable, but they have successfully propagandized, censored and bullied their way to be the ruling paradigm of the 20th and (so far) 21st Century. Yet research and new findings keep supporting design and a Creator instead of blind and impossible chance. That is the way it is. But that does not mean that we cannot beat lies with truth. It falls to real science to cast out scientism. Once people believed the Sun orbited the Earth. It was Christian scientists like Copernicus who asserted that the Earth actually orbited the Sun and it was the scientific establishment more than the church that fought against the concept. But the truth eventually won out.
Darwinism is nonsense. Darwinism is like the concept of the Sun orbiting the Earth. Evidence proclaims otherwise. The Universe is running downhill from a starting point. Simply stated, energy is converted into entropy. Technically one would say that heat is being lost and the Universe is heading for a cold state that is called "heat death." Darwinism is actually a description of what actually is happening, only in reverse. Organisms are not evolving into new creatures, they are devolving as they lose genetic information and accumulate mutations that will eventually kill them off. Organisms were designed with a large amount of genetic information from which to "choose" by environmental pressures that favor the best varieties of that organism in that area. We call this "speciation" and not evolution. Speciation involves the loss of information, not an increase in information. Organisms were designed free from disease and have accumulated mutations over the centuries. Mutation, the supposed building blocks of evolution, are actually killing organisms off over time. Many varieties of organisms have become extinct. They were not ancient ancestors of modern organisms that evolved into modern forms, they are simply varieties that were killed off aka became extinct.
Darwinism should be dead but lives like a vampire. Somebody find a hammer because I have a stake! Most extinctions are unfortunate, but the extinction of Darwinism would be a tremendous boon to mankind. I hope to live to see the day science "wakes up" and realizes they have been hoaxed badly, the biggest scam ever perpetrated on mankind since Satan asked Eve to question God's ban on eating that fruit!
Image below from this site
Atheism, evolutionism and families
Analysis of a recent popular psychology article
Published: 17 January 2013 (GMT+10)
A recent article by Bruce Grierson in Psychology Today, “The Atheist at the Breakfast Table”, shows dolls of Mom, Dad, Darwin and monkeys, and suggests that “nonbelievers [in God] are growing in number, but you might not know it because they may be in the next pew with their kids”1 (italics added). In other words, the article restates what believers, especially creationists, have been suggesting for some time: that the evolutionary worldview is coming into popular culture so much that it is having an effect on the belief of many churches, parents, and children. From a Christian perspective, such an unbelieving and one-sided evolution-supporting trend is negative, especially for young people, and it can lead to unspiritual thinking and consequences in other areas of society, too.
There is very significant (but not articulated) sympathy for intelligent design among academics in secular universities.
(1) Atheists typically assume that they are open-minded, but they usually exclude even the possibility of a Creator, i.e. they are not. E.g., Julian Huxley famously said that “Modern science must rule out special creation or divine guidance”.2 Todd more recently admitted that he also believed that science excludes a Creator: “Even if all the data point to an intelligent designer, such an hypothesis is excluded from science because it is not naturalistic”.3
(2) They assume that they are ‘quiet’ and ‘non-fundamentalist’ people, when in fact their position is just as ‘loud’ and ‘fundamentalist’ (in the modern derogatory sense of intolerant and exclusionary4) as that of anyone! To essentially worship pleasure rather than God (2 Timothy 3) might seem to be a non-religious, non-fundamentalist position but it is actually an (atheistic) fundamentalist/dogmatic position. Furthermore, to ignore God (if He exists, which is the question at issue) is actually a very bold and provocative thing to do—not a quiet, reasonable thing.
(3) They assume that the majority of academics do not believe in God. However modern science encourages people to keep silent about God; scientists are not allowed to mention God or give Him glory in their research papers. And if a scientist does mention God, his career can be negatively affected. However, our personal experiences as academics are that there is very significant (but not articulated) sympathy for, e.g., intelligent design among academics in secular universities.
In general, Grierson seems to be trying to promote the misconception that creationists are unreasonable and in a minority. However the greatest scientists like Newton, Maxwell and Faraday were creationists and were not unreasonable. (Furthermore, creationists have not always been in a minority.)
Atheism not mainstream
THE STAKES FOR BELIEVERS AND THEIR CHILDREN: the authors’
children: such children are typically and unavoidably bombarded by
evolutionist perspectives.
Strategy of many evolutionists who are atheists
Nevertheless, the article and its overall pro-evolution and non-believing perspectives also promote a strategy for nontheistic evolutionists, to help them convince people that currently believe in a Creator that He doesn’t exist: In essence, it suggests evolutionists should downplay any threatening aspects of atheism. Atheism is (at least according to the article) “not an adversarial position, just a position. There, in the vast middle of the religious spectrum, a space not occupied by fundamentalists of any sort, live tens of millions of atheists and agnostics, more or less quietly, mostly with their families. And their numbers are growing”.
In spite of evolution’s almost unilateral domination of the
educational system and its implication of no need for God, most people
tend to distrust the non-believers who most forcefully promote atheism.
Nevertheless, the article goes on to claim that “what nonbelievers most believe in is a gentle spirit of inquiry and open-minded investigation of options—which, as with [self-described atheist] Ross Harvey, may involve engagement with religious traditions” [such as Mr. Harvey’s apparent liking of religious ceremonies without himself believing in God; which may perhaps more accurately place him in another potential non-theistic category, that of a ‘neo-modern’6]. In any case, if such people want such open-minded investigation and discussion, why do they typically end up trying to force out all discussion of the possibility of creation as an option, even if it is based on an even-handed pro and con discussion of scientific evidences only (e.g. in public schools)? Is this open-minded?
The article also claims that “the place where atheists are found in the greatest concentration [is] the scientific community … especially tenure-track social scientists and natural scientists at America’s top research universities … [where] around 60 percent of these identified [themselves] as either atheist or agnostic … .That’s more than 10 times the proportion you’d find in a random slice of Americans but lower than you might expect, given that highly publicized surveys had previously pegged the percentage of atheists among top scientists at over 90 percent.” However, if the previous (and apparently now known to be mistaken) survey showed that “over 90 percent” at top research universities were atheists; but the new survey now supposedly shows that atheists plus agnostics are together only “around 60 percent” of such scientists; then perhaps the percent of top scientists who are atheists has dropped significantly in recent years; and/or one or more of such surveys have been mistaken (as somewhat admitted here in the article).
Mr. Grierson’s article goes on to say that within a group of self-identified atheists and agnostics in the sciences, almost one in five were part of a religious community or attending a church, temple or mosque “with some regularity”. Apparently, these unbelievers’ reasons for adopting some religious traditions were “highly rational”, such as some trying to reconcile their identities as scientists, non-believers, and spouses or parents; or trying to have a moral structure for their children, etc. This is commendable and all people, regardless of their current beliefs and rationales, should be (and generally are) made welcome in Christian churches, public dinners, guest speaker forums, etc. In fact at one time, many of us creation supporters were of one particular mindset (e.g. evolution and/or no God), but were at least somewhat open and willing to discuss reasons for what we believed with others. That in fact may represent a truly open and evenhanded, science-friendly meeting of minds.
Personal experiences
As an example of bias in “scientists are atheistic” suppositions, one of us (DO) recalls when I did my Ph.D. in the natural sciences at a major US research university in Georgia. In spite of my vulnerable situation, I trusted Jesus by daring to speak to and educate interested people on a scientific case against broad-scale evolutionary origins in my university classes (as well as in my own free time). What happened? I was given a very hard time by a number of professors, some of whom actively worked at getting me forced out of my Ph.D. program (in zoology). They eventually succeeded, but it appears that the Creator answered prayers anyway, because in the nick of time I was able to lateral into another similar program and got my degree (a Ph.D. in ecology). It was also clear from this that there was, and still is, significant anti-religious discrimination, even at major taxpayer-funded universities; but also that with the Creator’s assistance, outspoken Christians can be bold and prevail.
There was, and still is, significant anti-religious discrimination, even at major taxpayer-funded universities.
Possible significance for current non-believers and ‘free thinkers’
Another key part of Grierson’s article is where the atheist/neo-modern mentioned above, Ross Harvey, explained why he became an unbeliever as a teenager: “One of [Harvey’s] Brethren [church denomination] leaders, backed into a corner by Harvey’s queries, admitted that, yes, by definition of church doctrine, Gandhi would be going to hell. That was enough for Harvey. He was out [of his former Christian belief] and became an atheist”.7However, we would suggest that such questioning individuals need to reconsider such an issue in terms of scripturally consistent, traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs: Namely, that we are all considered sinners because we were conceived with the sin nature that passed down to us from Adam, the first man (and first wrongdoer). For Christians, the one exception was and is considered to be Jesus, the Son of God, who was the “seed of the woman” and conceived via a miraculous conception by God, instead of via a sin-bearing man. According to this view, we are all born into and live as wrongdoers and mortal beings because of our ancestry that traces back to the first fallen man, and because of our deliberately wrong choices afterward in our own lives. Therefore except for the perfect Saviour, we all (even Gandhi) deserve eternity in the place reserved for sinners who in their lifetimes do not agree to be spiritually cleansed by the sacrificial blood that was sacrificed on Christ’s cross.
Otherwise, we all go to the place in which we deserve to (and at least during life, desire to) continue to be separated from the perfect God (i.e., Hell). This may appear to be tragic, but it gives individual humans immense freedom to choose (at least from their perspective—see Ephesians 2:8 and 2 Timothy 1:9), and provides another perspective for us past or present ‘Atheists at the Breakfast Table’. This perspective provides a powerful answer regarding our broken universe and broken humans; yet one which seems historically to have provided the best environment not only for freedom and productivity, but also for the advancement of science itself.
Acknowledgments
We thank Dr. David A. DeWitt, Chairman of the Department of Biology and Chemistry and Director of the Center for Creation Studies; and Liberty University as a whole, for providing academic support for the authors to work on the above concepts, and in turn to hopefully help provide an alternative view for seekers.Further reading
References
- Grierson, B., The atheist at the breakfast table, Psychology Today, pp. 70–78, May 2012. Return to text.
- Huxley, J., Evolution, the Modern Synthesis, p. 457, Harper Bros. Publ., New York, 1942. Return to text.
- Todd, S.C., A view from Kansas on that evolution debate, Nature 401(6752):423, 30 September 1999. Return to text.
- See Grigg, R., Anyone for fundamentalism? Creation 30(4):15–17, 2008; creation.com/a/6124 and Darwinian fundamentalists … believe it, or else! Creation 15(3):4, 1993; creation.com/a/829. Return to text.
- Hitchens, C., God is Not Great: The case against religion, Atlantic Books, London, UK, 2007. Return to text.
- Fabich, A.J., Time to abandon postmodernism: Living a new way, Answers Research Journal 4(1):178–183, 2011; answersingenesis.org/articles/arj/v4/n1/abandon-postmodernism. Return to text.
- Ref. 1, p. 74. Return to text.
