I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist (27 page)

In fact, the late Julian Huxley, once a leader among Darwinists, admitted that sexual freedom is a popular motivation behind evolutionary dogma. When he was asked by talk show host Merv Griffin, “Why do people believe in evolution?” Huxley honestly answered, “The reason we accepted Darwinism even without proof, is because we didn’t want God to interfere with our sexual mores.”
³⁶
Notice he didn’t cite evidence for spontaneous generation or evidence from the fossil record. The motivation he observed to be prevalent among evolutionists was based on moral preferences, not scientific evidence.

Former atheist Lee Strobel reveals that he had the same motivation when he believed in Darwinism. He writes, “I was more than happy to latch onto Darwinism as an excuse to jettison the idea of God so I could unabashedly pursue my own agenda in life without moral constraints.”
³⁷

Author and lecturer Ron Carlson has had Darwinists admit the same to him. On one such occasion, after lecturing at a major university on the problems with Darwinism and the evidence for Intelligent Design, Carlson had dinner with a biology professor who had attended his presentation.

“So what did you think of my lecture?” Carlson asked.

“Well, Ron,” began the professor, “what you say is true and makes a lot of sense. But I’m gonna continue to teach Darwinism anyway.”

Carlson was baffled. “Why would you do that?” he asked.

“Well, to be honest with you, Ron, it’s because Darwinism is morally comfortable.”

“Morally comfortable? What do you mean?” Carlson pressed.

“I mean if Darwinism is true—if there is no God and we all evolved from slimy green algae—then I can sleep with whomever I want,” observed the professor. “In Darwinism, there’s no moral accountability.”
³⁸

Now that’s a moment of complete candor. Of course, this is not to say that all Darwinists think this way or that all Darwinists are immoral—some undoubtedly live morally better lives than many so called Christians. It simply reveals that some Darwinists are motivated not by the evidence but rather by a desire to remain free from the perceived moral restraints of God. This motivation may drive them to suppress the evidence for the Creator so they can continue to live the way they want to live. (In this sense, Darwinism is no different than many other world religions in that it provides a way to deal with the guilt that results from immoral behavior. The difference is that some Darwinists, instead of acknowledging guilt and offering ways to atone for it or rules to avoid it, attempt to avoid any implication of guilt by asserting that there’s no such thing as immoral behavior to be guilty about!)

These four motivations that we’ve suggested should not surprise us. Sex and power are the motivators that underlie many of our most intense cultural debates, such as those about abortion and homosexuality. Too often people take positions in those debates that merely line up with their personal desires rather than taking the evidence into account.

In the same way, belief in Darwinism is often a matter of the will rather than the mind. Sometimes people refuse to accept what they know to be true because of the impact it will have on their personal lives. This explains why some Darwinists suggest such absurd “counterintuitive” explanations—explanations that are “against common sense.” Despite the plain evidence for design, these Darwinists fear encroachment of God into their personal lives more than they fear being wrong about their scientific conclusions.

This is not to say that all Darwinists have such motivations for their beliefs. Some may truly believe that the scientific evidence supports their theory. We think they get this misconception because most Darwinists rarely study the research of those in other fields. As a result, very few get the big picture.

This is especially true of biologists. Molecular and cell biologist Jonathan Wells observes, “Most biologists are honest, hard-working scientists who insist on accurate presentation of the evidence, but who rarely venture outside their own fields.”
³⁹
In other words, although they do honest work, they only see their own piece of the puzzle. Since they’ve been taught that the Darwinian box top of the puzzle is generally true (it’s just those pesky details that remain unresolved), most biologists interpret their piece of the puzzle with that box top in mind, giving the benefit of the doubt to the Darwinian view and assuming that the really strong evidence for Darwinism lies in another field of biology. So even if they can’t see the evidence for spontaneous generation or macroevo-lution in their piece of the puzzle, the evidence must be somewhere else in biology because the Darwinian box top requires those things to be true. These circumstances leave the evolutionary paradigm unchallenged by the majority of biologists.

H
OW
I
MPORTANT
I
S THE
A
GE OF THE
U
NIVERSE
?

We couldn’t leave the discussion of evolution and creation without at least mentioning the age of the universe. Since there are several views on this topic, especially within Christian circles, we do not have space to treat them all here (they are discussed in detail in the
Baker Encyclopedia
of Christian Apologetics
and
Systematic Theology, Volume 2
).
⁴⁰

However, we do want to point out that while the age of universe is certainly an interesting theological question, the more important point is not
when
the universe was created but
that
it was created. As we have seen, the universe exploded into being out of nothing, and it has been precisely tweaked to support life on earth. Since this universe—including the entire time-space continuum—had a beginning, it required a Beginner no matter how long ago that beginning was. Likewise, since this universe is designed, it required a Designer no matter how long ago it was designed.

We can debate how long the days in Genesis were, or whether the assumptions that are made in dating techniques are valid. But when we do, we must be sure not to obscure the larger point that this creation requires a Creator.
⁴¹

S
UMMARY AND
C
ONCLUSION

Now, let’s get to the bottom line. There are really only two possibili-ties: either God created us, or we created God. Either God really exists, or he’s just a creation of our own minds. As we have seen, Darwinism—not God—is a creation of the human mind. You’ve got to have a lot of faith to be a Darwinist. You have to believe that,
without intelligent
intervention:

1. Something arose from nothing (the origin of the universe).

2. Order arose from chaos (the design of the universe).

3. Life arose from non-life (which means that intelligence arose from nonintelligence, and personality arose from non-personality).

4. New life forms arose from existing life forms despite evidence to the contrary such as:

(1) Genetic limits

(2) Cyclical change

(3) Irreducible complexity

(4) Molecular isolation

(5) Nonviability of transitional forms, and

(6) The fossil record

Okay, so the evidence is not good for macroevolution. But what about theistic macroevolution? Perhaps what can’t be explained naturally makes good sense if you add God to the picture.

Why suggest that? If there were evidence for God
and
for macroevo-lution, then there might be a reason to combine the two. But, as we have seen, there is no evidence that macroevolution has occurred. It’s not like you have contradictory evidence: some evidence that points to macroevolution, and other evidence that disproves it. If you had, say, a fossil record with millions of transitional forms on one hand, but irreducibly complex creatures on another, then perhaps you could suggest that God guided evolution through those unbridgeable gaps. But since that is not the case, it seems that God wasn’t needed to guide macroevo-lution because there’s no evidence macroevolution has occurred!

Finally, let’s look at the evidence with another question in mind: What would the evidence have to look like for creation (Intelligent Design) to be true? How about:

1. A universe that has exploded into being out of nothing

2. A universe with over 100 fine-tuned, life-enabling constants for this tiny, remote planet called Earth

3. Life that:

has been observed to arise only from existing life (it has never been observed to arise spontaneously);

consists of thousands and even millions of volumes of empirically detectable specified complexity (and is, therefore, more than just the nonliving chemicals it contains);

changes cyclically and only within a limited range;

cannot be built or modified gradually (i.e., is irreducibly complex);

is molecularly isolated between basic types (there’s no ancestral progression at the molecular level);

leaves a fossil record of fully formed creatures that appear suddenly, do not change, and then disappear suddenly.