DARWIN 200 YEARS LATER

By Marianne Mauti

Did Darwin realize the philosophical consequences of his ideas? Defiantly his clandestine notebooks, which he dared not show even close friends, reveal that he struggled with the fact that evolution could undermine people’s belief in God.The truth is Darwin wouldn't even recognize his theory…...

(Today's Article: is an except, taken from an article by Dr. Roger Sanders Ass. Proff of science at Bryan College and ass director of Center for Origins Research

WHEN WE THINK OF CHARLES DARWIN WE THINK OF THE GOD-HATER BENT ON OVERTURNING THE CHRISTIAN CULTURE.WHEN WE DIG WE FIND FROM THE PERSONAL DIARY HE KEPT FROM AN EARLY AGE UNTIL HIS DEATH, not a satanic ogre but an intellectual who embodied the many contradictions and conflicts prevalent in the British culture of Victorian England- a man like any other, a man whom God wanted to save.

Darwin grew up in a middle class family, and like many science types he took himself seriously. Despite Darwin’s association with evolutionists and the antireligious, such as Robert Grant, Thomas Huxley, and his brother Erasmus, a number of people God placed close to Darwin reveal a God reaching out to him. His wife kept the question of eternity before Darwin. By the time Charles and Emma were married, he already doubted a personal God, the inspired Bible, the soul and eternity.

Emma tried reaching him through letters in which she implored him to take to heart Jesus’ Last Supper discourse in John 13-17.In what Darwin called her “beautiful letter,” she said, “There is a danger giving up revelation…. in casting off what has been done for your benefit as well as for that of all the world…. I should be most unhappy if I thought we did not belong to each other for ever.”

He kept that letter safe all his life and jotted on it for her to read, “When I am dead, know that many times I have kissed and cried over this.”

Though God pursued Darwin through exposure to the scriptures time and again, he resisted. He resisted in part because he was the product of a culture that struggled against biblical authority, despite being a Christian in name. The majority of British clergymen and clerical scientists followed natural theology, a view of God that took root in the late 1600’s.In Darwin’s youth, they held that we can discover God and His attributes from human reasoning alone without reference to the scriptures. This mistaken approach led to three foundational concepts of natural theology, which undermine biblical authority:

• Creation is unchanging; otherwise the revelation of God would change and we could not know him. Problem: Denies Adams fall and the flood and there consequences.
• Creation has been allowed to run on its own according to the fixed laws of nature, which have always operated the same way as they do today. Problem: Denies miracles can happen.
• Wherever the Bible disagrees with science, God accommodated the words in the Bible to ancient man’s primitive understanding, and science must be accepted as the explanation. Problem: Science trumps scripture.

Asked on the mistaken theology, the scientific dogma of Darwin’s day insisted the species could not change, even thought he Bible make that claim? On the other hand, people could see the earth changing, rocks eroding, volcanos erupting and earthquakes wrenched the landscape. Therefore they concluded that the earth had changed since creation but very slowly by these processes. Most scientific observers of the early 1800’s concluded that these geologic changes had taken millions of years. Hardly any of them believed in a literal global Flood and all it implied about rapid change.

Darwin had been taught to think. The trouble was he started without a grasp on the authority of Scripture and with wrong assumptions. He saw species as the product of change but not change following the global flood. He saw rock strata as the product of processes but not processes stemming from the biblical catastrophe. He saw diverse kinds of plants and animals but did not recognize the gulf between distinct “kinds” that God had originally created.

Perhaps most importantly, Darwin could not see how a benevolent God could allow the death and suffering he saw in nature and humanity. Death and suffering must have always been a part of nature since creation-that is what natural theology said. If so, then this was not a God of Christianity or the bible but was unfeeling and distant and only a maker of starting points, materials, and natural laws.

The blame for his turning away from God must fall partly on the church and the theologians and scientists

If he could but show that species do change and propose the natural laws that originate new species, he could convince his peers that evolution is true. To the ruling class and clergyman scientists, who had already compromised on an old earth, the last remaining barrier to evolution was the no biblical litmus test of species fixity. Darwin was such a perfect product of his time that, despite all his years of worry, his scientific arguments in the “Origin of the Species,” overwhelmingly convinced his peers.

Most British Christians had already adopted a low view of scripture wherever it referred to science, believing science was more authoritative than scripture. So evolution did not create any conflicts. They largely embraced evolution as God’s way of creating over long eons, despite its requirement of painful death and suffering over millions of years. In fact, evolution became a point of national pride. To the British elite, Victorian England evidenced the heights to which evolution could carry the human intellect and government.

Did he realize the philosophical consequences of his ideas? Defiantly his clandestine notebooks, which he dared not show even close friends, reveal that he struggled with the fact that evolution could undermine people’s belief in God.

Darwin simply was unable to resolve suffering and death with a God who is good, just, and merciful. For him, the “Creator,” was distant, caring little whether the world was very good or bad. Rejecting the biblical view, he reasoned that death and suffering were integral to operation of the present world and had always existed. Darwin proposed a new natural law-natural selection-which assumed that death has operated from the beginning. With this naturalistic, impersonal force of natural selection, he found a substitute for the God of the bible, who is the creator of all life forms, the eternal judge of sin, and the only possible redeemer of fallen mankind and of our corrupted world. Though God had pursued him enough for him to know where to find the answers, Darwin never took the questions back to the bible to find God’s answer!

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ADDITIONAL SOURCES: Dr. Roger Sanders Ass. Proff of science at Bryan College and ass director of Center for Origins Research