Evolution and Recent History: Darwin, Evolution and His Critics-Part 5

Darwin’s Escape from God: Why Did Darwin Continue to Believe in Evolution? (con’t)

At one point in Darwin’s life, a letter from botanist J. D. Hooker brought the force of Paley’s Natural Theology back upon him. Darwin realized that Paley could not be disposed of so easily: “No wonder Darwin was disturbed. He had sought to escape from God: now he found his old enemy waiting for him in a new hiding place. His confusion can scarcely be exaggerated. In letter after letter he made the lamest excuses for his inability to think clearly. Intellectually, he said, he was in ‘thick mud.’”^[1]

Darwin’s own reasoning processes became increasingly strained because “Darwin was determined to escape from design and a personal God at all costs.”^[2] Not surprisingly, Darwin’s letters “exhibit a resolution not to follow his thoughts to their logical conclusion.”^[3] Of course, there were exceptions. For example, he spoke of the “impossibility of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including man with his capacity of looking far back­wards and far into futurity, as the result of blind chance or necessity.”^[4] But then, because his mind was really descended from lower life forms and more kin to a monkey’s mind, how could its reasoning processes really be trusted? Darwin wondered, “But then arises the doubt, can the mind of man, which has, as I fully believe, been developed from a mind as low as that possessed by the lowest animals, be trusted when it draws such grand conclu­sions? …Would anyone trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convic­tions in such a mind?”^[5]

As Clark and Bales observe:

Reason led Darwin to God, so Darwin killed reason. He trusted his mind when reasoning about evolution, but not about God? What a warning from the author to the reader this discrediting of reason would have made as a preface to the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man! …[But] How [then] could he trust his mind when it thought on the theory of evolution? As Arnold Lunn put it: “A clear thinker would never have been guilty of such inconsistent reasoning. If Darwin was not prepared to trust his mind when it drew the ‘grand conclusion’ that God existed, why was he prepared to trust it when it drew the depressing conclusion that a mind of such bestial origin could not be trusted to draw any conclusion at all?”^[6]

In other words, it would appear that Darwin rejected God not from reason, but “because of some violent prejudice” against God^[7]—itself an unreasonable reaction. In the end, “Darwin’s determination not to believe cost him his mind.”^[8]

It also cost him good science.

Having adopted logical positivism with its exclusion of the metaphysical, Darwin was hardly unbiased in his scientific methodology. Robert Kofahl, Ph.D., argues that Darwin’s particular philosophy of science was intended to invoke naturalism and accomplish some­thing heretofore unthinkable—to remove the concept of divine intervention from the category of scientific endeavors—a feat that if successful would have profound conse­quences:

It is this author’s opinion that Charles Darwin had a hidden agenda for science. There is much evidence for this in his writings. Neal Gillespie (1979) of Georgia State University in his important book, Charles Darwin and the Problem of Creation, established the fact that Darwin espoused logical positivism as his philosophy of science. His hidden agenda, then, was to remove from the thinking of all scientists any concepts of special creation, divine intervention, or divine teleology in the natural world. That this agenda has been achieved with almost total global success in the spheres of science, education and scholarly disciplines is obvious to any informed observer.^[9]

Professor Marvin L. Lubenow comments on this issue are important enough to cite in detail:

Not only was Darwin’s contribution primarily philosophical, it was a philosophy bent on a specific mission: to show that creation is unscientific. The most extensive research into Darwin’s religious attitudes and motivations has been done by historian Neal C. Gillespie (Georgia State University). He begins his book with this comment: “On reading the Origin of Species, I, like many others, became curious about why Darwin spent so much time attacking the idea of divine creation.”

Gillespie goes on to demonstrate that Darwin’s purpose was not just to establish the concept of evolution. Darwin was wise enough not to stop there. Darwin went for the jugular vein. Darwin’s master accomplishment was to convince the scientific world that it was unscientific to believe in supernatural causation. His purpose was to “ungod” the universe. Darwin was a positivist. This is the philosophy that the only true knowledge is scientific knowledge; no other type of knowledge is legitimate. Obviously, to accept that premise means to reject any form of divine revelation. Darwin accomplished one of the greatest feats of salesmanship in the history of the world. He convinced scientists that it was unscientific to deal with God or creation in any way. To be scientific, they must study the world as if God did not exist….

In all of this, it is important to realize that Darwin was not an atheist. He did not exterminate God. He just evicted God from the universe which God had created. All that God was allowed to do was to create the “natural laws” at the beginning. From then on, nature was on its own. With God out of the picture, evolution fell into place rather easily, since evolution seemed to be the only viable alternative to Special Creation….

We are now getting down to basics. The real issue in the creation/evolution debate is not the existence of God. The real issue is the nature of God. To think of evolution as basically atheistic is to misunderstand the uniqueness of evolution. Evolution was not designed as a general attack against theism. It was designed as a specific attack against the God of the Bible, and the God of the Bible is clearly revealed through the doctrine of creation. Obviously, if a person is an atheist, it would be normal for him to also be an evolutionist. But evolution is as comfortable with theism as it is with atheism. An evolutionist is perfectly free to choose any god he wishes, as long as it is not the God of the Bible. The gods allowed by evolution are private, subjective, and artificial. They bother no one and make no absolute ethical demands. However, the God of the Bible is the Creator, sustainer, Savior and judge. All are responsible to him. He has an agenda that conflicts with that of sinful humans. For man to be created in the image of God is very awesome. For God to be created in the image of man is very comfortable.

Evolution was originally designed as a specific attack against the God of the Bible, and it remains so to this day. While Christian Theistic Evolutionists seem blind to this fact, the secular world sees it very clearly.^[10]

(to be continued)

Notes

1. ↑ Robert E. D. Clark, Darwin: Before and After (Chicago: Moody Press, 1967), p. 89.
2. ↑ Ibid., p. 89.
3. ↑ Ibid., p. 87.
4. ↑ Robert T. Clark, James D. Bales, Why Scientists Accept Evolution (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1976), p. 38 citing Francis Darwin (ed.), Charles Darwin Life and Letters, Vol. 1, p. 282.
5. ↑ Ibid., p. 38 citing Life and Letters, Vol. 1, p. 285.
6. ↑ Ibid., pp. 38-39.
7. ↑ Ibid., p. 40.
8. ↑ Ibid.
9. ↑ Robert E. Kofahl, “Correctly Redefining Distorted Science: A Most Essential Task,” Creation Research Society Quarterly, Dec. 1986, p. 113.
10. ↑ Marvin Lubenow, Bones of Contention: A Creationist Assessment of Human Fossils (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1992), pp. 191-92.

Read Part 6