13 For You formed my inward parts; You covered me in my mother's womb.
14 I will praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; Marvelous are Your works, And that my soul knows very well.
15 My frame was not hidden from You, When I was made in secret, And skillfully wrought in the lowest parts of the earth.
16 Your eyes saw my substance, being yet unformed. And in Your book they all were written, The days fashioned for me, When as yet there were none of them.
Science and faith are not incompatible, and while scientists do not universally agree on how we came to this place in the history of humanity, there are many in the scientific community that are repudiating traditional Darwinist ideas and embracing the idea of a creator. Colossians chapter 1 states, regarding Jesus:
13 He has delivered us from the power of darkness and conveyed us into the kingdom of the Son of His love,
14 in whom we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins.
15 He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation.
16 For by Him all things were created that are in heaven and that are on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers. All things were created through Him and for Him.
17 And He is before all things, and in Him all things consist.
Stephen Meyer is a professing Christian, a former Meeting House guest, and has written and commented extensively regarding the subject of intelligent design; contending that evidence of design on our planet points to the existence of a designer. He tweeted out on the last day of 2023:
Over 1000 doctoral scientists from around the world have signed a statement publicly expressing their skepticism about the contemporary theory of Darwinian evolution. There Is Scientific Dissent From Darwinism. It deserves to be heard.
This tweet also included a link to a short YouTube video that pointed people to the website, DissentFromDarwin.org.
The website declares:
During recent decades, new scientific evidence from many scientific disciplines such as cosmology, physics, biology, “artificial intelligence” research, and others have caused scientists to begin questioning Darwinism’s central tenet of natural selection and studying the evidence supporting it in greater detail.
Yet public TV programs, educational policy statements, and science textbooks have asserted that Darwin’s theory of evolution fully explains the complexity of living things. The public has been assured that all known evidence supports Darwinism and that virtually every scientist in the world believes the theory to be true.
The scientists on this list dispute the first claim and stand as living testimony in contradiction to the second. Since Discovery Institute launched this list in 2001, hundreds of scientists have courageously stepped forward to sign their names.
And, there are criteria for those who would be allowed to be included as signatories for the list - the site notes:
Signatories of the Scientific Dissent From Darwinism must either hold a Ph.D. in a scientific field such as biology, chemistry, mathematics, engineering, computer science, or one of the other natural sciences; or they must hold an M.D. and serve as a professor of medicine. Signatories must also agree with the following statement: “We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged.”
And, over at The Stream, Tom Gilson seems to indicate that Darwin was the ideological brother to notable philosophers Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx, writing:
The three had a lot in common. Above all else, they each turned the meaning of being human upside down. To Freud, to be human was to be a confused sexual being. To Marx, to be human was to be an economic being, control by one’s “class consciousness.”
For Darwin, to be human was to be something even less, as we’ll see in a moment.
Freud was influential through the first half of the 20th century. Psychologists since then have dropped his main theory like a hot grenade. It made humanity less than human. And then there’s the little problem that it lacked all scientific support. His ghost lives on, though, in our destructively distorted views on sex.
Marx altered the map even up until today. He, too, made humanity less than human. So it’s no surprise his work opened the way to tens of millions of murders.
Darwin is partly to blame for it, though. Marx alone couldn’t have stripped us so completely of our humanity. Darwin’s theory “showed” that the human species was the product of unintended accidents (random variation) and natural selection. Natural selection means “survival of the fittest,” where “fittest” is known only by “that which survives.” Every species that’s ever appeared on earth was the product of accidents and the survival of, well, the survivors.
He continues:
To be human (under naturalistic or undirected evolution) is to have meaningless origins, and those meaningless origins mean we live in a meaningless world.
Many staunch Darwinists will grant there’s no meaning behind human existence, but still insist, “I create meaning for myself.” But that hardly makes sense. More likely, it’s meaninglessness creating the illusion of meaning.
How do you get from “survival of the fittest” to “love your neighbor”?
In another Stream article, John West of Discovery Institute wrote about the influence of Darwin on Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger. Just under the headline for the article, you find these words: "Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger was a racist and a proponent of eugenics, the effort to breed a superior human race in the name of Darwinian biology." He went on to say:
Eugenics was the effort to breed a superior human race in the name of Darwinian biology. Its supporters (which included the nation’s top evolutionary biologists) were terrified that society was destroying itself because it was preventing natural selection from killing off the poor, the sick and the handicapped, and from thinning down the “inferior races.”
West adds:
If you think Sanger’s views are completely out of sync with Planned Parenthood’s current leadership, consider the views of her grandson Alexander. Chair of the International Planned Parenthood Council, Alexander Sanger champions abortion as a practice that evolved through Darwinian natural selection to help humans survive.
“Humanity has evolved to take conscious control of reproduction and has done so in order to survive,” he declares. “… We cannot repeal the laws of natural selection. Nature does not let every life form survive. Humanity uniquely, and to its benefit, can exercise some dominion over this process.”
Darwin's philosophies, cloaked in scientific theory, should be repudiated. But, Ken Ham, writing at Answers in Genesis, says we need to do more, stating, "We...need to understand, as Christians, that it’s not enough for us just to stand against Darwin or some form of Darwinian evolution." He added:
We need to stand against all beliefs that are contrary to the Word of God, including other evolutionary ideas (evolutionary geology and cosmology, for example) that undermine the authority of the Word of God. So yes, we do applaud what these scientists are doing, but we challenge them to look to God’s Word for the answers to their questions about origins, as many other scientists are already doing.
I think this is a clear example of how Christians can rightly state what they oppose, but make the case for what they are for. We can certainly decry any celebration of a "Darwin Day" on February 12, the same day as the birth of Abraham Lincoln (which is certainly a cause for celebration). But, we must also make the case for the identity of our Creator, and point to Him and the Savior who was there at creation, who has come to earth to redeem fallen humanity and make us new creations in Him.
As Tom Gilson notes, Darwin believes that the human race is a product of "accidents." While Darwin's teachings devalued humanity, the Bible provides a sense of hope in our Creator, who has placed within us the image of God, and desires for all to come to know Him. Darwin, Freud, Marx, Sanger - their philosophies lead to death. But Jesus offers a way to life, through which we can be brought out of darkness into the kingdom of light. We are not here by chance or the product of randomness - there is intentionality and a sense of identity in the Lord that we reflect.
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