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Humans
have always wondered about the meaning of life...life
has no higher purpose than to perpetuate the survival of
DNA...life has no design, no purpose, no evil and no
good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference. Richard
Dawkins Evolution is “deceptively simple yet utterly
profound in its implications,” the first of which is
that living creatures “differ from one another, and
those variations arise at random, without a plan or
purpose.” Evolution must be without plan or purpose
because its core tenet is the natural selection of the
fittest, produced by random copying errors called
mutations. Darwin “was keenly aware that admitting any
purposefulness whatsoever to the question of the origin
of species would put his theory of natural selection on
a very slippery slope.” Pulitzer Prize author Edward Humes wrote that the fact of evolution was obvious but
“few could see it, so trapped were they by the
human…desire to find design and purpose in the world.”
He concluded:
Darwin's brilliance was in seeing beyond the appearance
of design, and understanding the purposeless, merciless
process of natural selection, of life and death in the
wild, and how it culled all but the most successful
organisms from the tree of life, thereby creating the
illusion that a master intellect had designed the world.
But close inspection of the watch-like “perfection” of
honeybees' combs or ant trails…reveals that they are a
product of random, repetitive, unconscious behaviours,
not conscious design.
The fact that evolution teaches that life has no purpose
beyond perpetuating its own survival is not lost on
teachers. One testified that teaching evolution
“impacted their consciences” because it moved teachers
away from the “idea that they were born for a purpose…
something completely counter to their mindset and
beliefs.”
In a study on why children resist accepting evolution,
Yale psychologists Bloom and Weisberg concluded that the
evolutionary way of viewing the world, which the authors
call “promiscuous teleology,” makes it difficult for
them to accept evolution. Children “naturally see the
world in terms of design and purpose.” The ultimate
purposelessness of evolution, and thus of the life that
it produces, was eloquently expressed by Professor
Lawrence Krauss as follows: “We're just a bit of
pollution…. If you got rid of us…the universe would be
largely the same. We're completely irrelevant.”
The Textbooks
To determine what schools are teaching about
religious questions such as the purpose of life, I
surveyed current science textbooks and found that they
tend to teach the view that evolution is both nihilistic
and atheistic. One of today's most widely-used textbooks
stated that “evolution works without either plan or
purpose…. Evolution is random and undirected.” Another
text by the same authors added that Darwin knew his
theory “required believing in philosophical materialism,
the conviction that matter is the stuff of all existence
and that all mental and spiritual phenomena are its
by-products.” The authors continued:
Darwinian evolution was not only purposeless but also a
heartless process in which...nature ruthlessly
eliminates the unfit. Suddenly, humanity was reduced to
just one more species in a world that cared nothing for
us. The great human mind was no more than a mass of
evolving neurons. Worst of all, there was no divine plan
to guide us.
Another text taught that humans are just “a tiny,
largely fortuitous, and late-arising twig on the
enormously arborescent bush of life” and the belief that
a “progressive, guiding force, consistently pushing
evolution to move in a single direction” is now known to
be “misguided.” Many texts teach that evolution is
purposeless and has no goal except to achieve brute
survival: the “idea that evolution is not directed
towards a final goal or state has been more difficult
for many people to accept than the process of evolution
itself.” One major text openly teaches that humans were
created by a blind, deaf, and dumb watchmaker namely
natural selection, which is “totally blind to the
future.”
Humans...came from the same evolutionary source as every
other species. It is natural selection of selfish genes
that has given us our bodies and our brains…. Natural
selection…explains…the whole of life, the diversity of
life, the complexity of life, |and| the apparent design
in life.”
The Implications
Many texts are very open about the implications of
Darwinism for theism. One teaches that Darwin's
immeasurably important contribution to science was to
show that, despite life's apparent evidence of design
and purpose, mechanistic causes explain all biological
phenomena. The text adds that by coupling “undirected,
purposeless variation to the blind, uncaring process of
natural selection, Darwin made theological or spiritual
explanations of the life processes superfluous.” The
author concludes by noting that “it was Darwin's theory
of Evolution that provided a crucial plank to the
platform of mechanisms and materialism…that has been the
stage of most western thought.” Another text even stated
directly that humans were created by a random process,
not a loving, purposeful God, and:
The real difficulty in accepting Darwin's theory has
always been that it seems to diminish our significance….
|Evolution| asked us to accept the proposition that,
like all other organisms, we too are the products of a
random process that, as far as science can show, we are
not created for any special purpose or as part of any
universal design.
These texts are all clearly teaching religious ideas,
not science. An excellent example is a text that openly
ruled out not only theistic evolution, but any role for
God in nature, and demonstrated that Darwinism
threatened theism by showing that humans and all life
“could be explained by natural selection without the
intervention of a god.” Evolutionary “randomness and
uncertainty had replaced a deity having conscious,
purposeful, human characteristics.”
The Darwinian view that… present-type organisms were not
created spontaneously but formed in a succession of
selective events that occurred in the past, contradicted
the common religious view that there could be no design,
biological or otherwise, without an intelligent design-er….
In this scheme a god of design and purpose is not
necessary…. Religion has been bolstered by… the
comforting idea that humanity was created in the image
of a god to rule over the world and its creatures.
Religion provided emotional solace, a set of ethical and
moral values…. Nevertheless, faith in religious dogma
has been eroded by natural explanations of its
mysteries…. The positions of the creationists and the
scientific world appear irreconcilable.”
Darwin himself taught a totally atheistic, naturalistic
view of origins. He even once said, “I would give
nothing for the theory of natural selection if it
requires miraculous additions at any one stage of
descent.” John Alcock, an evolutionary biologist,
therefore concluded that “we exist solely to propagate
the genes within us.”
Leading Darwin scholar Janet Browne makes it very clear
that Darwin's goal was the “arduous task of reorienting
the way Victorians looked at nature.” To do this Darwin
had to convince the world that “ideas about a
benevolent, nearly perfect natural world” and those that
believe “beauty was given to things for a purpose, were
wrong that the idea of a loving God who created all
living things and brought men and women into existence
was…a fable.”
The world…steeped in moral meaning which helped mankind
seek out higher goals in life, was not Darwin's.
Darwin's view of nature was dark black…. Where most men
and women generally believed in some kind of design in
nature some kind of plan and order and felt a
deep-seated, mostly inexpressible belief that their
existence had meaning, Darwin wanted them to see all
life as empty of any divine purpose.
Darwin knew how difficult it was to abandon such a view,
but realized that for evolution to work, nature must
ultimately be “governed entirely by chance.” Browne
concludes:
The pleasant outward face of nature was precisely that
only an outward face. Underneath was perpetual struggle,
species against species, individual against individual.
Life was ruled by death...-destruction was the key to
reproductive success. All the theological meaning was
thus stripped out by Darwin and replaced by the concept
of competition. All the telos, the purpose, on which
natural theologians based their ideas of perfect
adaptation was redirected into Malthusian Darwinian
struggle. What most people saw as God-given design he
saw as mere adaptations to circumstance, adaptations
that were meaningless except for the way in which they
helped an animal or plant to survive.
Neo-Darwinist Richard Dawkins recognized the
purposelessness of such a system:
In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic
replication some people are going to get hurt, other
people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any
rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe we
observe has precisely the properties we should expect if
there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and
no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.
How widely is this view held by scientists? One study of
149 leading biologists found that 89.9 percent believed
that evolution has no ultimate purpose or goal except
survival, and we are just a cosmic accident existing at
the whim of time and chance. A mere six percent believed
that evolution has a purpose. Almost all of those who
believed that evolution had no purpose were atheists.
This is only one example that Sommers and Rosenberg call
the “destructive power of Darwinian theory.”
Purpose and Christianity
Christianity teaches that God made the universe as a
home for humans. If the universe evolved purely by
natural means, then it just exists and any “purpose” for
its existence can only be that which humans themselves
attribute to it. But our own experience and intellectual
attainments argue against this. The similarity of
human-constructed machines and the orderly functioning
of the universe is the basis of the design argument.
Just as a machine requires a designer and a builder, so
too the universe that we see requires a designer and a
builder.
Determining the purpose of something depends on the
observer's worldview. To a non theist the question “What
is the purpose of a living organism's structure” means
only “How does this structure aid survival?” Eyesight
and legs would therefore have nothing to do with
enjoyment of life; they are merely an unintended
by-product of evolution. Biologists consistently explain
everything from coloration to sexual habits solely on
the basis of survival. Orthodox neo-Darwinism views
everything as either an unfortunate or a fortuitous
event resulting from the outworking of natural law and
random, naturally-selected mutations. Conversely,
creationists interpret all reality according to beliefs
about God's purpose for humans. Evolutionists can
usually explain even contradictory behaviour, but
creationists look beyond this and try to determine what
role it plays in God's plan.
Conclusions
Orthodox evolution teaches that the living world has no
plan or purpose except survival, is random, undirected,
and heartless. Humans live in a world that cares nothing
for us, our minds are simply masses of meat, and no
divine plan exists to guide us. These teachings are
hardly neutral, but rather openly teach religion the
religion of atheism and nihilism. The courts have
consistently approved teaching this anti Christian
religion in public schools and have blocked all attempts
to neutralize these clearly religious ideas.
As the Word of God states, “For the time will come when
they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own
lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having
itching ears; And they shall turn away their ears from
the truth, and shall be turned unto fables” (2 Timothy
4:3-4).
[© 2009 Institute of Creation Research,
www.icr.org]
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