Removing God from the Equation

For many people like me growing up, the story of evolution removes God from the equation of life. Like others, I once concluded that if there was a naturalistic, scientific way to account for the universe and everything in it, then God was irrelevant.

This atheistic mindset has led millions down a dark road. The conclusion that God is not needed was summed up well in the 2004 Australian Broadcasting Corporation series called Testing God. The episode “Killing the Creator” states,

But why have we turned out the way we are? Once we believed we were unique, blessed with a soul and lovingly created by God in His image. Today, evolution says we are just a product of Natural Selection, the descendants of primitive bacteria, not the children of God.1

Natural selection replaces God and changes our ethics and morality as well. Carried to its logical end, the solution to an overabundance of bacteria is to wipe them out. We’ve seen this solution applied generously throughout the 20th Century.

Stalin, Lenin, Mao, Pol Pot, Hitler—all of these leaders embraced evolutionary ideas and applied Social Darwinism to their populations, culling millions of their own people whom they deemed inferior and expendable. Such a mindset has even slipped down into the consciousness of many of our children.

Eric Harris, one of the perpetrators of the Columbine school massacre, said, “Sometime in April me and V [Dylan Klebold] will get revenge and will kick natural selection up a few notches.”2

This ideology was reiterated by another high school shooter, Pekka-Erik Auvinen, in a YouTube video rant he posted before his rampage:

I am a cynical existentialist, antihuman humanist, antisocial social Darwinist, realistic idealist and godlike atheist. . . . Life is just a coincidence . . . result of long process of evolution. . . . Human life is not sacred. Humans are just a species among other animals. . . . Death is not a tragedy. . . . Not all human lives are important or worth saving.3

Social Darwinism, consistently applied, has been detrimental to society on many levels. Even arch atheist and staunch evolutionist Dr. Richard Dawkins has said as much, declaring,

I’m a passionate Darwinian when it comes to science, when it comes to explaining the world, but I’m a passionate anti-Darwinian when it comes to morality and politics.4

However, like many moral relativists, it seems Dawkins would like Christian morality piled on top of his materialistic cake. But the question that must be asked is, can the biblical mandate to do unto others and love thy neighbor be logically applied if the story of evolution is true and God is just a myth?

If certain people groups are more advanced than others, and God’s moral law need not apply, under what logical premise can evolutionists argue for or against morality? If “Thou shalt not kill” applies to humans, the question now becomes, “How human?” If we are simply evolved animals, how does morality apply at all?

After all, I’ve never heard anyone accuse a great white shark of being evil or a snake being a serial killer. Such terms apply only to humans.

Compromise Within the Christian Church

Unfortunately, belief in evolution has crept into the Christian Church over the last century as well. Most Christian seminaries and Bible Colleges today accept large parts of the evolutionary story, while some have declared themselves theistic evolutionists (i.e., God used evolution to create).

Such compromise has caused much damage to the gospel message, as atheists have highlighted the inconsistency of such an approach. An example comes from atheist Frank Zindler in a debate against Christian William Lane Craig (who now accepts theistic evolution):

The most devastating thing though that biology did to Christianity was the discovery of biological evolution. Now that we know that Adam and Eve never were real people the central myth of Christianity is destroyed.

If there never was an Adam and Eve, there never was an original sin. If there never was an original sin, there is no need of salvation. If there is no need of salvation, there is no need of a savior. And I submit that puts Jesus, historical or otherwise, into the ranks of the unemployed.5

Believers can rightly deem Zindler’s conclusions as blasphemous but certainly not illogical from his atheistic vantage point. After all, if the first Adam never existed, why do we need the last Adam? Why did the Apostle Paul teach the concept of death in Adam but life in Christ in Romans 5:12?

Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men[a] because all sinned. (ESV)

Can Christians rightly reconcile the loving God of the Bible as using billions of years of death, disease, and struggle for survival in an evolutionary scenario, culminating in a process where ape-like creatures eventually morphed into humans who are somehow created in the image of God?

Wouldn’t that mean that God had used all of the supposed results of Adam’s sin supposedly (death and suffering) as His creative method before Adam even existed (metaphorically or not)?

Wouldn’t that violate the Holy Scriptures let alone necessitate disregarding the entire first 11 chapters of the Bible, the seedbed of all Christian doctrines, or consider it as mythology?

As the Darwin historian and Bible skeptic Peter Bowler rightly concluded,

If Christians accepted that humanity was the product of evolution—even assuming the process could be seen as an expression of the Creator’s will—then the whole idea of Original Sin would have to be reinterpreted.

Far from falling from an original state of grace in the Garden of Eden, we have risen gradually from our animal origins. And if there was no Sin from which we needed salvation, what was the purpose of Christ’s agony on the cross?”6

How can Christian laypeople not see how damaging it is to syncretize Christian theology with evolution, while atheists can understand and communicate it so succinctly?

Yet professing Christian influencers such as Ian Barbour (winner of numerous accolades in science and faith, including the 1999 Templeton Award) have proposed adopting the same theological outlook as non-believers:

You simply can’t any longer say as traditional Christians that death was God’s punishment for sin. Death was around long before human beings. Death is a necessary aspect of an evolutionary world. . . . One generation has to die for new generations to come into being. In a way, it is more satisfying . . . than to see it as a sort of arbitrary punishment that God imposed on our primeval paradise.7

It’s as atheist William Provine once commented:

One can have a religious view that is compatible with evolution only if the religious view is indistinguishable from atheism.8

A large swath of the Christian church has become like the circus sideshows of the past, exhibiting a depiction of humans that is a caricature of its true, biblical description—all as a result of imbibing humanistic evolutionary philosophies instead of God’s Word..

Next week, Part 7: Regaining God’s Image