The Quick Fix

Modern science just continues to provide a plethora of new gadgets and gizmos that allow us to do so many things we could never do before, or do things we’ve always done so much faster and more efficiently.

Examining God’s Creation

And another amazing thing our advances in science and technology have done is allow us to look at God’s creation in much more depth and detail than we’ve ever done before, so much so that you’d think the evidence for intelligent design would be even that much more apparent to the average person, just as Romans 1:20 states.

For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.

What with the average nature documentary on TV showing brand-new examples of absolutely mind-blowing capabilities in creatures that absolutely put our most brilliant engineers to shame on a weekly basis, you’d think it would be incredibly obvious that there is a master designer behind everything we see, even if we view the world through a sin-cursed lens.

And you’d think trying to find a way to deny the evidence for God’s existence would be extremely difficult. However, for the more atheistic types among us out there, as one fellow Canadian YouTuber says, it’s “actually, super easy, barely an inconvenience!” But how is that?

Swapping Design for Unintelligent Design

Well, have you ever used the find-and-replace function on your computer? It’s also a super convenient tool for whenever you want to make wholesale changes throughout an entire document from one word to another, without having to go through and change each individual occasion the offending word or phrase is used.

You just type in the word you want to replace and indicate the new word you want to insert in its place, and voilà, the function replaces every single instance of it simultaneously. And this find-and-replace function is analogous to what I believe is happening inside many a person’s mind whenever you mention examples of intelligent design in nature to them.

It doesn’t matter how much evidence of design you show them because their brain is programmed to instantly replace that notion of “intelligent design” with the concept of “mindlessly evolved,” without them even having to hear, understand, or even deal with what you are talking about with them.

So much so that they will actually turn around and declare that what you are demonstrating is actually evidence of unintelligent design, and they state that no matter what you show them, it all must have been brought about by the story of evolution!

The Magic Wand of Materialism

The hero of the plot is almost always the magical wand of millions of years, which is waved over top of whatever mixture of biochemical programming or irreducible complexity being discovered, with the mantra “Given enough time, anything is possible” being regurgitated in unison by the materialistic minded NPCs produced by our modern state-run indoctrination centers in the West.

It’s the equivalent of a Sunday school’s answer to every question being “Jesus” or “God did it!” Except, in this case, the answer is “Evo did it!”

A perfect example of what I’m mentioning here is encapsulated by the following quote from the Marxist atheist Richard Lewontin when he stated—

Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism.

It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.1

What Lewontin is touting here is a way of doing “science” called methodological naturalism. And as he explains, under this way of thinking, it doesn’t matter what facts are in front of you. You will always arrive at an “Evo did it!” conclusion based on materialistic explanations and come up with some kind of just-so-story—no matter how mystifying or nonsensical it might be—when operating under this paradigm.

Answering the Design Argument?

So, in effect now, in many people’s minds, the number one answer to the question “What evidence would you expect to find if God existed?”2 has been overcome by a simple cut-and-paste tactic—that is completely disingenuous, but highly effective—for generations of people who have been told what to think, not how to think.

Case in point, a motor protein (like kinesin3) inside even the so-called simplest living things on the planet performs tasks at a higher level of functionality than the most brilliant engineers on the planet could possibly hope to design.

But they respond, “Oh, evo did it!”

I should point out that the Voices of Oxford is offering a 10-million-dollar prize4 for anyone who can show how a coded language system like DNA could have possibly evolved by chance (when everyone knows that every other coded language we’ve ever seen has only come from an intelligent mind).

They respond, “Well, even though we don’t know how, evo did it over millions of years!”

If you point out that evolution has never been observed even once and that leading scientists like Professor Richard Dawkins, among others, have admitted as much, they respond with, “Well even though we didn’t see it happen, we know evo did it!”

Getting Their Stories Straight?

And what is really amusing is observing the statements from atheists and evolutionists in the comment section of our videos regarding the fact that evolution hasn’t been observed.

While one evolutionist will be insisting there are countless examples of evolution occurring before our very eyes, two comments later, a fellow evolutionist (who is obviously better informed) will be arguing that the reason we haven’t seen it is that evolution takes so long to happen that we wouldn’t expect it to be observed.

It’s all very convenient indeed that once again, no matter what you point out, their commitment to the matrix of what modern education tells them is simply parroted back at you like a convenient, materialistic catechism.

Hardening of the Heart

All of this, of course, is exactly what we would expect from a culture that has abandoned the authority of God’s Word. In doing so, it only affirms what Scripture says about those who do so.

Romans 1 (quoted earlier) continues on to describe those who harden their heart to the things of God and exchange worshipping the God of creation for the veneration of the creation itself as if it were God.

For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.

Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.

Although some may seem to think the idea that these verses are somehow describing what we see in much of academia today trickling down to the mainstream of society is somehow a stretch, let me share a couple of quotes from a Science Daily article5 on how scientists are describing what modern science is discovering and how they then perceive these facts.

Evolution may be more intelligent than we thought, according to researchers. In a new article, the authors make the case that evolution is able to learn from previous experience, which could provide a better explanation of how evolution by natural selection produces such apparently intelligent designs.

When we look at the amazing, apparently intelligent designs that evolution produces, it takes some imagination to understand how random variation and selection produced them.

Incredible, isn’t it? They can see the design because it is apparent. Yet they are willing to attribute some kind of godlike intelligence and a learning capability to a naturalistic process (the story of evolution) that by definition has no mind and was proposed as a replacement for God, particularly the creator God of the Bible.

It’s just as Lewontin (quoted earlier) described. Tell some more “just-so” stories. See evidence of design? Don’t use logic—just use your imagination and activate the “find and replace” function as fast as you can so you can do away with all the “apparent intelligent designs” you see all around you every day and tell yourself God doesn’t exist.

Hardening of Hearts

And what are the results you’d expect to find according to God’s Word in a society that no longer acknowledges God and his Word?

And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done. They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. Though they know God’s righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them. Romans 1:28–32

Is that not exactly what we see in much of today’s Western culture—the world has gone mad! Many are not only activating the find-and-replace button in relation to design and evolution but also in matters of morality, where good is now called evil and evil is called good, just as Isaiah 5:20 describes.

Woe to those who call evil good and good evil.

This shouldn’t surprise us either, as what people believe about the world and its origins will affect the way they believe about their eternal destiny as well, i.e., just as Jesus explained to Nicodemus in John 3:12—

If I have told you earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you heavenly things?

Ultimately, the modern-day “convenience” that many are embracing is the replacement of God with the story of evolution, as they believe it frees them from the responsibility of being held accountable for their actions. But as Romans 3:23 reminds us—

All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.

And the only hope that any of us have is the greatest substitutionary act that has ever taken place—Jesus taking the punishment that we deserve. The fact is that all of us will one day stand in God’s courtroom, and we will either hold up our own résumé and be judged on our deeds and actions in this life, or we will have Jesus’ résumé as a substitute.

The Bible is clear that on judgment day, those who have put their faith in Christ as Lord and Savior will be represented by the sinless Son of God, and those who haven’t will be held accountable for their sins. And no a priori commitment to materialism, “just-so” story, or excuse will suffice, for “they are without excuse” (Romans 1:20).