Darwinism Versus the Creation Science
It can scarcely be argued that two hundred years ago, most average western laymen and academics alike believed that the earth was relatively young. Whether they held to a view of Biblical chronology or just went with the flow of the times, there was little disagreement over the age of mankind and, by extension, the planet itself.
The scientific revolution of the eighteenth century had opened new avenues of investigation to the contrary, but the now commonplace fields of geology and paleontology had yet to see the growth of their disciplines to the extent that would be seen in the following century. Well respected natural philosophers such as Newton and Leibniz both held to what we’d consider to be young earth models of creationism. And this is to say nothing of the traveling merchant, the ploughman, or the day laborer. That the earth has existed for a comprehensible length of time—despite the colossal scope that a few thousand years poses to the average intellect—was an idea completely taken for granted. It was founded on what was presumed to be solid Biblical exegesis, the writings of every Church Father who wrote on the subject, and most if not all medieval and renaissance supposition on the issue, as well.
These views persisted well into the nineteenth century, and even into the twentieth, but with diminishing returns among the more learned and academic elite. Now, however, you have to travel into the last American bastions of mostly-Protestant and mostly-Southern fundamentalism in order to find such beliefs, and to some degree, even there they have been contorted as a result of the ongoing ideological conflict. Those of us who defend creationism and adhere to a young earth model are no longer afforded the luxury of believing in it as a result of social custom; like much of Christendom, what was once standard practice has come to be viewed as counter-revolutionary acts by the contemporary revolutionary Regime.
Proper investigations into Darwinism have been done many times over the last century, and most of them stand up well to scrutiny. So why is it that Darwinism remains the default position regarding the origins of man, and more broadly, the age of the earth, the validity of Scripture, and the framing narrative of modernity? If it were simply a matter of letting ideas be given their due attention in the public forum, Darwinism wouldn’t last long once scrutiny was actually applied to it. And yet, for many, there are no alternatives. Many believe that it did have its say, and that it won fair and square.
But before that, it’s important to address what is meant by Darwinism, and by extension, what is meant by the term science in its contemporary usage, as the two are more or less indistinguishable from one another. How common sense notions regarding origins, to say nothing of philosophical coherency, end up labeled as religious fundamentalism will be perfectly understandable as a result.
The Two Charleses
Charles Lyell rightly deserves his status as something of a proto-Darwinist. Although he was not the first to suppose the notion of an old earth in a modern setting, he was the most direct influence on Darwin’s thought in reorienting him toward a model that used millions of years instead of a few thousand. It was Lyell, after all, who published The Principles of Geology in 1833—the same book that would occupy Darwin’s reading time on The Beagle en route to the Galapagos. In it, Lyell attempted to systematize his amateur geology into a coherent theory about sediment deposits.
Granted, geology has come a long way since Lyell’s hypothesis, not unlike the field of biology with regard to Darwin, but the basic framework remains the same. Talk to a geologist that presumes the strata of rock deposits were all laid down over a period of weeks, rather than epochs spanning millions of years, and you’ll have immediately identified a creationist. There’s no middle ground.
Lyell and those thinkers he sympathized with were obviously not the first men to ever consider the age of the earth as incalculably ancient. The Greeks by and large considered time to simply extend infinitely in both directions. Most pagan societies of the Near East, as well as the learned civilizations of the orient, also held to an earth and to a sense of mankind rooted in a distant, unknowable past. The civilizations of Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley people, and the Chinese that developed along the Yangtze—all of them, by the time surviving written documents came about, held to founding myths that involved an age of gods ceding the world to a ruling class in times ancient even to their own scribes.
It was the ancient Hebrews who were among the odd men out, here. Contra the beliefs of their neighbors, the ancient Hebrews held not only to a belief that the beginning of the world was within the scope of human reckoning, but that it was even within the scope of human memory. Moses’ compilation and eventual transcription of the Genesis account is pivotal to understanding both the religion and culture of the ancient Hebrews, as well as the Christian worship that took its mantle. The theology of man’s first days cannot be separated from the liturgical rites of the Levite priesthood and the relevancy of Our Lord’s sojourn on earth two millennia ago.
The Hebrews were so unique in their absolute assurance of the world’s creation that Mosaic authorship included a systematized record of chronology in Genesis itself. Even if we were to suppose that this chronology was primarily relevant for numerological symbolism—a questionable and inconsistent theory even taken at its most charitable—the fact remains that Moses saw fit to include it at all indicates that the creation story of Genesis and man’s first parents were presumed historical realities to be taken for granted. The plainest reading of Genesis leads to only one conclusion: the Hebrews—and the Church who followed them—both believed that the earth and human beings were of comparable age, and that this age was within the scope of ten thousand years. Those who point to Christianity (or, as the courts would phrase it, the “western religions”) as the oddity in this respect were speaking rightly; they just held to the wrong presupposition that this uniqueness indicated error.
To Lyell’s credit, he apparently did recognize this uniqueness, in his own way, and this was part of his interest in developing an alternative geological history. To “free the science from Moses,” was his goal, as, by his estimation, whether there was a beginning “is a metaphysical question, worthy of a theologian… but the analogy is faint and distant.”
It could be argued that it was here, the shifting of gears by a lawyer, that marked the beginning of what we’d consider to be modern science. Certainly, it had its antecedents, as no one could deny the likes of Copernicus, Galileo, Brahe, Kepler, Newton, et al., their places in history—and some were more vehement in their animosity toward the Church than others. But these men were at least actual scientists, or the closest approximations thereof. Charles Lyell was a lawyer. Geology was just one of his hobbies.
And it was by way of Lyell, who flexed his connections to get The Principles of Geography published, that Darwin found himself considering a somewhat radical, though not particularly unheard of, view of life and the world. The transition away from a young earth model to an older one isn’t simply a matter of numbers or years. It’s a matter of jettisoning beliefs about how cataclysms shaped the very forms of the continents in favor of a prolonged, steady, gradualism that we presume to observe in daily life. On the one hand, it might seem sensible enough to assume that life and the landscape have continued—and will continue—in more or less the same way that we observe them presently. But anyone who’s witnessed a car crash, much less a volcanic eruption or an earthquake, knows that freak occasions can and do happen with unpredictable frequency.
This is the important shift to consider when dealing with Darwinism’s break from a more traditional model. It’s saying that these cataclysms didn’t happen, or if they did, they were necessarily localized occurrences. There were certainly volcanoes, localized pyroclastic flows, asteroids—even extinction level events. But these ultimately were not of a magnitude, so the well-known theory holds, to have interrupted the long, gradual deposit of sediment and the buildup or changing of the Earth’s crust to alter a geological timeline. At least not to any global and significant degree.
In the academy, this is the default position and has been for quite some time. When married with evolution, the twofold attack on origins intertwines a timeline of bare earth and material, on one hand, and biological adaptation and survival—life—on the other. We’ll consider Darwinian evolution as an ideology at the end of this piece, but suffice it to say that even efforts to pursue a deistic or theistic evolutionary ‘compromise’ to this worldview run into a problem self-evident on its face: these theories were made by people hostile to the Church and who had a vested interest in countering what was the commonly accepted view of the time.
Now, why would that be? The obvious answer is because the view of the time united the origins of man and rock back to certain moral, anthropological, and ultimately theological positions that no rational creature could ignore. But if it were possible to obscure these origins, either by heaping millions of years and the fluid mutation of species on top of them, blurring the lines and quietly erasing God from the picture, well: you have the scientific version of a child justifying himself as he lies about what happened to the cookies in the cookie jar.
This is not a convincing argument—or even much of an argument at all—for those already inundated and holding to the broadly Darwinian model of the world. But for our purposes here, it isn’t supposed to be. Consider, moreover, why it isn’t convincing. Consider not only what’s at stake should that model be wrong, but more importantly, why it has become so easy to believe.
Consider how this model affected the development of “science” as a body of fields over the nineteenth century. Consider that those who embraced the Darwinian framework quickly transformed it into an ideology, when only a few scarce decades had to pass before gene theory completely dismantled Darwin’s original theories, to say nothing of the completely contradictory findings of the fossil record. Consider too that Darwin’s own loss of faith was the mark of an era of apostasy that prefigured the catastrophes of the following century’s cultural revolutions. Those that held to Darwinian ideology in the nineteenth century found themselves with burgeoning academic opportunities in elite institutions, while those that didn’t steadily found themselves on shaky ground.
Charles Darwin, like other notable figures in his family, was a Freemason. This is relevant only because of the time at which he lived. Back then the threat of Freemasonry in the West remained a legitimate one for both aristocratic governments and the Church alike. Unlike today, when the actual organization of Freemasonry has been effectively relegated to hosting barbecues for the esoterically-inclined businessmen, the lodges of the nineteenth century posed enough of a threat as to warrant attention from governments and open censure from the Pope himself. One could argue that their ideological descendants run the asylum now in the form of Bilderberg groups and tech oligarchs, but the cult of Freemasonry itself exited the relevancy of history at about the same time the WASP domination of the United States elite did.
Some today will dismiss the prevalence of Freemasons among the intellectual elite of the nineteenth century, but it should make even the casual observer pause. Even if we were to dispense with theories of Masonic conspiracies and doomsday death cults, what remains indisputable is their activity in high culture, politics, and academia, and the general sense of ideological coherency to be found among its members and those they interacted with. Ideology is real, and it’s poisonous, contagious, and only by a limited degree does it by the consent of those it infects. This is why it was so important for those wishing to force it on the rest of society, on those uninvolved and uninterested in the lavish excesses of the oligarchical elite, to transform it into a means of demoralization. And for this, they needed the public school apparatus.
The Courts
The National Center for Science Education has up on their website a list of ten crucial court cases in which Darwinian ideology leveraged itself into the dominant view of the average American. We will briefly review here, but it’s worth reading their list to best understand the spin put on Darwinism so as to make it seem like the default position against which all other theories must be proven.
Their story begins with 1968’s Supreme Court case Epperson v. Arkansas, in which the Warren Court struck down a prohibition on teaching evolution in Arkansas schools. The decision framed the issue in the now-classic narrative of a secular state conflicting with religious values, immediately tying any theory counter to Darwin’s to some strain of religious fundamentalism. This fervor and confusion certainly existed prior to Epperson, but continuing the trend into the legal sphere immediately set the cause of creationism up for failure.
Remember, it has only been in the last century and a half that Darwinism was even acknowledged. Although the intelligentsia of the West had largely embraced it by the 1920s, there remained widespread resistance to it among large swaths of averagemen, particularly in America where religious fundamentalism of varying stripes remained strong. How thoroughly Darwinism permeated through the academies shouldn’t be considered a natural or organic development, however—unless we consider it as a rot that spread through an already sickly tree. The people manning higher education and research in the late nineteenth century had already disposed themselves toward avenues of thought that embraced explicitly anti-Catholic and anti-Christian worldviews, of which Darwinism turned out to be one.
But apparently it wasn’t enough for the elites to embrace the theory. It had to be inflicted on the rest of the country as well. Keep in mind how seemingly unassuming and noble a cause 1968’s Epperson case was. At the root of the case was simply an interest by a free citizen of the country to see an unproven but popular theory taught in schools—and taught specifically as an unproven but popular theory. The state’s defense even admitted that this was unacceptable according to their state statute prohibiting evolution in the classrooms:
On the other hand, counsel for the State, in oral argument in this Court, candidly stated that, despite the State Supreme Court’s equivocation, Arkansas would interpret the statute ‘to mean that to make a student aware of the theory just to teach that there was such a theory’ would be grounds for dismissal and for prosecution under the statute; and he said ‘that the Supreme Court of Arkansas’ opinion should be interpreted in that manner.’ He said: ‘If Mrs. Epperson would tell her students that ‘Here is Darwin’s theory, that man ascended or descended from a lower form of being,’ then I think she would be under this statute liable for prosecution.’
In a certain sense, Arkansas set itself up for failure by first having such a statute, and then by openly—if brazenly—defending it in court. By the time this was argued, evolutionist ideology, and more importantly, a sense of chic secularism divorced from any yoke of faith or reason, had completely triumphed across the institutions of the elite in the United States. 1968 is a year hard to forget, after all, even by those of us who hadn’t even been born yet. The times were changing.
And yet, surprisingly, it would be another fourteen years before a major case came before the courts regarding evolution. The 1970s passed by without a blip, at least according to the NCSE, which means our next stop is the 1980s. McLean v. Arkansas Board of Education, in 1983, again put the same state into the hot seat; its decision made the association between creation science and ‘religious fundamentalism’ even stronger, outright flaunting the normal preconceptions of the world by labeling every scientist and academic that lived before 1850 as a religious fundamentalist.
The National Center for Science Education considers this decision to have offered a “detailed definition of the term ‘science’,” the result of which made the court “declare that ‘creation science’ is not a science.” It sounds like a home run, if we’re taking the NCSE at its word. Here’s what the decision states as its relevant definition of creation science:
(a) “Creation-science” means the scientific evidences for creation and inferences from those scientific evidences. Creation-science includes the scientific evidences and related inferences that indicate: (1) Sudden creation of the universe, energy, and life from nothing; (2) The insufficiency of mutation and natural selection in bringing about development of all living kinds from a single organism; (3) Changes only within fixed limits of originally created kinds of plants and animals; (4) Separate ancestry for man and apes; (5) Explanation of the earth’s geology by catastrophism, including the occurrence of a worldwide flood; and (6) A relatively recent inception of the earth and living kinds.
A little broad, but the general thrust isn’t even particularly disagreeable. What’s disagreeable, however, is the court’s mind-numbing explanation of how it’s not science:
The evidence establishes that the definition of “creation science” contained in 4(a) has as its unmentioned reference the first 11 chapters of the Book of Genesis. Among the many creation epics in human history, the account of sudden creation from nothing, or creatio ex nihilo, and subsequent destruction of the world by flood is unique to Genesis. The concepts of 4(a) are the literal Fundamentalists’ view of Genesis. Section 4(a) is unquestionably a statement of religion, with the exception of 4(a)(2) which is a negative thrust aimed at what the creationists understand to be the theory of evolution.
The court, and secular ideology on the whole, tips its hand later in the same article. “The idea of a sudden creation from nothing,” the court declares, “is an inherently religious concept.” The fact that it’s not religious at all, as Dr. Norman Geisler, a defense witness pointed out, the court considered “contrary to common understanding”. The fact you cannot talk about the origins of anything without addressing a prime mover of some sort seems such a blatant oversight by the court that one can’t help but think of it as intentional.
Next door to Arkansas, a similar case in Louisiana went all the way to the Supreme Court just four years later. 1987’s Edwards v. Aguillard repeated the same talking points. Both Edwards and McLean were cases in which the losing party was teaching creationism alongside evolutionary theory. Both were instances of trying to present an even playing field, according to what the secular courts had demanded fifteen years prior. And both were massive losses for creationism in the legal sphere.
The line moved from “you have to teach Darwinism as at least a viable theory,” to “you’re not allowed to teach alternatives to Darwinism” in about fifteen years. According to the NCSE, the later 1997 ruling Freiler v. Tangipahoa Parish Board of Eduation “recogniz[ed] that curriculum proposals for ‘intelligent design’ are equivalent to proposals for teaching ‘creation science’.” Intelligent Design, admittedly, has been little more than an attempt to stick to noncommittal answers about the origins of everything in order to meet Darwinian ideology on its own turf—Darwinism claiming the ostensible ground that it’s merely a theory about a process and that it makes no claims as to the start or origins of that process.
This is what makes the Darwinian framework so appealing to the secular-minded: charitable interpretations allow room for the sort of gray doubt to permeate rational discourse, maintaining the liberal veneer that conclusions don’t really have to be reached in any meaningful capacity. We can see quite plainly how the courts leveraged this understanding of the secular state in order to quarantine every theory of origins except Darwinism into little cells of wrongthink.
The final three cases that the NCSE point to each concern disclaimer statements printed on evolutionary theory textbooks taught in public schools. The disclaimers across these cases were nearly identical, reading thus:
This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered.
This, however, was considered language that “disclaimed” or otherwise “denigrated” evolution in the US District court case Selman et al. v. Cobb County School District et al. in 2005. Remember, Darwinism has never been proven. From its fundamental premises all the way through to its conclusions, it remains a theory. And yet it’s worse than that, in reality, as it has taken on the structure of an organizing principle for entire fields of science.
Modern secularism, by which is meant not merely a public forum divorced of theological controversies—which was its definition in the wake of Westphalia—but rather a public forum that specifically excludes all notion of God Himself, naturally hungers for an organizing principle around which to make its own narrative coherent. Darwinism provided that principle.
Even if we ignore Darwin’s own writings, his own thoughts on this subject, his own connections to groups whose interests included such a purge of public thought, and his own loss of faith even in an abstract Deist god, Darwin’s model remains one of the most destructive ideologies in modern times. And this is not necessarily because of the ingenuity with which he made his claims, but rather because of how easily it’s been used by bad actors and useful idiots alike to undermine rational, sensible discussion on origins.
See how easily the narrative at the legal level went from merely seeking a place at the table to purposefully excluding, by judicial fiat, any competing theories on the basis of fighting so-called religious fundamentalism. Defining the legal struggle as an attack is simply stating the obvious. It was an attack on religion, and specifically Christianity, every bit as much as it has turned out to be an attack on the nation’s children by foisting theories of demoralizing nonsense on them starting at around age seven.
The use of indoctrination to force Darwinism in schools, even at a grade school level, was not done in the interests of promoting intellectual rigor or offering general explanations of geological and biological history. It was to push a narrative.
Demoralize the Eschaton
What Darwinism asks you to believe is that the world’s foundations rest on death. How often has our media couched amusing attempts at uplifting messaging in the language of “death brings about rebirth,” or “death of the old makes space for the birth of the new”? The underpinning ideas here are essentially the same: the world is a cycle of endless death, and rather than this being an accident of its nature, it is the baseline and foundation of it. Life is the anomaly, and life is mutable, a mysterious force fleeing from death—the world’s default ‘true’ state—into the empty spaces where death hasn’t found it yet, changing its form and features in order to survive. Death, rather than the thief that comes in the night, is the very house the living are subjected to residing in.
Death, to a certain relative degree, does posses a power over our days that could indicate a kind of omnipotence. It’s inevitable, it seems to spare no one, and by all observable indications, it’s final. There’s a mystery to it that terrifies the average person, and not only because it is accompanied in almost every case with unimaginable pain. These factors understandably drive those unfamiliar with Christian doctrine of creation into the waiting arms of Darwinian ideology; something so ever-present and easily observable surely must comprise a fundamental element of the universe.
We could phrase it another way. What does it mean for a quality to be fundamental to the cosmos? Rather, we should ask this: what is the most simple organizing principle that structures our thoughts, our matter, the places we hold in history? What is the common thread that pins every being and object in creation together? Is it death, and by relation, fear? Because if it is death, then there is little need for God even in His creative capacity. A universe organized by death is one in which life is an absurdity—a deistic creator god might have provided some impetus for life to begin, but if it was a mere blip in a great chaotic sea of utter disorder, that life seems scarcely to stand a chance. Although it remains impossible to explain the leap of why there is something rather than nothing, it’s much easier to dismiss the presence of some ambiguous creator god when one’s presumption about the world is that it is intrinsically hostile to life of any sort.
Furthermore, the very definition of life under such a system fails to carry uniqueness within itself. There’s no special categories that separate the smallest from the largest, the vegetative from the intelligent, the hive from the drone. Life is treated as a fluke, or worse, a joke told by a distant creator god who disappeared before he could explain the punchline. Such a cosmos considers life as a single general substance in which little distinction should be drawn between the smallest amoeba and the most sophisticated man. The evolutionary principle, fleeing from death and depositing qualities into lifeforms at random, is the only definition of life here. Uniqueness is a fluke, an accident of evolutionary chance. It holds no particular objective value.
But when this sort of cosmos is presented to a man in search of meaning, he cannot help but recoil back in revulsion. Men intuitively recognize order when they see it. To suggest that there is no order in the world is to deny a very obvious, observable reality. So there have to be explanations.
Perhaps the order is all projection, and that the mind, so suited to finding ways to live among the chaos, invents patterns of order and projects them outward upon an unknowable world. But if this is the case, how is the mind capable of fathoming order in the first place? If it carries no correlative function outside of the imagination, how can it even be conceptualized? A man recognizes that he can order his own thoughts, his own life, his own environment, to at least some limited degree. But these efforts are sensible only because he can also recognize that there must be a greater order to the world that makes such efforts possible in the first place. Order, this man recognizes, is not something he invents. He participates in it every time he puts his trash in place and his prized items in a different one, whenever he uses a tool to complete task—indeed, whenever he even considers ordering his thoughts toward the completion of goals in the first place!
Perhaps this order is imperfect, but perhaps not. In all humility, this man wouldn’t necessarily know. But he has to know that the order is there. And if the world is ordered, then it cannot be a chaotic sea of unending death. Chaos, rather than order, must be the accident here. Observing his surroundings, his house and family, assembled from the materials and the tools he acquired or built, this man could be forgiven—in fact, probably praised—for making a very practical, intuitive connection: when he chops down a tree to use for lumber, and his angles are a little off, the resulting less-than-perfect treefall is an accident. An imperfection in his intended plan brought about a result that, although it works, in this case, wasn’t exactly what he had wanted from the outset. The accident wasn’t just a derivation from the plan, but a deprivation from the outcome.
How then could order be an accident of chaos? How could life be an accident of death? The mere existence of life indicates that it can’t be a fluke, and its continued existence can’t be an accident. Order has to be something that preexists the chaos of the world. It’s not possible, either, to hold order and chaos in equal opposition to one another, as they are not substances that compete for space or energy. One is very clearly a deprivation of the other. Metal and rust don’t form a balanced whole any more than health and disease do. Good and evil, order and chaos, life and death—the relationship between these opposites is the same. It’s not a balancing act. One is substantive, the other is a failing.
Natural reason might suggest that death is an anomaly, but only by revelation is it possible to actually know that this is the case. Life, not death, is the default mode of God’s divine intentions. Death came into the world by means of Adam’s transgression—indeed, death is itself a deprivation of the breath God breathed into the dust. Death does not have an active presence, in any proper sense. Death is the absence of that active presence.
For around four millennia, according to Biblical chronology, man suffered under the weight of death awaiting the promised time of that savior who was to deliver creation from the seemingly unending nightmare. And He came, and He did deliver us out of the arms of evil, and yet, insist those skeptics with their eyes clamped shut, do we not still die the death? Does evil not still exist? The fullness of Christ’s Sacrifice remains shrouded, it would seem, by some veil that masks a secret knowledge. The irony is that the exact opposite of this is the case: the skeptic’s unwillingness to view the light is the veil that he has wrapped about himself, hiding his own eyes, in an effort to make his own knowledge secret from God.
Darwinism asks you to believe that all of this is projection, or little more than wishful thinking. It asks you to believe that the light shining in the darkness is an optical illusion cast by a mutated consciousness. And it asks you to believe that the darkness will overcome all of it, because the arc of evolution has no prescribed end and no meaningful beginning. Most importantly, it asks you to relegate God to a vague abstraction whose influence and involvement in your life is less relevant than the materials and atoms that affect and comprise your body. “Why would God care about such an insignificant species of featherless bipeds,” is a sentiment commonly expressed in the modern world. You can see where it comes from.
This is not a broad worldview conducive to sanity, nor is it one that can actively posit anything of its own substance. Appeals to gradualism and nominalist presumptions about animal species have time and again been rendered less reasonable beliefs to hold to than alternatives, and yet the alternatives are barred from government-run classrooms and ostracized from common discourse. This should make it obvious that the force driving Darwinian ideology isn’t really concerned with gradualism or with nominalist presumptions about animal species. It’s concerned, fundamentally, with driving your children insane.
Conclusion
Call it hyperbole if you want, but the arc of Darwinian ideology is out in the open and unambiguously defended by the elites at large. Their message is and has been clear on this issue. They don’t want anything except evolutionary theory in the discourse, and more importantly, they don’t want God there, either.
This leaks even into petty political squabbles between the right and the left: notice how whenever one of the green-haired rubes with five o’clock shadow decides to lecture a Christian on his own religion—regardless of denomination—all mentions of God or Our Lord are weaponized to conform to the left’s narrative. It’s not done in good faith. That’s on purpose. By all exterior considerations, they don’t care about God and only bring him up because they know that you might.
Where it really matters, however, they seek to force God out of the room entirely. Origins matter. Where you came from matters. What you are matters. Once someone begins organizing their beliefs on these topics around something other than his ego and the void, the enemy begins to move.
Self Promotional Blurbs:
Subscribe to our mailing list:
Want to support our work? Consider buying us a few beers or, better yet, becoming a monthly subscriber at Ko-Fi. $5 or $10 a month grants access to exclusive content.
