[The text below represents an edited transcript of this Tomorrow’s World program.]
Three Lies from the Theory of Evolution
The theory of evolution claims that life in all its astonishing and beautiful variety needs no God or Creator or Designer at all. Just start with a single, simple microorganism (though ignore where it came from.), and over 3 to 4 billion years, blind chance and mindless natural forces are supposedly able to turn it into every living thing we see around us, including mankind. No God necessary.
Many believe the evolution story, many don’t, and many still think it doesn’t make a difference. Who cares how life and mankind came to be? What difference does it make?
However, it makes all the difference in the world.
In 1859, Charles Darwin published his watershed book, On the Origin of Species. In its pages, he advanced the idea that seemingly endless variety and diversity of life on planet earth has evolved from past common ancestors through purely natural and unintelligent forces—natural selection, based on the pressures of surviving and reproducing, acting on random and unplanned genetic variations.
The claim is that, beginning with one simple, bacteria-like organism more than 3 billion years ago, accumulated random and purposeless genetic changes—acted upon by mindless natural pressures to survive, generation after generation—created literally all life on earth, in all of its stunning glory and awe-inspiring variety, humanity included.
God Created the Heavens and the Earth
According to the theory, no God or Creator or Designer of any kind is needed—just time and mindless, unintelligent, purposeless natural forces.
Of course, this stands in stark contrast with the Book of Genesis, which states very plainly in its very first verse:
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth… (Genesis 1:1).
And then goes on to tell how the ancestors of the life we now see on earth were directly created by God over the course of six days.
Now if you’re a longtime viewer, it will not surprise you that, here on Tomorrow’s World, there’s no contest: The Bible is right, and Charles Darwin and his fanboys are wrong. That said, today’s episode is not about that.
Instead, we want to look at the impact of the theory of evolution, because we believe nothing in a vacuum. Beliefs have consequences.
Consider what Jesus said in Luke 6:45. The connection to what I’m saying may not seem obvious at first, but bear with me.
A good man out of the good treasure of his heart brings forth good; and an evil man out of the evil treasure of his heart brings forth evil.
That is, our beliefs don’t stay inside. They emerge through our choices, our words, our actions. And they impact the world we shape around us—as individuals and, collectively, as a civilization. We cannot accept a set of beliefs without also experiencing the consequences those beliefs bring.
So for the rest of our program, we aren’t going to focus on whether the theory of evolution is true or false.
Instead, we are going to examine three specific lies that have been embraced by society due to widespread belief in Darwin’s theory of evolution. And as we’ll see, those lies have had a destructive and devastating impact on civilization.
Lie 1: Humans Are Just Animals
The first lie is the belief that “Man is merely another animal.”
That is, when a person accepts the theory of evolution, he sees human beings as just one more animal on the broad, smeared spectrum of life. Nothing special. Nothing noble. Just one animal evolving among many on planet Earth.
We see this sort of thinking in the efforts of organizations such as the Nonhuman Rights Project, which files lawsuits to give animals, such as chimpanzees and elephants, the same legal rights as human beings.
And we see it in the famous statement of Ingrid Newkirk, one of the co-founders of PETA, the animal rights organization.
Animal liberationists do not separate out the human animal, so there is no rational basis for saying that a human being has special rights. A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy.
Really? “A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy”? That is an utterly false and contemptible view of humanity. God’s word declares that mankind is created in the very image of God Himself. Man reflects his Creator in a way no other creation on earth can—with moral status, the capacity to think, reason, and create, and in possession of a spiritual nature that no animal has.
Let me ask you to reflect. Have you noticed that our society is increasingly one in which people follow the dictates of our own instincts and desires; our own wants, cravings, and hungers; stealing whenever they can get away with it; lying when it suits them; getting what they want without concern for others?
That’s because beliefs have consequences, and the longer we believe the lie that man is simply another animal, then the deeper we will descend into becoming a society of animals—ruled by nothing higher than cravings and urges, without regard to the needs, hurts, or concerns of others.
Lie 2: No Moral Standards Exist
The second lie that we will examine is this: “There is no absolute standard of morality.”
The Bible is plain: God is good (Matthew 19:17). God is love (1 John 4:8). And Jesus Christ is plain that those who would be His followers must seek to become like God. We see this in Matthew 5:48.
“You shall be perfect, just as your Father in heaven is perfect.”
God created man to reflect Himself, and thus He made man a morally accountable being—accountable to right and wrong, where the right reflects God’s own character, goodness, and love, and the wrong is what goes against that character, goodness, and love.
He helps us to see that absolute standard in His Ten Commandments—condemning murder, for instance; commanding husbands and wives to be faithful to each other; telling us to respect each other’s property; and commanding us to be truthful and not to lie.
The character of the transcendent God represents an absolute standard of what is morally good, right, and praiseworthy.
Yet as many have noted, when the materialistic worldview of evolution is taken to its rational conclusions, it tells us that there is no such divine, objective, and absolute standard of morality.
Evolution is, at its most basic, a heartless and merciless concept. Life advances when the strong dominate the weak. Passing on your genes is the only goal—no matter what pain, suffering, or death may result. There is no moral code governing the process—there is only survival or extinction.
In his groundbreaking book The Selfish Gene, famous evolutionist Richard Dawkins makes an important and honest observation. He writes:
My own feeling is that a human society based simply on the gene’s law of universal ruthless selfishness would be a very nasty society in which to live. But unfortunately, however much we may deplore something, it does not stop it being true (1976, p. 3).
To his credit, Dawkins argues that understanding the ruthless and merciless nature of evolution allows us to resist our natures to seek what he calls “a common good.”
Yet, apart from a transcendent God, what is the “common good” and why should we care about it?
In a world in which mankind has simply evolved through blind acts of molecules and chemicals, there is no source of any higher “moral law” to be concerned about. The lion isn’t guilty of murder when it kills and eats the zebra. The cobra isn’t guilty of theft or infanticide when it steals eggs from a nest.
In his book The Humanist Alternative, philosopher and secular humanist Paul Kurtz notes that:
If man is a product of evolution, one species among others, in a universe without purpose, then man’s option is to live for himself… (1973, p. 179).
For instance, there is nothing in the concept of “evolution” that serves to condemn the Holocaust of World War II, or to denounce a serial rapist or child abuser. If the Nazis acted as human lions and their victims were the equivalent of human zebras, evolution has nothing to say about the matter. And under evolution, there is nothing immoral about rape, slavery, even murder. All things become a matter of what one can get away with, with no higher power able to hold us accountable.
But is that true? Do we believe the Holocaust, the many slaughters of Joseph Stalin, or the butchery of the Rwandan genocide were anything but objectively evil? Is rape, murder, or the torturing of the innocent anything but objectively evil?
Now, look around and ask yourself: Are we living in a world that seems increasingly moral, upright, and good, or morally and ethically adrift, in confusion, and directionless? Are we increasingly living in a world that embraces a common right and wrong, or are we increasingly living in a world where the strong and powerful make rules that they don’t need to follow themselves—like Richard Dawkins’ “very nasty society” in which all are free to do all they can get away with?
When evolution whispers to society that “There is no absolute standard of morality,” the signs all around us seem to suggest that society is listening.
Lie 3: Life Has No Meaning
Yet, the third lie of evolution might, in its own way, be the most destructive of them all.
This third lie is profound in its reach and consequences. It is that “Life has no purpose or meaning.”
Have you ever asked yourself: Why were you born? Why were any of us born? What is our reason for being alive? Why does mankind exist? Why do I exist? What is your purpose for being, and the meaning of your life?
Even if we never put words to them, there is something about us as human beings that almost compels us to search for meaning and purpose.
Even the famous King David of Israel did so. We see him ask this in Psalm 8:4.
What is man that You are mindful of him, and the son of man that You visit him?
We need to know there is a meaning to our lives. We need a purpose. We long to know that our life has value and significance, and we suffer when we feel we have none.
When we go through hardship or difficult times, we need to know that there is a purpose behind it all—that we aren’t going through these difficulties for nothing and that our lives and experiences really do mean something in the larger scheme of things.
Purpose and meaning enrich our lives, give us hope, and equip us with what we need to endure the inevitable trials and times of suffering that arise in our lives.
Viktor Frankl, the famous psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, once wrote in his classic work, Man’s Search for Meaning:
What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost, but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him (1963, p. 166).
Frankl had learned through harsh experience that meaning and purpose is something essential to our make-up and composition.
Yet evolution says:
- There is no real or transcendent purpose for existence.
- Life is a meaningless accident—and even human life is merely the end result of a long chain of accidents.
- Life and mankind are not the result of planning or intention, according to evolution—rather, just how the molecules happened to come together. In another universe, they might come together differently—or, not at all.
- Randomness reigns in evolution—purposeless, mindless randomness, filtered by death and suffering in the meaningless struggle for survival in a universe that doesn’t care.
Of course, many atheists and evolutionists will tell you that this simply means you are free to determine your own meaning in life. Maybe it’s to plant flowers, or study literature, or feed the homeless, or prove UFOs are real—the choice is up to you.
But that doesn’t work, does it? We don’t want to imagine a purpose or meaning to our lives. We want to know that there is a real, objective, transcendent meaning to it all. Life is too hard, too cruel for us to settle for fantasies.
And when we ask it for a purpose to human life, our own lives, evolution answers plainly: There is none.
Evolutionist George Gaylord Simpson famously wrote in his book The Meaning of Evolution:
Man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind. He was not planned (1951, p. 179).
Similarly, in his own book River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life, Richard Dawkins notes,
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 (1995, p. 133).
In fact, Dawkins said it even more bluntly in an interview for Omni magazine.
You are for nothing. You are here to propagate your selfish genes. There is no higher purpose to life (Thomas Bass, “Interview with Richard Dawkins,” Omni, January 1990, 60).
My friends, this worldview has consequences. How much of the societal chaos we have seen over the last decade has been rooted in the idea that we have no common, transcendent purpose—given to us by our common, transcendent Creator?
How many people even now, as I speak, are making choices in their lives with what they do to their minds and bodies, based on the fact that there is no meaning in their existence? That there is no ultimate purpose to their lives?
Without meaning and purpose, there is no hope.
Is it any wonder that our children—taught from their first year in school to their last to believe in the theory of evolution—increasingly seem lost, hopeless, and without a sense of meaning in the world? Is there nothing in life but to eat, survive, and exist in a world where our lives are meaningless?
Absolutely not. The lie that we are nothing but bags of meat and chemicals simply biding our time until we expire and return to dust and nothingness is a Satanic lie.
There is purpose and meaning in life. And we do not have to accept the lies of evolution.
- Lie #1 was man is merely another animal.
- Lie #2 was there is no absolute standard of morality.
- And lastly, lie #3 was life has no meaning or purpose.
Before we conclude, I have to point out: Just because we do not like conclusions, that doesn’t mean they are not true.
For instance, we may not like what evolution implies—that man is an animal, or there is not objective morality or purpose to life. But our dislike of those conclusions is not enough to say that evolution is false. What is true and false is not determined by what we want to be true or false.
But the fact is that evolution is not true. Life did not evolve from some bacteria-like creature more than 3 billion years ago, no matter how many scientists tell you otherwise on popular science programs and no matter how many teachers or professors say so in their classrooms. If you want to understand what those so-called experts rarely admit, then you need today’s free offer on evolution and creation.
Three Truths About God’s Creation
And because evolution is not true, God is very real, and you and I are both very much His creations—crafted by his own hands for His good pleasure—then every lie told by evolution is replaced by its exact opposite and turned into a proclamation of hope.
- Man is not just another animal, but is created in the very image of His Creator—the pinnacle of God’s creative works.
- There is an objective morality at work in the world—with real good and real evil. And right and wrong is not determined solely by the whims of the strong and powerful.
- And life does have meaning and purpose. There is hope in our suffering and our struggles, because our creator has made us with a plan and a purpose for us to fulfill in our lives.
The fullness of that plan and purpose is too great for us to discuss in detail here in our last remaining moments, but I encourage you to check out our website at TomorrowsWorld.org. We have a wealth of free information there at your disposal. In fact, I can hardly think of a better way to learn than going to our website, and typing “purpose of life” in the search box.
No, evolution can’t teach you the purpose of life. But our website can.
For now, let me allow the Apostle Paul to comment on that transcendent purpose. In Romans 8, he writes of our purpose and the hope that purpose gives, even in times of trial and suffering.
For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us. For the earnest expectation of the creation eagerly waits for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it in hope; because the creation itself also will be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God (Romans 8:18–21).
An eternal existence in the family of God, bringing liberty to all of creation, just one facet of the beautiful purpose of life—your life—that can be learned and understood and embraced by those willing to learn, understand, and embrace the truth.
That purpose cannot be discovered by logic or science, but is revealed in Scripture by God. Evolution and the lies it brings do nothing but obscure it, hide it. That purpose gives meaning to life, in all its good days and bad days.
What God offers to us all through His Son Jesus Christ is almost beyond comprehension, and the hope it provides is almost beyond imagination. But it is only available to those who can look beyond the lies woven by the myth of evolution and fix their mind on the truth. For them, as Christ said almost 2,000 years ago:
“You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” (John 8:32).
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