Most Americans don't understand genetics both those in the creation camp and those in the evolutionary camp. I am studying this right now, and it is very technical information. Most Americans are busy working jobs, and providing for their families and don't have the time to think about scientific information. I am not saying their aren't those that do, think and study on a deeper level, but that it is few and far between.
I would say that the evolutionary perspective has gradually taken over since the scopes trials.
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Hello everyone...Interesting article ldolphin/ntcreation.html
By Phillip Johnson, DJ
So we start with this fundamental truth, "In the beginning was the Word, the Word was with the God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning." Notice "He" was with God in the beginning, not "it" was with God in the beginning. The Word is not merely a concept; it is a Being with intelligence and purpose, a Being who was with God and who was God.
I became a Christian in my late 30s. I was already an established senior professor at the University of California at Berkeley, a University which can lay claim to being the world's foremost scientific institution. This is where the atom was first split, this is where the atomic bomb was invented, this is the place that always claims to have more Nobel Prize winners than any other place-they claim that whether it is true or not. We are very, very proud of our scientific pre-eminence and heritage. So you might imagine that it is somewhat unusual to find a senior professor in this environment who becomes a Christian and a somewhat notorious one at times. I felt a little bit different at that university.
I go to a very fine church, the First Presbyterian Church of Berkeley, which is one of the evangelical congregations in a denomination that nationally is very troubled. It is really two different religions under one roof. A modernist liberal national hierarchy that is headquartered in Louisville and then quite a number of solidly evangelical congregations that are very much like the one to which I belong.
I would hear good Biblical teaching from the pulpit, very fine teaching. But then I would wonder, is this real? I would hear, "In the beginning was the Word." The church is right next door to the University of California at Berkeley, and I know what they are teaching over there. I know what the faculty believes. We have a sprinkling of faculty members in the congregation, but they are not typical of the University of California at Berkeley faculty. They are assuming something very, very different from this and yet here we are; we think we are part of the university community.
We have many students in the congregation. Our senior pastor is the pastor of the football team-there is always a football team. That is where you will find the Christians. We lost the universities, but we won the football teams! You can see that after every Sunday game. You know, "Jesus gave me what I needed to score that touchdown."
The professors were not talking about Jesus, and they were not talking about the Word. So to make clear what the difference was, what the creation doctrine of the university was, I wrote a little parody of the opening verses of the gospel of John. These are my satanic verses that contrast with what I have just read from John, "In the beginning were the particles and the impersonal laws of physics." Note "it," not "He." In the beginning were the particles, and the particles somehow became complex living stuff. That is a long story, which I have condensed considerably. That is evolution. The particles somehow became complex living stuff, and the stuff imagined God. That is the creation doctrine of the university.
Man created God; the stuff imagined God. Primitive people who had evolved from animals did not have science to tell them that, and so they projected this father figure in the sky and credited it with being their creator. And the stuff imaged God, but then discovered evolution. I will say it again, "In the beginning were the particles and the particles somehow became complex living stuff, and the stuff imaged God, but then discovered evolution." And this is the greatest discovery of all time, you see. It is the discovery that God is and always was an illusion. And it is called the death of God in philosophy. Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche proclaimed the death of God, Charles Darwin supplied the murder weapon, and then everything that happened in the 20th century followed from this important discovery that God is the product of our own imagination.
Once you have learned these verses, I think you will never again be tempted to think that this is just some controversy that exists among scientists, that it is just a scientific theory, and that it just has to do with how you interpret those days of Genesis. Lots of people have made that mistake. They have said, "Well, if we just say the days are long periods of time we can make peace with science and religion. Evolution was God's way of creating, the lion lays down with the lamb, and we have no further problems." That is an illusion; that is a complete mistake. You see, the particle story is the opposite in every way to the Word story. If the particles created us, if the particles somehow became complex living stuff, then there is no such thing, for example, as sin. You cannot be out of a right relationship with the particles, because the laws do not care what you do. Your behavior is not their concern. They are not thinking about you because they are not thinking about anything. And if man created God, then what we need to know is that God is an illusion, and then we turn to a different priesthood to tell us how to live-the scientific priesthood.
So the particle story is what you could call a creation myth. It is a creation story. Every culture has a creation story, and every culture has a priesthood to interpret the story for them and give the people the information that they need. It is not just the people who are scientific leaders, but also their compatriots who write editorials for the New York Times telling us what to think. They are part of this new priesthood.
Now let's go on to the next verse, the fifth verse of the prologue to the gospel of John. "The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it." Now what is the light and what is the darkness? The most important thing about light is not that you can see it. You can see light. If you are lost in a dark cave and you see a light coming, that is awfully good news. You can see the light, and you can see a rescuer coming to get you out of that cave. But the most important thing about the light is not that you can see the light itself, but you can see everything else because of the light. The light illuminates everything else. If you get started in the right way in your thinking and you can see everything else, then you can understand everything; but if you are started in the wrong way, then you are shrouded in darkness.
The Gospel says that the light is the light of the Word. The light shines in the darkness, and so that is the starting point for all our knowledge. But that is not what they teach at the University of California, or even at many ostensibly Christian colleges. No, they are teaching that the particle story is the light. The Word story is the darkness of superstition, which is dispelled by the light of scientific knowledge that tells us our true creator is a mindless, purposeless evolutionary process that does not control us; we can control it. And that is the great promise of genetic engineering, and that is the great dream which comes out of the human genome-sequencing project. We, not you and me, but we, the people who control the science, can take under our control the very creative power of the universe, the process of evolution. Before this, evolution was an unguided, purposeless process. The particles are unthinking; they just become complex living stuff. But now the stuff that imagined God in the first place can become God because it can take under its control the very creative power of the universe, the process of evolution, and make better people, a new kind of people. Now that is a powerful dream of life, a powerful dream of scientific conquest.
What is the light and what is the darkness? As I sat in the congregation listening to that good Bible teaching, I wondered when they were going to get to explaining whether this is for real or not, or were we just pretending to believe this. The liberals in our church would know how to deal with this. They would say the Word story is religious truth, but not scientific truth. Well, what exactly is this religious truth? It is the opposite of scientific truth. As soon as you begin to hear something like that you know what is coming. The true truth is the scientific truth. The religious truth is the thing you pretend to believe on Sunday mornings, because it somehow makes you feel good, maybe it makes you better people, it works for you in some way. So it is true for you, but we would not teach it to young people as if it really happened. It is imaginary, and it follows from this that everything else in the doctrine is just imaginary. Jesus rose from the dead--oh, that is a pretty story. But, no, people do not get up from the grave after they are dead. This is an event that happened in the minds and imaginations of the disciples; they imagined Jesus coming back from the dead. And that is probably what is going to be taught in most mainline seminaries as well as secular universities.
Well, I could not leave it there. I wanted to know what the true truth was. I had the opportunity to begin exploring this subject during the academic year 1987-88 when my wife and I went to London, England, on a sabbatical. I told the university I was going to study insurance law, but somehow I never got around to it. It may have been a big mistake. I might have become rich enough to buy and sell the whole town if I had done that, but I was not fascinated with insurance law. I wanted insight into this question of how are we created. And the Lord arranged it, or you could say it was luck, if you want. As I went from my apartment to my office at University College in London every day, I went past London's leading scientific bookstore, and there in the window as if beckoning to me was book after book on the theory of evolution. As I picked up these books and started reading, I came to understand a lot of what I have just told you. This not simply a scientific theory we are talking about; it is a creation story. And as a creation story, it is the foundation of everything else.
For example, why is it thought to be unconstitutional to put up a copy of the Ten Commandments in a public school? It does not have anything to do with that document you can see in the National Archives Building called the Constitution of the United States. It does not have anything to do with the thinking of the framers of that document; that is not what they had in mind at all. The rule that it is unconstitutional to put up the Ten Commandments as if they were authoritative comes from modernist thinking; it comes from the particle story. If the particles somehow became complex living stuff, what becomes of God's commandments? Well, they are illusory, just as God Himself is, and so they have no authority. We are talking about the customs of an ancient Jewish tribe that has no authority over us and does not know as much as we do. They did not even know about evolution, so why should we listen to them? The Ten Commandments becomes obsolete, and we have to make up a morality for ourselves.
The time when the Darwinian creation story became the official policy of the cultural establishment in the United States was the 1950s, and by around 1960 this was all established. The reason why it became so established was that we had had two world wars. Science had won the wars with radar, sonar, code breaking, the atom bomb, etc. Science had become the pre-eminent weapon and the pre-eminent resource of society. In 1957, the Soviet Union did something that scared the scientific establishment and the government. They put up the first space satellite. There was a panic that the Soviets were going to surpass us in science and hence win the Cold War. The government went very enthusiastically into teaching the whole culture to think scientifically. That is when the government really started putting out textbooks and advising how they should be. The major part of their effort was that every schoolchild was to be taught the theory of evolution so they would think scientifically and look to science to solve our problems.
Darwin published his masterpiece, The Origin of Species, in 1859, and 1959 was the centennial year. There was a great scientific convention at the University of Chicago that year to announce the triumph of Darwinism triumph in the scientific world and triumph in the religious world as well. This was the new creation story. Since that time you can say that this has become the established religion of the country, established by the government with its priests paid out of your tax money.
