What is there to celebrate about Darwin’s 200^th birthday?

by Tas Walker

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The 12^th February 2009 marks the 200^th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth, and evolutionists around the world want us to make it into a big celebration.

Unlike when Christians celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ, most evolutionists are not open and up-front about what they are on about, or how they feel.

They tell us it’s about the impact of Darwin’s great ideas. But when we ask about the way his ideas underpinned the blood-stained policies of Stalin, Mao, Hitler and Pol Pot they change their tune. Richard Dawkins, Darwin’s famous promoter, put it like this, “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.”¹ They want it both ways.

They pretend it is all about science but when do they make a similar fuss over other scientists, such as Newton, Kepler, Pasteur, or Maxwell? It seems that Darwin is an excuse to banish God. As Dawkins said, “ … Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.”²

They pretend that Darwin is about natural selection, but it was a creationist who first came up with the idea. Furthermore, natural selection is a simple part of the biblical Creation/Fall/Flood/Dispersion model, as a culling rather than a creative force.

What they really mean is that bacteria changed into bananas and butchers all by themselves over billions of years. It’s about removing the need for the Creator, but they won’t usually spell that out, or admit that they have no explanation for how it could possibly happen.

They claim Darwin’s idea of evolution was a great intellectual achievement, but don’t explain that the idea destroys reason itself. It certainly worried Darwin, who wrote, “But then with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?”³

They ask us to join in their celebrations but don’t give any reason for joy. How can we celebrate a Darwinian universe that has, as Dawkins described it, “no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference”?⁴

Darryl Scott, whose teenage daughter was gunned down in the school library by a killer with Natural Selection emblazoned on his tee-shirt, found no comfort in Darwin. He said, “If children are taught that they came from slime, that they evolved from a lower form of life, and that there’s no future after death, then their views of life are affected by that … life really doesn’t have the meaning that it does to children who believe they are created in God’s image and that they have not only this life but a future life as well.”⁵

William Provine, the son of a (liberal) minister, lost his professed faith to Darwin under the teaching of his evolutionary professor at university. He asks, “How can we have meaning in life? When we die we are really dead; nothing of us survives. Natural selection is a process leading every species almost certainly to extinction and ‘cares’ as much for the HIV virus as for humans. Nothing could be more uncaring than the entire process of organic evolution.”⁶

What is the sense of celebrating the uncaring process of evolution? C.S. Lewis wondered about this too, and whether there was a hidden agenda: “Does the whole vast structure of modern naturalism depend not on positive evidence but simply on an a priori metaphysical prejudice? Was it devised not to get in facts but to keep out God?”⁷

Keeping God out has consequences. Serial killer, Jeffrey Dahmer, who murdered 17 people before he was captured, said when interviewed in prison, “If a person doesn’t think there is a God to be accountable to, then—then what’s—what’s the point of—of trying to modify your behavior to keep it within acceptable ranges? That’s how I thought, anyway. I always believed the theory of evolution as truth that we all just came from the slime. When we died, you know, that was it, there is nothing … ”⁸

No, I find all this hoo-ha about the Darwin celebrations a bit contrived. So do lots of other people, according to the UK Guardian and UK Telegraph.⁹ Commenting on the latest polls the Telegraph said, “More than half of the public believe that the theory of evolution cannot explain the full complexity of life on Earth, and a ‘designer’ must have lent a hand.”

So, on the occasion of Darwin’s birthday in 2009, the Darwinists themselves would likely feel a bit unhappy about that result. Rather than celebrate, they must feel frustrated at not being able to convince the public after 150 years of continual indoctrination.