Dr. Bergman: “Evolution teaches that the living world has no plan or purpose except survival”(Section A of Part 2 of series on Evolution)

The Long War against God-Henry Morris, part 2 of 6

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Is there any purpose in life? Evolution is clear on this point. I have included the first portion of the article by Dr. Jerry Bergman who I have corresponded with in the past.

Darwinism: Survival without Purpose

by Jerry Bergman, Ph.D. *

Humans have always wondered about the meaning of life…life has no higher purpose than to perpetuate the survival of DNA…life has no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference.¹ –Richard Dawkins

Evolution is “deceptively simple yet utterly profound in its implications,”² the first of which is that living creatures “differ from one another, and those variations arise at random, without a plan or purpose.”³ Evolution must be without plan or purpose because its core tenet is the natural selection of the fittest, produced by random copying errors called mutations. Darwin “was keenly aware that admitting any purposefulness whatsoever to the question of the origin of species would put his theory of natural selection on a very slippery slope.”⁴ Pulitzer Prize author Edward Humes wrote that the fact of evolution was obvious but “few could see it, so trapped were they by the human…desire to find design and purpose in the world.” He concluded:

Darwin’s brilliance was in seeing beyond the appearance of design, and understanding the purposeless, merciless process of natural selection, of life and death in the wild, and how it culled all but the most successful organisms from the tree of life, thereby creating the illusion that a master intellect had designed the world. But close inspection of the watchlike “perfection” of honeybees’ combs or ant trails…reveals that they are a product of random, repetitive, unconscious behaviors, not conscious design.⁵

The fact that evolution teaches that life has no purpose beyond perpetuating its own survival is not lost on teachers. One testified that teaching evolution “impacted their consciences” because it moved teachers away from the “idea that they were born for a purpose… something completely counter to their mindset and beliefs.”⁶

In a study on why children resist accepting evolution, Yale psychologists Bloom and Weisberg concluded that the evolutionary way of viewing the world, which the authors call “promiscuous teleology,” makes it difficult for them to accept evolution. Children “naturally see the world in terms of design and purpose.”⁷ The ultimate purposelessness of evolution, and thus of the life that it produces, was eloquently expressed by Professor Lawrence Krauss as follows: “We’re just a bit of pollution…. If you got rid of us…the universe would be largely the same. We’re completely irrelevant.”⁸

The Textbooks

To determine what schools are teaching about religious questions such as the purpose of life, I surveyed current science textbooks and found that they tend to teach the view that evolution is both nihilistic and atheistic. One of today’s most widely-used textbooks stated that “evolution works without either plan or purpose…. Evolution is random and undirected.”⁹ Another text by the same authors added that Darwin knew his theory “required believing in philosophical materialism, the conviction that matter is the stuff of all existence and that all mental and spiritual phenomena are its byproducts.” The authors continued:

Darwinian evolution was not only purposeless but also heartless–a process in which…nature ruthlessly eliminates the unfit. Suddenly, humanity was reduced to just one more species in a world that cared nothing for us. The great human mind was no more than a mass of evolving neurons. Worst of all, there was no divine plan to guide us.¹⁰

Another text taught that humans are just “a tiny, largely fortuitous, and late-arising twig on the enormously arborescent bush of life” and the belief that a “progressive, guiding force, consistently pushing evolution to move in a single direction” is now known to be “misguided.”¹¹ Many texts teach that evolution is purposeless and has no goal except to achieve brute survival: the “idea that evolution is not directed towards a final goal or state has been more difficult for many people to accept than the process of evolution itself.”¹² One major text openly teaches that humans were created by a blind, deaf, and dumb watchmaker–namely natural selection, which is “totally blind to the future.”

Humans…came from the same evolutionary source as every other species. It is natural selection of selfish genes that has given us our bodies and our brains…. Natural selection…explains…the whole of life, the diversity of life, the complexity of life, |and| the apparent design in life.”¹³

The Implications

Many texts are very open about the implications of Darwinism for theism. One teaches that Darwin’s immeasurably important contribution to science was to show that, despite life’s apparent evidence of design and purpose, mechanistic causes explain all biological phenomena. The text adds that by coupling “undirected, purposeless variation to the blind, uncaring process of natural selection, Darwin made theological or spiritual explanations of the life processes superfluous.”¹⁴ The author concludes by noting that “it was Darwin’s theory of Evolution that provided a crucial plank to the platform of mechanisms and materialism…that has been the stage of most western thought.”¹⁵ Another text even stated directly that humans were created by a random process, not a loving, purposeful God, and:

The real difficulty in accepting Darwin’s theory has always been that it seems to diminish our significance…. |Evolution| asked us to accept the proposition that, like all other organisms, we too are the products of a random process that, as far as science can show, we are not created for any special purpose or as part of any universal design.¹⁶

These texts are all clearly teaching religious ideas, not science. An excellent example is a text that openly ruled out not only theistic evolution, but any role for God in nature, and demonstrated that Darwinism threatened theism by showing that humans and all life “could be explained by natural selection without the intervention of a god.” Evolutionary “randomness and uncertainty had replaced a deity having conscious, purposeful, human characteristics.”

The Darwinian view that… present-type organisms were not created spontaneously but formed in a succession of selective events that occurred in the past, contradicted the common religious view that there could be no design, biological or otherwise, without an intelligent designer…. In this scheme a god of design and purpose is not necessary…. Religion has been bolstered by… the comforting idea that humanity was created in the image of a god to rule over the world and its creatures. Religion provided emotional solace, a set of ethical and moral values…. Nevertheless, faith in religious dogma has been eroded by natural explanations of its mysteries…. The positions of the creationists and the scientific world appear irreconcilable.”¹⁷

Darwin himself taught a totally atheistic, naturalistic view of origins. He even once said, “I would give nothing for the theory of natural selection if it requires miraculous additions at any one stage of descent.”¹⁸ John Alcock, an evolutionary biologist, therefore concluded that “we exist solely to propagate the genes within us.”¹⁹

Leading Darwin scholar Janet Browne makes it very clear that Darwin’s goal was the “arduous task of reorienting the way Victorians looked at nature.” To do this Darwin had to convince the world that “ideas about a benevolent, nearly perfect natural world” and those that believe “beauty was given to things for a purpose, were wrong–that the idea of a loving God who created all living things and brought men and women into existence was…a fable.”

The world…steeped in moral meaning which helped mankind seek out higher goals in life, was not Darwin’s. Darwin’s view of nature was dark–black…. Where most men and women generally believed in some kind of design in nature–some kind of plan and order–and felt a deep-seated, mostly inexpressible belief that their existence had meaning, Darwin wanted them to see all life as empty of any divine purpose.²⁰

Darwin knew how difficult it was to abandon such a view, but realized that for evolution to work, nature must ultimately be “governed entirely by chance.” Browne concludes:

The pleasant outward face of nature was precisely that–only an outward face. Underneath was perpetual struggle, species against species, individual against individual. Life was ruled by death…destruction was the key to reproductive success. All the theological meaning was thus stripped out by Darwin and replaced by the concept of competition. All the telos, the purpose, on which natural theologians based their ideas of perfect adaptation was redirected into Malthusian–Darwinian–struggle. What most people saw as God-given design he saw as mere adaptations to circumstance, adaptations that were meaningless except for the way in which they helped an animal or plant to survive.²¹

Neo-Darwinist Richard Dawkins recognized the purposelessness of such a system:

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.²²

How widely is this view held by scientists? One study of 149 leading biologists found that 89.9 percent believed that evolution has no ultimate purpose or goal except survival, and we are just a cosmic accident existing at the whim of time and chance. A mere six percent believed that evolution has a purpose.²³ Almost all of those who believed that evolution had no purpose were atheists. This is only one example that Sommers and Rosenberg call the “destructive power of Darwinian theory.”²⁴

References

1. Scheff, Liam. 2007. The Dawkins Delusion. Salvo, 2:94.
2. Humes, Edward. 2007. Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, Religion, and the Battle for America’s Soul. New York: Ecco, 119.
3. Ibid, 119.
4. Turner, J. Scott. 2007. The Tinkerer’s Accomplice: How Design Emerges from Life Itself. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 206.
5. Humes, Monkey Girl, 119.
6. Ibid, 172.
7. Bloom, Paul and Deena Skolnick Weisberg. 2007. Childhood Origins to Adult Resistance to Science. Science, 316:996.
8. Panek, Richard. 2007. Out There. New York Times Magazine, 56.
9. Miller, Kenneth R. and Joseph S. Levine. Biology. 1998. Fourth Edition, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 658, emphasis in original.
10. Levine, Joseph S. and Kenneth R. Miller 1994. Biology: Discovering Life. Second Edition, Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath, 161, emphasis in original.
11. Raven, Peter H. and George B. Johnson. 2002. Biology. Sixth Edition, Boston, MA: McGraw Hill, 16, 443.
12. Purves, William K., David Sadava, Gordon H. Orians, and H. Craig Keller. 2001. Life: The Science of Biology. Sixth Edition, Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates; W.H. Freeman, 3.
13. Interview with Richard Dawkins in Campbell, Neil A., Jane B. Reece, and Lawrence G. Mitchell. 1999. Biology. Fifth Edition, Menlo Park, CA: Addison Wesley Longman, 412-413.
14. Futuyma, Douglas J. 1998. Evolutionary Biology. Third Edition, Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates, 5.
15. Ibid, 5.
16. Curtis, Helena and N. Sue Barnes. 1981. Invitation to Biology. Third Edition, New York, NY: Worth, 475.
17. Strickberger, Monroe. 2000. Evolution. Third Edition, Sudbury, MA: Jones & Bartlett, 70-71.
18. Darwin, Francis (editor). 1888. The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin. London: John Murray, 210.
19. Alcock, John. 1998. Animal Behavior: An Evolutionary Approach. Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates, 16, 609.
20. Browne, Janet. 1995. Charles Darwin: Voyaging, A Biography. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 542.
21. Ibid, 542.
22. Dawkins, Richard. 1995. River Out of Eden. New York: Basic Books, 133.
23. Graffin, Gregory W. 2004. Evolution, Monism, Atheism, and the Naturalist World-View. Ithaca, NY: Polypterus Press, 42.
24. Sommers, Tamler and Alex Rosenberg. 2003. Darwin’s Nihilistic Idea: Evolution and the Meaningless of Life.Biology and Philosophy, 18:653.

* Dr. Bergman is Professor of Biology at Northwest State College in Ohio.

Cite this article: Bergman, J. 2007. Darwinism: Survival without Purpose. Acts & Facts. 36 (11): 10.

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THREE TELLING ARGUMENTS AGAINST EVOLUTION by Adrian Rogers (Part 1 of series on Evolution)

The Long War against God-Henry Morris, part 1 of 6

Uploaded by FLIPWORLDUPSIDEDOWN3 on Aug 30, 2010

Do you think the theory of evolution is true? Check out this short article by Adrian Rogers:

“O Timothy, keep that which is committed to thy trust, avoiding profane and vain babblings, and oppositions of science falsely so called: which some professing have erred concerning the faith. Grace be with thee. Amen” (1 Tim. 6:20-21).

One of the most important questions to face our generation is this: “Are human beings simply the product of millions of years of mindless, evolutionary mutations and adaptations, or are we the creation of an infinitely wise, powerful, and loving God?”

The answer to that question is critical. Why? Because it determines your attitude toward God in heaven and mankind on earth. The debate over human origin is one of the most critical issues of our times.

THE DAMAGE OF EVOLTION

It’s hard to measure the enormous damage inflicted by Darwinian evolution, the teaching that life arose from a spontaneous spark in a pond of primordial ooze. The amazing thing is that influential scientists themselves are now denying Darwin’s theory as impossible. Yet its destructive effects remain.

For instance, if man is an accident of nature, then there is no fixed standard of right and wrong. So what the Bible calls sexual perversion is now a “lifestyle.” And a human life can be readily destroyed, whether in the womb or partially delivered.

Worst of all, evolution has helped destroy belief in God for millions. Denying biblical creation, evolutionists have “changed the truth of God into a lie” (Romans 1:25).

Should we be surprised that euthanasia is gaining widespread acceptance in our society or that the tide of abortion cannot be turned? Is it any wonder that sexual perversion is received as a valid alternative lifestyle? We have taught our children that they are just another species of animal – and they are finally beginning to act like animals! And our children and grandchildren are still being fed this lie today.

THE DECEIT OF EVOLUTION

What is behind this whole idea of evolution? Why is it such an emotional issue? Why can’t the world simply agree that there is no creation without a Creator, and out of nothing, nothing comes?

Humanist Aldous Huxley expressed the answer to those questions in his book, Ends and Means. Huxley said he and his contemporaries did not want government or morality. So they chose evolution in order to shut the mouths of those who believe in special creation.

For more than 100 years, the evolutionists have succeeded in convincing people that evolution is the only logical, scientific, and intelligent theory of human origin.

But this campaign has been carried out amid deceit and slight of hand on the part of many evolutionists. We’ve all seen the creative drawings of supposed ancestors of mankind, built on a few teeth or a piece of a skull. And the fossil hoaxes perpetrated over the last century are well known.

No wonder in his book Darwinism: The Refutation of a Myth, the Swedish embryologist, Soren Lovtrup, suggests that he believes that some day Darwinism “will be ranked the greatest deceit in the history of science.”

THE DEFEAT OF EVOLUTION

Despite its lack of credible evidence, evolution holds sway in our schools, the courts, and the public mind. What can we do?

We can preach, teach and defend the truth! We can set our children free from the devil’s lies by giving them the Truth of God’s Word (John 8:32) And we can point lost, confused and dying souls to Him who is the Way, the Truth and the Life!

With the steadfast support of friends like you, Love Worth Finding will continue to hold high the banner of Jesus Christ.

THREE TELLING ARGUMENTS AGAINST EVOLUTION

1. The fossil record. Not only is the so-called missing link still missing, all of the transitional life forms so crucial to evolutionary theory are missing from the fossil record. There are thousands of missing links, not one!
2. The second law of thermodynamics. This law states that energy is winding down and that matter left to itself tends toward chaos and randomness, not greater organization and complexity. Evolution demands exactly the opposite process, which is observed nowhere in nature.
3. The origin of life. Evolution offers no answers to the origin of life. It simply pushes the question farther back in time, back to some primordial event in space or an act of spontaneous generation in which life simply sprang from nothing.

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