Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday (February 12, 1809) is widely celebrated this year with many special events. Even many churchmen, who take Darwin’s words over God’s Word, are caught up with celebrating “Darwin Day.”

Atheists are putting on their own push with advertising on billboards and buses such as this one:

THERE’S PROBABLY NO GOD
NOW STOP WORRYING
AND ENJOY YOUR LIFE

These people must believe that an actual God in the universe is something like a cancer that would keep you from enjoying your life. But if I were trying to shed my faith in God, I wouldn’t find any reassurance in such advertising. Suppose symptoms of cancer are present, but my doctor says I “probably” don’t have cancer. Wouldn’t I want a biopsy, or at least a second opinion?

In fact, these people do not understand the trade-off. God in control of the universe is the system of certainty and security. We have the resources of immutable laws of nature (for example, the assurance of harvest after planting a garden), as the means of supporting life on earth. The same God has given us the Scriptures for direction on how to live, that we might be delivered from wrongdoing that ultimately turns the mercy and loving-kindness of God into wrath and judgment.

So what is the legacy of Darwinism? It is the denial of the principle of certainty. If it were in accord with science, the Darwinist claims of evolution would have been resolved a long time ago. Scientists are good at proving things in accord with nature and finding ways to get things done. They don’t argue that the earth is round, or that the moon revolves around the sun. They simply present the evidence. They don’t speculate that men could go to the moon, or that megabytes of information could be stored in silicon chips. They explore. They engineer. They invent. All this falls within the confines of the certainty of natural law. No intelligence or ingenuity can overcome what the laws of nature cannot support.

Thus, Darwinism is embraced as the Holy Grail of the learned, not as a science, but as a philosophical foundation of a belief system. This is an awkward way of saying it, because, simply put, Darwinism is a belief system that destroys belief systems. It promises release from a moral/ethical standard which comes from God to man, to which all people are accountable. It promotes the notion of doing what you please without consequences. Theoretically, it all comes back to personal choice—doing what you want to do.

This is the lie that goes all the way back to Eden. The theory could be tried with a hundred unsupervised toddlers on a playground. Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” quickly comes into play. Only the bullies “enjoy life.” The rest have plenty to worry about.

But don’t we grow out of that? Absolutely not! In reality, those who write their own rules are forever infringing on the rights of others. That is why we lock up murderers, rapists, thieves, and robbers. Darwinists in America have not learned the lessons of Stalin, Hitler, and others who elevate themselves on the corpses of their own people. Thus, what we didn’t see coming was the sophisticated in-your-face lawlessness and scandal now permeating our whole culture, and threatening our very existence. It has found its way into the highest levels of financial and political power. Honor has given way to dishonor and scandal. Policy and power is increasingly vested in the few who make our choices for us.

Thus, the cultural landscape is morphing into something that could not have been imagined even fifty years ago. True freedom of choice and godlessness are mutually exclusive, a lesson our world has yet to learn.

Christian teachings and Christian moral principles long dominated Western thought. People got married, stayed married, and carried their babies to term. They worked hard to pay their bills and their taxes, spanked their children when they misbehaved, and taught them a vocation. They ran the schools without counselors, policemen, or metal detectors, prayed and read the Bible in the home (and school), and took the whole family to church. Why did they do this? Because they believed in the certainty principle. They believed that God made Heaven and earth in six days, that He made people in His image, that honor and integrity trump pleasure, that punishment of wrong in homes and courts was but a prelude to hellfire for those who ultimately wouldn’t settle their accounts with God.

Within those bounds of personal responsibility and morality, people did enjoy freedom—freedom of press, freedom of speech, and freedom of conscience. But with Darwinist uncertainty going mainstream, and conscience not informed with God-defined morality, we thought that wasn’t freedom enough. We didn’t want limits on sexual passions. This led to the rush into hedonism, and stars such as the Beatles, Elvis Presley, and Michael Jackson becoming gods to us.

We altered freedom of press and of speech, to make vulgarity acceptable, and pornography indefinable. And we had to redefine even the right to life to exclude millions of inconvenient babies, thus adding murder to an acceptable lifestyle package.

Yet, any culture that lives for kicks and thrills must, of necessity, increase the dosage and the damage. Licentiousness prevails at the expense of marriage and home and a solid upbringing for children. Sexual wickedness runs itself aground and has no place to turn, but to feed on itself, male with male, and female with female. The Bible describes such cultural reversal as being “against nature,” and transpiring in the context of “evil men and seducers waxing worse and worse,” and also as a people who “treasure up wrath against the day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God.”

Thus the battle lines are newly drawn. The degrading elements of human passion that we were once expected to curb, we are now compelled to embrace. This turns to haunt us in ways we did not expect.

The goal of Darwinism was to escape moral judgment. The effect though, is the loss of all sound judgment. The only thing left in the unbeliever’s toolbox is man-made dogma. “Truth” becomes whatever world leaders and men in power make it to be, along with coercive regulation to enforce it. It is an awful thing to cut the reins of singular truth from the Almighty, then to vest those powers in demigods.

For example, communism has no power to engage the masses with production, prosperity, and plenty. It could finally offer only deprivation. Regulation is the only tool communism has, and regulation ultimately controls to the death.

Yet we pin our hopes on such. Even science takes the backseat to the ideas on fixing the economy, climate change, or even health care. Apparently, major, costly policy can be implemented on less research, development, and engineering agreement, than goes into a single new automobile model. There are reasons for this, of course. The world quickly rejects the problems with something on four wheels with a motor. Not so, with deeply flawed social or economic policies.

Besides Darwinism, we have raised a second barrier against returning to God. We take to the notion that all belief systems are equal and acceptable—excluding the one of moral certainty—once inscribed in stone. The exclusive righteousness of Biblical Christianity is repackaged to fit as an equal player with the other major religions of the world. We now see religious diversity as a thing to celebrate. The casualty here is truth itself, the loss of the line between good and evil. Professing Christians have been among the chief offenders, living contrary to truth, reducing faith from the responsible way to live into a bogus ticket to Heaven.

Thus like Israel of old, we reject the “fountains of living waters,” only to hew “out cisterns, broken cisterns, that hold no water” (Jeremiah 2:13). Yet, ultimately, certainty does prevail—the certainty of sore troubles, and of the judgment of God.

Lester Troyer