The Case for a Creator - Lee Strobel [10]
Pulitzer Prize–winning sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson was adamant on this issue. “If humankind evolved by Darwinian natural selection,” he said, “genetic chance and environmental necessity, not God, made the species.” 31 No ambiguity there.
Characteristically, Time magazine summed up the matter succinctly: “Charles Darwin didn’t want to murder God, as he once put it. But he did.” 32
DARWIN’S UNIVERSAL ACID
I wasn’t aware of these kinds of observations when I was a student. I just knew intuitively that the theories of Darwin gave me an intellectual basis to reject the mythology of Christianity that my parents had tried to foist on me through my younger years.
At one point, I remember reading the World Book Encyclopedia that my parents had given me as a birthday present to answer the “why” questions with which I was always tormenting them. Reading selectively from the entry on evolution served to reinforce my sense that Christianity and Darwinism are incompatible.
“In the Bible, God is held to be the Creator, the Sustainer, and the Ultimate End of all things,” the encyclopedia said. “Many Christians believe that it is impossible to reconcile this conviction with the idea that evolutionary development has been brought about by natural forces present in organic life.” 33
Everything fell into place for me. My assessment was that you didn’t need a Creator if life can emerge unassisted from the primordial slime of the primitive earth, and you don’t need God to create human beings in his image if we are merely the product of the impersonal forces of natural selection. In short, you don’t need the Bible if you’ve got The Origin of Species.
I was experiencing on a personal level what philosopher Daniel Dennett has observed: Darwinism is a “universal acid” that “eats through just about every traditional concept and leaves in its wake a revolutionized worldview.” 34
My worldview was being revolutionized, all right, yet in my youthful optimism I wasn’t ready to examine some of the disheartening implications of my new philosophy. I conveniently ignored the grim picture painted by British atheist Bertrand Russell, who wrote about how science had presented us with a world that was “purposeless” and “void of meaning.” 35 He said:
That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and beliefs are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius are destined to extinction . . . that the whole temple of man’s achievement must inevitably be buried—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built. 36
Rather than facing this “unyielding despair” that’s implicit in a world without God, I reveled in my newly achieved freedom from God’s moral strictures. For me, living without God meant living one hundred percent for myself. Freed from someday being held accountable for my actions, I felt unleashed to pursue personal happiness and pleasure at all costs.
The sexual revolution of the ’60s and ’70s was starting to dawn, and I was liberated to indulge as much as I wanted, without having to look over my shoulder at God’s disapproving gaze. As a journalist, I was unshackled to compete without always having to abide by those pesky rules of ethics and morality. I would let nothing, and certainly nobody, stand between