an_unshakeable_faith.. - Holy Bible Institute

earth by aliens] is that he judges the undirected origin of life to be a virtually insurmountableobstacle, but he wants a naturalistic explanation” (Darwin’s Black Box, chapter 11).Consider some statements that reflect the religious aspect of evolution:“Darwin’s real achievement was to remove the whole idea of God as the Creator of organisms from the sphereof rational discussion” (Julian Huxley, grandson of Thomas Huxley, Keynote address, Darwin Centennial,1959).“Let me summarize my views on what modern evolutionary biology tells us loud and clear. ... There are nogods, no purposes, no goal-directed forces of any kind. There is no life after death. ... There is no ultimatefoundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning to life, and no free will for humans, either” (William Provine, biologyprofessor at Cornell University, Origins Research, 1994, quoted from In Six Days, edited by John Ashton, p.379).“Man stands alone in the universe, a unique product of a long, unconscious, impersonal, material process withunique understanding and potentialities. These he owes to no one but himself, and it is to himself that he isresponsible. He is ... his own master. He can and must decide and manage his own destiny” (GeorgeSimpson, Life of the Past, 1953, p. 155).“Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding ofthe real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patentabsurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health andlife, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have aprior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of sciencesomehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that weare forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set ofconcepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to theuninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in thedoor” (Richard Lewontin, “Billions and Billions of Demons,” The New York Review, Jan. 9, 1997, p. 31;Lewontin was reviewing Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World).“I have never liked the idea of divine tinkering: for me it is much more inspiring to believe that a set ofmathematical laws can be so clever as to bring all these things into being” (Paul Davies, cited by CliveCookson, “Scientists Who Glimpsed God,” Financial Times, April 29, 1995, p. 20).“Some future day may yet arrive when all reasonable chemical experiments run to discover a probable originfor life have failed unequivocally. Further, new geological evidence may indicate a sudden appearance of lifeon the earth. Finally, we may have explored the universe and found no trace of life, or process leading to life,elsewhere. In such a case, some scientists might choose to turn to religion for an answer. Others, however,myself included, would attempt to sort out the surviving less probable scientific explanations in the hope ofselecting one that was still more likely than the remainder” (Robert Shapiro, Origins: A Skeptic’s Guide).“Thus, science welcomes the possibility of evolution resulting from forces beyond natural selection. Yet thoseforces must be natural; they cannot be attributed to the actions of mysterious creative intelligences whoseexistence, in scientific terms, is unproved” (“15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense,” Scientific American, July2002).“Even if all the data point to an intelligent designer, such an hypothesis is excluded from science because it isnot naturalistic” (Scott Todd, immunologist at Kansas State University, correspondence to Nature, Sept. 30,1999, www.answersingenesis.org/todd).The fact that evolution is an alternative metaphysical faith explains why that even when its pettheories are proven wrong, it refuses to consider the biblical account. For example, Lyle’suniformitarianism has been replaced with catastrophic views such as the moving of continents byplate tectonics, the destruction of dinosaurs by meteorites, and the creation of the Grand Canyonby flooding through the broaching of an ancient lake, all of which are a repudiation of187