Dear Dr. Darwin:
There is an interesting angle on teleology that is rather like tossing a bat to see which team is up first, in the reverse. You may not remember that children’s game. One captain tosses the bat to the other who wraps a fist around the bat. Tosser captain then wraps his fist around the bat just above the catcher captain. They crawl up the length of the bat until the last one to be able to get a grip wins. We do this in a backwards sort of way when we try to get at why we believe what we believe.
Your great contribution to western civilization was not an explanation as to why so many of us believe in God. Your contribution was to make it seem less silly not to. Marx and Freud, Feuerbach and Nietzsche explained to us why we believed in God. God was, in one way or another, a coping mechanism. He was either a way to deal with our suffering, our weakness, even our ennui. We made God, according to these men, because he met a need. You, on the other hand, took away a need.
Before The Origin of the Species, atheism suffered from one great weakness. It could not account for everything. Indeed, it could not account for anything. The “God hypothesis,” however much we might not like it, was the only explanation we could come up with for the existence of the universe, of ourselves. All other options forced us into a crude variation of rabbits out of a hat, flies out of rotten meat, something out of nothing. You, of course, did not answer that because you cannot answer that. Instead, you did a little slight of hand, and gave us not something from nothing, but everything from a very little something. Take as a given the material universe in its most basic form, add the magic dust of random selection and survival of the fittest, and out of the soup we crawl.
Now that we have no need of God to explain ourselves, we find ourselves as gods. Indeed while your fashionable intellectual Olympians waxed eloquent about why we might construct gods for our well being, they missed why they might seek to kill Him for their well- being. They, and you, want to live in a universe wherein you will answer to no one. God must die, because God is our judge. You did not land on Galapagos as a dispassionate, disinterested observer of reality, intent only on discovering truth for truth’s sake. You fled there as surely as Adam fled before you, that you might hide your shame from your Maker.
I’ve got to hand it to you, not as a scientist, but as a marketer. You belong not with the intellectual giants of the 19th century, but with the mythical grifter who made the Emperor’s new clothes. You constructed out of hole cloth (pun intended) a suit that was suitable for all men in rebellion against their maker. You’re no scientist, you’re an entrepreneur. You saw a market need, and you met it, with this bizarre tale that we were once monkeys and grew up to be something else, that birds were once fish.
Of course by now you know this has done you no good. If Marx were right, that we feel the need to believe in God because He offers hope for a better life in the beyond, that doesn’t, of course, mean there is no God who offers hope for a better life in the beyond. I want there to be a candy bar in my pocket. That I have this desire will not make the candy bar in my pocket cease to exist. Our wanting to believe in something, in short, will not drive that something out of existence. Thinking otherwise we call the fallacy of Bulverism. Worse for you, wishing something doesn’t exist doesn’t, of course, make it go away. I wish I weighted about forty pounds less than I do. Wait just a second. Nope, all the pounds are still there. Which means, in turn, that your desire that God not be will not kill Him. You cannot cover your eyes and make Him disappear.
You knew this all along. You suppressed the truth in unrighteousness. For what may be known about God was plain to you, because God has made it plain to you. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—His eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that you are without excuse, just as all those who embrace your folly are without excuse. For although you knew God, you neither glorified Him as God, nor gave thanks to Him.
There’s the rub. You wrote The Origin of Species so that you would not have to acknowledge God. And in so doing you slapped Him across the face. You took His creation, the one wonder of the world, the great shouting symphony of His glory, the great dance of the spheres, and you called it a burp, a stumble, lint in a dryer. He, as you now know well, is not amused.
You have encouraged our species to forget its origin, and so God has given us over. We have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed, and depravity. We are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. We are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful. We invent ways of doing evil. All this, so that you could fool yourself into thinking each night as you went to sleep, that you could escape the wrath of God. May God in His grace topple your folly, so that more of our species might escape His wrath. May God in His grace reveal to us not just our origin, but our end. May we believe His promise that those who repent and believe shall inherit eternal life. And those who refuse, will be consigned to the outer darkness where there shall more weeping and gnashing of teeth, just like you.
In the King’s Service,
Dr. R.C. Sproul Jr.
Nice title. I loved the subtle undertones, and not so subtle, and descriptions of what Darwin did sow, and the fruit it has produced. There is no evidence for evolution. But Darwin’s idea, is the only thing they have, their “evidence” is worthless, but it’s all they can cling to.