Bad Science Part 2

Evolutionist and Atheist point to evil as proof that God doesn’t exist. This view is held by Darwin and is extremely flawed in several areas.

Below are some very good points by Eric Hunter whom reviews Cornelius Hunter’s Book, Darwin’s God: Evolution and the Problem of Evil.





Great book!


Is the theory of evolution so well established that it can be considered tantamount to a scientific fact? Or is evolution really nothing more than philosophy dressed up in scientific garb? Cornelius G. Hunter’s work, Darwin’s God: Evolution and the Problem of Evil (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2001) brilliantly exposes how evolutionists use scientific jargon to conceal anti-supernatural metaphysics (philosophical theories about the nature of reality). Their theory is emotionally sustained by a certain idea of God. So when they perceive the facts of nature as contradicting their a priori (before experience) theology, they conclude God doesn’t exist, or at least, has little or nothing directly to do with nature. Hunter’s work has a particularly important insight when it draws attention to how important a particular idea of God is to evolutionists when they argue for their theory.
The problems they perceive in nature allows them to sustain faith in their theory even when the evidence really isn’t all that convincing; the same scientific facts could be rearranged to favor the model of special creationism as well or better than the model of evolution. Evolution, at its core, is about God, not science, for it’s a theodicy (a way of justifying to humanity God’s actions of allowing evil to exist) that ultimately aims to eliminate pleasing God as a focus of people’s concerns intellectually and emotionally.

DID THE GOD OF THE BIBLE MAKE NATURE EVIL AND DEFECTIVE?
Is nature full of evil? Does it contain structural flaws or inefficiencies? If so, how could an almighty, all-knowing, all-loving Creator have brought such a flawed creation into existence? The evolutionists, as they cavil about the physical world’s defects and evils, are reasoning back from the effect to the cause: Since the effect (i.e., the world) is full of evils and imperfections, therefore, the cause couldn’t be God, but some kind of random natural process instead. For example, the evolutionist David Hull reasoned that because nature produces millions of sperm and ova (eggs) that never result in a fertilized zygote, and that an estimated 95% of DNA in plants and animals has no function, “The God implied by . . . the data of natural history . . . is not the Protestant God of waste not, want not” (cited from Hunter, p. 156). Likewise, Darwin himself thought the existence of animal predation contradicted the existence of a loving, almighty Creator, such as cats playing with mice or (yuck!) parasitic wasps feeding within the bodies of living caterpillars. Of course, the God that Darwin and his evolutionist offspring are criticizing here isn’t the One of Scripture, who by cursing the earth as a result of Adam’s sin (Genesis 3:14-19), made the world around us deliberately not perfect as far as we humans are concerned. But at the time of the restoration of all things (Acts 3:21), there will be no more curse (Rev. 22:3). The fact that animal predation will be ended during the millennium (Isa. 11:6-9) shows that it wasn’t a permanent part of God’s plan for the earth. The creation, made subject to futility, groans now from corruption (Rom. 8:19-22), but will soon “be delivered . . . into the glorious liberty of the children of God.”


HOW AN IDEALIZED DEITY SET THE STAGE FOR DARWIN’S TRIUMPH
Hunter does important work when describing the theology of God’s nature that rationalizing, modernizing Christians had done in the decades, even centuries, before the time of Darwin. By describing God in ways that removed Him from directly influencing His Creation, they inadvertently helped to pave the way for the acceptance of the theory of evolution. Instead of Darwin (say) making a comparison of nature (the effect) with the God of the Bible (the cause), he was making an implicit comparison with a stripped-down Deity (another cause) that rarely if ever performed miracles and who rarely if ever punished His Creatures.

Hunter even compares the evolutionist’s God to that of the first- and second-century Gnostic movement’s portrayal of the Creator: They believed an evil, blundering Deity manufactured the corrupt physical world that includes the bodies, but not souls, of human beings. The God of the Old Testament, the Creator God, Jehovah, was considered to be evil, but the God of the New Testament, the God who sent Jesus, was a God of truth and light. Many centuries later, the natural theology of the Victorians, and those who preceded them, such as William Paley (1743-1805) with his famous “watchmaker” argument, tended to overlook or ignore the problems in nature as we find it. But much like skeptical Scottish philosopher David Hume’s use of the problem of evil to argue against a (good) God’s existence, Darwin used the imperfections and evils found in nature to question God’s power and goodness. By putting forth a non-Scriptural rationalistic Deity, Darwin’s predecessors unknowingly set the stage for God’s nearly complete elimination as a serious concern for modern intellectuals when Darwin and his fellow evolutionists compared the natural world’s defects and evils to this (humanly) idealized Deity rather than the actual God of Scripture, the intervening, wrathful yet merciful Jehovah who, out of love, later dies on the cross for the sins His creatures freely committed that He had allowed.


THE SCRIPTURAL GOD VERSUS THE RATIONALIZED DEISTIC GOD

Now Hunter describes the intellectual history of the Victorian era and earlier in this regard, showing that the God the evolutionists spar against is one who they never feel a need to justify as an accurate depiction of the Creator. That’s because many leading lights in the religious world of Darwin’s time and before had watered-down their view of God, having deemed an intervening, miracle-working, punishing, wrathful Jehovah distasteful. This “high” idea of God, as unscriptural as it is, they saw as honoring God’s power and foresight even more than the views of (say) conventional fundamentalists did about God. Darwin, and the evolutionists following in his steps, simply took over the prevailing non-Biblical ideas of God as their own also, and found Him (the capitalization is questionable!) a good straw man to pummel with the (unpleasant) facts of the natural world.


CAN MORALLY ABSOLUTE IDEAS OF EVIL BE USED TO ELIMINATE GOD?
The inescapable dilemma skeptical evolutionists face in employing the problem of evil against the existence of God stems from where the origin of our sense of morality, of right and wrong, comes from. As Hunter (p. 18) expertly summarizes the problem (his emphasis): “The existence of evil seems to contradict God, but the existence of our deep moral sense seems to confirm God.” For if we believe all is relative, that there are no absolutes, in a world without God, how can we condemn God for (say) allowing the Holocaust, the Cultural Revolution, or the Ukrainian terror famine? We can’t judge God unless we believe we can derive some kind of system of moral absolutes separately by human reason without recourse to Him or religious revelation. Hunter (p. 154) penetratingly exposes the evolutionists’ moral conundrum, after citing Richard Dawkins’ comment about the universe having no design, purpose, good or evil, “nothing but pointless indifference” thus: “Since there is no evil, the materialist must, ironically, not use the problem of evil to justify atheism. The problem of evil presupposes the existence of an objective evil—the very thing the materialist seems to deny.”

Cornelius G. Hunter’s work, Darwin’s God: Evolution and the Problem of Evil is a brilliant work for exposing the philosophical inconsistencies of Darwin and the evolutionists who have risen up after him. He perceives the enormous importance that the (perceived) imperfections and evils of nature have for the evolutionists’ view of special creation. Advocates of creationism must keep in mind this insight when arguing with evolutionists, and be ready to attack any and all references evolutionists make to some assumed natural theology about God that they use to “prove” evolution. It’s necessary to point out to evolutionists that if it’s wrong and “unscientific” to make arguments for God based on this or that marvel of nature, it’s equally unscientific and metaphysical to make arguments against God based on this or that flaw in nature. All evolutionists also need to be asked if they are moral absolutists when complaining about God’s allowing evil in the world but they suddenly transform themselves into moral relativists when making any other moral judgments. The evolutionists should be reminded that they haven’t refuted the God of Scripture scientifically when they attack the straw man Deity of rationalistic, modernistic, liberal Christianity. In reality, all they have knocked over is a God of their imaginations.

Amen and Amen!