GREAT MYTHS OF EVOLUTION #7

by David N Menton

PROFESSIONAL EVOLUTIONISTS ARE OPEN TO ACTIVE HELP FROM GOD REALIZING

THAT THE EVOLUTIONARY PROCESS WOULD NOT HAVE WORKED WITHOUT DIVINE

INTERVENTION

Creationism was ruled to be "unscientific" by Judge Overton in the

recent Arkansas Creation-Evolution trial precisely because it "involves

Divine intervention."

Evolutionists are not about to open evolutionism

to the same criticism, though some evolutionists tolerate "theistic

evolution" as a sop for those who they see as too weak to entirely

abandon their belief in the supernatural.

But what do leading

evolutionists really think about the role of God in evolution? Dr.

Carl Sagan, perhaps the single most important voice of evolutionism,

confidently claimed in his book COSMOS (p. 177) "the world was not made

by the gods, but instead was the work of material forces interacting in

nature."

Sagan's former teacher, the famous evolutionary astronomer

Harlow Shapely, once said "Some piously record, 'In the beginning God',

but I say, 'In the beginning hydrogen'."

The famous Harvard evolutionist

Dr. Steven J. Gould insists in his book EVER SINCE DARWIN, that

"Matter is the ground of all existence; mind, spirit, and God as well,

are just words that express the wondrous results of neuronal (brain

cell) complexity."

The distinguished evolutionist Dr. George Gaylord

Simpson in his book THE MEANING OF EVOLUTION (951 P.135) claimed that

"There is neither need nor excuse for postulation of nonmaterial

intervention in the origin of life, the rise of man or any other part

of the material cosmos."

In like manner, Sir Julian Huxley explained

that "in the evolutionary pattern of thought there is no longer either

need or room for the supernatural. The earth was not created; it

evolved. So did all the animals and plants that inhabit it, in-

cluding our human selves mind, and soul as well" (EVOLUTION AFTER

DARWIN, 1960, p.252).

And finally, what did Charles Darwin himself

believe about the role of God in evolution? Darwin expert Neal

Gillespie, in his book CHARLES DARWIN AND THE PROBLEM OF CREATION

(1974, p. 141), said that "Darwin clearly rejected Christianity and

virtually all conventional arguments in defense of the existence of God

and human immortality."

In his own autobiography, Darwin admitted that

his evolutionary beliefs gradually made the Bible unbelievable to him

and said "Thus disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but was at

last complete. The rate was so slow that I felt no distress, and have

never since doubted even for a single second that my conclusion was

correct. I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity

to be true."