Evolution
Today I would like to talk about the theory of evolution and what should a Christian do with it. I am not a scientist so I will not enter into the debate did God create the world in seven days or 7 billion years? When I grew up we were taught that evolution happened slowly and over a long period of time. Now we are taught that evolution can have long periods of nothing and then a short rapid period of evolution. As I don’t know which theory is true, I want to more speak about the idea that the world was created without God at all. I want to argue that the idea of creation being totally random is foolish and that God guided the world into existence, by whatever means.
Genesis 1 – 2:2
Free-Floating Morality
Pastor Timothy Keller runs a Presbyterian church in Manhattan. He tells how: “ A young couple once came to me for some spiritual direction. They ‘didn’t believe in much of anything’ they said. How could they begin to figure out if there even was a God? I asked them to tell me about something they felt was really, really wrong. The woman immediately spoke out against practices that marginalised women. I said I agreed with her fully since I was a Christian who believed God made all human beings, but I was curious why she thought it was wrong. She responded, ‘Women are human beings and human beings have rights. It is wrong to trample on someone’s rights.’ I asked her how she knew that.
Puzzled, she said, ‘Everyone knows it is wrong to violate the rights of someone.’ I said, ‘Most people in the world don’t “know” that. They don’t have a Western view of human rights. Imagine if someone said to you “everyone knows that women are inferior”. You’d say, “That is foolish.” And you’d be right. So let’s start again. If there is no God as you believe and everyone has just evolved from animals, why would it be wrong to trample on someone’s rights?’ Her husband responded: ‘Yes, it is true we are just bigger-brained animals, but I’d say animals have rights too. You shouldn’t trample on their rights, either.’ I asked whether he held animals guilty for violating the rights of other animals if the stronger ones ate the weaker ones. ‘No, I couldn’t do that.’ So he only held human beings guilty if they trampled on the weak? ‘Yes.’ Why this double standard, I asked. Why did the couple insist that human beings had to be different from animals, so that they were not allowed to act as was natural to the rest of the animal world? Why did the couple keep insisting that humans had this great, unique individual dignity and worth? Why did they believe in human rights? ‘I don’t know’, the woman said, ‘I guess they are just there, that’s all.’”
This conversation reveals how our culture differs from the ones that have gone before. People still have strong moral convictions, but unlike people in other times and places, they don’t have any visible reason for why they find some things to be evil and other things good. It’s almost like their morals are free-floating in mid-air — far off the ground.
The Evolutionary Theory of Morals
A common answer today comes from evolutionary psychology. This view holds that good people, those who act unselfishly and cooperatively, survived in greater numbers than those who were selfish and cruel. Therefore good genes were passed down to us and now the great majority of us feel that unselfish behaviour is ‘right’. There are, however, many flaws in this theory, and it has been given some devastating evaluations. An individual’s self-sacrificing, good behaviour towards his or her family might result in a greater survival rate for the individual’s family therefore result in a greater number of descendants with that person’s genetic material. But in the animal kingdom, however, the opposite is usually true. In the animal kingdom the strongest survive, the weakest are killed. From monkey’s to fish many animals fight with their own kind for the right to reproduce. Selfishness produces competition, competition produces natural selection. Natural selection kills off the weak and the disabled. If there is no God, the strong who kills the weak should be a trait we all admire.
If there is no God we would be like the rest of the animal kingdom and not have right and wrong. Birds, mamals, fish do not have right and wrong, they act on their instinct no matter who gets killed, hurt or injured.
Yet today we believe that sacrificing time, money, emotion and even life especially for someone ‘not of our family’ — is right. If we see a total stranger fall in the river we jump in after him. In fact, most people will to do so even if the person in the water is an enemy. How could that trait have come down by a process of natural selection? Such good people would have been less likely to survive and pass on their genes. On the belief that everything about us is here because of a process of natural selection, that kind of goodness should have died out of the human race long ago. Instead, it is stronger than ever. We do care about the weak, we do care about the frail, we do admire those who are selfless.
The Problem of Morals
If there is no God, then there is no way to say any one action is ‘moral’ and another ‘immoral’ but only ‘I like this’. If that is the case, who gets the right to put their feelings into law? You may say ‘the majority has the right to make the law’, but do you mean that then the majority has the right to vote to exterminate a minority? If you say, ‘No, that is wrong,’ then you are back to square one. ‘Who says’ that the majority has a moral obligation not to kill the minority? Why should your moral convictions be obligatory for those in opposition? Why should your view prevail over the will of the majority? The fact is, if there is no God, then all moral statements are arbitrary and there can be no external moral standard by which a person’s feelings and values are judged.
Nietzsche, of course, understood this.
‘The masses blink and say:“We are all equal — Man is but man, before God we are all equal.” Before God! But now this God has died.’
The Argument for God from the Violence of Nature
Genesis 1:28
To sharpen our focus on the significance of this permanent knowledge of morality, consider the observations of writer Annie Dillard. Dillard lived for a year by a creek in the mountains of Virginia expecting to be inspired and refreshed by closeness to ‘nature’. Instead, she came to realise that nature was completely ruled by one central principle — violence by the strong against the weak.
There is not a person in the world that behaves as badly as praying mantises. But wait, you say, there is no right or wrong in nature; right and wrong is a human concept! Precisely! We are moral creatures in an amoral world. . . . Or consider the alternative . . . it is only human feeling that is freakishly amiss. . . . All right then — it is our emotions that are amiss. We are freaks, the world is fine, and let us all go have lobotomies to restore us to a natural state. We can leave.. . lobotomized, go back to the creek, and live on its banks as untroubled as any kangaroo or tick.
Annie Dillard saw that all of nature is based on violence. Yet we inescapably believe it is wrong for stronger human individuals or groups to kill weaker ones. If violence is totally natural why would it be wrong for strong humans to trample weak ones?
In the bible we learn that nature has been cursed and there is something wrong with it.
Genesis 3:17 To Adam he said, "Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, ’You must not eat of it,’
"Cursed is the ground because of you;
through painful toil you will eat of it
all the days of your life.
18 It will produce thorns and thistles for you,
and you will eat the plants of the field.
19 By the sweat of your brow
you will eat your food
until you return to the ground,
since from it you were taken;
for dust you are
and to dust you will return."
Here we see the world is fallen, broken and needs to be redeemed, that explains the violence and disorder we see. Random evolution cannot explain it, the bible can.
The Endless, Pointless Court case of Existence
Revelation 22:13
13I [Jesus] am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End.
The playwright Arthur Miller in a play says:
For many years I looked at life like a court case. It was a series of proving yourself to the judge. When you’re young you prove how brave you are, or smart; then, what a good lover, then, a good father, finally, how wise, or powerful or /whatever. But underlying it all, I see now, there was a belief. That one move. on an upward path toward somewhere. God knows what. I would be justified, or even condemned. A verdict anyway. I think now that my disaster really began when I looked up one day. . . and there was no judge in sight. And all that remained was the endless argument with oneself this pointless court case of existence. Nothing matters.
We all live as if it is better to seek peace instead of war, to tell the truth instead of lying, to care and nurture rather than to destroy. We believe that these choices are not pointless, that it matters which way we choose to live. Yet if the world came about through random chance, none of this matters.
If there is no God to judge, then the whole span of human civilisation, even if it lasts a few million years, will be just a small brief flash in time. There will be no one around to remember any of it. Whether we are loving or cruel in the end would make no difference at all.
Once we realise this situation there are two options. One is that we can simply refuse to think out all this. We can hold on to our belief in random creation and yet live as if our choices are meaningful and as if there is a difference between love and cruelty. A cynic might say that this is a way of ‘having one’s cake and eating it, too’. That is, you get the benefit of having a God without the cost of following him. But there is no integrity in that.
The other option is to recognise that you do know there is a God. You could accept the fact that you live as if beauty and love have meaning, as if there is meaning in life, as if human beings have inherent dignity — all because you know God guided the creation of the world.
Genesis 1: 26 Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground."
THE PROBLEM OF SIN
Can we doubt that presently our race will more than realise our boldest imaginations, that it will achieve unity and peace, and that our children will live in a world made more splendid and lovely than any palace or garden that we know, going on from strength to strength in an ever-widening circle of achievement? What man has done, the little triumphs of his present state . . . form but the prelude to the things that man has yet to do.
—H. G. Wells, A Short History of the World (1937)
The cold-blooded massacres of the defenceless, the return of deliberate and organised torture, mental torment, and fear to a world from which such things had seemed well nigh banished — has come near to breaking my spirit altogether. . . ‘Homo Sapiens’, as he has been pleased to call himself is played out.
—H. G. Wells, Mind at the End of Its Tether (1946)
IT is hard to avoid the conclusion that there is something fundamentally wrong with the world. According to Christianity our biggest problem is sin. Yet the concept of ‘sin’ is offensive or ludicrous to those who believe random chance brought us here.
“Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men, because all sinned” Romans 5:12
Many have the impression that the Christian doctrine of sin is bleak and pessimistic about human nature. Nothing could be further from the truth. Another pastor ‘John’ told me a story ‘When I was brand new in the ministry a young man came to see me whose wife had just left him. He was feeling angry at what she had done, guilty over his own flaws that had led her to do it, and despondent before the whole situation. I said that what he needed more than anything was hope. He quickly agreed and asked how he could get some. As gently as possible I said that the good news was — he was a sinner. ‘
If the world is generated from random chance without the hand of God, there is no hope because there is no right or wrong. Animals and nature do not spiritually move forward, they just randomly exist.
John 4: 13Jesus answered, "Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, 14but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life."
Sin is the refusal to find your deepest identity in your relationship and service to God. Sin is seeking to become yourself apart from God. Sin is saying, God had nothing to do with creation of my life, it is all random chance.
The Personal Consequences of Sin
Matthew 6:1 12Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.
Defining sin this way, we can see several ways that sin destroys us personally. Without God, our sense of worth never is solid— it can desert you in a moment. For example, if I build my identity on being a good parent, I am just a parent, nothing more. If something goes wrong with my children there is no ‘me’ left.
If the world was created by random chance, and there is no God behind, then our identity can only be found in ourselves or the things around us.
A pastor called ‘John’, found himself counselling two different women, both of whom were married, both of whom had husbands who were poor fathers, and both of whom had teenage sons who were beginning to get into trouble in school and with the law. Both of the women were angry at their husbands for being poor fathers. Both women agreed to forgive their husbands. However, the woman who had the worst husband and who was the least religious was able to forgive. The other woman was not. This puzzled pastor John for months until one day the unforgiving woman blurted out, ‘Well, if my son goes down the drain then my whole life will have been a failure!’ She had centred her life on her son’s happiness and success. That was why she couldn’t forgive.’
Magazine columnist, Cynthia Heimel thought back on all the people she knew in New York City before they became famous movie stars. One worked behind the make-up counter at Macy’s, one worked selling tickets at cinemas, and so on. When they became successful, every one of them became more angry, manic, unhappy and unstable than they had been when they were working hard to get to the top. Why? Heimel writes:
That giant thing they were striving for, that fame thing that was going to make everything OK, that was going to make their lives bearable, that was going to fill them with ha-ha-happiness had happened, and the next day they woke up and they were still them. The disillusionment turned ‘them howling and insufferable.’
This is the inevitable path, if God is not the centre of our existence.
The Social Consequences of Sin
The Old Testament part of the bible lays out how sin destroys the social fabric. The Old Testament argues that human society is deeply fragmented when anything but God is our highest love. If our highest goal in life is the good of our family, then, says the bible, we will tend to care less for other families. If our highest goal is the good of our nation, tribe or race, then we will tend to be racist or nationalistic. If our ultimate goal in life is our own individual happiness, then we will put our own economic and power interests ahead of those of others. The Bible concludes that only if God is our our centre will we find our heart drawn out not only to people of all families, races and classes, but to the whole world in general.
Random evolution is based survival of the fittest.
The Cosmic Consequences of Sin
The Bible speaks even more comprehensively (and more mysteriously) about the effects of sin than we have indicated so far. The first and second chapters of Genesis show God speaking the world into being and, almost literally, getting his hands dirty. ‘And God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life’ (Genesis 2:7).
The devastating loss of peace through sin is described in Genesis 3. We are told that as soon as we determined to serve ourselves instead of God — as soon as we abandoned living for and enjoying God as our highest good — the entire created world became broken. Human beings are so integral to the fabric of things that when human beings turned from God the entire world unravelled. Disease, genetic disorders, famine, natural disasters, ageing and death itself are as much the result of sin as are oppression, war, crime and violence. We have lost God’s peace — physically, spiritually, socially, psychologically, culturally. Things now fall apart.
In Romans 8, Paul says that the entire world is now ‘in bondage to decay’ and ‘subject to futility’ and will not be put right until we are put right.
What Can Put It All Right?
At some point in most lives, we are confronted with the fact that we are not the persons we know we should be. Almost always our response is to ‘turn over a new leaf’ and try harder to live according to our principles. That ultimately will only lead us into a spiritual dead end.
Sin is not simply doing bad things, it is putting good things in the place of God. So the only solution is not simply to change our behaviour, but to reorient and centre the entire heart and life on God.
The almost impossibly hard thing is to hand over your whole self to Christ. But it is far easier than what we are all trying to do instead. For what we are trying to do is remain what we call ‘ourselves’— our personal happiness centred on money or pleasure or ambition — and hoping, despite this, to behave honestly and chastely and humbly. And that is exactly what Christ warned us you cannot do. If I am a grass field — all the cutting will keep the grass less but won’t produce wheat. If I want wheat.. . I must be ploughed up and re-sown.
Does that scare you? Does it sound stifling? Remember this — if you don’t live for Jesus you will live for something else. If you live for career and you don’t do well it may punish you all of your life, and you will feel like a failure. If you live for your children and they don’t turn out all right you could be absolutely in torment because you feel worthless as a person.
If Jesus is your centre and Lord and you fail him, he will forgive you. Your career can’t die for your sins. You might say, ‘If I were a Christian I’d be going around pursued by guilt all the time!’ But we all are being pursued by guilt because we must have an identity and there must be some standard to live up to by which we get that identity. Whatever you base your life on — you have to live up to that. Jesus is the one Lord you can live for who died for you — who breathed his last breath for you. Does that sound oppressive?
You may say, ‘I see that Christianity might be just the thing for people who have had collapses in their lives. But what if I don’t fail in my career and what if I have a great family?’ As Augustine said, if there is a God who created you, then the deepest chambers of your soul simply cannot be filled up by anything less. That is how great the human soul is. If Jesus is the Creator-Lord, then by definition nothing could satisfy you like he can, even if you are successful. Even the most successful careers and families cannot give the significance, security and affirmation that the author of the whole of creation can.
Everybody has to live for something. Whatever that something is becomes ‘Lord of your life’, whether you think of it that way or not. Jesus is the only Lord who, if you receive him, will fulfil you completely, and, if you fail him, will forgive you eternally.
Please note, this sermon draws heavily from the work of Timothy Keller ‘The reason for God’ the powerpoint for this sermon can be accessed by emailing pastor@soutperthbaptist.org
