The Secular Humanist Concept of Evolution
The student preached “The Secular Humanist Concept of Evolution.” The student demonstrated the value placed in evolution by the secular humanists. “Humanism believes that man is a part of nature and that he has emerged as the result of a continuous process.”[1] A Secular Humanist Declaration statesToday the theory of evolution is again under heavy attack by religious fundamentalists. Although the theory of evolution cannot be said to have reached its final formulation, or to be an infallible principle of science, it is nonetheless supported impressively by the findings of many sciences. There may be some significant differences among scientists concerning the mechanics of evolution; yet the evolution of the species is supported so strongly by the weight of evidence that it is difficult to reject it. Accordingly, we deplore the efforts by fundamentalists (especially in the United States) to invade the science classrooms, requiring that creationist theory be taught to students and requiring that it be included in biology textbooks. This is a serious threat both to academic freedom and to the integrity of the educational process. We believe that creationists surely have the freedom to express their viewpoint in society. Moreover, we do not deny the value of examining theories of creation in educational courses on religion an the history of ideas; but it is a sham to mask an article of religious faith as a scientific truth and to inflict that doctrine on the scientific curriculum. If successful, creationists may seriously undermine the credibility of science itself.[2]
Again, Kurtz declared
The scientific evidence points to the fact that the human species, like other forms of life on this planet, is a product of evolutionary processes. It has persisted as a result of adaptation; however, it has also benefited from Lady Luck. Survival is due to mutations, adaptations, and selective reproduction, which enables individuals to transmit their genes to their offspring and thus influence the course of evolution.[3]
Humanist Manifesto III said, “Humans are an integral part of nature, the result of unguided evolutionary change. Humanists recognize nature as self-existing. We accept our life as all and enough, distinguish things as they are from things as we might wish or imagine them to be.”[4]
Scripture declares that God created man. “God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Gen. 1:27). “What is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him? You made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor” (Ps. 8:4-5). “From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live” (Acts 17:26).
In refuting evolution, the student believed he had to demonstrate the importance of faith in the Creation; when evolution is accepted, great value has been removed from human life. Ernst Haeckel, the well-known zoologist at the end of the nineteenth century declared
Though the great differences in the mental life and the civilization of the higher and lower races of men are generally known, they are, as a rule, undervalued, and so the value of life at different levels is falsely estimated. . . . [The] lower races (such as the Veddahs or Australian Negroes) are psychologically nearer to the mammals (apes and dogs) than to civilized Europeans; we must, therefore, assign a totally different value to their lives. . . . The gulf between [the] thoughtful mind of civilized man and the thoughtless animal soul of the savage is enormous – greater than the gulf that separates the latter from the soul of the dog.[5]
Haeckel said, in essence, “Those who are not White Europeans aren’t as valuable as those who are White Europeans.” Haeckel also said, “What good does it do to humanity to maintain artificially and rear the thousands of cripples, deaf-mutes, idiots, etc., who are born every year with an hereditary burden of incurable disease?”[6] Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, advocated birth control, not just for family planning, but also to make sure that the human species continued to evolve. Through birth control, she argued, the human species would be helped through “survival of the fittest.” She wrote
In the early history of the race, so called “natural law” [i.e., natural selection] reigned undisturbed. Under its pitiless and unsympathetic iron rule, only the strongest, most courageous could live and become progenitors of the race. The weak died early or were killed. Today, however, civilization has brought sympathy, pity, tenderness and other lofty and worthy sentiments, which interfere with the law of natural selection. We are now in a state where our charities, our compensation acts, our pensions, hospitals, and even our drainage and sanitary equipment all tend to keep alive the sickly and the weak, who are allowed to propagate and in turn produce a race of degenerates.[7]
She also stated
Every feeble-minded girl or woman of the hereditary type, especially of the moron class, should be segregated during the reproductive years. . . . The male defectives are no less dangerous. . . . When we realize that each feeble-minded person is a potential source of an endless progency of defect, we prefer the policy of immediate sterilization, of making sure that parenthood is absolutely prohibited to the feeble-minded.[8]
If individuals reject Creation and embrace evolution, they no longer have reason to live morally. Concerning sexuality, Sanger said,
Slowly but surely we are breaking down the taboos that surrounded sex; but we are breaking them down out of sheet necessity. The codes that have surrounded sexual behavior in the so-called Christian communities, the teachings of the churches concerning chastity and sexual purity, the prohibitions of the laws, and the hypocritical conventions of society, have all demonstrated their failure as safeguards against the chaos produced and the havoc wrought by the failure to recognize sex as a driving force in human nature, -- as great as, if indeed not greater than, hunger. Its dynamic energy is undesirable. It may be transmuted, refined, directed, even submilimated, but to ignore, to neglect, to refuse to recognize this great elemental force is nothing less than foolhardy.[9]
Michael Tooley argues for both abortion and infanticide because “new-born humans are neither persons nor even quasi-persons, and their destruction is in no way intrinsically wrong.”[10] Stephen Pinker, an outspoken materialist, wrote an article entitled “Why They Kill Their Newborns”; in the article, Pinker said that infanticide should not be condemned because “‘a capacity for neonaticide is built into the biological design from our parent emotions,’ allowing parents, if a ‘newborn is sickly, or if its survival is not promising, . . . [to] cut their losses and favor the healthiest in the litter or try again later on.’”[11]
In beginning his presentation of the evidence for Creation, the student stressed that the scientists who propagate evolutionary ideals have a bias toward anti-supernaturalism. In so doing, the student wish to illustrate that evolutionary inquiry is not the white-coat laboratory process many have come to imagine. D. M. S. Watson, who promoted evolution on the B. B. C. said the following in an address to fellow biologists: “Evolution itself is accepted by zoologists not because it has been observed to occur or . . . can be proved by logically coherent evidence to be true, but because the only alternative, special creation, is clearly incredible.”[12] Sir Arthur Eddington, said, “The notion of a beginning is repugnant to me.”[13] Richard Lewontin, in describing the struggle between science and the supernatural said,
We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a divine Foot in the door. . . . To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen.[14]
In presenting evidence for Creation, the student first mentioned the Urey-Miller experiment. Harold Urey, a Nobel Prize-winner, and one of his graduate students, Stanley Miller, conducted an experiment, the results of which were published in 1953.[15] Miller placed inorganic molecules in a test tube with water vapor and an aqueous solution along with gasses believed to be present in the primitive earth, and he shocked the mixture with ultraviolet radiation. The experiment produced carbon compounds, the building blocks of life. The results of the experiment have been praised by evolutionists; Forrest and Gross, for example, wrote, “What the justly celebrated work of Miller and Urey did was to show that abiotic synthesis of the molecular building blocks of life is possible.”[16] In other words, Forrest and Gross say that man has discovered the material necessary for life can arise without assistance.
Such is a farce. The Urey-Miller experiment simply proves that intelligent beings can produce the building blocks of life. That is exactly what Christians believe: an Intelligent Being (God) produced life. If scientists, God forbid!, ever produced a human being from inorganic compounds, all that will have been established is that intelligence is necessary for the production of life.
The eye has caused problems since Darwin put forth his theory. Darwin, under the heading of “Organs of extreme [sic]Perfection and Complication,” states
To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.[17]
The eye is an amazing organ.[18] The eye can handle 1.5 million simultaneous messages, and the eyes gather 80 percent of all knowledge which goes to the brain. The retina covers less than a square inch, but the retina contains 137 million light-sensitive receptor cells; 130 million are rods (which allow the eye to see black and white) and 7 million are cones (which allow the eye to see in color). The average eye moves approximately 100,000 times daily, using muscles, which milligram for milligram, are among the body’s strongest. The eye is also self-cleaning. Lacrimal glands produce secretions such as tears to flush away dust and foreign materials. Blinking keeps the cornea moist and clean. Tears also contain a potent microbe-killer which guards the eyes against bacterial infections. Francis Hitching, looking for nontheistic ways to explain the eye and other complex organs, admits that the odds against the eye having evolved by chance are at least 10 billion to one.[19]
Symbiotic relationships also strongly point away from evolution. “A symbiotic relationship is one in which two organisms live in such a close relationship that one cannot live without the other and vice versa.”[20] If these two organisms evolved, how did they do so in such close association? Leaf-cutting ants have a symbiotic relationship with a particular mushroom.[21] Using leaves instead of soil, the ants cultivate the mushrooms. The ants cannot eat the leaves, for they contain a natural insecticide. The mushrooms cannot live on the leaves, either, for they have a prohibitive wax covering their surface. The ants carefully remove the wax from the leaves, and then the leaves decay into a mulch which allows the mushrooms to grow. The mushrooms absorb the insecticide and turn it into a food the ants use to survive. Additionally, scientists have recently discovered that the mushrooms have a parasite enemy which would destroy them, but they can be protected by an antibiotic produced by a certain bacterium. This bacterium just so happens to thrive in the ants’ bodies.
Termites also have a symbiotic relationship with protozoa.[22] Scientists believe that only termites can digest cellulose, and without termites, the vegetable growth and decay cycle would be greatly disturbed. Protozoa thrive in the intestinal tracts of the termites, and the protozoa allow the termites to digest the wood. Scientists have heated the termites to 97 degrees Fahrenheit – the termites were not killed by the heat, but they soon died from starvation, because the parasites were killed by the heat.
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[1] Humanist Manifest I, Second.
[2] Kurtz, Humanist Declaration, 21-22.
[3] Paul Kurtz, The Courage to Become: The Virtues of Humanism (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997), 9.
[4] Humanist Manifesto III.
[5] Ernst Haeckel, The Wonders of Life: A Popular Study of biological Philosophy, trans. Joseph McCabe (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1905), 390-91; quoted in Benjamin Wiker, Moral Darwinism: How We Became hedonists (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2002), 257.
[6] Quoted in Wiker, Moral Darwinism, 260.
[7] Margaret Sanger, “Birth Control and Women’s Health,” Birth Control Review 1, no. 12 (1917): 7; quoted in Wiker, Moral Darwinism, 265.
[8] Sanger, The Pivot of Civilization (1922; Reprint, New York: Maxwell, 1969), 101-102; quoted in Wiker, Moral Darwinism, 267.
[9] Sanger, The Pivot of Civilization, 246; quoted in Wiker, Moral Darwinism, 270.
[10] Michael Tooley, Abortion and Infanticide (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983), 411; quoted in Wiker, Moral Darwinism, 303.
[11] Wiker, Moral Darwinism, 150.
[12] Douglas Dewar and L. M. Davies, “Science and the B. B. C.,” The Nineteenth Century and After, April, 1943, 167; quoted in Herbert Schlossberg, Idols for Destruction (Wheaton, IL: crossway Books, 1990), 144-145.
[13] Schlossberg, Idols, 145.
[14] Richard Lewontin, “Billions and Billions of Demons,” New York Review of Books, January 9, 1997; quoted in Benjamin Wiker, Moral Darwinism (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2002), 294-295.
[15] Barbara Forrest and Paul R. Gross, Creationism’s Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).
[16] Ibid., 102, emphasis in the original.
[17] Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species The Modern Library (New York: Random House, n.d.), 133.
[18] The scientific material about the eye comes from Bert Thompson, “The Design Argument – ‘Eye of the Storm,” in Bert Thompson and Wayne Jackson, eds. Essays in Apologetics, Vol. IV (Montgomery, AL: Apologetics Press, 1990), 181-194.
[19] Rubel Shelly, Prepare to Answer: A Defense of the Christian Faith (Nashville, TN: 20th Century Christian, 1990).
[20] Clayton, The Source, 49.
[21] Ibid.
[22] Basil Overton, Evolution in the Light of Scripture, Science and Sense (Winona, MS: J. C. Choate Publications, 1981).