Articles
The Bombardment of Naturalism
You can’t escape it. Whether you are watching a nature documentary, reading an online article, visiting a museum, a national park or a zoo, it is ever present. Perhaps it is so ubiquitous that you don’t even notice it anymore, but it’s there just the same. The drip, drip, drip of how life on earth accidentally evolved into its present form; how you and I are just products of a natural process from primitive beginnings to modern man.
An article in Reader’s Digest recently caught my eye: “Surfing for Brain Power: How to avoid being clickbaited by your own brain.” I wanted to gain more insight into how internet marketers tap into our curiosity and entice us to click on what is often amusing but useless information.
It didn’t take long. The third paragraph of the article began, “Across evolutionary time, curious animals were more likely to survive because they learned about their environments; a forager that occasionally skipped a reliable feeding ground to explore might find an even better place to eat … Evolution has left us with a brain that can reward itself … Albert Einstein famously advised a young student to ‘never lose a holy curiosity.’ Given our evolutionary history, there’s little danger any of us will” (5/2020, p 113-115).
It doesn’t matter what the article is about, the backstory is always about our prehistoric roots, our hunter-gatherer past, the gradual evolution of our brain, etc. Humanists ridicule the fanaticism of the religious for their cherished beliefs, but Christians don’t hold a candle to the zeal of the naturalists. These people couldn’t write a recipe for fudge brownies without a dissertation on the evolutionary development of the cacao seed and the ancestry of chickens.
Perhaps most disturbing is that these things are stated as fact when the truth is they are assumptions, hypotheses, guesses or just pure fiction. Where are the fact checkers?! Where are the critics who roundly castigate theologians and believers for advancing the myths, fables and legends of the Bible (as they see it)? Oh, yes, good for me, but not for thee.
Here is more dogma from the naturalists that we commonly encounter in the public square:
1) The age of the universe. This is an ever-changing number, but the latest estimates are about 13.7 billion years. Expect this number to increase exponentially now that the Webb space telescope is operational.
2) The age of the earth. Again, a moving target, but currently thought to be 4.5 billion years. This, obviously, cannot be squared with the affirmations of Scripture, but so much pressure has been brought to bear by the intelligentsia that brethren have tried to “slip in” these eons between Genesis 1:2 and 1:3 or by asserting that the creation “days” were long eras of time.
3) The flood never happened. One foundation stone in the evolutionary worldview is a statement attributed to Charles Lyell: “The present is the key to the past,” i.e., the doctrine of uniformitarianism. Evolutionists deny that catastrophic events or processes that vary from the present norm – such as a global inundation – could be responsible for what we currently observe in the environment.
4) Humans were primitive hunter-gatherers. We’ve all seen the artist’s renderings of our ancestors – apish, knuckle-dragging, grunting, sitting around a fire picking bugs out of each other’s hair, etc. But Scripture says that Adam and Eve were formed fully cerebral, cognizant and capable. They didn’t scrounge around for blackberries and bamboo shoots, and this is not verified by archaeology. It is pure fiction based on evolutionary assumptions. God said, “See, I have given you every herb that yields seed which is on the face of all the earth, and every tree whose fruit yields seed; to you it shall be for food … The Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden, and there He put the man whom He had formed. And out of the ground the Lord God made every tree grow that is pleasant to the sight and good for food … Then the Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to tend and keep it” (Gen 1:29; 2:8-9, 15). Of course, this is mocked as myth by naturalists and replaced by their own fables.
5) Death preceded the advent of man. The evolutionary model postulates millions of years of death by predation before mankind evolves onto the scene. But Scripture states that death entered the world as a consequence of Adam and Eve’s sin, thus fundamentally changing the dynamics of the life process (cf. Gn 2:17). Further, Scripture expressly says that God had provided plant life to sustain both man and animals from the beginning (cf. Gn 1:30). Thus, the predatory behavior of living things is part of sin’s fallout.
Part of God’s sentence against Adam was this pronouncement: “‘Lest he put out his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever’ – therefore the Lord God sent him out of the garden of Eden to till the ground from which he was taken. So He drove out the man; and He placed cherubim at the east of the garden of Eden, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to guard the way to the tree of life” (Gn 3:22-24). This is obviously not reflective of the hundreds of thousands of years of gradual evolutionary human development advanced by Darwinists.
6) Land animals became sea creatures. I watched another interesting documentary recently on Orcinus orca, or killer whales. Of course, I got the evolutionary history of how a certain land creature gradually began wading in the shallows of the ocean, and over time its feet became flippers and fur became blubber. It’s not clear why these adaptations left the orca with air-breathing lungs; surely it would be an advantage living in the ocean to get oxygen from the water, as do fish and other sea creatures. Details, details. But this is the kind of myth taught to children by dinosaur books, toys, cartoons and in classrooms: reptiles gradually became birds; insects predated flowering plants; man evolved from primitive predecessors and gradually developed intelligence, tools and civilization.
Adults can get benumbed to the constant bombardment of evolution; every characteristic, tendency and behavior of man is tied to our evolutionary development. But it is our kids we need to be concerned about. It is almost impossible not to absorb the toxic propaganda so eagerly served to them in every plaque, textbook and article they read. Talk to them – a lot.
