But it is. According to biologist Francisco Ayala, Darwin “completed the Copernican Revolution…. Darwin discovered that living beings can be explained as a result of a natural process—natural selection—without resorting to a Creator.”7
Biologist E. 0. Wilson writes, “If humankind evolved by Darwinian natural selection, genetic chance andenvironmental necessity, not God, made the species.” Biologist Stephen Jay Gould invokes evolution to show that “no intervening spirit watches lovingly over the affairs of nature … whatever we think of God, his existence is not manifest in the products of nature.” Douglas Futuyma asserts in his textbook Evolutionary Biology, “By coupling undirected, purposeless variation to the blind, uncaring process of natural selection, Darwin made theological or spiritual explanations of life processes superfluous.” Biologist William Provine boasts that “evolution is the greatest engine of atheism.”
So there is an anti-religious thrust in Darwinism, and this is the main reason many Americans refuse to embrace it. They view Darwinism as atheism masquerading as science. They also suspect that Darwin’s theories are being used to undermine traditional religion and morality. Many parents are concerned that their children will go to school and college as decent Christians and come out as unbelievers and moral relativists. As we can see from the quotations above, these concerns about contemporary Darwinism are justified. Evolution in the way that it is promoted and taught today seems to promote a social agenda that is anti-religious and amoral.
But doesn’t evolution contradict the claims of the Bible? Let us look carefully at what the book of Genesis actually says. We read in Genesis 2:7 that “the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.” Right away we notice something significant: the Bible says that the universe was created out of nothing but it does not say man was created out of nothing. Rather, it says that man was made or shaped from the existing substance of nature. “Dust thou art and to dust thou shall return:’ So the Bible is quite consistent with the idea that man is made up of atoms and molecules and shares the same DNA found in earthworms, whales, and monkeys.
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