Happy "Evolution Sunday"
by Eric Rauch

Churches around the country will be celebrating this Sunday. More than 10,000 individual clergy and over 400 “churches” will be kicking up their heels to mark a momentous event in the life of the church. Just what is this event you ask? Why Charles Darwin’s 197th birthday, of course.

The Clergy Letter Project (CLP) is sponsoring “Evolution Sunday,” on February 12. The idea is to get clergy and congregations that don’t have a problem with mixing Darwinian evolution with Christianity to make their views known. According to the website:

[H]undreds of Christian churches from all portions of the country and a host of denominations will come together to discuss the compatibility of religion and science.   For far too long, strident voices, in the name of Christianity, have been claiming that people must choose between religion and modern science.  More than 10,000 Christian clergy have already signed The Clergy Letter demonstrating that this is a false dichotomy.  Now, on the 197th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, many of these leaders will bring this message to their congregations through sermons and/or discussion groups.  Together, participating religious leaders will be making the statement that religion and science are not adversaries.  And, together, they will be elevating the quality of the national debate on this topic.1

Not quite content to actually deal with the religious implications of their own evolutionary philosophy, or the science that is being put forward by the “strident voices,” the CLP would rather spend this Sunday organizing mass attacks of the conservative Christian “straw-men” that they have erected. Never has a creationist or an intelligent design advocate ever made any claim as outlandish as what the CLP attributes to them. Working at a creationist organization for over five years put me in very close contact with the movers and shakers of this movement that has evolutionists running scared, and never once did I hear anyone even remotely make the claim that “people must choose between religion and modern science.” This is a flat-out lie. In this day, lies sell more papers than truths.

It should also not come as too much of a shock that many of the churches that have signed on to take part in “Evolution Sunday” are pastored by women. If you’re open to reinterpreting the book of Genesis, reinterpreting 1 Corinthians 14 is no big deal. The name of the game here is “intellectual respectability.” These churches and their clergy believe they have found the loophole that can win them favor with God and man. What difference does it make HOW God created? All that is important is giving Him the credit, right? God did it, and man can tell us how He did it, or so goes the reasoning. This is nothing new. In the 16th century, Cardinal Baronius, a friend of Galileo, put it this way: “The Bible teaches us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go.” But the problem is God did tell us how He did it—He spoke it into existence, over the course of six days, with a specific order of events. In order to harmonize this with evolutionary theory, the Bible must be sliced, diced and ignored. And this plays right into the evolutionists’ hands. They have no need of spineless Christians in their camp. Listen to what Will Provine has to say:

Of course, it is still possible to believe in both modern evolutionary biology and a purposive force, even the Judaeo-Christian God. One can suppose that God started the whole universe or works through the laws of nature (or both). There is no contradiction between this or similar views of God and natural selection. But this view is also worthless.… [Such a God] has nothing to do with human morals, answers no prayers, gives no life everlasting, in fact does nothing whatsoever that is detectable. In other words, religion is compatible with modern evolutionary biology (and, indeed, all of modern science) if the religion is effectively indistinguishable from atheism.2

So there you go. Only if you trade your Christianity in for a working version of atheism are they happy to let “church-people” join their social club of “modern science.” Celebrate “Evolution Sunday” and proselytize for the atheistic worldview and then get sucker-punched walking into the lab on Monday. Nice arrangement. Evolution is an alternate religion. It cannot be smuggled into Christianity in any way, shape, or form. The two are mutually exclusive; they are diametrically opposed. Michael Ruse understands this:

Evolution is promoted by its practitioners as more than mere science.  Evolution is promulgated as an ideology, a secular religion—a full-fledged alternative to Christianity, with meaning and morality.… Evolution is a religion. This was true of evolution in the beginning, and it is true of evolution still today.… Evolution therefore came into being as a kind of secular ideology, an explicit substitute for Christianity.3

Why would Christians want to have the substitute, when they have the real thing? Why drink Pepsi when you can have Coke? It defies all logic. If the evolutionists themselves get this, why can’t Christians wake up to it? Evolutionists are not willing to consider the possibility of “divine intervention.” They are closed-minded, narrow-minded religious bigots.

In The Blind Watchmaker Richard Dawkins tells his readers that even if a statue of the Virgin Mary waved to them, they should not conclude they had witnessed a miracle. Perhaps all the atoms of the statue’s arm just happened to move in the same direction at once—a low-probability event to be sure, but possible.… Dawkins has written that anyone who denies evolution is either “ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked—but I’d rather not consider that.)”4

Don’t think for a moment that becoming a practical atheist to gain access to the laboratory is going to win any points with the Richard Dawkins of the world. The lab is their church, and they will defend it as strongly as we defend ours, even more so. It is time for Christians to reconsider Elijah’s words in 1 Kings 18:21, “How long will you hesitate between two opinions? If the Lord is God, follow Him, but if Baal, follow him.” “Evolution Sunday” is the atheistic version of Evangelism Explosion, and thinking Christians need to slam the door on these cult-peddlers. Creationism and ID are making an impact, let’s keep the momentum going.

1. http://www.uwosh.edu/colleges/cols/rel_evol_sun.htm

2. Henry M. Morris, That Their Words May Be Used Against Them (Green Forest, AR: Master Books, 1997), 395-396.

3. Michael Ruse, National Post (May 13, 2000), B1, B3, B7

4. Michael J. Behe, Darwin’s Black Box (New York, NY: The Free Press, 1996), 249–250.