People like to point to C.S. Lewis as a moderate who believed evolution. Actually he began as an evolutionary humanist who ended up convinced God was real, then Jesus was real....thinking out carefully the implications of what discoveries he had made. He said initially that what troubles he had with evolution as a theory weren't religious in nature (which would have got him pilloried in our day all by itself!), but by the end of his life was leaning against it. Would one of the best logicians and apologists of the 2othC have been heard with respect if he had seen the difficulties much earlier? How about now? Could C.S. Lewis get a fair hearing if he began his career now?
September 13, 1951: I have read nearly the whole of Evolution [probably Acworth's unpublished "The Lie of Evolution"] and am glad you sent it. I must confess it has shaken me: not in my belief in evolution, which was of the vaguest and most intermittent kind, but in my belief that the question was wholly unimportant. I wish I were younger. What inclines me now to think that you may be right in regarding it as the central and radical lie in the whole web of falsehood that now governs our lives is not so much your arguments against it as the fanatical and twisted attitudes of its defenders. C.S. LewisIt was the bad-spirited, anti-Christian, anti-deist venom that really made me look twice at evolutionary doctrine as a kid. Real science doesn't need hatred. It is supposed to be impartial, right? So why did so many who 'really' believed in it act like such jerks? Why were they so hostile to any other point of view - even privately held?
Once my eyes were opened it became easier to see biased interpretations in different fields chosen specifically to refute Biblical positions. I had a mentor in high school who had been convinced that biblical archeology had proven scripture wrong, and shared the books that convinced her with me as a student. I dutifully read them, and researched the claims, but some I already knew were wrong. I was on several archeology mailing lists at the time, and so had already heard the answers for some of the nonsense these books were spouting. (Specifically: Jericho HAS got a layer of damage consistent with scripture, as do most sites in the Holy land. The Bible DOES mention worship of the 'Queen of Heaven' and other cults both before and after strong temple worship periods. Its just that there - contrary to established archaeological practice elsewhere, they insist that since the record and their chronology do not match, it must be the Bible that is wrong, rather than their dating system. Even the OT does have strong female figures who were remembered with respect - Esther, Deborah, Judith etc. It wasn't all gained from increasing Ashteroth worship or whatever.) The obvious anti-Biblical (and anti-Torah/Talmuddic) goal of such 'scientific' works opened my eyes early then to the spiritual warfare aspect of some endeavors in what is currently accepted as 'science.' I did not know about the Creationist movement when I was a child. I just knew Christ was true. I did not know about Creationist based scientific alternatives until I was a mother myself. I just had realized in my school years that evolutionary ideas were being pushed like a faith, where proponents openly ridiculed those who believed in God and/or the story of Genesis. Later, in private study, I learned how many of the early 'proofs' had turned out to be frauds and that this had not altered the theories promoted or the increasing control of those who promoted those falsehoods one iota. Pure science is supposed to be self-correcting as new information comes to light, but the longer I looked at the history of the main scientific establishments, the more obvious it became to me that this was not the method employed to bring it into the ascendancy. Plenty of others have independently made the same discoveries. Not a wonder so many of us are skeptical of the evolutionary belief system. We would be even if the creation scientist & ID guys had never appeared. Fakes and tautologies still abound in children's textbooks. No matter how often this is pointed out, they stay there until the iconic images of evolution are well-ingrained. THEN -in the upper grades- they are only corrected by talking about how those old fakes have been replaced by 'new evidence.' uh huh
The evolutionary science framework demands that God not be considered as a possible effect upon the natural framework, then uses the absence of proof of God inside theorems then substituted as proof of absence. It is outrageously illogical - so - in the spirit of 'pure science' they call those who notice this 'idiots' & those who who have a Christian background into the bargain are 'religious fundamentalists who only don't believe because religion has blinded them.' They seem pretty blind to us, or they could acknowledge the very real holes in the system. I have read some of the ID versus evolutionary debates, and its usually the Evo-believers who do most of the flaming.
Evolution has had so many definitions that some of them are endorsed by everyone. All scientists and educated laypersons believe that species are capable of variation to improve their survival as their environments change. Thing is- dissenters see that adaptive mechanism as built into the creatures, incapable of macro-changes needed to make a frog into a man. Luther Burbank's 'reversion to the mean' seems to be a real principle. The fossil record could as easily be accounted for by a catastrophe after alien settlement as by the Genesis account, but many of us see issues with accepting the geologic columns and the larger Darwinist creation mythos. Therefore Darwin's theories need to be given up as the ruling paradigm, and recognized again as possible - but unproven. The discoveries that have been made since his time need to be examined on their own merits. Let everyone believe their own creation myth, evolutionist atheists too, just quit calling it 'science' - because it isn't!
What gets me is that accepting that Darwin blew it doesn't make anyone believe in God per se. You cannot prove Him. (In fact, He will not show Himself to those who wish to be blind. He wants us to come by faith, for the right reasons and not because He really is the only sensible choice.) C.S. Lewis is correct. Should this complicated fabrication be largely amended or replaced prior to Christ's return, depend upon it, another tasty, human-flattering, poetic fantasy will take its place.
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