The Dying Theory of Evolution - Part 1

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You are all familiar with that famous passage in Romans 1, where Paul argues that God's deity and His eternal power are clearly seen in the things that are made – tonight, I want us to begin our study of evolution versus creation with the first half of a compelling video called Unlocking the Mystery of Life. As I mentioned this morning, it was put together by those men who used to put together the Moody science videos; it's very well done. And what you will see in this video – let me, first of all, warn you that it is not a biblically based video; instead, it does exactly what Romans 1 says, and that is, it looks at the creation. It looks at God's character; that is, His deity and His eternal power as written in creation, and argues on the basis of the creation that there must be an intelligent mind behind all that we see and all that we know. Its purpose, I'll touch on a little bit when it's done, but I think you'll enjoy it, and my prayer is that it will arm some of you who are constantly in the battle in schools and colleges, perhaps in scientific workplaces – it will begin to arm you even further to battle against the idol, as we'll see later, of evolution. With that said, let's enjoy the video together.

I hope you didn't miss the large point that was being made there – we were looking at a motor on a bacterium that four billion of which could fit in a thimble. The complexity of the smallest levels of life in the world in which we live all cry to the glory of God, and I hope you caught that big picture – and next week they're going to look, as we look, at a little more of this, and look at the conclusion of it. They're going to look at the cell itself and the DNA and the process through which cells construct and through which the little machines that are a part of all the cells of our body, how they function.

Let me just mention the value of this video – I want you to understand why we decided to show it. First of all, I want you to be clear on this – science is not a source or a foundation of our faith; science must never change our interpretation of the scripture. We must never change our view of the scripture to accommodate the latest scientific theory – let God be true, but every man a liar. However, there is a value to this, and this is what I see as the value – the first is as an encouragement to our faith. Just as archaeology, for example, it doesn't – that's not why we believe the Bible, is because there have been archaeological discoveries, but as those discoveries are made, they're encouraging, they're supportive, and they encourage our faith. I see this as the same, encouraging our faith – but I think there's even a more compelling reason, and that is, it is a direct attack, using the creation which God intended to show, as He said in Romans 1, as He intended to show His deity and His eternal power. Here, we're seeing at the smallest levels of life, a demonstration of God's deity and eternal power shown in what He has made, and it absolutely kicks the feet out from under the reigning philosophy of how everything came to be in our world, and that is evolution. It is an apologetic, if you will, that shows the illogic and the lack of scientific basis for Darwinian evolution. You know, if you read most evolutionists today, you would think that the theory is settled fact and that only the most ignorant and uneducated people in the country would ever question its reality. This approach is a logical fallacy called ad hominem; it means "to the man" – it means to attack your opponent rather than to answer his arguments. But, in spite of their press releases, Darwinian evolution is a theory in crisis – it is even appropriate to call it a dying theory; it's dying because it's choking on its own teaching. Evolutionary theory is rife with serious, unsolvable problems, logical problems as you've seen, scientific problems, and obviously for us, clear biblical statements to the contrary.

Now, as we begin – and really, tonight, we are just beginning, in the time we have remaining, to sort of, first of all, continue to attack the prevailing theory of how things came to be, and that is evolution. I want us to understand that there are several important factors in terms of origins – when you talk about origins, and you talk about how origins came to be, you're talking about several different things, and this can be confusing, because the word evolution is used to describe all of these things. So, let me just sort of clarify what we're talking about as we begin. First of all, evolution can be used to describe variety within species; that is, the key word here is within – within a certain species, there is variety; how did that happen? Well, one view says that it evolved, that variety evolved through changing conditions – this is called microevolution. This is what happened to the finch population in the video, where there are small changes over time. Another perspective on how there is variety within species is that some variety – this is what we would say – some variety within species was created, but minor changes do occur over time through changing conditions. For example, the variety in human appearance – Adam and Eve didn't have a variety of skin colors and facial features, for example, but over time, those features that now separate the races of our world came to be through microevolution.

But then there are other forms – not only are we talking about variety within species, but we're talking about the origin of different species. The origin of different species – one view says that these different species came to be through natural selection, as you saw on the screen – through a simple, single life form, all that we see came to be. Those first single-cell organisms have evolved, through various mutations directed by natural selection, into every living thing, from the simplest one-cell bacteria to a man. This is called macroevolution, or biological evolution – we say, and the scripture argues, that these different species were created, each after its own kind, by a Creator.

Another thing to keep in mind is, when we're talking about evolution, sometimes we mean the origin of life itself – now, you're not talking about the origin of different species, but the origin of life itself. Evolutionary theory teaches that it occurred; that is, life occurred through chance biological processes – you'll learn a little more about this next week in the video – pre-biological evolution is what this is called. One writer describes it this way: several billion years ago, chemicals in the sea, acted on by sunlight and cosmic energy, formed themselves by chance into one or more single celled organisms. This is how life came to be in modern evolutionary theory. The most famous quote about this – I love – by Fred Hoyle is that a living organism emerged by chance from a prebiotic soup is about as likely as that a tornado sweeping through a junkyard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein. Chance assembly is just a naturalistic way – that is, not wanting God in the picture – chance assembly is just a naturalistic way of saying a miracle. We, of course, say that the origin of life is created.

The final issue that you look at, when you look at evolution, is the origin of matter. You look at the difference, the variety within a particular species; you look at the origin of species, of different species; you look at the origin of life itself, biological life – and finally, you have to answer the question of where did the matter come from? The origin of matter – there are two views of this as well that separate our world. The first is that matter is eternal; matter is the only reality, and it has always existed – this is called materialism. Now, in popular theory, it's usually explained this way: There have always been – somewhere, nowhere – there have always been protons and neutrons, and at some point, for reasons that are not fully explained, there was a collision of compressed rotating protons and neutrons, and it created a huge bang, an explosion. The planets and stars that are part of our universe resulted. We believe the origin of matter was that it was created at a point in time. You can see that there are two hugely conflicting views of the world – of how it came to be, of the origin of life, even the origin of matter.

Now, understand that when we use the word evolution, people use it to speak of each of these things – variety within species, the origin of different species, the origin of life, as well as the origin of matter. When I use the word evolution – and we'll use it tonight and next week – I'm not referring to microevolution; that is, the first of these, variety within species. I'm using it to refer to the rest of these – the origin of different species, that is, that they evolved; the origin of life, that life itself happened spontaneously, generated out of some prebiotic soup; and the origin of matter, where did matter come from? When I use the word evolution, those are the three things to which I refer – the package that comes from a materialistic view of the world.

There was an article in Newsweek that documented exactly the view that these people now are holding – "Cosmologists are no longer content to invoke the deity as the ultimate explanation behind the universe. To what do they now look? For better or worse, they have cast their lot with the laws of physics, and not with Einstein's friend, the old one, the creator. In the greatest leap of imagination," – listen to this, this is shocking – "most cosmologists now believe that the universe arose from nothing, and that nothing is as certain to give rise to something as the night is to sire the dawn." In other words, there was nothing, and there was no one, and that equals everything – this is brilliant. Alan Guth, a brilliant MIT cosmologist – I mean, this man has advanced degrees, he's at MIT – he declares that the universe is "a free lunch," that is, it came from nothing, that there was nothing – not God, not energy, not matter. Simultaneously, the void of nothing gave rise to – no, he uses the word decayed to – all matter. He contends that the universe, "not with a bang so much as a poof, ballooned accidentally out of the endless void of eternity, from a stillness so deep that there was no there or then – only possibility." What does that mean, it was only possibility? It goes on, but I won't work you through all of that. Carl Sagan, at Cornell University, in his bestseller Cosmos, wrote this: "The cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be." Now, that can't be proven scientifically; he's philosophizing. Furthermore, he explains that what he calls the beauty and diversity of the biological world, the music of life, comes through natural selection, and he says, "compared to the God hypothesis, this is equally appealing, equally human and far more compelling." Carl Sagan says, look, I've got to choose between believing God did all this and believing that the cosmos is all there ever was, and it has, through a series of mutations and natural selection, come to be – it's "equally appealing, equally human and far more compelling."

Where I want us to go briefly tonight is to see what drives evolution – you know, everything has to have a cause; there's a cause. Robert Reymond, in his Systematic Theology, from which I quote these articles, he says, "What are the causal powers within the evolutionary process upon which Sagan suspends the origin of all things? What's the cause in the evolutionary world?" If you read Sagan, if you read these other cosmologists whom I've quoted, you will discover this: accident, randomness, fate, and chance – those are the words that always come up. You see, these are all synonyms for chance, and chance – this is what I want you to see – this whole system is built on chance. But what is chance? Chance is nothing; chance is not something. Chance has no power to act; chance, as R.C. Sproul says, is a zero – it is simply mathematical probabilities. Chance is not a thing – it's not a being, it's not energy, it's not mass, it's not power, it's not intelligence, it's not an entity – it's only a mathematical concept, and yet that is the power that lies behind all of evolution. And folks, what I want you to know is, this is not new – chance is an evolutionary substitute for God; it is the deity of the evolutionist; it is a modern-day idol.

But it's not just modern-day – I want you to turn back to 1 Samuel; it may seem a strange place to go. You remember the story of the ark of the Lord – in 1 Samuel 4, the children of Israel line up in battle against the Philistines, their old tireless enemy, and verse 2 of chapter 4 says, "The Philistines drew up in battle array to meet Israel. When the battle spread, Israel was defeated before the Philistines, who killed about four thousand men on the battlefield." So, what happens? The Israelites come back to camp, and they say, we've got a problem – I mean, how did this happen, and what's the solution? And the solution they arrive at is this – let's take the ark of the Lord into battle, because if we take the ark of the Lord, that'll be like our rabbit's foot, there's no way we'll be defeated if we have the ark of the Lord. But, of course, you know the story – exactly the opposite happens. Verse 10: "The Philistines fought, and Israel was defeated, and every man fled to his tent and the slaughter was very great, for there fell of Israel thirty thousand foot soldiers." You know, sometimes I think we read these numbers, and we just sort of slip right over them – thirty thousand men died that day, but that's not the worst of it. Verse 11: "The ark of the Lord was taken, and the two sons of Eli, Hophni and Phinehas, died." You'd remember the story, how the word comes to Eli – he was a heavy man, overweight, and when he heard the story, when he heard that the ark of God had been taken, when he heard that his sons had been killed, he falls over and he dies. Verse 22: "The glory has departed from Israel, for the ark of God was taken."

So, the Philistines now have a problem – they have the ark of God; they take it, and they do what you would expect them to do. Verse 2 of chapter 5: "They took the ark of God, brought it to the house of Dagon, and set it by Dagon," their god, to demonstrate the superiority of Dagon over Israel's God. Now, remember in the ancient world, when two armies battled, it wasn't just the armies battling, it was a titanic struggle between the gods of the two peoples, and if your army won, it wasn't necessarily just that your army was better, it was that your god was stronger than the other god, and so what do they do? Obviously, their god was stronger, right? So, they take the ark of God, the God of the Israelites, and they set it at the feet, if you will, of Dagon. But, again, you know the story – it begins to encounter problems, this statue of Dagon. Verse 3: "When the Ashdodites arose early in the morning, behold, Dagon had fallen on his face to the ground before the ark of the Lord. So, they took him, and they set him in his place again." You know, it's pretty foolish to worship a god that has to be set back in his place when he falls. And verse 4 – it gets worse, you know – Dagon fell on his face, "and the head of Dagon and both the palms of his hands were cut off on the threshold, only the trunk was left to him." So, they had a problem, but then the problem got personal. Verse 6: "Now the hand of the Lord was heavy on the Ashdodites," which was one of the one of the major cities of the Philistines, "and He ravaged them and smote them with tumors, both Ashdod and its territories." Now, there's a lot of debate about what these tumors were, probably because if you notice over in chapter 6, verse 5, they "make likenesses of the tumors," or boils may be a better word, "and likenesses of your mice that ravage the land." Probably, what happened here is the bubonic plague, which is often associated with rats and mice – and so, God inflicts terrible justice on the Philistines for having taken the ark of God.

But here's what I want you to see – get to chapter 6; they're trying to work out the problem. Verse 2: "The Philistines call for the priests and the diviners." They say, okay, what are we going to do with this thing? "Tell us how we shall send it to its place." They already understand – they don't want this anymore; we want to get rid of this – how do we do it? And they say, okay, here's what you have to do: "Five golden tumors," verse 4, "and five golden mice, according to the number of the lords of the Philistines, for one plague was on all of you and on your lords. So, you shall make likenesses of the boils and likenesses of the mice that ravage the land, and you shall give glory to the God of Israel; perhaps He will ease His hand from you, your gods and your land." Verse 7: "Now therefore, take and prepare a new cart and two milch cows on which there has never been a yoke, and hitch the cows to the cart and take their calves home, away from them." Now, what's going on here? Basically, they're setting up a test – verse 8: "Take the ark of the Lord and place it on the cart and put the articles of gold which you return to Him as a guilt offering in a box by its side. Then send it away that it may go. Watch, if it goes up by the way of its own territory … then He has done us this great evil. But if not" – watch this – "then we will know that it was not His hand that struck us; it happened to us by chance." You see, the Philistines had the same problem – they weren't into evolution, but they were into the same basic theory that chance could be a cause of something. Chance can't be a cause of anything because it is nothing. It is an evolutionary substitute for God when chance is involved in evolution; it's always been a part of the pantheon of man's gods.

I want you to see how the Scripture speaks directly – turn to Hebrews 11; let's start in verse 36 of chapter 10. "For you have need of endurance, so that when you have done the will of God, you may receive what was promised." Now, I'm not going to give you a whole lesson on Hebrews, but let me just bring you up to context – basically, the writer of Hebrews is saying to the people to whom he writes, look, some of you are genuine believers; you have left Judaism, and you have embraced no longer just the shadows, but you've embraced the substance which is Christ. And now that you have, "you have need of endurance, so that when you have done the will of God, you may receive what was promised. For yet in a very little while, He who is coming will come and will not delay, but My righteous one shall live by faith" – faith is the essence of what it is to be a believer – "for if he shrinks back, My soul has no pleasure in him." And he says, listen, I'm confident – verse 39: "We are not of those who shrink back to destruction, but are of those who have faith to the preserving of the soul." Verse 1 of chapter 11 gives us a sort of working definition of faith – it is "the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen." Literally, this word assurance is used in the papyri for title deeds; we could even translate it "now, faith is the title deed of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen" – literally, the evidence of things not seen. "For by it, the men of old gained approval." Now, what I want you to see is verse 3, because verse 3 begins a litany of expressions of how genuine faith expresses itself. "By faith, we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things which are visible."

Listen, folks – how do we know? You weren't there, I wasn't there, these scientists that we saw on the screen, they weren't there – how do we really know that the world was created as it's described in the pages of scripture? We receive it by faith. Faith is not a blind leap – faith is a matter of who is your authority; in whom do you put your confidence? Are you going to put your confidence in a scientist who lives today and is gone tomorrow? That's how man is described. Are you going to put your confidence in a scientist who is described in Romans 1 as professing himself to be wise, yet becoming a fool, because he denies who God is, and God's creative power? Or are you going to put your confidence in God, the only Person who was there? "By faith, we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things which are visible." In fact, we'll talk later in our study about creation ex nihilo; that is, creation out of nothing. It's not "nothing plus no one equals everything," it's "nothing plus God, the eternal, true, and living God, equals everything." It comes down to who are you going to believe? And that's what the writer of Hebrews says – by faith, we believe God and what He has revealed, and what we're going to do in the coming weeks is look at exactly what God has revealed that is to be the grounds of our faith.

Let's pray together.

Father, we have simply begun to scratch the surface of this great issue. Lord, I pray that tonight, You would help those of us who know You and are devoted to You to put our confidence in Your revealed word, in Your revelation, to put our confidence in what You have said. Lord, help us over the coming weeks to understand exactly what it is You have said about creation, to come to grips with Your word – but in the end, Father, I pray that You would help us to let You be true and every man a liar. Lord, I pray for all of us who have to live in this world and struggle with those who embrace this bankrupt system. Help us to be informed, help us to know the truth, and help us to know the error, so that we can apply the truth properly to it. Lord, thank You for this opportunity tonight, and in the coming weeks, I pray that You would establish our faith in You, the eternal Creator. Lord, whatever Your word teaches about this crucial issue, may we put our confidence there. Lord, I pray for the person here tonight who perhaps doesn't even embrace the reality of Your existence – it's hard to imagine, Lord, and yet I know that that can be true, some young person who questions all that they've been taught. Lord, I pray that Your Spirit, like a hammer, would take the truth of Your word, drive it into their hearts, help them to see that they are in rebellion against You, their Creator – to fall down and seek Your forgiveness, to beg Your redemption in Christ.

We pray it in Jesus' name – Amen.