Friday, December 30, 2011
True Believers
Does it bother you when people claim one world view and then live another? For example, are you irritated with politicians who condemn greed while cruising the world on their private yacht? Or does it bother you when someone lectures you on their version of a healthy diet and then pigs out on junk food? It appears that all of us are prone to hypocrisy; too often our theories and the living of our lives don’t line up. This has been diligently pointed out in the lives of people who believe in the Bible, but I have rarely heard it mentioned as it relates to those who believe in evolution.
Consider the amazing claims of evolution. It has been proposed that life spontaneously erupted and became amazingly more and more complex and successful in spite of unbelievable odds. Nothing was able to stop it; it just kept getting better and better, adapting to every challenge and conquering every obstruction. Fish figured out how to grow limbs, giraffes developed longer and longer necks, animals miraculously developed the apparatus necessary for flight – all by chance! Only people of immense faith can truly embrace such a doctrine.
However, a true believer in evolution would have to let go of a lot of popular opinions about natural laws and social issues that are currently being promoted by scientific and educational communities. For example it is a stretch to embrace the law of entropy and evolution. It also seems intellectually dishonest to be frantic about global warming, if life has survived and thrived through multiple ice ages. Why worry about such global issues if evolution will triumph? Wouldn’t that be hypocritical? If evolution is really the driving force of forward progress, then why do we fret about species that are going extinct or radiation that is killing humans – won’t the animals adapt to save themselves?
There are also moral considerations. Under the evolution model true believers would support or accept things like racial cleansing, genocide, animal extinction, global warming, pollution and overpopulation because they would fall into the category of “agents of change” that should eventually take life to ever-improving states of being. Are we supposed to believe that over billions of years this whole evolution thing worked like a charm but now gasoline engines, poachers and land developers have the capacity to crash the whole system? Can puny man do what the cataclysmic shifting of tectonic plates and meteorite collisions could not do? If someone truly believed in evolution wouldn’t they just relax, knowing that the fittest will survive and that organisms will just decide to grow new limbs or develop gills or come up with cancer resistant systems or evolve into animals that thrive on pollution?
Do you see the problem? Observable science can’t quite mesh with such concepts. One minute we are told that the rain forests got here in spite of insurmountable odds and the next minute we are told that they are soon to disappear and must be saved. Evolution says millions of species have survived and even thrived throughout billions of years, ingeniously adapting and morphing, but observable science says that we need to manage our resources and take care of the plants and animals that populate our earth, because when we don’t they degenerate and become extinct. Wait a minute! That sounds familiar: “And the LORD God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it.” (Genesis 2:15 KJV)
I believe in a Creator who made an awesome habitat at just the right spot in the universe and then gave mankind the honor of taking care of it. My faith is strengthened as I observe His continued interaction with His creation, as he changes lives, heals bodies and even performs verifiable miracles. I guess I’d better do my part and help take care of the earth and, more importantly, God’s crowning creation -- people. After all, I don’t want to be a hypocrite.
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