Darwin and evil

It is well known that Darwin rejected Christianity and the biblical account of creation because of his view of evil. He lost his mother when he was eight years old and his beloved daughter, Annie, when she was only ten. He could not correlate these events with the God of love.

As he developed his ideas on natural selection as a mechanism for evolutionary change, he became aware that this was built on a bitter struggle for survival. Then he was confronted with seemingly awful activities in nature. He mentions the parasitic ichneumon fly that lays its eggs in a caterpillar and, when they hatch, they eat the host.

The final judgment

Ultimately he squirmed at the biblical testimony to the final judgment, which he considered to be a hideous doctrine. Of course, whatever we make of these things, the denial of God does not remove the actuality of these events. They are still there and have to be faced.

The issues are still dominant in many arguments by non-Christians. A recent report in The Guardian newspaper picked on the parallels between the beginning of the earth and the final judgment, causing the reporter to react against creationism. David Attenborough repeatedly refers to river blindness as an excuse for not believing in the God of the Bible.

Answering Attenborough

The latter item has been specifically responded to. Attenborough’s comment that the worm can live in no other way than in a child’s eye is emotive and wrong. The worm does not live in the eye; it dies there. Its host is, in fact, the ‘black fly’ which infects humans and so causes the transfer. It is a bacterium that the worm carries that causes the blindness. However, it seems that the cause of the trouble is that the flies can no longer find their necessary protein and iron in the plant environment and so invade humans to feed.

Of course, this still seems a hard thing, but recent research seems to demonstrate that this is a widespread effect. Maillard and Gonzales (2006) and Ostfield (2009) report studies that indicate that it is a loss of biogenetic diversity in the environment that is a significant cause of disease in animals and humans. They suggest this is a good reason to preserve biodiversity!

Darwinian past

Perhaps one of the most interesting reactions to the problem of evil is that by Professor Richard Dawkins. He said (Heart of the Matter, BBC, September 29 1996):

‘We get our immorality largely from our Darwinian past. [From it] we get our selfishness, we get our drive for self-interest, for ruthlessness, for cruelty perhaps, and I think the first thing we should do is throw out Darwinism; we should regard Darwin’s natural selection as a great evil. It’s out there, it’s true, it’s what is causing the whole living world to be the way it is, including ourselves. And we humans uniquely have the power to say we can throw off our Darwinian past and using our conscious brains — which may be almost unique — we can make a world which is anti-Darwinian as far as morality is concerned. Although, of course, we remain Darwinian as far as our understanding of how the world got to be the way it is.’

Origin of morality?

We can only classify these things as immoral if there is the moral position. One might ask, ‘Where do we get our morality from?’ The same applies for Darwin’s rejection of God. If evolution is true, why are we concerned about these things?

The sad thing about this position is that there is ultimately no answer to the evil in this world. Experience tells us that we cannot ‘throw off’ these things. It is only in the Bible that we get the diagnosis of the state of mankind and an explanation of its origin. It’s only in the Bible that we find the solution in Christ’s death.

We must never forget that ‘creation’ is part of the ‘big story’ of God’s dealings with man. Exposition of Genesis 1-2 alone will give an unbalanced picture, in that it is not the world we live in today. Genesis 4 is closer to that experience! The difference comes in Genesis 3. ‘The Fall’ is the doctrine that is fundamental to understanding the state of the world, the spiritual state of mankind and God’s plan of redemption.

JHJP

© Evangelicals Now - July 2009
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