Easter Essay
Accompanied by a picture of a cross and a sunset, captioned “The Sun and the Son,” a somber-looking Brian Walden wrote an essay in the BBC News expressing his reaction to Astronomer Royal Sir Martin Rees’ “chilling” comment that “It will not be humans who witness the demise of the Sun six billion years hence; it will be entities as different from us as we are from bacteria.” Rees stated that the idea of evolution is well-known, but that the “vast potential for further evolution isn’t yet part of our common culture.”
Walden delved into the implications of this assumed “scientific” view of our future for morality, ethics, and religion with a note of nostalgia for his simple childhood faith: “This is Easter and I can’t help contrasting the Christian promise of my youth with what science expects to happen.”
This essay had better make every Christian pastor and believer wake up and ponder the deadly effect of evolutionary thinking. Mr. Walden is caught in a tension between what his conscience says and what the Darwin Party soothsayers are telling him. He sees the enormous complexity of an unborn baby revealed by the latest sonograms, and he fears the future of bioethics with no foundation for ethics, but he accepts at face value what Rees says about evolution and the future of the sun billions of years from now. Like a dumb sheep, he fails to question the glittering generalities pronounced by the Babble-onians on the left, the liberals who drove the wedge between science and religion as far back as the 18th century. While realizing that any kind of consensus between the Christians and the liberals would be an alloy of iron and clay, he yet hungers for some kind of dialogue between them at least.
This is pathetic. Walden is badly uninformed, because he grants to secular science an authority and credibility it doesn’t have. If he would stop naively trusting what scientific sleuthsayers like Rees say the sun is going to do in six billion years, he could begin to regain some confidence in the Son who said, “He who believes in Me has everlasting life.” Somebody give Walden a rope to climb out of the dark cave of (misnamed) Enlightenment thinking. Maybe a copy of The Privileged Planet would help, and a bookmark to Creation-Evolution Headlines.
England made a mistake by welding the church to the government. Enlightenment liberals rightly despised the corruption that resulted, but went too far in asserting autonomy in matters of science and ethics. It’s time for England to get rid of its useless state church, and experience a revival from the ground up: from individual believers no longer intimidated by the wormtongues of liberal philosophers (who know neither the past nor future of our sun). It’s time for them to understand the strength of the Biblical foundation for science and morality. Armed with new confidence in the unchanging Word of God and its ability to stimulate true science as well as provide solid ground for ethics, individuals must overthrow the Darwinian usurpers before their vile ethics bear any more poisoned fruit.
Suns and babies do not come from nothing. Like everything in nature, they have the fingerprint of design: not just impersonal design, but the design of an all-wise, all-powerful, personal Creator. Walden’s predicament comes from having his authorities inverted. The sun is subservient to the Son, not the other way around. There may be nothing new under the sun, but if the Son shall make you free, you shall be free indeed (John 8:36).