Genesis Ideology Immunizes Against Evil
From several angles, the news shows
that an evolutionary worldview leads
to bad societal consequences
With the death of God, science dies (12 Aug 2024, X post of Jordan Peterson). Nancy Pearcey reposted an X message from @KatKanada showing a clip of Jordan Peterson speaking with YouTuber Christian Williamson about atheism and science. “One of the things that dies when God dies is science,” Peterson begins. Continuing to explain what he means, he says that science requires a belief in Truth and that it is Good to pursue the Truth. He points to Richard Dawkins‘ plagiarism of Christian beliefs. In spite of his atheism, Peterson contends, Dawkins by believing in the scientific enterprise is “walking down a path that is Christian to its core.” Nancy Pearcey, who has written books about this, adds her comment to the post: “Science grew out of Christianity because science requires two fundamental convictions—that the universe has an intelligible order AND that the human mind is capable of discerning that order.”
Update 8/13/24: Speaking of Richard Dawkins, Evolution News mentioned an ironic post from Dawkins about how his entire Facebook account was temporarily censored apparently because he had posted his view that “genetically male boxers… should not fight women in Olympics.” Genesis, as everyone knows, teaches that “So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them” (Genesis 1:27). But according to the Darwinian theory Dawkins adores, gender is a product of natural selection. A consequence of that belief is that truth evolves according to those in power, because “fitness” is the only value.
Predatory conferences are on the rise. Here are five ways to tackle them (30 July 2024, Nature). The Editors of Nature are worried about “predatory conferences” that lure scientists to attend and present their findings outside of the standard journals. But on what basis can they voice opposition to this trend? The evolutionary worldview sees the rise of predation as a normal outcome of natural selection. It takes a belief in transcendent non-evolving moral standards like “Thou shalt not bear false witness” to oppose dishonesty and subterfuge.
When godliness goes up, misconduct goes down (8 Aug 2024, George Mason University). This surprising article from a typically materialist university found that financial advisers who are “godly” commit less fraud and misconduct with their clients’ money.
The researchers used a data-set tracking misconduct among 462,000 U.S.-based financial advisors, which they cross-referenced with county-level religiosity (i.e. church membership) information from the Association of Religion Data Archives. They found strong evidence of an inverse relationship – the more religious a county was, the less misconduct was found among financial advisors working in that area.
Church leaders: If you think you’re neutral, you’re drifting left (10 Aug 2024, Clear Truth Media). Evangelicalism in America is not immune to the entropy of leftism, writes Joel Berry in a review of Megan Basham‘s new book Shepherds for Sale. This book is stirring a hornet’s nest of reaction from critics and supporters of Basham’s thesis, that leaders in Big Eva (Big Evangelicalism) have been selling out to leftist activists either intentionally or not.
But something strange happened in the ensuing two decades. Every one of these “politically neutral,” “gospel-centered” leaders and institutions, almost to the last man, drifted left politically.
There’s been a lot written about how and why this happened, the latest of which is Megan Basham’s excellent new bestseller Shepherds for Sale, which talks about how lust for money, power, influence, and respect from the world led our Evangelical leaders astray.
Whether or not that is the case for individual pastors and influencers, Berry fingers Darwin as the cause of the leftist political mindset:
And right now, the culture, all our institutions, our politics, and our pop-culture, are all moving Left. Christians aren’t leading the way in this drift. At this point, they’re just along for the ride. At the highest levels of Leftism both culturally and politically, you see people who are unapologetic about their hostility towards God and everything good, true, and beautiful. The Leftist movement starts with the assumption of a godless universe populated by an animal species that through evolution can build heaven here on earth. All their politics follow from that beginning. Every power center on earth, almost without exception, is following their lead.
Incidentally, John G. West (head of the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture) gave a good review of Shepherds for Sale. Like Berry, West noted that many evangelical leaders and pastors, eager to appear neutral politically, are quick to tell their congregations that ‘God is not a Republican’ but not nearly as eager to point out the harms of LGBTQ, abortion, climate change, and other anti-Biblical moral positions of the left. This dual standard of political ethics, and its causes, is the subject of Basham’s book, and the reason that Berry titled his essay, “If you think you’re neutral, you’re drifting left.” Leftism, he says, is like a river running against Biblical morality, “a rushing force of nature that’s doing everything in its power to drag you in one direction.” Pastors cannot pretend to be a neutral stick in this river.
Update 8/14/24: Why progressivism destroys everything (14 Aug 2024, World Magazine). In this essay Andrew T. Walker begins by asking, “Do you ever wonder why everything progressivism touches eventually rots?” With lessons of history behind us, we should know better. The rot spreads up from the foundation:
Progressivism is fundamentally materialistic (John Lennon’s “Imagine” and its “No hell below us, above us, only sky” comes to mind). There is no god outside of progressivism’s own sovereignty. It has no moral limits outside of the claims it makes for itself. All its self-ascribed omnicompetence and omnibenevolence determine what good or evil is. Its claims are, therefore, totalizing. Like a gelatinous blob, it oozes into every corner of existence to conquer it.
It assigns itself godlike abilities. But since there is no sovereign God in the progressive secular universe, the most expansive action that can be taken in God’s absence is activism through the social collective. Progressivism comes down to working through the one vehicle that relies upon the preponderance of godlike sovereignty: the state. So, in this accounting, the state takes on similar powers as if it were God. But it is not God. A not-sovereign that acts sovereign will misuse and abuse this pseudo-sovereignty.
The end result is totalitarianism. “Whereas Christianity honors the Creator-creature distinction,” Walker writes, “progressivism recognizes no Creator-creature distinction and bends toward totalization.” And because it rejects creation and fancies itself as a god, progressivism twists and distorts the ideas of the good, the true, and the beautiful. As a result, everything it touches becomes “disfigured, disordered, and frayed.”
Other reviewers have noted the analogy of spiritual entropy that pulls downstream with the culture. It must be resisted by actively swimming upstream against the current. The reason for the entropy is our sin nature as sons of Adam and daughters of Eve that began in the Garden of Eden when the first human parents sinned. If not resisted, this nature leads to predatory science, financial misconduct, and “shepherds for sale” who will violate the core beliefs when tempted by money, fame, or popularity.
The fall in Genesis ended with a promise. God said to Satan the tempter, “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her Seed; He shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise His heel” (Genesis 3:15). That promise has been fulfilled. Jesus Christ, the Seed of the woman (Galatians 3:16), was bruised at the cross but never ceased to be God in His physical death; He rose again in power and is now interceding for believers at the right hand of the Father in heaven. Satan, however, was crushed in the head, and will be destroyed forever. Those who by faith are “crucified with Christ” in identifying His sacrifice as their substitute for their own sins (Galatians 2:20, Colossians 2:11-15), are freed in their spirits from the entropy of sin and, though still in the flesh with its fallen tendencies, are now free to walk by the Holy Spirit in newness of life (Colossians 3:1-11).