Lee Southard, PhD
July 1, 2018
In my To Know With Certainty classes we talk a lot about the Christian worldview. But there is another worldview to which our youth are exposed. In the book To Know With Certainty evolution is presented as a competing worldview to a Christian worldview. Let’s take a look at an excerpt from it.
A worldview is a particular philosophy of life or conception of the world. It is what you believe, and how these beliefs influence you regarding what goes on in the world, is a result of your worldview. The evolutionary worldview relies on scientific knowledge and reason to explain man’s past and man’s future destiny through the process of evolution.
Evolution’s worldview is captured in the Evolutionary Manifesto that states it “is an intentional attempt to promote the shift to conscious evolution and that evolutionary activism that will drive it.” It seeks a global consciousness and the development of a global society. Part 2 of the manifesto has a position on religion, stating that religions have typically promoted surrender to ‘the absolute,’ acceptance of whatever happens in the world and even physical withdrawal from normal daily life. It argues that evolution and the continuing revelations of science provide humanity with the only way to live life with meaningfulness and purpose. In short, there is no place for God in the strict evolutionary worldview.
Not all people who believe in evolution would subscribe to the Evolutionary Manifesto. They would believe in the fundamentals of evolution that creation of the heavens and the earth and all of life happened by chance as part of natural processes. They would also advocate that there was no supernatural being involved, but they would not share evolutionary activism as stated above to the exclusion of God being involved.
The evolutionary worldview has a level of activism that reaches into the classroom. At the core of evolution activism there is a demand that only evolution can be taught in the classrooms of America. There is no place for any other view especially anything that might lead to the student invoking God as the creator.
One such activist group is the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) whose tag line is “Defending the Teaching of Evolution and Climate Science.” One of their stated tenets is to supply needed information and advice to defend what they term “good science” education at local, state and national levels. These tenets sound good at first glance, because who does not want good science?
But what is good science to NCSE? It is not allowing alternative explanations for the findings of science that don’t fit into the evolutionary dogma. This is not science because it violates the very definition of science to pursue research wherever the data leads.
Scientific data that does point to opposing views such as creationism and intelligent design should be allowed in the classroom and the decisions left up to the students based on all the facts. Let the students intellectually analyze competing views. Let the students reason it out and sift through alternative views and vigorously debate. Isn’t that what we want our graduates to be free thinkers and apply reason? Unfortunately, the evolutionary worldview often drives the agenda.
Evolution is not the only explanation for how living organisms came into being over time. It has become more questionable. How questionable and how controversial it is depends on one’s worldview. Evolution has served as a way to explain in a somewhat systematic and scientific way how the various species might have arisen and how they might relate to each other, but there is a lot of new information that raise doubts about the theory. New scientific findings increasingly point to intelligent design in explaining the origin of man, the pinnacle of all species and of God’s creation, and in biological processes fundamental to life.
