Very few people today realize that modern science is based on naturalistic assumptions. Modern science is based on the philosophy or belief system in naturalism. Naturalism is the belief or philosophy which states the following: First, only the natural exists. There is no metaphysical or supernatural. Second, everything can be explained as a result of random natural causes. These two axioms are the foundation stones upon which naturalism is built and of which the General Theory of Evolution is the outgrowth.
In the past science was defined as knowledge, or the search for knowledge, or the search for the truth of the how and the why of nature and the physical world around us. With this definition of science, scientist of the past did not separate their belief in God from their science. In fact, their science was an outgrowth of their belief in God. If there was a rational God who created a rational world then, scientists reasoned, they could search and find out the rationale that God used to uphold His creation. Like Kepler said, “We were merely thinking God’s thoughts after Him.”[1]
Because scientists believed in a rational creator they searched for the rationale behind the creation. Their belief in a Divine Creator did not deter their scientific investigation, but rather justified and enhanced their scientific inquiry. Indeed, their scientific inquiry was a result of their belief system and their belief system justified scientific inquiry and predicted the results: scientific discoveries of the laws of nature, physics, chemistry etc. In a purely naturalistic world, why should we expect that there be any laws of nature if everything is a result of random, uncaused processes? As C.S. Lewis expressed in the following quote:
If the solar system was brought about by an accidental collision, then the appearance of organic life on this planet was also an accident, and the whole evolution of Man was an accident too. If so, then all our present thoughts are mere accidents - the accidental by-product of the movement of atoms. And this holds for the thoughts of the materialists and astronomers as well as for anyone else's. But if their thoughts - i.e., Materialism and Astronomy - are mere accidental by-products, why should we believe them to be true? I see no reason for believing that one accident should be able to give me a correct account of all the other accidents. It's like expecting the accidental shape taken by the splash when you upset a milk-jug should give you a correct account of how the jug was made and why it was upset.[2]
In other words, naturalism does not make sense. Nevertheless, it appealed to man’s baser instincts and therefore it took hold in the hearts and minds of the men who wanted to be free from the moral constraints of formalized religion and a God of retribution.
So we see, as a reaction to the moral restrictions imposed by the religious element of society in the 18th and 19th century and earlier, learned men, wishing to free themselves from the shackles of religiosity, began to oppose Biblical interpretations of nature. As an outgrowth of the Age of Reason, as opposed to the age where men accepted things by faith, because that is what the Church taught; and as a result of the political and social upheavals of the 18th century with the French and American Revolutions, enlighten thinkers began to promote naturalism. By the late 1700’s and early 1800’s naturalism made headway in the scientific community.
Scotland’s James Hutton’s book The Theory of the Earth promoted uniformitarianism. Uniformitarianism is the belief that only natural processes happening in the present can be used to explain the world around us and its past history. Hutton’s mantra was “the present is the key to the past.”[3] Later, Charles Lyle’s Principles of Geology published in 1830 built on Hutton’s ideas and propagated his naturalistic interpretations as the correct way to do science and interpret the world around us. Lyle’s goal was to get Moses out of science,[4] and he greatly succeeded. Lyle was a great friend of Darwin and continually encouraged him in his writing of the Origins, so much so, that Darwin confessed that it seemed like his ideas came from the mind of Lyle.
It was not long before the idea that all of life and natural occurrences could be explained by unguided natural forces without soliciting supernatural explanations. Biblical interpretations of past events, or catastrophism seemed childish. By 1855, four years before Charles Darwin published the Origins of the Species, we see Charles Spurgeon, the famous British Baptist evangelist admitting his acceptance of naturalistic assumptions. He said,
Can any man tell me when the beginning was? Years ago we thought the beginning of the world was when Adam came upon it. But we have discovered that thousands of years before that God was preparing chaotic matter to make it a fit abode for man, putting races of creatures upon it, who might die and leave behind the marks of his handiwork and marvelous skill, before he tried his hand on man.[5]
Thomas Chalmers, the Scottish theologian and professor from the University of Edinburgh was the first to popularize the Gap theory early in the 19th century. He accepted the millions of years that both Hutton and Lyell propagated. Chalmers developed the theory mainly for the purpose of accommodating the great ages demanded by evolutionary geologists.[6] Natural theology became the popular theology of the day and was the idea that the science of nature was just as an important “revelation” as the scriptures themselves. The two could not contradict each other.
Rather than look for the weaknesses or faults in the scientific reasoning or assumptions, the 19th century man embraced naturalism as taught by Hutton and Lyle and abandoned the traditional Flood geology. Flood geology which had until then been the accepted method of explaining the geological features lost credibility and the atmosphere was ripe for Darwin’s ideas a few years later. Chalmers’ Bridgewater Treatise was published in two volumes in 1833 and went through 6 editions. His books were effectively an encyclopedia of pre-evolutionary natural history, commissioned and published whilst Charles Darwin was on board the Beagle.
The evolutionist Derek Ager in 1981 commenting on this period of history said the following:
My excuse for this lengthy and amateur digression into history is that I have been trying to show how I think geology got into the hands of the theoreticians (Hutton and Lyle) who were conditioned by social and political history of their day more than by observations in the field… In other words, we have allowed ourselves to be brain-washed into avoiding any interpretation of the past that involves extreme and what might be termed ‘catastrophic’ processes![7]
Evolutionist Stephen Jay Goule when writing about the Great Scablands debate said something similar.
The ‘establishment,’ as represented by the United States Geological Society (a modern day scientific organization), closed ranks in opposition (to a scientist’s interpretation of the geological features that supported catastrophic and therefore Biblical processes)…. Instead of testing Bretz’s flood on its own merits, they rejected it on general principles… Bretz stood against a firm, highly restrictive dogma (uniformitarianism) that never had made any sense: the emperor had been naked for a century. Charles Lyell, the godfather of geological gradualism (uniformitarianism), had pulled a fast one in establishing the doctrine of imperceptible change (uniformitarianism).[8]
Here we see that it was not scientific dating methods that gave us the millions of year, not scientific observations in the field, but theoreticians who had rejected the traditional Biblical analysis of the geological column. The acceptance of millions of years came before any modern day scientific dating methods. Such dating methods proofs were similar to Dr. Jan Baptista von Helmont’s experiment proving that Aristotle’s idea of spontaneous generation was true.[9] His experiment was merely verification. He placed dirty underwear and wheat in an open jar in a corner of the home and left it for two weeks. At the end of which he found adult mice in the jar and concluded that spontaneous generation was true. Today’s modern dating methods all too often fall under this outrageous category. They assume the millions of years and then seek a method that confirms that assumption and are oblivious to any evidence which contradicts or calls into question the conclusions or initial assumptions that were made.
By the middle of the 19th century Biblical interpretations began to be seen as infantile or at least unscientific. Naturalism became accepted as the philosophy of science and religion. Men rejected traditional Biblical interpretations, though few men admitted that it was because of the restrictive moral implications forced on society by the religious institutions. Nevertheless, from the time of the French Revolution there was a new awakening in man’s desire to be a free moral agent, an agent who followed his own dictates rather than those imposed upon him by ancient religious institutions. Men wanted to be free from the laws of touch not, taste not, think not, etc. Religion was seen by many as a hindrance to intellectual progress and, therefore, political and scientific progress. Naturalism was embraced because it eliminated God from scientific inquiry and at the same time freed man from the moral confines that religion demanded. If the world around us could be explained by purely naturalistic means, man would not need to invoke the help of the supernatural and could in a sense free himself from its moral restrictions. Man could be free to act and behave according to his own dictates and not to those of a book written thousands of years before to an entirely different culture and people. These underlining reasons helped lead to the rejection of Biblical interpretations.
Later in the 20th century, we see an interesting confession by Aldous Huxley, the grandson of Thomas Huxley, Darwin's closest friend and promoter. Grandfather Thomas Huxley had done much to help defend the evolutionary theory at its beginnings and is credited to winning the famous Evolution/Creation debate with abolitionist William Wilberforce. Thomas Huxley did more to defend evolution than Darwin himself and became known as Darwin’s Bulldog. However, he was not totally convinced of Darwin’s mechanism for evolution. Later in 1960, grandson Aldous spoke honestly about his own hidden agenda.
I had motives for not wanting the world to have meaning, consequently assumed it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption . . The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world (and this is what evolution ultimately teaches) is not concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics; he is also concerned to prove there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do (moral freedom is the goal, to be free from religion’s restrictive confines). For myself, as no doubt for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation. The liberation we desired was simultaneously liberation from a certain political and economic system and liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom.[10]
So here we see Aldous Huxley, one of the most influential liberal writers of the 20th century, confessing that his rejection of a creator and his support of atheistic/naturalistic philosophy stemmed from his desire for sexual liberty. The apostle Peter in prophetic words had said the following:
Knowing this first, that there shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts, and saying, ‘Where is the promise of his coming? For since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation.’ (This is what uniformitarianism preaches that the present natural processes are the same as those that have been in the past.) For this they are willing ignorant of, that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water: whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished.[11]
In other words, they are willingly ignorant of the creation act by God and the historical global catastrophic flood of Noah.
What has happened down through the centuries is that the false hypocritical religious systems have driven men from God. As men rejected God, they became proud in mind and their foolish hearts were darkened.[12] Professing themselves to be wise, they in fact became fools believing in the illogical and contradictory.[13] Instead of man being made in God’s image, we became descendants of creeping things, birds and four-footed beats, the Theory of Evolution. Saint Paul prophetically predicts the very same in his letter to the Romans.
For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse: Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, And changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and four-footed beasts, and creeping things.[14]
Most people today do not realize they have bought into naturalistic assumptions by accepting the Big Bang and the General Theory of Evolution. Naturalism is so strongly accepted into our society, we no longer reject its tenants conscientiously. We do not realize that the scientific models that we are taught as truths are those models that assume naturalistic assumptions and steer clear of Biblical ones. These models assume there is no metaphysical. They assume that past events can be explained by random natural forces happening today. By changing the definition of science to mean natural processes by which we can explain the world around us, modern day science has eliminated God from the discussion and conned mankind into accepting its naturalistic philosophy without mankind even realizing it.
Let´s take a look at the Big Bang Theory as an example. When formulating their model of the beginning of the universe evolutionists steer clear of anything which validates the Biblical framework. In the Biblical framework we would expect to find our galaxy near to the center of the universe. We would expect to find the universe expanding from that central region. Dr. Russell Humphreys has made such a model and has found some interesting discoveries concerning distant starlight, time and gravity.[15] His model postulates the possibility, because of gravities affect on time, of time passing slower on earth than at the end of the universe. He speculates that although billions of years could have passed at the far distant end of the universe, it could be possible that only six thousand years of earth time passed here on our planet. In choosing his model, Dr. Humphreys starts with a universe with a center and with our galaxy near that center. That would put our galaxy near the gravitational center of the universe. Since it is an established fact that gravity effects time and causes time to pass more slowly, time on earth would be expected to pass slower than time at the outer fringes of the universe where the universes gravitational well would have a much weaker affect. Dr. Humphreys’ universe also has an edge.
However, evolutionists when doing their model of the beginning of the universe avoid those two assumptions made by Dr. Humphreys: the universe has a center and our galaxy is near that center, and the universe has an edge. Internationally renowned astrophysicist George FR Ellis explains it in the following manner:
People need to be aware that there is a range of models that can explain the observations .... For instance, I can construct a spherically symmetric universe for you with Earth at its center, and you cannot prove otherwise based on observations, (that it is wrong) ....you can only exclude it on philosophical grounds. In my opinion, there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. I want to bring into the open is the fact that we are using philosophical criteria in choosing our models. A lot of cosmology tries to hide it.[16]
Ellis is admitting that evolutionists exclude a model like Dr. Humphreys’ because of philosophical reasons. They exclude it because it would give credence to the Biblical story, not because the evidence negates it. The fact is that the evidence supports Dr. Humphreys’ model over the traditional Big Bang model, but because of its Biblical ramifications, Dr. Humphreys’ model is ignored.
Evolutionist Professor of Genetics Richard Lewontin made a similar confession of evolutionist’s anti-Biblical bias. He said,
We take the side of evolutionary science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just so stories, because we have a prior commitment to materialism, that materialism is absolute for we cannot allow a divine foot in the door.[17]
Modern science is full of naturalistic assumptions which are contrary to reality. Because of modern man’s bias against God the naturalistic assumptions are assumed to be true without scientific evidence to back them up. It’s about time we re-evaluate the state of modern science’s condition. Ben Stein’s documentary, Expelled; No Intelligence Allowed, questions modern science’s bias and dictatorial control of modern thinking.[18] Dave Schoch in his book, The Assumptions Behind the Theory of Evolution, has said the following:
The truth can only be made up of facts, not assumptions. We should not be teaching assumptions as facts to our children, especially a theory that only stands upon one assumption after another.[19]
It is about time we take a closer look at our educational and scientific community and see exactly what’s going on. Future generations are dependent on us standing up for our convictions and exposing the false evolutionary doctrine for the mythological hocus-pocus that it is. Let’s get back to true scientific investigation without bias and prejudice whatever form it may take. The future of our children and the world depends upon it!
[3] http://www.thebrpage.net/theanswer/?article=james_hutton_(1727-1797)
[4] http://creation.com/charles-lyell-free-science-from-moses
[5]John Morris: http://www.icr.org/article/826/174/
[6]Gap Theory: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gap_creationism
[7] Derek Ager, The Nature of the Stratigraphical Record, Macmillan, 1981, pg. 46-47.
[8] Stephen Jay Gould, The Great Scablands Debate, Natural History, Vol. 87:7 (Aug.Sep 1978) pg. 12 & 14.
[9] Evolution: the Grand Experiment, page 12.
[10] Aldous Huxley, "Confessions of a Professed Atheist," Report: Perspective on the News, Vol. 3, June 1966, p. 19.
[11] 2Peter 3:3-6
[12] Romans 1:21
[13] Romans 1:22
[14] Romans 1:21-23
[15] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3XSz5TEInU
[16] http://evidencepress.com/short-answers/are-we-in-the-center-of-the-universe/
[17] http://evidencepress.com/short-answers/are-we-in-the-center-of-the-universe/
[18] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5EPymcWp-g
[19] Dave Schoch, The Assumptions Behind the Theory of Evolution, pg.
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