C.S. Lewis and Evolution

 By Peter Barnes Published 17 Apr, 2007 | Updated 27 Apr, 2007 at Creation Ministries International

Creation Ministries International

Credit: genvessel www.flickr.com.

There would be a strong case for the assertion that C.S. Lewis (1898–1963) has been the most celebrated Christian apologist of the second half of the twentieth century. Even into the twenty-first century Lewis’s popularity shows no sign of diminishing. His war-time radio broadcasts, which aired in 1942–1944, were published in book form as Mere Christianity, which has proved enormously influential. His other books have also found themselves onto the bookshelves of many Christians, notably The Problem of Pain, The Screwtape Letters, Miracles, The Four Loves, The Abolition of Man, and Letters to Malcolm, as well as the seven Chronicles of Narnia and his science fiction trilogy (Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, That Hideous Strength). Even The Pilgrim’s Regress, which Lewis later came to regret somewhat, is applauded by J. I. Packer as ‘the freshest and liveliest of all his books’, and the one that Packer has reread more often than any other.1 For logic, beauty of expression, command of the English language, honesty, earthy wit, and imagination, few writers can equal Lewis—or come near him.
C.S. Lewis as theologian

Theologically, Lewis described himself as an Anglican who was ‘not especially “high,” nor especially “low,” nor especially anything else.’2 He is often regarded as suspect in his views, especially regarding the doctrines of revelation and the atonement. Certainly, Lewis retained some liberal elements in his thinking. For example, he was open on the possibility of persons of other religions belonging to Christ without knowing it.3 Regarding revelation, he declared in an interview conducted in 1944 that ‘The Old Testament contains fabulous elements.’ He considered that the accounts of Jonah and of Noah were ‘fabulous’, whereas the court history of King David was probably as reliable as the court history of King Louis XIV. ‘Then, in the New Testament the thing really happens.’4 It is the sort of view that rightly needs to be criticized by evangelical believers. Lewis held quite a high view of Scripture, but it remained somewhat vague and elusive in places. Not long before his death, he commented that as Christians ‘we still believe (as I do) that all Holy Scripture is in some sense—though not all parts of it in the same sense—the Word of God.’5

Regarding the atonement, Lewis was equally as vague and disappointing. He declared that what matters is that it works, not how it works: ‘The central Christian belief is that Christ’s death has somehow put us right with God and given us a fresh start. Theories as to how it did this are another matter. A good many different theories have been held as to how it works; what all Christians are agreed on is that it does work.’6

Later in life, Lewis appears to have shifted in a direction that was more biblically orthodox. One of his last essays, Fern-seeds and Elephants, is quite a devastating critique of the acceptance of Modernist theology in the Church of England. Lewis’s final sentence is particularly barbed: ‘Missionary to the priests of one’s own church is an embarrassing role; though I have a horrid feeling that if such mission work is not soon undertaken, the future history of the Church of England is likely to be short.’7 Overall, Lewis never regarded himself as a theologian; his strengths lay in his wonderful command of prose and in his clarity of thought.
C.S. Lewis as an atheist

Only in 1929 did Lewis become what he called ‘perhaps the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England’.8 This was a conversion to theism, but it was followed two years later by the acceptance, while being driven to the zoo, that Jesus was the Son of God. Until his conversion, Lewis was a rabid unbeliever, being not simply indifferent to Christianity but decidedly hostile—not unlike Richard Dawkins today. Indeed, Lewis was to refer to this period of his life as ‘the days when I still hated Christianity’.9 He used the traditional argument that the state of the world shows that it is not governed by a good God. In October 1916 he wrote to one who was to be his lifelong friend, Arthur Greeves: ‘I believe in no religion. There is absolutely no proof for any of them, and from a philosophical standpoint Christianity is not even the best. All religions, that is, all mythologies, to give them their proper name, are merely man’s own invention, Christ as much as Loki.’10

Lewis was more philosophical than scientific in his outlook, and so he rarely referred to the evolutionary hypothesis in his rejection of Christianity. One of the few references comes in 1925 when Lewis recorded that Mrs Moore’s daughter, Maureen, had asked him about the theory of evolution. Lewis’s response was straightforward: ‘I explained that the Biblical and scientific accounts were alternatives. She asked me which I believed. I said the scientific. She said “I suppose if one believes in it then, one doesn’t believe in God.” I said one could believe in God without believing in all the things said about him in the Old Testament. Here the matter ended.’11
C.S. Lewis’ early attitude to evolution as a Christian

When Lewis became a Christian, he felt no immediate need to renounce any belief in evolution. In the meantime, Bernard Acworth (a retired Royal Navy captain), Douglas Dewar, and Sir Ambrose Fleming launched the Evolution Protest Movement. Acworth came to seek to enlist the pen of Lewis on the side of the anti-evolutionary creationists. Lewis, however, was reluctant to come on board. On 9 December 1944 he wrote to Acworth: ‘I can’t have made my position clear. I am not either attacking or defending Evolution. I believe that Christianity can still be believed, even if Evolution is true. This is where you and I differ. Thinking as I do, I can’t help regarding your advice (that I henceforth include arguments against Evolution in all my Christian apologetics) as a temptation to fight the battle on what is really a false issue: and also on terrain very unsuitable for the only weapon I have.’12

At this time, Lewis was not convinced that it was wise for Christians to declare war on evolution, and in any case he did not possess enough biological knowledge to make any contribution to the cause of creationism. In The Problem of Pain, written in 1940, Lewis showed his willingness to accept virtually any view of evolution provided the biblical doctrine of the Fall was retained.13
C.S. Lewis’s growing questioning of evolution

However, by 1951 that tone was changing, and Lewis wrote to the same Captain Acworth: ‘What inclines me now to think you may be right in regarding [evolution] as the central and radical lie in the whole web of falsehood that now governs our lives is not so much your arguments against it as the fanatical and twisted attitudes of its defenders.’14 Lewis rarely intruded into the area of science as such but he was impressed by Acworth’s arguments, and wrote: ‘The point that the whole economy of nature demands simultaneity of at least a v[ery] great many species is a v[ery] sticky one.’14

For all that, Lewis refused to write a preface for an anti-evolutionary work on the grounds that he was known to be no scientist. He argued that ‘When a man has become a popular Apologist he must watch his step. Everyone is on the look out for things that might discredit him.’14 He was somewhat gleeful that Piltdown Man had been proved to be a hoax in 1953, but warned that Christians had been guilty too of forged decretals and faked miracles. He had no time for the rhapsodies of Teilhard de Chardin in The Phenomenon of Man, which he regarded as ‘evolution run mad’.14

It was sometime in this period when, at a dinner party where the guests included Helen Gardner, the topic was raised as to whom one would like to meet in heaven. One guest suggested Shakespeare while another suggested the apostle Paul, but Lewis said that he would like to meet Adam. He gave as his reasons:

Adam was, from the first, a man in knowledge as well as in stature. He alone of all men ‘had been in Eden, in the garden of God, he had walked up and down in the midst of the stones of fire’. He was endowed, says Athanasius, with ‘a vision of God so far-reaching that he could contemplate the eternity of the Divine Essence and the coming operation of His Word’. He was ‘a heavenly being’ according to St. Ambrose, who breathed the aether and was accustomed to converse with God ‘face to face’.

Helen Gardner, a church-goer with a deep interest in the seventeenth century English metaphysical poets, ventured to suggest that Adam, if he existed, would be a Neanderthal ape-like figure whose conversation would hardly be interesting. Apparently, Lewis responded in a gruff voice: ‘I see we have a Darwinian in our midst.’15

In a letter to Dorothy Sayers on 4 March 1954 Lewis penned a satirical poem entitled Evolutionary Hymn. Christians with no sense of mockery have sometime asked whether it was meant to be serious, and to be dated from his unbelieving days. Lewis, however, had a well developed sense of satire, and this effort is particularly biting. Its opening stanza is:

Lead us, Evolution, lead us
Up the future’s endless stair:
Chop us, change us, prod us, weed us
For stagnation is despair:
Groping, guessing, yet progressing,
Lead us nobody knows where.

Significantly, this attacks the claims of evolution as a philosophy rather than as a science.

As early as Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis had mocked creative evolution as espoused by George Bernard Shaw and Henri Bergson: ‘The Life-Force is a sort of tame God. You can switch it on when you want, but it will not bother you. All the thrills of religion and none of the cost.’16 Lewis’s interests were more philosophical than scientific, although that should not be interpreted to mean that he espoused a brand of Idealism. Lewis’s views on evolution provide an interesting insight into his questing intellect. Ultimately, they stop short of the full-orbed Christian view, but we can be thankful that he came to see that the evolutionary hypothesis made for bad philosophy, and increasingly came to view its scientific underpinning, in so far as he understood it, as equally as flawed. One wonders what he might have said had his vague acceptance of evolution been shaken earlier. There is a wealth of suggestive possibilities in his 1951 lament: ‘I wish I were younger.’14
C.S. Lewis on materialistic thoughts

‘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. of materialism and astronomy—are merely 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 that the accidental shape taken by the splash when you upset a milkjug should give you a correct account of how the jug was made and why it was upset.’

C.S. Lewis (1898–1963), The Business of Heaven, Fount Paperbacks, U.K., p. 97, 1984.
References and Notes

J. I. Packer, ‘Still Surprised by Lewis’ in Christianity Today, vol. 42, 7 September 1998.

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Glasgow: Fontana, 1975, p.6.

Ref. 2, p.173.

C.S. Lewis, ‘Answers to Questions on Christianity’, in God in the Dock, ed. by Walter Hooper, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1970, pp.57–58.

C.S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms, London and Glasgow: Collins, 1974, p.22.

Ref. 2, p.54.

C.S. Lewis, ‘Fern-seeds and Elephants’ in Christian Reflections, ed. by Walter Hooper, Glasgow: Collins, 1983.

C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, London and Glasgow: Fontana, 1953, p.182.

C.S. Lewis, ‘On the Reading of Old Books’, in God in the Dock, ed. by Walter Hooper, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1970, p.203.

Cited in J. Ryan Duncan, The Magic Never Ends, Nashville, 2001, p.27.

C.S. Lewis, All My Road Before Me: The Diary of C.S. Lewis, 1922–1927, ed. by Walter Hooper, London: HarperCollins, 1991, p.361.

C.S. Lewis on Creation and Evolution: The Acworth Letters, 1944–1960’, www.asa3.org/aSA/PSCF/1996/PSCF3-96Ferngren.html Gary Ferngren and Ronald L. Numbers have put together a most helpful treatment of Lewis’ views on evolution.

C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, London and Glasgow: Fontana, 1975, especially pp.57–76.

C.S. Lewis on Creation and Evolution: The Acworth Letters, 1944–1960’, www.asa3.org/ASA/PSCF/1996/PSCF3-96Ferngren.html

Cited in A. N. Wilson, C.S. Lewis: A Biography, London; Collins, 1990, p.210.

Ref. a ahttps://creation.com/gk-chesterton-darwinism-is-an-attack-upon-thought-itself

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Defending the Authority of Scripture: John MacArthur on Genesis 1-3

 

Defending the authority of Scripture

Lael Weinberger talks with leading Bible expositor John MacArthur

Editors: RIP John Fullerton MacArthur Jr. (19 June 1939 – 14 July 2025).

Pastor MacArthur stood firm on CMI’s primary axiom: the authority of Scripture. As a result, he also taught CMI’s best-known theorem—something logically deduced from the axiom—young-earth creation. He has now heard the word of our Saviour: “Well done, good and faithful servant.”

This interview was published almost 15 years before his death.

Dr John MacArthur

For over forty years of ministry, Dr John MacArthur has had a passion to proclaim the authority of Scripture. His ministry has reached out from Grace Community Church in California to an ever-growing audience around the world. The ministry has taken many forms: radio broadcasts, books, and the training at The Master’s College and Seminary, where Dr MacArthur serves as president.

John recently shared his insights on the church, Genesis, and the interpretation of Scripture in an interview for Creation magazine.

LW: Back in 2001, you published a book, The Battle for the Beginning, on the creation account in Genesis. Why?

JM: During nearly two decades as president of The Master’s College, I had been watching the erosion of belief in Genesis among the Christian colleges in the national Christian college association. Many of these were supposedly conservative in their biblical beliefs, but they were quietly, tacitly denying the authority of God’s Word in exchange for worldly academic esteem. They were doing this by deliberately fudging on their interpretation of Genesis in order to increase their scholastic status. For many of them, abandoning the biblical account of creation proved to be a first step toward relinquishing other key biblical and evangelical essentials. That’s because the eventual crumbling of all biblical conviction is an inevitable by-product of choosing to treat scientific theory as a higher authority than the plain teaching of Scripture. There were more than 100 schools in that coalition, and only a handful held to literal six-day creation.

By 1997, most evangelicals had begun to treat 6-day creationism as a wholly optional belief. In fact, many within the evangelical movement had become openly hostile to young-earth creationism. Some of the most outspoken enemies of a literal interpretation of Genesis 1–3 even today are considered sound evangelicals. These things ought not to be so.

I am persuaded that the biblical account of creation is irreconcilable with macroevolutionary hypotheses. And I wanted to make that point with an exposition of the biblical text.

Some of the most outspoken enemies of a literal interpretation of Genesis 1-3 even today are considered sound evangelicals. These things ought not to be so.

LW: Where is the modern church in understanding the creation account?

JM: Liberal churches embraced Darwinian theories and abandoned the authority of Scripture starting more than a century ago. Most evangelicals held the line on the Genesis account until some began to waver in the 1970s and ’80s. The vast majority of rank-and-file believers in the US still hold to the literal interpretation of Genesis 1–3 in spite of the defection in Christian colleges and universities. But more and more evangelical institutions of higher learning have been shifting to the wrong side of the debate. Most Christian leaders (including some whose personal convictions about the origin of the universe are perfectly sound) remain silent about the issue and allow confusion to fester, rather than dealing with a controversial issue. That’s a recipe for large-scale spiritual disaster, as evangelical students graduate and populate churches, bringing with them the compromised views they were taught in Christian colleges.

LW: You have long taken a strong stand for the historicity of the Genesis creation account. What kind of reactions have you received from fellow evangelical Christians?

JM: Actually, my personal interactions with other Christian leaders on biblical creationism have been encouraging and fruitful. Because I have based my stand on what the text of Scripture says, any Christians who want to challenge my stance would need to make their arguments from the text of Scripture—and that is impossible. My friend R.C. Sproul once embraced the ‘framework hypothesis’ and an old-earth interpretation of Genesis. He even endorsed one of Hugh Ross’s books. But he announced a few years ago that, after a careful study of the Genesis text, he now believes in literal six-day creation.1 I’m grateful for his courage, and I hope many others will follow his example.

LW: Why are so many evangelical Christians confused about the issue?

JM: I think this reflects the failure of evangelical leaders to take the issue seriously, deal with it boldly, and teach Genesis with genuine conviction. … Frankly, however, even among creationists, … not enough emphasis has been given to the actual text of Scripture. While the ‘intelligent design’ movement has gained a little bit of helpful ground, it is a serious mistake and a very bad tactic to shift the argument away from Scripture, making scientific, cosmological, and teleological arguments bear all the weight of our case. The effect has been a diminishing confidence in Scripture among evangelical creationists—some of whom now act as if they are embarrassed to cite Scripture as any kind of authority. Throughout the movement there seems to be a general unwillingness to draw any explicit connection between the intelligent Designer and the God of Scripture.2 If every major scientist finally acknowledged that intelligent design is a clear necessity, but apologists bartered away the authority of Scripture in the process, it would be a very foolish bargain. It’s a prospect that genuinely concerns me.

LW: You have said that those who advocate an ‘old earth’ interpretation of Genesis have done so on an inconsistent and faulty reading of Scripture. Why are so many Christians going this way?

JM: It’s a sinful tendency of the fallen human heart to crave worldly respect, and secular culture has been highly successful in making people think creation is unsophisticated, unscientific, and superstitious. In reality, nothing could be more absurd and superstitious than the belief that everything evolved out of nothing with no intelligent plan.

I do think American evangelicals have clearly become too comfortable with bending the rules of interpretation and playing games with the meaning of the text to reconcile Scripture with whatever is politically correct at the moment (or to achieve whatever other end they desire). You see this not only in the violence that is done by old-earthers to the plain sense of Genesis, but also in the way postmodern evangelicals reimagine so many difficult doctrines—the atonement, the role of women in church leadership, the biblical prohibition against homosexuality, and others.

LW: Would you say that western Christians, including in the US, are hermeneutically illiterate?

JM: Yes, and those who aren’t hermeneutically illiterate are often hermeneutically inconsistent. The illiteracy is the fruit of church-growth philosophies that do everything to capture people’s interest except proclaim and teach the Word of God. For decades evangelicals have been entertaining themselves and calling it worship. The church is now largely untaught and devoid of biblical conviction. It’s not merely a hermeneutical deficiency (though it surely does include that). The bigger problem is a lack of confidence in the efficacy of God’s Word. Christians doubt the power of the Gospel to reach unsaved people and change their hearts, so they have substituted other, artificial means of stimulating church growth. They have lost their confidence in the authority of Scripture as well. As a result, they are susceptible to the worldly lie that science and human reason are better judges of truth-claims than the Bible is.

LW: What can we do about this?

JM: What we need to do is get back to preaching and teaching the Scriptures in the corporate gatherings of God’s people. God’s written Word will not return void.

LW: Many ‘old-earth’ evangelicals say that they’re removing a stumbling block to faith by showing people that you can believe in the Gospel without giving up evolution and billions of years. Is this really a slippery slope of reinterpreting Scripture to conform to naturalistic science?

JM: Of course. The idea that getting in step with the latest scientific theories is ‘best for evangelism’ is a natural result of the loss of confidence in biblical authority. It is much worse than merely a slippery slope; it represents the abandonment of the most important aspect of faith in the Bible—the conviction that Scripture is God’s Word and that it’s the ultimate, inviolable authority over every thought or theory of the human mind.

The so-called ‘framework hypothesis’ and every other literary trick designed to prove that Genesis 1–3 doesn’t mean what it seems to say are all de facto rejections of the authority and perspicuity of Scripture. They represent a refusal to allow Scripture to mean what it plainly says, while relying on novel theories no one ever imagined before to explain the ‘true’ albeit hidden meaning of the text—as if no one unsophisticated enough to deconstruct the literary genre could possibly understand what God was trying to tell us. That is as wrong-headed as it is arrogant.

Evangelicals need to recover their biblical convictions and creationism, and believe what God has plainly said—whether or not worldly minds approve of it. We especially need to have confidence that the Gospel (not clever arguments or human reason) is the power of God unto salvation. The salvation of every sinner is a sovereign miracle of God by the Word of truth (1 Peter 1:23); not a work of man by clever means (John 1:12–13).

LW: Thank you, Dr MacArthur.

First posted on homepage: 26 December 2011
Re-posted on homepage: 17 July 2025

Original article found here: https://creation.com/john-macarthur-interview?fbclid=IwY2xjawLojWxleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHiak2Lif6vqkFWMMAII0VWmRuCjE7sycHV4NDOzKHZ6ZdbU25uPFidngXpQF_aem_RESRIQNNIvYSlxKN2xVXgA

References

1. See Famous evangelical apologist changes his mind; creation.com/sproul. Return to text.
2. Ed: Hence the release by CMI of the important book by Jonathan Sarfati: By Design: The evidence for nature’s Intelligent Designer—the God of the Bible. Return to text.
3. Original article found here: https://creation.com/john-macarthur-interview? fbclid=IwY2xjawLojWxleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHiak2Lif6vqkFWMMAII0VWmRuCjE7sycHV4NDOzKHZ6ZdbU25uPFidngXpQF_aem_RESRIQNNIvYSlxKN2xVXgA
   

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Were the Pyramids Built Before the Global Flood?

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The Waiting Time Problem

 by Don Batten

13 June 2022 

freepik.com / lookstudio

DNA carries the instructions for how and when to make the principal components of cells, called proteins. Different organisms differ in their DNA instructions (composed of DNA ‘letters’, technically called ‘base pairs’) such that they make at least some different proteins.

To change an organism into a different kind, you would have to have a mechanism for changing the letters. For evolutionists, the ‘only game in town’ to change the letters is mutation. Mutations are accidental changes to the instructions, which can be one letter at a time, or multiple letters at once. Letters can be swapped, deleted, or added. Obviously, to change an organism into something more complex, letters would have to be added, not just swapped or deleted.

To change an organism into a different kind, you would have to have a mechanism for changing the letters. For evolutionists, the ‘only game in town’ to change the letters is mutation.

Now consider that human DNA has about 3,000 million letters, which is equivalent to a thousand Bible-sized books. Imagine an ape evolving into a human. We have to add letters—via mutations—to create the information for the features that humans have that apes do not have. This amounts to a difference of at least 10%, compared to our closest relative, according to evolutionists—the chimpanzee.1 That amounts to 300 million letters!

Imagine that an ape has a baby and a mutation has added one letter to the baby’s DNA. Would the mutation be ‘beneficial’ in terms of progressing evolution? ‘Beneficial’ here means only that the baby will grow up to have more offspring than other apes that don’t have the mutation. Would natural selection be able to ‘see’ it and favour the survival of the mutation into the following generations? This is known as ‘fitness’. The probability that this random change will contribute enough to the individual’s fitness for natural selection to be able to ‘see’ it is very low. Evolutionary geneticists acknowledge this.

Now imagine that another mutation occurs, not just anywhere, but next to the one above, in an individual that has the mutation passed on to them. There could be a population of evolving apes, of say 10,000. The ‘right’ mutation is more likely to occur in the offspring of apes other than the one that already has the first such mutation. And then they have to meet, mate, and have babies, which is unlikely. Or, over many generations the mutations might spread slowly through the population, increasing the chance of them getting together in a mating pair. This obviously takes time.

When numerical assumptions are made that favour evolution happening … it takes 84 million years to get just two letters lined up in an individual. This greatly exceeds the timeframe—about seven million years— evolutionists give for the evolution of humans from a common ancestor with chimps.

How much time? Calculating this is complex, taking everything into consideration, such as mutation rate, fitness due to the mutations, number of offspring, generation time, population size, etc. Well, a team of scientists created a computer program, called Mendel’s Accountant,2 which does these calculations. In a review more than a decade after the program was first published, CMI geneticist Dr Robert Carter commented,

We are unaware of any peer-reviewed paper that attempts to refute the methods or conclusions of Mendel. After a decade of established work, there should be something. Their silence is telling.3

The program simulates or models a real population and can work out how long it would take to get these DNA letters lined up next to one another.

When numerical assumptions are made that favour evolution happening, such as unrealistically high fitness from the mutations, it takes 84 million years to get just two letters lined up in an individual.4 This greatly exceeds the timeframe—about seven million years— evolutionists give for the evolution of humans from a common ancestor with chimps. To get just five letters lined up together, the time exceeds two billion years! This is not even a tiny fraction of a single small gene, which might be several hundred letters long. Many genes are thousands of letters long. This is the ‘waiting time problem’—for evolution.

In other words, evolution of humans from apes is not just unlikely or improbable, but impossible.

https://creation.com/waiting-time-problem?utm_campaign=infobytes_uk&utm_content

References and notes

1. Tomkins, J. and Bergman, J., Genomic monkey business—estimates of nearly identical human–chimp DNA similarity re-evaluated using omitted data, J. Creation 26(1):94–100, 2012; creation.com/chimp. Return to text.
2. Sanford, J. et al., Mendel’s Accountant: a biologically realistic forward-time population genetics program, SCPE 8(2):147–165, 2007; scpe.org. Return to text.
3. Carter, R., A successful decade for Mendel’s Accountant, J. Creation 33(2):51–56, 2019; creation.com/mendels-accountant-review. Return to text.
4. Sanford, J. et al., The waiting time problem in a model hominin population, Theor. Biol. Med. Model. 12(18), 2015. Return to text.

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Tracing the Nations back to Babel

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Yale university professor renounces Darwinism!

But what does he believe now instead?

by Matthew Cserhati and Robert Carter

Professor David Hillel Gelernter is a writer, artist and professor of computer science at Yale University. He is a senior fellow in Jewish thought at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem and was also a member of the American Enterprise Institute and the National Endowment for the Arts. He is also chief scientist at Mirror Worlds Technologies. He has published widely in numerous newspapers and written several books. Professor Gelernter has caused quite a buzz recently by publicly renouncing his “faith” in Darwinism, which he describes as a “replacement religion” for troubled souls who desperately need one instead of God.1

…what I have seen in their behavior intellectually and at colleges across the West is nothing approaching free speech on this topic. It’s a bitter, fundamental, angry, outraged rejection [of intelligent design], which comes nowhere near scientific or intellectual discussion. I’ve seen that happen again and again.

Gelernter says that he was swayed by the scientific evidence into abandoning the materialistic theory of Darwinism. Interestingly, most of the evidence that changed his mind falls into three categories of science: natural selection, genetic mutations, and the fossil record, which are three of the five top pieces of evidence that college students use to justify their belief in evolution. Interestingly, our Evolution’s Achilles’ Heels covers these three subjects in depth (chapters 1, 2, and 4, respectively). Notable Intelligent Design (ID) publications which influenced Gelernter’s about-face include Darwin’s Doubt, by Stephen C. Meyer, The Deniable Darwin, by David Berlinski, and Debating Darwin’s Doubt, edited by David Klinghoffer

Some of the arguments that convinced Gelernter

The following are some of the arguments that Gelernter believes discredit Darwinism, taken from his online review of the three previously mentioned works by ID authors.2

The origin of life

Mathematics is the bane of evolution. Probability, specifically, tells us that believing in evolution is akin to believing in miracles. For example, there are only approximately 50,000 known protein families,3 but certain proteins are essential for all forms of life. Most proteins are composed of hundreds to thousands of amino acids. Let’s pick one of these proteins and say that only 150 of the amino acids are necessary for it to work. What is the probability that this one, short protein would evolve in the primordial soup? You can think of the amino acids in a protein like beads on a string. Each position along the string can hold any of the 20 amino acids. Thus, there are 20150 ≈ 10195 possible proteins of this length. This number is much, much larger than the estimated 1080 atoms in the universe.

But bacteria need more than one protein. I published some calculations in 2015 that estimated the probability of a “simple” bacterium evolving with only the very basic essential proteins. The probability of a bacterium evolving from the chemical soup with a mere 1,340 proteins was 10–167,500. We can’t even represent that number with words. That’s smaller than 1 chance in a trillion trillions, and even that is nowhere close. In other words, there is virtually no chance that life evolved; it had to be created. This short exercise gives us the idea of how futile chemical evolution is, and this is only the beginning of probability calculations.

Developmental mutations

Figure 1. The Antennapedia mutation, which involves the mutation of a so-called homeobox gene, causing legs to form in the place of antennae on the head of a fruit fly.

Mutations that affect the later stages of the development of an organism achieve only small adjustments in the organism, affecting only local structures. Examples include mutations that influence the density of fur, the shape of a bird’s beak, or the color of a flower. Such mutations occur frequently and are often not detrimental. In contrast, there are no known mutations which occur very early on during embryonic development. These would fundamentally affect the body plan. From everything we have seen, such mutations are always lethal, leading to a premature death, usually before the organism is even born. At best, they produce a monstrous organism that is inviable in the wild, such as the antennapedia mutation that produces legs in the place of antennae in fruit flies (figure 1). Yet these are the kinds of mutations which are necessary for large-scale evolutionary changes, such as transforming invertebrates into vertebrates. This field of “evo-devo” (short for evolutionary development) has been looking into this for decades, but they have drawn a blank. Tinkering with the fundamental building blocks of living organisms only produces catastrophic results, so evolution can’t even get started. This is where Darwin failed. He noticed changes. But his mechanism for change cannot get over the hurdle of genetics, a field he knew nothing about.

The fossil record

Darwinism is a step-by-step process, yet we see a striking variety of organisms suddenly appearing on the scene during what is called the Cambrian explosion. During a short window of only “a few million years” all major animal groups suddenly appear in the fossil record without any predecessors. This means that life appeared very suddenly on Earth—it makes much more sense if life was instantaneously created, as the Bible says.

The reception in insecure secular academia

Although not completely ostracized by all parties for his change of beliefs (perhaps due to his prestige and his not being a biologist), Gelernter describes the extreme anger and hostility that evolutionists have for anyone who denies their worldview. The reason ‘rational’ scientists, who supposedly apply nothing but impassioned logic to their work, transform into fist-shaking, angry people is, as Gelernter says, that evolution goes beyond science and serves as the basis of their atheistic worldview. According to Gelernter, “You take your life in your hands to challenge it intellectually. They will destroy you if you challenge it.”1 Furthermore, “…what I have seen in their behavior intellectually and at colleges across the West is nothing approaching free speech on this topic. It’s a bitter, fundamental, angry, outraged rejection [of intelligent design], which comes nowhere near scientific or intellectual discussion. I’ve seen that happen again and again.” 1

www.claremont.org

Cartoon depiction of Darwin’s “Two Commandments of Evolution”: Mutations and Natural Selection.

Gelernter also views ID as a viable scientific theory capable of replacing Darwinism. It should not be rejected out of hand in a bigoted manner by evolutionists. He states that design is the most obvious explanation for the complexity of life and says that Darwinism was formulated to explain how seemingly designed organisms assembled themselves by evolution. According to Gelernter, the question of intelligent design, “…is one of the most important intellectual issues of modern times, and every thinking person has the right and duty to judge for himself.”2

Evolution does not have a monopoly over theories of origins, and academia is not the exclusive playground of atheists. Such monolithic thinking on the part of secularists kills critical thinking.

What does Gelernter believe now instead of Darwinism?

Based on his rejection of Darwinism, is Gelernter now a biblical creationist? What does he believe now that he has rejected evolution?

It does not automatically follow that, just because someone gives up Darwinism, they become a biblical creationist. According to Gelernter, he still claims that evolution is a beautiful and brilliant scientific theory, because it can explain large processes in the history of life with a simple mechanism, natural selection. He thinks that the legacy of Darwinism will never truly disappear and that only a Darwinist “heresy” will take its place. At the same time, even though Gelernter admits that living organisms show evidence for intelligent design, he claims that the world is a mess, and that humans are prone to do evil. If left to him, Gelernter would fail the intelligent designer for making such a world. Gelernter doesn’t go the extra mile to accept biblical creation (oddly despite his Jewish roots), because he thinks that the two creation accounts in Genesis chapters 1 and 2 are contradictory. However, we have already dealt with this alleged contradiction in detail.

But Gelernter contradicts himself. How can he fail the intelligent designer who created this world, yet at the same time call evolution a beautiful theory? This is because, according to evolution, nature is ‘red in tooth and claw’. It is all about selfish struggle; the stronger species crushes the weaker species. Death is a necessary element in the endless process of struggle, suffering, and extinction.

As opposed to evolution, the Bible calls death the last enemy (1Cor. 15:26). God is a God of the living and not of the dead. This is why Jesus Christ rose from the grave, conquering death. Death and suffering were never part of God’s original, good design. God is not an ogre to use suffering and death to create life. How opposite life is from death! God did not use evolution to create.

Conclusion: the insufficiency of Intelligent Design

Sadly, the evidentialist approach of the ID movement does not often bear much fruit. We have written much about ID before (our position statement on ID is available here).

… the big problem is that those ID proponents who happen to be Christians are not necessarily attempting to prove a distinctly Christian brand of theism. It would thus make much more sense to deal with Christianity and theism as a unit, and not two separate issues.

As Christians, we should preach the full Gospel. If we convince a person that evolution is inviable, we must also replace this defunct worldview with something else which better explains the origin and meaning of life. Many proponents of ID even believe in a form of guided or ‘theistic’ evolution. The ID movement notoriously tends to leave the Bible out of their discussions, by design. But what do we gain if we prove the existence of a “god”, who may turn out to be Zeus or Allah in some peoples’ minds? Indeed, not all members of the ID community, or the flagship of ID, the Discovery Center, are professing evangelicals. One famous ID advocate (Jonathan Wells) is well-known for being a member of the Unification Church of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon (a.k.a. the “Moonies”), which most evangelicals consider a cult. ID is not enough for saving faith. Rather, we need special revelation–the Bible. As mentioned previously Gelernter doesn’t even believe that the Old Testament is fully historical. In comparison, when we look at the conversion of the famous atheist Anthony Flew to theism in 2004, we also see that Flew ended up as a deist. Flew did not believe in the Trinity or the Resurrection of Christ. Rather he believed in what he describes as Aristotle’s God, a philosophical, rationalistic type of God.

ID attempts to deal with theism first, then Christianity later. However, the big problem is that those ID proponents who happen to be Christians are not necessarily attempting to prove a distinctly Christian brand of theism. It would thus make much more sense to deal with Christianity and theism as a unit, and not two separate issues. ID proponents are in effect appealing to human reason alone to build their case, which is the same method atheists use. What is worrisome is that if their starting point is outside the Bible, their endpoint might also well be the same, as Van Til noted.4 Clearly, we must base our thinking on the Bible as the sole highest authority (Sola Scriptura).

According to Psalm 19:1:

“The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.”

There is ample evidence for the existence of the God of the Bible. We can trust the eye-witness accounts of the Bible. His Word is enough for us (2 Timothy 3:16-17) to guide us unto all truth (John 16:13), not just a partial truth. Thus, while we applaud Professor Gelernter for his bold stance in rejecting Darwin, we plead with him to take the next logical step and accept that Jesus Christ, the Creator of the world, is also his Saviour.

Original article found here: CMI 

References and notes

1. Kabbany, J., Famed Yale computer science professor quits believing Darwin’s theories. thecollegefix.com/famed-yale-computer-science-professor-quits-believing-darwins-theories, 30 July, 2019. 
2. Gelernter, D. Giving Up Darwin. claremont.org/crb/article/giving-up-darwin, 1 May, 2019. 
3. Orengo, C.A., Thornton, J.M., Protein families and their evolution—a structural perspective, Annu Rev Biochem. 74:867–900, 2005. 
4. Van Til, C., The Defense of the Faith, Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co., Phillipsburg, NJ, 1967, pp. 114–122. 

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