Making a monkey out of Christians

I recall being somewhat taken aback some years ago as I sat with a group of pastors in a large Midwest city, after a pastor of a large "conservative" evangelical church shared an experience. He had preached against abortion, special rights for sexual behavior and other "controversial" topics, but he said by far the largest negative reaction he ever had from within his congregation was when he took on Darwinian evolution.

He knew he had many in the government education field attending his church, but he did not realize that he had a large block of "theistic evolutionists" as part of that package. This was in the same state, by the way, that has had two nationally visible battles on their state board of education over allowing something besides the theory of evolution to be taught.

While the scientific, media and politically liberal classes gush over the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin, as always I think it vital that focus be placed on those who should not so easily fall for the increasingly discredited postulations of a pseudo scientist.

That, of course, is none other than those of the Jewish and Christian adherents in particular who claim to believe in the orthodox teachings of our respective faiths. However, as we well know, there are those in both faith groups who have departed from that and many other traditional beliefs.

"I am not ashamed to have a monkey as an ancestor," declared Senior Pastor Henry Brinton of Fairfax Presbyterian Church in a recent radio debate with author, speaker and evangelist Ray Comfort.

"We believe that the theory of (Darwinian) evolution is a foundational scientific truth," hundreds of "Christian clergy" affirmed as part of the Evolution Weekend, Clergy Letter Project.

We can certainly understand how the atheists, agnostics, skeptics and others in the non- or anti-religious categories so easily accept the premise that all living things, including humans, evolved from a single-cell micro-organism by random mutation. Because they believe that material is all that exists anyway, someone had to come up with a theory they could cling to.

However, as Ken Ham, creation apologist and founder of the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Ky., states, "God tells us that on the same day He made all animals that walk on the earth (the sixth day), He created man separately in His own image with the intent that man would have dominion over every other living thing on Earth (Genesis 1:26-28). From this it is clear that there is no animal that is man's equal, and certainly none his ancestor."

The simple explanation for Rev. Brinton and his "Christian" allies on the side of Darwin is that they first rejected the inerrancy, infallibility and inspiration of the Holy Scriptures, which left the door open wide to embrace other "truths" and what amounts to the most successful fairy tale in all of history.

First and foremost for Christians is the very word of the sovereign God of the universe in Whom we claim to believe. As Dr. Ham stated above, there is no wiggle room for anything other than what God said – man and animal were created distinctly and separately.

We were made in HIS likeness, meaning the non-physical attributes that did not take place until the Creator breathed His "neshamah," or spirit, into the man made by Him from the dust. But certainly we could have simply evolved from amoeba to frog to monkey to man before He "breathed," could we have not?

Only by saying that Scripture is invalid and full of errors, then ignoring the abject lack of any evidence of physical evolution in mankind, combined with overlooking the intentional deceptions used to "create" Nebraska Man, Piltdown Man, Australopithecus afarensis (currently being marketed as "Lucy") and other human "ancestors," can a person arrive at the conclusion that we are the products of evolution. (See "Did Humans Really Evolve From Ape-Like Creatures?")

If the foundational consequences of this cosmic battle were not so tragic, it could be written off as just another theological dispute or the typical tension between religion and science, as if there really is such a tension. Think about it.

If parents and pastors teach children on Sunday that they are unique creations of a loving, personal God who made Himself known through His created order, the life, death and resurrection of His Son and the "breathing" of His written word to provide absolute truth – and then from Monday to Friday for 16 years they are taught they are a biological accident by random chance, simply a higher form of animal and that the only moral order is that which they determine for themselves …

Do you think we should be shocked when generation after generation of young people grows up to act more and more like the animals they believe they are?

Finally, if pastors do not take this issue on aggressively, teaching both Scriptural truth and sound scientific and historical evidence to refute this destructive lie, we cannot be surprised when Christianity is shelved under "religion only" in the lives of our congregants to pull off in a crisis like a pain medication, then placed back and ignored for all other arenas of life.

Just as Abigail Adams, wife of President John Adams, stated that "A patriot without religion is as great a paradox as an honest man without the fear of God ...," I assert that any so-called Christian and most emphatically any member of Christian clergy who embraces the deception of Darwinian evolution is no more a Christian than the chimpanzees from which he or she claims to have evolved.