It's Immaterial

There was much consternation on the blogosphere a month or so ago over the Gallup poll t hat showed that in this country very few believe in evolution.  46% believe God created humans in pretty much the present form, 32% believe God somehow guided evolution and only 15% believe evolution occurred with no help from a deity.

The lament seems to be that somehow science education has failed or worse, the false science of Creationists has poisoned the minds of too many of the undereducated folks in flyover states.  I find that hard to accept.  For decades evolution has been taught virtually unchallenged in public education and major science programs on popular and public TV have also pushed the standard Darwinist viewpoint, while one would be hard pressed to find a "creationist" view tolerated on virtually any mainstream media outlet without considerable qualification.  In addition, Intelligent Design views are almost universally disdained in mainstream media and academia while in the courts ID is lumped in with creationism as an enemy to be vanquished.  (More)


Darwin's dangerous idea has enjoyed immense favor for most of the last century and the first 12 years of this one.  Yet with all the advantageous positioning of the naturalist-materialist view of origins, only a little more than half accept Evolution in any major form and only 15% accept evolution as an unguided purely natural process.  Why?

I think it is very simple.

In its pure form, evolution is a purely materialistic view of origins.  But everything that we human beings depend on to give meaning to life are immaterial.  Love, loyalty, faith, morality, virtue, honor, integrity - all these are ideas that are hard to pin down as purely material effects from natural causes, and in fact to do so is to destroy their meaning.  As C.S. Lewis famously pointed out, if my immaterial thoughts are merely the result of electro-chemical impulses in my brain then there is no reason to think my thoughts are true.

And I think the average man on the street intuitively understands that even if he cannot articulate it.   Nothing comes from nothing.  Meaning does not come from meaningless, purposeless, unguided events.  Life makes no sense if matter, energy, time and space are the ultimate realities and all that has developed is simply a chain of cause and effect from unguided and undirected events in the past.  At its most basic and primal level, materialism and materialist explanations for reality violate everything that makes us human.

So on that level, 150 years of compiling evidence for origins through unguided natural processes comes to nothing - for not only are there no answers down that path, the questions themselves become irrelevant.  And the average Joe intuitively knows better.

So Darwinists need to stop gnashing their teeth over the alleged lack of good science education.  They are utterly missing the point.   Add 100 times the amount of evidence currently collected and materialism will still not make sense to the majority of thinking, feeling, living human beings.  Men created in the image of God generally know that there is something more to reality than nature and natural law.

And once one accepts that there is something "beyond nature", lots of alternative explanations become plausible.