Imagine your banker installed a new accounting system. It has all sorts of bells and whistles, syncs up with a handy app on your phone, and makes financial transactions much more transparent and convenient. There’s just one tiny glitch written into the code: However much you deposit or transfer, whatever your previous balance may be, the program always manages to multiply your funds by a single number: zero. And that’s how much you now have in savings. Nothing you or the banker can devise will ever correct this error—which may outweigh all the new system’s other advantages.

Imagine the banker is stubborn. He explains to you that he did extensive research to find the very best system. It comes highly recommended, with gold stars and industry awards. It’s the same system which other, more prestigious bankers are employing, and he feels professional pressure to install and maintain it.  If he tries to go back to the old “obsolete” system which doesn’t delete all your money, he would put his own job in danger. Given these problems, he implies your complaints about this new progressive system seem to reflect a narrow, self-serving perspective.

How long would you listen to this banker’s arguments, before finding a new bank and contacting federal regulators?

Before you answer, remember that the Western world has been listening to Charles Darwin and his followers for more than 160 years. And Darwinist materialism exerts the same effect as that progressive banking software’s pertinacious zero: It negates all that came before in terms of meaning and morals. I wrote a few weeks ago at The Stream about Darwin’s

broader project, which came to permeate every aspect of Western culture: the effort to explain away human life, all life, and finally the entirety of the universe, as the product of random chance.

That’s a faith-killer. You can’t believe that, even implicitly, and still cling to faith in the God of the Bible. The Jewish and Christian traditions teach us that life is a wondrous, mysterious gift from an all-knowing, all-loving Mind. Since Darwin’s time, every intellectual discipline, from the hard sciences to religious studies, has striven to prove the opposite: Life is just some flotsam that happened to wash up on the beach. Those two views can’t be reconciled, full stop.

It’s not that Darwin’s view was new or unprecedented. A fascinating new book by my old friend David Klinghoffer, Plato’s Revenge, explains that Darwinism is simply the most rhetorically successful incarnation of the Materialist (or Atomist) worldview that goes back to Democritus, and which has emerged then receded repeatedly over many centuries. You need not deny the overwhelming evidence of the age of the earth, retreat to biblical literalism, or even contest the (speculative but probable) theory that all organisms share a common ancestor, and that new creatures evolved from old. None of that proves or even implies that all those phenomena happened randomly. But that’s the sticking point for today’s dogmatic Darwinists. Contest that, and they caricature you as a “Creationist.”

Darwin’s work didn’t offer new proofs that Materialism is true, so much as dress up a very old argument to accord with 19^th century technological progress. Darwinism isn’t a coherent, persuasive theory so much as the harrumph of a man in mutton chops scolding some annoying Methodist street preacher: “My good man, how can you cling to such ancient superstitions in an age of railways, steamships, and eugenic advances?”

I won’t try here to prove to you that such materialism is false, that the math doesn’t add up, that the astronomical complexity of even the simplest, first form of life can’t be accounted for by random chance—not in the narrow timespan between the cooling of the earth and the first evidence of life. And not even if that time was multiplied by millions or billions of years. How long would it take the sand on a beach to randomly form silicon chips for a supercomputer? Or the winds and erosion to carve out the faces on Mount Rushmore? Add all the time you like. (For much more on the improbability of a liveable universe and of a random chemical origin for life, see Eric Metaxas’ classic Is Atheism Dead? or Stephen Meyer’s The Return of the God Hypothesis.)

Nothing comes from nothing, science really does teach us. So what is the source of the vast, unthinkably elaborate information required to build even single-celled organisms, much less to innovate thousands of ever more rococo creatures, culminating with man? Klinghoffer’s book addresses such questions, popularizing the work of biologist and mathematician Richard Sternberg, who points to an immaterial, theist, Platonist source: the Logos. (Sternberg, some might remember, was ousted from the Smithsonian Institution for daring to publish a single erudite, peer-reviewed article that hinted at support for Intelligent Design. The Darwinist inquisition is much more ruthless and effective than the Spanish version ever was.)

Go read Plato’s Revenge for an eloquent account of the perennial battle between the Atomists and the Platonists, and the surprising appeal of immaterial Forms to famous 20^th century scientists—men who knew enough math to realize that the probabilities of random, drifting matter and energy producing information aren’t so much infinitesimal as impossible. It’s not the verdict of science so much as a nihilistic will to power that multiplies our religious traditions and moral intuitions by zero.

And that has practical, political, life-ruining effects. Many young people who grow up in faith-filled homes report that they began drifting away from the creed of their ancestors after taking a college biology class, where some respected professor invokes sonorous phrases such as Carl Sagan’s “pale blue dot,” and reduces human consciousness to the last, most complex phase of primate evolution. No wonder that the churches have sputtered and failed in their efforts to resist the Sexual Revolution, even its latest and most blatantly unscientific claims about 47 shifting “genders.” As I’ve pointed out before, if a pastor or pope concedes that we’re the products of unguided evolution, then he’s conceding that

all life, including human, is a piece of cosmic happenstance with no trace of a Designer. We’ve trained ourselves to see the existence of the sexes not as some artifact of a loving Maker who has in mind a plan for how we ought to live. Instead, the sexes are just a clumsy, messy means of reproducing the species which happened to confer a greater fitness on some long-ago lower animal, so he survived. We’re no more bound to respect our sexual nature than we’re morally obliged to live as hunter-gatherers, merely because our ancestors did.

https://chroniclesmagazine.org/web/why-we-must-deal-with-darwinism/