Recently I watched an episode of “Bang Goes the Theory,” a British popular science program. One segment featured Richard Dawkins, a famous militant evolutionist and atheist, explaining the evolution of the eye to one of the presenters. He described the beginnings and evolution of vision using light-sensitive spots on ancient worms as the beginning. The presenter lapped up the story he gave her like a happy puppy. The problem is that she was being conned by a slick fraud.

The fraudulence of evolution is not my idea. Malcolm Muggeridge, a renowned British journalist and broadcaster, after a speech in 1980, answered a question concerning evolution as follows. “I myself am convinced that the theory of evolution, especially the extent to which it has been applied, will be one of the great jokes in the history books in the future. Posterity will marvel that so very flimsy and dubious an hypothesis could be accepted with the incredible credulity that it has.”

Dawkins spoke as if genetic biology does not exist. Thus he avoided current questions regarding the development of sight such as How are photo-reactive chemicals biologically produced? What places the chemicals at a given spot just under the worm’s skin? How is the nerve function made, then connected to the light-reactive spot, and thus able to sense the change in the chemical molecules? How is the change in light level sent to a muscle function that acts to move the worm in a way that is beneficial to it so it can be naturally selected to continue its existence. Dawkins’ mythology is that the worms decided that it would be good to be able to sense where light was and so they decided to evolve a way to do it.

A French philosopher, Etienne Gilson, wrote in 1975 that evolution was “bad science and worse philosophy.” If intelligent people like Muggeridge and Gilson saw more than 30 years ago that evolution was defective, why has it claimed a larger and larger role in popular culture? While it is true that evolution appears to push God out of biology, there are probably not enough atheists to account for its wide acceptance, so other reasons must be sought.

There seem to be two aspects, that are diametrically opposed features of evolution, that have given it its strength. One feature is that it eliminates human responsibility. If we are products of primeval slime arriving at what we are by way of primates, how can we be held accountable for doing anything other than eating, drinking, sleeping, copulating, along with some war, child care, and recreational pleasures thrown in. There is no reason for any larger loyalty than to our own selves. Certainly there is no need for responsibility to a community, a nation, or to the rest of the people in the world. As for passing along our genes or our culture, all that can be forgotten.

I think the other appeal of evolution is that it makes what Satan told Eve in the Garden of Eden appear true. Satan said, “For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3:5, NIV). By eliminating God from human culture, evolution allows people to decide for themselves what is good and what is evil. However, Satan is a liar, and Eve quickly became one when she told herself she had disobeyed God because the fruit was good for food, pleasing to the eye, and provided wisdom (Genesis 3:6, NIV). There was other good fruit in the Garden but what she wanted from eating that particular fruit was to decide for herself what was right and wrong. Evolution supports the tendency we inherited from Eve of thinking we can make our own rules for our lives. However, thinking that we can invent right rules is as wrong now as it was when Eve first thought it.

The appeal of evolution has in our culture allowed evolutionists to claim all of biology as their own. However, evolution and genetic science are basically incompatible. The theory of evolution came into existence about 100 years before the DNA code was deciphered, and it would have taken something like divine inspiration for evolutionists to have correctly understood how life works. Evolution’s story in fact has been altered several times since Darwin, and there are now even different sects under the evolutionary umbrella. It is thus not surprising that evolutionists are joining themselves to molecular biology and hoping nobody is going to notice that a paradigm shift has taken place.

I think Christians need to use this paradigm shift very carefully. There is an obvious temptation to answer the question, “Who wrote the DNA code?” by stating it was God. However, creationist explanations do not work for secular scientists nor, remembering the attractiveness of evolution to our culture, are they likely to inspire immediate acceptance among the media or the general population. What we can do as Christians, though, is to keep the lies and mythology of evolution out of molecular biology so we can ensure genetic science is done with integrity.

Part of the reformation of American Christianity must include our arriving at a common and true understanding of what science tells us about the physical world. Then when nonbelievers come to us, we can show them what physical reality is like and how it makes sense to those who believe in God to accept that it is all created by God.