Rep. Rush Holt from New Jersey wants to give Charles Darwin a special birthday celebration on February 12, 2013 to acknowledge the atheist icon’s 204th birthday. He wants to call it “Darwin Day.” Every day is Darwin Day in the United States. Darwinism is taught in our nation’s government schools. It’s America’s unofficial State religion. Any competing theory is hauled into court and dismissed as being unscientific. To speak against Darwin is to commit blasphemy. Darwinism is an atheistic religion masquerading as science. By the way, there was a big celebration of Darwin in 2009 on his 200th birthday. Can the atheists at least wait another 100 years? I’ve never heard of a celebration on the 204th year of a famous person’s birth. It shows how religiously committed they are to the man who wasn’t even the first to propose what he proposed.
Holt isn’t the first guy to propose a “Darwin Day.” Self-professed atheist and California congressman Peter Stark offered an identical resolution in 2011. Darwinism isn’t about science; it’s about human autonomy.
Charles A. Hodge concluded in his 1874 book-length critique of evolution, What Is Darwinism?, that Darwinism is “atheism.” “This does not mean . . . that Mr. Darwin himself and all who adopt his views are atheists; but it means that his theory is atheistic, that the exclusion of design from nature is, as Dr. [Asa] Gray says, tantamount to atheism.” ((Charles Hodge, What Is Darwinism? And Other Writings on Science and Religion, eds. Mark A. Noll and David N. Livingstone (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1994), 159–60.))
Today, however, Darwinism is the scientific “proof” that there is no God. Richard Dawkins , the high priest of the New Atheist movement, and a religious Darwinist himself, proudly declared that “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.” ((Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design (New York: W.W. Norton, 1986), 6.))
Holt may deny that he’s an atheist or that Darwinism promotes atheism, but that’s not the way today’s evolutionists see it. There is no meeting of the minds between evolution and Christianity or any other religion. In a 2011 interview, Dawkins said the following about his own religious evolution from “Christian theism” to deism to atheism:
[B]y far the most important was understanding evolution. I think the evangelical Christians have really sort of got it right in a way, in seeing evolution as the enemy. Whereas the more, what shall we say, sophisticated theologians are quite happy to live with evolution, I think they are deluded. I think the evangelicals have got it right, in that there is a deep incompatibility between evolution and Christianity, and I think I realized that about the age of sixteen.
Rep. Holt’s claim that Darwin was the first Darwinist is mythological. There were people before Charles Darwin who proposed a theory of evolutionary development. Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802), Charles’ grandfather, had set forth the theory in his day, and it wasn’t unique to him. “Evolutionary thought, the conception that species change over time, has roots in antiquity, in the ideas of the ancient Greeks, Romans, and Chinese as well as in medieval Islamic science.” It might go back as far as the Egyptians who believed that all of life came into being from the sun interacting with the waters of the Nile.
In 1837, Darwin wrote in a notebook “one species does change into another.” There is no empirical evidence that this is true. Changes take place within species, but no one has observed one species changing into another. Darwin’s scribble was not science; it was wishful thinking. He had proposed what he and others have never proved.
Darwin was no biologist. If he could have seen into the inner workings of the cell, he would have realized that its intricate design made evolution impossible. Michael Behe has shown that “irreducible complexity” renders gradual evolutionary change unworkable. An irreducible complex system is one “composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning.” This means, for example, you couldn’t have a working digestive system unless the system was working with all the needed parts from the start.
“The idea of Darwinian molecular evolution is not based on science. There is no publication in the scientific literature—in journals or books—that describes how molecular evolution of any real, complex, biochemical system either did occur or even might have occurred. There are assertions that such evolution occurred, but absolutely none are supported by pertinent experiments or calculations. Since there is no authority on which to base claims of knowledge, it can truly be said that the assertion of Darwinian molecular evolution is merely bluster. ((Michael J. Behe, “Intelligent Design Theory as a Tool for Analyzing Biochemical Systems,” Mere Creation: Science, faith, and Intelligent Design, ed. William A. Dembski (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1998), 183.))
All that evolutionary biologists have in response is a theory as to how complex systems c_ould have_ evolved. Anybody could do that. There is no empirical evidence for the “could have.” In addition, there is nothing in a biologist’s experience where evolution can be seen to take place. Remember what an evolution has to prove: that nothing became something and that something organized itself into what we see today in the complexity of life on this and no other planet.
Holt goes on to make another misleading claim in his resolution:
“Without Charles Darwin, our modern understandings of biology, ecology, genetics, and medicine would be utterly impossible, and our comprehension of the world around us would be vastly poorer.”
What nonsense. A person does not have to believe in evolution to be a great biologist, work in the field of genetics, or advance in the field of medicine. In fact, the opposite is the case. The uniformity of nature, the lack of any observable evidence of one species evolving into another, and the impossible claim that life can spontaneously appear from non-life, worse, from nothing, are three indicators that evolution is impossible.
An evolutionist looks at an automobile, a computer, and a house and his scientific mind tells him somebody designed and built them. This same evolutionist looks at the human body and fools himself into believing that it evolved over eons of time with no design or direction.
I don’t think so.