Ex-Christians: The Evolution Factor
Why are the liberal churches losing so many young people?
On ReligiousTolerance.org, we find the following note concerning Retaining the Young:
“It is common for young adults to drift away from the faith group of their youth. Some never return. The large liberal and mainline Christian denominations seem to lose large numbers in this way. Only between 10 and 12% of those identifying with the Congregational, Episcopalian, Methodist, Presbyterian, and United Church denominations are between the ages of 18 and 29.”
One has to think that one of the more probable reasons is that people want something they can hang their hats on. They don’t like inconsistencies and hypocrisies in general, much less in their faith traditions.
In the case of Christianity, I’ve often been asked why liberal Christians bother with Christianity at all! They don’t believe the Bible, our sourcebook, is accurate. Many of them don’t believe in miracles, angels or even a literally resurrected Christ, though Paul stated that believing that God raised Christ from the dead is a condition of our salvation!
They replace these doctrinal truths with a fuzzy sort of lukewarm social gospel. They say they wish to emulate Jesus, though they don’t believe even half of what’s been printed about Him.
Whatever their own reasons for embracing such a contradictory faith, their children tend to see the situation more critically than they. They want no part of Limbo. They’d rather be hot or cold.
If you listen to the testimonies of these refugees from Limbo, you find a common thread. Amid the muddle of charges against Christendom, we find that almost all of their stories mention that once evolutionism was explained to them as a fact that they began to find fault with the Bible.
Huston Smith comments on this trend:
“One reason education undoes religious belief is its teaching of evolution; Darwin’s own drift from orthodoxy to agnosticism was symptomatic. Martin Lings is probably right in saying that ‘more cases of loss of religious faith are to be traced to the theory of evolution… than anything else.’ (Studies in Comparative Religion, Winter 1970.) – quoted from Christian Century, July 7-14, 1982, p. 755.
Once they lost faith in the Beginning, they began to echo the Serpent’s question “Did God really say?” and then they began to doubt the rest, until it all seemed pointless.
They recognized the truth of atheist Frank Zinlder’s assessment:
“The most devastating thing though that biology did to Christianity was the discovery of biological evolution. Now that we know that Adam and Eve never were real people the central myth of Christianity is destroyed. If there never was an Adam and Eve th ere never was an original sin. If there never was an original sin there is no need of salvation. If there is no need of salvation there is no need of a Saviour. And I submit that puts Jesus, historical or otherwise, into the ranks of the unemployed. I think that evolution is absolutely the death knell of Christianity.”
–[Frank Zindler, debate with William Craig, Atheism vs Christianity video, Zondervan, 1996.]
Or G. Richard Bozarth:
“Christianity has fought, still fights, and will fight science to the desperate end over evolution, because evolution destroys utterly and finally the very reason Jesus’ earthly life wassupposedly made necessary. Destroy Adam and Eve and the original sin, and in the rubble you will find the sorry remains of the son of God. If Jesus was not the redeemer who died for our sins, and this iswhat evolution means, then Christianity is nothing.” — quoted from The American Atheist, September 1978, p. 30.
Those who embraced evolutionism as fact rejected Christianity wholesale, recognizing that what was being presented as scientific truth completely contradicted what they’d been taught as religious truth.
For example:
They are taught that scientific can be proven, but religious truth must be taken by faith. If they contradict one another, who can blame them for picking the one they’re told can be proven?
Some of these ex-Christians were familiar with Creation Science, but were smugly assured that it was pseudoscience, so it was rejected without having ever seriously examined it’s arguments. After all, if evolutionism was true, why examine the alternatives? Most never challenged the claims of evolutionism itself, it being firmly established by the weight of scientific authority and the smug intolerance of their teachers, professors and peers. Not once did they suppose that the high wall of protection around evolutionism wasn’t a symbol of its inconquerable might so much as a testimony to how badly the theory needed protection from simple, honest criticism.
Observable, testable, repeatable science has given us many discoveries and innovations. Some have conflated the theory of evolution with such science and believe the lie that molecules-to-man evolutionism is a foundational scientific truth upon which rests much of human knowledge and achievement. Yet most of the disciplines within science, even within biology itself, were founded before Darwin or by scientists, like Mendel, Owens and Agassiz who actually rejected his theory. Creationists today continue to practice normal, experimental science without need of evolution.
The fossil record still fails to yield the innumerable transitional forms predicted by his theory. A century and a half later, we have only a handful of dubious candidates which could as well be mosaics like the platypus as true transitional forms.
Darwin believed that natural selection was a creative mechanism that facilitated fish-to-philosopher evolution; however, it is now acknowledged that few mutations are beneficial and none add the genetic information required of Darwin’s theory. Instead, natural selection is a conservative process that weeds out harmful mutations but allows survival adaptations within created kinds, so that a dog is still a dog, be it a wolf, a German shepherd or a teacup poodle.
Since real, experimental science stubbornly fails to validate its claims, it must continue to adapt itself to avoid falsification. The Modern Synthesis [MS], Neo-Darwinism, suggested that genetics would be the key, but the cell has turned out to be an impossibly complex world of molecular machines containing a mind-boggling amount of information, encoded in our DNA. This level of information and complexity suggests intelligent design, not blind evolution. Undaunted, evolutionists will unveil the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis, [EES] or Post-Darwinism in 2009 to further adapt this failed theory.
Evolution is not observable, testable, repeatable science. It’s a belief about the past, an atheist Just-So Story seeking to displace the divinely revealed Creation record. It’s based on the flaw of naturalism, which begs that all problems must have a natural explanation, so God isn’t needed. This stands directly at odds with the Biblical claim that God’s existence, eternal power and Godhead are self-evident in His Creation, for it excludes His very possibility from all consideration. Faulty assumptions lead to faulty conclusions!
It’s time to judge this tree by its fruit! Evolution is a lie which undermines the authority of the Bible, shackles science with an unfalsifiable Just-So Story based on the faulty premise of naturalism and causes our children to reject religious truth wholesale! There are organizations, like the Kanawha Creation Science Group, who are dedicated to bringing to light scientific evidence against evolutionism and for creationism. Some of the more popular ones are:
It’s time to equip ourselves and educate our churches, so that they may know they can trust the Bible from the Very First Word!
On Behalf of the KCSG and the Creation Letter Project,
Rev. Anthony Breeden
The Creation Letter 
Trackbacks