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Evolution as philosophyWhy in our sophisticated and technically advanced culture should a significant group of secularly educated Christians be in rebellion against the teaching of evolution, a concept which has been incorporated into the faith of a large segment of the Christian community? It is to help answer this question that this article has been written. Many of these Christians have been educated in the most respected universities of Australia, England and the United States of America. Some are lecturers in these universities. Many are researchers and teachers. These Christians are a concern, particularly to the non-Christian academic community, because of their stand in favour of the literal Biblical Creation account. They are a concern to the secular humanist and to his educational system because of their persistence in bringing the Biblical Creation account into the classrooms as a viable alternative theory of origins. According to Professor Peter Medawar:
What Medawar has really said is that for himself and those colleagues of similar religious pre-suppositions, the idea of thinking in terms of an infinite Creator instead of an infinite process, of a sovereign God, instead of chance and time; of an immutable Lawgiver, instead of immutable natural laws, is totally unacceptable. These scholars must assign to Creation the eternal and infinite characteristics of the Creator, just as the wise men, intellectuals and priests of the ancient Egyptian, Chaldean, Persian, Greek and Roman cultures did before them. As for the concept of a personal, loving, heavenly Father:
In one of the local news agencies I recently picked out a school project resource material book entitled Early Man. The author makes the following statement;
We have observed what elements of religious faith lie behind the above instruction for children, but what can be said about the philosophical implications of such statements? R.L. Wysong in his book, The Creation-Evolution Controversy, gives the following example of a university student’s analysis of the philosophical implications of evolution:
If man is the result of an impersonal process, plus time, plus chance, what can be said then about his intrinsic worth? It is not surprising that behaviourists like B.F. Skinner, who have had no small impact on teacher training and education theory, think of the individual as a machine whose net worth depends solely on how ‘it’ is programmed by the environment. The general theory of evolution serves as the philosophical foundation of the contemporary humanist. The philosophy of Humanism’s debt to evolution theory can be defined by the following affirmations from the Humanist Manifesto I:
Who is to dictate what is right or wrong for the individual? Without God who is the lawgiver? It is society or society’s leaders. Humanism is not a passive philosophy hiding in the cloistered halls of higher education waiting prey for some misguided intellectual. As Paul Blanchard, writing in The Humanist magazine, extols:
How many Australian school children have fallen victim to similar systemised propaganda? The philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche [1844-1900], was most notably known for his vehement attacks on Christianity and for his ‘God is Dead’ philosophy. He had also developed a philosophy of heredity from Darwin’s postulate of evolution that the fittest for survival dominate the species. In Existentialism — For and Against Paul Raubiczak, professor of philosophy at Cambridge University, observes:
Opposed to this view of man as merely animal is the view of Scripture:
But evolution is not just a philosophy—it is a religion with scientific vestments. |
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