In the October 1, 2009 edition of National Geographic a new skeleton was unveiled. According to scientists this is Ardipithecus ramidus, a 110 pound female, but you can call her Ardi. She lived, according to these same scientists, about one million years before Lucy, the previously celebrated connection to our primate past. She also poses new complications because according to this article Ardi means that there is no missing link, that primate and humans share ancestry but that we did not evolve from the apes. All those murals in museums that show the progression from knuckle-dragging chimp to more erect ape to fully walking human have to be papered over now…pity.
But if you think that the discovery of Ardi might put evolutionists on the defensive then you do not understand their deeply rooted faith in the religion of science. While this discovery changes things, even dramatically, it cannot undo years of pagan indoctrination. So while Alan Walker, a Penn State paleontologist can claim that Ardi “shows that the last common ancestor with chimps didn't look like a chimp, or a human, or some funny thing in between,” (what NG concludes is the end of the missing link) his colleagues can merely morph their view on the existence of a missing link and continue beating the drum of evolution. In other words, no missing link, no problem.
Yet the discoveries in paleontology that damage the credibility of evolution are nothing compared to the research being done in other fields. For example, Richard Dawkins wrote a book about thirty years ago titled The Selfish Gene. He was summarizing the work of two biologists, William Hamilton and Robert Trivers. A summary of their work concludes that one of the foundations of evolution, the survival of the fittest theory, is based on the gene, on our DNA. Dawkins takes their conclusions and applies it to morality, a problem for evolutionists.
Like homosexuality, which offers no hope for an offspring and therefore cannot be considered part of the fittest sociologically, morality creates all sorts of problems for evolutionary theory. That’s because people basically are selfish and selfish people tend to do things that help themselves. So why do people help others? Altruism is not evolutionally progressive. So what Dawkins does is he tries to explain how people are moral because they are selfish. Within your own family you help out because they are kin. Dawkins example is a woman who rushes into a burning building to save her two young children. She does so, in his mind, because they share her DNA. She attempts to save them instinctively. Outside the family your morality is explained by the old line “you help me and I’ll help you.” But Dawkins has a harder time explaining why a man might give up his seat to an elderly woman on a bus. He doesn’t know her and cannot assume that she’ll do the same for him at a later time. He calls this “altruism by strangers” and this is not something supported by natural selection. Yet die-hard evolutionists argue that such kindness is actually a selfish attempt to foster a good reputation improving one’s social position and increasing the possibility of a better mating opportunities. In their minds even the most unselfish of acts has a selfish motive and they ascribe this behavior to our selfish gene.
However, as with all the evolutionary theories, there is a missing, an undiscoverable link between what they hypothesize and reality. A mother doesn’t rush into a burning building to save her children just because she bore them physically. A mother with two adoptive children would do the same thing under the circumstances. She wouldn’t argue with herself: “oh yes, I might normally risk life and limb but after all, they aren’t actually my children.” While economic thinker Adam Smith calls morality the “impartial spectator” not every businessman makes every transaction solely because of the personal gain. Some transactions do have altruistic motives. Even the man on the train giving up his seat to the elderly woman: does he actually know these people with whom he is raising his reputation or he just another nameless face on the bus? Fact is, sometimes people are just kind.
What evolution does because it has to in order to survive philosophically is it removes the Imago Dei from man.[1] It snatches the moral conscience from his heart and destroys the essence of agape love. The usual motive behind anyone risking his life for another is love. Jesus says as much in John 15:13. God’s image in man, stamped there by His creative will, though twisted by sin, still remains a powerful influence in our decision making process. If God did not create us then He couldn’t have put His image in our conscience. Evolution has tried to rip it out of our collective chests by saying our choices are instinctive based on chemical process alone. Because God is love we have a capacity to love. Because we are full of sin that love does not always demonstrate itself. We do have a selfish gene. It’s called a sin nature. Evolution misreads our spiritual self in the DNA of our bodies and removes any possibility of love being the motive behind anything. Ultimately, it destroys the foundational motive for the Cross. According to 1 John 3:16 Jesus died there because God loves His creation and desired to redeem it. Evolution has no answer for the Cross because it is a fundamentally flawed theory based on a lie the Devil told to a scientist named Charles Darwin and continues to tell to all those who seek to dig from the earth the bones of ancient animals hoping to call them “cousin.” For Christians trying to combat the powerful force of ideological evolutionary theories our champion is not a great scientist who agrees with our position. Our champion is Jesus Christ and our best argument is His Cross.
