The Survival of the Fittest Churches
13 Feb 2006
Yesterday was Evolution Sunday, a day in which several hundred American churches observed the 197th birthday of Charles Darwin. If you attended a real church yesterday, not one in name only, you probably knew nothing about this illustrious occasion. Understandably, real churches are no more interested in commemorating the birthday of Charles Darwin than the Vietnam Veterans of America are in commemorating the birthday of “Hanoi Jane.”
Evolution Sunday is an outgrowth of the Clergy Letter Project, an effort started by academics and clergy in Wisconsin to discredit anyone questioning evolutionary theory in public schools. One would expect such a project to be spawned in a state like Wisconsin, a state whose capital, Madison, has been described as "eighty-five square miles surrounded by reality."
The fact that true science is a never-ending process of questioning theories and hypotheses seems to elude the diehard evolutionists of our day. Thus, they insist that evolution be taught as the infallible dogma of origins in today’s public schools. No contrary theories are allowed and no questions permitted. Everyone is to blindly adhere to the ape-man without seeing, hearing or speaking any evil against evolutionists’ current monkeyshines.
To fool a gullible public and to conceal the fatal flaws in their theory, evolutionists keep moving the goalposts. Knowing that there is no evidence of any species evolving into another species (macroevolution), evolutionists now point to small changes within species (microevolution) as scientific proof of their cockamamie theory. For instance, Brett Lowe, a computer engineer who attended yesterday’s Evolution Sunday services at Atlanta’s St. Dunstan’s Episcopal Church, claims: “Evolution is a fact. It’s not a theory. An example is antibiotics. If we don’t use antibiotics appropriately, bacteria become resistant. That’s evolution, and evolution is a fact.” Sorry Brett, but no cigar. Try again when a single cell of bacteria becomes a toad frog. That’s evolution, and that’s when you good folks at St. Dunce’s, I mean St Dustan’s, can call your harebrained theory a fact.
Shrouding the preposterous in piety, Michael Zimmerman, the dean of the College of Letters and Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh and the key organizer of the Clergy Letter Project, insists “that among God’s good gifts are human minds capable of critical thought and that the failure to fully employ this gift is a rejection of the will of our Creator.” So much for the Biblical admonition, “Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding” (Proverbs 3:5). According to Zimmerman, we’re at odds with God whenever we trust God’s Word more than our own thinking. Apparently, Zimmerman thinks that God is better served by those who consider themselves infallible and God’s Word unreliable.
In its reporting on Evolution Sunday, the New York Times pointed out that the only churches observing the event were those from mainline Protestant denominations; that is, churches whose “congregations have fallen sharply in the past 30 years.” If all a church is going to do is parrot the world, then there is no need for that church. Why should I go to hear Rev. Mitchell Brown preach on Darwin to 21 people in the basement of an apartment building in Evanston, Illinois, when I can stay home and watch the Discovery Channel or go to the local Science Museum? Or better yet, why should I go to a church that preaches evolution and bows at creation’s altar, when I can go to another that preaches salvation and bows at the Creator’s altar? Perhaps, this explains the devolution of Evolution Sunday churches and the evolution of evangelical, fundamentalist churches. It’s simply, as Darwin would put it, the survival of the fittest.
Don Walton
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