Arminianism - The Father of Darwinism

Through out the last few blogs I have posted here, the main theme was about Charles Darwin and the theory of Evolution. This was the result of a comment posted to one of my articles, Our Eternal Home wherein I made the suggestion that Adam and Eve watched a spectacular contest between two Dinosaurs, the vegetarian Triceratops making a stab at the advancing carnivore, Tyrannosaurus Rex. Thanks to its three horns on its face, Triceratops won the victory as his horns sunk into T. Rex's underside. As they watched the life of the carnivore ebb away, Adam and Eve realised the enormous gravity of their sin in the garden, when they listened to the snake rather than obeying God, and accepting the snake's false promise of godhood.

The evolutionist doubled up himself in laughter, then he actually commended me for being the first to make such a suggestion of Man and Dinosaurs co-existing (actually, I wasn't the first - it was something already suggested by Creationist scientists in the past. All I did was to dramatise a typical scenario.)

Within the last week of this writing, I watched a series of Darwinism on You Tube, originally broadcast on the BBC in 2009. In one of the episodes, presenter Andrew Marr, a keen fan of Charles Darwin, commented on a skull of a giant Armadillo found along the shores of Argentina. Since all sedimentary rock in which fossils are found were originally laid by water, to me, this presented evidence of the Noachian Deluge, or the Biblical Flood, which was responsible for the extinction of the Dinosaurs along with many other species of life, both fauna and flora.

But to Darwin, according to Marr, this skull presented a link in the long chain of biological Evolution - and that despite the evidence that even the Giant Armadillo of the present day (which grows up to sixty inches) does not reach the size and power of its ancestor. Darwin theorised that because of the slow change of environment, natural selection had to do away with the giants for the species to survive. This thinking was, and still is, very true in many ways. The example of the two groups of different coloured mice was the analogy of natural selection given in a recent blog. To summarise, if a group of mice lived in a dark or shady area had dark fur, effectively camouflaging them from predators, they would stand a better chance for survival and breeding than any mice with white fur, which would be spotted more easily by a predator. This is the essence of natural selection, and it is ongoing within the present natural world.

Nine Banded Armadillo

I can accept the inerrant truth of the Bible and still believe in natural selection. What Darwin observed was a distinct truth within the field of Biology. But his error was to question the truthfulness of the Bible's historicity by assuming that one species had evolved from another, and from yet another, all the way back to a single Amoeba-like cell floating in the primeval ocean. Another way of putting it was where the Bible teaches the origin of species within each "kind" - for example, the Feline "kind" consisting of species such as the Domestic Cat, Wild Cat, Puma, Leopard, Tiger, Lion and Cheetah; the Canine "kind" of Dog, Wolf, Fox, Coyote and the Hyena, the Equine family of Horse, Donkey, Zebra and the Kiang. All these are examples of "kinds", each descending from its own ancestral pair created out of the ground by Divine Intelligence. As one who is committed to the Bible as historical, I find no problem with this thesis, as Creationism, as it is called, is fully supported by Natural Selection, still at work at present, providing that Natural Selection remains within each "kind".

Thus Creationism can be viewed as a hypothetical forest of trees, each tree rising from the ground as a single trunk, which represents the original ancestral pair (a male and a female) of any one "kind" before branching out into different species from the one tree trunk. Charles Darwin, however, put forward the theory that all the "kinds" were branches of the single trunk of the one evolutionary tree. The base of this one trunk representing the single cell, the boughs being the different kinds, while each bough divided into different species, providing the diversity we see today. It is also important to note here as well, that the single trunk of this hypothetical tree of Darwinism divides into two principal boughs, not far from the ground, giving indeed, a very short single trunk. The main division into two boughs are the separation of the flora, or vegetative "kinds" from the fauna, that is, all animals.

Darwin had to be both very intelligent and having excellent observational skills to conclude his theory just by watching and studying the behaviour, habits and breeding methods of wildlife, together with such a diversity of fossil remains found where ever there are sedimentary rocks. Using Charles Lyell's work in his book, Principles of Geology Darwin began to write his own book, On the Origin of Species. But his underlying reason for his research was his lack of conviction and belief of the historicity of the Bible.

Darwin grew up in a Christian family, and he himself believed in God. However, as a boy, he went with his mother to a Unitarian Church. This particular group believes that God is one being, and not co-existing in three persons as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. They also deny that Jesus Christ is God, that his crucifiction does not atone for one's sins, and one has to do deeds of righteousness to be saved. In other words, man is left to be his own saviour. Later, Darwin at the age of nine, was sent to Shrewsbury Anglican School as a boarder. It was hoped by his father, Robert Darwin, that his son may study to be an Anglican parson.

The Anglican Church, unlike the Unitarians, accepted God as a Trinity, justification by faith rather than works, and the validity of the Crucifixion for atoning of one's sins. But the Anglican Church, as with the Unitarians, maintain that one has to hold out faithful to the end to be saved, an idea known as Arminianism, after James Arminius, a 17th Century Dutch Theologian, began to oppose the doctrines of Predestination and the Sovereign Grace of God, as taught by John Calvin. For full details of the history of Arminianism, go to my blog, Once Saved Always Saved- Part 1 - How Did This Originate? Published April 10th, 2011.

As Calvin emphasised the Sovereign Grace of God, based on Predestination and the imputation of Christ's righteousness on the sinner, justifying him through faith alone, Arminius leaned on the emphasis over human choice alone - whether to accept or reject the Gospel - determining one's eternal destiny. With this, although one accepting is justified by faith in Jesus Crucified, he then must hold faithful to keep his salvation, or risk losing his redemption and becoming lost again. This kind of thinking keeps a believer in a lifetime of fear, rather than love and thankfulness to God for his redemption. David Pawson, one of the UK's prominent men in Bible teaching, an author and church pastor, actually taught that fear of Hell was the right motive for Christian living and keeping oneself spotless from sinning, as the slippery slope to Hell was never far away. Pawson was raised in a Methodist environment, itself founded by John Wesley, who embraced Arminianism.

Dutch Theologian James Arminius

Arminianism is about human choice. If so, then there is the belief that if the Bible itself was written by the hand of men, it is subject to error. This carries the notion that you can take parts of the Bible as the Word of God where it suits you, and leave out the rest as man's word. Although David Pawson says publicly that the whole Bible is the inspired Word of God, it looks to me that he is rather dismissive of various verses such as Romans 8:38-39 where Paul writes that nothing material or spiritual can separate us from the love of Christ, along with robbing John 10:25-30 of its full power simply by saying that you yourself can walk away from both the hand of the Son and of the Father, therefore denying the Omniscience, Omnipotence and the Sovereignty of God, a phenomenon which is the thin end of a dangerous wedge sometimes known as Religious Liberalism, or (a now obsolete term) Modernism.

Don't be misled here. This sort of liberalism has nothing to do with the liberty enjoyed through faith in Jesus Christ. Instead it is refusing to believe the Bible as the inerrant Word of God with its accuracy in historicity. One of the main denominations deeply affected by liberalism, particularly in the USA, is the Methodist Church. In America, it was once headed by Dr. Bromley Oxnam (1891-1963), a bishop who was believed to have been called a "radical modernist" - who denied the Virgin Birth of Christ, his physical Resurrection, the power of the Atonement and the imputation of Christ's righteousness to the sinner. In other words, because the Bible was written by men, each Bible author was left to his own choice what to write and what not to write. Although to my opinion, it was rather extreme, this can be the final fruit of Arminianism.

Within the Anglican Church, better known here as the Church of England, Arminianism has been the cause of national apostasy, despite our Media heralding the idea that we are still a Christian nation. If the reliability of the Bible can be questioned, even in Darwin's day, it leaves the door open for total unbelief. Most likely it was because he did not have the assurance of salvation, nor was he aware of the full saving power and the love of Christ through faith alone, Darwin threw the first doubt of the historicity and reliability of the Bible when he published his book, On the Origins of Species.

Because Darwin was advocating his theory as science, it began to catch on rapidly. As Andrew Marr stated, Darwin's work brought a fatal blow to the authority of the Church of England. As the theory of Evolution became widespread, belief in the reliability of the Bible began to wane, along the need to believe in Christ Crucified for one's salvation. Hand in hand with this turning away, the awareness of the Afterlife - Heaven and Hell, also began to be disregarded, and became the taboo of religious fear, and the means to control the minds of the ignorant and the superstitious.

Today the likes of staunch Evolutionist Richard Dawkins, who dismissed the Bible as a book of fiction stories without any moral values whatsoever, influences the minds of many with his books, The Selfish Gene and The God Delusion. Dawkins all but worships Darwin as the Messiah of Evolution and so do most in our nation, in the name of progress for a higher civilisation through science, education and bettering oneself towards godhood. But the downside of all this is remaining lost to the knowledge and belief of the love of God and his saving power from sin, which we are all guilty of, and the assurance of eternal life, relishing in the love of God for all eternity.

One Tangible Proof That God Exists...

During the reign of the Russian leader Peter the Great, an aged preacher was imprisoned for his testimony of Jesus Christ. When the Czar called him for questioning, the elderly saint was asked:
"Can you show me one tangible proof to verify the truth of the Bible?"
"Yes sire, the Jew."

Since I was converted to Christ in 1973 (then aged 20) God has blessed me with the wonderful privilege to travel several times around Israel as a backpacker, my favourite way to get about overseas. One of the most striking locations I ever stayed was at a small backpackers hostel, set in a Medieval building in the Old City of Jerusalem, the capital of Israel since 1980.

The Western Wall, Jerusalem, taken in 1994.

The sovereign nation of Israel is one astonishing miracle. The last time this nation had its own sovereignty was before King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon razed Jerusalem to the ground in 586 BC. Since that fateful day, Israel as a self-governing nation did not exist until May 14th, AD 1948.

During the long, 2,600 year interval, most of the Jews remained in the land where they were taken to during the original captivity, thus known as the Diaspora. Although the majority of Jews still live outside their original homeland, with the USA still holding the largest proportion of Jews outside the Holy Land, nevertheless, from 1948, Israel's population has swelled to more than 7,600,000 at present.

Yet, long before Moses was even born, while the fledgling nation had just settled in Egypt, there stood a silent witness, the Cave of Machpelah, close to the Palestinian town of Hebron. It holds the remains of just six people: Yacob, better known as Israel to us, Isaac, Sarah, Rebekah, Abraham, whom Elohim called from the land of Ur, and Leah. Here I have arranged the names with each initial letter in bold in such a way that each letter spell the name Yisrael. Therefore, within the cave of Machpelah, six people were buried. They were three couples, chosen by God to be the literal biological founders of the people of Israel. And this tells us something important about this nation, which is that God (Elohim) is in the midst of his people, and God is still the God of Israel to this day. Furthermore, just before Jesus was born, a large building was constructed by Herod the Great by 4BC. It served as a synagogue, a church and at present, a mosque. Today, this structure is known as the Tomb of the Patriarchs.

The Tomb of the Patriarchs

This very structure was most likely a familiar feature visited by the Holy Family (Joseph, Mary, young Jesus and his siblings) to pay respects to their ancestors, just as King David did a thousand years earlier, when he chose Hebron as the seat of his reign for the first seven years before he took the Jebusite city of Jerusalem.

When Roman General Titus razed Jerusalem to the ground in AD 70, the majority of the Jews were dispersed around the known world. Others were sold as slaves. The Holy Land became desolate, particularly Jerusalem. Yet as the Jews were scattered across the globe for rejecting their Messiah, the Tomb of the Patriarchs remained intact, having survived the Roman invasion under General Titus. For the next 1,878 years, the Tomb stood as a silent sentinel bearing witness that this land belonged to the Jews. It stood despite the would-be natural tendency for the Jews to intermarry and forever lose their identity.

But throughout the millenia the Jews retained their identity. Some say it might have been due to their traditions. But surely, can traditions alone be the sole binding force? The ancient Babylonians, Persians, Medes and other ancient societies all had their own traditions, but that was not enough to prevent eventual intermarriages and the resulting amalgamation into what are modern Arabs to this day. And America today is the melting pot for English, Irish, Polish, Spanish, Italian and other European nationalities who first settled there just a few generations ago. Yet the Jews remain uniquely a distinct people.

And Biblical prophecies regarding the future of Israel as a nation ruled by its Messiah-King remain standing. Even throughout the dispersion, the Jews knew from their own Scriptures that there will come a day when the whole nation will be back in its own homeland, and the Son of David will reign over them. It is something many Jews still aspire to this day.

The building of the Dome of the Rock mosque on the exact site of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem during the 6th Century AD, was not done because Mohammad decided that Jerusalem was a holy city to Muslims. Rather it was done to stop the Jews returning to their homeland and rebuild their Temple - something which the Bible prophets insist that one day this would happen. As simple as this: as long as the Jewish Temple remains un-built, the Messiah cannot return, for, according to the Prophet Ezekiel, the Messiah will have his throne there. And so the area remains "safe" as long as the Jews remain dispersed around the world.

But in 1914 the Great War broke out. It was during this war when one Jew, Chaim Weizmann, invented a bomb which would turn events in favour of British victory against the Germans. For a reward from the British Government, Weizmann rejected personal riches in favour of the Jews returning to their original homeland of Palestine as their Zionist aspirations. On November 2nd, 1917, Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour drew up his Declaration to the leader of the British Jewish Community, Baron Walter Rothchild, to allow the Jews to settle in their own land. By 1937, there were 430,000 Jews in Palestine.

While the population in Palestine was growing, Adolf Hitler and his German Nazi Party brought on the Second World War in 1939 and with it, the Holocaust, as mentioned in my last blog. The desperate attempts to annihilate the Jews to solve what he called, "The Jewish problem" was astonishing! As mentioned in my last blog, it was an act of Social Darwinism which violently defiled every concept of mankind reaching greater civilisation by means of greater education.

Although the British Government, under Prime Minister A. Neville Chamberlain, reneged on the 1917 Balfour Declaration in 1939 in favour of Arab control and rule, most likely in keeping trade with the Arab oil supply running smoothly, this did not stop the formation of Israel as a sovereign nation on May 14th, 1948, three years after the end of the War in 1945. The 1939 White Paper, as it was called, temporarily stopped the flow of Jewish immigrants into Palestine, their homeland given by God to their father Abraham. The majority were refused entry into their ancient homeland by the British, and were sent back on ships to Germany and Poland to be ruthlessly killed in the Holocaust. Personally, I believe that this dreadful breach of the 1917 Declaration not only ended the British Mandate over Palestine, but it was also the cause of the loss of the British Empire. If this is true, and I have no doubt that it is, then every national leader around the world should heed the warning of the danger in tampering with the fate of the Jews, God's Covenant people.

Today, Israel is a thriving nation, despite its threatened destruction by the Arab nations around her. After becoming a nation in 1948, Egypt, Syria, Jordan and the Arab world in general, wanted to push Israel into the sea. Even the U.S.S.R. sided with the Arabs against Israel by supplying arms to the Arab nations. The young Jewish nation had to keep constantly on its guard. Then on the 2nd June 1967, the Six Day War broke out with Egypt, Jordan and Syria launching an all out attack against the Jews, yet the Jews winning an astonishing victory against them on the 8th June, six days later, and for the first time for nearly two millennia, the Jews took possession of the Western Wall, as well as winning the Golan Heights, a strategic vantage point for the Syrian military. With such a tiny nation winning a war against three much bigger nations can be only described as a miracle, a special protection by God's grace based on His promise made to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob (Israel).

For years to come after the Six Day War, Israel continued to suffer under the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, or the PLO, led by the late Yasser Arafat. Although later in his life, Arafat attempted to settle the issue using diplomatic efforts to offer peace to the Israelis for exchange of various Israeli territories such as handing back the Golan heights to Syria, his real intention was always to destroy Israel. Today, after Arafat's death in November 2004, Israel's main source of bother seem to be from the Hamas, in the Gaza Strip.

I titled my last blog The Snake Is Still Talking... It was about Social Darwinism being the concept of the snake of Genesis 3. The existence of Israel as a nation against all odds is not only a miracle from God, but also a major rebuke to Darwin's evolution. Contrary to the analogy of the dark and light coloured mice, tiny Israel withstood the onslaught of a group of much bigger and stronger nations, even against the Soviet Union, considered to be one of the major world powers. According to Darwinism, there is absolutely no hope of Israel surviving as a nation to this day. But the fact it does demonstrates the power and the grace of Almighty God and his keeping of this promises. And such promises should be a source of encouragement for all Christians. If God had not forsaken Israel, he will not forsake you, the true believer in Christ.

The snake is terrified of the Messiah's return. The Second coming of Christ will forever put an end to the snake's power. The snake has shown his anger, and as long as Israel exist, he will continue to be angry. The fact that it took two world wars to bring the Jews back home, together with Hitler's holocaust, the hostility of the Arab nations, along with the blocking of the Temple being constructed for the past 1,400 years - all shows the snake's displeasure in the thought of Jesus Christ reigning over Israel from Jerusalem. It would mean the end of his power.

The Bible predicts the future Battle of Armageddon. This is where the snake will make his final attempt to stop the Jewish Messiah to return to take the throne of his father David. It will be about the ownership of the city of Jerusalem. The intention of the hostile forces is to take the city from the Jews. But because forces from all nations of the world will be involved, before the battle against Israel gets underway, a dispute among their leaders apparently will arise, concerning on who will own the city afterwards. This disagreement will cause the forces to start in-fighting among themselves to their own destruction.

What a terrible, terrible shame! Every one of those soldiers could have instead, be sitting in the Kingdom of God, lavishing in the love their Saviour have for them, for all eternity. Instead they sided with the snake and accepted his offer of maggot-ridden apples of high social status, prestige, wealth and education.

Because of God's promise to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob cannot be broken, your salvation is equally sure, your eternal security.

The Snake Is Still Talking...

Here I wish to conclude this series of Creation versus Evolution, which incidentally was the result of a comment posted for the first of the series of blogs, Our Eternal Home, published February 5th, 2012. In that article, I made a suggestion that the age of the Dinosaurs shared the same time frame as Adam's early descendants. This opinion brought a comment from a scientist who firmly believed in Evolution, making total nonsense of my ideas.

What have been the overall result in believing this theory? Here I wish to highlight the consequences in believing Darwin's survival of the fittest, and to show, if I can, that Darwinism had not brought in the Utopian society wished for by the likes of Richard Dawkins, who believe that religion had always been detrimental to society.

And sure enough. Dawkins does have a point. Religion has been the cause of the rivers of blood which had flowed throughout history, and it is still flowing now, particularly in the Middle East. And the Bible itself records a history of religious oppression. The stoning of Stephen recorded in Acts chapter 7 is one good example.

But Darwinism is not just about Natural Selection. The theory embraces the idea that we, mankind, are constantly working upward in achieving a higher status, with the end means of becoming gods. Therefore we can conclude that the true teaching of Evolution is that of a very slow progress from a single, amoeba-like cell floating in the primeval ocean right up to what we are today, then into the future as divine beings. Maybe one day, as in the motion picture, 2001 A Space Odyssey, we might evolve out of our bodies to exist as pure energy, with an omnipresent feel and with technology impossible to fathom at present!

However, there are some very serious problems with the evolutionary theory. First of all, there is not enough time in the entire age of the Universe for the cell to have evolved, as we have seen in the last two blogs. A single cell is a vastly complex unit. The sheer impossibility for it to evolve has even led to a fascinating idea of panspermia. This simply mean that living cells from space had hitched a ride on a meteorite and splashed into our primeval oceans from where Darwinian Evolution began to get underway. Of course many evolutionists have dismissed all this as pseudoscience, yet such a theory has not been written off as nonsense.

Most academics, like the one who commented earlier, ridicule the idea of a talking snake. Nobody had ever seen a snake talk, for that matter, any animal. Sure enough, parrots may talk, but only repeating what they had been taught without understanding what those sounds mean. But there is absolutely no record within zoology of any beast talking and knowing what these sounds mean. Little wonder the Bible is looked upon as a book of fantasy stories. After all, Grimm's Fairy Tales are full of talking animals, but every reader knows what they are - fiction. But if we, as Christians, take the Bible as the inerrant Word of God and therefore all the events written therein as historical, then the narrative of a talking snake must be also historical. Hence, Christians who accept the Bible as historical are now held as ridicule by not only the academics but by society in general.

The truth is that the snake is still talking to this day - and we are listening! Let us go the the narration and read what it says:

Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the Lord God has made. And he said to the woman, Yea, hath God said, you shall not eat of every tree in the garden?
And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden:
But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God had said, Ye shall not eat of it, nor touch it, lest ye die.
And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die:
For God doeth know that in the day that ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.
Genesis 3:1-5 (AV).

After being warned by God not to eat of the fruit of a certain tree, the snake then asks Eve if it was true that God warned her about the fruit of this particular tree. Eve's answer is quite interesting. She admitted that this was true, but she also added the words, "neither shall ye touch it" in her response. God did not say that, it was added by Eve herself with the belief that there was something in the fruit itself. Then the serpent, or snake, denied the truth of what God has originally told them and accused the Almighty of being a jealous sycophant who wasn't keen to see the couple rise in status. This accusation is often known as the Edenic Lie.

Ye shall be as gods! And this has been the fierce battle between God and the snake within every human heart ever since. The lust for power, fame, prestige, riches and mastery over others, are all what are offered by the snake to this day. And on towards godhood. And we are listening. And furthermore, we by nature have put out our hands to grab what he offers.

Darwinism is one of the snake's lies on how we got here. It is a slow progress from a cell to becoming gods ourselves, and we are supposed to be getting there. There is a strong similarity between western thinking on organic evolution and eastern religions. In the Far East, Karma is taught, both in Hindu and in Buddhism. The two differ only in that in Buddhism, bad Karma is restricted to a human reincarnation of a person to a lower status in life. In Hinduism, bad Karma means being reincarnated as an animal. In both cases, good Karma is coming back as someone with a greater social status, in a long chain of reincarnations when someone eventually becomes a god. The sheer impossibility is that any sins committed in this life would lead to bad Karma in the next. Reaching godhood is impossible.

Darwinism involve Natural Selection, with weaker species becoming extinct to allow for the stronger to survive. Let us give an example. Let's imagine two groups of mice, intermingling with each other. One group consist of mice with dark fur, the other with white fur. They are prey to carnivorous birds such as the eagle or the owl. If the environment is dark and shady, it will most likely result in the birds spotting the light coloured mice more easily, with the result of the lighter group becoming extinct, while the darker group continuing to survive and multiply. It's the other way round if the two groups are in a bright environment, where the darker mice would then be easily spotted by the predators, allowing the white mice a greater chance to survive and multiply. This, as Darwin himself called this analogy Natural Selection, and this does not necessarily mean that the two groups of mice fought against each other in vying for space at the given environment. But a 19th Century philosopher, Herbert Spencer, who studied Darwin's work, in 1864 coined the phrase Survival of the Fittest which indicated that the two groups of mice fought each other for the space, pushing out the weaker group to full exposure to the predators.

It was Spencer's "Survival of the Fittest" which made evolution enter a new dimension: Social Darwinism. This was a development, using organic evolution to justify social behavior, mainly racism, slavery, social class and imperialism. Imperialism had always been a feature in ancient history. Empires such as the Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Greek and Roman - all mentioned in the Bible and all six having had dominance over Israel. But it was Social Darwinism which provided justification for more recent imperialism.

While this blog is written, Jeremy Paxman is presenting a documentary series about the British Empire on the BBC. Unlike former presenters on this subject, Paxman gives a more realistic view of British imperialists invading other countries, particularly India, and subjugated the indigenous population to servitude, lower social class and racism, along with the expectation to be looked on as god-like by the indigenous and treated as lords. All of these were based on the notion that the British were a superior race due to the result of a greater advance in Organic Evolution which inevitably led to the imperial philosophy of Social Darwinism.

Racism at football grounds was most certainly the result of Social Darwinism, the insult of racist fans, for example, throwing a banana on to the pitch in the direction of a black player with a reminder that such a person, despite his excellent footballing skills, was still closer to the Primate than the white offender at the stands - was of Darwinian origin, although I have wondered whether the offender was bright enough to realise this. Nowadays, such racism is a criminal offence here in the UK, and quite rightly so.

But the worst case of racism and national superiority were the German Nazis over the Jews. During the Second World War, up to six million Jews were needlessly slaughtered under the Nazi leader, Adolf Hitler. The sole reason is definitely Darwinian in nature. When I visited the Yad Vashem and Holocaust Museum in Israel back in 1993, I came across this introductory poster at the start of the visit:

The singular tragedy of the Holocaust, in which some six million Jews were ruthlessly annihilated by Nazi Germany and its collaborators, is a pivotal chapter in human history....Guided by racial principles, Nazi ideology ordained that the Germans belonged to a superior race that was destined to rule the world. The Nazi vision of a new racial order called for the overthrow of democracy and humanism. Rooted in traditional and political Jew hatred, Nazi racial antisemitism defined the Jew as Germany's foremost enemy....In the Holocaust, man's most cherished beliefs about himself and the nature of civilisation were violently defiled. The events of the Holocaust are compelling and confronting them, every thinking person feels the weight of their imprint.

A candle burns inside the Yad Vashem Memorial, Israel

Here we have the result of Darwinism - the slaughter of millions of Jews due to national and racial superiority. This is not done so much out of Darwin's Natural Selection as Spencer's "Survival of the Fittest" and its immediate consequence - Social Darwinism.

The next image I have posted to give the real, shocking truths of Darwinism. It shows indeed that the snake is still talking and on this occasion has found a very keen ear in the head of the Nazis.

The fruit of Darwinism - Victims of the Holocaust

But what about today? Recently I have come across an article in the Daily Mail newspaper, the timing of such writing could not have been better. It was written by columnist Sonia Poulton, and was published 6th March, 2012. On the subject of the Welfare Reform Bill, she wrote that our present Government is into "Brutal Acts of Savagery". The article features on how the most vulnerable in society - the disabled or sick person will, under the reform, be made to work unpaid in factories and private businesses if they want to keep on receiving State benefit. These include patients with Alzheimer's Disease and Multiple Sclerosis. Meanwhile, company bosses and business executives can save by employing such people and make a greater profit, while the bureaucrats of the Department of Work and Pensions - who decides on who receive benefits - can carry on with their travels, hotel expenses and stationery paid for by the State. The result of all this for the disabled is cold, naked fear - of being rejected and excluded from society and the feeling of being unwanted. The knock-on result will include being beaten up on the streets, the perpetrators goaded with the idea that their taxes are being used for benefit fraud - despite the percentage of frauds given by the DWP is only 0.5%. In the past year, according to Poulton, street attacks on the disabled had risen by 42%.

Suicide among the disabled is rising due to the Reform Bill, the last count being 103, and evidence seem to indicate that it is nearing 150. Again, Poulton suggest that these suicides brings relief to the cost of the National Health Service. There seem to be a shocking similarity here, with the fate of the disabled as with the holocaust, where many Jews were put into unpaid labour, except without the gas chambers.

Then there is Dr. Francesca Minerva, a philosopher from Oxford University, also mentioned in Poulton's article. She recently suggested that babies born with disabilities such as Downs Syndrome should be killed. She then says that such children are not human and for them to live would be a burden on the national expense. Shades of Adolf Hitler! The snake is still talking and we are listening.

Here in the UK, where there is a strong social class ethic, academics are given a far wider respect than a commoner or unlearned person. Education is the catch-all in a person's worth, along with wealth. It looks to me that not only is the snake talking, but his seductively alluring many to deception under the false notion of high education, wealth and social status. I once attended a church where most, if not all of the graduates of my age believed in Darwinism. Despite their best intentions to hide their thoughts and feelings, and their attempts in forming friendships with me, I was able to detect an underlying current belief within them of my academic and therefore social inferiority.

It was 1973. The thunder rolled outside. I was alone in the house, as the rest of the family had gone out for the evening. As a devout believer in Evolution, I turned to the beginning of the Bible and began to read Genesis, starting with the very first verse: In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

I was converted. There and then I turned from Evolution to Creationism in one turn of 180 degrees. God has spoken to me. I was convicted and believed.
God has saved me from my academic insanity!

Evolution, Panspermia and Creationism.

Before I discuss further in this series, I first feel obliged to thank one of our commentators, Bryce, for his input. Having received a Bachelor of Science degree in Biology, he is a qualified scientist, who, I realise, would know much more about the working of the cell than I would, as discussed in the last blog. Therefore, where credit is due, he is to be commended for spending time discussing these issues with a commoner such as myself, here on this website.

I was not accusing Bryce of being a subscriber of the ancient astronaut theory, especially of the sort expounded by Erich von Daniken. Instead I was discussing that the idea of all life having an extraterrestial origin, such as the case of the Murchison Meteorite having amino acid molecules, as being taken seriously by some evolutionists. That does not mean that Bryce must also believe that that was how life must have originated. But the idea of Panspermia, as this branch of science is called, does hold a lifeline for the theory of Evolution, and then at its very beginning. As Bryce himself admitted, he and his colleagues are still in the dark on the very beginnings of the theory, namely, the evolution of the cell itself.

Bryce was also surprised that I did not bring up the "Tornado creating a Boeing 747 while passing through a metal scrapyard" argument. Personally, I think such a way of reasoning used for discrediting Evolution to be rather childish, therefore unworthy of any discussion here. Yet it was Fred Hoyle himself who had invented the "Boeing 747" theory. And even though Hoyle denied that the cell could have ever evolved by chance due to mathematical impossibility, yet he remained an atheist who embraced Darwinian Evolution once it got underway.

Let us re-cap on what Fred Hoyle believed. He was a Darwinian, but rejected any possibility of the single amoeba-type cell evolving on its own by chance. He then calculated that the chance of just the enzymes evolving by chance is one out of one, followed by 40,000 zeros! First, let us give a practical demonstration of what this means:

There are 60 seconds in a minute, in one hour - 3,600 seconds. In 24 hours - 86,400. In one year, i.e. 365.25 days - approximately 31,557,600 seconds. Bryce talks about the beginning of evolution taking place some 2,000,000,000, or two billion years ago. By multiplying two billion with 31,557,600 - which is the approximate number of seconds in a year - we get 63,115,200,000,000,000. Now this is way, way short of the 40,000 digit number calculated by Hoyle. We can go further with the microsecond, the nanosecond and even the picosecond, but this won't be necessary, as such results would still fall short of the 40,000-digit figure.
(Here the American billion is used.)

Therefore it would not have been possible for the vastly complex structure of a whole cell to have evolved by itself. There isn't simply enough time throughout the entire age of the Universe for the cell to have evolved without outside influences. That is why the idea of amino acid molecules in the Murchison Meteorite, and even a fossil imprint of a fully evolved bacteria, such as found in the ALH84001 Meteorite discovered in Antarctica, 1984, has been a kind of "saviour" to the theory of Evolution. Scientists such as Dr. Richard Hoover embraces the idea that what was discovered was a fossilised imprint of an alien bacteria.

An image of how an alien bacteria found on the ALH84001 Meteorite may have looked.

The possibility of such organisms traveling through space, then reproducing and starting the process of evolution when the environment is right - in our case the Earth's primeval oceans - is known as Panspermia. After examining the facts connected with this theory, I get the impression that it is not unlike a spore, too small to be seen with the naked eye, settling on a piece of sliced bread left in a warm, moist environment. After a short time, from this spore, a large area of green mould has spread across the slice. In the evolutionary sense, it is grasping on straws in a desperate attempt to save the theory from its impending doom. If the theory cannot be saved, then the possibility of Intelligent Design would be the only alternative, unless the theory of Panspermia can be proven as fact. Although Fred Hoyle was a strong believer and supporter of such a theory of living cells traveling through space, many other scientists, including those in the field of Paleobiology, rejected such a theory as pseudoscience, and put it aside as a lunatic fringe together with von Daniken's Ancient Astronaut theories.

If Intelligent Design is not acknowledged, and at the same time, the theory of Panspermia is also rejected, this leaves one in a bit of a dire situation when it comes to solving the issues of Evolution, particularly the functions within the cell, as given in my last blog. To quote a couple of examples from Michael J. Behe:

A single flaw in the cell's labyrinthine protein-transport pathway is fatal. Unless the entire system is entirely in place, our ancestors would have [died]...Attempts at a gradual evolution of the protein transport system are a recipe for extinction...
At some point this complex machine had to come into existence, and it would not have done so in step-by-step fashion...as Darwinian evolution would have it.
Source: Michael J. Behe, Black Box, P. 114-115.

The cumulative [evidence] shows with piercing clarity that life is based on machines - machines made of molecules...[which are] enormously complex...The complexity of life's foundation has paralyzed science's attempt to account for it....Faced with such complexity with even simple phenomena, Darwin's theory falls silent.
Source: Michael J. Behe, Black Box, p. 4-5, 97.

Bryce, in his last comment, then challenged me to bring proof of Creation by Intelligent Design. I was surprised to read such a statement at this stage, as surely, by giving a description of the genome system within a cell's nucleus, and the mRNA, the Ribosome and the extreme complexity of the resulting polypeptide, one of in a protein chain, I would have thought that this was good evidence of intelligent design. In fact, the very idea of needing a "saviour" in the form of Panspermia, or cosmic cells splashing into our primeval oceans while riding on meteorites billions of years ago - even this testifies that for the cell to exist in the first place, it must have came fully evolved, or else no life would exist in the present day!

Such a concept gives rise to another, I would think, a very serious problem, that of Infinite Regress. That is, to ask: If Darwinian Evolution took place due to the arrival of traveling cosmic cells into our oceans, then how did they evolve? What were the cells which sparked life into them, and so on ad infinitum? Hoyle, who saw this as a problem, attempted to solve it by suggesting various chemicals, such as hydrogen, helium and other materials in the newborn stars of the young Universe giving rise to amino acids, the building blocks for protein. In other words, the basis of all life began with the formation of the stars themselves. This is a fascinating interpretation on the origins of a fully functional, highly complex living organism. It has really goes to show how far in one's determination one can go to push away the screaming obvious - intelligent design! As Paul the Apostle wrote, that their minds have become darkened until futile - see Romans 1:18-23, especially verse 20.

But Fred Hoyle was an atheist and a supporter of Darwinism, and to utterly reject any concept of Divine Creation, he gave full support to the theory of Panspermia. To note, Hoyle was an astrophysicist and brilliant mathematician who was also a professor at Cambridge University. So he was no fool, and unlike von Daniken, he did not attempt to use a degree of dishonesty to propound his theories, as mentioned in my last blog.

But to turn to the Bible for proof of Intelligent design, this would require faith. This is because of what we are really doing is turning to a written record of past events and allowing ourselves to be told how these events transpired without visual proof on how these events took place.

The narrative of the six-day Creation of Genesis chapter one provides a good example. Here we are told on a Hebrew day-by-day process of Creation by intelligent design. The "evening and morning" of day one, two, three and so on up to day six depicts the new day beginning at sunset, as in the Hebrew clock to this day. Then on the seventh day, so the narrative goes, that God rested from the work of Creation, and hallowed the 7th day, which became the reason for the 4th Commandment given in Exodus 20:8-11, that the 7th day of the week must be kept holy by the children of Israel, to whom it was delivered.

Bryce was right when he commented that the weekend was likely to be around before any of the Bible was written. It was divinely introduced at the very birth of history. But on the scientific side, the 7th day of rest testifies that the forces that were at work during the Creation Week are not in operation now. As another commentator has pointed out, the material world at present is subject to decay, starting from a high order of things and slowly declining towards disorder, a fact known as the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In other words, nothing lasts for ever. One good example is this very computer I'm using to write this blog. There will be a day that I'll be needing to replace it. As for myself, soon to enter the 7th decade of life, (my sixties) I would not be surprised at the slow decline of body defence mechanisms which are vital for sustaining good health.

But the idea of a Limited Evolution is not denied by us Creationists. The number of animals in the Ark of Noah does shed some light on this issue. Take a look at the Canine family. Here some species are listed along with their chromosome numbers. (As a yardstick, humans have 46 Chromosomes in the nucleus of each cell.)

African Wild Dog....78 Chromosomes
Dingo...............78
Domestic............78
Coyote..............78
Golden Jackal.......78
Hyena...............40
Wolf................78

With the exception of the Hyena, every species of the Canine has 78 chromosomes. Closely related to the Dog is the Fox, of the related Vulpos family. However, there is a greater variation of chromosome count as listed here:

Ferret Fox...........64
Grey Fox.............66
Red Fox..............34
Tibetian Sand Fox....36
Bengel Fox...........36

Although there is a variation of Chromosome count here, there is a belief among Creationists that all of these species could have evolved from just one pair - a male and female. On the other hand, the Vulpos family of the Fox could have had its own ancestor. Whatever may be, it is not impossible that evolution within its own kind has taken place and is taking place at present. It is also noteworthy that the domestic cat, the lion and the tiger all have 38 Chromosomes, which lends to a rather fascinating idea that the Feline family began as a single pair, but here the separate species within this family could not be more diverse. On the other hand, in the Primate family the Gorilla, the Chimpanzee and the Orangutan all have 48 Chromosomes, just two more than us.

Further listing say, of the Equine family would include the Horse, Quagga, Zebra, Zebroid (a cross between a Horse and Zebra), Onager, Kiang, Ass and the Kianger (a cross between a Kiang and Onager).

Bryce believes that the the Ark of Noah is so nonsense that he rates ancient astronauts and cosmic cells as being more plausible than the Biblical account. Yet I have listed up to 26 species from as little as four different families or kinds. The idea that 26 species (and not all were named, particularly in the Primate and Feline groups) came from just four pairs not only makes Noah and the Flood more plausible than Panspermia, but it also looks at the high chance that the Bible is friendly toward a limited form of Evolution within the confines of each separate kind.

This is the kind of limited Evolution Bryce and his colleagues use as evidence to support the impossible theory of Darwinism.