What Socialists and Creationists Have in Common

“[W]hile you see the products and services provided for you by the government, you are forever blind to the benefits that would have been provided by those same resources had the government not confiscated them…”

Creationism has lost the argument in the public square. Any biologist working to understand life-related phenomena has no choice but to take seriously Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. That is that all of the apparent design and purposefulness that we observe in the biosphere, from a bird’s wings to a shark’s fins to a human brain, came about by a long but steady series of gradual changes in unbroken genetic lineages. Amazingly, Charles Darwin (as well as Alfred Russel Wallace) discovered his elegant explanation of the biosphere’s apparent design without knowledge of the underlying code of life: DNA. Nor did he know about genes, the fundamental unit of evolution by natural selection (for a detailed overview, see Richard Dawkins’ seminal book, The Selfish Gene).

To be sure, there is a host of unsolved problems in biology, but that is always the case in science; it is no blemish against Darwin. A theory must always be judged against its rivals, not against some utopian theory that explains everything once and for all.

Next time you roll your eyes at a religious fundamentalist’s denial of Darwinism, remember that there is another Creationism pervading our culture, one that is far more destructive.

Biological Creationism is the theory that the wondrous designs we see in the biosphere cannot have arisen due to ‘mere’ mutation and selection—and that a divine source must, instead, have caused them. Some Creationists insist that all creatures have had the forms that they currently hold, while others accept Darwin’s theory but posit that God nudged evolution along according to His own plan. In either case, the Creationist rejects that complex adaptations could possibly emerge without a top-down Designer intervening. And when such a Creationist hypothesis is coupled with the assertion that the world has not yet had its 10,000th birthday, mockery understandably comes its way. Millions of laypeople can now articulate and defend the idea that the design and complexity of living things have come about by a process that involved no Designer whatsoever. The Creationist often rejects this design-without-a-Designer idea merely on the grounds that it’s utterly counterintuitive.