Worldview Apologetics and Evolution-as-Faith Arguments

While some of the most characteristic and attention-getting tactics by anti-evolutionists (i.e., young-earth creationist evangelicals) involve arguments that evolution is flawed as a science, the more potent case of late seems to be that evolution is flawed as a faith.

How? The latest iteration of young-earth creationism suggests first that science involves direct observation that leads to certain, unchanging truths about nature. It then points to, even glorifies, data from fossils, biology, geology, and astrophysics--all to establish that, while this data reveals much about the present state of the universe, it does not allow people to travel magically back in time to see the universe's past or origins. Every propositional statement about the universe that moves beyond a description of the present is, from this perspective, essentially extra-scientific speculation, a kind of faith based on a worldview.

I will bracket for a moment the fact that non-creationists can and do contest this line of thought at multiple points (a few: that definition of science is unworkable/inaccurate; that data from the present, when properly studied, do in fact point in countless ways to a history at odds with that narrated in Genesis; that old-universe theories can and do coexist with religious faith). The important thing is that the evolution-as-faith argument performs two important functions for creationists: 1) it brings an otherwise esoteric debate involving advanced scientific theories and methods down to a "plain-sense" level of accessibility; and 2) it forces evolutionary theory to play by religion's rules. The question posed to evolution and creationism shifts from "which is superior science?" to "which is the superior worldview?"

This latter question creation evangelists are primed to answer. Worldview apologetics, the present-day descendant of presuppositionalist thinkers like Cornelius Van Til and Carl Henry, postulates that humans make primary decisions about faith based not on a neutral consideration of rationalities but from within the assumptions and presuppositions--the "starting point"--of their worldview. You cannot, generally speaking, argue a person into belief in Christ by piling up reason after reason. One's worldview exerts a definitional power, pre-determining for a person exactly what he or she considers good or bad reasons. Items that qualify as good reasons within one worldview ("the Bible says X, Y, and Z") may not function as such within the context of another worldview ("Who cares what the Bible says? I'm an atheist!").

The worldview apologist, operating from what is generally termed the "Biblical Christian" (i.e., conservative evangelical) worldview, takes it upon herself, then, to recognize where an unsaved person is coming from, enter (provisionally) into the thought-world of this foreign worldview, and find where and how the worldview suffers from inconsistencies. Because--and this is what would drastically separate a worldview apologist from a garden-variety postmodernist--worldview apologetics never questions that the Biblical worldview represents anything but the Absolute, Ultimate-Objective Truth. As per evangelical theology, worldview apologetics teaches that a day will come when God makes clear just which worldview is actually accurate--and thus which worldviews are necessarily misleading or deluded.

This, of course, is close to Gregory Koukl's approach that I wrote about last week. Rather than presenting the Biblical Christian worldview as true from the get-go (a tactic that worldview apologists would argue simply won't work with non-Christians), evangelicals must gain an appreciation for what non-Christians believe and why, confident that those reasons will reveal themselves as flawed.

"Flawed" in this sense means self-contradictory. Most worldview apologetics, drawing from the presuppositionalist tradition of Gordon Clark (rather than Van Til), rely directly or indirectly on the second of Aristotle's three laws of logic, the principle of contradiction. That is, for Aristotle, one cannot rightly believe one thing and its opposite at the same time. Do hold the two beliefs at once is to engage in irrational activity. Worldview apologetics (including Koukl's version) seek to locate and highlight contradictions within other worldviews' systems of thought.

For evangelicals, holding fast to a simplified version of the law of noncontradiction gives them a perceived edge over worldviews they consider secular or atheistic. The Bible, in conservative evangelical thought, has no contradictions. Its tenets are utterly harmonious with each other. Apparent contradictions in scripture can be explained, they insist, in any number of ways. Properly interpreted, then, the Bible is complete and whole, granting to believers a certain foundation for their worldviews.

Evolution, by contrast, leads to some fairly obvious moral contradictions. If humans are not qualitatively different from any other organism, if we are just one more kind of animal sprung from the same common ancestor without guidance of a Divine Mind--how then can any evolutionist claim that human life is worth saving or that human effort enjoys any kind of ontological privilege over rats foraging through trash or germs colonizing a gut? If the standard of evolution is "survival of the fittest," how then can any human moral system--necessarily secondary to the biological imperative of evolution--claim anything other than a war of all against all mentality?

Evolution, considered through creationist eyes, thus becomes a monstrous religion of soulless machines eating, reproducing, killing, and dying in endless procession. No wonder, then, that creationists find Biblical Christianity more appealing.

The creationist tactic toward evolution has parallels in evangelical approaches to secular life and thought more generally, particularly when confronted by the nonChristian worldview evangelicals call "postmodernism."

More tomorrow,

JF