If Evolution Is True

Assume for the moment that evolution is true. Then, ironically, it has produced a result — homo sapiens — that innately believes in supernaturalism. Over the course of thousands of generations, spanning hundreds of thousands if not millions of years, natural selection has favored those hominids (the most intelligent of the primates) who believed that the world is larger than what the senses can perceive. According to evolution’s own tenets, there must have been some survival advantage in living one’s life as though actions had consequences through unseen forces, since every group of human beings on the planet has had some form of religion, mythology, animism, or superstition.

Thus adherents to evolution should not expect our species to give up belief in supernaturalism so quickly. It has been only 150 years since Darwin’s Origin of Species — much less than what is routinely described in textbooks as “the blink of an eye in geologic time.” This is hardwired in our genes! If it is to be eradicated, then belief in naturalism will have to provide some survival advantage over supernaturalism: “survival of the fittest.” And there has been nowhere near enough time for random mutations to overpower the genes that have been selected through the millennia.

Or are we bound to our genes? A survey published just in time for today’s 200^th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin revealed that only 39% of Americans believe in evolution; apparently 25% disbelieve it, and fully 36% stated no opinion. When correlated to education, the pollsters found that the more education you have, the more likely you believe in evolution. The strong implication: smart people believe in evolution; you’d have to be dumb not to. I offer an alternate explanation: since evolution is the only thing taught in school, the longer you are exposed to it, the more likely you are to accept it. Thus, even if we are hardwired to believe in the supernatural, enough conditioning can overcome it. (So much for the “born that way” argument!)

But even if we could convince the whole world that evolution is true, should we? Can the human race survive such knowledge? Do we want a society in which the weak and sick are cast aside as “unfit” and in which “only the strong survive”? Does not a conscience and a fear of divine retribution (or “karma,” or whatever it may be called) provide a necessary check against the unbridled oppression of the weak by the strong? Can we remove these restraints of the “animal instincts” of human behavior without suffering grave consequences? Or have we not grown so powerful as a species that we would destroy ourselves if we were allowed to believe that there is no higher authority to which we are accountable?

But I began by assuming that evolution is true. If evolution is true, it has created us to believe that it is not true, and it forces us to live as though it is not true. If, on the other hand, God has created us in His image, then He has made us to acknowledge this, and He desires that we live as though He does exist and is important. I submit that only one of these positions is internally consistent and coherent.