The Big Scary God(*)

   'The heavens are telling the glory of God, and the firmament proclaims his handiwork'
Psalm 19 verse 1      
The Bible narrative, highly summarised
Evolution foundational to atheism
Evolution is above criticism

Although molecules to man evolution is presented as the best scientific explanation of the living world, deep down it is really about denying the BSG, the Big Scary God. Evolution and atheism have always gone hand in hand. Wherever people accept evolution, they either give up God entirely (as Josef Stalin and Thomas Hardy did) or accept a watered-down version, like the present archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams. Atheists understand the destructive effect of evolutionary belief on Christianity all too well; unfortunately, many church leaders do not! No wonder that Islam, which has never accepted evolution for a minute, is growing so self confidently, despising the church's spineless response to secular materialist triumphalism. (**)

Below is an extremely summarised outline of the Bible's message for complete beginners. Caution, unvarnished Biblical reality may offend adherents of the secular humanist consensus. Truth does not have to be comforting.

The Bible teaches that God is the rightful ruler of the world and all things, including us, because he created all things. The world, and the entire cosmos, was created to be the ideal home for Man, who was made in God's image with the intention that God would have other free selves with whom He could enjoy relationship. The Bible also teaches that although God had high and wonderful aims for humankind, he required our first mother and father to face and pass a 'probationary test' of obedience (see Genesis, first 3 chapters) because He wanted them to love and obey him freely rather than through compulsion. They listened to an enemy and believed a lie, they disobeyed God, and failed the test. This ruined everything and is why we have jealousy and greed, sickness and death, tyranny and war, sexual abuse and intellectual arrogance, selfish ambition, misunderstanding, pride, futility and madness today.

God had no option but to curse the earth, but promised to send a Saviour to redeem fallen mankind. He set in train a course of events which would lead to salvation for those who believed, which would involve a chosen people, Israel, from whom a saviour, God's own son Jesus would come. God planned to redeem the whole of mankind, but this meant they would have to 'repent', which means agree with God that they had done wrong and accept God's remedy. However, God would not take control of our will and force us to repent and believe. Those who refused to accept the forgiveness and redemption that God would provide would have to faced face judgement and accept the full consequences of their inherited and their own actual sin. Sin equals disobedience to God, and is the ultimate source of all the evil and suffering in the world.




Humanity went from bad to worse. We read about how violent and wicked the human race had become (Genesis 6 verses 5-7).  God decided that to make the best possible fresh start to get His purposes back on track, the whole world would be flooded with only a few people land some animals saved through Noah's ark. This sounds absolutely terrible. It is. Absolutely terrible. That doesn't mean it didn't happen. We find evidence of the global flood in sedimentary rocks all over the world-how else were the fossils made? Jesus referred to the flood as a historical fact, as did Peter, asserting that just as God had judged the world by water in the past, He would judge it finally by fire in the future, in order to bring the present age to an end and make a new earth in which no evil thought or deed or person would exist. The above Bible text suggests that God was so taken aback by how wicked mankind turned out to be, He wished He hadn't made us in the first place. But having started, He meant to see it though to the end. He later made a promise to Abraham that he would become the father of a chosen people, the Jews, from whom would come a saviour, Jesus, who would be God become man and would fulfill prophecies, teach us how to live, demonstrate thought his power that He had come from God, and die in sacrificial atonement for our sins and rise again so that we could avoid going to Hell, if we believed and followed Him. Christians find much of this appalling in the true sense of the word, but accept it on the authority of Jesus Christ, who was raised from the dead.

This teaching is highly offensive in its entirety to those who do not wish to follow Christ.

There were certainly atheists pre-Darwin, but they were somewhat timid, not least because a believer could easily disarm them by asking them, if there was no creator, where did we come from? Men who professed to be wise but did not wish to acknowledge or obey God needed to find an alternative explanation for the existence of the cosmos, the earth, and life, including human life. Evolution provided just what they were looking for, an apparently plausible explanation for life, therefore it was welcomed and promoted enthusiastically by atheists. It was just what they wanted.

Can anybody deny that we are all very willing to believe interpretations of things which support our preferred world view?
Sometimes so willing that we may be a teensy-weensy bit over-eager to disregard any problems or question marks?   

Richard Dawkins could not have been clearer about this when he wrote that

'Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist'.

Denying Dawkins' interpretation of the evidence as I do, I would re-phrase this as something like 'Darwin made a noise which ALMOST drowns out the voice that God speaks through creation, a noise loud enough to satisfy those who wish God's voice to be drowned out.' The voice is not entirely drowned out, as the apostle Paul writes in Romans chapter 1 where he writes that people who deny God have no excuse, because His divine power and wisdom are apparent through the things that have been made (i.e., the cosmos, the earth, plants, animals and ourselves). Paul would have been aware that the Greeks (they weren't 'The Ancient Greeks' then, just 'the Greeks') had philosophical beliefs about life emerging by itself: he didn't argue about it, he simply asserted that it was self evident that things couldn't have come into being without a creator, fullstop, period. This is in effect the first time we hear the Intelligent Design argument from complexity. It was true then and is still true today, but it is an unwelcome truth to those who want nothing to do with the BSG, and I repeat-this includes atheists, pagans and followers of 'Christianity lite' who are OK with a softy Father Christmas sort of God but who draw the line at the One the Bible tells us about.

Evolution is one of the soporific medicine these people want to 'silence the voices', or should I say, The Voice.


Evolution is as dear to it's committed adherents as the Sweet Virgin Mary, the Holy Mother of God is to her Roman Catholic devotees (***)  Criticism of evolution or Darwin is seen as highly offensive, and meets with an unscientific (to put it mildly) response which any creationist or Intelligent Design activist will tell you about. I was bullied at primary school, because I was extremely tall, socially clumsy, no good at football, and cleverer than the other kids. I was then regularly mentally abused and beaten  at a Roman Catholic boy's grammar school in the early 1970s by one particularly sadistic teacher who hated me, I think for the same reasons. When I came top of my class twice running, he snarled at me in front of the whole class, 'Well Hayes, if you can come first, it shows what a bloody appalling standard there is'. I have also been severely kicked and beaten by a drug addict, put though the mill by a false complainant, and worse, been badly let down by people I trusted, more than once. No big deal, I'm not after sympathy, I'm just stating this as background to the assertion that I have never experienced such vile, unjustified and sustained personal abuse in my whole life as I have had thrown at me for questioning evolution. Friends, this is NOT a science theory like other science theories. This is the 'theory' that was designed and promoted to damage and overthrow Christian belief. It has done quite an effective job in Britain. You are NOT ALLOWED to question Darwin. The evidence that falsifies evolution is NOT ADMISSIBLE.
If you can open your eyes and take a truly unbiased fresh look you will see that this is true.

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(*) I hope I will be forgiven for adapting this term from Roald Dahl's BFG (Big Friendly Giant)
(**) No-one is less cheerful than I am about the rise of militant jihadi Islam, but I do find it ever so slightly amusing that the reasonable, kindly, science-friendly religion of Christianity has been weakened severely, in Britain anyway, by evolution, and is being displaced by the violent, misogynistic, essentially anti-science, anti-free thinking religion of Islam which has not been weakened by evolution, since it never accepted it. Probably never HEARD of it in most cases. Well, it's only natural selection for a stronger strain of the virus Richard, but wouldn't you prefer a self-confident traditional British church to the Sharia law Britain may well end up with through expanding Islamic demographics when the nihilistic post-modern vacuum has led us into an anarchy that cries out for strong religion?
(***) Protestant Christians like myself refer to Mary as the mother of Jesus, not the Mother of God, since although Mary gave birth to Jesus, who was true God and true man, God existed before Mary and this seems an inappropriate title which is not used in the Bible and has some resonances with pagan deities. Protestant Christians do not pray to Mary or say rosaries, believing that Jesus is the only mediator between God and man. I do not mean to cause offense by this analogy, merely to suggest how 'sacred' and above criticism evolution is to those whose materialistic world view is underpinned by it. The Roman Catholic body of teaching about Mary's 'immaculate conception' (not to be confused with the virgin birth), assumption into heaven, her titles such as 'star of the sea' and 'queen of heaven' and burning of candles to statues of her etc are not supported by the Bible, just as the Darwinist's assertion that evolution is proven fact is not supported by scientific evidence. But try putting this to a true believer in either case and you may get a punch in the face rather than a rational discussion about the evidence.