By Wayne Christensen
Many years ago, Henry Ward Beecher, a strong Christian, displayed in his home a beautiful globe depicting the various constellations and stars. One day Robert Ingersoll, a well-known agnostic, was visiting Beecher, and while admiring the globe, he asked, “Who made it?” Beecher seized the moment to attack Ingersoll’s agnosticism, and said, “Who made it? Why nobody made it, it just happened!”
Genesis (which means beginning) is the beginning of the Bible; it is the beginning of creation; it is the beginning of our history; it is the beginning of our faith. The author of Hebrews states, “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen…By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible” (Heb. 11:1, 3). By faith we believe that the universe was created by the spoken word of God ex nihilo (out of nothing), because this is the testimony of Scripture. “By the word of the LORD the heavens were made, and by the breath of his mouth all their host…For he spoke, and it came to be; he commanded, and it stood firm” (Ps. 33:6, 9).
Even if you’re an ordinary layman don’t be intimidated by the intellectual rhetoric of the scientific community. Cosmogony (the origin of the universe) boils down to two basic views: In the beginning, God. Or, in the beginning, nothing…which then went “Bang!” and started the whole evolutionary process. R. C. Sproul asks, “Have you ever thought about the tremendous explosion that nothingness can cause?” It should be patently obvious to the first-year logic student that if there ever was a time when nothing existed, then there would still be nothing today, because ex nihil, nihil fit, out of nothing, nothing comes. Watch out for scientific sleight of hand with highfalutin academic jargon such as “spontaneous regeneration.” The term sounds plausible when naïve freshmen in high school read it in a thick textbook—until you clarify that scientists are postulating that something came from nothing. That’s not science, that’s nonsense. Sproul quotes one Nobel prize winning-physicist, who wrote in an article: “The day has arrived in modern physics when we can no longer speak of spontaneous regeneration—things popping into existence out of nothing on their own.” This article went on to say, “Now we have to be more circumspect and understand that for something to come into being out of nothing requires an enormous period of time.” At the root of cosmogony is not two competing scientific views, but two competing faiths or philosophical systems.
The battle rages over cosmogony, because if this domino falls, the rest will follow suit. It’s axiomatic that ideas have consequences. If there is no Creator, there is no God; if there is no God, there is no Lord; if there is no Lord, there is no lawgiver; no lawgiver, no objective standard of right and wrong—no absolute truth. Without a Creator there is no real meaning or purpose to life, apart from what we make up as we go along to make our accidental existence bearable. Also, history is not moving in a specific direction, except toward eventual annihilation, because according to the second law of thermodynamics (which fails to recognize Christ personally upholding the universe, Heb. 1:3) everything in the universe is breaking down. The day is coming, therefore, when the sun will cease to shine, and that will spell the end. Naturally there is no life beyond the grave, so you might as well live your life according to the philosophy of a beer commercial, and go for all the gusto now. This is the logical conclusion given the premise. The apostle Paul agrees, “If the dead are not raised, ‘Let us eat and drink for tomorrow we die’” (1 Cor. 15:32).
Let’s not be naïve, evolutionists have an agenda. In his book Ends and Means (1937), Aldous Huxley admitted, “I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; and consequently, assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption. The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics. He is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do. For myself, as no doubt for most of my friends, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom. The supporters of this system claimed that it embodied the meaning - the Christian meaning, they insisted - of the world. There was one admirably simple method of confuting these people and justifying ourselves in our erotic revolt: we would deny that the world had any meaning whatever.” Huxley also confessed that “he and most of his friends had accepted the theory of evolution as a means of escaping from Christianity” (Ralph A. Smith, Trinity and Reality, p. 52).
Charles Darwin saw the implications clearly, he said, “A man who has no assured and ever-present belief in the existence of a personal God or of a future existence with retribution or reward, can have for his rule of life, as far as I can see, only to follow those impulses and instincts which are the strongest or which seem to him the best ones.” Now, at last, without the Lord of creation, Huxley and company were free to live however they pleased.
Ralph Smith notes, “If we say, ‘In the beginning, Bang!’ our confession of faith will lead to moral, ethical, social, and political consequences. Animal rights, abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia are part and parcel of a new ethical system that is being promoted at Princeton University. A crucial assumption of Peter Singer’s popular ethics text-book is a logical conclusion of evolution; there is no reason to assume the superiority of the human race above other species. Besides promoting political policies that involve the redistribution of wealth and restrictive laws to protect the environment, Singer advocates legislation to limit the use of animals for experiments, while at the same time liberalizing our rights to terminate human life. Of course, not all evolutionists agree with Singer, but his views show us the kinds of practical issues that bring cosmogony and worldview into the political arena. In the end, the battle for the hearts and minds of men is never separated from the story of the beginning” (Ibid., pp. 52-53).