‘In the Beginning Were the Particles’

An excellent article by Chuck Colson from 2002:

The Unacknowledged Creation Story ~

In this 2002 BreakPoint commentary Chuck reminds us of the importance of asking the right questions when we’re engaging in hand-to-hand struggle in the conflict of worldviews.

It’s a classic story of creation — one you may be familiar with, but probably have never heard spelled out quite this way. Here’s how it goes:

“In the beginning was no intelligence or purpose; there were only particles and impersonal laws of physics. These two things plus chance did all the creating. Without them nothing was made that has been made. The particles combined to become complex living stuff through a process of evolution. Primitive humans, not having science to tell them what had happened, dreamed up a Creator they called God.”

As Wilberforce Forum Board of Reference member Phillip Johnson writes in his new book The Right Questions, this is the “creation story” of evolutionary naturalism. And once we understand that — really what they’re saying — we will have the enforcers of Darwinism on the run.

As Johnson explains, there is “an unacknowledged creation story” at the root of all secular learning which is the precise opposite of the biblical one. But don’t expect to hear it told forthrightly at Harvard or Berkeley or anywhere else. To state its elements this explicitly would be to reveal that it is merely a story. “A foundational story,” Johnson writes, “is much more powerful when it is pervasively assumed.” If its elements, you see, are never evaluated, it appears to be an unavoidable implication of reason itself.

The secular creation story originated with Charles Darwin, whose evolutionary theories appeared to make God unnecessary as Creator. Religious belief, intellectuals assumed, would die out as soon as people became better educated.

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