Beliefs Have Consequences

As a high school student decades ago I remember a radio personality ridiculing the theory of evolution with the catchphrase, “Did we come from scum, or did we climb from slime?”—parodying the idea that life emerged from some algae-laden pond. His phrasing had a clever ring to it, as evidenced by the fact that I still remember it years later.

At the time I was intensely interested in science. I won my school science fair’s highest award three years in a row, once for creating a set of three-dimensional, full-color cutaway models of various kinds of cells.

I still remember researching and working on that project and being amazed at the complexity of the microscopic marvels of blood cells, nerve cells, muscle cells, skin cells, plant cells and more. Electron microscopes were just beginning to reveal that cells were not merely simple blobs of matter, but were in fact highly refined structures beautifully designed for their purpose.

Except, we were told in our biology books, they weren’t really designed at all. And they didn’t have a purpose. In fact, they were nothing more than the product of chance and countless random accidents over an unfathomable period of time.

But what I saw sure had me fooled. I had never seen anything that worked so well put itself together out of nothing!

And then there were the cattle. Every year we raised a steer to provide meat for our family with three boys, and we consumed a lot of beef and beans. After my older brother left home, it fell to me as an eighth-grader to help my father kill and carve up that year’s steer.

To put it mildly, it was not a pleasant task. But the yuck factor was considerably compensated for by the opportunity to examine, up close and personal, how a large living creature was put together—the skeletal structure, the various internal organs, the protective outer hide, the digestive system, the blood veins and arteries, the intricate nerve system, and even a natural built-in fly swatter in the form of a highly efficient tail.

It sure looked like an intricately designed system to me. But again, I was fooled by my own eyes. The biology books assured me it had all put itself together out of nothing!

I speak facetiously, of course—but just barely. Only a few years earlier the U.S. Supreme Court had banned the Bible and prayer from public schools and much of public life. At my own school those rulings were pretty much ignored, and students continued to pray and meet for Bible studies every day before classes started. No one then ever worried about serious school violence, and school shootings were unheard of. This was even though some students in rural schools like mine had rifles in gun racks in their trucks or a pistol under the car seat, usually for shooting snakes.

What a different world we live in today. We are now well into a second or even third generation of schoolchildren who’ve been educated without the Bible, prayer or acknowledgment of God as part of their formal schooling. And sadly, it shows.

For decades now, in spite of its many flaws, Darwinian evolution has been taught to schoolchildren as fact. They’ve been educated to believe they’re simply highly developed animals. So why should we expect them to behave differently than animals?

With God removed from the picture and schoolkids taught they’re just another kind of animal, is it any wonder our schools today see so much bullying, violence, casual sex, teen pregnancies and sexually transmitted disease, along with an unprecedented epidemic of young male mass killers?

Is it any wonder human life is so degraded and devalued when abortion is so commonplace? After all, we’re told those tiny human beings are just lumps of tissue, of even less value than animals, to be discarded when it’s no longer wanted or convenient!

The sad fact is, beliefs have consequences. History is littered with the bloody debris of that reality.

Margaret Sanger was a firm believer in eugenics—ridding the human race of what she considered less-desirable specimens. You might say she wanted to streamline the evolutionary process, to make it more efficient. And she did. She founded Planned Parenthood a little more than a century ago. In the decades since, the organization has been responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of babies through abortion and “emergency” contraception—making the organization one of history’s most prolific mass killers.

Adolf Hitler similarly believed in enforcing a kind of “evolution” as government policy. He ordered the extermination of millions of members of cultural or ethnic groups deemed undesirable in death camps so he could purify the earth for the superior Aryan master race to rule in a planned thousand-year Germanic empire known as the Third Reich. 

Darwinian evolution has as its foundational premise “survival of the fittest.” And tragically, that mentality has taken root again and again in hateful ideologies all over the globe, leaving death and destruction in its wake. Isn’t it about time we woke up and acknowledged its evil fruit?

In this issue we examine some of the more recent discoveries highlighting the theory’s fatal flaws. Evolution leaves mankind blind to our purpose, wandering and wondering in the dark. We hope you’ll read these articles carefully—and realize that yes, beliefs have consequences.