Founder, IOM E-Community
Intellectual theory is always birthed out of a religious experience - or lack of it. Robert Darwin, Charles father, was a free-spirited rebel when it came to religious matters. His mother was a Unitarian, which was where Charles attended "church" with his mother. His father was an active mover and shaker of the liberal "enlightenment movement" within the Anglican "church." It was in his Unitarian experience that Charles developed a taste for natural history. After his mother died, his father required him and his siblings to attend the Anglican church and to be schooled by them in 1817.
What exactly do the Unitarians and Anglicans believe? Unitarians believe that God is one single unit - no Jesus Christ or Holy Spirit, at least as a godhead. They support the deist beliefs of God using the "bang" theory to form matter, then left the rest to mankind to do as he pleases with it. Anglicanism was formed by the mixture of Protestantism, Roman Catholicism and Mystical Eastern Orthodoxy. The Anglicans were considered the first movement to blend humanism, enlightenment (intellectualism) and religion. This is why the "state" considered it safe to adopt this blended lukewarm church as their official state church - which is the case to this day.
While his father continued in the "enlightenment movement" within the Anglican church, he relentlessly applied pressure for Charles to become a priest of the Anglican's new reform - instead becoming a taxidermist. Charles maintained that the leaders of the Anglican church were hypocritical and at best - intellectually warm. He found more and more acceptance in following naturalist and collecting beetles. It was in this "beetle juice" stuff that launched him into his assumptive theories.
So there you have it - Darwinism is a pure mixture of Unitarianism (big bang), Anglicanism (enlightenment) and Naturalism (study of plants and animals). As in most cases, a man's beliefs are birthed through his bitterness toward, or, his devote love for his father. In Darwin's case, he spent his whole life trying to gain the respect of his father but ended up dishonoring him by refusing to join his father's mission. The sad part is - his father got what he wanted, deism in the world of science.
The IOM E-Community has a defined burden for unveiling the Truth behind the post-modern movement of evolution, old earth and humanism. Creationism is the Biblical Worldview belief that humanity, life, the earth, and the universe (as God sees it) are the creation of a supernatural agency - the God of Abraham. In the 1900's, British geologists and other non-Christian scientists argued that the world was considerably older than they previously been taught, scripture-based calculation of less than six thousand years. In the United States the apparent discrepancies between science and Biblical Worldview were "seized upon and amplified" in a historically know "cultural war" over whether humanistic (man based) science or Biblical documentation (God Based) could provide the most accurate and provable text for education. By the early 1920s, the Christian church realized the traditional beliefs of creationism, commonly accepted by mankind, were being questioned due to their new "age of enlightenment" movement of scientific humanism. Shortly after this "wake-up call," they soon realized their view of Biblical creationism had become "the standard alternative" to humanism based "scientific" explanations of the biosphere (ecosystem) - instead of being the primary view.
Critical Note: The humanistic view of "global ecological system" believes that the integration of all living beings and their relationships, including their interacting with the elements of the lithosphere (outermost planetary shell), hydrosphere (water) and atmosphere (gas planetary layer) is all based on the subjective data of evolution. The man-formed view of the biosphere postulates that it all evolved through a process they call biogenesis (life-forms producing life-forms) and biopoesis (life-form from inanimate matter).
The Truth: Creationism embraces the simple truth that the Creator (God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit) birthed the global ecological system by way of intelligent design - the truth that all elements of the universe, as God sees it, have been hand crafted by way of the mind of God. Since man's thoughts are not Gods and God's thoughts are not mans, the human mind of man will never embrace intelligent design (1 Cor. 2:11).
But a natural man does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually appraised. (1 Corinthians 2:14)
The reality of man accepting the intelligent design of the biosphere will require a conversion from the mind of man into the mind of Christ Jesus (Phil. 2:1-7). This can only be done through being evangelized by the Holy Spirit - thus we have Creation Evangelism.
Creation Evangelism adds one more layer to the Biblical Worldview of Creationism. Creation Evangelism belief is that the study of the creation actually reveals the gospel of leading an individual to Christ Jesus for salvation. These practitioners use the field of Creationism vs. Evolution to detail the fight between God and Satan. All well groomed (true born-again) Creationist know that it is impossible for mankind to understand, let alone embrace, creationism without a conversion to Jesus Christ.
HISTORICAL RELEVANCE:Since the end of the 19th century, Creationism in the United States has been set in sharp oppositional contrast to "scientific" assumptive theories, such as that of evolution, which derive from earthly, naturalistic and post-modern religious observations of the universe and life. This kind of "wisdom" is certainly not the kind that comes down from a God-o-logical view (James 3:15). Strict Biblical Worldview Creationists believe that evolution cannot adequately account for the history, diversity, and complexity of life on earth. Biblical Creationist bases their belief on a literal reading of NOT just the book of Genesis but the entire Bible, as well as the studies of the natural (natural matter that can be seen). In contrast to the Biblical Worldview Creationists, evolutionary creationists maintain that, although evolution accounts for the nature of the biosphere, evolution itself is cosmologically attributable to a Creator deity. It needs to be noted here that most evolutionary creationist are deist (God created it, then left the rest to man's reason and observation) by choice. True Biblical Creationist do not hold to the evolutionary creationist beliefs, in fact they consider them to be the violation of James 3:15.
How Evolution Got the Upper Hand:
Times are changing. For centuries, Christians have left the un-saved take the upper hand in world of education. Due to the provocation of the Holy Spirit, body members of Christ are "taking back the ground" lost in the cross-cultural wars over intellectualism and enlightenment. To put it quite blunt - Christians are no longer willing to be dumbed down. A resulting conclusion, men and women of God's intelligent design are stepping up to the forum and proving the Truths of Intelligent Design. Needless to say, within the world of science, the humanist have been left gasping for intelligence. In most debates, the Christian educators, and/or scientists, are winning hands down.
At first, these Christian thinkers were associated with being non-thinking Christian fundamentalist in opposition to human evolution. That soon "evolved" into these Christian thinkers being an actual threat - to, they actually platform better than we do. Thanks to communicators like Dr. Joseph Kezele and others, the roles between Biblical Worldview science and human evolutionary science have completely reversed. Christian educators are now considered the "experts."
How did the church get into this mess to start with? As a resident historian, I remember several U.S. states passing laws against the teaching of evolution in public schools, as upheld in the Scopes Trial. This court upholding was on the grounds of the Butler Act of 1925. Evolution was omitted entirely from school textbooks in much of the United States until the 1960s. Due to the teachings of evolution entering the back doors of our universities, international student exchange program, separation of church and state and the laziness of the church, a vigorous renewed effort stormed America with legal judgments - primarily through the work of the American Civil Liberties Union, ACLU (1920). By the 1980s, Christians giving way to their incompetence, suffered the ramifications of their laziness of thinking.
This defeat stimulated a new generation of Christian thinkers. Christians began developing a voice in history, science, politics and law. Such beliefs as Young Earth creationism, proponents of which believe that the earth is thousands rather than billions of years old - was back on the platform again. This time, Christians were putting their science where their mouths are.
By the start of the twentieth century through propagation of assumptive education and speculations, evolution was widely accepted and was beginning to be taught in U.S. public schools - thanks to the ACLU. After World War I, popular belief that German aggression resulted from a Darwinian doctrine of "survival of the fittest" inspired William Jennings Bryan to campaign against the teaching of Darwinian ideas of human evolution. In the 1920s, the Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy led to an upsurge of fundamentalist religious fervor in which schools were prevented from teaching evolution through state laws such as Tennessee's 1925 Butler Act, and by getting evolution removed from biology textbooks nationwide. Creationism became associated in common usage with opposition to evolution.
PUBLIC SCHOOL WAR:
In 1961 in the United States, an attempt to repeal the Butler Act failed. Post-modern efforts began to be birthed through this assumptive "scientific" work of evolution. The Genesis Flood by the Baptist engineer Henry M. Morris brought the Seventh-day Adventist biblically literal flood geology of George McCready Price to a wider audience, popularizing a novel idea of Young Earth creationism, and by 1965 the term "scientific creationism" had gained currency. The 1968 Epperson v. Arkansas judgment ruled that state laws prohibiting the teaching of evolution violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution which prohibits state aid to religion. and when in 1975 Daniel v. Waters ruled that a state law requiring biology textbooks discussing "origins or creation of man and his world" to give equal treatment to creation as per Book of Genesis was unconstitutional, a new group identifying themselves as creationists promoted a "Creation science" which omitted explicit biblical references.
In 1981 the state of Arkansas passed a law, Act 590, mandating that "creation science" be given equal time in public schools with evolution, and defining creation science as positing the "creation of the universe, energy, and life from nothing," as well as explaining the earth's geology by "the occurrence of a worldwide flood". This was ruled unconstitutional at McLean v. Arkansas in January 1982 as the creationists' methods were not scientific but took the literal wording of the Book of Genesis and attempted to find scientific support for it. Undaunted, Louisiana introduced similar legislation that year. A series of judgments and appeals led to the 1987 Supreme Court ruling in Edwards v. Aguillard that it too violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.
THE BIRTH OF INTELLIGENT DESIGN:"Creation science" could no longer be taught in public schools, and in drafts of the creation science school textbook Of Pandas and People all references to creation or creationism were changed to refer to intelligent design. Proponents of the intelligent design movement organized widespread campaigning to considerable effect. They officially denied any links to creation or to religion, and indeed claimed that "creationism" only referred to young Earth creationism with flood geology; but in Kitzmiller v. Dover the court found intelligent design to be essentially religious, and unable to dissociate itself from its creationist roots, as part of the ruling that teaching intelligent design in public school science classes was unconstitutional.
So there you have it. That is about where the war on Evolution vs. Intelligent Design is today. We have much work to do. We are so close to shouting "victory" but it is critical that we close the gap. The enemy will not lay down and die. He might lay down and play dead but he has a unique way of showing his ugly head - all ten of them. IOM E-Community is dedicated through the work of Dr. Joseph Kezele, and others, to re-establish God's view of the world, He designed with His intelligence. Enjoy their work!
Visit our new Creation Evangelism site: IOM Creation Evangelism.
