My Semester with an Evolution-Nazi
by Phil Johnson
When I was in college (Southeastern State University, Durant, OK) and still a fresh convert to authentic Christianity, one of the hardest challenges I faced was what to do with the claims of secular scientists. I had a biology professor who was an ardent evolutionist.
Strike that. He was a fanatic who talked about little else, and he took up the subject on day one of the first semester.
His claims were so bold and his attitude so cocksure and self-satisfied that I was intimidated. He was quick-witted, sharp-tongued, and hard-core. After day one, neither I nor anyone in the class had the courage to raise any questions, because he made it clear from the start that he would ruthlessly mock students who dared to question anything. And I'm talking about conscientious students who asked honest questions, not argumentative people who challenged him. No one would have dared to challenge him.
At first.
I had grown up in a liberal denomination, a believer in theistic evolution, and yet this fanatic evolutionist's lectures were what first got me to think seriously about the questions of human origins and the creation of the universe. The more I tried to absorb the things this fellow was teaching, the more the ramifications of evolutionary theory troubled me. But the professor blew past or dismissed all the difficult (and, to me, obvious) questions his lectures raised.
Finally after several weeks of silent note-taking, I summoned the courage to ask about abiogenesis; and the second law of thermodynamics; and the presence of intelligent, ordered data in DNA; and the scarcity of intermediate forms in the fossil record; and whatnot. I didn't raise those questions all at once, but over a period of two weeks or so. I gradually got to the point where I suppose I was asking a question or two every day.
And something very quickly became obvious: this guy had no good answers to the hard questions. He had never really thought through those issues. He was a doctrinaire evolutionist whose presuppositions were dogmatically atheistic, and he had never seriously considered any arguments against his views. When I (and soon others) began to question his claims, he knew he was in over his head. His cool braggadocio gave way to agitated frustration.
So for three weeks he brought in a guest lecturer from the department of geosciences at the University of Texas in Dallas. And you know what? That guy had no sensible answers either. All the two of them could do was mock and fulminate against whoever was raising the questions. And trust me: they did plenty of that, laughing at one another's jokes and competing with one another to see who could treat the questioners in the class more condescendingly.
It turned out there were a dozen or so other Christians and lots of open-minded students in that biology class. The whole class collectively could see the lameness of the "answers," so they kept raising questions. Good ones. In the end, the geology "expert" took to cursing the questioners and then simply stopped taking any questions—giving long, tedious, angry lectures instead. Then when his three weeks were up, the whole topic of evolution was declared off limits, and we focused the rest of the semester on real biology.
If you analyze the fulminations of the New Atheists and the amateur atheist brotherhoods on the Internet, they are basically of that same type. Moreover, my impression is that science departments in most secular universities are even more despotic in their promotion of atheism today than they were when I was in college.
So my advice to students: summon the courage to challenge your professors. Ask the hard questions. It may cost you academic stature and several grade points, but I predict you'll discover what I did: naturalism is a religion, and an ill-tempered one. It's not really based on rational proof (as most naturalists claim). It's a dogma of the same style and with the same destructive potential as the Roman Catholic dogma of papal infallibility. |
