Excuses

Charles Darwin and his cohort have a lot to answer for..!  I was talking to a neighbour in our street; someone about my vintage.  As so often happens when octogenarians engage in conversations the subject of human mortality easily comes into the conversation.  Moses, in Psalm 90 asserts that the years of our life are threescore and ten or perhaps by reason of our strength, four score.  That implied that we are both in our bonus years.  So somewhere in the conversation about our mortality I slipped in the million dollar question: “So are you prepared and ready to face your Maker?”  His answer floored me... an answer I’d never heard expressed so bluntly in the many times I’ve asked people that question.  Without a moment’s hesitation he stated, “I don’t have one John!”

Stone the crows...!  I don’t have a Maker...?  How sad is that?  Here’s man who categorically states without a shadow of a doubt that he ‘just happened’.  Once there was nothing and then nothing turned into something – isn’t that how it works?  Or does he belong to a different denomination of secularists?  One who takes the view that matter has always existed and then some random event within that matter triggered the earliest sources of life?  I didn’t get a chance to discuss this further with him because he told me in no uncertain terms that he didn’t want me preaching to him.

So why do I blame Charles Darwin and his cohort?  Because more than a hundred and sixty years ago Darwin published his “Origin of Species”.  That publication for the first time gave people a so-called "scientific excuse" for believing in fairy tales.  Well, sort of.  Let me give you an example.  There’s an old children’s story of a princess who kissed a frog and that kiss turned the frog into a prince.  A Fairy Tale!  But think about it.  The frog is an amphibian.  The prince belongs to the species homo-sapiens.  Before Darwin we would all have agreed that only in Fairy Tales do amphibians turn into home sapiens.  But according to Darwin and his followers it is scientifically arguable that this can indeed happen if we increase the time factor.  In the fairy tale the transformation was instantaneous.  Darwin (in effect) argued that all we need to do is change the equation by bumping up the time factor from instantaneous to millions of years and amphibians did indeed turn into homo-sapiens.

It’s a ludicrous idea that life ‘just happened’ purely by chance.  Secular people who follow the religion of materialism may mock our Christian belief of an eternal Divine Being creating us out of nothing, but does the doctrine of life beginning by chance in some pre-existent primordial swamp really make more logical sense?  I once had an atheist workmate who accused Christians of believing the fairy tales of some Divine Being who loved them and cared for them.  He mockingly spoke about us having an invisible friend.  But my atheistic workmate who based his world-and-life view on the theory of evolution couldn’t see the fairy tale he himself had swallowed hook line and sinker.

So where does that leave my neighbour who doesn’t believe he has a Maker?  Well, maybe this sounds somewhat judgmental but I believe it’s a convenient excuse for not having to face the reality of God’s existence.  I am convinced that if Charles Darwin knew what we know today about genetics and if he knew what we know now about the amazing complexity of even the simplest cell, he would never have published his Origin of Species.  In fact, is it not so that for generations we have attempted to produce life in a test tube without success?  How then could it just happen randomly... by chance?  The point is that Darwin’s theory has provided countless millions of people with pseudo evidence for no longer needing to believe in a Creator God.  And... let’s face it... our fallen and corrupted human nature likes it that way.  It means that instead of God being at the centre of the universe we can keep ourselves at the centre of things.  It means that we then don’t have a God to whom we are accountable and a God who will one day judge unbelievers for every idle word they have ever spoken.  But the big question then is: what do we do with the story of God who became man in the person of Jesus?  That’s no fairy tale.  That’s history.

John Westendorp
2MaxFM June 22nd 2025


 

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