This July marks the 100th anniversary of one of the most consequential legal and cultural battles in American history: the Scopes “Monkey” Trial.
Held in 1925 in Dayton, Tennessee, the trial centered on the teaching of Darwinian evolution in public schools. But its implications reached far beyond the small-town courtroom. A century later, the trial remains deeply relevant — not just for Tennessee but for the entire nation.
The loss of God in our schools has led to the loss of purpose in the hearts of many young people.
Why? Because the heart of the trial wasn’t just about curriculum — it was about worldview.
When John Scopes was charged with violating Tennessee’s Butler Act for teaching that humans descended from lower animals, the case became a flashpoint in a larger war over truth. The debate wasn’t about scientific inquiry; it was about whether our children should be taught that their lives are the result of random chance or divine design.
Darwinian evolution strips humanity of inherent worth. It reduces people to mere products of an unguided, purposeless process. For generations now, our public education system has promoted this theory as settled fact, conditioning students to view themselves as nothing more than advanced animals with no higher calling or creator.
This is not just a scientific discussion — it’s a spiritual crisis.
Genesis 1:27 highlights the truth of mankind’s origin, “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” Despite this truth that once shaped our nation, children are now taught that their origins are accidental, that morality is relative, and that there’s no divine image imprinted on their being.
The result of this leads to the heartbreaking reality of anxiety, identity confusion, and hopelessness. The loss of God in our schools has led to the loss of purpose in the hearts of many young people.
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Even with our nation’s stray from truth in public school systems, Tennessee has once again stepped into the national conversation. But this time, with a new kind of clarity.
In 2012, Tennessee passed legislation informally known as the “Monkey Bill.” Contrary to how it’s often portrayed, the bill doesn’t ban the teaching of evolution, yet, it encourages critical thinking among students. The law allows teachers the freedom to help students analyze and evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of scientific theories, including evolution.
In short, it affirms that students have the right to question. To debate. To think.
This is an important shift. Since the deviation of biblical truth, evolutionary theory has been treated as sacred dogma in our schools, protected from scrutiny or alternative viewpoints. The 2012 bill creates space for inquiry — not indoctrination. It gives students the freedom to explore other explanations for human origins, including intelligent design and biblical creation.
Tennessee is not alone.
Across the country, more parents, teachers, and lawmakers are beginning to ask: Are we really offering students a full picture of science? Or are we force-feeding them a worldview that excludes God by default?
The Scopes Trial is no longer just a historical milestone — it is a mirror, reflecting how far we’ve drifted from the foundational truths that once guided this nation. We’ve traded the biblical truth that we were created in God’s image for a theory that says we’re cosmic accidents. And the fruit of that trade has been bitter.
It’s time to return to the truth.
We must fight to protect our children from ideologies that deny their worth, confuse their identity, and distance them from their creator. We were not made by chance. We were created by God, in His image, with purpose and dignity. That truth must once again be allowed in our classrooms — and in our culture.
A hundred years after Dayton, the battle continues. But so does the opportunity to stand for truth. Let us not waste it.
For most of human history, scarcity was the enemy. Territory, calories, energy, and land all had to be fought for, hoarded, and rationed. Wars were waged and innovations forged to survive deprivation. But the material hardship that once united societies in common struggle has largely faded in the affluent world.
Now we face a different enemy: artificial abundance.
The future belongs to those who reject the simulacrum and embrace reality.
In the wealthiest nations, human beings are no longer selected for resilience in the face of scarcity. They’re selected for their ability to resist the seductions of abundance — synthetic food, fake relationships, dopamine on demand. The danger isn’t hunger or want, but the numbing comfort of simulated satisfaction.
Once, entire civilizations rose or fell depending on their ability to produce and preserve food. Famines routinely devastated societies, and most people spent their lives just trying to eat.
Now, calories come cheap and easy. Factory farming, food science, and global logistics mean even the poorest Americans can gorge on processed junk. A trip to McDonald’s or a few bucks at Walmart buys a week’s worth of empty calories.
But artificial flavorings and chemical fillers are no substitute for real food. They simulate nourishment, but slowly poison the body. Calories are now so available that obesity, not hunger, is the largest threat to the well-being of the poor. The need has been met — and subverted.
The same dynamic has corrupted sexual desire. Historically, sex drove men to build civilizations, conquer enemies, win wealth, and rise in status. Today, that drive is short-circuited. Men can now simulate conquest and fulfillment without risk, pain, or purpose — through pornography and video games.
Why fight for honor or love when you can get the illusion of both from a screen? Instead of greatness, many young men settle for a life of digital masturbation — and that’s how the system likes it. Young men remain trapped in a kind of eternal adolescence: satisfied just enough to avoid rebellion, addicted just enough to stay quiet.
Social media and dating apps have similarly distorted the lives of young women. Women crave connection, validation, and community — roles they once fulfilled in family, faith, and friendship.
Now they chase attention online, deluding themselves into believing that likes and comments are the same as love and loyalty. Social media simulates female community and male desire, but gives neither. Depression rises. Real-life relationships crumble. Women fear male attention in person but crave it online, where they feel in control.
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What results is a dysfunctional, hypergamous dating market. Men won’t approach. Women hold out for the fantasy of the “perfect man” who never arrives. Both sexes lose.
COVID-19 lockdowns showed us the true danger of attempting to simulate every aspect of human experience.
During the lockdowns, social interactions from school, church, work, and even bonding with friends over a meal became impossible. School, church, work, friendship — all of it was forcibly digitized.
The results were catastrophic: soaring depression, stalled childhood development, and broken education.
But the worst part? People stayed in their digital cages even after the doors opened. Simulated connection became easier than real interaction. And easier won.
Reality demands effort. Family, community, faith, and responsibility are hard. They hurt. They risk rejection. But they matter.
Left alone with simulated choices, most people will pick the path of least resistance. That’s why society must rethink what it rewards. Because the simulations aren’t harmless distractions — they’re traps.
The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard called this phenomenon the “simulacrum” — a copy with no original. A cheeseburger that isn’t food. AI “friends” that aren’t human and virtual “communities” that cannot possibly relieve loneliness. A porn star who looks and behaves nothing like a real woman. Online attention that ruins offline romance. Video game violence that replaces true heroism.
We face an evolutionary bottleneck as serious as any in human history. But instead of favoring the strong, smart, or adaptable, survival now depends on who can say no.
Can you say no to simulated sex? Simulated success? Simulated community? Can you hunger for meaning, not just comfort?
Those who make it through this filter will be the ones who choose austerity over ease — who hunger for the real thing. The future belongs to those who reject the simulacrum and embrace reality.
Artificial intelligence will only make these temptations worse. But those who refuse to be pacified will also be the ones who endure.
Choose meaning. Teach your children to do the same. The future depends on it.
If anyone remembers the Scopes Monkey Trial today, it’s most likely because of its fictionalized retelling in the classic 1960 movie “Inherit the Wind.”
Itself an adaptation of a popular play, “Inherit the Wind” stars Spencer Tracy as the Clarence Darrow stand-in, an idealistic lawyer defending a man accused of teaching the theory of evolution to schoolchildren — a crime according to (recently passed) Tennessee state law.
It was not evolutionists’ irreligiosity Bryan opposed but rather their overreach: Who were they to argue with how the people of Tennessee had decided to educate their children?
The movie depicts the trial as a battle between noble, free-speech-minded liberals and cruel and ignorant fundamentalists. It portrays prosecutor Matthew Harrison Brady (a proxy for William Jennings Bryan) as pompous and attention-hungry, while downplaying Darrow’s own love of the spotlight as well as his hostility toward both the South and religion.
A week away from the trial’s 100th anniversary (it took place July 10-21, 1925), this is more or less the version that survives in the cultural memory. In 1967, Joseph Wood Krutch, who covered the trial for the Nation, opined that Scopes had become “more of a part of the folklore of liberalism than of history.” To this day, it’s regarded as both a victory in the battle between progress and superstition and a sobering reminder that that battle still rages on. One recent headline is exemplary: “100 years after the Scopes trial, science is still under attack.”
Like the play on which it is based, “Inherit the Wind” uses the Scopes trial as an allegory for McCarthyism. (Director Stanley Kramer was subsequently praised for employing the blacklisted Nedrick Young as co-screenwriter.) As a result, the movie adopts a tone of high-minded seriousness quite at odds with the carnival-like atmosphere of the actual trial.
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The entire affair had the contrived air of a publicity stunt from the outset. The Butler Act — a statute prohibiting Tennessee’s public schools from presenting “any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals” — had little if any immediate practical impact when the state legislature passed it in March 1925.
It was only when the American Civil Liberties Union decided to challenge the Butler Act on free speech grounds that the teaching of evolution became a cause célèbre. The ACLU placed ads in Tennessee papers for a teacher willing to serve as their defendant; these ads caught the attention of community leaders in Dayton, a declining mining town 40 miles north of Chattanooga, who saw an opportunity to bring in some much needed tourist revenue. They convinced local football coach and science teacher John T. Scopes to step forward.
Scopes barely qualified as a defendant; he’d only taught biology on occasion as a substitute, using a textbook that happened to mention evolution, and after the trial admitted he couldn’t remember if the subject had ever come up in class. Still, it was enough to accuse him of violating the Butler Act, a misdemeanor offense.
The implied showdown between science and religion quickly eclipsed any First Amendment concerns, and Dayton got the tourism boom it had hoped for. More than 200 journalists and hundreds of spectators descended upon the town to watch the trial — and perhaps to patronize the blocks of newly erected stands selling stuffed monkeys and other keepsakes.
Bryan, Woodrow Wilson’s former secretary of state and three-time failed Democratic presidential nominee, was invited to join the prosecution and given the chance to rail against the evils of evolution, while celebrity lawyer Clarence Darrow embraced the defense team’s offer to attack fundamentalism on the public stage.
What emerged was largely a comical farce, its outcome weighted in favor of the prosecution and both sides more interested in swaying public opinion than in securing a relatively inconsequential legal victory. (While Scopes lost, incurring a fine of $100, his conviction was overturned on a technicality; the Butler Act remained on the books in obscurity until it was finally repealed in 1967.)
As historian Edward J. Larson describes, the trial was a laid-back affair. The judge dispensed with the usual courtroom dress code as a concession to the boiling Tennessee summer, occasionally even moving the proceedings outside. The town itself took on an atmosphere of absurd spectacle emblematic of the excesses of the roaring twenties, with at least two actual chimpanzees (technically apes rather than monkeys) paraded through the streets.
After a dramatic and sweltering eight-day battle, both the prosecution and the defense emerged convinced they’d successfully embarrassed the other. Neither suspected that they’d set in motion a series of lengthy legal battles over the role of religion in public life and set the stage for the fundamentalist-modernist crisis that came to split American Protestantism in half. The Scopes trial would change America forever but not necessarily in the ways those involved expected.
“Inherit the Wind” openly maligns Bryan as an ignorant fool stirring up a mob of uneducated, hateful yokels, a selfish man more enthralled by the sound of his voice than devoted to the truth. Anybody who knows of his importance as the leading figure of the Progressive Era would understand why this is disingenuous. As for the citizens of Dayton, by all accounts they enjoyed the hullaballoo and were perfectly gracious to participants on both sides.
The movie culminates with a depiction of Darrow’s infamous two-hour grilling of Bryan on the witness stand. Called to testify as a Bible expert, the fictionalized Bryan stumbles repeatedly over his opponent’s complicated questions of Old Testament interpretation.
While this did have the effect of damaging Bryan’s reputation and perhaps even hastening the ailing man’s death (in the movie, Bryan expires in the courtroom immediately after the verdict; the actual Bryan died peacefully is his sleep five days later), “Inherit the Wind” drastically simplifies Bryan’s actual beliefs.
Bryan fit into an older political paradigm where socialism and fundamentalist Christianity could coexist on a platform of eschatological optimism. He wasn’t a shallow anti-intellectual pushing against new ideas but a defiant moralist who doubted that science alone could provide a moral framework for society.
Bryan was a liberal Democrat, a feminist, labor organizer, silver standard proponent, anti-imperialist, anti-KKK, anti-alcohol, and anti-war advocate. Although he believed progress was God’s will, he was hardly a theocrat and believed wholeheartedly in the mandate of the masses.
He arguably had a more sincere faith in democracy than anyone today, believing that change must come through the power of the vote. If the policies he advocated — such as prohibition — happened to save souls along the way, all the better, but he believed they must be achieved through secular majoritarian processes.
His central critique of evolution, though obviously rooted in Christian revelation, drew most heavily from rational moral arguments. Bryan was particularly concerned that reducing man to a “mere mammal” would fatally devalue individual human lives. Given the Nazis’ embrace of eugenics and genocide less than two decades later, it’s hard to conclude that Bryan was wrong.
Conversely, “Inherit the Wind” treats the evolutionists as well-meaning, if flawed, idealists. But the real-life Darrow was a prickly, controversy-courting atheist and free-will denier who wasn’t above using cruel tactics to advance his agenda — a far cry from the dignified and tolerant figure the movie presents.
The movie also exaggerates the role journalist and gadfly H.L. Mencken (portrayed by Gene Kelly as E.K. Hornbeck) had in the proceedings, which has burnished his reputation as a free speech pioneer. While Mencken’s syndicated column for the Baltimore Sun made him a national figure, his influence on conventional wisdom was limited. As historian Madison Trammel writes, news “coverage of fundamentalists was fairly evenly split between positive, negative, and neutral articles.”
“Inherit the Wind” further lionizes Mencken by ignoring the less savory aspects of his self-styled crusade against ignorance and hypocrisy. As his late biographer Terry Teachout notes, Mencken’s tendency to dismiss entire classes of people (such as the ignorant masses he dubbed the "booboisie") at times could take on an ugly eugenic tone.
"The educated negro of today is a failure," wrote Mencken in an exchange with prominent socialist Robert Rives La Monte, published in 1910. "Not because he meets insuperable difficulties in life, but because he is a negro. He is, in brief, a low-caste man."
Mencken’s interest in the trial derived in large part from his contempt for the prosecution’s side. Worried the local bumpkins wouldn’t provide him with enough material, Mencken attempted to trick them into attending the service of a made-up faith healer. Despite printing and handing out 1,000 handbills for his proto-"Daily Show" stunt, he was unable to find any locals gullible enough to take the bait.
Like Darrow, whom Mencken convinced to take the case, Mencken took glee in making Bryan look like a fool. He couldn’t even resist crowing about the latter’s sudden death, publicly joking that “God aimed at Darrow, missed, and hit Bryan instead.” In private, he was less eloquent, noting simply that “we killed the son-of-a-bitch.”
After a century of this mythology, what remains of Bryan’s public image is a caricature — a fat, egotistical, ignorant, religious nut-job, driven by what Mencken called “simple ambition.” Darrow and Mencken, on the other hand, retain their images as progressive heroes.
In this sense, it’s clear that the trial’s putative losers have been victorious in the long-term. Their underlying assumption that Christian faith poses a threat to education has influenced debates about school prayer, homeschooling, and the right of the state to intervene against religious parents for their children’s safety.
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At the same time, the attempts of majority-Christian communities to enforce their own local norms have been recast as fanatical campaigns to impose religion on public life, with the removal of age-inappropriate materials from public school libraries likened to book-burning .
One can even spot the influence of Scopes on the COVID-era demonization of “anti-vaxxers,” whose main offense is their obstinate refusal to defer to their supposed superiors, the technocratic elite deriving authority from “the science.”
Bryan rejected this claim to authority. It was not evolutionists’ irreligiosity he opposed but rather their overreach: Who were they to argue with how the people of Tennessee had decided to educate their children? Why did they assume that their particular beliefs held greater weight than those of their opponents?
“Christians are compelled to build their own colleges in which to teach Christianity,” Bryan said in a statement weeks before the trial commenced. “Why not require atheists and agnostics to build their own colleges in which to teach atheism and agnosticism?”
For Bryan, the invocation of free speech concealed the kind of secular, governmental power grab we still see playing out today: “The duty of a parent to protect his children is more sacred than the right of teachers to teach what parents do not want taught.”
English Catholic journalist G.K. Chesterton echoed this view, arguing that the removal of Christianity from education had merely swapped trust in God for trust in the pluralistic education system and any teacher who administered it: “And if his own private opinions happen to be of the rather crude sort that are commonly contemporary with and connected with the new sciences or pseudo-sciences, he can teach any of them under cover of those sciences. That is what the people of Dayton, Tennessee, were really in revolt against.”
One can see how prescient Chesterton was about such fashionable educational trend-chasing in everything from the trans-kids controversies to the “book burning” scandals. Who is truly in charge? Parents or teachers? Majoritarian populists or experts? Who should be in charge?
While objections like Chesterton’s seem to have faded from memory, to view the Scopes Monkey Trial as Christianity’s last, desperate attempt to claw back institutional power from ascendant science is to overstate the case. Gallup reports that 37% of Americans still believe in young-earth creationism, while a further 34% believe in some form of theistic evolution or divine intervention. Both sides of the debate remain as inflamed as ever, if not more virulently distrustful of the other's intentions.
The fundamentalists may or may not be correct about the age of the Earth or the origin of species, but their instincts about the authoritarianism lurking beneath our modern, post-religious order are worthy of our attention.
Considering that the same technocratic oligarchy that claimed Scopes as a victory drove the world into two World Wars, multiple economic crises, and a pandemic-cum-social engineering experiment, the spiritual heirs of William Jennings Bryan may yet get another day in court.
In my quest to learn the ins and outs of the orthodoxy of evolutionary theory (and therefore bring to light its deficiencies), I discovered geologist and lawyer Dr. Casey Luskin, associate director of the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute.
A proponent, researcher, and advocate for intelligent design, Dr. Luskin has been defending academic freedom for scientists who face discrimination because of their support for ID for nearly 20 years.
Life is very low entropy, meaning it’s very ordered, and yet it’s also very high energy. How exactly does life maintain this seemingly contradictory state?
I’ve written about it here before, but I shared with Dr. Luskin my personal skepticism concerning the religion of evolution. As a layman (relative to him), it seemed to me as if Evolution™ had an “invisible hand of God” problem that’s never been seriously addressed.
The mythology of Evolution™ seems to have a beginning (the Big Bang), an end (modern Homo sapiens), but no middle. And as I came to understand from my conversation with Dr. Luskin, much of the evidence for evolutionary theory amounts to flimsy, tenuously linked assumptions on the verge of being disproved in various fields.
We began by discussing one of the more popular arguments against intelligent design: the concept of “junk DNA."
The argument goes something like this: If everything is intelligently designed, then why does the vast majority of our DNA seem to serve no purpose?
As Dr. Luskin explained, the idea originated in the early 1960s, when scientists mapped out the molecular protein production process: DNA encodes RNA, which then carries that information to ribosomes, which in turn use it to assemble chains of amino acids into proteins.
Because so much of the DNA that had been studied up to that point did not seem tobe doing that, it was tossed in the proverbial junk bin, hence the name.
The idea really took off with the publications of Japanese geneticist Susumu Ohno’s “So Much Junk DNA in Our Genome” in 1972 and Richard Dawkins’ “The Selfish Gene" in 1976.
Ohno famously asserted that 90% of our DNA was total nonsense. Dawkins piggybacked off that and gave the junk DNA a “purpose,” saying that the only true function of the gene was to replicate itself. Whether or not the gene helps you is of non-substance.
Luskin was one of the first to push back against this idea. As an undergraduate at the University of California, San Diego, he experienced firsthand how the "junk DNA" theory was used to dismiss the burgeoning ID movement.
Luskin would argue with his professors and peers that it was still premature to conclude that most of our DNA could be classified as “junk,” citing the unfinished-at-the-time Human Genome Project as evidence for the lack of evidence.
Luskin seems to have been onto something. In the past few years, the “junk DNA” theory has slowly unraveled.
This is in large part thanks to a groundbreaking series of papers entitled the ENCODE Project, published by biologists studying “non-coding” DNA — the goal being to uncover the mysteries of the human genome.
Since the ENCODE Project began in 2010, it has found that at least 80% of the genome has shown evidence of biochemical functionality. In other words — contrary to junk DNA theory — this DNA is transcribing information into the RNA.
And as for the other 20%?
The lead researchers of the ENCODE Project say that many of these non-coding elements of DNA occur within very specific cell types or circumstances, so to catch them in action doing what they’re supposed to be doing is simply very difficult. But they predict that as they study more and more cell types, that that 80% figure will most certainly jump up to 100%.
All this is to say that applying a Darwinian paradigm to discoveries about gene function has led to erroneous conclusions about "junk DNA" — which then, in turn, has been used to justify the same Darwinian theory that spawned it.
Meanwhile, Intelligent Design's predictions that we would find function for that junk DNA have been borne out.
As Luskin pointed out, the origin of life is the origin of information. Life, on its face, is a very strange arrangement of matter.
It’s very easy to find things that are high entropy-high energy (think tornadoes or explosions) or low entropy-low energy (snowflakes, crystals). But life is different. Life is very low entropy, meaning it’s very ordered, and yet it’s also very high energy.
How exactly does life maintain this seemingly contradictory state?
Machinery.
Our cells are full of molecular machines that process and encode information to be used as applicable instructions. That is what our DNA, RNA, and ribosomes are all there for. They’re machines that process information.
Imagine you wanted to watch "Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith" on DVD. Would you be able to watch it without the DVD player? No.
Imagine if the instructions for building the world’s first ever DVD player were on a DVD. Could you build the DVD player just with the DVD? No.
The information and the information-processing machine are inseparable.
The question then becomes: How did these machines come into being?
Did they build themselves? No, we just showed how that can’t be the case.
The only plausible answer is — intelligence. There needed to be an intelligent designer to create both the machinery and the instructions.
Despite the initial mockery greeting Intelligent Design, the theory is gaining ground as a reliable model and explanation for the origin of life and genes. And that’s simply because the evidence is getting to be a bit undeniable.
Make sure to follow Dr. Casey Luskin’s work here.
In the beginning, there was ... a big explosion.
Which came from ... nothing?
Thinking man has introduced the most unpredictable force in the universe: free will. He can steer the destiny of all life in any direction he so chooses.
In order for evolution to make sense, we must accept its explanation for the genesis of all life.
So let's start there: Everything that has ever supposedly existed came from this gigantic explosion from a single subatomic point of origin.
And over time, this entropic inertia of particles from the explosion eventually somehow created stars and planets.
Now, most planets are barren wastelands of nothingness. But ours? Ours is different. We are teeming with life.
But how did life come into existence here on this tiny, blue planet? Well, according to our brightest minds, we don’t exactly know. But from what we can gather, after hundreds of millions of years of particles sloshing around in this primordial soup of water, nitrogen, carbon, and some other random elements, the first protein was magically created!
And from there, it was only a matter of time before a protein magically became a single-cell organism, which eventually magically turned into a more complex organism, and so on and so forth.
Fast forward to now. Trees and animals everywhere.
Then you have us. The most complex life forms in the known universe. We have bones, muscles, organs (each with its own specific function), eyes, ears, noses, and brains.
It’s kind of funny how all of this life came to be so incredibly complex, multilayered, and perfectly symbiotic in its structure.
But there’s obviously no way any of this could have been purposely designed by an intelligent designer, because we know that this all happened by a random and chaotic process of particles smashing into each other over millions of years until they eventually began building themselves into fully functioning organisms.
OK, that’s the end of my sarcastic rant. Time to get serious.
My general thoughts on evolutionary theory?
To put it simply, it’s too broad, general, and discombobulated of a theory for it to be considered a serious historical account of our universe.
The process of simply recording human history is one that involves making sense of specific moments in time involving specific historical figures with the hope of compiling a coherent story of humanity.
This consists of finding primary evidence, like documents and artifacts, of those moments in time. And then it takes teams of scholars to interpret what the evidence means; to connect the dots.
And that process is never 100% accurate. It is, much of the time, guesswork. It is excruciatingly hard — in fact, damn near impossible — to know to a full extent the full scope of detail for a single moment in history. And that’s only for a single moment.
Evolutionary theory asserts an assumption that is applied to the entirety of history. That life has uniformly and unquestionably progressed to this point in time according to its rules.
The problem with that is that it attempts to cover way too many data points across time and space and yet has no real way of doing so. We’re not talking about a team of scholars debating the political motivations of Napoleon during one of his military campaigns; we’re talking about the development of all life everywhere throughout all time.
It is the epitome of theory having no evidence to back it up.
Personally, I think our ideas on evolutionary theory need an update. We need to see it through a new lens.
Evolution asserts that nature selects the set of genetic traits that are to be passed on to the next generation of organisms. But what we have to understand is the role the thinking man plays within the evolutionary model.
As conscious beings, we humans have gotten to the point where we have direct influence on what and who gets chosen to live on. We have the power and the conscious will to change the genes of an unborn child or abort the baby before it ever gets to be born.
On a simpler scale, we plant flowers and trees in a garden in an aesthetically pleasing fashion. We hold the power of life and death in our hands, and, therefore, we essentially construct and shape our world.
A few questions arise from this. How does evolutionary theory account for this journey of “biological construction” man has been able to embark on for quite some time? How much weight can it really hold if it does not?
My initial impulse is to be skeptical of the supposed immovable object that is evolutionary theory, only because it seemingly does not possess an historical account, and therefore predictive analysis, of the times when ecosystems have been and continue to be constructed by man.
What I mean by this is simple. Take the invention of agriculture for example. Every time people fashion a wooded forest or an empty plot of land into a farm of crops, a new ecosystem is born.
This would not have happened naturally. The forest cannot evolve into a garden. It can only happen through human intervention. It needed to be constructed. Keep in mind, I'm not saying the evolutionary traits that have been passed down to every species of plant and tree don't remain, which is why hedges need to be trimmed and branches need to be pruned or else it would grow wild.
But that's also exactly my point. The farmer must intervene and choose how this ecosystem operates. He chooses what plants stay, what plants get uprooted, and what the arrangement of the crop looks like. He decides what things get to live on and what things must go.
Similarly, on a larger scale, man has waged war with man and with nature. He has erased entire genetic pools from the face of the earth. Now, is that evolution? I thought “the survival of the fittest” was a random and automatic process, one that was out of our control? How is it possible then for man to logically and consciously choose to initiate a "random" process of genetic elimination?
It would make sense if he were merely an animal, for animals aren’t conscious beings with agency. Animals are in bondage to their instincts.
(If this were the case, if man were merely a cog in the evolutionary process, then genetic elimination via anthropogenic climate change should be considered one of the forces of natural selection, but that's a discussion for another time.)
Obviously, man also can be a slave to animalistic instincts. But he has the ability to overcome them and be a freely thinking man. And this thinking man is what shatters the paradigm of the routine-like progression model of evolution. Thinking man has introduced the most unpredictable force in the universe: free will. He can steer the destiny of all life in any direction he so chooses. In this very manner and for this very reason, I am arguing that evolutionary theory is deficient.
The current model of evolution is a reductive approach that meagerly attempts to “predict the past” per se by observing biological subjects in an atomistic fashion. It doesn’t attempt to take into account an organism’s past and present relationships with its ecosystem.
What’s meant by that is that the way an organism behaves in the present day (genetic traits and all) is obviously a product of a complex history of events through generations. And what evolutionary theory lacks is an exhaustive account of generational history relating to its subjects of study.
What this means in simple terms is that there is not enough evidence to justify the acceptance of the evolution model. The biggest red flag in the evidence department is the absence of transitional fossils.
You see, evolutionary theory traditionally holds that species undergo evolutionary change via a process called phyletic gradualism, wherein species branch off into different species gradually over time. And if this were to be the case, there should have been thousands, if not millions, of fossils showing this transition.
The problem is just that. There’s a gaping hole in the transitional fossil record. Some of the most famous evolutionary theory proponents, like Darwin and Dawkins, even admit the glaring absence of this evidence. The evidence is so severely lacking that some scholars have had to come up with entirely new models of evolution to explain the phenomenon.
Harvard Professor Stephen Jay Gould, contrasting phyletic gradualism, came up with the theory of punctuated equilibrium, wherein he asserts that speciation actually occurs in short bursts in between long periods of evolutionary stability.
This new model should be able to help verify the validity of evolution, in theory. It should at least narrow the timeframes for genetic mutation down to specific time periods. Suddenly, data now theoretically does not have to be gathered from all time periods in all of history and all locations in all the world.
However, it also puts the pressure on evolution advocates precisely because it narrows down the field of view. In a weird paradoxical way, it has broadened and complicated the quest to validate evolution.
Now, not only is there a search for evolutionary change in specific times and locations (a proverbial needle in the haystack), there must also be some account for and definition of what exactly “evolutionary stability” looks like to appropriately contrast the short bursts of change.
By abandoning the search for transitional fossils, evolution advocates have doubled their work. They must be able to explain the properties of the long-term routine the biosphere experiences as well as the drastic short-term chaos that intervenes in order to produce such kinds of changes.
There’s that word again: intervene. It seems as though genetic change can only occur when there are specific instances of intervention.
And who is the only variable in the biosphere?
Mankind.
Make no mistake, only mankind is capable of consciously exerting its authority over nature enough to change nature itself. Because as tempting as it is to gloss over generations of history with a single doctrine like “survival of the fittest,” we ultimately don’t have any transitional fossils of ancient plants, fish, or kangaroo, but we do know about the one conscious agent who had the ability to deliberately intervene in nature’s business.
The point is that evolution implies this sort of random process whereby species unpredictably vie for survival, but what it misses is how conscious will intervenes in this process. And there’s no shortage of this human intervention.
We construct our world today in too many ways to count. Look around you. Most things didn’t evolve to be there. They were fashioned. Crafted. Placed.
The more interesting question to me is, what exactly emerges when we deliberately choose which genetic traits to proliferate and which traits to leave out?
Make no mistake, issues like the pro-choice vs. pro-life debate serve as examples of our struggle with evolution and eugenics.
We are currently shaping a new evolutionary pathway because of our tendency to intervene, whether we know it or not. Who's to say what the effects of these practices will be?
When I was a child and I was being indoctrinated in school with the evolution meme, my teacher (who was actually pretty based) asked the class a question: "So which is it? God or evolution?"
I raised my hand and gave an answer: "Why couldn't God have simply created evolution?"
I got some praise from some classmates (especially the supposedly smart ones), but my teacher treated that answer as a cop-out and wasn't satisfied.
Looking back on that moment as a full-grown adult, I realize just how childish my answer was and just how childish I was for believing in evolution.
God, the Logos, the unmoved mover, can't create a nonsensical, chaotic process that magically transforms inanimate, microscopic particles into living, breathing, fully fleshed-out organisms.
For intelligent design to come from random chaos is ridiculous and impossible and would have no trace of God's fingerprints. My answer truly wasn't thought through and was, in fact, a cop-out. (I was in seventh grade.) The truth is that you do have to choose one or the other.
To my seventh-grade brain, evolution made sense.
"Animals just changed over time!" I thought. "The monkeys look kind of like us. We must have just come from them millions of years ago."
In retrospect, I think I and many others in my generation were subliminally psyoped by the liberal notion of "progress" that pervaded every aspect of our culture in the 1990s and 2000s. Clearly, we were more socially enlightened and technologically advanced than any other civilization in history. We as the human race were living proof that "progress" was real.
So why wouldn't that apply to biology as well? We must have "progressed" from tiny specks of dust to fish, to monkeys, to humans.
But if we think about this with just a modicum of rigor, we began to detect traces of absurdity. Take so-called transitional fossils — fossils of species that would link modern species and ancient species. We've found very few, if any, so few that evolutionary biologists like Stephen Jay Gould had to come up with an entirely new model (punctuated equilibrium) to make evolution make sense.
That's just one example. The deeper you dig, the dumber and more childish it gets.
As adults, we must learn to put childish things away. That means using critical reasoning skills instead of slurping up the slop we slurped up as a child. The superstition that we all came from monkeys is a good place to start.
Progressivism is a multipronged deviation from the straight and narrow that talks — or takes — people off the path to the New Jerusalem and toward false secular utopias. In this loose coalition, these otherwise unreconcilable strays are drawn in by a lack of gratitude and the sense that "better" must be anywhere other than here and anyone besides those present. And they're kept together by a Procrustean vibe – and what they've turned their backs on.
The arch-conservative Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn emphasized in both “Leftism” and “The Menace of the Herd, or Procrustes at Large” how the left – a term that encompasses the progressive movement – takes after Procrustes, the legendary highwayman of Attica.
This Luciferean movement appears eager to take the whole of our species away from the straight and narrow, presuming the raw material made in the image of God needs to change.
In Greek mythology, Procrustes, also known as Damastes, "tied his victims upon an iron bed, and, as the case required, either stretched or cut off their legs to adapt them to its length.”
Like Procrustes, progressives have a habit of socially, legally, or literally hacking away at those parts or wholes of human beings that fail to fit into their preconceived systems. The 20th century is full of atrocities in which millions of innocents were cut up because progressives in the Soviet Union, Germany, Cambodia, and elsewhere, with an eye to purportedly better futures, desired that all bodies and minds fit the lengths of their Procrustean beds.
This tendency is clear also in other progressive subgroups, such as the eugenicists and transsexual activists, who both seek to cut away at biological realities they find undesirable.
This Procrustean verve is, however, becoming especially pronounced among the transhumanists of our day.
Before noting some of the ways the transhumanist movement is working to carve up a new mankind, it is important first to note the other tendency that unites progressives.
Progressives share in common a prideful rejection of the primacy of God, the goodness of His creation, and the worth of the humanity Christ endured and elevated with his suffering, death, and resurrection. Simply put: Progressivism is Luciferian.
In the garden, the serpent — who cannot create but can only distort and destroy — told Eve of eating the forbidden fruit, “Ye shall not surely die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods.”
Eve was enticed not to emulate or follow the one true God, but to follow Satan’s example and seek divinity besides and without God, contrary to His will.
This lack of humility and the desire to be independent of God not only resulted in the fall of mankind, but has ever since stained progressive efforts to achieve immortality and to escape the humanity that was evidently valued enough by God for Christ to take on and save.
C.S. Lewis wrote in “Mere Christianity," “People often ask when the next step in evolution – the step to something beyond man – will happen. But in the Christian view, it has happened already.”
He went on to write, “In Christ a new kind of man appeared: and the new kind of life which began in Him is to be put into us.”
Technological and political innovations aside, the apex of humanity and the superlative by which the comparative “progress” should be measured was nailed to a tree two millennia ago.
The Christian understanding is that the pursuit of God and true progress means trying to follow Christ and fit the cross. After all, on the cross are perfection and immortality, which entail the very suffering and death the transhumanist seeks to eliminate.
The transhumanist endeavor, ultimately, is to pursue godhood by rejecting the cross and setting oneself down on Procrustes’ bed, cutting off anything resembling the Son of Man. In this sense, transhumanism is the epitome of regression.
Artificial wombs, brain implants, virtualization of everything in the anti-sacramental Metaverse, transsexuality – these transhumanist drives away from our humanity each substitute parts of what makes us human and human life worth living. What’s more, they amount to sterile shortcuts off the path to the New Jerusalem that cut away at the travelers who take them.
A video from Yemeni “science communicator” Hashem Al-Ghaili entitled “EctoLife: The World’s First Artificial Womb Facility” recently went viral, discussing the so-called “bioreactors” that may soon supplant mothers and enable investors to “genetically engineer” prospective children, reported the Christian Post.
The mother and the bond she enjoys with her baby, unborn and newborn, appear not to fit the transhumanists' Procrustean bed.
EctoLife: The World’s First Artificial Womb Facilityyoutu.be
Rather than improve the ways we teach or understand, the transhumanists appear keen to change the raw material that is taught or comprehended. The brain implants that may one day soon help the blind to see and the lame to walk will in short order be also used – along with some version of OpenAI's ChatGPT – as stand-ins for the common man’s common sense.
The promise of Zuckerberg’s Metaverse is that we can skip the messy, real interactions between human beings that we have long enjoyed, at least up until the pandemic, and instead stream into false realities remotely. The new humanity need not risk adventure or moral consequence in the world of flesh and bone that God deemed good. These experiences will join our common sense and the other cuttings at the foot of Procrustes' bed.
G.K. Chesterton reminds us in “Orthodoxy” — the book that helped set the militant atheist and World War I infantryman C.S. Lewis on his way to Christian conversion — “You may, if you like, free a tiger from his bars; but do not free him from his stripes. Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump: you may be freeing him from being a camel.”
The transhumanist prong of the progressive movement is doing precisely that: freeing us camels of our humps.
This Luciferean movement appears eager to take the whole of our species away from the straight and narrow, presuming the raw material made in the image of God needs to change, as opposed to the will and moral reflexes of the immortal, albeit imperfect, persons animating it.
“If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive,” wrote Lewis.
The progressive coalition and all its Procrustean subgroups, transhumanism in particular, appear to have taken a wrong turning and are desperate for us to go with them, bereaving us of our proverbial humps along the way. For all their hacking and dreaming, their efforts to go forward have not brought them anywhere nearer the place where we all ought to be: not like gods, apart from God, but with God in Christ.
Southern Baptists remain united on the Gospel, but things get tricky — and less unified — when the rubber starts to meet the road on other policy issues.
www.theblaze.com
Atheist Richard Dawkins now labels himself a 'cultural Christian': Here's why
Famous atheist Richard Dawkins has spent years criticizing religion, but in a recent interview, Dawkins told Rachel Johnson of LBC, “I count myself a cultural Christian.”
“I love hymns and Christmas carols, and I sort of feel at home in the Christian ethos. If I had to choose between Christianity and Islam, I choose Christianity every single time,” Dawkins continued.
He explained his reason being that Christianity is a “fundamentally decent religion” while “Islam is not.”
When questioned on this belief, he responded that the Quran is fundamentally hostile to women and gays, and he likes “to live in a culturally Christian country,” although he doesn’t “believe a single word of the Christian faith.”
Pat Gray is shocked.
“That seems like a shift in his ethos, if you will,” he says.
“I will say, cultural Christianity from Richard Dawkins [is] pretty interesting. You know why? Because he has seen the decay of society and civilization, that’s why. He sees our very civilization crumbling around us and what keeps it together,” Gray adds.
America was founded on Christian values, and Dawkins is recognizing what happens when the masses reject those values.
“Once you’ve built your foundation on those principles and then people start taking a jackhammer to it, something bad is going to happen. And he understands that now,” Gray says.
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