The Modern Creation Trilogy. Dr. Henry M. Morris
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is scientific evidence that many creatures, from before the time of men, ate other animals. The evidence says there was animal death before Adam.21
Of the many modern progressive creationists who hold similar views, one of the most influential is Hugh Ross. In his recent book (which is mainly a polemic against “young earth creationists,” especially at the Institute for Creation Research), Dr. Ross says this:
An organism’s place in the food chain determines its capacity for efficient work. . . . Considering how creatures convert chemical energy into kinetic energy, we can say that carnivorous activity results from the laws of thermodynamics, not from sin . . . we cannot realistically compare the suffering and death of animals to the suffering and death of humans.22
Thus, progressive creationists see no theological or biblical problems with having animal death prior to human sin, nor in the idea of billions of animals suffering and dying long before God got around to placing them under man’s dominion (whatever that could mean, after the animals had already been around for a billion years).
Literal creationists do have problems with this idea, however. The concept of an omnipotent, omniscient, loving, caring God devising such a scheme seems completely incongruous!
Knowledgeable evolutionists have difficulty with it, too. For example, Stephen Jay Gould, probably this nation’s most influential evolutionist, emphasizes not only the cruelty of natural history, but also its randomness, with no indication of direction or purpose.
Moreover, natural selection, expressed in appropriate human terms, is a remarkably inefficient, even cruel process. Selection carves adaptation by eliminating masses of the less fit — imposing hecatombs of death as preconditions for limited increments of change. Natural selection is a theory of “trial and error externalism” — organisms propose via their storehouse of information, and environments dispose of nearly all — not an efficient and human “goal-directed internalism” (which would be fast and lovely, but nature does not know the way).23
Dr. Hugh Ross tries to mitigate the harshness of the process by saying that some kind of “mini-creation” process is activated every time a new species appears, maintaining that these millions of mini-creations that he postulates make him a creationist. It is obvious, however, that such a system is merely theistic evolution under another name. In any case, it does not do away with the utter cruelty and randomness of the whole monstrous system. How can we dare blame God for such a thing? Gould’s atheism is much more logical than so-called “progressive creationism”! As mentioned earlier, Dr. David Hull, professor of philosophy at Northwestern University, has said:
Whatever the God implied by evolutionary theory and the data of natural history may be like. . . . He is certainly not the sort of God to whom anyone would be inclined to pray.24
Or, as Dr. Gould said, in an earlier article:
You can hardly blame the divine Paley for not even imagining such a devilish mechanism.25
The God of the Bible is neither capricious nor cruel, and it is a mistake to think that He would use the “devilish mechanism” of billions of years of trial-and-error variation, struggle, suffering, and death in the animal world as prologue to His great plan for creating and redeeming men and women.
His creative purpose, instead, was that “they shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain.” Anything other than that can only be rightly understood as a later intrusion into God’s “very good” creation.
The leaders of evolutionary thought are indeed intractable. They will never be persuaded by any amount of compromise. Compromise on this vital subject is, in the long run, futile — and perilous!
The Sad Results of Compromise
Indeed, it is dangerous for those that get involved in compromise of creation. One compromise leads to another. Once the safe haven of absolute biblical inerrant authority is left behind, there is no satisfactory or secure resting place. Following the shifting winds of secular intellectual opinion often leads to spiritual shipwreck.
The life and death of Charles Darwin himself is a case in point. Although he has received the adulation of the world for over a century, and was buried with high honors in Westminster Abbey, he never knew peace himself after once placing his faith in evolution. As one of his many biographers, Irving Stone, has noted:
Darwin returned to England at 27 in a robust state of mind and body. It was not until a year later, when he began to write in his evolutionary notebooks, that he first felt and commented on his illnesses, forcing himself into a lifetime of severe, repugnant, and sometimes ludicrous disability.26
Darwin complained all during his life of his constant illnesses, and entire books have been written just about this aspect of his life. Yet in the most exhaustive and modern volume on this subject, a book entitled To Be an Invalid, the author, Dr. Ralph Cox, concludes that there was nothing organically or physically wrong with Darwin at all. His granddaughter, Nora Barlow, who edited his autobiography, said he was a hypochondriac.
The biographer Irving Stone, who is an ardent evolutionary humanist and profound admirer of Charles Darwin, attributed all his troubles to the intense conflicts generated by his evolutionary theory, blaming the opposition of the Christians and creationists of Darwin’s day. Stone does acknowledge, however, that Darwin hated to “think about the demon of evolution he had released upon an unwilling and unprepared world.”27
Whatever the cause, Charles Darwin was a vigorous, healthy, almost happy-go-lucky young man before he was converted to evolution, but a man of sickly body and troubled mind all his life thereafter. Stone also is anxious to repudiate the widely circulated story of Darwin’s repentance and conversion during his final days:
Upon word of his death, his detractors circulated a rumor that he had repented on his deathbed, and asked God’s forgiveness for his blasphemies. There was not an iota of truth to the charge, yet it still surfaces today, presented as fact by those who would like to believe it.28
It is not surprising, of course, that belief in evolution leads eventually to inward conviction of guilt, and outward conflict and turmoil. If God does indeed exist, and we are indeed His creatures (and this is surely the teaching of the Bible and of all true science), then our very minds and hearts are bound to be programmed God-ward. Rebellion against God — whether in terms of philosophical denial, active disobedience, or careless neglect — is bound, therefore, ultimately to deprive mind and heart and body of the spiritual sustenance they require from their offended Creator.
It is well-known that Darwin studied for the Anglican ministry, though his heart was never really in it. He at least professed nominal belief in biblical creationism in his younger days, but was easily led to believe in progressive creationism when Charles Lyell put forth his arguments for uniformitarianism and the long geological ages. This progressed into theistic evolutionism, and Darwin soon repudiated Christianity altogether, though he still allowed for the possibility of some kind of God creating the very first life form.
But note the comments of Professor L. R. Croft, lecturer in biological sciences at the University of Salford, in England:
Darwin was well aware that a satisfactory explanation for the origin of life was of crucial importance to his theory. Undoubtedly he recognized that this was the weakest link in his theory. On the other hand, his early opponents, rather than accept defeat, found that