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Until around the 1960s in America, lasciviousness, adultery, and fornication were almost universally deemed reprehensible. Divorce was shameful, pornography was underground, and homosexuality was illegal. These elements are now on open display and enjoy wide approval—and participation.
Is our nation stronger or weaker because of these changes? Are families/homes more or less secure? Is the “misery index” for individuals greater or less? Do more or fewer people turn to chemical “solutions” for failure to find “purpose” in life? Are we experiencing more or fewer individual murders by abortion and mass murders? To ask is to answer.
Many “whys” might be suggested to explain the unarguable decline in national morals and ethics. Arguably, they all go back to a single taproot: Charles Darwin and his evolutionary hoax. Before his theories caught on in the 1870s, Western nations, though divided between Protestant and Catholic, were united in accepting the Biblical view of man as the apex of the creation of the Almighty, Self-existent God. Man had a purpose—to glorify God—and the Bible set forth man’s behavior that would do so.
The leaven of Darwinism had its first effects in Western Europe. America stood as the last bastion of any degree of faith. Early in the 20th century, Darwinism gradually began influencing major theological schools, eventually producing an ever-larger army of faithless pulpiteers. It steadily morphed from mere theory to “fact” in the public schools, wreaking havoc on faith. By the last third of the century, a palpable decline in morals was occurring. General respect for Biblical morals has now become almost passé in our national culture.
The increased acceptance of Darwinism and the parallel increase in amoral/immoral patterns of behavior are not merely coincidental. The widespread adoption of Darwinism undermined the Biblical purpose of mankind—the basis of human morality. Darwinists admit as much:
- Darwin was “keenly aware of the…religious implications of his new idea…. Religion, especially, appeared to have much to lose…” (Chet Raymo, Skeptics and True Believers).
- “You are here to propagate your selfish genes. There is no higher purpose to life” (Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene).
- “[That] the human species was not designed, has no purpose, and is the product of mere material mechanism…seems to be the message of evolution” (Douglas Futuyma, Science on Trial).
Contrary to this pessimistic, destructive, nihilistic, anti-theistic, depressing view of man comes the Bible’s profound statement of man’s Divine purpose: “Fear God and keep his commandments; for this is the whole duty of man” (Ecc. 12:13).
[Note: I wrote this article for and it appeared in the Denton Record-Chronicle, Denton, TX, October 28, 2016.]
Attribution: From TheScripturecache.com, owned and administered by Dub McClish.
