More Contradictions Than Oxymoronia

A Devolved Human Being

Consider the following statement by Jacques Monod, reacting to unfaithful Christians who have embraced "theistic evolution".  Monod is a Nobel Prize recipient in molecular biology and an atheist.  He both points the finger at one of the stumbling stones in theistic evolution theories and manages to self-condemn at the same time.  Not a bad effort.  Two for the price of one.
 

Selection is the blindest, and most cruel way of evolving new species, and more and more complex and refined organisms . . . the more cruel because it is a process of elimination, of destruction.  The struggle for life and the elimination of the weakest is a horrible process, against which our whole modern ethic revolts.  An ideal society is a non-selective society, it is one where the weak are protected; which is exactly the reverse of the so-called natural law  I am surprised that a Christian would defend the idea that this is a process which God more or less set up in order to have evolution.  [Jacques Monod, interview with the Australian Broadcasting Commission, cited by Andrew S. Kulikovsky, Creation, Fall, Restoration: A Biblical Theology of Creation (Fearn, Ross-shire: Mentor/Christian Focus Publications Ltd, 2009),  p.119.]

A major stumbling block (one amongst many) of theistic evolution theories (the attempt to reconcile the revelation of Genesis 1-3 with Darwinian evolutionism) is the existence of death.  Darwinianism necessarily posits death as intrinsic to life and the development of species.  Without death as the norm, evolution would not have occurred.  The Scripture reveals that death, particularly the death of man, is a punishment for sin.

Theistic evolutionists need to argue that death is necessarily intrinsic to the creation (and therefore not a punishment for sin) leading to the conclusion that the Bible is telling porkies.   Monod is quite right: he fingers the fundamental contradiction in all theistic evolutionary theories.  Either the creation was initially perfect and then fell, or it was never perfect to begin with, nor is now.  Theistic evolution necessarily denies the original perfection of the creation, meaning that the Genesis account has to be mythical.  But if the Genesis account is mythical, so is the rest of Scripture, for everything thereafter is a direct consequence of what is recorded in Genesis 1 through 3. 

But Monod goes further.  He also condemns himself and his own position.  Monod tells us that he wishes evolutionism were not true because it makes an evil to be good.  Evolution is a "cruel", "horrible process" and is revolting to our "modern ethic".  In so doing, he reveals that he, along with all men, is made in God's image: he cannot  speak without having recourse to ethical concepts and categories (which in an atheistic materialistic evolutionist world view are meaningless and non-existent), and those ethical standards he does embrace can only be hung on sky-hooks.  They have no foundation--which means at best they are idle preferences and whimsical fancies.

Worse, from his own perspective he indirectly acknowledges that the modern ethic of protecting the weak--which he applauds--is itself a fundamental weakness because it is a revolt against the non-ethical, remorseless, blind, impersonal world of brute chance and relentless natural law.  In other words, Monod stands before us as a devolved being, fit only to be exterminated as a weaker member of the species. 

So far the wisdom of our age.  More contradictions than Oxymoronia.