Evolution: The Atheist’s Religion–Part 1–The Why and the Background

currently watching: The Wire-Season 3 currently listening to: Cymbals Eat Guitars-Why There are Mountains

Having discussed Atheism/Humanism and Liberalism going hand in hand, I’d now like to venture into how Atheism/Humanism has managed to infiltrate into the minds of people today.

The Why

Since the creation, those opposing God have sought to discredit, disprove, and ultimately destroy the idea that man did in fact originate in perfect form from a god, most often the God of the Bible.  Paganism and its many offshoots are as old as Jewish history.  Like I wrote in my description of Humanism, man opposes God because he does not want to submit to His will, does not want to admit sin, and desires to live entirely for himself.  James 4:4 …whoever chooses to be a friend of the world takes his stand as an enemy of God.  Romans 8:7 The mind of the flesh [with its carnal thoughts and purposes] is hostile to God, for it does not submit itself to God’s Law; indeed it cannot.

So why is evolution so important to Atheists?  Its perhaps best summed up by Atheist Richard Bozarth in an article “The meaning of Evolution” published in the American Atheist:

Christianity has fought, still fights, and will fight science to the desperate end over evolution, because evolution destroys utterly and finally the very reason Jesus’ earthly life was supposedly made necessary. Destroy Adam and Eve and the original sin, and in the rubble you will find the sorry remains of the son of god. Take away the meaning of his death. If Jesus was not the redeemer who died for our sins, and this is what evolution means, then Christianity is nothing!”

The Background

Evolution itself is Paganism, and it originated long before Darwin published the “Origin of Species”. Upwards of 2,500 years before Darwin in fact.  Some early cosmologies included a concept of God or a form of intelligence, and some were strict Atheism.   I’ll detail both, and I’ll start with a few more well-known figures.

Plato (422-347 B.C.), of whom we have a ton of writings from, combined purpose and chance as an explanation for the cosmos.  He talked about a form of “devolution” (that from God came about successive emergences of lower and less worthy forms) and used descriptions for the universe that defined it as a “Living Creature” (a form of pantheism).  Plato’s successor, Aristotle (384-322 B.C.), began to remove aspects of the Biblical God by referring to God as a more impersonal “Prime Mover” that simply set the pre-existing and uncreated (eternal) cosmos in motion–then leading to devolution (summarized in his “Great Chain of Being” theory).  While these two had some concepts of evolution, they were not what was surmised by Darwin.

To get closer to the Atheistic/Darwinian views, you actually have to go back further than Plato and Aristotle.  Around 6th century B.C.(about the same time other “rationalistic” religions like Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, and Vedanta Hinduism were beginning–not a mere coincidence i’m sure) in Asia Minor the father to Greek philosophy, often called Milesian or Ionian philosophy, began.  Thales was its creator, he was the first to introduce naturalistic and materialistic lines of thinking to describe the world rather than supernatural.  From Thales’ thinking developed Atomism (5th century B.C. philosophy developed by Leucippus and Democritus) which simply said that there were invisible building blocks(atoms) making up anything that exists.  Ultimately this lead to the philosophy of Epicureanism.  Epicurus (342-270 B.C.; who today would be an absolute champion of the Humanists) believed that everything that occurs is the result of the atoms colliding, rebounding, and becoming entangled with one another, with no purpose or plan behind their motions.  From this you would have little trouble conforming it to modern “sciences” and evolutionary ideas.

So as you can see, the original line of thinking (that we developed from random and chaotic chance) began in and around Ancient Greek philosophy.  From there evolutionary thinking was broken down and redeveloped many times, often by people in the church trying to mesh it with Christianity (see Origen, Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas for some examples).  Then in the 19th century Charles Darwin published “Origin” and the same atheistic philosophies developed 2000 years earlier were finally accepted as “science”.  Though before we get to Darwin, we still need to look at the more immediate precursors to “his” theories.