In a day when biology and chemistry are probing the mechanism of life, and physics is ranging from the microcosm to the macrocosm, there is a tendency on the part of some scientists of high prestige to make authoritative pronouncements about matters of theology. Whenever this happens, it is well to remember that there is a difference between science and scientism. The latter word describes a type of thinking that does not hesitate to let science play God in assuming for itself virtual omniscience and omnipotence, even to the extent of holding out to mankind a species of mundane salvation. Thus the scientist who deals with the most profound questions of faith and theology, while at the same time arbitrarily discarding the whole of supernatural Christianity, has departed from science into scientism.

This is exactly what Sir Julian Huxley, noted British biologist and grandson of Thomas Huxley, the great Victorian protagonist of Charles Darwin’s evolutionary hypothesis, recently did. For flagrant scientism, it would be difficult to surpass his speech of November 26 at the Darwin Centennial Celebration at the University of Chicago. The crux of his address came in these words: “In the evolutionary pattern of thought there is no longer need or room for the supernatural. The earth was not created; it evolved. So did all the animals and plants that inhabit it, including our human selves, mind and soul, as well as brain and body. So did religion.”

“Evolutionary man,” Sir Julian continued, “can no longer take refuge … in the arms of a divinized father-figure, whom he has himself created.” Leading up to this wholesale dismissal of every form of theistic religion was a series of statements hard to match for the sheer arrogance of their scientism.

After a grudging admission that “religion of some sort is probably necessary, but not necessarily a good thing,” Sir Julian proceeded to select from the long history of Christianity some examples of religious intolerance with a reference to communism to balance the scales. But to indict Christianity on such grounds, while conveniently ignoring all the humanitarian, to say nothing of the spiritual, benefits it has brought mankind is about as sensible as using astrology, alchemy, and the phlogiston theory to belittle science, and then by-passing everything it has done to advance civilization.

One of the most ominous notes in the address, as it was reported in the New York Times, is near its beginning, where Huxley demands the organization of man in a single “inter-thinking group to prevent disruption through ideological conflicts and to replace nationalism with international cooperation.”

A clue to the meaning of this reference to a single inter-thinking group came the next day in another excursion into scientism, this time in an address by Professor Ralph W. Gerard of the Mental Health Institute of the University of Michigan. For him the most important factor in the improvement of the mind is “the collective mind of collective man,” a concept he developed by reference to “business-type machines and card machines” and the supplementing of man’s “central decision making and reasoning processes” with other instruments called computers. “This,” he went on, “is a kind of organism that is evolving more rapidly than anything else in the world.”

What is manifestly implied here is nothing less than the de-personalization of humanity, a process that is right now well under way in Soviet Russia and particularly in Red China.

Actually, Sir Julian’s thesis of an all-encompassing, all-sufficient evolutionary process, out of which everything, God included, has emerged and is yet to emerge stands in logical opposition to his criticism of communism. What he describes sounds very much like the old idea of causal evolution, an idea of crucial influence in the development of Marxist ideology. Moreover, in a time when leading physicists like W. G. Pollard see in the neutron capture theory of the elements a definite beginning of the universe, and when the cumulative evidence of on-going process in the physical world demands a beginning, Huxley’s sweeping and dogmatic dismissal of both Creator and creation has a very old-fashioned ring.

In his autobiographical Adventures in Two Worlds, A. J. Cronin tells of a working boys’ club to which he invited a distinguished zoologist to lecture. Choosing to speak on “The Beginning of Our World,” the zoologist gave a frankly atheistic picture of how the pounding, prehistoric seas had generated by physiochemical reaction a pulsating scum from which there had emerged the first photoplasmic cell. When he finished, a very average youngster got up nervously and said: “Excuse me, sir. You’ve explained how those big waves beat upon the shore; but how did all the water get there in the first place?”

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The question is relevant, even for Sir Julian Huxley; and no one who accepts what the Word of God reveals about the problem of origins should hesitate or fear to ask it.

But there is more to be said of this current deification of evolution. As Sir Julian and his colleague, Professor Gerard, discussed the gigantic problems of war, overpopulation, and the revolution of the depressed masses—there was no word about the root cause of all our ills—the sin of man whereby he is alienated from God. Nor was there the slightest awareness of the power of Christ to change human life. Yet as St. Paul said to Festus in reference to the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, “This thing was not done in a corner.” For those who will see, there is abundant evidence, not done in a corner but available for anyone who will open his eyes and see that the ills of man are curable. They are curable at a price, which is nothing less than humble submission to the will and work of God through his Son Jesus Christ. But the price is one that the Promethean spirit that informs modern scientism finds much too high to pay.

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