Idolatry and natural selection

"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1). The Creator of all things is the Lord Jesus Christ, who has no equal in authority and status. The first two commandments reiterate that this high position is His alone: “You shall have no other gods before Me. . . . You shall not make any . . . likeness . . . . You shall not bow down to them nor serve them” (Exodus 20:3, 4).

Darwin’s clever link between idolatry and the evolutionary worldview is natural selection and the concept behind that term. Scientists initially criticized natural selection as a personification. As a science historian explains, “One source of trouble was that Darwin liked the term ‘natural selection’ because it [a mental concept] could be ‘used as a substantive governing a verb [a real agent that can act]’ (F. Darwin, 1887, vol. 3, p. 46). But such uses appeared to reify, even to deify, natural selection as an agent.”

Q: Do evolutionists invoke natural selection as a substitute creator? 

A: Let’s hear from them.

"This was Darwin’s fundamental discovery, that there is a process that is creative, although not conscious. . . . It was Darwin’s greatest accomplishment to show that the complex organization and functionality of living beings can be explained as the result of a natural process—natural selection—without any need to resort to a Creator or other external agent."

"Natural selection is a creative process that can explain the appearance of genuine novelty."

Natural selection is venerated as the creator of biology, so why not for the entire universe? As one evolutionist put it, “Charles Darwin .

. . [has] brought the entire natural world under a single law of natural selection . . . [the] starting point [of my theory about the universe’s evolution] is the remarkable theory of cosmological natural selection proposed by the physicist Lee Smolin.” It follows that “the universe could be further understood as a self-coherent and self-creating whole, without the need for anything outside itself to give it law, meaning or complexity.”

Natural selection is idolatrous in the basest of ways. Not only does it ascribe rational powers to unconscious environmental features, like any other idol, but it also induces people not to give the Lord Jesus credit for the incredible intelligence and machinery He has built into His creatures that enable them to adapt to their environment. Consider the Lord’s declaration in Isaiah 42:8: “I am the LORD: that is My name: and My glory will I not give to another, neither my praise to graven images” . . . or to nature as creator." 

ICR