Derbyshire proves Bryan was right

Looking at a passage in John Derbyshire’s profession of non-religion at National Review Online, a reader comments:

William Jennings Bryan is right again! Darwinian evolution eventually cancels out belief in God!

Here’s what Derbyshire wrote:

I can report that the Creationists are absolutely correct to hate and fear modern biology. Learning this stuff works against your faith. To take a single point at random: The idea that we are made in God’s image implies we are a finished product. We are not, though. It is now indisputable that natural selection has been going on not just through human prehistory, but through recorded history too, and is still going on today, and will go on into the future, presumably to speciation, either natural or artificial. So which human being was made in God’s image: the one of 100,000 years ago? 10,000 years ago? 1,000 years ago? The one of today? The species that will descend from us? All of those future post-human species, or just some of them? And so on. The genomes are all different. They are not the same creature. And if they are all made in God’s image somehow, then presumably so are all the other species, and there’s nothing special about us at all.

Why does Derbyshire stop at denying that man is made in the image of God? He might just as well have said: “There are lots of different people in the world, and they’re all different from each other, so how can there be such a thing as ‘man’”? The point is, if you see only the material, then there is no such thing as God, there is no such thing as man, there is no such thing as objective good and bad, and ultimately there is no such thing as language itself, because all these things exist in a dimension beyond matter and what can be seen with the material senses.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 02, 2006 02:01 PM | Send