Creation or Evolution: A Letter to Emily, Part 2

So a week or two ago, I wrote a post about the scientific problems with both evolutionary and creationist views of the world. To summarize, I think Darwinian evolution makes more of the scientific evidence than is warranted, while creationism makes much less. While that debate is interesting in itself, the ramifications of the answer are what truly make the question important.Let’s follow both sides of this debate to their logical ends. First, I’ll deal with evolution.

Let’s imagine for a moment that evolution is true—the world and all life got here simply by chance and a long period of time. Since there is no God who had designed us for a purpose, it means that there is no purpose in our lives other than what we define for ourselves. This sounds very liberating, doesn’t it? To decide for myself what my purpose is, with no interference from any outside authority seems like a great way to live. But here’s the problem: without some absolute definition of life’s purpose, our own definitions are merely preferences. The same is true of morality. If we are all deciding for ourselves what is right and wrong, your rights and wrongs are no more authoritative than mine, no matter how extremely different they might be. Morality, like purpose, is reduced to mere preference. I like punk rock music, and maybe you like country (God forbid). There’s no objective way to say punk rock is better than country; it’s just what I like. I also prefer a nice scoop of plain vanilla ice cream to some fancy flavor full of candy bits and caramel sauce. You may have a different preference, but it is meaningless to say vanilla is wrong.

So lets bring this back into more substantial terms. Most people, most of the time believe that purposely killing an innocent person is wrong. What do we say though, to someone like Charles Manson, who does not necessarily hold this belief? What about the rapist, or the child molester? Just because most of us prefer to not to behave this way, on what basis can we say murder, rape, and child abuse are wrong? The inescapable conclusion is that there are no means of differentiating right from wrong. The very concepts of right and wrong become meaningless. We are left with a moral void that can only be filled by power: whoever has the ability to impose his or her preference on the rest of us gets to define morality. In other words, people are sent to prison for murder, rape or child abuse not because these actions are wrong, but because the government prefers we not do these things and has the power to enforce laws against them. It’s not a big distinction so long as the government's preferences align closely to my own. But what about Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia, or Mao’s China? Those governments had preferences for killing millions of people, and also had the power to enforce those preferences. As long as morality has no absolute source, we are forced to accept this situation as well. It doesn’t matter, though, because those millions of lives had no real purpose to begin with (remember? we’re all just here by chance). Without purpose, there is no value, and why should we cry over the destruction of the worthless? While we may stoically face this conclusion as our lot in life, not even the most hardened atheist is really prepared to live as if this is true. Just try to put a nativity scene on the city hall lawn and you’ll hear about how “wrong” it is to violate the First Amendment ban on state-sponsored religion.

Clearly, humanity needs some absolute standard for morality—life is unlivable otherwise. A moral standard, however, implies that life has purpose and meaning; to have meaning requires someone to mean it.

So we have arrived at the existential reality that we can’t explain life without God. I laid out my case in the last post for why I don’t think literal young-Earth creationism is scientifically viable. I find the theories of intelligent design to be appealing, because it considers the scientific observations, comes to a rational conclusion that the world was designed by some Intelligence, and that’s where the theory stops. It doesn’t attempt to make a scientific case for the Christian God, or the Biblical story of creation. Science may have plenty to say on how the world came to be, but it can tell us nothing about why it came to be. However science does explain the hows of life, though, the answers must recognize that there is a why. Conversely, religion may explain the whys through a sovereign and loving God, science shows us through the hows that the world is much more elegant than we imagine.