Darwin’s Legacy of Purposelessness

If Darwinism is true, we should be honest and face up to its implications that life has no overarching purpose and no rational basis for moral obligation.

If the rich diversity of organic life on earth came about by an undirected, impersonal process ruled by random mutation and survival of the fittest, then, indeed, human life has no purpose beyond survival and reproduction. Moreover, morality, while it may be beneficial for the group, has no basis for obligation binding on the individual.

As evolutionary philosopher and Tufts University Professor Daniel Dennett eloquently explains, "Darwin's idea--bearing an unmistakable likeness to universal acid . . . eats through just about every traditional concept, and leaves in its wake a revolutionized world-view.” So purposelessness replaces the glory of God and amorality replaces the morality of the Ten Commandments of Christian faith.

Our government schools have taught this corrosive idea, the evolutionary creation myth, to generations of American children. This myth makes the implausible claim that unintelligent causes are enough to explain all the astounding complexity of organic life from the single cell to the human brain. When youth taught this myth realize its implications, we should not be surprised that some despair of life and commit suicide. Others have even murdered their tormentors (and others) at school before they turned their weapons on themselves—confident from the myth that no Creator existed to hold them responsible.

But macroevolution can never be directly observed because it requires so much time. And where are the endlessly intergrading fossils recording the gradual process of transformation of species that Darwin expected would be found? And how explain the production of the massive amounts of encoded information in each cell’s DNA by a random process? Finally, how did life ever get started when the mathematicians say that attaining the minimal level of chemical complexity necessary for life by accident would take far more time than the 14-billion-year age of the universe?

For good reasons, then, many Americans remain skeptical of Darwinism.