Part One:  IS EVOLUTION PHILOSOPHY OR SCIENCE?

This new blog series will focus on the four foundational assumptions of evolution. I will demonstrate there is virtually no scientific way to prove any of them. In fact, I’ll demonstrate in future blogs that the evidences evolutionists claim support these four core beliefs, such as big bang cosmology, better supports divine creation! The reason for this, as today’s blog will show, is because evolution is essentially a philosophy rather than empirical, verifiable science. The order and design of the cosmos and the existence of life on Earth can’t possibly be the result of mindless natural processes with no cause, no purpose, and no goal. Hence, people who reject creation in favor of evolution are making a philosophical decision—not a scientific one.

Phillip Johnson, who has written extensively on evolution as a philosophy, observed that “the doctrine that some known process of evolution turned a protozoan into a human is a philosophical assumption, not something that can be confirmed by experiment or by historical studies of the fossil record.” (Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds, 34-35)  

Although there are evolutionists who believe in the existence of God and even credit His participation in creation, evolutionists of the ilk I’m writing about represent the majority of evolutionists—often called Darwinists because they advocate Charles Darwin’s naturalistic theory that all organism arose from common ancestors and developed through natural selection. They typically flat out reject God’s involvement in creation and often deny His existence.

Darwinists are committed to a philosophical worldview called naturalism, which posits that all reality is merely physical and nothing supernatural or nonmaterial exists. Thus, they believe the origin and development of life and the cosmos can be accounted for by purely natural processes at work in a wholly material universe. Nature is a closed system that cannot be affected by any nonmaterial entity such as God. Of course, there is no observable or testable evidence for this worldview. Hence, again, evolutionary theory is philosophy.

The four foundational assumptions on which the entire structure of naturalistic evolution rests are essentially speculative—as future blogs will demonstrate. If any one of them is false, Darwinian evolution, as an alternative to divine creation, collapses. The first has to do with the origin of the universe, which will be the topic of next week’s blog article. ©

Next Week we’ll see that the best explanation for the origin of the universe is a divine creator.