Why Your Presupposition Matters, Psalm 14:1, Humanist Manifesto II,

A humanist believes there is no God and thus that man is his own “higher power.” The humanist has no choice but to reject God and believe in man and biological evolution because the alternative is to say there is a supernatural creator and intelligent designer. If there is such a creator, then He is the author of the laws of nature, and we are accountable to Him. But being accountable to anyone other than self is not acceptable to the humanist. As a result, humanists reject out of hand any and all evidence that challenges their desired reality.

The liberal, then, who chooses to have faith in evolution does so not because of compelling intellectual honesty but because the alternative requires accountability to God both in this life and the next. You can see how this would render the liberal agenda a house of cards. If the liberal acknowledges God, then abortion is murder, homosexuality is a sin, and sex outside of marriage is fornication. Most humanists refuse to admit to God’s existence—regardless of the sound reasoning and evidence to the contrary—because of their commitment to self-idolatry and pride. But the Bible paints a clear picture of these people in Psalm 14:1: “The fool says in his heart, ‘God does not exist.’” Only a fool could look at the historical, archaeological, prophetic, philosophical, and scientific evidence and still deny God’s existence.

Scripture says, “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky proclaims the work of His hands” (Ps. 19:1). In this chapter, we’ll look at several aspects of creation that reveal this glory of God and announce His existence.

While I admit I look at everything through the presupposition that “in the beginning, God,” the humanist starts with “in the beginning, man.” This means the humanist looks only at theories that don’t contradict their presupposition. The Humanist Manifesto II states, “We find insufficient evidence for belief in the existence of a supernatural; it is either meaningless or irrelevant to the question of the survival and fulfillment of the human race. As non-theists, we begin with humans not God, nature not deity.”

Anything that calls into question the original presupposition (that there is no God) is rejected, even if it means having “faith” in an idea, belief, or theory that is not mathematically possible, or even if it contradicts known scientific facts or laws of physics. As long ago as 1929, Professor D. M. S. Watson, one of the leading biologists and science writers of his day, explained that the real goal behind evolution is to reject the alternative—a belief in God. Watson notes, “Evolution [is] a theory universally accepted not because it can be proven by logically coherent evidence to be true, but because the only alternative, special creation, is clearly incredible.” (Footnote #2)

Professor Richard Lewontin, a geneticist and self-proclaimed Marxist, reveals why the dogmatic humanist continues to accept the lie of evolution despite its improbability and the unscientific propositions on which it is built:

We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so-stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. (Footnote #3)

I appreciate Prof. Lewontin’s candor. Few humanists are so clear-headed in understanding and articulating what they are really trying to achieve by promoting purely naturalistic explanations for everything. Evolution is not based on science, despite what most evolutionists will tell you. Dr. Robert A. Millikan, a physicist and Nobel Prize winner, was equally clear when he stated in a speech before the American Chemical Society, “The pathetic thing about it is that many scientists are trying to prove the doctrine of evolution, which no science can do.” (Footnote #4)

Yes, pathetic is a good word. It is really quite pathetic when you consider the mental gymnastics a humanist must perform to defend the presupposition that there is no intelligent designer for the universe and that spontaneous, macro-evolution is scientific. Although the humanist typically mocks as unscientific those who believe in a creator God, when the science that is the foundation of their worldview is proven to be unscientific and mathematically impossible, they choose to ignore those facts and instead create preposterous theories that not only contradict science but take more blind faith than believing in the Intelligent Designer.

Happily for some, the incredible scientific discoveries of the past few years have caused some scientists to reject the lie of evolution and explore the evidence for an “intelligent designer.” The complexity of the human body and the orderliness of the universe are so overwhelming, these researchers no longer believe that everything we see and know happened by chance. Nevertheless, while no longer believing in evolution, they are not ready to say, “God is,” but at least they acknowledge the necessity of an intelligent designer of some sort.

So, the issue is not that one worldview (theism) requires faith while the other (atheism) does not—both do. The question is: Which worldview is based on a more rational faith? And to that, the answer is clear. There is far greater evidence for the existence of God as Creator than for the notion that everything came about by random chance. To accept the belief that God is the Creator, you need to have faith in only one thing—an all knowing, all-powerful God. The astonishing complexity of creation is consistent with the infinitely knowledgeable, omnipotent Creator. Only such a Being could have created the universe as we know it. On the other hand, to believe in spontaneous evolution, you must have faith in billions upon billions of mathematically improbable and scientifically impossible things.

Footnotes:

2 D. M. S. Watson, “Adaptation,” Nature, 124:233, 1929.

3 Richard Lewontin, “Billions and Billions of Demons,” The New York Review, January 9, 1997, 31.

4 Tim LaHaye and David Noebel, Mind Siege: The Battle for Truth in the New Millennium (Nashville, TN: Word Publishing, 2000), 140.