The Book that Deceived the World

14m; 13MB

The Institute for Creation Research has a weekly radio show called Science, Scripture, & Salvation. Or at least they had a radio show – certainly, I can’t find any evidence that they’re still making new episodes. The Book that Deceived the World is one of these episodes, and yes, they’re talking about The Origin of Species:

Words can be a powerful and persuasive tool for good or evil. In 1859 a book that challenged the truthfulness of God’s Word and denied Him as Creator was published and became widely received. What was this book that deceived the world? Tune in to find out and to learn why it is still so popular.

The radio show shares certain similarities with the That’s a Fact videos. Most importantly both shows contain a lot of spurious claims about how the evidence shows that evolution is false, but at the same time they never actually show this “evidence.” As such, both SSS and TaF constitute examples of how the ICR presents its case to the true believers. It’s not particularly nuanced.

The show is narrated by “Chris O’Brien” – I think that’s what he said; I can’t find it written down anywhere. After his introduction (most of which is in the quote above) O’Brien explains things as he sees it. Darwin’s book has “deceived” people into accepting “a world view that denies any need for a supernatural creator,” along with “the lie that the bible is not true, and that we are all just a product of chance.” We then hear from John D. Morris, president of the ICR, who says:

Up until that time [when Origin was first published], in general, people had believed in a god, and a god who had created, and they saw the design, they attributed to the handiwork of a creator-designer. But in the late 1700s and early 1800s people begin to question that, and to – at least in the western world – come up with other ideas of how they thought things might have gotten here. They begin to talk about millions of years of development and it wasn’t an instantaneous creation recently as the bible says. And then when Darwin came along in 1859, he begins to apply that long age concept to the biological world. Over a generation or so Darwin’s ideas begin to catch on, and soon almost all the scientists believed it too.

The narrative that the ICR pushes is that, up until Darwin (and/or Lyell, the geologist they blame for people believing that the Earth is old), everyone believed in young Earth creationism. But then suddenly all these sinners had an excuse not to believe in God any more – and meanwhile the churches were making compromises – until The Genesis Flood came along to begin undoing all the damage. This is, of course, nonsense – the supposedly creationist scientists of pre-Darwinian times did not believe what the ICR does now. The much-idolised Newton, for example, would be considered a “compromiser” today.

John Baumgardner is next up. He blames the Enlightenment for creating the concept of uniformitarianism – according to him, Darwin was just taking it to the logical conclusion. He continues the trend of never explaining why people would be convinced of these un-biblical ideas, merely claiming that they were “jumped on the bandwagon” because it was an “excuse to push God out of their view of the world.” Baumgardner believes that Darwin was just “speculating” and that he didn’t have much of a case.

David DeWitt is the third speaker:

Mankind, since the Fall of Adam, has an innate tendency to drift, to turn away from God. And so this [The Origin of Species] simply facilitated that. Darwin’s book really pushed people away from looking at biology from any kind of biblical perspective, or even considering God’s involvement in the creation of organisms at all. Essentially, Darwin gave people what they wanted to hear.

Back to O’Brien:

Even though many people reject God in favour of evolution, there’s still no genuine scientific support for this random chance idea of origins.

Yes, this is the “there’s no evidence for evolution” section of the show, where people who should know better voice some utterly unsophisticated creationist PRATTs. Morris himself provides some choice examples:

I think people just wanted to believe it. They wanted to rid themselves of the concept of a creator for whom they’re accountable. And so, Darwin gave them the pseudo-scientific justification for a life without accountability to God. And it had great appeal. It’s interesting that the scientific evidence didn’t support evolution, and the scientists knew it. And the evidence doesn’t support evolution to this day! You can’t show me any evidence that one type of animal ever changed into another type of animal! We’ve got a lot of variety within the animal types, but this is creation within the kind. And variety within that kind, well that happens. There’s a lot of dogs, there’s a lot of cats, and nothing in between. Evolution says they came from a common ancestor. There’s no evidence for that and yet this lie has dominated the world. It’s convinced the world. It’s become the dominant religion. The creation myth of the natural mind.

Yes, this is the president of the ICR talking – not some random letter-to-the-editor writer. And it gets better:

Think about it: how could a theory without any evidence convince the whole world, and become the philosophy that- the world view that runs the world today? I think there’s almost an extra-natural explanation for that. Something is driving it. I think it’s man’s desire to live a life without a god. But you just wonder, how much does Satan play into this? I mean, this is a satanic view. I really believe that. That it, well it flies in the face of creation, it distorts biblical teaching, it denies the fact that Christ is God and that he died for our sins. And this is a Satanic concept. Now many scientists will say ‘ah, no, we’re not Satanists,’ and they’re not, but they have been, I think, bullied into believing a story that really doesn’t have any evidence for it. Evolution is the lie that changed the world. It’s been around for a long time. It could be thought of as the long war against God and his authority.

There’s a lot in this. Morris really does believe that evolution is Satanic. He also seems to think that it “denies the fact that Christ is God and that he died for our sins,” though where he got that idea from I don’t know. And note that there seems to be a bit of a contradiction over how people came to believe in evolution: people have been “deceived” by it, it “gave people what they wanted to hear,” and scientists have been “bullied” into it. Which of those is true? I don’t think it can be all of them.

Following this, the episode basically becomes an advertisement for The Genesis Flood. We don’t need to bother with the gushing.

I don’t really have a point here, except to show that even those at the top of the creation movement still espouse the same ill-founded and simplistic beliefs of the true believers. Do they believe these things themselves? We only have their word for it.