My middle son and I are reading Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life together. Peterson has become a cultural phenomenon, and one the secular left hates. That alone is enough to take him seriously, but from the little I’d read and heard, it seems he wants to help men become men, and take responsibility for their lives. This alone is enough the have the alphabet people clamoring for his head. Although he is not a Christian, he takes seriously the cultural tradition of the West that includes the contribution of plenty of dead white men, not so popular today among his fellow academics. But I was compelled to write because of something secular academics do that drives me nuts: They sneak evolution as a creative power into their prose. I will give a couple examples, and once you see this hopefully it will forever drive you nuts too. I’ll also briefly explain why this is so important.
First, evolution as defined by Darwin and his progeny is random mutation with natural selection, specifically an unguided material process. Got that? It’s random and unguided. I keep yelling at my son as we’re reading, when has anything random and unguided ever created anything! Random and unguided processes only create chaos, not order, breaking, not functionality. Yet secularists keep saying that evolution does this, and nature does that. No it doesn’t! I’ll give a few brief examples from the first chapter.
Evolution laid down the cornerstones for basic physiology long ago.
No it didn’t! Just replace the word evolution with God, and you’ll see it’s a distinction without a difference, other than that evolution can’t do anything, and God can do everything. The old switcheroo is that they give an unguided random material process God-like powers. Those who believe in evolution (and it is a leap of faith) use the word and concept in exactly the same way we use God, but they have assumed God out of the equation. So instead of God being the Creator, Evolution is the Creator. And then, as I exclaim to my children all the time, praise chance! Let us bow down to so great a Creator as Evolution if it can create the ridiculous complexity and functionality as we find throughout nature. How about this:
Now evolution works, in large part, through variation and natural selection.
See how he did that? Evolution works, it has creative power. No it doesn’t! I’m not talking about micro-evolution, or the small changes we see happen throughout nature, but macro, like human beings accidentally coming out of some primordial soup. Or like a new species coming from some other species. That has never happened, hasn’t been proved to happen, and in fact can’t happen. It is simply assumed to have happened because, well, if you’re an atheist materialist (matter is all that exists), do you have any other choice? You have to have something like the absurdity of evolution, of chance being responsible for existence, the whole shabang! That is what he calls “a Darwinian perspective.” Or take this:
Individuals vary within a species for such reasons. Nature chooses from among them, across time.
No it doesn’t! How could brute matter choose anything? By any definition of choose, there must be a choosing agent, something capable of thinking, weighing alternatives, and then deciding. So Peterson, like other evolutionists, use a word that in the context means absolutely nothing, but uses it because he has to to keep God out of the discussion. Something, or someone, chooses, something, or someone, creates, or there would be nothing. Only God has such power, by definition.
The real pernicious thing about this, is that the impression is given to the uncritical reader that God isn’t necessary, that for the world to be what it is, to exist at all, God is superfluous. Of course the vast majority of people believe in God because they know intuitively this whole thing is not a cosmic accident, but they live out the implications of the evolutionist: God is superfluous. This is the secular life most people live, and it is a sinister influence on God’s people who too often live like evolutionists.
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