Engaging Culture
Jason Cherry
Oct 14, 2025
Every worldview is accountable to the question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?”
The primary battleground the world has with the church is the issue of beginnings, including human origins. The Darwinian theory isn’t a mere abstraction of the outrageous. It has social and cultural implications. What follows are seven quotations about Darwinism, each designed to reveal that it’s not only scientifically flaccid, but spiritually wanting.
#1 Aldous Huxley, “The liberation we desired was simultaneously liberation from a certain political and economic system and liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom.”¹
In other words, Huxley’s basis for belief in Darwin’s speculations was that he wanted to fornicate. Similarly, D.M. S. Watson said, “Evolution itself is accepted by zoologists not because it has been observed to occur or …. Can be proved by logically coherent evidence to be true, but believe the only alternative, special creation, is clearly incredible.”² The common bias uniting these sentiments is an a priori metaphysical prejudice against submission to a God who creates moral and physical boundaries. Darwinism doesn’t begin with science or scientific evidence, but with a subtilizing spirit of revolt. This shouldn’t be surprising. Sneering skepticism usually begins by embracing lust and ends by resisting resurrection.
#2 Karl Marx said that Darwin’s Origin of Species “is the book which contains the basis in natural history for our view.”³
The Communist Manifesto, written in 1848, and Origin of Species, written in 1859, are knotted by more than time. Trotsky explained why, saying, “Darwin did away with all of my ideological prejudices. He opened the universe to me.” Engels gave the eulogy at Marx's funeral and said, “Marx is doing for Darwinians and social sciences what Darwin did for the physical sciences.” Ever since Marx and Darwin published their works, the regnant presumption is that everyone in society circles shall kneel before them. So we have the situation, as Chesterton once put it, of men who worship nothing divine becoming the gods who are blindly worshipped.⁴
Darwinism and Marxism each bear the stamp of materialism. Both offer sullen resistance to the spiritual realm by holding that matter alone is real. Marx taught that change takes place as people compete for control of material goods. Everything in the world can be understood through the lens of this contest for control. Every social, cultural, and religious institution functions to gain this control. Darwin taught that change in living things takes place through a process of natural selection. Every living thing evolves for the contest of survival.
In contrast to these, Jesus taught that if you seek the spiritual things first, then you ought not be anxious about the material things (Mt. 6:31-33). Materialism denies the existence of the spiritual realm, which, as it turns out, is devastating for the material realm. Isn’t it ironic that those who deny the spiritual realm, those who believe in and seek only the material realm, should, in their denial of the spiritual realm, also be denied basic needs in the material realm? This is foretold in the book of Ecclesiastes, which argues that a life devoted to pleasure-seeking, results in an unsatisfied appetite.
#3 G.K. Chesterton said, “No materialist who thinks his mind was made up for him, by mud and blood and heredity, has any hesitation in making up his mind.”⁵
C.S. Lewis put it like this, “If minds are wholly dependent on brains, and brains on biochemistry, and biochemistry on the meaningless flux of the atoms, I cannot understand how the thought of those minds should have any more significance than the sound of the wind in the trees.”⁶ In other words, if thought is produced by an impersonal biochemical reaction in the brain, then it’s inchoate nonsense to trust Darwin’s thoughts as trustworthy. Nothing is so anarchical to reason as the grey matter of the brain divorced from the divine purpose of the Creator. If the materialistic bias of secular science is true, then the human brain, the same brain that does scientific work, is merely a meaningless and random collection of atoms.⁷ How can a meaningless and random collection of atoms function with such meaning and purpose in its pursuit of truth using science?
#4 Michael Behe, “The very same factors that promote diversity at the simplest levels of biology, actively prevent it at more complex ones.”⁸
Michael Behe argues that unguided mutation and natural selection can adapt organisms to their environments, but only within strict limits. In other words, mutations can produce microevolution, but not to the extent of producing macroevolution. Limited biological adaptation that allows living things to adjust to their environment is part of God’s design. But it is a very different thing from a species changing kind, as Darwin speculated.
Neo-Darwinism relies on random mutations that are selected by a blind, impersonal, unguided, directionless process of natural selection. However, as Michael Denton argues, the vast majority of changes produce an organism less fit for survival.⁹ Random and undirected processes tend to harm organisms. Darwinism must prove that a simple living cell has transmutated over billions of years, adding complexity along the way, until living cells become as complex as the human brain. The problem is that a random seriatim of mutations doesn’t add complexity, and they don’t produce macroevolution.
#5 G.K. Chesterton, “They continue to demonstrate the Darwinian theory from the geological record by means of all the fossils that ought to be found in it.”¹⁰
The fossil record lacks intermediate fossils. These are called missing links, and there are more than a few missing fossils. If evolutionary biologists only went off the fossils they have in hand, the theory of the gradual evolution of species would fall apart. As Chesterton said elsewhere, “In dealing with a past that has almost entirely perished, he can only go by evidence and not by experiment. And there is hardly enough evidence to be even evidential.”¹¹ There is a very big difference between having fossil records formed by gradual processes over millions of years and expecting to find them.
#6 G.K. Chesterton, “Evolution as an explanation … of the cause of living things, is still faced with the problem of producing rabbits out of an empty hat; a process commonly involving some hint of design.”¹²
Biology teaches that life doesn’t come from non-life. Atheists believe that existence comes from non-existence. Chemistry has no explanation for the mystery of the origin of life. The atheist explanation is that nothingness spontaneously generated matter, progression, causation, and life. So, what is the cause of living things? The atheist says nothing and nowhere suddenly became something and somewhere. And they call this theory “science,” even though there is no empirical explanation for how a primordial soup could arise in the Earth’s hostile environment or how life came from this erstwhile commune of chemicals.
Atheists can’t fathom how Christians believe that the dead, nonliving Jesus became living again. They find that hard to believe. They think it is absurd. But the atheist believes that all life came from that which is nonliving, which, according to their own label, can only be described as absurd. So, atheists must possess far greater faith, something they decry as irrational, than Christians do that living things come from nonliving things. And all with no scientific evidence, something they demand as necessary. They must believe in ten billion miracles of life because they are too skeptical to believe in the Resurrection Life. In contrast, the biblical doctrine of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, accompanied by theological and historical evidence, explains what would otherwise be absurd. But the resurrection itself is not absurd.
#7 Joshua Chatraw and Mark Allen, “Where does it lead? Does its path take us to the fulfillment of our heart’s desire or to deepest disappointment? Are we on a path to the fullness of God or to a vacuous emptiness? Is it a bridge to eternal life or a dead end? Does it restore us to creational goodness and beauty or plunge us into confusion and despair?”¹³
Scientific critiques aside, the baleful problem with Darwinism is the fruit it produces. You can evaluate if a tree is healthy by the fruit it gives. The culture that’s been formed by the story of Darwinism is decaying. Why? Because it leaves man spiritually unsatisfied. It starves the soul. It doesn’t fulfill man’s higher hunger.
Other Articles
https://trinityreformedkirk.com/collection/human-nature-is-religious-and-why-it-matters
Jason Cherry is an elder at Trinity Reformed Church in Huntsville, Alabama, as well as a teacher and lecturer of literature, history, and economics at Providence Classical School in Huntsville. He graduated from Reformed Theological Seminary with an MA in Religion and is the author of the books The Culture of Conversionism and the History of the Altar Call and The Making of Evangelical Spirituality.
Footnotes
¹ Aldous Huxley, Complete Essays, edited by Robert S. Baker and James Sexton (Landham, MD: Ivan R. Dee, 2001), 4:369
² Douglas Dewar and L.M. Davies, “Science and the B.B.C.,” The Nineteenth Century and After (1943), 167.
³ Karl Marx, qtd in R.L. Meek, ed., Marx and Engels on Malthus (New York: International Publishers, 1954), 171.
⁴ G.K. Chesterton, Selected Essays “About Voltaire” (Wilco Publishing, 2005), 37.
⁵ G.K. Chesterton, St. Thomas Aquinas: “The Dumb Ox” (Image Books, 1956), 156.
⁶ C.S. Lewis, “Is Theology Poetry?” in Walmsley, C.S. Lewis: Essay Collection, 21.
⁷ Barr, Stephen M. “Feel Free.” First Things, August 1, 2024. https://firstthings.com/feel-free/
⁸ Behe, Michael J. Darwin Devolves: The New Science About DNA That Challenges Evolution (New York: HarperOne, 2019), 38.
⁹ Michael Denton. Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis (Seattle, WA: Discovery Institute Press, 2016).
¹⁰ Dale Ahlquist, Common Sense 101: Lessons from G.K. Chesterton (Ignatius Press, 2006), 111.
¹¹ G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man (Rough Draft Printing) 24f.
¹² G.K. Chesterton, Chaucer, Collected Works, 18:172.
¹³ Joshua D. Chatraw & Mark D. Allen. The Augustine Way: Retrieving a Vision for the Church’s Apologetic Witness (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2023), 121f