Hi, I'm David Bercot, and tonight we're going to be talking about the myth of evolution, but not primarily from the perspective of science, but rather from the perspective of ancient history. You see, most people think that the theory that life on Earth got here by accident is a modern view, a product of the age of science. That's certainly the way it was presented to us in high school.
The scene that's portrayed in public school is that humans originally believed that they were the special creation of God or of the gods, plural. But then the hard evidence led scientists to conclude that man is not a special creation of God after all. Rather, he started out simply as an animal, and that all life on Earth evolved from nothing. That life on Earth got here by accident, by mere chance. But that portrayal of things is not at all accurate.
Because the belief that life on earth got here by accident is not a product of the age of science. Rather, it's a product of the age of myths. It's something that was taught centuries before the birth of Christ. And so was the belief that there is no God. Now it is true that nearly all ancient cultures did believe in some type of gods.
However, just because a culture believed in the existence of gods or divine beings, it doesn't necessarily follow that they thought that we humans were created by those gods, or that the universe was created by the gods. In fact, many ancient people believe that the universe had always existed. The truth of the matter is that the majority of the ancient cultures did not teach something similar to the Genesis account of man's creation.
The schools make us think that that was something everyone believed, but that is not at all borne out by the evidence. Rather, in ancient times people thought that humans sprang up from dragon's teeth that had been sowed in the ground, or that mankind had lived underneath the earth and climbed up from underneath the ground, or that we got here as the result of an accident or other notions like that.
It was certainly not common for ancient people to believe that all humans descended from the same two original parents. That's something we Christians believe, and our belief goes back many thousands of years, but that's not what other ancient people believed at all. And in fact, although nearly all cultures did believe in the existence of gods, not everyone who lived in those cultures believed in the gods themselves.
In other words, the culture may have thought that, but that doesn't mean everyone went along with the culture. And we're going to be seeing that specifically as we continue on. In other words, the conflict here is not modern thought versus ancient antiquated thought. No, the battle is between two ancient schools of thought that have always opposed each other. The one is belief in special creation by intelligent design. The other is the belief in spontaneous or accidental creation.
Hundreds of years before Christ, you had teachers on both sides of this issue. So as I said, it's not a modern view versus the ancient view. Nor is it a fight between science and religion, although that's how believers in spontaneous or accidental creation have tried to paint it. Actually, until the 18th and 19th century, virtually no one imagined that you could separate science from religion. My dictionary defines science as the systematized knowledge of nature and the physical world.
Now, if God exists, then you can hardly systematize knowledge about nature or the physical world without God entering into the equation somewhere, any more than you can study music without any mention of composers or musicians. And so until about the 18th or 19th century, a study of science naturally suppose a study of God's role in the physical world. And I don't mean that just Christians saw it that way, or just Christians and Jews.
No, actually the earliest known proponents of the belief in spontaneous or accidental creation themselves did not imagine that you could separate science from religion. Although the belief in spontaneous or accidental creation probably goes back 3,000 years or so. But the earliest written records we have of this belief is from certain of the Greek philosophers. But those philosophers did not pretend that they could separate science, philosophy, and religion, or even government and the arts for that matter.
Philosophy covered all of those subjects. They well understood that all of these disciplines are intertwined. So with the Greek philosophers, there is no line of demarcation between science, religion, and philosophy of life, as indeed there shouldn't be. Now, the ancient belief in spontaneous or accidental creation falls into two categories. One, you have the mythologists. These would be the ones who believe that humans sprang up from dragon's teeth or something like that. And then two, you have the materialists.
Now my dictionary defines a materialist as one who holds to the philosophic doctrine that matter is the only reality in the universe. In other words, there's no spirit world. There's just the physical world. Now, the ancient materialist might have believed in the existence of gods, but he believed that these gods were made up of matter, matter that was more ancient than the gods. And he didn't believe that the gods designed or created the universe.
They were there just as another form of life like animal and human, et cetera. Well, tonight we're going to be focusing on what the materialists taught. That's because no one today that I know of is espousing the dragon's teeth theory or something like that. But millions of people are teaching the materialist theory. Now, as we look into what the ancient materialists taught, please remember that not everything they said was in error. Actually, these ancient philosophers did make some brilliant observations.
At the same time, they also came to some absolutely absurd conclusions. In so many areas of life, error is often mixed in with truth. You know, it's much easier to poison someone if you mix the poison in with ordinary, nutritious food. And so the falsity of materialism was mixed in with some accurate scientific observations. Now, when we use the word" materialist" or" materialism" tonight, please understand we're not talking about covetousness.
We're not using it in the sense that we use it when we're talking against greed or against the desire to accumulate a lot of material things. That's one meaning of the word" materialism," but tonight we're using it in the philosophical sense of a philosophy that matter is the only reality in the universe. There is no God, there is no spirit world. Now, today, scientists understand that energy can be converted into matter and vice versa.
So if we're talking about materialism today, to be more accurate, we would probably say they would believe that only matter and physical energy are the only realities in the universe. Now, I first became aware of this ancient origin of the theory of spontaneous or accidental creation when I read the writings of the early Christians. This was about 20 years ago, because what I found was that they were having to defend special creation just like we Christians do today. And that was quite a surprise to me.
I wasn't expecting to find that. I thought that that was something new that Christians are facing today. I didn't know it was also something ancient. And it whetted my appetite to learn more. So I decided to dig a lot further to find out exactly what the ancient philosophers taught about creation and the nature of man. Because the ancient Greek philosophers essentially stood in the same position as modern-day scientists do.
The only difference is the philosophers, their study encompassed everything religion, science, music, mathematics, government, all of those things. They didn't try to separate wisdom or knowledge. It flowed into every sphere, as they correctly understood. Now, I always like to get things straight from the horse's mouth, not from reading somebody else's book about something. So I purchased a number of the works of the ancient Greek and Roman philosophers so I could read their writings directly.
Now, one of the first things I discovered from reading their writings is that the ancient philosophers did not all teach the same thing. There were quite a few different schools of thought among them. In fact, the majority of the Roman and Greek philosophers were not materialists. They did believe in a spirit world or a supernatural world. And we'll be talking a little bit more about that later.
Now, in the realm of Greek philosophy, the roots of the doctrine of materialism go back to the 5th century before Christ, to a philosopher named Empedocles. And don't worry about remembering these different names. We're going to be naming about four or five philosophers. Some of the names you've probably heard before, and others, this may be the first time you've heard of them. Now, Empedocles taught that matter is without beginning and without end. It's eternal. It's always been here.
Now, although he believed in the existence of the gods, he did not believe that they were the creators of the universe or of mankind. In fact, he taught that there was no Creator because matter has always existed. You know, in every belief system, there is always something that is eternal. You can't escape from it. For Empedocles, it was matter. So in his philosophy, in essence, matter becomes God, because matter is eternal. Now he said that there are four elements or four forms of matter.
There's earth, water, fire, and air. And he believed that all of these elements are sentient. By sentient, we mean that they have feeling that they're conscious. And since these four elements are eternal, they're older than the gods. In fact, he believed that the gods were formed by these elements coming together in a certain combination. Now his doctrine taught that these four elements are always in motion, being pulled or being pushed by two eternal forces. One is love and the other is strife.
Love brings these four elements together. Strife pushes them apart. Now you remember he could talk about love and strife because he believed that the elements were in a sense alive, that they had consciousness. Furthermore, he taught that these fundamental elements have pores in them that allows the other elements to intermingle with them, or in his words, as he phrased it, that they run through one another.
So you might have a block of, say, water, but it has these pores, and so fire can come inside the water and intermingle with it. So that was his basic plan or understanding of the universe. And he taught that everything in existence, the earth, the sun and moon, the animals, the plant life, humans, even the gods, that everything is made up of a formula or recipe of these four elements: earth, air, fire, and water.
For example, he writes, I'm going to read directly from his writing." There are these four elements alone, but by running through one another, they become men and the tribes of beasts." He continues," The kindly earth received in its broad funnels two parts of gleaming water out of the eight, and four parts of fire." So arose white bones divinely fitted together by the cement of proportion. So that's how he thought bones were created, how men and animals got here.
Well, as I think you can see, the materialist philosophy began as a mixture of myth and fact, and it was mostly myth. I mean, after all, matter can feel and think. You can create a human by simply mixing together earth, water, air, and fire in the right proportions. That's nonsense. In short, the materialist philosophy, it didn't come about because the evidence forced this view upon earnest objective scientists. This philosophy began in the age of superstition and myth.
And the only thing you can say about it is, in many respects, it was no more ridiculous than what other people were teaching that we sprung up from dragon's teeth or something like that. Actually, the major flaw of the philosophy of materialism was evident in the very beginning. And this flaw, which is still around today, is that it has always treated life and the universe itself as things that are extremely simple.
You just mix together two parts water, four parts fire, some earth and air, and voila, out pops a man. You see, the Greek philosophers had no idea whatsoever of how complicated an organism a human being is. Now, the logical development of Empedocles' ideas was through what is known as the Atomist School of Philosophy. This is spelled A-T-O-M-I-S-T. It's where we get the word atom, ATOM. Now, a man named Leucippus is usually credited as the founder of this philosophical school.
Now, as we saw, Empedocles had an almost totally materialist universe, except that he had attributed thought and feelings to the four elements, and he also interjected the forces of love and strife. Well, the atomists took the next step, and bit by bit, they eliminated all of the metaphysical ideas, all of the things that go beyond the material world. So in the end, they said that all exists is matter, and matter does not have any consciousness to it, and void, or empty space.
Now, they still believed in the four original elements, but they said that these four elements are composed of tiny invisible particles, which they called atoms. And that these atoms have different shapes, sizes, and weights. Now, if you're like me, you're probably surprised to find out that the concept of atoms goes back to centuries before the time of Christ, but it does.
Now, Leucippus taught that these atoms move about in an infinite great void, what we would call outer space, where they constantly collide with one another. And these collisions create numerous possibilities of combinations, and this is how worlds are produced. Now he said there's no external force or power that moves these atoms, and the atoms have no feeling or consciousness, they're not alive. It's just an inherent property of them that they always move.
The Atomist philosophers didn't think you had to explain motion. It was just there, they said. Now, Leucippus did not ascribe all of this to chance. He believed that there was some great mind called in Greek the Logos behind it all, and that all things are governed by a cosmic fate. Now, this great mind wasn't really a personal God, but it was some sort of intelligence that exists on its own.
So he almost had a perfectly materialistic world, but he still allowed that, yeah, there was some kind of mind behind all of this. Well, all of that disappears with the next one in our chain here of materialists, and that was a philosopher named Democritus. Now, Democritus was a disciple of Leucippus. He grew up in a wealthy family, and as a boy, he was instructed by the Persian Magi. Anyway, they instructed him in astrology and theology. And after the death of his father, Democritus, traveled in search of wisdom.
In fact, he used his inheritance to just travel and try to learn. He visited Egypt, Ethiopia, Persia, and India. And then at some point in his life, he ended up in Greece, and he became a disciple of the founder of the Atomist School, and that was Leucippus, who we've talked about. Well, Democritus acquired fame with his knowledge of natural phenomena, and he predicted changes in the weather. And he used this ability to make people believe that he could predict future events.
And so they came to view him as something more than human. He was also known as the laughing philosopher because he never appeared in public without expressing his contempt for human follies and laughing at other people's beliefs. In fact, his fellow citizens in Greece called him the mocker. Well, now Democritus expanded the atomic theory of Leucippus. He argued that matter, empty space, and motion are all eternal. The worlds which we see resulted from the endless collisions of falling atoms.
He said that the human soul consists of atoms of fire, which impart movement to the body. Now in his explanation of the movement of these atoms, he drew a distinction between their primary motion, the direction they would normally be traveling, and then the secondary effects that we would call reaction when they would hit one another. And he said that there are laws that govern both their primary motion and then their reactions, and it's a basic law of necessity which rules all things.
But whereas Leucippus had acknowledged there was some great mind behind all of this, Democritus said," No, there is no great mind. It's all random accident. These atoms have always existed. They've always moved." Now obviously when you take away God from the equation or the great mind or any other kind of force beyond the material world, it's bound to affect your whole philosophy of life. And it did.
Democritus' philosophy of life was this, and I'm quoting from him," The best thing for a man is to pass his life so as to have as much joy and as little trouble as is possible." That was his whole point of living, to have as much happiness and as little trouble as you can have. Now, Democritus also taught a sort of evolution of man's intellect. He said that humans learned to spin by studying spiders. They learned to build houses by studying swallows who build these elaborate nests.
And they learn how to sing by observing the birds. So here with Democritus, you have basically the entire framework upon which evolution was built, all of this centuries before Christ. In fact, Democritus could have walked right into the 18th century, the 1700s, and fit pretty well with the philosopher scientists of that day.
The irony is that even though Democritus during his own lifetime mocked everyone else as being idiots, you know in the end we would know now that virtually everything he taught, he was wrong about. He was right about the visible universe being made up of smaller invisible particles. But that's about it. And he didn't invent that. That was a conclusion that others had drawn before him. And the existence of atoms has nothing to do with the belief in accidental or spontaneous creation.
It fits the belief of special creation just as well as the other. Now most people in Democritus' day didn't buy into his arguments. I mean, after all, it is pretty absurd to think that if you collide microscopic particles of Earth, water, and air, and combine them with fire, that you can suddenly create mankind. You can create the whole universe.
In fact, the only reason he didn't get laughed out of the country is that most of the opposing views to his were just as silly, that humans sprouted up from dragon's teeth and nonsense like that. Now to be sure, many Greeks did believe in special creation by their gods, but their stories about the gods were so absurd that thinking people usually found them hard to believe. Democritus was able to advance his ideas because he wasn't competing against a much more scientific belief.
The belief that there is an intelligent being, God, who designed and created the universe and everything in it, and who cares about it and had a purpose in mind in creating it. So he wasn't having to compete against that kind of scientific belief. Now you might be reeling right now trying to keep up with these various unfamiliar names. Actually, we've only mentioned three philosophers. Let's just briefly go over them again.
It's not important that you remember their names necessarily, but just so you can follow the line of thought here. The first one was Empedocles, who taught that matter is eternal, and that it can feel and think. And so it created everything, including the gods, because it has some kind of innate intelligence in itself. And he said that the whole universe was made up of four basic elements: earth, water, air, and fire. Okay, that's Empedocles. Okay, the next one, the second one, was Leucippus.
And about all we need to remember about him is that he founded the Atomist School of Philosophy. He took basically the thoughts of Empedocles and said that this matter is made up of these tiny invisible particles called atoms. This was one of the few things that this line of philosophers got correct. Now Leucippus said that matter doesn't have any feeling to it, that it just moves about in this great void and the different collisions of atoms has created the universe.
But he did say that the universe itself has some kind of mind to it. The great Logos is what he called it in Greek. So there's this inanimate logic thinking mind that's out there somehow in the universe, not a God or anything, maybe closer to what people would call Mother Nature. And then the third and only other one we've talked about was Democritus, who was a disciple of Leucippus. And what he did was just take out the idea of a great intelligence behind this.
Everything was by random accident, but that there are laws of physics that determine and control everything. So in those three steps, in Empedocles, Leucippus, Democritus, we end up with a materialist universe, no God, no purpose in life. Everything is made up of matter. And when we die, we die. There's no afterlife. There's no soul that lives on after us. There's no judgment after death. That's it. The material world is the only world.
Now, if I haven't lost you now on those three philosophers, we're only going to mention two more, so we're nearly home. Now I mentioned with Democritus that a materialistic teaching about man and about the universe, that all we are is matter. All that exists in the universe is matter and void. This is bound to engender a whole philosophy of life. And it did with Democritus that try to get as much pleasure and have as little trouble and pain in life, and that's what life is all about.
The man who best articulated this philosophy was one of the atomists, and his name you've perhaps heard of before, was Epicurus. We get the adjective Epicurean today, which means a life of pleasure. Now, Epicurus lived about 300 years before Christ was born. He didn't start out as a materialist or as an atomist. Rather, he started out wanting to free mankind from the fear of the gods and from the fear of the afterlife.
He saw that this dominated Greek life, people always offering up sacrifices to the gods, people afraid to do this or that for fear of the punishment in the afterlife. So he chose the Atomist School of Thought because it fit his needs. Epicurus felt like one of the main things in life was to obtain protection from other men who might want to do us evil.
But he said there is no advantage to obtaining protection from other men, so long as we are alarmed by events above or below the earth, or in general by whatever happens in the universe. Now Epicurus did believe that the gods existed, but simply as higher animals. Just as man is higher than dogs and cats and that sort of thing. Well, gods are a little higher than man. But he said we don't have to offer sacrifices to them or be afraid of them. They are not concerned about us.
The universe in mankind and the gods came about only by the chance collision of atoms. He also believed that we have no soul. When we die, we simply go into nonexistence. So there's nothing to be afraid of after we die. There's no judgment. There's no punishments. He also taught that humans started out with no speech, but rather that they communicated in grunts, et cetera. Something you hear a lot nowadays in school textbooks.
I'm going to read you a passage from one of his works in which he tries to explain how language came about. He said," Hence, even the names of things were not originally due to convention, but in the several tribes of man under the impulse of special feelings and special presentations of sense, primitive man uttered special cries. The air thus emitted was molded by their individual feelings or sense presentations, and differently according to the difference of the regions which the tribes inhabited.
Subsequently, whole tribes adopted their own special names, in order that their communications might be less ambiguous to each other and more briefly expressed. Well, that all sounds fine to an evolutionist, but you know there's no scientific basis to believe in that at all. Everything we know about language is that when it starts, it's full and complete. It doesn't start off simple and crude and then develop into something more complex. In fact, languages have gone the other way.
They were more complex thousands of years ago, and they've gotten less and less complex as we go. For example, Latin, not only did you have different tenses of verbs, but you had different cases of noun, depending whether it was the subject, or the object, or the indirect object, or something like that. So for each noun, where we would have one word" table," whether it's the subject, the object, the indirect object, it's always table.
See, there would be several different forms of the word" table", depending on its usage. Now, our English language today has far more words than the Latin or Greek language contained, because we have taken words from other languages and added it to ours. And because of all of the new inventions and all of the new words that that has engendered, just think about computers and all of the terms that we have that are in existence because of computers, or because of cars, or things like that.
Actually, Epicurus developed a number of theories that are very similar to that of the 19th-century evolutionists. Lactantius, who was the educator of Constantine and was also a Christian, a very educated man, and very familiar with the different philosophers.
He said," Epicurus is accustomed to say that animals are not produced by any design of the divine mind, but by chance." And in order that he can show this, he says that in the beginning of the world, innumerable other animals of wonderful form and magnitude were produced. However, he says that they were unable to be permanent because either the power of taking food or the method of procreating had failed them. So this is basically Darwin's theory of natural selection. It was around centuries before Christ.
It originated in the age of myth. He writes again, Epicurus saw in the bodies of animals the skill of a divine plan. However, in order that he might carry into effect that which he had imprudently assumed before, he added another absurdity to agree with his first proposition. He said that the eyes were not produced for seeing, nor the ears for hearing, nor the feet for walking. Instead, these members were produced before there were the functions of seeing, hearing, and walking.
So all the uses of these members developed after they had already come into being. See, I mean, he could have just fit right in with Darwin, Lamarck, these other early evolutionists, making the same kind of bold claims that are absurd nonsense. Well, I hope by now you can see that the fight that we special creationists have, it isn't against modern science. Science isn't the problem nor the true facts that have been acquired in the modern centuries.
Our fight is against an ancient, antiquated superstition that's something as complex and ingenious as a human, or even as an animal, a dog, or a cow, that this could just come about by accident. You just get enough atoms and throw' em about, and boom, you have a cell, you have a dog, you have a man, whatever. Well, getting back to Epicurus, if what he taught is true, well, what's the point of life then? Well, Epicurus had the answer for that. Pleasure. Pleasure is the purpose of life.
Now, to be fair to Epicurus, by pleasure he didn't mean drunken orgies and momentary pleasures. He meant pleasures that endure a lifetime, such as friendship to him. That was something that made life worthwhile, having a genuine friend. Now of course he couldn't object to debauchery on moral grounds because there is no morality, there is no God, there is no ultra right and wrong. It's whatever fits our culture. But he did say that debauchery wasn't the best pleasure because it was momentary and fleeting.
Or drunkenness. Well, if you get drunk, you're going to wake up the next morning with a hangover. So the pleasure you obtain from being drunk is going to be counteracted by the misery the next day. So then he advised against drunkenness. Actually, in fact, he taught a type of asceticism. He said the fewer needs you have, the happier you're going to be. So ironically, this Greek philosopher stumbled upon some of the truths that Christ would later make more clear to people.
So as I said, very few of the philosophers were all error. They had some truth, but the error was always greater than what truth they had discovered. And in the case of Epicurus, his whole system was false from the very beginning. And very few of his disciples followed an ascetic way of life. He may have preached that and perhaps to an extent lived it himself. But all his followers got out of his philosophy was," Let's have fun.
Life is for the purpose of pleasure." And that's what's usually meant today when we talk about someone being Epicurean. All right, the last philosopher we're going to talk about was a Roman named Lucretius. Now, actually, he wasn't an original philosopher in any sense. He simply took the teachings of the Atomist School of Thought among the Greeks, the teachings particularly of Democritus and Epicurus.
And he wrote an epic work entitled" On the Nature of the Universe." He wrote it in Latin, and thereby he was able to take all of these teachings of the Greeks and introduce them to the Roman world, who up to that time knew nothing about them. He was born about 100 years before Christ. I'd like to just read to you some passages from it, some of the things that he said. This is from Lucretius' epic work entitled" On the Nature of the Universe." This is all concerning the creation of the universe.
He said," Certainly the atoms did not post themselves purposefully in due order by an act of intelligence, nor did they stipulate what movements each should perform. As they have been rushing everlastingly throughout all space in their millenniums, undergoing a myriad changes under the impact of collisions, they have experienced every variety of movement and conjunction till they have fallen into the particular pattern by which this world of ours is constituted.
The universe was certainly not created for us by divine power. And again, in his work, he says the theory that the gods deliberately created the world in all of its natural splendor for the sake of man, so that we ought to praise this eminently praiseworthy piece of divine workmanship and believe it eternal and immortal, and think it a sin to unsettle by violence the everlasting abode established for mankind. This theory with all its attendant fictions is sheer nonsense.
For what benefit could immortal and blessed beings reap from our gratitude that they should undertake any task on our behalf? Well, after laughing at what other people believe, he gives his own account of creation. He says this:" At that time, this is when the earth was just beginning. At that time the sun's bright disk was not to be seen here, nor the stars, nor sea nor sky, nothing but a hurricane raging in a newly congregated mass of atoms of every sort.
From this medley, they started to sort themselves out, like combining with like. In fact, they began to separate the heights of heaven from the earth to single out the sea as a receptacle for water detached from the Earth mass. In the first place, all the particles of Earth, because they were heavy and entangled, collected in the middle and took up the lower stations. The more closely they clung together, the more they squeezed out the atoms that went into making the sea and stars, sun and moon.
For all these are composed of smooth, round seeds, much smaller than the particles of Earth. So Lucretius believed that the Sun is no bigger than what it appears in the sky, and likewise the moon, and the stars, likewise, they're just tiny dots that are out there. Also like all of the other materialist philosophers, Lucretius mistakenly believed that life can be spontaneously generated.
He said," The fact that we perceive eggs turning into live fledglings and worms swarming out when the earth has been rotted by intemperate showers, we may infer that animate beings can be generated from the inanimate." Now, as with all of the other philosophers, what he taught was a combination of science, or generally superstition, but what purported to be science, along with religion and philosophy, all mixed together. For example, he said this about death.
From all this, it follows that death is nothing to us, and no concern of ours since our tenure of the mind is mortal. So when we shall be no more, when the union of body and spirit that engenders us has been disrupted, to us who shall then be nothing, nothing by any hazard will happen anymore at all. Nothing will have power to stir our senses, not even if the earth was fused together with the sea and the sea with the sky.
If any feeling remains in mind or spirit after it has been torn from our body, that is nothing to us. For we are brought into being by the wedlock of body and spirit. If the future holds travail and anguish in store, the self must be in existence when that time comes in order to experience it. But from this fate, we are redeemed by death, which denies existence to the self that might have suffered these tribulations. Rest assured, therefore, that we have nothing to fear in death.
One who no longer is cannot suffer or differ in any way from one who has never been born. But once this mortal life has been usurped by death, which is the only thing immortal. When you find a man treating it as a grievance that after death, he will either molder in the grave, or fall a prey to flames, or to the jaws of predatory beasts, be sure that his utterance does not ring true. You are at peace now in the sleep of death, and so you will stay to the end of time.
So that was Lucretius' science, his religion, and his philosophy. As I've read these things, I don't doubt that you've seen parallels between it and the materialist philosophy of today. Dr. David L. Simpson, who's a professor at DePaul University and somebody who admires Lucretius, said this about him:" Every modern reader of Lucretius has been struck by the extent to which Lucretius seems to have anticipated modern evolutionary theories in the fields of geology, biology, and sociology.
However, to acknowledge this connection is not to say that the poet deserves accredited status as some kind of scientific evolutionist or pre-Darwinian precursor, it is merely to point out that however we choose to define and evaluate its influence, Lucretius' writings from the 17th century onward were a massive cultural presence and hence a ready source of evolutionary ideas.
His work formed part of the cultural heritage and intellectual background of virtually every evolutionary theorist in Europe from Lamarck to Herbert Spencer, whose hedonistic ethics also owed a debt to Lucretius, including Darwin himself, though he claimed never to have read Lucretius' epic. Again, as far as I know, Dr. Simpson believes in evolution himself. He's not decrying the fact that what evolutionists teach today is very similar to what Lucretius taught thousands of years ago.
He's just pointing out the obvious it's pretty hard to read Lucretius and not realize that this had some influence on modern thought. In fact, he was widely read in the 17th, 18th, 19th centuries, and is still read today for that matter. Well, in summary of what we've seen from these five philosophers, materialism, that is the philosophy of materialism, has always been a combination of science, religion, and philosophy of life. It's part science because it studies the universe and it studies life on Earth.
It's part religion because even materialism cannot escape the question of eternity. There is always something that is eternal. And there are always so-called laws of nature. So the ancient materialists, the philosophers we've talked about, they made matter eternal. Today's materialists are forced to make energy eternal because they realize that matter can be created out of energy and matter can be turned into energy.
And both ancient and modern materialists have had to acknowledge that eternal laws govern energy and matter. They can't get around that. So materialism is a form of religion. Just because it gives no intelligence to this eternal energy that doesn't take it out of the realm of religion. I mean, in essence, the materialists of today believe that the universe was created when some of this eternal, mindless energy was randomly converted into matter.
Now we who believe in special creation believe that the source of the universe was energy with a capital E that had a mind. This is God, who used his boundless energy to create the material universe, and he created it on purpose. It wasn't an accident. Now our belief is both science and its religion, just as materialism is both science and religion. One gives personality, thought, and life to this energy that created everything. The other says this energy had no personality, no life, no purpose.
But they're both scientific, and they are both religious. And thirdly, materialism is a philosophy of life because your belief on what is the ultimate cause of the universe will affect how you live. If you believe in an ultimate, intelligent creator, then it's a natural assumption that he had some purpose and goal in mind in creating us. So you seek to live in harmony with His will. You seek to find out what His purpose was.
But if you think the universe came about through random chance, then we humans are the ultimate ones who determine what's right and what's wrong, and that changes with culture. And for the materialists, there are no punishments or rewards after death. So there's no need to take such things into account when making decisions in life. Pleasure and earthly happiness become the greatest goals in life for most materialists.
This influence of religion and philosophy with science becomes very clear in the life of Charles Darwin, whom I want to talk about for just a few moments. At the outset, let me clear up one thing. Charles Darwin was not the originator of the theory of evolution, as probably most people think. Actually, the whole materialism philosophy, as we've seen, dates back to centuries before Christ, the idea that the universe got here by accident.
Now, the teaching that life forms here on Earth changed from a lower form into a higher one, was also taught decades before Darwin wrote his famous book," The Origin of Species." For example, it was taught by the French biologist Lamarck, but his theory of evolution was a little bit different. It was based on the idea that individuals adapt during their own lifetime, and they transmit these adapted traits onto their offspring.
Then the offspring adapt from where their parents left off, enabling evolution to advance. Of course, it's pretty easy to disprove that notion. Acquired characteristics are not passed on to our children. For example, let's say you spend a lot of time if you're a man working out in a gym and building these huge muscles and all of that. Well, your children aren't going to have huge muscles because of doing that. That's an acquired characteristic that is not passed on.
Or if you study and come to all of this great knowledge, your children are going to start off at Ground Zero. None of that is passed on to them unless you teach it to them after they reach an age of understanding. So Darwin's contribution to the theory of evolution and to the philosophy of materialism was his coming up with the theory of natural selection, that the fittest species survived, that you have all of these species out here with different characteristics, and then the fittest ones survive.
But his theory of natural selection doesn't even remotely answer the question of how the fittest species got there in the first place. Nor does it answer the ultimate origin of life and the universe. For answers to those questions, even modern materialists have to still go back to the ancient Greek materialists that life got here through random accident by the random collision and adhesion of atoms and molecules.
So even though today's materialists pretend to simply be objective scientists, the truth of the matter is that the philosophy and religion of materialism came before the science did. Materialists don't want there to be a god. They don't want there to be an eternal moral code that transcends culture. They don't want there to be a judgment day after death and future punishments.
For example, in his autobiography, Darwin wrote this concerning his state of mind when he was on the British ship the Beagle doing his studies that led him to write the book The Origin of Species.
He writes," I had gradually come by this time to see that the Old Testament from its manifestly false history of the world with the Tower of Babel, the rainbow, sign, et cetera, and from its attributing to God the feelings of a revengeful tyrant was no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindus or the beliefs of any barbarian. The question then continually rose before my mind and would not be banished.
Is it credible that if God were now to make a revelation to the Hindus, would He permit it to be connected with the belief in Vishnu and Siva? As Christianity is connected with the Old Testament? This appeared to me to be utterly incredible.
By further reflecting that the clearest evidence would be requisite to make any sane man believe in the miracles by which Christianity is supported, that the more we know of the fixed laws of nature, the more incredible do miracles become that the men at that time were ignorant and credulous, to a degree almost incomprehensible by us. By such reflections as these, I gradually came to disbelieve in Christianity as a divine revelation. Thus, disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but was at last complete?
The rate was so slow that I felt no distress, and have never since doubted even for a single second that my conclusion was correct. I can hardly see how anyone would wish Christianity to be true. For if so, the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my father, brother, and almost all of my friends, will be everlastingly punished. And this is a damnable doctrine. I'm still reading from him.
The old argument of design in nature, which formerly seemed to me so conclusive, failed now that the law of natural selection has been discovered. We can no longer argue that, for instance, the beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door by man. There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings, and in the action of natural selection than in the course the wind blows. Everything in nature is the result of fixed laws.
So even though Darwin pretended that he was simply being an objective scientist, the truth of the matter is that he didn't want Christianity to be true. He wanted to find some way to get around there being a God and punishments after death. He was not at all being objective, and his theory of natural selection hardly cancels out the obvious fact of great and intelligent design in the universe and in plant and animal life. But as we've said, what he believed ultimately goes back to the ancient Greek philosophers.
Evolution is not the product of modern science, it's a relic of the age of myths. And how much genuine scientific knowledge did those Greek and Roman philosophers actually discover or correctly theorize? I'm talking about the materialists now. In the end, the only thing they were right about was the existence of microscopic atoms, that objects we see with our eyes are composed of tiny particles that are too small to see.
But they were absolutely wrong about these atoms being made of the four elements of earth, water, air, and fire. In fact, we know today that none of those four things are actually elements. The first three are compounds. They aren't basic building blocks. And fire, the fourth one, is a chemical reaction. It's not even an element at all. So the only thing they were right about is the one thing that they said that does not in any way contradict the biblical account of creation.
That God created the material visible world from microscopic particles that we can't see is perfectly in harmony with Scripture. In fact, the philosophers came to their theory of atoms by studying God's creation. They saw that you could take a substance such as water and to continue to break it down into smaller and smaller droplets, but each one was still water with all of the properties of water. They saw that theoretically you could break down any substance into particles that would be too little to see.
They also observed that water dripping on a rock for centuries would wear that rock away. However, they realize that no one has actually seen a visible piece of that rock being washed away, talking about, you know, dripping water or waterfall, something like that. You could sit there forever and you would not see, at least not with the naked eye, a piece of that rock going away.
They realized then that there must be tiny particles of that rock that are being washed away with each drop of the water, but these are so tiny we can't see them with our eyes. See, they came to their knowledge by studying God's creation and then coming to a very brilliant conclusion from it. Well, in the end, just as you and I often have to defend creation and the existence of God from those who teach evolution and a materialistic world, well, the early Christians were fighting the same battle we are.
Because as I said, it's not a modern battle, it's an ancient one. I want to read to you just a few of the passages that the early Christians wrote to the Romans and Greeks in response to the teachings of Lucretius and Epicurus from Democritus and the other atomists.
Dionysius of Alexandria wrote the year 262," Who can bear to hear it said that this mighty habitation, which is composed of heaven and earth and is called the cosmos, was established in all its order and beauty by those atoms that hold their course, devoid of order and beauty, or that this same state of disorder has grown into this true cosmos of order. They realize that you don't get order out of disorder.
He continued," Truly we have here a most marvelous democracy of atoms where friends welcome and embrace friends, where all are eager to travel together in one domicile. By their own determination, some have rounded themselves off into that mighty luminary the sun. Even though men like these may choose not to admit it, there is a mighty Lord who made the sun. Oh, you blind ones, do these atoms of yours bring you the winter season and the rains in order that the earth may yield food for you?
Lactantius, who we've already quoted, wrote this," It is more believable that matter was made by God because He is all-powerful than to believe that the world was not made by God.
For nothing can be made without mind, intelligence, and design." And again he said," If you had been brought up in a well-built and nicely furnished house, but had never seen a workshop, would you have supposed that your house was not built by some man just because you didn't know how it was built?" Again, speaking about the atomists, he said," Some erring philosophers say that men and the other animals arose from the earth without any maker." Again, he said," If nothing can be done or produced without design, it
is plain that there is a divine providence to which that which is called design particularly belongs." If there is no providence, how is it that the bodies of animals are arranged with such foresight?
How is it that the various members are designed in a wonderful manner and each serve their own functions individually? If there is no providence, why do rains fall, fruits spring up, and trees put forth leaves? In talking about these early evolutionists, he said," Some philosophers say that the first men spent a nomadic life among the woods and plains. Men were not united by any mutual bond of speech or justice. They had leaves and grass for their beds, and they used caves and grottos for their dwellings.
Furthermore, they were prey to the beasts and stronger animals. Later, those who had escaped the beasts had recourse to other men. They begged protection from them. At first, they made their wishes known by nods. Then they tried the beginnings of conversation. By attaching names to each object, they little by little completed the system of language. However, when they saw that numbers alone were not sufficient protection from the beasts, they began to build towns.
He's saying that's what the philosophers teach, and he says," Oh, minds unworthy of men that produce these foolish trifles." These things are by no means true. Men were not born from the ground around the world as though they sprung from the teeth of some dragon, as the poets say. Rather, one man was formed by God, and from that one man, all the earth was filled with the human race. There were never men on the earth who could not speak, except for those who are infants.
Now before closing, there's one interesting aside that I want to share with you. It's very interesting that the materialist Greek philosophers did not argue that man has existed for millions of years. Because you see, they had this very simplistic notion about life. They didn't realize that the human body was so complicated. So they didn't need man to have existed for millions of years. So they actually argued for Earth's and man's recent creation, because that's what the evidence pointed to that they saw.
Lucretius wrote," If earth and sky had no starting point in time, why have no poets sung of feats before the Theban War and the tragedy of Troy? Why have no heroic deeds of great antiquity found any shrine in lasting monuments of fame?" The answer, I believe, is that this world is newly made. Its origin is a recent event, not one of remote antiquity. That is why even now some arts are still being perfected. The process of development is still going on.
So he realized if humans had been here on the earth for millions of years or even tens of thousands of years, there would be some evidence of it. There would be writings, there would be tales of people from way back. But Greek and Roman history only went back to perhaps a thousand years before Christ. If people lived for millions of years before then, why didn't they leave anything written or even sculpted or anything like that? Now, interestingly, he had one conjecture that would have changed things a little bit.
He said," Alternatively, you may believe that all these things existed before, but that the human race was wiped out by a burst of fiery heat, or its cities were laid low by some great upheaval of the world, or engulfed by greedy rivers which persistent rains had driven to overflow their banks." So he said," If men were here very much longer than the past 1,000 years or so, then there must have been a generation that was wiped out by some catastrophe such as a flood or earthquake, something like that, which is
exactly what the Scriptures teach us.
Finally, before closing, I do want to point out that the majority of the Roman and Greek philosophers were not materialists. I don't want to end this having you believing that the real thinkers of the ancient world all concluded that the universe got here by accident. The greatest minds of Greece and Rome all came to the conclusion that there must be a God.
For example, both Socrates and Plato, who are usually considered two of the greatest philosophers, the wisest of all of the philosophers, they both taught that there is a God. In fact, they both taught that there is only one supreme being. They did not believe in the gods, in the myths of the Greeks, nor did they believe in the nonsense of the atomist school of thought, that all of this got here through random collisions of atoms.
No, they realized there must be one supreme being, that he is the prime mover who set the universe in order. Both Socrates and Plato taught that we have an immortal soul that survives death, and they said that men should be concerned about the state of their souls. So there has been no shortage of great thinkers and scientists who have believed in special creation, who have come to that conclusion from observing the evidence of creation around them.
The contest between special creation versus accidental creation is not a contest between thinkers and non-thinkers. You've had educated thinking people on both sides of the equation. And yet, invariably, the materialists have always been the ones who have mocked and laughed at others, always looked down upon them, thinking they had it all sewed up and everyone else who could see the evidence of design and purpose in the universe are just ignorant people to be laughed at.
And that's still the way that evolutionists treat Christians today. However, as we've seen today, and I hope this information will be helpful to you, something you can pass on to your children, that the theory of evolution, the theory of a universe without a creator, is not something that came out of the age of science, that came out only in recent years. No, it was something that was first taught and was first developed in the Age of Myths. Evolution is a relic from the Age of Mythology.