Satan's War against God and Man's Dark History

by Henry Morris

A cosmic warfare is raging between God and the devil. Every age, every nation, has been involved, and we also are involved on one side or the other because, after all, these are the only two worldviews. Either we can explain the origin and development of all things in terms of continuing natural processes or we cannot; so the one worldview is evolution and the other one is creation. These two perspectives embrace everything in the world of sense, knowledge, and understanding. We must believe either one worldview or the other; we cannot really believe both because they are not synonyms, but antonyms. Each is the opposite of the other.

Looking at Scriptural and Scientific Proofs

The basic rationale, the foundation of this cosmic conflict, is between these two worldviews: God-centered or creature-centered. Creator or creature. Creation versus evolution. This conflict has been going on since the very beginning in one form or another. When we evaluate these two worldviews scientifically, we find that all of the genuine scientific evidence supports creation but not a single real fact of science supports evolution.

I But there's also another way to evaluate this conflict, away that the Lord Jesus himself gave us. He said, "By their fruits you shall know them. A good tree cannot bring forth corrupt fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit" (Matt. 7:16-17). We can therefore evaluate these two worldviews not only in terms of their scientific validity or invalidity, but also in terms of the fruit which they have produced. When we do this, it becomes evident that the creationist worldview, the creationist tree, has born good fruits and the evolutionist tree has borne nothing but bad fruits.

The creationist worldview has produced sound doctrine, good systems, and good practices. The evolutionist tree, on the other hand, universally has produced bad doctrine, bad fruits, bad practices. That may sound like an extreme statement, but I believe that it can be documented compellably in ways even most Christian people are not aware of. I That's part of what we want to take a look at in this chapter.

In support of the thesis that there is a basic conflict involving evolution versus special creation, or Satan versus God, let me mention a few verses of Scripture. The Lord Jesus Christ said himself in John 8:44 that the devil is the father of liars. He is a liar, he is the great deceiver. Revelation 12:9 reveals that Satan is the one who has deceived the whole world. In 2 Corinthians 3-4, we read, "If our gospel be hid, it is hid to them that are lost, in whom the god of this world, [that is, the devil] hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them." If people cannot understand the gospel, it's because their minds have been blinded by the devil. He is the great deceiver. He appears sometimes as an angel of light and he has socalled ministers of righteousness, but he is basically the deceiver. And as I John 5:19 says, "The whole world lies in [the wicked one]." Evolution is, in fact, Satan's great lie, with which he seeks to persuade men and women to abandon faith in their Creator.

In reference to the creationist tree producing good fruits, let me suggest a few things. Are you aware that our nation was founded upon creationism? Our American nation, with all of its tradition of religious liberty and freedom, was founded upon creationism. It's even in the Declaration of Independence, which asserts that we have been endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights. And creationism is implicit in the Constitution and in the writings of the founding fathers. Even men like Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin, who were deists rather than fundamental, Bible-believing Christians, at least believed in creation. Thomas Jefferson explicitly rejected the idea of evolution in his writings. Ben Franklin also said that he believed in a Creator who had created the world. So did George Washington and even Tom Paine. The founding fathers of our nation were practically all creationists, and our country was founded upon creationist principles built around laws which were the laws of that Creator. Our early schools - not only religious schools, but also public schools taught creation when they first came into existence. But it wasn't long before Unitarians such as Horace Mann and others got control of the public school system. And it wasn't too long after that until John Dewey came along and established evolutionary humanism as the religion of our public school system and, with others of like mind, established the American Humanist Association with its humanist tenets. Since that time our nation and its schools, its courts, its media, just about our whole society, have been taken over by the evolutionary worldview. But the creationist worldview was our foundation.

The same thing is true with science. True science does not support evolution; almost all of the founding fathers of science were creationists. Many people think that science came out of the Renaissance, but it did not. Greek philosophy, which was an evolutionary philosophy, was restored in the Renaissance. True science came out of the Reformation when people began to have access to the Bible and to be able to read and propagate the Word of God. Then came along men such as Johannes Kepler, Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle (the father of chemistry), Pascal, Pasteur, Brewster, and most of the other great founding fathers of science. Almost without exception, these men were Bible-believing theists who at least professed to believe in creation and in Christianity. They might have been somewhat unorthodox in various ways, but they all believed in God as the Creator. They believed in the Bible, they believed in Christ, and many said men such as Newton, Kepler, and Clark Maxwell - that they were simply thinking God's thoughts after Him as they were doing their science. But now science has been taken over by the evolutionary worldview by and large. Our scientific establishment is currently circulating the idea that science is a proven fact and everything has to be taught in the light of evolutionism. The fact is, however, that true science, true Americanism, and true Christianity are all based on the foundation of special creation.

Jesus Christ as Creator

Sometimes we hear people say, "Don't get involved in preaching creation. Just preach the gospel. It's important to get people saved, not to make creationists out of them." In a sense we would agree with that. Our purpose is to see people come to the Lord Jesus Christ. But we have to realize that Jesus Christ was Creator before He became the Saviour. And the reason we need a Saviour is because we rebelled against our Creator who is Jesus Christ. "For by Him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones or dominions, or principalities or powers: all things were created by Him," it says in Colossians 1:16. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not anything made that was made" (John 1:1-3). He is our Creator, and we don't really preach Christ without preaching Him as He is. We don't want to preach another Jesus who is not the true Jesus, as we see mentioned in 2 Corinthians. We want to preach Christ as He is, and He is the Creator and the Saviour and the coming King and Lord. That's the full scope of the doctrine of Christology, which is founded upon Christ as Creator.

In reference to Christ's saving in the gospel, the last time and the climactic time the word "gospel" is used in the Bible is in Revelation 14:6-7, where John says, "I saw another angel fly in the midst of heaven, having the everlasting gospel to preach unto them that dwell on the earth ... Saying, with a loud voice, Fear God, and give glory to him; for the hour of his judgment is come, and worship him that made heaven, and earth, and the sea, and the fountains of waters. " That's the final time (of the 101 times) where the word "gospel" is used in the Bible.

Remember that Paul, in Galatians 1:8, said, in effect, that even though "an angel from heaven preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed." Therefore, we can be sure that this angel of Revelation 14 will be preaching the same gospel that Paul preached and the essence of the angel's gospel is a command to worship Him who had made heaven and earth and the sea and the fountains of waters. In other words, worshipping a Jesus who supposedly comes into our experience merely through some personal feeling, or something like that, isn't the way it is. We have to recognize that Jesus Christ is the Creator of the heavens and the earth, and all things therein. In Adam, we have all rebelled against Him and He has pronounced an age-long curse on the creation because of man's sin. Death has come in because of that; therefore, we need a Saviour, and the great Creator is the only one who can be the Saviour. There are two other creationist religions besides Christianity Islam and Judaism, for example - that are creationist because they accept the Book of Genesis as their foundational account of creation. But they miss the boat when they refuse to acknowledge that the Creator must be the Saviour, and that He must die and rise again in order to implement His purpose in creation. Biblical Trinitarian Christianity is thus the only real creationist religion. It's basic and essential, then, that we believe in creation.

We could go on and show that all the other basic doctrines of Christianity are founded upon the doctrine of creation. A man once wrote me and said, "You shouldn't be talking about creation being the foundation, because don't you know that Christ is the head of the Church?" Yes, Christ is the head of the Church. Christ the Creator is the head of the Church. And furthermore, He is the head of the whole creation, not just the head of the Church. He is the author, the finisher, the head, the Alpha and Omega of everything. We need to preach Him as He really is.

On the other hand, the evolutionist worldview tries to explain everything in terms of an eternal cosmos which never was created, never had a creator. The cosmos, itself, therefore is the ultimate reality. That's basically what evolution is: it seeks to explain everything in terms of the cosmos and its processes and systems and properties, even though these may be personified in terms of different gods and goddesses. Basically, it identifies ultimate reality with this physical universe. That evolutionary worldview has come to dominate not only our modem world, but it has dominated the world since time began.

As far as the present order of things is concerned, let me just read a statement from Sir Julian Huxley, who might be called the world's top evolutionist of the twentieth century until he died a few years ago. He was the first director general of UNESCO, the main founder of neo-Darwinism, and, along with John Dewey, was one of the chief founders of the American Humanist Association. Having written many, many books, Huxley was a profoundly influential man. In one of his books, he said: "The concept of evolution was soon extended into other than biological fields. Inorganic subjects, such as the life history of stars and the formation of the chemical elements on the one hand, and on the other hand, subjects like linguistics, social anthropology and comparative law and religion are studied now from an evolutionary angle till the day we're able to see evolution as a universal, all- pervading process." In another place, he says: "The whole of reality is evolution, a single process of self-transformation."' So every subject, not just biology and the natural sciences, but the social sciences, the fine arts, and other subjects today are taught within the framework of an evolutionary premise in our colleges, universities, public schools, and unfortunately, even in many Christian schools. Evolution is a worldview which impacts every field, no matter what your field of study may be.

I mentioned the American Humanist Association. Humanism is what's really being taught in our public schools today. Most of the secular universities would not acknowledge that humanism is a religion, though some of them do. But basically this evolutionary humanism is a religious point of view. The tenets of the American Humanist Association, which were promulgated primarily by John Dewey, Julian Huxley, and others of like mind back when they formed the organization in 1933, really provide what we find being taught in our schools and also in the news media today. Whether it's explicit or not, basically these tenets of humanism have become the official doctrine of our intellectual world. The original tenets of humanism set forth in 1933 were combined with another manifesto that was given in 1973 and published more recently by the American Humanist Association in the magazine the Humanist. In a preface to that, Editor Paul Kurtz said that: "Humanism is a philosophical religious and moral point of view as old as human civilization itself.... It has its roots in classical China, Greece, and Rome; it is expressed in the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, in the scientific revolution, and in the twentieth century."'

Humanism: A Denial of God

And what is this humanism? First, religious humanists regard the universe as self-existing and not created. So the first tenet of humanism holds that there was no creation; the universe is the ultimate reality. It is self-existing. The second tenet of humanism states that man is a part of nature and he has emerged as a result of a continuous process.' There is no Creator, there is no creation; everything is explained in terms of evolution. The other humanist tenets involve a world government, complete freedom of sex, and all of the other things that we see causing so much havoc in society today. The late Isaac Asimov, who was president of the American Humanist Association and one of the most prolific science writers of our time, was a bitter opponent of creationism. He refused to debate us publicly, but he wrote against creationism vigorously in his publications. Asimov, who is said to have produced more than 500 books covering every field of science, probably knew science as well as anybody. Here's what he said, in case you have any questions about what humanism really is: "I am an atheist." Out and out, he was an atheist. Humanism is basically an esoteric form of atheism. He went on to say, "Emotionally, I'm an atheist. I don't have the evidence to prove that God doesn't exist. But I so strongly suspect He doesn't that I don't want to waste my time."' Now if anybody would have any scientific evidence against God, it seems like he would. But he admitted that he didn't, and if he didn't, then nobody does.

So people are not evolutionists because of science; scientific evidence does not support evolution. If anybody maintains that it does, just tell them, "Well, show me the evidence." Science is supposed to be what you can see, but nobody's ever seen evolution take place. As long as people have been looking at changes in biological organisms and other things, nobody has ever seen a new species evolve. Nobody's ever seen a new star evolve. Nobody's ever seen evolution from simple to complex take place anywhere in the whole universe in all human history, and nobody knows how evolution works.

Charles Darwin became famous 135 years ago by solving that problem, the humanists thought, with his Origin of Species by Natural Selection. But as Dr. Colin Patterson of England, a great evolutionist, has said, nobody has ever seen a new species come into existence by natural selection or any other way. Nobody knows how it works; nobody's ever seen it happen.' If you go to the fossil record, there are no transitional forms there.' Evolution is even contrary to the laws of thermodynamics, the basic laws of science. There is no scientific evidence for evolution whatsoever. People don't believe in evolution because of science. In spite of science they believe in evolution because emotionally they don't want to believe in God. They don't want to have this Man to rule over them, as Christ said in one of His parables in the New Testament.

Something which is based on the rejection of the very possibility of a God who creates and controls His cosmos is bound to create havoc in the universe. Charles Darwin ended his famous book, The Origin of Species by Natural Selection, like this: "Thus, from the war of nature from famine and death the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely the production of the higher animals, [by which he means man] directly follows." In other words, man came about by suffering and death. So suffering and death are basically good because they produce evolution, a struggle for existence, survival of the fittest, natural selection - that's the ultimate good in the world. Of course, that's exactly opposite to what the Bible says. Darwin says "By death came man." The Bible says "By Man came death" (I Cor. 15:21). There was no death, suffering, or struggle for existence in the world until sin came into it via man. God had to pronounce the judgment of the curse on the creation, which had been given to man as his dominion. Because of this introduction of spiritual disorder, God pronounced a judgment of physical disorder on his dominion, and there has been suffering and death in the world ever since then.

Stephen J. Gould, the most articulate modem evolutionist, has insisted in many of his writings that "evolution is a proved fact of science," in one way or another. This is a litany that evolutionists repeat over and over, as if they expect everybody to believe it because they say it so often. But then when people ask Gould for evidence that proves evolution, he says that the best evidence for evolution is imperfection in the universe. For example, he cites the panda's thumb, which he says he could have designed better if he or an engineer had designed it. Imperfections in the animal world, he says, prove that God didn't have anything to do with creation because God would make everything perfect .8 However, the fact that God made everything perfect doesn't mean it's going to stay perfect! We do have the reality of sin in the world, and mutations, disease, decay, disintegration, and death because of sin. But rather than proving evolution, these imperfections really prove that we are alienated from God because of sin.

Evolution's Destructive Impact

Of course, this idea of struggle for existence and survival of the fittest has had a terrible impact on the world as a whole. For example, laissez-faire capitalism became the watchword of England, America, Germany, and the western world back in the nineteenth century. Even many of our conservative political people today still kind of stick with evolution because they think that the survival of the fittest applies in society and in economics today. But we need to realize that all of this was based on evolution, too. For example, the great steel baron, Andrew Carnegie, whom we honor because of his charitable endowments, said, "The law of competition is here, we cannot evade it. No substitutes for it have been found and while the law may sometimes be hard for the individual, it's best for the race because it insures the survival of the fittest in every department."'

So let's exploit labor, let's do whatever we have to do. What's good for the corporation is good for the world. Here's what he also said in his autobiography: "I remember that the light came in as a flood and all was clear. Not only had I gotten rid of theology and the supernatural, but I had found the truth of evolution." 10 That was the basis for his actions. John D. Rockefeller said much the same thing, and so did Raymond Hill, the railroad baron. In fact, all the great "robber barons" of the nineteenth century, as many called them, were basically following Herbert Spencer, particularly with his survival of the fittest concept. Spencer didn't believe in child labor laws or anything like that because he believed the fittest should survive, and that's what would contribute to the advancement of society.

Of course, in Germany, the concept of "survival of the fittest" led finally to World War I and later to the great racist implications of Hitlerism and World War II. Let me pass along just one statement from an authority, Daniel Gasmann, who said of Adolf Hitler in his book, The Scientific Origins of National Socialism, "(Hitler) stressed and singled out the idea of biological evolution as the most forceful weapon against traditional religion and he repeatedly condemned Christianity for its opposition to the teachings of evolution." Hitler was a strong evolutionist. For Hitler, evolution was "the hallmark of modem science and culture"" He was also an occultist who was committed to astrology. But basically, he was a Darwinian and an evolutionist and he felt that in the struggle for existence among nations, the greater nations would survive. So it was justified in his mind to wage that kind of war. Even in England, Alexander Keith, who was opposed, of course, to Hitler, acknowledged that Hitler was a good evolutionist and that he was following the principles of evolution in his plan for the war.

Communism also is based on evolution. And racism is completely based on evolution, not on fundamentalist Bible teachings in the South at all. All the great evolutionary scientists of the nineteenth century were evolutionary racists, including Charles Darwin. You can see that in his book, The Descent of Man, in which he makes it clear that there's an ascending order of evolution among the races. Thomas Huxley said the same thing. All these men of science, evolutionary scientists of the nineteenth century, were evolutionists.

The same thing applied particularly among the anthropologists, even up to the mid-twentieth century. Men such as Henry Fairfield Osborn, the director of the American Museum of Natural History, believed that the Negro race, for example, was not even of the same species as homo sapiens. These men of science said some terrible things about the supposed "lower races." Of course, with World War II and Hitler's genocide and racist activities, racism lost favor among scientists and most evolutionary scientists today, of course, are not racists.

Then we come to the social practices we're so alarmed about today: the drug culture, abortion, pornography, immorality, and others. If space permitted, we could document that all of these are based on evolutionary philosophy. That doesn't mean that, for example, every young woman who has an abortion or doctor who performs one is an evolutionist. People commit sin for all kinds of reasons. But whenever anybody tries to rationalize these things on a scientific basis, they fall back on evolutionism as their rationale. For example, take a look at this quote reported in the LA Times from Elie A. Schneour, who says he is the director of the Biosystems Research Institute in La Hoya, California, and chairman of the Southern California Skeptics, which is an affiliate of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Quoting Schneour: "Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. This is a fundamental tenet of modem biology that derives from evolutionary theory and is thus anathema to creationism as well as to those opposed to freedom of choice. Ontogeny is the name for the process of development of a fertilized egg into a fully formed and mature living organism. Phylogeny, on the other hand, is the history of the evolution of a species, in this case, the human being. During development, the fertilized egg progresses over 38 weeks through what is, in fact, a rapid passage through evolutionary history. From a single, primordial cell, the conceptus progresses through being something of a protozoan, a fish, a reptile, a bird, a primate, and ultimately a human being. There is a, difference of opinion among scientists about the time during pregnancy when a human being can be said to emerge. But there is general agreement that this doesn't happen until after the end of the first trimester."

You see, the justification some people use for killing a fetus in the womb is that it isn't really human. If people who propose freedom of choice and abortion really believed that this was a human being, then they would have to acknowledge that killing it is murder. But they don't believe it's a human being. Their rationale for saying that is to say that it's going through its evolutionary history. But the fact is that this recapitulation theory, this so-called biogenetic law, was disproved at least 50 years ago, and no knowledgeable biologist or embryologist would still believe in the recapitulation theory because it's completely unscientific. The embryo never does go through a fish stage. It never has gills or a tail or anything like that.

In fact, the DNA which programs the whole development indicates that the embryo is a human being right from the very time of conception. There's no rationale whatever in terms of real science to support the idea that it ever is anything but a human being.

Once again, that's why I say that all these harmful practices basically find their rationale in evolutionism. I think we could show that to be true of our modem drug culture. You see, Aldous Huxley, Timothy Leary, and others who were the founding fathers of the modem emphasis on drugs some 50 years or so ago said that we've done away with God. Evolution has proved that there is no God, yet we still need that religious experience. So Aldous Huxley said that we can compress an eternity of joy into just a few hours with the materials that the pharmacologists provide for us." So the drug culture is based on the rejection of God because of evolution.

New Age Seduction

What about the New Age movement? You've heard of that, I'm sure. The New Age movement, in all of its multiplicity and complexity, encompasses witchcraft and astrology and spiritism on the one hand and the anthropic principal and biosystems and biogenetic fields and so forth on the other hand. Various churches, cultures, and religions now are involved in some aspect or other of the New Age movement. Every single one of them have two features in common: 1) their goal is a world culture, a world religion, a world government; and 2) they base their worldview, without exception, on evolution. The patron saint of the New Age movement is the Jesuit priest, Teilhard de Chardin.

Marilyn Ferguson, who wrote The Aquarian Conspiracy, the socalled bible of the New Age movement, polled the leaders of the New Age movement, asking them who had been the most influential in leading them to their philosophical position. By far, most of them answered de Chardin. What was his view? Here's what he says in his book, The Phenomenon of Man: "Is evolution a theory, a system, or a hypothesis? It is much more. It is a general condition to which all theories, all systems, all hypotheses must bow, and which they must satisfy henceforward if they are to be thinkable and true. Evolution is a light illuminating all facts, a curve that all lines of thought must follow.""

Evolution, to him, is God. Only it's not a personal god, it's a god of nature. It's a pantheistic god. And, of course, the New Age orbit generally is a restoration of ancient pantheism. It sounds a little bit more spiritual to say "pantheism," which means "all God," or "God is everywhere," than it does to say "atheism," which means "no God." But, you see, if God really is everywhere in general, then he's nowhere in particular, and there's really, therefore, no difference in terms of the practicality of God's existence and meaning.

People would ask, "But wasn't this de Chardin a priest? Didn't he believe in Christ?" Yes, he did. But listen to what he said about Jesus Christ. "It is Christ, in very truth, who saves - but should we not immediately add that at the same time it is Christ who is saved by evolution. Evolution is not only the creator but also the saviour, and now that we understand past evolution, we can control future evolution."" And as the Humanist Manifesto of 1973 says, "No deity will save us; we will save ourselves." A recent assistant secretary general of the United Nations, Robert Muller, who is currently one of the leaders of the New Age movement, has said: "The most fundamental thing we can do today is to believe in evolution." He says, in effect, that our whole system must be based on evolution if we are to realize the goal of world government.

Thus, the impact of evolution today is worldwide; it's devastatingly harmful everywhere. I don't think we could find a single good product that has come out of evolutionary philosophy. It hasn't produced any scientific discoveries. None of the 100 outstanding contributions of science and technology each year ever have anything to do with evolution. Evolutionary theory doesn't produce anything good in science, yet it's considered to be the basic premise in science in many states. Amazing!

Well, where did this evolutionary paradigm come from? Most people think that it came from Charles Darwin's Origin of the Species. Yes, Darwin was a catalyst who was tremendously influential, both in his day and in our day. He changed the world in a very real way. Yet he didn't invent evolutionism. As a matter of fact, he didn't even discover the idea of natural selection. In my own reading, I have found that at least two men had published books or articles advocating natural selection before Charles Darwin did. In fact, Darwin's grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, did so before Charles was even born Benjamin Franklin advocated natural selection. And so did various others. But the most influential person in this area was a man by the name of Alfred Russell Wallace. And I must tell you a little about him because it does seem more than coincidental that the time that modem Darwinian evolution came to the fore back in the mid- nineteenth century was also the time when ancient witchcraft, spiritism, and occultism were being revived in the western world. These practices had always been prominent in the world of pantheism, in other nations and in the ethnic religions of the world, but in the western "scientific" world, spiritism and occultism began to be revived about the same time as Darwinian evolution began to be promoted.

I mentioned earlier that a long war has been raging between the devil and God. Apparently because of the God-sent revivals and the Christian worldview that dominated Victorian England and our own nation at its birth, Satan determined to accelerate his war with our Almighty God. Three men are generally believed to have made the greatest influence on modem thought: 1) Sigmund Freud, in the field of psychology and human relationships; 2) Karl Marx, in the field of economics and political science; and 3) Charles Darwin, in the field of natural science. These men all seem to have had some strange occult influences behind what they were doing. Scholar Paul Vitz, in his book Sigmund Freud and His Christian Unconscious, gives an abundance of evidence that Sigmund Freud (whom most people believe to have been an atheist, but who really was a pantheist) based his system on the recapitulation theory mentioned earlier. Vitz explains that Freud thinks people have psychological hang-ups because they haven't evolved far enough; therefore, they can be treated by psychoanalysis. Vitz says that Freud was preoccupied with things like the devil, Antichrist, demonism, and so forth, and then he presents some rather significant evidence that Freud might even have made a Faustian pact with the devil.

The same thing has been shown to be true of Karl Marx. In his book, Marx and Satan, Richard Wurmbrand suggests that Karl Marx was not just an atheist as we tend to think; he was a pantheist. Marx was a professing Christian through high school. In fact, he wrote a rather interesting essay that appeared in Christianity Today many years ago on "Abiding in Christ." It sounded like a spiritual testimony from someone who was a Christian talking about how important it was to abide in Christ. But shortly after that essay was published, he, like Freud, seems to have made some kind of a Faustian pact with the devil. He even says in one of his poems, "My goal is to destroy him who reigns above." So Wurmbrand makes a strong case for the belief that Marx was actually a Satanist.

As far as Darwin was concerned, he wasn't a Satanist; he was an atheist, although there may be some rather equivocal evidence that he may have had a partial change in his thinking near the end of his life. At any rate, up until very near the time of his death, Darwin was an atheist who sometimes wavered between being an atheist and an agnostic. He firmly rejected Christianity, the Bible, and creation. He had been working on his theory of natural selection for some 20 years there in England, ever since he returned from his well-known round-the-world voyage on the Beagle. He was influenced then by Charles Lyell, in particular, to try to develop this theory. But Darwin was afraid to publish the theory; he didn't think he had strong enough evidence, so he kept looking for more evidence, with the intention of publishing at some point a massive tome on natural selection. But all of a sudden, he condensed his material down quickly and got his book out, because he was afraid he was going to be pre-empted by Alfred Russell Wallace.

Wallace was an interesting person. He was an anarchist and a spiritualist. In fact, he was one of the leaders in the spiritist revival in England at the time. He wrote books on the scientific evidence for spiritism and he believed that one could communicate with the spirits, just like modem New Age people believe they can do this through what they call channeling. Furthermore, Wallace had spent many, many years in the jungles, working with animist tribes who also believed in this communication with the spirits. Wallace thought very highly of these people; he was not like Darwin, who thought these were primitive people just a little above the apes. He thought very highly of them because he worked with them and he knew they were true human beings. In, fact, he wouldn't go along with Darwin's idea that man's soul had evolved. He believed that some sort of a pantheistic, cosmic consciousness had generated man's soul. Wallace was a self-educated man who had never had much opportunity to associate with the scientists of England - he had only met Darwin and Lyell very briefly, but he knew that they were interested in the origin of the species as he was. He wrote this testimony in a book called The

Wonderful Century: "I was then (February 1858) living at Ternate in the Moluccas and was suffering from a rather severe attack of intermittent fever, which prostrated me every day during the cold and succeeding hot fits. During one of these fits, while again considering the problem of the origin of the species, something led me to think of Malthus' Essay on Population."

Malthus talked about the survival of the fittest and human populations and he had been quite influential in Darwin's thinking, too. "It suddenly flashed upon me," Wallace said in another book, "that this self-acting process would necessarily improve the race, because in every generation the inferior would inevitably be killed off and the superior would remain - that is, the fittest would survive. Then at once, I seemed to see the whole effect of this. Returning to the first quote, he said that "the whole method of species modification became clear to me, and in the two hours of my fit, I had thought out the main points of the theory. That same evening, I sketched out the draft of a paper; and in the two succeeding evenings, I wrote it out and sent it by the next post to Mr. Darwin .

When he received the draft, Darwin was just astounded. He told his friend, Lyell, that Wallace had anticipated everything that he had poured 20 years of research into in preparation for his big book. So Darwin had to come out with a book right away in order to establish priority. He never did publish his big book, and probably never would have published a book at all had it not been for Wallace sending him this information stating that he had discovered the theory not during 20 years of research among the leading scientists in England, but during two hours of a fit in Malaysia jungles. Loren Eiseley, a great historian of science at the University of Pennsylvania, said in an article about Wallace: "A man pursuing birds of paradise in a remote jungle did not yet know that he had forced the world's most reluctant author to disgorge his hoarded volume or that the whole of Western thought was about to be swung into a new channel because a man in a fever had felt a moment of strange radiance. Make what you want out of that, but I cannot help thinking that there is more there than meets the eye. This may well have been the beginning of the modem battle in Satan's long war.

Evolutionists Before Darwin

But then, of course, neither Wallace nor Darwin originated evolution. As we go back to consider men before Darwin (his grandfather, Erasmus, and other leading evolutionists), we find all sorts of strange influences being brought to bear on them. Le Marcq, the German rationalist philosophers, and various French philosophers had all been influenced very much by a system called the "great chain of being." This is not taught much anymore, but the ancient idea of a great chain of being was that there is a continual link between all orders of reality in the cosmos. This is not a biblical concept, but it does have sort of a religious flavor. It starts out with the divine essence, whatever that may be. Some of the medieval religionists put that into the form of the theological God, but that wasn't the way it started out. It was just the divine essence of nature. That descended in a continuous link through the spirit world - angels, demons, what- ever other spirits there might have been - down to the highest races of human beings, then down to the lower races, then to the great apes, then to the other animals, then to the insects, then to the non-living things, and finally down to the elementary particles. The idea was that there was a chain of being in which there were no missing links; it was up to the philosophers to find them.

Of course, all the nineteenth century evolutionists had to do was to invert this chain of being and then put a time scale on it to come up with the evolutionary system. That chain of being was really the basis for the initial studies of comparative anatomy and comparative embryology. The idea was that everything had to go through this chain from simple to complex or complex to simple. So the development of the embryo progresses from very simple to complex. Their comparative anatomy had to be based on the idea of studying the simplest organisms on up to the most complex. Finally, when it came time to develop a geological time scale (there is no place in the world where the standard geological column is ever found except in a text book) it was developed by assuming that the simple forms of life had to be early in the chain of being and the more complex forms of life later. That was imposed on the study of paleontology, and was finally built up into our standard time scale. So the recapitulation theory, the geological column, the idea of races being inferior and superior, and the idea of human beings not having fully developed and therefore still having psychological hang-ups - all these things were based on this idea of the great chain of being.

And where did that come from? Not from the Bible, obviously. It came from the ancient philosophers, probably Plato. But it became most prominently expressed among the neo-platonists after the time of Christ.

Ancient Greek philosophers without exception were non-creationists. They did not believe there was a personal creator-god who had created the universe. They all believed that the universe was the ultimate reality and that it gradually expressed itself in terms of the chain of being. Paul dealt with some of them, you will remember, in Acts 17. The Epicureans were atheists; the Stoics were paritheists. There were also many varieties of gnostics, but they were all pantheists and some of them tried to mix Christianity with their gnostic pantheism, when Christianity became prominent. In fact, one can trace such beliefs on back through Plato and Socrates and then to the pre-Socratic philosophers back around 600 B.C. in Greece. Among these were such men as Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes, as well as later thinkers such as Leucippus, Democritus, and others who developed the materialistic philosophy, the evolutionary system which was prominent then in Greece and later in Rome. Evolution isn't a modem idea at all!

But where did the Greeks learn it? According to Milton Munitz, professor of the philosophy of science at New York University and one of the greatest authorities on the history of science, "Anaximander reinterprets, while at the same time retaining basically the same pattern of cosmogonical development that is to be found in the Babylonian myth .1121 This has already been partly transformed in the Greek version of Hesiod's theogony. Homer and Hesiod held a polytheistic system of gods and goddesses, Nit really, polytheism is just a form of pantheism. Pantheism is the all-god, expressed locally as the god of fire, the god of thunder, the goddess of the river, and so forth. The forces of nature personified represent the all-god, the whole cosmic consciousness, or Mother Earth, Gaia, or Mother Nature. They got this, Munitz says, from Babylon.

But now we have to think in biblical terms, because the Bible says that Babylon the Great is the mother of harlots and abominations of the earth. Once we get back into that era, long before 1000 B.C., which was Hesiod's time, we've stepped into the realm of mythology. We don't have very much recorded history from that far back except what we find in the Bible and a few archaeological monuments.

Many people don't want to go to the Bible for their information, but that's where the best information is, of course. The Book of Genesis, in chapters 10 and 11, tells us that Babel was the center of the first great world kingdom and that Nimrod was its founder. The beginning of his kingdom was Babel, but Nimrod also founded Nineveh and other great cities. He was the first great world emperor.

He was just the great grandson of Noah, so it wasn't very long after the flood. It had probably been 100 or more years or so, enough time to build a fairly good population. But instead of going out and filling the earth like God had told him, Nimrod wanted to make a name for himself and his people. So they decided to build a great city and a great tower - not to "reach into heaven," but rather, dedicated to the heavens, to the host of heaven, to the angels, to the stars. (The stars and the angels are apparently used almost interchangeably in the Bible. Stars are called angels and angels are called stars frequently because everything in the realm of the heavens where the stars are is also where the angels are.) So this tower dedicated to the host of heaven probably had at the apex a great shrine with the zodiac symbols and so forth. God came down and confused their languages and scattered the people across the face of the earth. They couldn't talk to each other anymore, so each little family group had to become isolated and segregated. Each group first had to develop a hunting and gathering culture and inbreed for a while. The recessive genetic characteristics in the little population could now be expressed, so that each small family group developed its own tribal characteristics (not "racial" characteristics, however; "race" is not a biblical concept).

People think of that event as having been the origin of the races. No. There's no such thing as a race in the Bible. That's an evolutionary idea. God made of one blood all nations of men to dwell on the face of the earth. There's only one race, that's the human race, biblically speaking. We're all descended from Noah and from Adam. At any rate, the family groups developed into nations, some of which became extinct like the Neanderthals, and others developed into great kingdoms like Egypt and Sumeria. That's where the different characteristics of each nation came from, too.

But where did Nimrod get this concept? If we go into the Babylonian origins myth, the Egyptian origins myth, or the cosmogonies of many other nations around the world, we find a rather amazing similarity. Although they couldn't talk to each other anymore, they all carried the same religion with them everywhere. They had different names for their gods and goddesses. They had different languages. But basically the same system of evolutionary religion was carried everywhere and the source of all this was, apparently, the Babylonian cosmogony, which I suggest Nimrod had learned, probably from Satan himself. That cosmogony was the Enuma Elish. This famous Babylonian "genesis" said that originally there was nothing but a watery chaos everywhere and out of this watery chaos two gods just appeared, and from them everything else came. One finds the same thing in Egypt, the same thing in Hesiod, in many of the African tribes and American Indian tribes, this idea of a primal chaos. But none of them tell where the creation, the universe, came from. All start with the universe in a chaotic condition, usually a watery chaos.

Now why that? Well, that immediately makes us think of Genesis, of course, where, "In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said let there be light" (Gen. 1:1-3). Initially, there was water everywhere. It wasn't chaos; it was all perfect for that particular stage of God's created work.

God created the angels as well as human beings. Angels were created first, probably on the first day of creation, and Satan was the highest of all the angels, as we read in Ezekiel 28:15-17. He was perfect in his ways and full of wisdom and perfect in brightness and beauty until iniquity was found in him and God told him that He was going to cast him to the earth. Everything was "very good" at the end of the six days of creation (Gen. 1: 3 1), so it was after that that God cast Satan to the earth. Then Satan tempted Adam and Eve, apparently with the same temptation with which he had tempted himself. He had said, in effect: "I want to exalt my throne above the stars of God, I want to be God. I want to ascend above the Most High" (Isa. 14:13-14). In other words, he thinks he is of the same order as God.

Now where would he get such an absurd idea? When he first came into existence, all he knew was that God told him that he had been created for a great purpose, but all he could see was this watery chaos around him. That's where he was when he was created, and all the other angels had been created the same way. So he thought, perhaps, that he was of the same order as God. And it was just a matter of time before he could successfully rebel and become God himself or like God, at least. So he, at that time, initiated his long war against God.

Now if Satan (or Lucifer) is going to believe that God isn't really the Creator, then he has to have some other explanation. That's why I have to say that Satan was the first evolutionist. Evolutionists ridicule me for saying that, but again, I can think of no better explanation for how this worldwide, age-long lie came to be, than through the father of liars, who is the devil. Satan is the deceiver of the whole world, but he has deceived himself most of all!

And he still thinks, apparently - because he's still fighting against God - that somehow he's going to win. So he keeps on fighting. He has to use the same lie with which he deceived himself, that the universe is the ultimate reality, that it's evolving itself into higher and higher systems, and that now men think they can even control its future evolution. Men can develop human beings and other things the way they want them in the future if Satan can just get control of everything.

We who believe in the Bible know that's not the way it's going to end. But that's the way it is right now. And it looks like he's getting control pretty rapidly. But God's Word does say that we "wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places" (Eph. 6:12). Therefore, we cannot fight this war with bullets or even with ballots. "Though we walk in the flesh, we do not war after the flesh; (For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God, to the pulling down of strongholds), casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ" (2 Cor. 10: 3-5). That's our commission, to fight that war. It's a spiritual battle. We have to have the girdle of truth and the breastplate of righteousness and the helmet of salvation and our feet shod with the gospel of peace. We must have the shield of faith, and the sword of the spirit, which is the word of God, and all this weaponry must be accompanied by a great aura of prayer(Eph. 6:14-18), but then the weapons are powerful and mighty through God to the pulling down of strongholds.

Finally, we can read in the Book of Revelation how it's all going to come out. There it says that all the kings in the world one day are going to give their allegiance to the great humanist man who gives his allegiance to Satan, They're all going to worship the beast, as this man of sin is called, they are going to worship the dragon who gave his power to the beast. The whole world will become Satanists then, and all the kings of the earth are going to give their power to him. They're all going to "make war with the Lamb, but the Lamb will overcome them: for he is Lord of lords and King of kings; and they that are with him are called and chosen and faithful" (Rev. 17:14).

It's going to be a lot better to be with Him than with them in that day!