Dale Ridge church of Christ

Dear Mr. Darwin,

This week many millions of people in countries all over the world are celebrating your birthday.  This year is an especially big one for you – 200 years makes you older than many of the nations that have organized “Darwin Days” in your honor.  As the world gets a fresh draught of your legacy, my own thoughts have turned to what I would have said to you,  had we lived on God’s earth during the same time.

I hope that my evangelistic perception would be acute enough to sense that  you are a man with questions, that needs help finding the right answers.  I hope that I would have prayed for you as a student, and that my eyes, ears, and hands would have been open to register how I could best help you learn the truth.

I would have pointed out the countless evidences of God’s existence.  As a self described man of science you would surely appreciate the obvious proofs found in teleological and cosmological facts.  You would certainly have applied established scientific laws such as biogenesis to recognize that life must begin with life.  Logic would then carry you to recognize that the original life must begin with God.

From there I would have carried the facts of God’s existence to the inspiration of His word.  I know you studied “ministry” courses at Cambridge, but judging from your writings about your understanding of the Bible, I’m afraid you were taught in error, or at least misapplied any truth that you did hear in those classes. 

We would examine the historicity of the Bible, much of which was readily proven in the field by archaeologists, geologists, and anthropologists before and during your own lifetime.  Imagine if you had applied your intellect to these worthy endeavors!

From that Word study, your eyes would have seen that God alone is the creator of life.  A learned man like yourself would appreciate reading Genesis 1 & 2 in the original Hebrew, where I know your brains would have sparked to consider the Hebrew verb bara – for create – is reserved for God alone.

I’m sure an inquiring mind like yours would be fascinated by Biblical prophecy and would have seen the incontrovertible proof that Jesus of Nazareth is the only man in history that fulfilled those messianic foreshadowings of the Old Testament.  You would really have valued the written witness of Jesus as a historic person left behind by Roman writers, such as Tacitus and  Suetonius,  who certainly wouldn’t have sought to help Jewish and Christian historians.

While many people this year are filling libraries with books that tout you as the most significant figure in intellectual history, I would have pointed out that there is One about whom the world itself is insufficient to contain all the books that should be written (John 21:25).

I would have shown you that God created all men in His image (Genesis 1:27, Genesis 9:6), and that he did so quite recently.  That men were present from the very beginning of creation (Matthew 19:3-4, Mark 10:6), and did not graduate from other forms over eons of time.  We would have bench-marked the historical references from the Bible against secular history which you wouldn’t doubt, and then applied the genealogies of Genesis 5, Genesis 11, and other passages to establish a quite young age for the Earth.  That would have entirely eliminated a consideration of billions of years to evolve life.

We certainly would have spent much time examining the Flood record of Genesis 6-9, to help you register that all humanity on the earth today owes their ancestry to Noah and his three sons.  So you would see that all peoples are the same, and lose your idea of “races of man“. 

You see Mr. Darwin, nowadays people conveniently leave out the fact that your evolution concept is inherently racist.  We hear in our media today all about your book “Origin of Species”.  But few people talking about it have ever actually read it, and  for some reason we never see that work referenced with the full title which you gave it – “The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life“.   We don’t hear the accounts of how your grandfather Erasmus dug up buried Tasmanian people to stuff them as curiosities of what he called “lower primates” in British museums. 

Today, we never hear how you described native peoples as “savages” and “animals“.  Or how you treated the natives of Tierra del Fuego on that famous voyage aboard the Beagle, when you wrote that “one can hardly make oneself believe that they are fellow creatures”.  By studying the Bible, you would have seen that all men are our fellows, created alike by God.  And that all men have souls in need of salvation.

Lastly sir, I would have shared with you the Bible’s plain teaching on salvation.  That while life remains in us we may hear that glorious & ancient Gospel of Jesus Christ (Romans 10:17).  That hearing leads to belief (Matthew 28:19-20).  That belief bears the fruit of repentance, when we turn from our sin (Luke 13:3).  That the repentant heart burns to know the plan of salvation, and confesses the name of Jesus as Lord (Romans 10:19), then joins Him by being immersed in the watery grave of baptism for remission of those sins (Acts 2:37-38).  That after being added to the church of Christ (Acts 2:47) the Christian is to live a steadfast and faithful life unto death (Revelation 2:10).

I would have prayed that you would hear, believe, and obey.  I would have invited you to worship and Bible classes.  And I would have invited you to Dale Ridge Kid’s Day to hear some real science, some real history, and some real Bible.

Now Mr. Darwin, I know you sadly can never read this letter, and it is eternally too late for you to obey.  But for many that have robbed themselves of the truth,  being confused by teachers of your doctrine, there is still time.  I know that could you speak from the grave as desired the rich man (Luke 16:19-31),  you would now beg those students to heed the Word of God.

Happy 200 Chuck,

A New Testament Christian

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Filed under: Authors, Gregg Alexander on February 13th, 2009