The Evolution of Evolution

In the 15th century a man named Copernicus proved that we were not in the center of the universe, in fact his discovery was worse than that, he discovered we were not even in the center of our own solar system. About a century later, Rene Descartes, the man that gave us the Cartesian coordinates, proved God without the need of the church. Sandwiched between these two scientific juggernauts was a lowly monk who shattered a thousand years of Church dogma. These three men, all devout Christians, unknowingly were essential to the evolution of evolution, but to truly grasp their impact it requires that we back up two thousand years.

–Highest, High-level History Lesson Ever–

The year was 592 B.C., or 586 B.C. or there about, when the Word of the LORD came to a priest living in exile named Ezekiel. Among the visions made known to Ezekiel was that the Glory of the LORD was departing from the temple (see, Ezekiel 11:22-25). Now what follows you may say was completely coincidental, but what is very interesting is that at the same time there was an abrupt and sweeping movement by man to reconcile the world apart from God. We refer to this discipline as philosophy.

Please do not misunderstand me or read more into this statement than what is said. I am in no way implying this was Ezekiel's message or his intent. All that was said is that when God stopped dwelling with Israel, his chosen people, the nation that he commanded to live as priests (Ex. 19:6) to the world, when he removed himself–man began inventing philosophy. Prior to this momentous occasion, everything was tied to God or gods. The weather, war, a hearty crop, or a failed harvest; it was all tied, accredited, and controlled by the divine. Prior to Ezekiel the world may have been pagan, but it was not what we now call atheistic.

Simply look at the timeline and ask yourself one simple question: Before the Glory of the LORD left the earth had man ever asked: "Who am I? Where did I come from? Where am I going?" Of course, he did. The book of Job is one of the greatest literary and philosophical works of antiquity. That is to say nothing of the works of Solomon, such as the book of Ecclesiastes. But these works cannot be considered philosophy because they break the cardinal rule of philosophy. They include God. The God that created them. And when I say, they include God, I mean, these works know that in the midst of the chaos, God is there, aware and in control; and this is not acceptable if a work is to be considered philosophy!

This rule can clearly be seen via a cursory review of most freshman level Philosophy 101 syllabi of prominent universities across the country. It is incredible how many exclude Anselm and Aquinas. How can these philosophers be excluded by philosophy? The answer is, they contain too much God to be included. That said, rambling on and on about the gods is allowed and we know full well the Greeks did.

The 500 years that followed Ezekiel's visions saw the likes of Anaximenes, Pythgoras, Promenades, Heraclitus, Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Lucretius, and Cicero reshape the way the world was understood. While these men were philosophizing, Alexander the Great and then Rome reshaped language, literacy, travel, and the political and economic landscape. Then the most incredible of all events took place. A man claiming to be the Son of God walked out of the grave.

The impact of Jesus simply can't be expressed and for following three hundred years every power in hell warred against his followers (see, Revelation 12:17) … but could not prevail. During this period Christians were fed to lions for sport, Nero would dip them in tar and light them on fire to light his parties. When reading what the heroes of the faith endured found in Hebrews 11, it is hard not to see the early church, the new heroes of the faith, enduring the same. "Some were tortured, … Others suffered mocking and flogging, and even chains and imprisonment. They were stoned, they were sawn in two, they were killed with the sword. They went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, afflicted, mistreated—of whom the world was not worthy" (vv. 37 & 38a).

The entirety of Eusebius's AD 340 work, Church History, recounts how the church faced the most hideous of tortures and capital punishment imaginable. One eyewitness described the events thus:

The magnitude, however, of the tribulation in these parts, and the intensity of the fury of the Gentiles against the saints, and the variety of the sufferings which the blessed martyrs endured, we are neither able to state with accuracy nor indeed is it possible for them to be embraced in writing. For the adversary darted upon us with all his might, preluding thus soon his fearless coming which is about to be. He practised withal every device. – The Epistle of the Gallican Church. p22.

If Christianity could not be crushed it had to be corrupted.

In the early fourth century, Constantine, the emperor of the Roman Empire converted to Christianity. A year later in AD 313, he issued the Edict of Milan, legalizing Christianity. (Which allowed Eusebius to write the work mentioned above.) Then in 392 pagan worship was outlawed by emperor Theodosius. The next two hundred years saw Christianity move from the poor and ostracized to the rich and powerful. But it also saw the nearly thousand-year reign of the Roman Empire fizzle away until it was no more.

By the publication of St Augustine's City of God (AD 426) Rome was breaking apart but to be Roman was to be a Christian, or more accurately to be Roman required one to be Christian. The invading pagans that had split the Roman Empire in two were not Roman. One hundred years later emperor Justinian the Great re-united the east and west but it was his ecclesiastical reforms that would endure.

1. Christianity is the only allowed religion, all others would be persecuted.
2. Only the clergy were allowed to read the Bible.
3. Only the state church could conduct baptism.
4. Heretics were forbidden to gather for worship.
5. The church could confiscate property from heretics.
6. All magistrates and soldiers must swear allegiance to the church.

However, Justinian's political and military victories were a flash in the pan. Rome immediately splintered again, and the western fall was inevitable. Thus, for the next thousand years the church was the glue that held Europe together. During this period, termed the dark ages, by a people that termed themselves enlightened¹ (always consider the source) it was the church, even with all its corruption, that kept a faint glimpse of literacy alive in Europe. However, to explain this, let us return to our lowly monk.

Martin Luther was the first person ever to go viral. It is literally hard for us to imagine the speed at which his writings spread from Germany to Spain.² For a thousand years the church could move fast enough to enforce Justinian's reform and silence anyone that questioned the status quo. However, the printing press, an invention that predated Luther by only 43 years, allowed for the production of material at a rate faster than the church could burn it. And while the church made a valiant effort to burn everyone and everything they could, they simply weren't fast enough. One of my professors referred to the printing press as "an information accelerant." Yet, what did that pesky monk write that went viral?

Luther had a problem with some traveling "priests" that sold indulgences in his town. These snakes would offer insane opportunities, such as removing a million years from a relative's sentence in purgatory at the cost of a small donation. You read that right. These 'men of the cloth' would tell peasants that if they donated to the church in return the church would reduce the sentence of a dead relatives' time in purgatory. How could the poor ignorant souls not give if they could relieve their own mother's suffering? Additionally, Luther could not stand indulgences, some of which were sold prior to the sin being committed. (Imagine you are planning a trip to Vegas, maybe consider paying for those sins before you leave, just in case.) Lastly, he did not like relics, the mortal remains of a saint, or something associated with them. The more relics a church had, the more of a tourist destination it was thus the more profitable it was. Who wouldn't want to take a pilgrimage to the place St. Peter was buried? However, the relics were much more specific than a mere grave. Metexas recounts the following concerning Frederick's collection of relics tied to the life of Jesus:

[They] included a swatch of his swaddling clothes, a piece of the very gold brought to him by the Magi, and three precious fragments of the funereal myrrh they had prophetically included. There were also thirteen lucky fragments said to be from Jesus's childhood crib, … there was a preserved piece of the very bread served at the Last Supper in the Upper Room fifteen centuries earlier, as well as a vial containing drops of milk from the breast of the Virgin Mary. ... And there were precisely thirty-five splinters from the True Cross! And last and certainly most ethereal of all was the pinnate stunner of the collection, the very feather of an angel!³

We read this and think, "How could these people believe such blatant lies?" How the Irish Saved Civilization by Thomas Cahill is a great answer to this question but the short of it is this. By Luther's day the church had sufficiently locked up scripture, which wasn't necessarily hard given that no one knew how to read; and remember point 2 of Emperor Justines' reforms, only clergy were allowed to read the Bible. Cahill summarizes:

In late antiquity, as municipal and provincial governments disintegrated and imperial appointees abandoned their posts, there was one official who could be counted on to stay with his people, even to death: the episkopos (say it quickly and you will hear where the English word bishop came from), a Greek word meaning "overseer" or "superintendent." In the Acts of the Apostles and the letters of Paul, bishops are mentioned occasionally as church functionaries, hardly distinguishable from priests (from the Greek presbyteroi, or elders). Most early Christian congregations seem to have been run by some combination of bishops and priests, local men—and, in the first stages of development, women as well—who were chosen by the congregants for specified terms to take care of practical matters. With the deaths of the apostles (apostoloi, or envoys), who had been the chief conveyors of Jesus's message, the role of the bishop grew; and by the beginning of the second century we find him being treated in a more exalted manner as a successor to the dead apostles and symbol of unity for the local congregation—but still the appointee of his congregation. As its symbol of unity, he was duty-bound to consult his congregation in all important matters. "From the beginning of my episcopacy," the aristocratic Cyprian of Carthage, monumental bishop of third-century Africa, confided to his clergy, "I made up my mind to do nothing on my own private opinion, without your advice and without the consent of the people."

By the end of Augustine's life, such consultation was becoming the exception. Democracy depends on a well-informed electorate; and bishops could no longer rely on the opinion of their flocks-increasingly, uninformed and harried illiterates-nor, in all likelihood, were they averse to seeing their own power grow at the expense of the people. In many districts, they were already the sole authority left, the last vestige of Roman law and order. They began to appoint one another; and thus was born five centuries after the death of Jesus the self-perpetuating hierarchy that rules the Catholic church to this day.⁴

There is a lot there, but his point is clear. The leadership of the church stopped consulting the flock from which they should have been raised and started self-appointing and making decisions on their own. As Rome weakened in the early 5th century, it was Pope Leo that defied Attila the Hun, not the Roman military. When Rome finally fell in 476, Europe was invaded for the next five hundred years on a level that is hard to comprehend. The Turks from the east, the Arabs, and the newly formed Muslims from the south, and the Vikings from Scandinavia—who went as far east as Constantinople, modern day Istanbul. As well as Nagra, where they were called Rus' from which we get the word Russia.

The church was the one place where a literate man could be found. From pagan war lords to the Holy Roman Emperor, they all needed the church to be able to read treaties, determine who owned what lands, and how much was due in taxes. The church became the de facto financial and managerial departments for kings, and with an illiterate flock comprised of nothing more than domesticated savages, the clergy would not dare consult.

Once Europe righted herself, she spent the next few hundred years fighting the crusades and building castles and cathedrals. Luther knew these 'men of the cloth' were mere traveling salesmen raising funds for the construction of St. Peter's Basilica, and he knew their claims held no biblical support. So, he did what any pious young monk would do, he wrote down a few statements that he wished to defend in an academic debate, then nailed them to the community board.

Today this is romanticized as a defiant act by a strong monk that wished to single handedly take on the big bad church, but this could not be further from the truth. Luther's 95 Theses nailed to the church in Wittenberg were almost assuredly written in Latin and even if they had been written in German it is not likely anyone could have read them other than their intended audience, the academic theological community.

Once wind of Luther's theses became known a letter was written alerting the local archbishop (a man that coincidentally happened to be compensated quite nicely from the 'men of the cloth' that were selling the indulgences).⁵ Archbishop Albrecht could have simply ignored the letter, and one can only speculate what the world would look like today. However, in his fury Albrecht demanded Luther recant and immediately brought the pope into the mix.

That simple request for a debate unknowingly put the wheels in motion of the largest revolution in the Western world since Constantine's conversion to Christianity, 1200 years earlier. In a single generation the church lost control of who was allowed to be married, the church lost control of who was allowed at the communion table, and most importantly, the church lost control over who was allowed to go to heaven. (And, as an aside, congregational singing return to the church after a thousand years of silence.)

The thousand-year hold of corruption crumbled in one lifetime. The church was reeling. It's lies about being in the center of God's creation were exposed circa 1543 as propaganda due to the publication of On the Revolutions by Nicolaus Copernicus. Its stranglehold on dogma had disappeared because a lowly monk, who simply requested a debate, ended up splitting the church into the Catholic church and the protestors, aka the Protestants. Then, less than a hundred years later, a Jesuit, meaning a member of the society that was birthed out of the Councils of Trent, the councils where the Catholic Church determined what to do with the Protestants, yes, one of their own from Jesuit college of La Flèche, Rene Descartes proved God without the need of the church, via his 1641 publication of Meditations on First Philosophy. (This is to say nothing about how the church stifled mathematics for centuries due to their refusal to accept zero and the infinite. For a detailed account of this, I would suggest reading Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea by Charles Seife.) And as if to add insult to injury, an astronomer was about to publish his findings.

Galileo Galilei caught wind of the "Danish perspective glass" in the early 17th century. As an astronomer he did what any astronomer would do, he pointed his "telescope" toward the heavens and lo and behold he saw craters on the moon.

Today we laugh and say, of course there are craters on the moon, but the Catholic church had drunk the Aristotelian kool-aid to the point that Aristotle was nearly as inspired as St. Paul. St. Augustine and Thomas of Aquinas were essentially disciples of Aristotle and by the time of Galileo scala naturae (the great chain of being) was unquestioned. Aquinas' chain descends from God who is obviously at the top, to angels, to humans descending all the way down to the inanimate.⁶ It is not hard to apply a theological interpretation to this chain, at the top perfection with God and as one descends away from God the more corrupt things become until you arrive at the point at which God is no more, we call this "hell."

The church's response to Galileo's claims of a nonperfect moon resulted in a choice Galileo had to make. Admit the craters were defects in his devices or be excommunicated. It must be understood that to a Catholic in that day excommunication was an eternally damning sentence. So, after much consideration, which took approximately 8 years, Galileo conceded the craters were in fact defects. Wouldn't you!?

. . .

But a precedence had been set. The church could not have anything to do with science. An apt verdict given the overwhelming evidence uncovered during the last two centuries. The propaganda machine had run for a thousand years during Europe's most tumultuous years, and if Europe were to truly recover it would need to remove the impediment, the church. This ushered in an onslaught of philosophers attempting to reconcile the world around them apart from God. Sound familiar?

Immanuel Kant postulated that all observation was reliant on our sensory experience. Therefore, we don't really know anything for what it is, only how we perceive it to be. Thus, he split everything into two categories, the phenomenal world and the noumenal world. The former is the world that we are aware of via our senses. The latter "refers to objects as conceived in themselves, apart from the limitations of human experience."⁷ Think God, the soul, heaven, etc.

Kant's impact was pervasive but concerning religion it was deadly. God had been relegated to the unknowable world. Listen to how Louis Berkhof describes Kant's impact.

The phenomenalism of Kant had a rather revolutionary effect on the common conception of theology. It limited all theoretical knowledge, scientific or otherwise, to the phenomenal world. This means that according to it man can have no theoretical knowledge of that which transcends human experience, and therefore theology as the science of God is an impossibility.⁸

And so, it was. Academia relegated everything into two buckets. The knowable and the unknowable. The definition of science would never be the same. Religion and God were categorized out. Thus, Anselm's and Aquinas' absences from so many syllabi. If this evidence was not enough reason for the evolution of evolution during this time-period another fascinating invention was taking place.

The city clock could now fit in the palm of a hand or in a shirt pocket. Machining advancements allowed for higher precision, thus greater accuracy which allowed for the same level of complexity on much smaller scale. A few eccentric men made use of these advancements in their attempt to create nonbiological homeostasis—self.

For many scientists of the day, this was the definition of life. For many scientists of our day, this is still the definition of life. (Recall, Larry Page accusing Elon Musk of being a speciesist in response to Musk's leeriness about AI robots.)

For those wondering, homeostasis is defined as "any self-regulating process by which an organism tends to maintain stability while adjusting to conditions that are best for its survival."⁹ Three hundred years ago nonbiological homeostasis may not have contained the intelligence provided by today's large language models but the robots were no less impressive. These automata could draw, play musical instruments, and even chess—very similar to what we see them doing today. Cambridge professor Simon Schaffer has an excellent documentary on the creation of these automata available on YouTube.

We may chuckle at the notion of these automata robots as no less than gimmicky toys, but to do so is to ignore the importance of these analog devices. They were self-regulating, self-governing animations regardless of outside influences—it's a pretty good definition for how we still categorize living beings versus inanimate objects.

Again, we chuckle at this today because when we see life, we have a much deeper grasp of the immense complexity beneath it. However, in Darwin's day DNA had not been discovered, much less decoded. Everything was mechanical. It is easy to see how in their eyes, time could cut a tail off here, chance could stand an animal up on two legs there, perhaps a bad mutation removes some fur, dramatic climate change alters a diet which leads to increased cognition and, voila, monkey to man.

This is the evolutionary explanation of the progress. A slight modification here and there and out comes a new species. Hit the rewind button and if you wait long enough each slight modification is reversed until you end up with a single cell organism. One may ask where the single cell organism came from and the answer is, of course, "a place with the right ingredients to create a single cell organism."

Scientifically, it has been called the primordial soup. Those that reject this ridiculous answer have postulated that perhaps it was a life-caring comet. Yet even this for some is a very disappointing answer. For most of us, time plus chance has never given way to a mixing bowl popping out a chocolate cake regardless of the initial ingredients and temperature. Most disappointing for me, time plus chance has never given way to random marks on a piece of paper resulting in a passing grade. Yet for the explanation of life, we are given no starting point—as that would reside in Kant's noumenal world. And we are only given time plus chance to explain where and what we are—as we are only allowed to look for the answer in the phenomenal world. Why? Because science drew a line in the sand that said it must be knowable, it must be material, it must not include outside influence.

This line has become a wall, and it has obstructed all scientific development in the field of our origins, and it will continue to do so until the establishment is exposed and rejected, just as it was exposed and rejected 500 years ago.

Again, we ask, what is the evolution of evolution? Paul said it quite nicely, "they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator" (Romans 1:25). But what prompted those enlightened men to exchange the truth for a lie?

Evolution's primordial soup was a corrupt church. Evolution's cosmic inflation exploded out of a church that used the Lord's name in vain. In the name of God under the threat of eternal damnation, the church fed its fleshly desires of power and control. Each lie being concealed with another. When concealment failed, the lie was protected through banishment. When banishment failed, public torture and execution was employed. But be sure your sins will find you out (Numbers 32:23). The enlightenment was a culmination of evidence so great that the church could no longer maintain control in the face of such blatant lies. Their sins were found out. And what was the consequences of their sins? Not only did it cost them their stranglehold on what was deemed truth but caused the greatest backlash ever experienced by man–they threw away God.

By 1882 the result of throwing away God had manifest itself. This led Friedrich Nietzsche, one of the greatest of philosophers and staunchest of atheists, to pin a parable in which he tried to warn us of the results for throwing away God.

The Madman

Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly: "I seek God! I seek God!" - As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? emigrated? - Thus they yelled and laughed.

The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. "Whither is God?" he cried; "I will tell you. We have killed him-you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.

"How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever is born after us-for the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto."

Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they, too, were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke into pieces and went out. "I have come too early," he said then; "my time is not yet.¹⁰

Dear Nietzsche, I believe the time has come. We can now see the result of killing God. I believe it is high time we kill evolution before it is too late for us.

FOOTNOTES