“WILL YOU SURVIVE?”

The human survival instinct doesn’t tell us why we ought to survive; it’s just there, helping us do it. If we got here by the almighty chance of Mind-less evolution, the survival instinct functions only to insure that we live long enough to pass on our genes and protect our young till they can do the same thing. Afterwards, if evolution could care, it would care less about our personal survival. Despite that, the instinct keeps working anyway, with or without an evolutionary permission.

But if God is the Author of the human survival instinct, it changes the whole picture. Once we recognize a Divine Mind behind it, we can rationally envision that the instinct serves higher purposes than mere reproduction. It quietly assures the value and significance of human life itself, both to mated couples anticipating parenthood and to veteran spinsters and bachelors with no progeny at all. In its psychological dimensions — which material theories of evolution have always been ill-prepared to address — the instinct entertains a hope for the survival of personal identity itself.

Those without faith in an afterlife may interpret this psychological hope as finding its fulfillment merely in the memories of friends and family members who outlive them. But such a hope is short-lived. When those who knew us also finally die, their memories will die with them. Unless we become popular artists, well-known authors, or encyclopedia material, subsequent generations won’t even remember our names. If mine, engraved on stone in some cemetery, is noticed by future passers-by, one in a thousand might think, “I wonder who David Hatton was.” Even if they were curious enough to do research and find out, their knowledge about me would not be “ME,” anymore than the things I’ve created or written are "me." A deep, personal examination of this instinct reveals that the hoped-for survivor is the self.

There’s one other dimension of this psychological hope that deserves consideration: our ambitions. Our desires to create and accomplish and explore, taken together, are bigger than this life can contain. It seems that all of us leave this world with unfulfilled longings: things we wished to have, or dreamed of doing, or hoped to see. We die in the midst of wanting to know more about everything, trying to investigate new realms of knowledge and information. We depart with long lists of unkept New Year’s resolutions for embracing new virtues or adopting new habits. This life just doesn’t seem long enough or large enough for us to fit in all the changes, all the adventures, all the new horizons we would like to experience.

The survival instinct points us beyond, urging us to hope for the ultimate manifestation of all these ambitious longings. It tacitly promises their accomplishment, not by our last will and testament to the loved ones we leave behind, but by the “YOU” and the “ME” who personally dreamed the dreams. It whispers in our hearts the hope of an afterlife, where we will be forever involved in learning and doing and growing.

AFTERLIFE

The growth of our dreams
and our ambitious schemes
To accomplish still more as we age
Are proof, while alive,
that our souls must survive:
Life on earth only turns the first page....

— David L. Hatton, 5-24-2013
(from Poems Between Birth and Resurrection)

(See also the essay on my website called, “Life after Death”)

THE SUPERSTITIOUS FAITH OF EVOLUTIONISM

I just finished an exceptional book, Anatomy of Movement, written by a French dancer-turned-physiotherapist. Its pages helped me visualize that dimension of the musculoskeletal system most often skimmed over by anatomy books: the dynamics of movement. This intelligent woman’s review of virtually every aspect of human mobility inspired my praise for the awesome craftsmanship of our Creator. How sad that she herself repeatedly attributed this marvelous interplay of bone, joint, ligament and muscle to an evolutionary series of cosmic accidents.

I’m not criticizing her any more than I would a parrot for mimicking its master. A powerful educational oligarchy groomed her to speak only the language of its sacred dogma, or to suffer political and academic shame. She’s a smart lady, but a victim of religious superstition.

Let’s be realistic. Darwinian evolutionism is not and can never become science. It’s merely a philosophy based on faith in presumptively interpreted archaeological data. Evolutionists freely exploit their position in the scientific community or their tenure among the academic elite to claim “science” as the basis of their beliefs. This not only deceives the gullible minds of a modern world, but prostitutes real science by trivializing the scientific method.

Evolutionists know that their belief system depends on a large array of unproven hypotheses. Not one of their proposed “guesses” are capable of ever qualifying as a legitimate scientific theory. In any discussion of orthodox science, intelligent evolutionists are obliged to confess this. Yet that fact doesn’t stop their bold preaching from textbook pulpits that evolution “developed this” anatomical marvel or “created that” physiological mechanism. Why can’t they just be honest and say they proclaim Evolution as Creator—or get really honest and admit they believe that Chance or Accident is God?

When evolutionistic faith sees similarities in the anatomical and physiological data of life on Earth, it claims that an infinitesimally long series of reproductive accidents brought forth all this biological diversity from a single ancestral cell. Theistic faith looks at these similarities and deems them compositions by the same Divine Artist. Evolutionists have called such belief in an invisible personal Deity “superstition.” But a small group of heretics have arisen from among them to challenge the academic status quo with the very same accusation. These disobedient scientists are using their brains and seeing Intelligent Design (ID).

A media well-catechized to parrot Darwinian faith has done much to slander ID scientists. But the obvious won’t go away, and that’s why these critically-thinking rebels dared to break from the pack in the first place. They saw the gross superstition in imagining that time and chance could produce the trillions of intricate complexities that comprise biological life on our planet.

Keep rolling a thousand mindless dice for a billion years. What are the odds of them all coming up “snake eyes”? Even if they finally did, what you’ve got is not the whole eyeball, folks, but just the retina. Yes, and that little bit of realism is not something evolutionists like to discuss. The enormous stretch of the imagination for the accidental production of the whole human body becomes hilariously preposterous. One biochemist converted to faith in ID when he realized that the statistical possibility for a linear series of necessary accidents to evolve the hemoglobin molecule would be one chance out of the number of atoms in the known universe.

The ID scientist is like an astronaut who lands on a planet and finds a strange but beautifully crafted vehicle resting on a plain not far from a dormant volcano. He tells his fellow astronaut that there must be intelligent inhabitants. The evolutionist is like the first one’s partner. After examining a nearby lava bed and finding the vehicle composed of the same volcanic material, he calls the first astronaut superstitious and says that the volcano must have spat that thing out. When the first questions the chances of that happening, the second dodges by saying, “Well, I don’t see any intelligent inhabitants around . . .do you?”

It’s way past time for atheistic evolutionists to give up their “scientific” hoax and confess their hypocrisy. Academic pushers of evolutionism have been calling theistic believers in a Creator “superstitious” long before ID scientists ever came on the scene. Yet all along these atheists knew they couldn’t offer a single example from the real world that illustrates how Nature's elaborate complexity could have arisen by chance from simplicity. Meanwhile, theists—and now ID scientists—have at arm's reach millions of human designs in everyday life that illustrate how an Intelligent Mind stands behind the fine-tuned sophistication of anatomical structure and physiological process actually involved in biological life.

People, wake up. Isn’t it obvious by now which group of believers has been religiously bowing its knee to Superstition?

(For my own testimony about leaving evolutionism when I discovered it took too much faith to accept, read “Journey to the Center of My Heart.”)