“Have no other gods before Me.” Exodus 20:3

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1). The Creator of all things is the Lord Jesus Christ, who has no equal in authority and status. The first two commandments reiterate that this high position is His alone: “You shall have no other gods before Me. . . . You shall not make any . . . likeness . . . . You shall not bow down to them nor serve them” (Exodus 20:3, 4). Of course, there is no other God, for “the LORD is the true God; He is the living God and the everlasting King” (Jeremiah 10:10).

The Biblical Description of Idolatry

The human mind seems readily disposed to commit idolatry. The Bible describes idolatry as someone wrongly giving creatures (or human-fashioned representatives of them) credit for creation or interventional actions, such as hearing, acting, etc. A classic example is when Israel demanded, “Come, make us gods that shall go before us” (Exodus 32:1). After fashioning a golden calf, they said, “This is your god, O Israel, that brought you out of the land of Egypt” (Exodus 32:4). But only God is worthy of such credit.

Gold, wood, rabbit’s feet, or lucky charms have no real powers. Paul reminded the Corinthian Christians, “We know that an idol is nothing in the world, and that there is no other God but one” (1 Corinthians 8:4; see also Deuteronomy 4:28 and Isaiah 37:19). The profound offense to our Creator comes when the minds of people vividly imagine—and they truly believe in their hearts—that created things exercise agency and Godlike powers. These actions rob God of His rightful glory. Though acclaim is projected onto inanimate things, in the unseen realm, “the things which the Gentiles sacrifice they sacrifice to demons and not to God” (1 Corinthians 10:20). This behavior is idolatrous and even satanic, and the apostle John forbade it: “Little children, keep yourselves from idols” (1 John 5:21).

Satan and demons cannot, so to speak, lay a finger on God. But they can disrespect Him and mock Him by getting His creatures to not honor Him as the true Creator. Idolatry is both Satan’s means and objective toward dishonoring God.

Are we so advanced from our primitive past to where Western Christians can replace the idea found in the Bible that an idol acted supernaturally by projecting powers onto something, with today's teaching that idolatry is merely esteeming money or fame in our heart as more important than God? Not in the slightest. Today’s Christian leaders are simply blind to the fact that something less tangible than a carved idol—but still a created thing, namely, nature itself—is still held as not only acting like God, but as the actual giver of life and sculptor of life’s diversity and engineered wonder.

An Idolatry More Seductive Than Tangible Idols

After the apostle Paul depicted how people sinfully fail to credit God as Creator in Romans 1, he described the worst idolatry in verse 25: people revering nature as creator. They “exchanged the truth about God for a lie [or some lexicons render it as exchanged the ‘true God for the false god’¹], not only falling into adoration of but also reverentially serving the created material realm of nature, contrary to the Creator, who is praised (by His handiwork in creation) endlessly. Amen [author’s own translation].”²

Darwin’s clever link between idolatry and the evolutionary worldview is natural selection and the concept behind that term. Scientists initially criticized natural selection as a personification.³ As a science historian explains, “One source of trouble was that Darwin liked the term ‘natural selection’ because it [a mental concept] could be ‘used as a substantive governing a verb [a real agent that can act]’ (F. Darwin, 1887, vol. 3, p. 46). But such uses appeared to reify, even to deify, natural selection as an agent.”⁴

That pithy statement, “used as a substantive governing a verb,” is best illustrated by an example. The Philistines mentally conceived their lifeless idol Dagon as a real volitional agent that could do things, e.g., “Dagon delivered into our hands” (Judges 16:23). Similarly, today’s atheistic selectionists say, “Natural selection creates . . .” while theistic selectionists maintain, “The only thing natural selection can do is . . . .” Thus, idolatry doesn’t exist in the idol, but in someone’s mind—and the abilities they project onto unconscious things.

Darwin projected agency onto natural selection by claiming that it can act like human breeders. This analogy shrewdly cloaks this pseudo-agency and few people spot it as illegitimate. However, two prominent atheists bothered by Darwin’s duplicity have done so: “Darwin didn’t manage to get mental causes out of his account of how evolution works. He just hid them in the unexamined analogy between selection by breeding and natural selection,”⁵ an analogy that these researchers declare is “patently false.”⁵ Simply put, breeders have a mind that can make real selections and nature doesn’t, though selectionists treat it like it does.

Natural Selection Personified as the Substitute Creator

Do evolutionists invoke natural selection as a substitute creator? Let’s hear from them.

This was Darwin’s fundamental discovery, that there is a process that is creative, although not conscious. . . . It was Darwin’s greatest accomplishment to show that the complex organization and functionality of living beings can be explained as the result of a natural process—natural selection—without any need to resort to a Creator or other external agent.⁶

Natural selection is a creative process that can explain the appearance of genuine novelty.⁷

Natural selection is a simple concept, but it is perhaps the most important idea in biology. It is also one of the most important ideas in the history of human thought . . . for it explains the apparent design of the living world without recourse to a supernatural, omnipotent designer.”⁸

In the same way, natural selection . . . builds step by step, even if by trial and error, entities of infinite complexity, ingenuity, and if one be inclined to say so, beauty.⁹

With evolution, however, it is different. The fundamental scientific idea of evolution by natural selection is not just mind-boggling; natural selection, by executing God’s traditional task of designing and creating all creatures great and small, also seems to deny one of the best reasons we have for believing in God. . . . the idea that natural selection has the power to generate such sophisticated designs is deeply counterintuitive.¹⁰

Biologists now tend to believe profoundly that natural selection is the invisible hand that crafts well-wrought forms. It may be an overstatement to claim that biologists view selection as the sole source of order in biology, but not by much. If current biology has a central canon, you have now heard it.¹¹

Darwin was brilliant to make “natural selection” a sort of godlike term, an expression that could replace “God”, who did it – [sic] created life forms. . . . He made it easy for his contemporaries to think and verbalize Mr. Big Omnipotent God in the Sky picking out those He wants to keep. He has been conceived of as The Natural Selector. He throws the others away.¹²

Another evolutionist sums up the situation. “Evolutionary biologists routinely speak of natural selection as if it were an agent . . . . Natural selection becomes rather like an occult Power of the prescientific age.”¹³

Natural selection is venerated as the creator of biology, so why not for the entire universe? As one evolutionist put it, “Charles Darwin . . . [has] brought the entire natural world under a single law of natural selection . . . [the] starting point [of my theory about the universe’s evolution] is the remarkable theory of cosmological natural selection proposed by the physicist Lee Smolin.” ¹⁴ It follows that “the universe could be further understood as a self-coherent and self-creating whole, without the need for anything outside itself to give it law, meaning or complexity.”¹⁵

Natural selection is idolatrous in the basest of ways. Not only does it ascribe rational powers to unconscious environmental features, like any other idol, but it also induces people not to give the Lord Jesus credit for the incredible intelligence and machinery He has built into His creatures that enable them to adapt to their environment. Consider the Lord’s declaration in Isaiah 42:8: “I am the LORD: that is my name: and my glory will I not give to another, neither my praise to graven images” . . . or to nature as creator.

References

1. Bauer, W., W. F. Arndt, and F. W. Gingrich. 1979. A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, 2nd ed. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 261, 511, 891.
2. For a full translation of Romans 1:18–25, see: Guliuzza, R. J. 2017. Engineering Principles Point to God’s Workmanship. Acts & Facts. 46 (6): 16–19. Emphasis added.
3. In 1861, the Perpetual Secretary of the French Academy of Sciences described Darwin’s Origin of Species as “metaphysical jargon thrown amiss in the natural history,” “pretentious and empty language,” “puerile [silly] and supernatural personifications,” and stated that Darwin “imagines afterwards that this power of selecting which he gives to Nature is similar to the power of man.” Huxley, T. H. 1894. Darwiniana. London, UK: Macmillan and Co., 65.
4. Hodge, M. J. S. 1992. Natural Selection: Historical Perspectives. In Keywords in Evolutionary Biology. E. F. Keller and E. A. Lloyd, eds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 213.
5. Fodor, J. A. and M. Piattelli-Palmarini. 2010. What Darwin Got Wrong. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 15, 162.
6. Ayala, F. J. 2007. Darwin’s Greatest Discovery: Design Without Designer. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 104 (suppl 1): 8567–8573.
7. Ayala, F. 2009. En el Centenario de Darwin. Ludus Vitalis. 17 (32): 1–16.
8. Futuyma, D. J. 2013. Evolution, 3rd ed. Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates, 281.
9. Lerner, I. M. 1959. The Concept of Natural Selection: A Centennial View. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society. 103 (2): 173–182.
10. Dennett, D. C. Show Me the Science. The New York Times, August 28, 2005.
11. Kauffman, S. 1995. At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 150.
12. Mazur, S. 2009. The Altenburg 16: An Exposé of the Evolution Industry. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 265.
13. Talbott, S. L. Can Darwinian Evolutionary Theory Be Taken Seriously? The Nature Institute. Posted on bwo.life May 17, 2016.
14. McFadden, J. Why Simplicity Works. Aeon. Posted on aeon.co October 11, 2021.
15. Rifkin, L. The Logic and Beauty of Cosmological Natural Selection. Scientific American. Posted on scientificamerican.com June 10, 2014.

Dr. Guliuzza is the president of the Institute for Creation Research.