This item is available on the Apologetics Press website at: http://www.apologeticspress.org/articles/3204 - it was originally published in Reason & Revelation, issue 27[1]:6-7
AP Content :: Reason & Revelation
America and Atheistic Evolutionists
by Dave Miller, Ph.D.
Amid militant cries by evolutionists to ban God from science, the public school, and America, how ironic that such talk is permissible only because America was founded by theists. For some fifty years now, atheistic evolutionists have been chipping steadily away at belief in God and the Christian religion throughout the public school and university system of this country. They have successfully indoctrinated many young people with their godless theory. Virtually every department in state universities has been infiltrated by humanistic presuppositions. Study and research are conducted from an evolutionary, relativistic framework that either jettisons the notion of God altogether, or dilutes it sufficiently to exclude the biblical portrayal of deity. Many American universities are now firmly under the control of atheists, agnostics, and skeptics who forthrightly reject belief in God, embrace a materialistic view of origins, and are determined to eradicate any residue of belief in God that may linger in the minds of their victimized pupils.
But the United States was born under such drastically different circumstances. Indeed, the foundational premise for severing ties with England, and the central rationale and justification for establishing a new nation, was articulated by the Founders in their declared intention to establish their independence (Declaration of..., 1776). In the very first sentence of that seminal document, they insisted that “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle[d] them” to achieve “the separate and equal station” of a new nation. The “Nature’s God” to whom they referred was the God of the Bible. In the second sentence they declared that they had been “created” (not evolved) by their “Creator” who invested them with “certain unalienable Rights.” In other words, the American Republic had a right to exist on the basis of the authority of the God of the Bible. Further, they justified their intentions by “appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world.” And they staked the entire enterprise on “a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence.” Four times in the brief literary missive that launched the United States of America, the Founders alluded to the God of the Bible; yet now, over two centuries later, evolutionists have declared war on those who believe in that God!
The architects of this country would be outraged—and thoroughly alarmed for national survival. As Benjamin Franklin declared to Thomas Paine:
For without the Belief of a Providence that takes Cognizance of, guards and guides and may favour particular Persons, there is no Motive to Worship a Deity, to fear its Displeasure, or to pray for its Protection. If Men are so wicked as we now see them with Religion what would they be if without it? I intend this Letter itself as a Proof of my Friendship.... (1840, 10:281-282, emp. added).
John Adams played a central role in the birth of our nation, as delegate to the Continental Congress (1774-1777) where he signed the Declaration of Independence, signer of the peace treaty that ended the American Revolution (1783), two-time Vice-President under George Washington (1789-1797), and second President of the United States (1797-1801). In a letter to Thomas Jefferson on April 19, 1817, John Adams insisted: “Without religion this world would be something not fit to be mentioned in polite company, I mean hell” (1856, 10:254). He declared in 1778 that atheism ought to be treated with “horror” and those who embrace it are traitors, hypocrites, and guilty of treason:
The idea of infidelity cannot be treated with too much resentment or too much horror. The man who can think of it with patience is a traitor in his heart and ought to be execrated as one who adds the deepest hypocrisy to the blackest treason (1977-1989, 6:348).
Writing to Noah Webster on July 20, 1798, Dr. Benjamin Rush, signer of the Declaration of Independence, said: “I anticipate nothing but suffering to the human race while the present systems of paganism, deism, and atheism prevail in the world” (1951, 2:799). Another signer of the Declaration, Samuel Adams, stated in a letter written in 1772: “I have a thorough contempt for all men...who appear to be the irreclaimable enemies of religion” (1906, 2:381). Signer of the Constitution, Gouverneur Morris, insisted in 1816:
There must be religion. When that ligament is torn, society is disjointed and its members perish. The nation is exposed to foreign violence and domestic convulsion. Vicious rulers, chosen by vicious people, turn back the current of corruption to its source. Placed in a situation where they can exercise authority for their own emolument, they betray their trust. They take bribes. They sell statutes and decrees. They sell honor and office. They sell their conscience. They sell their country. By this vile traffic they become odious and contemptible.... But the most important of all lessons is the denunciation of ruin to every State that rejects the precepts of religion” (Collections of..., 1821, pp. 32,34, emp. added).
Speaking to the senior class at Princeton College in 1775, Declaration signer John Witherspoon declared: “Shun, as a contagious pestilence,...those especially whom you perceive to be infected with the principles of infidelity or [who are] enemies to the power of religion” (1802, 6:13).
With uncanny anticipation of the audacious, avowed determination by evolutionists to rid the nation of belief in God, Alexander Hamilton, another signer of the federal Constitution, condemned France in 1798 for a comparable aspiration: “The attempt by the rulers of a nation to destroy all religious opinion and to pervert a whole people to atheism is a phenomenon of profligacy.... [T]o establish atheism on the ruins of Christianity [is] to deprive mankind of its best consolations and most animating hopes and to make a gloomy desert of the universe” (1979, 21:402-404). Also describing France, John Jay, first chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, explained:
During my residence there, I do not recollect to have had more than two conversations with atheists about their tenets. The first was this: I was at a large party, of which were several of that description. They spoke freely and contemptuously of religion. I took no part in the conversation. In the course of it, one of them asked me if I believed in Christ? I answered that I did, and that I thanked God that I did.... Some time afterward, one of my family being dangerously ill, I was advised to send for an English physician who had resided many years at Paris.... But, it was added, he is an atheist.... [D]uring one of his visits, [he] very abruptly remarked that there was no God and he hoped the time would come when there would be no religion in the world. I very concisely remarked that if there was no God there could be no moral obligations, and I did not see how society could subsist without them... (Jay, 1833, 2:346-347, emp. added).
Even Benjamin Franklin chided the French with the near absence of atheism in early America:
[B]ad examples to youth are more rare in America, which must be comfortable consideration to parents. To this may be truly added, that serious religion, under its various denominations, is not only tolerated, but respected and practiced. Atheism is unknown there; infidelity rare and secret; so that persons may live to a great age in that country, without having their piety shocked by meeting with either an atheist or an infidel (1784, p. 24, emp. added).
Even Thomas Paine, who styled himself a deist and opponent of Christianity, nevertheless repudiated the atheism being perpetrated by today’s evolutionists. In his Age of Reason, he claimed to believe in God and afterlife: “I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life” (1794). He also wrote: “Were man impressed as fully and as strongly as he ought to be with the belief of a God, his moral life would be regulated by the force of that belief; he would stand in awe of God and of himself, and would not do the thing that could not be concealed from either” (1794). Paine not only believed in “the certainty of his existence and the immutability of his power,” he asserted that “it is the fool only, and not the philosopher, or even the prudent man, that would live as if there were no God.” In fact, he stated that it is “rational to believe” that God would call all people “to account for the manner in which we have lived here” (1794). According to Paine, today’s atheistic evolutionists are imprudent, irrational fools. The psalmist articulated the same conclusion centuries ago when he wrote: “The fool has said in his heart, ‘There is no God’” (Psalm 14:1; 53:1).
If atheistic evolutionists have their way in this country by having God expunged from public education, according to the Founders of America, this country will become a nightmare—a “gloomy desert,” or as John Adams believed, a living “hell” on Earth. Russia went down the same road of atheistic evolution a century ago. Because of their inability to discern spiritual things (1 Corinthians 2:14), the Soviet cosmonauts looked out of their spacecraft in the 1950s and, in ridicule, asked, “Where is God?,” echoing again the words of the psalmist: “Why should the nations say, ‘Where now is their God?’ But our God is in heaven; He does whatever He pleases” (Psalm 115:2-3). Pride is a deadly pitfall that blinds one to the truth: “The wicked in his proud countenance does not seek God; all his thoughts are, ‘There is no God’” (Psalm 10:4).
The Father of our country, George Washington, would be heartsick to hear the intentions of today’s evolutionists:
I am sure there never was a people who had more reason to acknowledge a Divine interposition in their affairs than those of the United States; and I should be pained to believe that they have forgotten that Agency which was so often manifested during our revolution, or that they failed to consider the omnipotence of that God who is alone able to protect them (1838, 10:222-223, emp. added).
Nevertheless, the physical evidence remains abundantly clear: the Universe “declares” the plain work of the Creator (Psalm 19:1). Those who see “the things that are made” and deny the very One Who made them—are “without excuse” (Romans 1:20).
REFERENCES
Adams, John (1856), The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States, ed. Charles Adams (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, & Co.).
Adams, John (1977-1989), The Papers of John Adams, ed. Robert Taylor (Cambridge: Belknap Press).
Adams, Samuel (1906), The Writings of Samuel Adams, ed. Harry Cushing (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons).
Collections of the New York Historical Society for the Year 1821 (1821), (New York: E. Bliss & E. White).
Declaration of Independence (1776), National Archives, [On-line], URL: http://www.archives.gov/national-archives-experience /charters/declaration.html.
Franklin, Benjamin (1784), Two Tracts: Information to Those Who Would Remove to America and Remarks Concerning the Savages of North America (London: John Stockdale).
Franklin, Benjamin (1840), The Works of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Jared Sparks (Boston, MA: Tappan, Whittemore, & Mason).
Hamilton, Alexander (1979), The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, ed. Harold Syrett (New York: Columbia University Press).
Jay, William (1833), The Life of John Jay (New York: J. & J. Harper).
Paine, Thomas (1794), Age of Reason, [On-line], URL: http://www.ushistory.org/paine/reason/singlehtml.htm.
Rush, Benjamin (1951), Letters of Benjamin Rush, ed. L.H. Butterfield (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press).
Washington, George (1838), The Writings of George Washington, ed. Jared Sparks (Boston, MA: Ferdinand Andrews).
Witherspoon, John (1802), The Works of the Reverend John Witherspoon (Philadelphia, PA: William Woodward).
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