Will There Be a National Darwin Day?

Will Darwin Day be honored as a national holiday here in America? Well, a resolution was reintroduced to the US House of Representatives recently to recognize Charles Darwin’s birthday (February 12, 2016) as a national holiday because of many absurd reasons. There has since been an additional resolution from a Democratic Senator that would show Congressional support for the Darwin Day distinction.

Now, some of the reasons listed nationally for celebrating Darwin, who of course was not an American, include the following:

•Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by the mechanism of natural selection, together with the monumental amount of scientific evidence he compiled to support it, provides humanity with a logical and intellectually compelling explanation for the diversity of life on Earth.

•It has been the human curiosity and ingenuity exemplified by Darwin that has promoted new scientific discoveries that have helped humanity solve many problems and improve living conditions.

•The teaching of creationism in some public schools compromises the scientific and academic integrity of the United States education systems.

•Charles Darwin is a worthy symbol of scientific advancement on which to focus and around which to build a global celebration of science and humanity intended to promote a common bond among all of Earth’s peoples.

These are terrible reasons to make Darwin Day a national holiday. Putting aside the fact that Darwin was not an American, Darwinian evolution has no confirmation in observational science. What we see in the world is consistent with God’s Word, not evolutionary ideas about the past, and much of what we observe actually contradicts evolutionary ideas.

Darwin isn’t a great example of “human curiosity and ingenuity”—he was compelled to come up with a way to explain life without God because he rejected God. Although AiG doesn’t lobby for it because creation would probably be poorly represented by teachers, mandating that creation be taught alongside evolution doesn’t compromise “scientific and academic integrity”—if done properly, it promotes critical thinking and inspires a desire to learn more about God’s creation.

And Darwin isn’t a “worthy symbol” of the promotion of “a common bond among all of Earth’s peoples.” He was racist and his ideas were racist! Choosing Darwin as the symbol of “scientific advancement” instead of many more worthy and less controversial figures like Newton, Mendel, or Pasteur seems to be nothing more than an attempt to push the anti-God religion of secularism on the nearly half of Americans who believe in a Creator.

Proposed Holiday Shows How Anti-God Our Society Has Become

This proposed new holiday only emphasizes how anti-God our society has become. Christian holidays like Christmas or Easter have been secularized to the point where Nativity scenes and crosses are being taken out of public places, yet a secular figure whose ideas on the origin of life are a major tenet of the secular religion of humanism can be publicly applauded and celebrated. It’s not really Darwin who’s being celebrated on Darwin Day, it’s an anti-God religion and its foundation of evolution and millions of years that’s being celebrated. Actually, the intolerant secularists (intolerant of Christianity in particular) are now wanting more and more to impose their anti-God religion on the culture.

On the home page of the International Darwin Day website (a website that promotes the celebration of Darwin around the world) scrolls several phrases: “Let’s celebrate intellectual bravery . . . perpetual curiosity . . . hunger for truth . . . Let’s celebrate Darwin Day.” It should be more like “let’s celebrate man’s fallible ideas being trusted over God’s infallible Word!” This is really a worship of man, a worship of the god of self.

Darwin Day is a day that celebrates the legacy of a man who elevated his own fallible ideas over God’s Word. Darwin took the things he observed—natural selection and adaptation—and leapt to the conclusion that these small, observable changes within a kind could lead to huge, unobserved (and still unobserved!) changes between kinds. But his ideas still have no observational corroboration. What we see in nature is kinds that reproduce according to their kinds with only limited amounts of variation within the kind. We do see common designs in all of creation but that is explained by a common Designer, not common descent. This is consistent with God’s Word, not Darwin’s imaginations about the past.

This February 12, I encourage you to celebrate the truth of God’s unchanging Word. Use “Darwin Day” as a springboard for conversations with your friends and family about the flaws of evolution and show them how observational science confirms God’s Word from the beginning. And then challenge people that the history in the Bible—starting with Genesis—is true, and that’s why the gospel based in that history is true.

Thanks for stopping by and thanks for praying,
Ken

This item was written with the assistance of AiG’s research team.