Viewpoint of Mark Cadwallader, Creation Moments Board Chairman
At this special time of year, let me ask: What are you thankful for?
I have some ideas. We Christians have so very much to be thankful for – the blessings of love and of family which are at the center of God’s plan for us. We can be thankful for Jesus, our elder Brother, Redeemer and marvelous Savior, and the opportunity to serve and enjoy Him now and in Glory forever! Furthermore, we can be thankful for living in a great land of opportunity, freedom and the rule of law as we do in America. We have still more to be thankful for in this life! I was reminded of that when I went to Cuba on a mission trip this summer.
I’ll tell you what I am particularly thankful for this season. I am thankful that for the first time since 1934, we have a majority conservative Supreme Court in the United States! Judicial philosophy is vital in the courts. And with the recent appointment of another “originalist” or “textualist” justice, the court majority philosophy is not one of ever “evolving” law, but one that searches for the original intent and meaning of the authors of the Constitution!
This approach to the text is the same approach we should use when reading the Bible. It is the cornerstone on which we stand as creationists – believing the plain sense and original intent and meaning of Scripture! We don’t want to “read our own ideas into” the text, but rather to let the text speak for itself ! For example, when we read the word “day” in the historical narrative style of Genesis and Exodus, we understand it to mean what it is saying – a 24-hour day. (“For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth…” (Exodus 20:11). There is no reason from the text that we should bend the meaning to simply accommodate the materialistic worldview of Charles Darwin’s theory.
Did you know that the theory of evolution heavily influenced how the law and the Constitution came to be taught and interpreted? When man began to adopt the theory of evolution in the nineteenth century, jurists and other legal intellectuals began to subscribe to a view that law is a mere byproduct of human will and social struggle – “survival of the fittest”. Previous to Charles Darwin, the dominant view in Western legal tradition was that human laws are subject to higher law, to natural law, to God’s law – a fixed standard. And this, through the Bible and through such sources as Blackstone’s Legal Commentary, was the worldview which framed the American Constitution. There is no basis in the Constitution for so-called “legislating from the Bench”. There is no basis, for example, for finding a right to gay marriage or a right to abortion, and to usurp the power of states and of legislatures. That is evolutionary theory at work in our courts, folks.
Under the influence of Evolutionism and its off-shoot Social Darwinism, a powerful transformation of legal studies took place in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Western Civilization – just as occurred in science. And it occurred for the same reason. Man’s depravity, his will to sin and rebel against his Maker, drives a hatred for submission to God’s rule – therefore, people have piled-on to perceived justification to omit God.
In fact, it has been said that the sixteenth century Protestant Reformer most closely linked to the doctrine of the fundamental depravity of man, John Calvin, was the single most influential person to our Constitution! The result is that the Constitution has a complex system of checks and balances to the abuse of power. In one dimension, there are the three separate branches of government: legislative, executive and judicial, with independent defined powers. And in another dimension, there is the check and balance between federal and state’s powers. America’s founders worked hard to protect the people from the inherent corruption (the inherent depravity) of those in power!
By contrast, other systems of government assume the basic “goodness” of man – that he is morally perfectible through education and training. This is a false view supported by evolution. And this is the basis for socialism/communism – for the political “left”. Man is essentially perfectible by the ongoing “dialectic struggle” – the clash between thesis and antithesis to get a new synthesis which becomes the next thesis in an ongoing evolution of man and society!
By denying the biblical view of man as a sinner who can only be saved by God, socialism and communism subscribe to an evil lie. And the evil is compounded by the need for socialism to get its recruits through the politics of envy and of bitterness and of slothfulness. Socialism must create victim classes for the “struggle”, and it must stoke the flames of envy and bitterness (ongoing anger and hatred) to do so.
So this Thanksgiving I am thankful that the evil did not prevail, that the political left in this country did not succeed with its efforts at character assassination and with its bitterness promoting message of females-as-victim-class in order to stop the appointment of another conservative justice to the Supreme Court! I am thankful that the rule of law on which this country was founded finally prevailed and that we have a Court that now arguably leans away from an evolutionary view of law.
I am also very thankful for you, who support this vital ministry of fidelity to God’s Word. Evolution needs to be exposed for what it is – a horrible foundational lie which need not and must not be compromised with! So I am very thankful that you have joined with us in this great cause of tearing down “every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God” 2 Corinthians 10:5).
And I encourage you to pray for this ministry and for this country because the battle is for people’s hearts and minds. We have already seen that the results of an evolutionary worldview, such as socialism, have become entrenched in many of our institutions. All the more reason that we need to be here bearing witness for the Spirit to change those hearts and minds and to keep proclaiming the evidence for truth!
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