Studies in Early Genesis

The Closed Universe of Evolution

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Pentateuch

Genre: Speech

Lesson: 1 of 11

Track: #46

Dictation Name: RR115A1

Date: 1960-1970’s

[Rushdoony] Almighty God our heavenly Father we thank Thee that Thou art God and that the judgment is upon Thy shoulders. And we come to Thee again in this confidence, rejoicing because our times are in Thy hands, and Thou doeth all things well. And so our Father give us grace day by day to wait on Thee. Give us faith to know that because Thou art God the kingdoms of this world shall become the kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ. Make us bold in Faith, knowing that if God be for us, who can be against us? Bless us now as we study Thy word and grant us Thy peace. In Jesus name, Amen.

Let us turn now to Genesis one. The first Chapter of Genesis has far reaching implications for our times, and we shall perhaps take two or three weeks to study its implication.

1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.

5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

6 And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.

7 And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.

8 And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.

9 And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.

10 And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.

11 And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so.

12 And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good.

13 And the evening and the morning were the third day.

14 And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years:

15 And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so.

16 And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.

17 And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth,

18 And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good.

19 And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.

20 And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.

21 And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good.

22 And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth.

23 And the evening and the morning were the fifth day.

24 And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so.

25 And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good.

26 And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

28 And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

29 And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.

30 And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to everything that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so.

31 And God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.

This chapter has for many centuries been a center of controversy. The church no sooner began its existence then Greek philosophers who quickly attempted to take over the church in the form of Gnosticism, one of the most dangerous movements in all history, one which is still with us, and began to re-interpret this chapter in terms of Greek thinking; in terms of the chaos cult and evolution. This attempt at revision was constant throughout the centuries. And beginning in the 17th century it began to become more and more conspicuous. And in the last century particularly, since the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859 the assault has been tremendous. When Darwin formulated his thesis, evolution was already a widely accepted concept. Going back to Hegel and to his thinking, evolution had become accepted as the basic factor in all social thought. And hence all Hegelians, such as Karl Marx, posited social evolution. All that Darwin did was to apply the same ideas in the area of biology. And when he did so, Karl Marx was delighted and hailed the publication of the Origin of Species as the work which if accepted would make socialism inevitable.

Why? Today we are going to analyze the reason why the doctrine of evolution is so important to left wing thought. Evolution is, scientifically speaking, a hypothesis; more than that we can call it a myth. It is one of many culture myths that has occurred in the history of civilization. Darwin did not go to nature, observe it and then formulate his thesis, he went to contemporary philosophy as well as to certain economic thinking and derived his ideas of social evolution and then applied these ideas to nature and set about to prove that his already accepted hypothesis was true.

Evolution is unproven. It is a religious principle. And it is the basic religious premise of the modern world. We hold to creation because we do so by faith, the scientist who holds to evolution also does so by faith. We believe there is more scientific evidence for creationism then there is for evolution but in the very nature of the case, both are unprovable, they cannot be put to the test. Both are held, both views, for religious reason. Now what is the religion in back of evolution? We find evolution to be a universal concept apart from biblical faith. What we have described for us here in Genesis one is a series of created acts by God, not a process. What evolution describes for us is a process. So on the one hand we have the creative acts, on the other hand process philosophy.

Now, in all philosophy your given is ultimately that which governs everything in your system. That which is your basic presupposition ultimately is your total world, your source of power, the be all and all of your system. Now if you believe that God created heaven and earth then your source of power in the universe is God. And for man and society to prosper they must have respect for God’s law because God is creator, is the governor and the determiner of all things. And all things having been made by him are governed by his law. But if on the other hand you hold to evolution as all non-Biblical religions have you believe that originally there was nothing but a primeval chaos, and out of this chaos through a series of accidents, life and the whole universe evolved. Now, what is your source of power? Chaos. Since all things evolved out of chaos, chaos is your given. Chaos is your source of energy, your source of power, your source of regeneration, of revitalization for life in the universe.

In my pamphlet The Religion of Revolution I have analyzed the meaning of this chaos cult. And the cults of chaos underlie all non –Biblical religion. They are present in all those who deny creationism and teach a modernistic faith. As a result if you hold to a doctrine of evolution, how are you going to revitalize a society? Naturally through chaos, and chaos means revolution. So that the minute the doctrine of creationism was challenged a couple of hundred years ago revolution entered into the Western world. It came to the surface in the French revolution; it tore Europe apart throughout the last century and today is the major force in the world. Moreover we find that Marxist, for example, and they are not alone in this believe that even if a country is to be taken over peacefully by the ballot box, it is necessary to have, as it were, a controlled revolution thereafter. You have to go through and eliminate a sizable section of the population. A third, a fourth, an eighth, a half, it depends, but you need this, you need controlled chaos, you need ritual chaos, you need revolutionary chaos because this is the source of regeneration, there is no future apart from chaos for man. Of course it is fate.

As a result every philosopher who holds to this position, whether he showeth openly or covertly has somewhere in his system a requirement for chaos, for revolution. Those who champion it openly, such as Henry Miller, insist that we need two centuries of chaos, during which time all of society will be subverted, there will be no law and order, in which there will be nothing but shear anarchy and destruction. And out of this, he says, will come paradise on earth. In other words chaos means revitalization. There is no real plan in Karl Marx for what is to take place after the revolution. And when the revolution took place in Russia Lenin had to improvise, and so Marxist philosophy today is called Marxism/Leninism. Marx had no thought for the day after revolution because he believed once you brought about this chaos there would be, inevitably, a social revitalization. The excuse the Marxist/Leninist give now is “Well this cannot take place until the whole world is turned upside down with chaos.”

Take away the doctrine of creationism and every philosophy gravitates immediately to the cult of chaos, to the religion of revolution, it is inescapable. Because then the God of your system, the power in your system is below, in chaos; because all things came out of chaos accidentally, and so you do not want law and order. Law and order clog, they withhold, they stop up, they dam the energy with {?} being. Therefore away with law and order, subvert it, destroy it, give chaos freedom to do its regenerating work. But if we believe that God created the heavens and the earth, that by His sovereign word in six days He brought all things into being, we believe therefore that all things were created by God, are governed by God, are subject to and under His law. Therefore mans only hope is first to believe in that God and in His plan of salvation; and secondly to abide by His law.

There is no regeneration personal or social apart from God and His sovereign work. Therefore as Christians we hold that to have a future as a country we must be under law. We must uphold and advance the dignity of the law, the authority of the law. That we must be a God fearing and a law abiding people or we destroy ourselves. This seems very obvious to those of us who have been brought up in the faith. But we don’t realize that to ancient man, as well as to modern man who is ancient pagan man revived, this is the worse thing you could do. You’re clogging the pipes, as it were, of energy. You need the return to chaos. And so in the ancient world you had your periodic return cult chaos, your annual ritual, you had a belief in revolution and thus you had revolutions regularly, and this was necessary. Society required it. And today vast portions of the world believe this. We are so used to the propaganda of Europeans about the United States that we are just a young country and they are an old, old country, we don’t realize that there isn’t a civil government on the continent of Europe that has as long a history as The United States. That because the European Continent has for almost two centuries been under the influence of these revolutionary and evolutionary ideas, it ahs been subject to repeated revolution, and there is no country on the continent with a history anywhere near as long as that of The United States.

I spoke two years ago with one man, and Austrian still living in Austria who has in his lifetime lived under seven different civil governments in his particular part of the Tyrol {?}. He has lived through many a revolution. Our immunity for so long a period to revolution has been due to our Christian inheritance, our belief in the authority and in the infallibility of the word of God, to our believe in creationism. Now we are seeing in recent years a steady attack on the doctrine of creation; which means an attack on God. Which means an attack on God’s government and its {?} laws and as a result we see a steady increase of revolutionary thinking in our midst. It’s futile to talk to these people, to try and convince them that revolution is fact. Some years ago someone called Harold J. Laski’s attention to all the hideous bloodshed that had taken place in the USSR. And Laski, professor at the London School of Economics and one of the leading Fabians, made it clear that he believed that a certain amount of blood letting and butchery was not only a necessary thing but also desirable. If you believe in revolution then you are going to walk on revolutionary chaos. You are going to call for it, you will demand it. It is not surprising that one psychologist, definitely not a Christian, in analyzing the modern temperament has characterized it as “The urge to mass destruction”.

If you have this evolutionary faith, with its deification of chaos as ultimate, and chaos a revolution as the means to regeneration, then everything in your being is going to require logically, as well as psychologically mass destruction. This is your hope. When you add to this the fact that all modern psychologies rest on the clean slate concept, which is a revolutionary concept, which means that you educate the child by wiping out from its mind everything that the home, the church, the past, taught him; you have introduced into education itself and into child training revolution. And what is the clean slate as applied to the world at large but wiping out the past? Insisting, in other words, that the only way you can build is first of all to destroy everything that exists. This then is the inevitable implication of any evolutionary thinking. This is the reason why Karl Marx hailed Darwin and the concept of biological evolution. He very rightly understood its meaning, world revolution and world scientific socialism, he held, is impossible without this. Convince men that this is true and you have then laid the groundwork for world revolution. You have planted the requirement for it in the minds of all men. You have made chaos ultimate. Hence chaos is the creator of order and the only source of any future order.

This faith has invaded the churches. It is not the religion of our Lord Jesus Christ which is preached from the pulpits today but the religion of revolution. There are scarcely any seminaries in The United States where a ministerial student is not taught evolution, and with it revolution. Moreover your newest translations are introducing the concept into the very text of scripture. Those of you who have read my pamphlet Translation and Subversion are familiar with my development of this point. In the new Anchor version this is very clear. Because the first three verses of Genesis are translate therein as one sentence, instead of four complete sentences, and the statement that “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” is made a dependent clause so that the co-eternity of matter is asserted. And they read this matter as primeval chaos. So your newer versions will definitely have this {?}catered text of scripture. And yet so subtly that the average person in reading it is not aware of what has happened.

But there is another aspect to evolutionary thought. Creationism asserts that the universe cannot explain itself, that to find out what the meaning of the universe is you must go beyond the universe to the holy Trinity; God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. But, if you hold to evolution then you say that the universe is a closed universe and totally comprehensible in terms to self, there is no transcendence. There is nothing beyond it. Now if there is nothing beyond it and all things are understandable only in terms of that which is within the universe, then the only law of the universe is what man says law is. There is no supreme court over the universe, no law beyond the universe. When our country was established, as even Corwin, definitely a liberal admitted in his work The Higher Law Background of the US Constitution it was the fundamental assumption of the framers that the law they had established in the constitution and in all legislation was simply an attempt to approximate, to understand, to interpret God’s fundamental law. That above and beyond all manmade laws, such as the constitution, was the law of God, And man could only transgress that to his peril.

But today the Supreme Court is no longer god; the Supreme Court is in Washington. It was intended originally to be only the supreme court of These United States, not the Supreme Court of the universe. The Supreme Court itself has denied that there is a higher law, and Vinson has said that only truth is that there is no truth. And so the only law is what the Supreme Court says law is. And it is bound neither by God, nor by the founding Fathers. When you deny creationism you have a closed universe. There’s no Supreme Court of the universe, there is no law beyond man made law.

Now the God concept is inescapable for any system of thought. God has so made us we cannot think apart from the God idea. So that a man may deny God, but he is going to retain the idea of God and he will simply transfer God from heavens to the earth. And the minute you deny that there is any transcendence, the minute you say that God did not create the heavens and the earth, and that God is not God, that there is no God, you have denied indeed, that the Triune God, but you have created another God. You have said somewhere we’re going to place final authority. And so you have, as in the ancient world, the divine theaters. The state becomes God, the state becomes the highest point of power in the universe and therefore the state is God on earth. Hegel, the modern father of evolution, the father of Marx and Darwin, philosophically speaking, said the state is God walking on the earth. God is your supreme power; take away the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, take away the Holy Trinity and your God is going to be the state, because the state becomes your point of supreme power. And so the minute you challenge the doctrine of creation, and you assert that there is a closed universe, although contradictorily, and this is typical of their use of language, they talk about their ideas being the idea of an open universe. This is the kind of semantic trick they’re always playing. But the minute you have this closed universe of evolution the God concept attaches itself to the highest point of power, the state and freedom begins to disappear from the world.

And the minute in modern times, again, the doctrine of evolution was introduced, revolution began and freedom began to disappear. And the minute it began to invade America you began to see rapidly the rise of Statism. Because here is the point of highest power, therefore all power to your God, the state. And so you have the state as God and no escape from it because man no longer has any appeal to any higher law. This was the vice of man in ancient, and in ancient Babylon, in ancient Greece. He was a creature of the state. He was made not in the image of God but in the image of the state. Aristotle said “man is a political animal” he’s a creature of the state! Therefore the state, Plato and Aristotle made clear has the right to tell him whether he can marry or cannot, whether he can give birth to children or cannot, and if he gives birth any unlicensed children they can be destroyed, and he can be punished. Plato’s so called Republic makes this very emphatic. And Plato’s pupils were the thirty tyrants of Greece. They simply set out to apply these principles, and they destroyed Greece.

The closed universe of evolution means to closed state. And to diminish the sovereignty of God in creation at any point is to diminish His sovereignty and redemption, providence, predestination, and in all things else. And total sovereignty must exist in the universe, take away from God and you’re going to give it to the state, because sovereignty is a total concept, either God is totally sovereign or the state is totally sovereign. Sovereignty as a total concept is an inescapable face of the universe; reference the very word sovereignty in the Constitution. Because God alone is sovereign, and they did not give sovereignty to any branch of the federal government or to the states or to people, they simply dropped the use of the word. And it is only as Pollard, an English historian has noted since World War I that the word has again become popular in the United States.

(The goal of?) Versailles is the ant heap. This openly stated by many. Read Roderick Seidenberg’s Post-historic man in Anatomy of the Future, and you see that anti heap is the goal. We find for example in one very influential contemporary writer, this statement, and I quote “Why are we afraid of becoming insects? I can imagine no lovelier goal. The streets of paradise are not more lovely than the highways of the ant heap. Let the hive take my responsibilities, I am weary of them.” End of quote.

But Genesis one says that man is created in the image of God, which means that he is created in knowledge, righteousness, holiness, and to exercise dominion over heaven and earth in the name of God. It means that he is responsible to God. To be created in the image of God means further that man is under authority, under law, not as Satan declares the source of law. And man created in the image of God comes to fulfillment only as he is having fallen, recreated in Christ the true man and the true image of God. And because man is created in the image of God, any attempt to make man into a citizen of the ant heap goes against the very nature of the universe, as Deborah sang in her victory song concerning the tyrant Cisera “the stars in their course fought against Cisera”, the whole of the universe having been created by God moves to one destined purpose, God’s purpose. And men even move forward in terms of God’s law and their blessing in terms of it, or they are destroyed as the judgment of God overtakes them.

And I believe, and in terms of this premise these meetings are being conducted, that the judgment of God is already upon the people in high places today. That this socialistic order that He is increasingly surrounding us is under the judgment of God and shall be destroyed, that time is running out for it, that the closer it comes to succeeding, the closer it comes to judgment. And to the end, and that we must apply ourselves to the word of God for this purpose, the day is soon coming for reconstruction. We’re going to rebuild this country in terms of God’s word. In terms of the glorious liberty of the sons of God, and we need to prepare ourselves for the task of reconstruction.

Let us pray.

Our Lord and our God we give thanks unto Thee for Thy word, we thank Thee that Thou art sovereign and that these ungodly ones, the wicked ones, who dream of creating a paradise apart from Thee have hanging over them Thy judgment, Thy sense of death. Make us mindful our Father as we confront them, that their power is but for a day. That the sentence of judgment has gone forth and has been pronounced in Thy word, and give us grace and faith and strength and boldness to prepare ourselves for victory, and to reconstruction. We pray our Father for Thy blessing upon everyone here present. Bless each household, minister to their every need, Thou knowest the secret and unspoken prayer of every heart, hear we beseech Thee and answer. Heal the broken hearted, comfort the afflicted, bless the joyful in their joy and strengthen us all in Thy service and to Thy praise and glory, in Jesus name Amen.

[Chalcedon advertisement interlude]

[Rushdoony] The Santa Anna register, a series of articles on the scientific evidences against evolution. The articles ran a series of eight of them, and then they were stopped because every student in the area took the articles to class and raised they questions that these articles created, in the classroom. And every college and university in the area protested to the newspaper that it was disrupting their classes, they could not answer the question. And so reluctantly the paper canceled the series, they’ve now been put out on pamphlet form and perhaps Mrs. Terrace {?} can get them for you so that sometime soon you can pick it up. It is an excellent statement. But they will not engage in any debate unless they can get somebody who doesn’t know anything about creationism. They will not debate with a legitimate scientist. The one instances which is about 25 yrs. Old was a series in England between Douglas Dewar an ornithologist on creationism and Shelton as an evolutionist with Sir. Arnold Lunn as the moderator. And it’s quiet a remarkable volume, it’s been published because Shelton comes out very badly, Dewar clearly cornered him and reduced him to total frustration.

Yes?

[Audience Member] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, a good question. There are those that believe in theistic evolution and they have given other names to the same idea, they also speak of it as progressive creationism, and there are several other terms. These are people who are ostensibly evangelical churchman who want to have a foot in both camps. They want to say they believe in creation but they also want to be respectable among scientists who are evolutionist and so they say “well we believe in evolution but behind it is God”. The unhappy factor of this marriage of two ideas is that one always loses out. And inevitably these people end up by sacrificing God in the system; because you cannot link the idea of chaos having energy and God having sovereignty and power. Our Lord said he cannot serve two masters; you’ll either hate the one or love the other. And so this creative evolution always ends in disaster, but it’s very popular in certain circles. IN this area one of your most prominent creative evolutionist is religious circles is Bernard Ramm who teaches at a seminary in this area. It doesn’t have much respect among scientist.

Yes, Paul?

[Audience member] The previous question about a debate originally there will be a debate in Missouri county Oct. 21 & 22 {?}

[Rushdoony] That will be worth having the tape or the text of, because this is a rarity now.

[Audience member] {?}

[Rushdoony] A very good question, what do we mean by natural law? It would take an hour to go into the elementary history of the term, and there isn’t time. But I would say by and large the wise thing to do is to avoid the term entirely. There are possibly valid uses of the term, but if this is what has happened, the fact that you got to have a source of law, you’ve got to have a source of sovereignty, and in modern when men beginning with the enlightenment, began to turn away from God, they turned to this natural law concept and said “well the source of everything is not God, He created (and this is Deism) the world and then He became, so to speak, an absentee landlord. So natural law governs everything, now along came Darwin and he said “yes but nature is just blind, has no law within itself, it’s struggling, it’s the survival of the fittest, its accidental”. So that nature has no real source of law in it, as you observe nature you see all kinds of things in it. So, and this is why, one of the reasons why Marx said Darwin and evolutionary thinking was important, who’s going to supply law in the universe? Its not God and nature, well everything takes place in nature. The moral man and the pervert, the criminal and the Saint, everything is there, which is the law? Now, the evolutionist said “well nature is obviously not the source of law, man is, therefore the state”. Now the older liberal did not believe in state interference because he said “natural law will take care of it”, but the new liberal because he believes in evolution says “well nature has no law, therefore man or the state becomes the source of law.”

In view of this the whole concept of natural law is so completely tainted by this development of the last two centuries I think its unwise to use it at all and simply to speak of God’s law; because this long and complicated history of the natural law concept has so many facets, and especially in the modern sense has been so misused. Natural law today, by the way this is getting into some of the involved state, is the law of the state. That you’re going to get yourself into trouble if you use the concept because this is the kind of thing the subversive is geared to take advantage. But if you talk about God’s law, that you know, and when he takes God’s law and tries to make it mean something else, as Genesis one tries to read evolution into it, it’s so obvious to you you’ve got him. That he is trained through all the semantics tricks which characterized Marxism and Fabianism, to use these con… [audio ends]