Darwin worse than abortion

Maybe you saw the news release:

Evangelicals say ACLU is Top Threat to Nation’s Spiritual Health.

The American Civil Liberties Union was ranked the top threat to America's spiritual wellbeing in an informal write-in survey of American evangelicals recently conducted by Coral Ridge Ministries, a Christian media outreach.

More than 13,000 Christians across America responded to CRM's 2008 Spiritual State of the Nation Survey, distributed in January, assesses where pro-family Christians stand on a wide range of social, economic, and moral issues. Pro-homosexual indoctrination, abortion, Islamic terrorism, and Hollywood rounded out the listing of top threats to America 's spiritual health.

Nothing surprising there – 99 percent agreement across the board – but I thought it interesting (and statistically significant) that the Evangelicals believe it’s more critical to squelch Darwinian teaching than to extirpate abortion.

13. How important is it that America outlaw abortion?
[80%] Critical [12%] Important

16. How important is it that schools teach evolution as a theory rather than a fact—and include evidence for Intelligent Design?

[83%] Critical [9%] Important

Coral Ridge Ministries is the radio and television outreach of Dr. D. James Kennedy. Its programming reaches more than three million people weekly through more than 750 radio outlets, more than 600 TV stations, and its website, www.coralridge.org.

There were no questions asking whether the nation’s spiritual or civic health might be in danger from the twisted theology and political perversions of certain seminaries, so I guess we’ll never know how those dangers rank. But the survey’s not that far wrong from the radical believer’s point of view.

Darwin, of course, started out as a Christian, educated in theology at Cambridge and teased by his shipmates aboard the Beagle for his Bible-quoting piety, and he continued to cite a divine creator in all his work, but it might not be the creator the Coral Ridge folks believe in.

Says David Quammen in The Reluctant Mr. Darwin:

The existence of god, any sort of god, personal or abstract, immanent or distant, is not what Darwin’s evolutionary theory challenges. What it challenges is the supposed godliness of man, the conviction that we above all other life forms are spiritually elevated, divinely favored, possessed of an immaterial and immortal essence, such that we have special prospects for eternity, special status in the expectations of god, special rights and responsibilities on earth. That’s where Darwin runs afoul of Christianity, Judaism, Islam and probably most other religions on the planet.

In plain language: a soul or no soul? An afterlife or not? Are humans spiritually immortal in a way that chickens and cows aren’t, or just another form of temporarily animated meat? Today we tend to overlook this horrible challenge implied by Darwin’s idea. Theistic evolution has supposedly made the theory safe for people of all faiths.