Was Darwin Wrong?

Preliminary Comments

Mount St. Helens in southwest Washington State, USA, has awakened, and lava is oozing out. The volcano’s renewed activity is being keenly watched by creationist geologists.

The cover story of November’s National Geographic (which is in the mail to USA and international subscribers right now) poses the questions: “Was Darwin wrong?” and “How well has Darwin stood the test of time?” On its website, National Geographic has already revealed its cards with comments like there is “overwhelming evidence” for Darwinian evolution and that it is really more than just an unsubstantiated hypothesis.

For an updated, detailed review of the 33-page cover story, please see National Geographic Is Wrong and so Was Darwin, posted 8 November 2004.

For the moment, we have some preliminary comments and questions. For example, why this topic after decades of heavily promoting evolution through its glossy pages (and sometimes having to retract its evolution stories)? National Geographic points out (in an excerpt from the November issue) that:

“ … not just scriptural literalists remain unpersuaded about evolution. According to a Gallup poll drawn from more than a thousand telephone interviews conducted in February 2001, no less than 45 percent of responding U.S. adults agreed that ‘God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so.’ Evolution, by their lights, played no role in shaping us.

“Only 37 percent of the polled Americans were satisfied with allowing room for both God and Darwin—that is, divine initiative to get things started, evolution as the creative means. (This view, according to more than one papal pronouncement, is compatible with Roman Catholic dogma.) Still fewer Americans, only 12 percent, believed that humans evolved from other life-forms without any involvement of a god.

“The most startling thing about these poll numbers is not that so many Americans reject evolution, but that the statistical breakdown hasn't changed much in two decades. Gallup interviewers posed exactly the same choices in 1982, 1993, 1997, and 1999. The creationist conviction—that God alone, and not evolution, produced humans—has never drawn less than 44 percent. In other words, nearly half the American populace prefers to believe that Charles Darwin was wrong where it mattered most.”

We praise God that through ministries like the Institute for Creation Research, the Creation Research Society, Answers in Genesis (on its website, National Geographic calls this AiG website a “very large young-Earth creationist website.1 Although most material is in English, it includes pages in ten Asian and European languages”) and dozens of other creation groups, the evolutionist worldview that so dominates America’s academic and media establishments is not having the impact that the editors of National Geographic seek.

The National Geographic article will also point out the irony of Darwin’s famous resting place. Read our commentary about this incredible display of compromise within one part of Christendom.

For an updated, detailed review of this 33-page article, please see National Geographic Is Wrong and so Was Darwin.