With regard to my reading assignments connected to my doctoral studies with Corban University, Dr. Henry Morris’s book entitled, "The Long War Against God: The History and Impact of the Creation/ Evolution Conflict” is a worthy read. Dr. Morris shows how evolutionary theory, in direct opposition to biblical creationism, undergirds the entire modernist project, including even the eastern mysticism of New Age occultism. Such a vast, all-encompassin g worldview strongly suggests that modern evolutionary theory is anything but new. On the contrary, Morris strongly argues that evolutionism is very ancient. Morris easily demonstrates how evolutionism not only goes back to Lucretius and Epicureanism, but even predates Socrates and Plato philosophically , scientifically, and religiously. Morris points out how evolutionism is essentially rooted in the mystery religion of the Tower of Babel going all the way back to Genesis 10-11 and the Table of Nations. As such, when God dispersed the original Babylonians/ Sumerians across the planet replete with new languages, environments, and cultures, they managed to take the cult of religious evolutionism with them – all of which is at the very heart of man’s rebellion against God. As such, "for too many, Evolution has become not only their Creator but also their Savior.” Morris points out here, how the doctrine of progress which underlies much evolutionary theory, is a false secular counterfeit salvation of sorts.

Morris spends some time detailing how archaeology has uncovered the exact opposite of what evolutionism normally teaches with regard to ancient history. The typical storyline of how ancient tribes were veritable cavemen who worshiped nature and animals before evolving into more sophisticated religious doctrines like polytheism, monotheism, and pantheism, is everywhere betrayed by the actual archaeological evidence. Morris notes how there are still some savage tribes who are alive today, which by itself undercuts evolutionary theory. Morris thus further points out, "even the most ‘savage’ tribes today, as well as the earliest traditions of the nations of the past (Egypt, Sumeria, India, China, Greece, etc.) manifest an original belief in a high God who originally made the world. In other words, within animistic tribes and cultures, their primitive monotheism had degenerated into pantheism, then polytheism, and finally into crude animism.” The truth of the matter is thus the opposite of what is normally presented in modern education. Morris also notes how the fossil evidence demonstrates massive extinction rather than evolution. He then states how the 1st and 2nd Law of Thermodynamics in science can easily explain what the Bible has said all along with regard to creation. Originally there was a good God who created a good world that is still being conserved, but that the law of increasing chaos, something which the Bible presumes is the the Fall, is also very much at work leading to increasing entropy, loss, and eventually destruction.

Contrary to popular opinion, Morris thus makes the argument the doctrine of evolution has deep religious roots going back to the ancient pagan past long before philosophy or science or even modern Darwinism took center stage. Starting from ancient nature worship and idolatry, Morris discusses how evolutionism undergirded such myths, whether that be with regard to the early Sumerians, or the ancient Egyptians and/or the Chinese, or other pagan cosmogonies popularly held by many tribes and groups across the planet which later showed up in India and Greece as well. Even Israel’s fight against Baalism had an evolutionary tinge to it that is often overlooked, but Morris leaves this argument undeveloped.

Of special note were the early Greek secularists who predated Socrates and Plato. Morris describes how early Greek scientists and thinkers like Xenophanes, Anaxagoras, Heraclitus, Empedocles, Democritus, and Leucippus passed on their evolutionary views to Lucretius and Epicureanism a few centuries later. Morris then drops this line, "Thales and Anaximander taught that men evolved from animals, animals from plants, plants from organic elements, and all these from water. Xenophanes argued, on the basis of fossil shells on mountains, that land animals had evolved from marine animals. Both Heraclitus and Empedocles held that random changes led to development, which involved a form of struggle for existence and natural selection, long anticipating Darwin.” Democritus emphasized that "all things were made of fundamental invisible particles, which he called ‘atoms’ (he coined the word, in fact).” In Acts 17, St. Paul later famously debated with Epicureans on the streets of Athens at the marketplace. Paul also debated their cousins, the Stoics, in Athens as well. The Stoics were pantheistic, but still were evolutionists. Moreover, many Greek cosmogonies actually taught that while the universe was essentially eternal, the material world we live in today came about through a process of de-evolution – a backward or downward view of evolution that played no small role in the rise of Gnosticism against the early church.

Such Greek cosmological ideas were then carried over into the church through the teachings of Aristotle and Plato as many Christian scholars unwittingly sanctified both of them to argue against paganism. While Platonic Christianity dominated the early church, Aristotelian Christianity dominated the medieval church, with no small thanks to Thomas Aquinas. Here, the Greek emphasis upon the "Great Chain of Being” going back to Plato played a large role in developing Christian natural theology of the Scholastic period, which then later helped kick off the Renaissance. Morris writes that the "Great Chain of Being” is where "living organisms can be arranged in a continuous linear scale, with man at the top and the simplest at the bottom. Below this are stones, metals, earth, water, air, and ether. Above man are higher worlds, angels, cherubim, and finally God. In this ideal construct, there are no gaps,” which were later filled in with evolutionary time and the mutability of all natural forms as they were continuously being made and processed.

One of the great ironies here is how Galileo later was heavily criticized for rejecting Aristotelian Catholic cosmology, but that evolutionary theory later regurgitated Scholasticism’s "Great Chain of Being” through the works of French scholars in the 1600’s and 1700’s. Such a legacy was then passed on to Lamarck (1744-1829). While Darwin and many evolutionists since have been very critical of Lamarckian mechanisms to explain evolution, there is no question he was a proto-Darwinist . Lyell’s geology and his prodding of Darwin eventually led to the Origin of Species being published with some competition coming from another English explorer who was pushing for the same thesis, but had more mystical ideas about evolutionism he had absorbed from living with primitive tribes.

Accordingly, but unfortunately also left undeveloped in his book, Morris mentions how perhaps even more fundamental to the development of Darwinism were German scholars rather than French ones like Lamarck. Morris points out how early German evolutionists in the 1700's and early 1800's were transcendentali st because of their mixing of romanticism, semi-nature worship, deism, and empiricism wherein Goethe (1749-1832) represented the climax of this movement. A critical scholar along this particular road was Alexander von Humboldt, Germany's evolutionary geographer and environmentalis t of the early 1800's who Morris seems unaware of. Yet Humboldt was one of Darwin's favorite authors. Darwin's famous 5 year voyage on the Beagle was directly inspired by Humboldt's 5 year South American voyage from 1799-1804. Humboldt's works and diaries were profusely read by Darwin on his long journey.

Humboldt is one of the early fathers of German nativist and/or racial ecology which circulated in the anti-Judeo Christian academic brew of the European Academy of the 1800's. Even Darwin's original subtitle in his Origin of the Species was blatantly racist. Morris then goes on to show how both Nazism and Marxism were heavily indebted to Darwinism, with no small help coming from German Social Darwinist, Ernst Haeckel, who coined the term ecology in 1866, both of which were used to create a grand socialist slaughterhouse that was the 20th century.

Neither is it a coincidence that Hegel’s philosophy of history based on philosophical-s piritual evolutionism preceded Darwinism by a generation. One could easily make the case that Darwinism was merely a biological form of Hegelian spirit. As such, Darwin’s Victorian Social Darwinism, which featured monopoly capitalism as its own justification in the name of survival of the fittest, was quickly outplayed and outmaneuvered by both a Socialist, Fascist, and Marxist Social Darwinism that continued to the be the case throughout the 20th century.

Thanks to all this, virtually all of education is now largely based on evolutionary theory in one form or another, and too many Christians, according to Morris, have contributed greatly to this by refusing to stand up for biblical creationism. Morris bitingly writes how it was the Christians, steeped in the progressivist natural theology of the 1800's of the European Academy rather than in the Bible, who were among the first ones to help promote Darwin's theory rather than the scientist of the day. Paleontologists were initially heavily critical of Darwin because of the lack of fossil evidence, a problem which has only greatly worsened since he originally proposed his thesis thanks to all of the bones which have been dug up since then continue to show lack of evolution from one species to another. Yet when the paleontologists saw the theologians flock to Darwinism, they went along with it helping to lay the very evolutionary century that was the 20th.