Is Evolution Demonic?

Tom:  Our topic for this week is The Occult Invasion by Dave Hunt, subtitled: The Subtle Seduction of the World and the Church, for the past couple of weeks and for some weeks ahead, because the content of the book is fascinating, but also very important. Because we are indeed, in an occult invasion both in the world, and of greater concern to us, is the invasion that’s taking place in the church. Now, Dave, one of the things that people don’t realize is that the church has ministries, really good ministries, that address the creation/evolution problem. But sometimes it’s not advanced that evolution really goes way back. Definitely before Darwin and his views—it goes back to Eastern mysticism.

Dave:  Well, evolution is part of the occult. It’s part of that lie that the serpent gave Eve in the Garden. You don’t die, you just get recycled. You’re being reincarnated, and you are on a journey upward to godhood. There’s no point in coming back again and again if you’re not advancing. So reincarnation and evolution are very much related. But let me quote from WL Wilmhurst’s book, The Meaning of Masonry. He’s one of the leading authorities on masonry. This is what he says: “The evolution of man into superman . . . ” (We’re not just talking about evolving into human beings but evolving upward to godhood).“The evolution of man into superman was always the purpose of the ancient mysteries (that is, the secret power trips, the occultisms). Man who has sprung from the earth and developed through the lower kingdoms of nature to his present rational state, has yet to complete his evolution by becoming a god-like being and unifying his conscious with the omniscient.” So the goal of evolution has always been to reach godhood. In other words, we’re just at the beginning stages here.

Tom:  So, the 1860s, Darwin with his theory, but actually we can go back to heaven can’t we?  I mean we can go back to its real origin, which began in heaven according to Isaiah:14:14I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High.
See All... you have Lucifer exalting himself. He would be like the Most High. Now that ‘s “evolving upward,” isn’t it?  And then he brings that same lie, that self-delusion, and he offers it to Eve, that she will be as God. Now, basically, as a finite being, there has to be an evolution upward, right? Isn’t that what . . . ?

Dave:  Well, if you’re going to get to godhood, you’ve got to somehow ascend.

Tom:  Right.

Dave:  Darwin called it the “descent of man,” but he didn’t mean going down but the origin of man. Listen to what Darwin (and he recognized the spiritual implications of his theory), in The Descent of Man, he wrote: “Man may be excused for feeling some pride at having risen to the very summit of the organic scale, and the fact of his having risen instead of having been aboriginally placed there (you know, that would be by creation, you would call it) may give him hopes for a still higher destiny in the distant future. So we are “evolving upwards.”

I mentioned, I think it was to somebody I was sitting next to on an airplane recently, Robert Jastrow, you know, one of the world’s leading astronomers, founder and director for many years of the Goddard Space Institute that sent Pioneer and Voyager into space—he’s an agnostic—he said, “Evolution could have been going on on some planets ten billion years longer than on planet earth, and those beings would be as far beyond man on the evolutionary scale as man is beyond a worm.” And he said, “They would seem like gods to us, they would have such powers.” And then he says, “And some of them could have evolved beyond the need of bodies. They are what old fashioned religious people call spirit beings.” 

Well, what a setup for demons! Because we’re trying to contact these extra-terrestrial beings out there, some of whom maybe aren’t even physical—how are we going to tell if they are telling us the truth, and so forth?  So, anyway, the point is that even the agnostic scientist says that there are god-like beings out there. They have been created by this “power of evolution.” The whole purpose, really, of the theory of evolution is to do away with the God who created us so we are not morally accountable to Him. This was the motive of Darwin, and . . .

Tom:  But also, it was the motive of Satan in the Garden of Eden.

Dave:  Of course, right.

Tom:  You know those who are New Agers will recognize the name Ken Wilber, and in one of his books, The Atman Project—Atman, I assume, the Hindu idea of the individual god, Atman, [and] Brahman is the universal god. He says, “If men and women have ultimately come up from amoebas, then they are ultimately on their way towards god.” Here is the New Age lie; there is nothing new about it. It’s right out of the Garden.

Dave:  Yes, so evolution then plays—some people say, “Well, what’s evolution doing in a book on the occult?”  Evolution is really at the heart of it. This is how we become gods, and evolution, of course, causes you to believe in some kind of a force innate within the universe that is moving us in the direction of godhood. Therefore, if you can tap into this force through yoga or some other spiritual technique, then you can accelerate your progress towards godhood and gain this power. So, evolution plays a really important role, and it also plays an important role [in that] it has cost an awful lot of young people their faith. Of course you can’t destroy real faith. But an awful lot of young people who were raised in Christian homes, who believed in God [and] who believed in the Bible, when they are confronted by some bright professor in a university or even in high school, who says, “Look, Genesis is a myth, that’s not the way it happened. It happened through evolution,” and because this is science speaking, they believe it, well, then they’ve had the rug pulled out from under them. And an awful lot of young people have turned away from God [and] from Christianity because of evolution. So it’s really an important topic.

Tom:  Right, I mean it rejects the God of the Bible and really leads in the direction of replacing the God of the Bible by, as we are working our way up the godhood, we become gods ourselves.

Dave, there is an issue here of . . . we’re saying “the New Age,” “Eastern mysticism”—evolution has always been at the heart of these beliefs. We see it in some of their doctrines and some of their teachings, which, by the way, sometimes Christians have taken as truth and bought into, in effect. For example, reincarnation. Without evolution, reincarnation is meaningless isn’t it? 

Dave:  Right, yes. You know, if you are coming back, being reincarnated all the time, what’s the point unless you are progressing—evolving higher? That’s, as we mentioned, the connection.

Tom:The same with karma. That teaching implies that you’re going do things, you’re going to work things out, and you are going to evolve upward based on dealing with your karma.

Dave:  Or downward.

Tom:  Right.

Dave:  So it’s a two-edged sword actually—karma and reincarnation. But unfortunately, these ideas . . . well evolution is being accepted both among Catholics and evangelicals—not just Protestants but evangelicals. Not only being accepted, but it has been accepted for many years.

I remember receiving, when, a couple of years ago, the pope came out, and it was a statement to the Pontifical Academy of Science in Rome, that evolution was true, I got a call from a reporter at the New York Times, or from a number of radio stations. “Mr. Hunt, what is your reaction to that? What do you think of that?”

And I said, “I don’t have any reaction. Why should I have a reaction? This is what the Catholic Church has always believed. You would find it in the 1967 New Catholic Encyclopedia. In 1982, on the 100th anniversary of the death of Darwin, the Pontifical Academy of Sciences there in the Vatican held a conference in honor of Darwin. It’s taught in Catholic schools—they believe it, and the pope, in fact, I find his statement to the Academy rather interesting. Let me just read a part of it. He says, “Truth cannot contradict truth, and since evolution is a scientific truth, therefore the truth of the Bible can’t contradict it.”

And then he says, “The exegete and the theologian must keep informed about the results achieved by the natural sciences.”  In other words, be careful, you might make a mistake. You better check with scientists first—as though God doesn’t know about science. And I think the pope kind of had a little flashback there to the case of Galileo, you remember? When Pope Urban VIII threatened an elderly and very ill Galileo with torture at the Inquisition—well, he’s on his knees before Rome’s Holy Office of the Inquisition recanting with his lips, but not with his heart, that the sun—and now he’s got to say that the sun and all heavenly bodies revolve around the earth. And he knew that wasn’t true. But that remained official Roman Catholic dogma for centuries, with “infallible” popes affirming it.

It wasn’t until 1992 that the Vatican finally officially admitted that Galileo was indeed right. So the pope is saying, “Check it out with the scientists first. We don’t want to make any more mistakes.” I find that tragic, and I think it is pitiful, as though the Holy Spirit who inspired the Bible doesn’t know about science.

But that’s not the worst of it, Tom. An editorial in Christianity Today backed the pope up! And New Man magazine also said basically the same. It’s taught in our Christian universities and other Christian schools, but what they teach is theistic evolution.

Tom:  Dave, before we get into that, I just want to back and make another point about the Roman Catholic view. Many who are evangelicals were a little bit shocked, because, you know, the Bible-believers—I’m talking about Christian leaders—were shocked at the statement by the pope on evolution, but they kind of smoothed it over very quickly. But in your book you quote a Catholic priest, Edwin Daschbach, and I think this is a point that really ought to be brought home to evangelicals, because if they think it’s just an accommodation to the scientific community—it’s not. It’s really directed at evangelicals, those who are Bible-believers who take God’s Word literally.

I want to quote some of this from this Catholic priest, “The church then does not accept the literal interpretation of the opening chapters of the book of Genesis that would lead us to think that God, for example, actually made two grown adults suddenly from clay and rib. Catholics should be against creation science for at least three serious reasons.”

And these reasons—I mean, they’re not pulling any punches here: “First, it effectively teaches a distrust of science and ultimately hurts religion, as well. By defending a literal understanding of the opening chapters of Genesis, creation science sets itself squarely against the world of true scientific discovery. The myths used by the Genesis authors are simply tools with which they communicate their religious belief.”

I mean this is tough stuff. “Second, creation science is contrary to the method of interpreting scripture favored universally by scholars and strongly approved by our church.”

I won’t go into that, that speaks for itself. But this last one: “Third, creation science leads to deep prejudice and bigotry against the Catholic Church. A case in point is the book of Revelation when creation science advocates ply their fundamentalist tools to this final scriptural book, the church often becomes a target for vehement attack.”  So, a lot of this is really directed at what they would call fundamentalists, but what we would say are just evangelicals—those who believe God’s Word and take it literally where it’s meant to be taken literally.

Dave:  Well there are serious consequences to this. First of all, the listeners need to understand: what do they mean by evolution?  Well, the pope’s not an atheist. The pope says, “We’ll stand firm on this”—that God put a soul; it was God who put a human soul in these creatures.

Now, Cardinal O’Connor said that Adam and Eve were a couple of anthropoid creatures. So they are talking about theistic evolution, which says God used evolution to bring these anthropoid creatures up to close enough to human beings and then, at that time, God put a human soul in them.

Now, we have some serious consequences: 1) It contradicts the Bible. “Oh we’re going to believe in God; we believe God put a human soul,” and the pope says, “We’ll stand firm on that.”

But wait a minute. How does it contradict the Bible? Well, in a lot of ways. There is no way that you can reconcile God creating Adam out of the clay, dust of the ground. Adam is there (well, we don’t know how long, whether it was days or months or years) but certainly, he was there for a period of time. He named the animals, he talked with God, and so forth, and God saw that Adam needed a companion. So He puts Adam to sleep and takes his rib and makes a woman out of this.

Now you can’t reconcile that with two critters, male and female, evolving side by side over thousands or millions of years, and then God zaps them with a human soul. Adam is mentioned thirty times in ten books of the Bible. If you pull Adam out of there, you have punctured so many holes in the Bible, it can’t be a container for truth. Jesus believed in Adam and Eve. He quoted from Genesis.

Tom:  Right.

Dave:  The Bible says “By one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin, so death passed upon all men.” Well, but if we’ve got death—critters evolving and dying before Adam came into existence and before he sinned, then you’ve got some pretty serious consequences.

The American Atheist magazine—they know the consequences of this. Let me quote it to you: “Destroy Adam and Eve and original sin, and in the rubble you will find the sorry remains of the Son of God and take away the meaning of His death. If death preceded man, and was not a result of Adam’s sin, then sin is fiction. If sin is fiction, then we have no need for a Savior. Evolution destroys utterly and finally the very reason for Jesus’ earthly life. If Jesus was not the Redeemer who died for our sins (and this is what evolution means) then Christianity is nothing.”

Tom:  Now, Dave, just let me add onto that. Now, this is shocking, because we are talking about atheists here who see the problem—they see it clearly. They are enemies of the gospel, and they see it. Yet Christianity Today, after the pope made his endorsement of evolution—there was an editorial that declared, “John Paul II was reminding scientists that if they were to be faithful Christians, there were limits beyond which their science could not take them. No theory of evolution was acceptable that did not recognize the divine origin of the human soul.” Now what is that?

Dave:  Well that’s a—it’s irrational, first of all, because as the American Atheist points out, never mind the soul, the body, the evolving body, and their dying, evolution means Christianity isn’t true. It’s just as simple as this Tom. If I cannot believe what the Bible says in Genesis about the origin of man, why should I believe what the Bible says about the destiny of man? If I can’t believe what the Bible says, the explanation for man’s separation from God, why should I believe what the Bible says about man’s reconciliation to God?  So Genesis is the foundation for the Bible. If Genesis is not true, you’ve pulled the rug out from under the Bible. We’re not going to be intimidated by science, and if I could find it here, I would like to just read a quote by Charles Haddon Spurgeon. Do we have time for it?

Tom:  Yes.

Dave:  He said, “We shall, with the sword of the Spirit, maintain the whole truth as ours and shall not accept a part of it as a grant from the enemies of God. The truth of God we will maintain as the truth of God, and we shall not retain it because the philosophic or scientific mind consents to our doing so. If scientists agree to our believing a part of the Bible, we thank them for nothing. We believe it, whether or no. Their assent is of no more consequence to our faith, than the consent of the mole to the eagle’s sight. God being with us, we shall not cease from this glorying, but will hold the whole of revealed truth even to the end.”

One of the tragedies today is our young people are being intimidated by science; intimidated by their professors in the universities, and so forth,  and we need some training in Sunday school, in our churches, that will arm our youth against all of the deception and the delusions and the antichristian theories that are out there that would cause them to lose their faith, or at best to compromise the faith. The pope is obviously intimidated by science. He says, “Check it out first.”

Tom:  Right, but then we have evangelicals accommodating this kind of thing. New Man,when it was the official magazine of Promise Keepers—here’s a quote from . . . now these are evangelicals who ought to know better and ought to be concerned, maybe not necessarily with what’s going on in the Catholic Church, but certainly what they are saying, because they are influencing millions of other evangelicals. But I’ll quote this, “Remember, however, that the debate over how God created the world through millions of years of evolutionary work or through a few words spoken over a few days is not the central tenet of Christianity.”  Well, it was good for Jesus.

Dave:  Well, “not the central tenet”—I don’t know what he means by that, but I can tell you it is the foundation. Theistic evolution, as we have said, absolutely contradicts the Word of God. Now you are going to have to take the Bible as a whole. You can’t pick and choose, and, as you know as a former Catholic, the Catholic Church teaches that the Bible is inerrant only with regard to faith and morals. When it speaks on faith and morals, then it’s inerrant. When it speaks on science and history it is not inerrant.

Now, look, doesn’t God know about science and history? Why would God inspire people to write something that isn’t true scientifically and historically? But then when He inspires them about faith and morals, then it is accurate. It doesn’t make sense, and it just undermines confidence in God’s Word.

And as this American Atheist says “ . . . in the rubble you will find the sorry remains of the Son of God, and you will realize that Christianity isn’t true if the story of Adam and Eve is not true.” We’ve got to stand for truth and earnestly contend for the faith and not compromise with people—I don’t care what their credentials are, scientifically or whatever, or what degrees they have. I am going to stand upon the Word of God, and I will not be ashamed because God knows the truth! He created this universe, and He knows all about it, and He has told us the truth about it.