You could say that Christians who believe the biblical creation accounts are both accurate and historical have an agenda, and it is true! But so did Charles Darwin have an agenda. He wanted to prove the bible was wrong as regards origins. In his book The Descent of Man, published after his book the Origin of Species, he gives the reasons that influenced his original work.
"I had two distinct objects in view; firstly, to show that species had not been separately created, and secondly, that natural selection had been the chief agent of change…Hence if I have …exaggerated it’s (natural selection's) power….I have at least, as I hope, done good service in aiding to overthrow the dogma of separate creations."
Darwin had other agendas including establishing the link between primates and man as found in his follow up book “The Descent of Man”.
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Evolution of an Idea
- The recipe for Evolution involved the destruction of the old belief that God created everything supernaturally.
- Darwin needed huge periods of time for his theory of evolution to work.
- Lyell made respectable the idea of millions of years and long ages in relation to Geology.
- The collusion of these two enabled the theories of evolution and long ages to be acceptable to the world and the general public.
Charles Lyell who wrote the “Principles of Geology” was the foremost Geologist of his time. Lyell established the principle of “long ages” and millions of years and came to share Darwin’s belief in Evolution. This was vital for Darwin’s theory because he required vast periods of time to be feasible. Both Lyell and Darwin shared an agenda to discredit the accounts of creation and the flood as told in Genesis.
In his private correspondence, Lyell admitted to the strongly anti-biblical (“anti-Mosaical”) nature of his ideas. In 1829, just a few months prior to the publication of the first volume of his Principles of Geology, Lyell wrote, in a letter to fellow old-earth geologist Roderick Murchison:
Darwin had his agenda, and it was not some small-scale incidental matter, it was central to the subject he had spent most of his life studying. It could be argued that destroying the Christian belief in 'separate creations' was his primary objective; and that his theory, which changed and overturned almost everything, was only a Secondary matter.
Scientists are supposed to be objective. Darwin was clearly anything but objective.
Someone who has an agenda but keeps it quiet until long after his major work has been established in the public mind, is not to be trusted in the same way as someone who is honest and open about what he or she believes is and is not.
I trust I shall make my sketch of the progress of geology popular. Old [Rev. John] Fleming is frightened and thinks the age will not stand my anti-Mosaical conclusions and at least that the subject will for a time become unpopular and awkward for the clergy, but I am not afraid. I shall out with the whole but in as conciliatory a manner as possible.
Lyell’s ideas on geology influenced Charles Darwin to think in terms of millions of years, paving the way for his theory of evolution.
