Why you should become a Bible-believing anarchist
who also believes the universe was created around 4004 B.C.
In his 20s and 30s, Robert Chambers was a Scottish publisher, writer, and journalist. He co-founded the publishing company W. & R. Chambers with his brother William, and they published books, periodicals, and educational materials. Gary North says this:
Gertrude Himmelfarb, in her superb study, Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution (1959), quoted an amusing and highly revealing section from Benjamin Disraeli’s 1847 novel, Tancred. Disraeli, who later became England’s Prime Minister, caught the new evolutionistic spirit of some of Britain’s upper classes—pre-Darwinian evolution, and a perspective universally condemned by scientists everywhere prior to Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859). A fashionable lady urges Tancred, the hero, to read a new book, Revelations of Chaos (actually, Robert Chambers’ anonymously printed and enormously popular Vestiges of Creation): “You know, all is development. The principle is perpetually going on. First, there was nothing, then there was something; then—I forget the next—I think there were shells, then fishes; then we came—let me see—did we come next? Never mind that; we came at last. And at the next change there will be something very superior to us—something with wings. Ah! that’s it: we were fishes, and I believe we shall be crows. But you must read it. [Tancred protests, mentioning that he had never been a fish. She goes on:] Oh! but it is all proved. . . . You understand, it is all science. Everything is proved—by geology, you know.”
It was people like this lady who bought 24,000 copies of Vestiges of Creation from its publication in 1844 until 1860—not the scientists, but good, upstanding Anglican Church members. When Darwin’s Origin was published, the entire edition of 1,250 copies was sold out to booksellers in one day. The doctrine of evolution, rejected by scientists in 1850, was the universal orthodoxy in 1875. The idea of natural selection over millions of years had become the catch-all of the sciences. The entire universe is a chance operation in this perspective. Chance brought all things into existence (if in fact all things were not always in existence), and chance presently sustains the system. The utterly improbable laws of probability provide creation with whatever piecemeal direction it possesses. This cosmology was a return to the cosmologies of ancient paganism, though of course it is all dressed up in its scientific smock and footnotes.
The reigning cosmologies of the non-Christian world have always had one feature in common: they do not distinguish between the being of God and the being of the universe. In all these cosmogonies—stories of the original creation—a finite god created the world out of a preexisting “stuff,” either spiritual or material. This god, only comparatively powerful, faced the contingent (chance) elements of the ultimately mysterious “stuff” in a way analogous to the way we now face a basically mysterious creation. Chance is therefore ultimate in most non-biblical systems. Some “primitive” cosmogonies affirm creation from an original cosmic egg (Polynesian, eighth-century Japan).1 A large number of the creation stories were creation out of water (Maori, certain California Indian tribes, the Central Bantu Tribe of the Lunda Cluster, Mayan Indians in Central America, Babylon). The Egyptian text, “The Book of Overthrowing Apophis,” provides an excellent example of a water cosmogony: “The Lord of All, after having come into being, says: I am he who came into being as Khepri (i.e., the Becoming One). When I came into being, the beings came into being, all the beings came into being after I became. Numerous are those who became, who came out of my mouth, before heaven ever existed, nor earth came into being, nor the worms, nor snakes, were created in this place. I being in weariness, was bound to them in the Watery Abyss. I found no place to stand.”3 After planning in his heart the various beings, he spat them out of his mouth. “It was my father the Watery Abyss who brought them up and my eye followed them (?) while they became far from me.” This god is not the sovereign God of the biblical creation story. The Bible’s God did not spring from a watery abyss, nor did He create the world from His own substance. He created it out of nothing.
This is a must-read article.