Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street. According to the principle of the day, posted August 26 by multi-billion dollar hedge fund manager Ray Dalio, quote, evolution is the single greatest force in the universe. It's the only thing that's permanent, it drives everything. He then went on to declare everything from the smallest subatomic particle to the entire galaxy is evolving.
While everything apparently dies or disappears in time, the truth is, all just gets reconfigured in evolving forms. Remember, that energy can't be destroyed. It can only be reconfigured.
So, the same stuff is continuously falling apart and coalescing in different forms. The force behind that is evolution. End quote.
Now, if this psalm to the glory of non-religious materialism sounds quite religious to you, it is. Often those most wholeheartedly dedicated to atheism and its aimless cosmic progression make proclamations like universe created or nature provided or as Dalio put it, evolution drives. They claim that everything results from a purposeless, pointless series of atomic reactions, but then they imply that this story of the universe is also somehow a storyteller. They talk of evolution as if it's the mind behind it all, including itself, a mind that might not love us, but which nonetheless. Has a plan for our lives.
In the dramatic opening to the 1980 documentary Cosmos, Carl Sagan announced the Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be. Decades later, Neil deGrasse Tyson reincarnated the series by declaring, and I quote, a generation ago, the astronomer Carl Sagan launched hundreds of millions of us on a great adventure.
Now, I doubt that he meant here to quote Stephen Curtis Chapman. much less to borrow those same theistic assumptions. But that's what he did. He saddled up that same horse. Even the best attempts to demonstrate that the universe is meaningless tend to smuggle in language of purpose, transcendence, wonder.
And they are every bit as evangelistic as the religions they often despise in their attempts to convince and convert others. As it turns out, the theistic impulse shows up wherever and whenever human beings try to make sense of their world. That's probably 'cause the world was made to point us to God. It's the same impulse that drove the ancients to explain the world that drives all of us today. It's the same impulse that led pagans to worship something.
that's seen in the same reverence for scientific theory and technological innovation. Every world view assumes that there is some kind of plan to life, even those that deny the planner. If the materialists are right, all that is or ever was or ever will be amounts to in the end nothing.
So there's no great adventure here to be found or had. All of the high-sounding rhetoric is just a way to talk about the entropy that will end in the heat death of the universe where all life, light, and order ends in darkness. Life's just a much longer version of Samuel Beckett's very short play The Breath. in which life begins with a gasp, ends with a gasp, and everything in between is simply garbage. That worldview, of course, is just simply not big enough for life as we know it.
As G.K. Chesterton said, and I quote: the worst moment for an atheist is when he's really thankful. but has no one to thank. Dahlio might wish to credit Evolution for all of this, but he's just really looking for someone behind it all. Even as he denies anyone is there, but there is someone there.
There is a direction the universe is headed. There is a life. And life is an adventure that's worth exploring. Even better, that God that's behind all of this has made himself known, not only in what he has made and what he has said. but ultimately in Jesus of Nazareth.
As he has said to us in Isaiah 43, and I quote, but now thus says the Lord. He who created you, O Jacob, He who formed you, O Israel. Fear not, for I have redeemed you. I have called you by name. You are mine.
For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street with Break Point. Today's Breakpoint was co-authored by Dr. Timothy Padgett. If you appreciate Breakpoint, would you leave us a review wherever you download your podcast? And for a version of this commentary that you can download or print out or email and share with others, go to breakpoint.org.
