The Results of Rejecting Creation

The following is an excerpt from How Now Shall We Live?, Chuck Colson & Nancy Pearcey, Tyndale House, 1999, pp. 309-10. You really need to read this book.

In a nutshell, if we reject the biblical teaching about creation, we end up with nature as our creator. Morality then becomes something humans invent when they have evolved to a certain level. There is no transcendent source of moral standards that dictates how we should live. Each individual has the right to chart his or her own course. And if we reject the idea of sin and the Fall, nothing is objectively wrong, and there is no real guilt; there at only false guilt feelings that result from social disapproval. The logical conclusion of this thinking is that redemption means freeing ourselves from false guilt and restoring our natural autonomy by eliminating the stigma from all lifestyles. And the role of public authorities is to mobilize resources to make sure that no negative consequences follow from the choices any individual may make. For if all choices are morally equal, then no one should suffer for the choices he or she makes.

By contrast, Christianity claims that God created the universe with a definite structure — a material order and a moral order. If we live contrary to that order, we sin against God, and the consequences are invariably harmful and painful, on both a personal and a social level. On the other hand, if we submit to that order and live in harmony with it, then our lives will be happier and healthier. The role of public authorities is to encourage people to live according to the principles that make for social health and harmony.

Over the past four decades, our public discourse was dominated by the value-free model. Yet today, its disastrous consequences are becoming abundantly clear. Even determined secularists have begun to see that society simply can't keep up with the costs of personal and moral irresponsibility: Over those same four decades, abortion and teen pregnancy soared; the welfare system grew overloaded; crime rates shot up, especially among juveniles; health-care costs climbed so fast that the government keeps threatening to take over (even as Medicare projects bankruptcy in a few years). It is becoming increasingly obvious that the welfare state has not been able to "invent ways" to give fatherless families "the same physical and psychic necessities of life available to other kinds of families," as Jencks put lt. Instead, welfare has helped create a permanent underclass that is disordered and demoralized. By compensating for irresponsible behavior, government has, in essence, subsidized it, thus encouraging more of it.