During the recent holidays, I visited the Australian Museum in Sydney. The place was alive with people, especially school children. I was particularly interested in the section dealing with “human evolution”, which attracted hordes of curious on-lookers.

For many years now the museum has vigorously promoted the theory of evolu­tion as fact. The curators, who have put the exhibition together, have a clear message for the viewing public: the world has made itself through evolution, and is in the process of evolving further.

As with other museums around the world, the curators have given the public no indication that there are alternative interpretations about the origins of man. Nowhere do they suggest that there are conflicting theories. People are given no opportunity to make up their own minds on the basis of the evidence. Our minds are made up for us.

One particularly interesting section of the human evolution exhibition was a dis­play entitled The Apes. It consisted of some large sketches of a gorilla, a human, a chimpanzee, an orangutan and a gibbon ape. They were all naked male figures standing upright in that order, and side by side as in a police identification parade. The caption told me that these were the “five kinds of living ape in the world today”.

The display reinforces the idea that humans evolved from apes by pointing to alleged similarities between humans and the other apes in a number of social activities, including mating, love-making and the murder. The sign in the display case reads: “In all societies murder may be done to enhance the murderer’s social status. On one occasion the son of an ageing dominant male gorilla killed his father’s consort, a move that improved his status. Political murders of this kind are a familiar part of all human societies.”

The display teaches that the present behaviour of men and women must be understood and judged in the light of the behaviour of our alleged fellow apes. From this perspective, it is understandable and natural that some humans murder each other for political reasons, because our fel­low apes, the gorillas, do the same. It is understandable and natural that “many humans” should be sexually promiscuous because chimpanzees are sexually promis­cuous.

I will be interested to know whether courts of the future will be required to receive evidence of this kind in mitigation of punishment for murder and other vio­lent offences. If Darwinian evolution is true, why not?

Although I have no empirical evidence, I suspect that the Australian Museum’s exhi­bition will encourage school students and the wider public to look to the family of apes as possible role models. When pictures of mating chimpanzees are placed side by side with a nude human couple engaged in sexual intercourse, I imagine that viewers who believe the theory of evolution may become less sexually restrained. One can only speculate as to the amount of damage this is causing individuals and society.

Sadly, museums today have no room for anything which depicts man as distinct from the animal world. Nor do they appear willing to portray human beings as created in the image of God and then fallen, as the book of Genesis teaches.

Instead, museums around the world promote the lie of evolution that there is no downward movement in the history of mankind. Human progress is represented by a constant upward curve. We developed from “pond slime” to be part of the family of the apes, all of whom we have now surpassed even though we still have some sim­ilar behaviour traits. And these traits have supposedly been acquired through the processes of natural selection and survival of the fittest on the way up, and not as a result of our tragic fall into sin from a state of original goodness.

According to evolutionists, the world is a cruel place created by the impersonal process of chance, not God. As the biolo­gist Monod said in an interview in Australia in 1976:

(Natural) selection is the blindest, and most cruel way of evolving new species ... The struggle for life and elimina­tion of the weakest is a horrible process, against which our whole modern ethic revolts ... I am surprised that a Christian would defend the whole idea that this is the process which God more or less set up in order to have evolution.

It has to be said that the Australian Museum is completely consistent in the way it deals with the implications of what it believes to be the fact of evolution. If evolution is true, the exhibition cannot be disputed. It logically follows.

However, belief in evolution has its con­sequences. As the King James Bible puts it “as (man) thinketh in his heart, so is he” (Prov. 23:7). In other words, the worldview of an individual, of a nation, always affects behaviour. We see clearly from history that a worldview based on Darwinian evolution leads to policies and practices that are enormously damaging to nations and their people.

Where Darwinian evolution is accepted as fact, the first casualty for most people is the Christian faith. Darwin himself is an example of this. His original position was that of a creationist and nominal Christian. After his experiences on the Beagle, he became a theistic evolutionist and soon abandoned the Christian faith altogether. In his autobiography he testified:

I had gradually come, by this time (about 1837 just after his experience on the Beagle), to see that the Old Testament, from its mani­festly fake history of the world ... was no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindus, or the beliefs of any barbar­ian.

Is it surprising that so many people today have rejected the Christian faith because they believe that evolution is a proven fact? They see the inherent contra­diction between an evolutionary view of life and the one presented by the Bible. Unfortunately, most people never get to see the scientific information which raises confidence in the Bible so they think the Christian faith is the stuff of fairy-tales. As a result, they opt for a worldview that is based on naturalistic evolution.

This has been noted by Christian observers. For example, the Slavic Gospel Association Magazine, Australia, reported the observations of Pastor Ton in a public address he gave in London in 1981:

I was coming from a place where the churches were being refined through suffering, yet they were packed, with hearts on fire for the Lord. I received the shock of my life when I saw churches in London almost empty ... I heard ministers saying how they pondered quitting the ministry ... discour­aged and defeated ... in a losing battle. From the turns of this century when 85 per cent of the population every Sunday was in church, now only 5 per cent attended.

I came to the conclusion that there were two factors which destroyed Christianity in Western Europe. One was the theory of evolution, and the other, lib­eral theology. Liberal theology is just evolu­tion applied to the Bible and our faith.

The second casualty of evolution is the people who become its victims because evolutionary theory suggests they should be treated as inferior or expendable. One such group is the Australian aboriginal peo­ple.

On 3 March 1990, in an article entitled “Darwin’s Body-snatchers”, The Sydney Morning Herald detailed the horrors inflicted on Australian Aborigines, particu­larly the Tasmanians, because of the desire to prove they were the “missing link”. Over the protests of the Aboriginal people, thou­sands of Aboriginal bodies were shipped off to overseas museums, up to 10,000 going to British museums alone. (The emi­nent evolutionist Professor Stephen Gould of Harvard has confirmed that while “bio­logical arguments for racism may have been common before 1859 ... they increased by orders of magnitude following the accep­tance of evolutionary theory”.)

According to the Herald article, this “scientific” endeavour began as far back as 1803, but received a real boost when Darwin used the Australian Aborigine as an example of a living link to the animal. Later, Darwin’s leading spokesman, T. H. Huxley, superimposed an Aboriginal skull on to a Neanderthal skull to start what the news­paper called an “Australian growth indus­try”, a “frantic attempt” to prove Darwin right.

The Bulletin (12 November 1991) dis­closed that US evolutionists were also involved in the flourishing “industry” of gathering specimens of “sub-humans”. Australian journalist David Monaghan wrote that some of the top names in British science were involved in the large-scale grave-robbing trade, including Darwin him­self. Darwin wrote asking for Tasmanian skulls when only four of the island Aboriginals were left alive, provided his request would not “upset” their feelings.

Pickled Aboriginal brains were also in demand, to try to prove that they were inferior to those of whites. Good prices were offered for Aboriginal specimens and evidence exists to show that “fresh” speci­mens were obtained by simply going out and killing Aborigines.

Edward Ramsay, curator of the Australian Museum for 20 years from 1874, was heavily involved. He published a museum booklet which appeared to include Aborigines under the designation of Australian animals. The booklet also advised how to exhume the bodies of Aborigines from graves and how to plug bullet wounds in freshly killed “speci­mens”. A month after Ramsay asked for skulls of Bungee (Russell River) blacks, a science student sent him two. He told him that the two victims had been shot. They were the last of their tribe.

One particularly gruesome operator was Amale Dietrich, a German evolutionist nicknamed “the Angel of Black Death”. She came to Australia asking station own­ers for Aborigines to be shot for specimens. She accomplished her mission.

A missionary to the Aborigines, Lancelot Threlkeld, witnessed a slaughter in NSW when mounted police killed dozens of Aboriginal men, women and children. Forty-five heads were then boiled down and the ten best skulls were sent overseas.

What happened to the Aboriginal peo­ple is merely one example of the horrors which took place worldwide under ideolo­gies shaped by evolutionary theory. Time magazine of (14 August 1995) provides a partial summary:

This century has seen countless millions killed — more than in all known wars of human history put together — in the name of ideologies that owe their inspiration and justification directly to evo­lution.

The Nazis used this “science falsely so-called” to justify treating other races as sub­human. Engaging in war, even genocide, could hardly be wrong so they thought, since it made their version of the fittest more likely to survive.

Communism’s dialectic materialism required belief in evolution for intellectual respectability. Stalin’s butchery is directly linked to his renunciation of God (and thus all notions of sin and judgment) after read­ing Darwin’s book. Mao Zedong, responsi­ble for the deaths of tens of millions, listed Darwin and Huxley as his two favourite authors.

Few have realised, however, the degree to which Japanese thinking leading up to and during World War II was also heavily influ­enced by Darwin.

Japanese thought blended the theistic with the evolutionary. They were a chosen people because the Emperor was a descen­dant of the sun goddess; they were a master race because they were more highly evolved. Japanese biologists produced stud­ies decrying the apish physical features of other races (hairiness, long arms) and not­ing the highly evolved characteristics of the Japanese’ (which included milder body odour).

We are mindful of the fact that profess­ing Christians have also been guilty of racism and other atrocities but, as Francis Schaeffer has pointed out, these “Christians” were not then operating con­sistently with the biblical faith (eg Acts 17:26), even if they used perversions of scriptural teaching as justification. Not so with materialist evolutionists who, like Hitler, adopted racist policies. They acted consistently with their philosophical pre­suppositions. So do evolutionist academics, scientists and others today who justify policies such as euthanasia, and abortion which also have disastrous effects on human beings.

Failure by Western civilisation to return to its roots in a Christianity which is guided by God’s Word rather than the faulty (and constantly changing) vision of man, can only lead to fresh horrors in the future.