The Case For a Creator: A Journalist Investigates Scientific Evidence That Points Toward God

“White-coated scientists of the modern world had trumped the black-robed priests of medieval times. Darwin’s theory of evolution—no, the absolute fact of evolution—meant that there is no universal morality decreed by a deity, only culturally conditioned values that vary from place to place and situation to situation.”

Part of Strobel’s narrative structure is the story of his own movement from being fully persuaded by Darwinism to overturning that belief in favor of intelligent design. This quote represents Strobel’s summation of his initial mindset. Part of the sensibility that he wants to convey to his readers is that of a table-turning surprise—one exemplified not only in his own conversion, but in the progress of science over the previous 50 years, which (he argues) has begun to overturn some of the settled assumptions of the scientific community itself. It is important to note that Strobel’s characterization of Darwinism as leading inevitably to atheism (and atheism as leading inevitably to moral relativism) is itself contentious.

“I was experiencing on a personal level what philosopher Daniel Dennett has observed: Darwinism is a ‘universal acid’ that ‘eats through just about every traditional concept and leaves in its wake a revolutionized worldview.’”

Here, Strobel quotes from Daniel Dennett, hailed near the beginning of the 21st century as one of the “four horsemen” of the New Atheist movement. Strobel is articulating the way that Darwinism acted as the key factor in convincing him that the nominal faith of his childhood was false and that scientific naturalism—with its complete rejection of the supernatural—must therefore be true.