Defending Absolute Truth

This transcript has been adapted from the attached audio. It may not be in its final form and may be updated.

RICHARD LAND: I’m sure you’ve noticed, I’ve noticed, our listeners have noticed, the outrage that you get from people in the community when Christians say this is the truth, and it seems to me that what happens is a natural reaction to being engulfed in a world of relativism where every view point is acceptable except the viewpoint that says that there are absolutes. I don’t know if you’ve seen the latest Star Wars movie, you are going to love this line. You know, the Sith are the evil empire. Only the Sith believe in absolutes.

CHUCK COLSON: Well, you will hear us as conservative Christians equated with the Taliban and with Islamo-fascist terrorists because we believe in absolutes. Everybody believes in absolutes. Stanley Fisher says the great enemy on the campus today is Christians because they make claims of truth when tolerance rules out any claims of truth. He has just made a statement of what is true to him is that tolerance rules out claims of truth. That is a truth claim. You can’t live that way, and eventually, if you argue that point, you win it. My great dream, Richard, which I say in the end of this book, as a lawyer, what I always wanted to do was argue a case in the Supreme Court, and I did get a case through the circuit court, which I won, against the government. Then I was taken to the White House and became special council to the president, so I never got to argue the case in the Supreme Court, but someday I would love to argue the case. The proposition would be this: The only, only formulation of a reality, the only understanding of the world, the only world view by which you can live rationally is the Christian world view. All others fail. I would love to argue that case in the Supreme Court. This Supreme Court I’d lose 5-4, but I think the merits of the case are indisputable. I don’t think you can argue once you really study it.

LAND: Chuck, where do we go from here? I mean, I have the strong belief and inclination that you can’t really address this whole question of this society without taking on the whole question of what social scientists and philosophers and theologians have done with Darwinism. Not what hard scientists have done, but what social scientists and philosophers and theologians have done with Darwinism because Darwinism, implicit in the theory of Darwinian evolution, is that there are no absolutes.

COLSON: There have to be. But even more compelling, the issue of Darwinism poses for us is that if there is no creator God, if there is no transcendent authority, everybody is free to make up their own rules as they go along. You may argue that there is evolution, and you can show evidences of evolution. I would say it is adaptation within a species; it is not one species becoming another, for which there has never been any fossil record. But you can’t argue the fact, and scientists can argue about evolution and the extent to which there is adaptation and what you would call evolution; micro evolution. But you cannot argue the fact that if Darwin is applied philosophically, it leads to the total chaos of the society. What, after all, is the ethics of Darwinism? What is the highest value in a Darwinian system—survival. So, survival of the fittest gets you the fact where the people who survive it have all the power. Who wants to live in a tyranny? Darwin would lead you to a tyranny. I don’t know that you noticed it, just in recent days, Cardinal Schonborn from Austria—one of the leading thinkers in the Roman Catholic Church, was a candidate for Pope, and is a friend of the present Pope—wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Times, which was one of the best I’ve ever read in which he argues for intelligent design and says that Catholics have not made their position clear on this and it is time to make it clear. Now the New York Times, the next day, did a front-page story saying this is outrageous and Catholic scientists are objecting. Of course it is outrageous. If the Catholics and evangelicals join forces to fight against Darwinism, no longer can be we stereotyped in every school board across the country as the heirs of Williams Jennings Bryant and the Scopes trial, no longer can we be called flat earthers, no longer can we be called unscientific, because some of the best scientists in the world are on the Catholic side. So, this is a tremendous shift. You said a few moments ago when we started this broadcast, you were talking about what the future holds and can you be optimistic. Yes, I can be really optimistic when I see the battle for intelligent design shifting to our side.

LAND: Well, I debated an atheist in Texas at a university. I started off by saying; first of all, I want to acknowledge that I am in the presence of a man of far greater faith than myself. It takes a lot more faith to believe what he believes than to believe what I believe. I said also, when I was in college as an undergraduate, he was standing up here on a mountain and I was down here in a bog, but I said, now, I am standing on a mountain of evidence. I said I don’t have time to talk about it tonight, but go to www.intelligentdesign.org and you can peruse to your heart’s content. People of faith and people who are not people of faith who say, particularly physicists and mathematicians, using their computers, the only probability that works is there had to have been an intelligent designer—an intelligent designer I call God; An intelligent designer that some scientists would just called intelligent design. The fact is, what this atheist says happened, the physicist and mathematicians’ computers tell them can’t have happened. So, are you going to deal with the scientific evidence or continue to believe in this unscientific faith called evolution?

COLSON: That’s a great way to put it, and that’s exactly the issue. In this book, I talk about Michael Behee and his work with the cell structure. The fact that we now know that DNA has more intelligence in it than the Encyclopedia Britannica four times over, all thirty volumes, has information in it. It is all intelligent information. So, we are seeing the sophistication of the way we are made as we study more about the human genome project. I think the whole intelligent design school is going to win, and the argument I make in here is if that is so, and if you can know moral truth, and if you can see truth through beauty, then you can’t deny the intelligent designer who created us and created in us these creative talents and gifts. So then the only question is, the last chapter of the book, and the question is, how do you get there? That’s where you come to simple faith.

This For Faith & Family insight has been produced by the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission. Join the conversation at Insight.FaithandFamily.com.