It was the evolutionary view that convinced anthropologists there were different races of humans at different levels of intelligence and ability. It is the Christian view that teaches there is one race (in the sense that we all came from the same two humans, and therefore there are no lower or higher evolutionary groups) and that all people are equal.

At one school a teacher said to her students that if ape-like creatures had evolved into people, then this should be seen to be happening today. Some of the students told her that this was happening today because some aborigines are primitive and therefore, still evolving. Regrettably, in the childrens eyes the teaching of evolution had relegated the Australian Aborigines to a sub-human level.

3. Drugs and Evolution

Many people would not think of evolution as being in any way related to the taking of drugs. However, the following letter of testimony from a man in Western Australia shows clearly this relationship.

At school, the theory of evolution was presented in such a way that none of us ever doubted it was scientific fact. Although the school was supposedly Christian, the biblical account of creation was presented as a kind of romantic fiction, not intended to convey literal truths about God, man or the cosmos. As a result, I assumed the Bible was unscientific, and therefore practically of little or no use.

It never occurred to me that evolution was only an assumption a concept concocted in someones head and I regret to say that I wasnt sufficiently interested to go check out the so-called "facts" for myself. I assumed that reliable people had already done that.

After I left school, I began to put into practice the assumptions and presuppositions Id picked up during childhood. My naive belief in evolution had three important practical consequences:

1. It strongly encouraged me to look to drugs as an ultimate source of comfort and creativity.

2. It led me to the conclusion that God, if He was around at all, was a very distant and impersonal figure, separated from humanity by very great distances of space and time.

3. It led me to increasingly abandon the moral values I had been taught at home, because when man is viewed as an arbitrary by-product of Time + Matter + Chance, there is no logical reason for treating men or women as objects of dignity and respect, since in principle they are no different from the animals, trees, and rocks from which they supposedly came.

I want to elaborate on just one point, the great faith in dope that I had as a result of being convinced that evolution was "fact." After leaving school, I became increasingly susceptible to drugs. Drug-taking seemed to me to make sense because in principle it fitted with what Id been taught about the nature and origin of man. "From chemical reactions hast thou come, and unto chemicals thou shalt return." And so I did.