According to the “Principle of the Day” posted on August 26 by multibillion dollar hedge fund manager Ray Dalio, “Evolution is the single greatest force in the universe; it is the only thing that is permanent, and it drives everything.”
He went on to declare, “Everything from the smallest subatomic particle to the entire galaxy is evolving. While everything apparently dies or disappears in time, the truth is that it all just gets reconfigured in evolving forms. Remember that energy can’t be destroyed—it can only be reconfigured. So the same stuff is continuously falling apart and coalescing in different forms. The force behind that is evolution.”
If this Psalm to the glory of non-religious materialism sounds religious, it is. Often, those who are most wholeheartedly dedicated to atheism and aimless cosmic progression make proclamations such as “Universe created,” “Nature provided,” or, as Dalio put it, “Evolution drives.” They claim that everything results from a purposeless, pointless series of atomic reactions but then imply this story of the universe is also the storyteller. They talk of evolution as if it is the Mind behind it all, a Mind that may not love us but which, nonetheless, has a plan for our lives.
In the dramatic opening to his 1980 documentary, Cosmos, Carl Sagan announced, “The cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be.” Decades later, Neil deGrasse Tyson reincarnated the series by declaring, “A generation ago, the astronomer Carl Sagan … launched hundreds of millions of us on a great adventure.” I doubt he meant to quote Steven Curtis Chapman here, much less to borrow his theistic assumptions, but he saddled up the same horse.
Even the best attempts to demonstrate that the universe is meaningless tend to smuggle in language of purpose, transcendence, and wonder. And they are every bit as evangelistic as the religions they often despise in their attempts to convince and convert others. As it turns out, the theistic impulse shows up wherever and whenever human beings try to make sense of their world. The same impulse that drove the ancients to explain the world drives all of us today. The same impulse that led pagans to worship something is seen in the reverence for scientific theories and technological innovation.
Every worldview assumes that there is a plan to life, even those that deny the Planner. If the materialists are right, “all that is, or ever was, or ever will be” amounts to nothing. There is no “great adventure” to be found or had. All of the high-sounding rhetoric is a way to talk about the entropy that will end in the “Heat Death” of the universe, where all life, light, and order ends in darkness. Life is but a much longer version of Samuel Beckett’s short play, “Breath.” Life begins with a gasp, ends with a gasp, and everything that happens between is garbage.
This worldview, however, is simply not big enough. G.K. Chesterton said, “The worst moment for an atheist is when he is really thankful and has no one to thank.” Dalio may wish to credit evolution for it all, but he’s really just looking for Someone behind it all, even as He denies that anyone is there.
But there is Someone there. There is a direction in which the universe is heading. Life is an adventure worth exploring. Even better, He has made Himself known in what He has made, what He has said, and ultimately, in Jesus of Nazareth. As He has said to us in Isaiah 43, “But now thus says the Lord, he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel: ‘Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine.'”