If evolution is true, then every living thing is a distant, but direct, relative.
If evolution is true, not only is every living thing today directly related to every other living thing, but no one and nothing has any true significance.
Evolutionists make a big deal every time someone suggests that we are descended from apes. The mistake, we are told, is that we do not descend from apes, but we have a common ancestor with modern apes.
Does that clarification help? Does having a “common ancestor” with the apes make the evolutionary creation story any more believable or meaningful?
What if you were told by evolutionists that you also have a common ancestor with seaweed? Or potatoes? Or even those monkeys everyone loves? What if you learned that eggplants are your cousins and that you share a great, great … grandfather with a jelly fish?
Here is a fact that evolutionists rarely, if ever, tell you: If evolution is true, then you have a common ancestor with every single living thing today. If evolution is true, every living thing—plant or animal—on earth today is a direct, literal cousin to every other living thing, including you.
Yes, if evolution is true, you have a distant grandfather who was also a grandfather to seaweed, potatoes, and monkeys. And every other living thing. In fact, our first common ancestor was the first ever living thing on earth, whatever that was.
Consider a typical “phylogenetic tree” diagram shown on the next page. This diagram supposedly shows how every current living thing branched off in the “diversity of life” from the first ever living thing—again, whatever that was. The first living thing is a common ancestor to us all.
If evolution is true—and the phylogenetic tree is even conceptually accurate—it is easy to see how humans are directly related to every other living being on Earth. Find “animals” on the diagram and see that you can trace a continuous line from animals to every other kind of being on Earth. Every “fork” is a common ancestor.
What does this mean, other than showing an absurd implication of the theory of evolution? Is this logical conclusion of evolution not preposterous? Is it possible that whenever you sit down to dinner, you are eating a distant but direct relative?
What does this really mean for the human condition? First, if evolution is true, then humans carry no more significance on earth than ladybugs and mushrooms.
To kill one or eat the other carries no more consequence than killing or eating the other. Natural selection facilitates such senseless killing all the time without thought, plan, or purpose. Death and destruction drive the evolutionary machine relentlessly night and day. Whether it’s humans, ladybugs, or mushrooms—natural selection does not care. Why should we?
Secondly, it means that humans were not created by God in his image, and they have no particularly meaningful place among all the animals and plants on earth.
The lines of the phylogenetic tree go from one starting point equally to all end points. Every animal and plant on earth just happened without thought, plan, or purpose. Humans believing themselves special merely shows their unfounded tendency toward speciesism, according to evolutionists.
Third, it means that Jesus Christ was just one more living thing in the “animal” branch of nature’s evolutionary tree. And his birth and life were no different from every other organism on Earth that lived and died without thought, plan, or purpose. If evolution is true, a man (and just a man) named Jesus Christ could no more help you or me through a death on a cross than a ladybug or a mushroom could have.
And he certainly was not resurrected.
Do humans have a direct family line to a common ancestor of stink bugs, clownfish, pumpkins, and worms? You decide. Let your heart and mind guide you on this one. Because if evolution is the true creation story and you get it wrong, your decision carries no eternal significance. Your decision, like every other decision in your life, is meaningless.
But if evolution is not the true creation story and you get it wrong, you will be wrong for a very long time.
Think about it.