Video Games and Evolution

My family received the March issue of the magazine Popular Science the other day. A prominent article was regarding a new video game based on Evolution and designed to promote creativity, of all things!

The new game, called Spore, was developed by Will Wright, an atheist who also designed such anti-God productions as The Sims. Players will be able to pilot the cosmological, biological, and political development of their own universe. They will even be able to share their universe and its life-forms with other players, through use of the Internet.

While Wright admits that the game is more like Intelligent Design than Evolution, he insists that it is a "pretty accurate, though caricatured, representation of reality in the way life evolved from single cell to multicell to intelligence."

The picture on the first page of the article featured a large fanciful planet with green oceans and pink-and-purple-swirled mountains. Vegetation on the planet included what appeared to be cauliflower-like trees and bumpy pea-like objects. On the second page, a herd of red-and-yellow-striped dinosaur styled creatures with electric waves emanating from their tails grazed at the edge of a primeval-looking forest.

My evaluation of the launch of the game of Spore is that it is designed to produce confusion in the minds of the public as to what Evolution really is. There is a growing movement promulgating the idea that Evolution is not so un-designed or directionless after all. Some even believe that the existence of life is intrinsic in the Laws of nature, being put there by an unknowable mathematic "Force" (cf. Star Wars), thus following this idea to its logical conclusion.

Another thing which becomes obvious is that this video game will further convolute any perception the public still holds of the existence of unchanging scientific Law. Still more of our once-great civilization will thus go down the drain of relativism.

Of course, the new Spore game is only a small part in the struggle. Our goal must be to reclaim the "waste places" as the Bible says and demonstrate that Laws are good and the Bible can be trusted. After all, the Bible is the Word of a loving and powerful Creator who can make real worlds and actual people.


-R. Josiah Magnuson