The Cause of the current Apostasy - my two cents.

Part 1

The 19th Century Christianity flourished.

When Lyell, Darwin, and many others were orchestrating their Secular Humanism mischief in Great Britain, Christianity was thriving. Evangelical revivals led to social movements such as the abolition of slavery, child welfare legislation, prohibition of alcohol, and the development of public health and a public education that was pro-Christian, with the McGuffey Reader, prayer, and Bible readings. The Salvation Army was founded in 1865 with the goals to spread and advance Christianity, the advancement of education, the relief of poverty, and other charitable objectives beneficial to society or the community of mankind as a whole. The 'Church Army' was founded in England in 1882 to advance the moral condition of the lowest classes of the people which called for new and aggressive action on the part of the Church and was most effectively done by lay people of the same class as those whom it was desired to touch. 19th Century Great Britain and the USA sent many missionaries to bring the gospel to foreign lands and colonies. The Gideon s was formed for the purpose of placing Bible in all Hotel Rooms, Hospitals, etc.

Great Britain had many great Preachers in the 19th Century, including Charles Spurgeon. In my college days, I remember reading through a few of England’s leading Newspapers of the 1860's and was amazed at the prominence Christianity held in those Newspapers. Christian Sermons by prominent Pastors were featured articles; Announcements of invitations to attend Christian Bible studies, readings, and lectures were common.

My point here is that the magnificent progresses brought about by the Industrial Revolution in England did not at all diminish Christianity. Christians were very active during that period in bringing about improvements at all levels of society, materially and spiritually.

That was one of the greatest Christian generations in world history. Little did they know there was a plot afoot to overthrow the Christian worldview, and it was aimed at their offspring. While the Christians were doing many good works, Lyell, Darwin, and company took over the education system and masterminded a secular theology that overthrew the Biblical accounts of God as Creator, and the worldwide flood of Noah, as well as remove Christianity itself from the School systems. They replaced these ideas with ‘MAN’ as the highest authority in the universe. Reinforcing this trend, Newspapers became secular.

Because of these successful efforts by the Secularist Humanists taking over the Schools and news media, the children of this great christian generation became confused about Christianity; the grandchildren even more infected with Secular Humanism imposed upon them became blasé toward their Christian upbringing; the third generation began to abandon Christianity except for some lip service to it. Today, only about 10% of England’s population consider themselves practicing Christians.

At the time of the 1926 Scopes trial, America was still a deeply Christian nation. Secularism had not yet infected our public school systems. The Christian oriented McGuffy reader was the most popular text in the elementary school. The Bible was still read daily in public schools and prayers were permitted and encouraged. Then FDR became President, He was a Fabian and appointed fellow Fabian, Atheist John Dewey in charge of our public schools. FDR also appointed radical judges to the Federal Courts including the Supreme Court. All of a sudden the constitution became a living document, in came the doctrine of Separation of Church and State, out went Bible readings, adult led prayers, the McGuffy readers. Into our schools came Pragmatism, Secularism, and Materialistic Evolution the Fact (the Bible of Atheism). Thus began the decline of Christianity in America. Ideas derived from the Fabian school of thought include birth control, legalized abortions, permissiveness, drugs to cure societal ills, recreational drugs, and Socialism. Foul language and casual sex has become the acceptable norm.

Humanists had gained a chokehold on most institutions of higher learning. By 1938, the New York Herald Tribune reported a speech by Dr. Goodwin Watson, professor of Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, where he "begged the teachers of the Nation to use their profession to indoctrinate children to overthrow 'conservative reactionaries' directing American government and industry."6

In his 1951 famous book, God and Man at Yale , William F. Buckley, Jr. commented that:

"The teachings of John Dewey and his predecessors have borne fruit. And there is surely not a department at Yale that is uncontaminated with the absolute that there are no absolutes, on intrinsic rights, no ultimate truths. The acceptance of these notions, which emerge in courses in history and economics, in sociology and political science, in psychology and literature, make impossible an intelligible conception of an omnipotent, purposeful, and benign Supreme Being, who has laid down immutable laws, endowed his creatures with inalienable rights, and posited unchangeable rules of human conduct .7"

George Orwell's Book '1984' captured the future perfectly. But it did not come directly from politics, it came from the materialists of Academia whom gives us only scientists and educators that they approve of, Official materialists' textbooks, journalists, newscasters, teachers, etc., whom in turn influenced a public, who in turn influenced elections of politicians to office, that allowed the Bible and prayer to be censored in public schools; But allowed relative values, abortion, a drug culture, foul language, disrespect, self centeredness, and sexual promiscuity to thrive.

Part 2

Charles Lyell was studying Law, but his interest in geology and origins was spurred by the lectures of famed geologist
The Creationists of the 19th Century had it right.

Dr. William Buckland at Exeter College in Oxford. Buckland wrote Reliquiae Diluvianae (1823) in which he argued that the evidence of geology alone demonstrated that a great flood had covered the entire globe. This irked young Charles Lyell so much from that moment on, that Lyell would soon give up his initial goal of practicing law and dedicate his life to overthrowing the Noachic geology. Lyell embraced the very gradualistic uniformatarian geology ideas of James Hutton, the very same gradualistic uniformatarian concept that would be used in Darwins' origin of life scenario. At the time, Charles Lyell had a plan to overthrow the Noachic geology, which he estimated that it would take 50 years to overthrow.

Charles Lyell was not an honest scientists who simply examined the geological evidence which forced him to abandon his cherished Christian scriptural view of Noachic geology as written by Moses in Geneisis. Before doing any research at all, Charles Lyell, along with a small clique of like-minded friends, set out to reinterpret the geological record in order to undermine the Biblical Noachic geology.

This fact is born out by a private letter Lyell sent to personal friend, Poulette Scrope, as Scrope prepared a review of the newly published first volume of The Principles of Geology for the Quarterly Review:

"If you don't triumph over them, but compliment the liberality and candour of the present age, the bishops and enlightened saints will join us in despising both the ancient and modern physico-theologians. It is just the time to strike, so rejoice that, sinner as you are, the Q.R. is open to you. If I have said more than some will like, yet I give you my word that full half of my history and comments was cut out, and even as many facts; because I, or Stokes, or Broderip, felt that it was anticipating twenty or thirty years of the march of honest feeling to declare it undisguisedly. … I conceived the idea more than five or six years ago. That if ever the Mosaic geology could be set down without giving offense, it would be a historical sketch. … Let them feel it, and point to the moral."

The Life, Letters and Journals of Sir Charles Lyell, (Mrs.) K.M. Lyell (ed.). John Murray, London:1881. Vol. 1. p.271.
Lyell's work was immensely popular and widely read both by professional geologists and, surprisingly enough, "by the cultivated public whose curiosity about the secrets of the earth was growing."24 However, as one might expect, laymen were confused by Lyell's relatively technical and irregular interpretation of the Deluge. Since orthodox biblical scholarship seemingly held the upper hand in theological circles at the time, laymen expected a refutation or synthesis of Lyell's tranquil, uniformitarian interpretation from Christian biblical scholars. But, much to their consternation, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Bishop of London and the Bishop of Llandaff in 1831 invited Charles Lyell to be professor of geology at King's College of the Church of England.

In a letter Lyell related their attitude toward his work:

"They considered some of my doctrines startling enough, but could not find that they were come by otherwise than in a straightforward manner, and (as I appeared to think) logically deducible from the facts . . . there was no reason to infer that I had made my theory from any hostile feeling toward revelation."25

This seemed outrageous to the orthodox. In fact Lyell's perceptive friend, Poulett Scrope, quipped:

"If the news be true, and your opinions are to he taken at once into the bosom of the Church, instead of contending against that party for half a century, then, indeed, shall we make a step at once of fifty years in the science-in such a miracle will I believe when I see it performed."26

25Mrs. Lyeil, Life, Letters and Journals of Sir Charles Lyell, I, 317. Lyell assurred Bishop Capelston of Llandaff "that there was 'no objection to his drowning as many people as he pleased on such parts as can he shown to he inhabited in the days of Noah' " (Gillispie, Genesis and Geology, pp. 140-41).
26Mrs. Lyell, Life, Letters and Journals of Sir Charles Lyell, I, 317.

In 1841, Charles Lyell paid a visit to New York's Niagra Falls. Collecting facts from the people who lived near Niagra Falls, it became clear that the rate of erosion about 3 feet per year, which implied that the gorge was a little less than 12,000 years old. When Lyell included Niagra Falls in one of his updates to his 'Principles of Geology', he reduced the erosion rate to about 1 foot per year and stated that the Niagra gorge took 35,000 years to erode to its' present state. Today, modern science reveals that the gorge only took 3,000 to 4,000 years to erode. So Lyell is known to lie outright with respect to the geological evidence in order to support his efforts to undermine the Bible.

In sum, Lyell using his legal skills would manufacture an opus presenting the alleged evolutionary version of the earth’s geological past. He would lead his readers to doubt the chronology of Moses and the Bible as a whole without directly attacking it and without even naming it. With his Principles of Geology, published when he was only in his early thirties, he succeeded no doubt beyond his wildest dreams. We are not left to wonder if Lyell was conscious of his indirect, deceitful maneuver against the Bible. He employed the same tactic generally, rarely asserting dogmatically what he wanted readers to believe, but cleverly allowing them to reach his conclusions on their own. Indeed, he wrote of his use of this tactic to encourage belief in biological evolution: “I left this rather to be inferred, not thinking it worthwhile to offend a certain class of persons by embodying in words what could only be a speculation” (Lyell, 1881, vol. 1, p. 467).

Darwin, who labeled Christianity as a "Damnable religion', observed Lyell using this tactic:

"Lyell is most firmly convinced that he has shaken the faith in the Deluge far more efficiently by never having said a word against the Bible than if he had acted otherwise. … I have read lately Morley’s Life of Voltaire and he insists strongly that direct attacks on Christianity (even when written with the powerful force and vigour of Voltaire) produce little permanent effect; real good seems to follow only the slow and silent side attacks "(Himmelfarb, 1968, p. 387).

For his efforts, Lyell was knighted in 1848, and was created a baronet in 1864, in which year he was president of the British Association at Bath. He was elected corresponding member of the French Institute and of the Royal Academy of Sciences at Berlin, and was created a knight of the Prussian Order of Merit. In 1851, Lyell used his influence to bring about educational reform at Oxford, namely by greatly diminishing the influence of Christianity, which he had long 'quietly' opposed. Lyell remained a regular church-goer throughout his life.

In his The Principles of Geology, Charles Lyell rejected Lamarck's Theory of Evolution which allowed a roll for a Divine Creator. Lyell just about stated Darwin's theory of Evolution, leaving biographers scratching their heads as to why Lyell did not complete his thoughts on the origin of life to their natural conclusions. But Charles Lyell did not want to endanger the strides he made in overthrowing the Biblical Noahic Flood.

During his voyage on the Beagle, Charles Darwin was greatly influenced Charles Lyell's 'Principles of Geology'. He was given volume 1 as he set sale frm England. Volume 2 he received while sailing on the Beagle. When he came back to England on October 2, 1836, Darwin was at a total lost as to his future and what he would be doing. An eager Charles Lyell met Darwin on 29 October and introduced him to the up-and-coming anatomist Richard Owen. Lyell took Darwin under wing. By 1839, Charles Darwin had his 'Theory of Evolution, and the Survival of the Favored Races, by Means of Natural Selection', formulated. But He did not publish it till twenty years later, and only when . The evidence for it was not very strong, nor has it ever been strong. It wasn't until Alfred Russel Wallace, a naturalist working in Borneo, came up with a similar theory about the survival of the fittest, that Lyell, Thomas Huxley, and Hooker, moved to get Darwin's book out and keep control of the Theory rather than let Wallace be the spokesman for the Theory. Upon receipt of Wallace's first letter in spring of 1856, they told Darwin to finish completion of His book while they started canvassing influential scientists to gain their support of Darwin's ideas, and the forthcoming book.

But were they really Darwin's ideas. After all, Lyell seemingly almost stated that same Theory in the early 1830's. In Darwin's own words:

"I really think my books come half out of Lyell's brain," said Charles Darwin, "I see through his eyes."

Darwin's 'Origin of the Species' was well received. The fruit of Lyell, Darwins, and friends has born its' ungodly fruit. The Bible was relegated to be merely a book of ancient fables, and Christianity rapidly diminished, and non-Christian ideas flourished; all to the point that led to Europe became a Bastion of Secularism. It gave way to moral relativism, Aryanism, Eugenics and abortion. Last to fall, America resisted the works and ideas of Lyell and Darwin until FDR rendered control of government, our courts, and our schools and colleges over to the secularists. With God's word removed as the measure of human values, the whole world has now gone into moral decline and philosophical chaos.

Lyell, who rewrote science, was wrong.

As for Lyell and Darwin's works, Stephen Jay Gould points out:

“Charles Lyell was a lawyer by profession, and his book [Principles of Geology, 1830-1833] is one of the most brilliant briefs ever published by an advocate ... Lyell relied heavily upon two bits of cunning to establish his uniformitarian views as the only true geology. First, he set up a straw man to demolish. ... In fact, the catastrophists were much more empirically minded than Lyell. The geologic record does seem to require catastrophes; rocks are fractured and contorted; whole faunas are wiped out. To circumvent this literal appearance, Lyell imposed his imagination upon the evidence. The geologic record, he argued, is extremely imperfect and we must interpolate into it what we can reasonably infer but cannot see. The catastrophists were the hard-nosed empiricists of their day, not the blinded theological apologists.

"Lyell's 'uniformity' is a hodgepodge of claims. One is a methodological statement [see previous paragraph] that must be accepted by any scientist, catastrophist and uniformitarian alike. Other claims are substantive notions that have since been tested and abandoned. Lyell gave them a common name and pulled a consummate fast one: he tried to slip the substantive claim by with an argument that the methodological proposition had to be accepted..."

Above quotes from Stephen Jay Gould, “Catastrophes and Steady-State Earth, in Natural History, February, 1975, pp. 16, 17.

“Gradualism was never ‘proved from the rocks’ by Lyell and Darwin, but was rather imposed as a bias upon nature. …has had a profoundly negative impact by stifling hypotheses and by closing the minds of a profession toward reasonable empirical alternatives to the dogma of gradualism. …Lyell won with rhetoric what he could not carry with data.”

Gould, S. J., Toward the vindication of punctuational change.In: W. A. BERGGREN & J. A. VAN COUVERING (Eds.): Catastrophes and Earth History: The New Uniformitarianism, Princeton University Press, Princeton (New Jersey), pp. 14-16, 1984.

This is just one example of a liberal departure that has proven to be extremely destructive. We are now living in a Post Christian world. Christians have become weak because they embrace the ideas of the world, not aware of Satan's influence in the world. Lyell and Darwin and friends set the stage for these developments that have distracted many from God's truths. Notice the Orwellian ways and means Lyell and Darwin and company resorted , seizing the present to rewrite the past and force upon an unwary public beliefs about geology and origins of life that simply are not true.