Whistler's Tune: |
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"and he's not just whistling dixie either!" |
Darwinism – “The Devil’s Gospel”
Hey, don’t get upset with me about the title! I didn’t come up with the idea
for it all on my own – I had some great help. And that help didn’t originate
from a source that you might have expected. Any guesses as to its origin?
Nope, this referral to Darwin’s theory of evolution as the devil’s gospel
didn’t come from any Christian or creationist literature, nor from the mouth
of some podium-pounding, foaming-at-the-mouth fundamentalist preacher.
Give up?
Hold on to your hats! You may find this hard to believe, but this term came from
the very creator of the evolutionary theory, Charles Darwin himself! It appears
in a letter to his evolutionary literary friend Aldous Huxley, dated August 8,
1860. In this letter Darwin refers to Huxley, who was helping popularize Darwin’s
new evolutionary theory through his writings, as “my good and kind agent for
the propagation of the Gospel – i.e., the devil’s gospel” (The Life and
Letters of Charles Darwin, Vol. 2, p. 124).
Darwin haunted by doubt and guilt until death
What an admission! Even if Darwin by chance made this comment half in jest, it
is apparent that he was very much aware that his theory was not only taking on
conventional thought, but God himself. And the amazing thing is that Darwin was not
an atheist! But he did harbor a deep-seated desire to keep God and all that he
stood for at arms length. But subconsciously, he knew better. Darwin himself
expressed serious doubts about the idea of evolution. He attempted to
rationalize these doubts, but they were so powerful that they haunted him until
his death.
In the sixth chapter of Origin, “Difficulties on Theory,” Darwin
remarked, “Long before having arrived at this part of my work, a crowd of
difficulties will have occurred to the reader. Some of them are so grave that to
this day I can never reflect on them without being staggered…” In his
chapter on instinct, for example, he conceded such “simple” instincts as
bees making a beehive could be “sufficient to overthrow my whole theory.”
In a similar vein, Darwin states that “nothing at first can appear more
difficult to believe than that the more complex organisms and instincts should
have been perfected, not by means superior to though analogous with, human
reason, but by the accumulation of innumerable slight variations…” Darwin
admits that thinking the eye could evolve “by natural selection, seems,
I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree.” (Charles Darwin, J.W.
Burrow {ed.}, The Origin of Species, Penguin Books, p. 435).
Darwin could neither live with God, nor could he escape him. He knew, in the
very depths of his soul, that evolution didn’t, and never could explain the
existence of life in all its forms. This internal battle raged throughout his
life and it not only cost him his physical health, but to some degree, his
mental health. Darwin was dealing with a much deeper and fundamental feeling –
guilt. In essence, his inability to either accept divine creation or to escape
it caused his own reasoning processes to become strained. As Dr. Clark and Dr.
Bales observed, “Reason led Darwin to God, so Darwin killed reason. He trusted
his mind when reasoning about evolution, but not about God.”
What explains Darwin’s doubts? Darwin’s own reason informed him that the
evidence for intelligent design was overwhelming. Although he was “determined
to escape from design and a personal God at all costs,” he never really could.
Thus, he confessed to the “impossibility of conceiving this immense and
wonderful universe, including man with his capacity of looking far backwards and
far into futurity, was a result of blind chance or necessity.” (Clark, Darwin:
Before and After.)
Darwin had good reason to feel those frequent stabs of guilt regarding his
theory. Anyone who doubts the validity of Darwin’s own assessment of his
theory as being of dark origins doesn’t have to look very far for
confirmation. For example, Karl Marx found Darwinism very effective in the
propagation of the Communist ideology. Marx “felt his own work to be the exact
parallel of Darwin’s” and he was so grateful that he wanted to dedicate a
portion of Das Kapital to Darwin, who declined the honor (Darwin, Marx
and Wagner, p. 8).
In 1861 Marx wrote to Engels that “Darwin’s book is very important and
serves me as a basis in natural selection for the class struggle in history…”
Thus was born the concept that all men are not created equal…in fact, they’re
not even created. The concept of love for ones fellow man could now be rejected
as being of no validity, to be replaced by the concept that hate and revenge
were the new “laws and privileges” of the day. “Superior” races could
now pit themselves against “inferior” races with a clear conscience, knowing
that they were but enforcing the natural law of “survival of the fittest.”
This is exactly what Marxist ideology has spawned in the last 100-plus years,
leading to the deaths of some 150 million people. Hitler and others over the
years have murdered millions of victims, not with the misguided intentions of
saving their souls or punishing their sins, but because they were competitors
for food and obstacles to “evolutionary progress.”
Many have understood the relationship between Nietzsches’s ideas and Hitler’s
mass murder teams and crematories. Few have traced the linkage back one step
further to Darwin, the “scientist” who directly inspired Nietzsches’s
superman theory and the Nazi corollary that some people were subhuman. The
evidence was all there – the term neo-Darwinism was openly used to describe
Nazi racial theories.
Because Hitler understood the implications of evolution, evolutionary precepts
were pounded into the German people, and it swayed them. The schools were
profoundly influenced as biology was purposely infused with an evolutionary
bias. Who should be surprised that the German Youth Movement sided with the
German states’ view of not supporting the struggles of the weak? “Inferior”
individuals were to be sacrificed for the health of both the state and the “purity”
of the human stock itself.
The expression “natural selection,” as applied to human beings, turns up at
the Wannsee Conference in the prime document of the Holocaust. Hopefully lessons
have been learned about how the evolutionary theory has led historically to such
horrendous behavior. History doesn’t need another one hundred million deaths
to prove that scientific atheism is a form of mental illness.
But from whence did this damaging theory arise? In essence, one could expect
that materialistic scientists would intentionally devise conceptual
frameworks that would interpret nature without God or put God at a distance, no
matter how speculative and far-fetched those theories might be. This was exactly
what Darwin purposely did.
Scripture clearly declares God’s displeasure at men who suppress the truth
about God, even after God has made this truth plain to them: “The wrath of God
is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men
who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about
God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since
the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities – his eternal power and
divine nature – have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been
made, so that men are without excuse. For although they knew God, they neither
glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile
and their foolish hearts were darkened” (Romans 1:18-21).
Scripture also informs us that Satan has “blinded the minds of unbelievers…”
(2 Corinth 4:4). How does he do this? One way is through anti-Christian
philosophies and religions. In their own way they each insulate their advocates
against the Gospel.
Did God use evolution as His tool?
But “Whoa!” many readers may be saying right about now. “Who says that
evolution never occurred? Maybe God used it as his tool. Modern day science is
very cutting-edge and sophisticated. Surely evolution has some scientific basis
in fact, otherwise it would have been discredited by now, right?”
Dr. Willem J. Ouweneel, Research Associate in Developmental Genetics, Ultrech,
Netherlands, with the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences, points out in
his article “The Scientific Character of the Evolution Doctrine,” what is
now obvious to more and more scientists: “It is becoming increasingly apparent
that evolutionism is not even a good scientific theory.” He argues that
evolution should not be considered a scientific fact, theory, hypothesis,
or even a postulate.
He points out, for example, that evolutionary theory is not, strictly, a scientific
postulate because to be so:
(a) it must be in accordance with the principal laws of mathematics and natural
science;
(b) it must not be more complicated than necessary for the explanation of
observed phenomena;
(c) it must give rise to conclusions which can be controlled by further
experimental observations and testing;
(d) it must conform to the general data of science;
(e) alternate hypotheses must be shown to be wrong or less acceptable; and
(f) the reliability of a scientific conception is inversely proportional to the
number of unproven postulates on which it is founded.
Evolution fails all six criteria for categorization as a scientific postulate.
This is why Dr. Ouweneel properly concludes that evolution is actually a materialistic
postulate rather than a credible scientific theory. As philosopher and
non-creationist Dr. David Berlinski pointed out in the September 1996 issue of Commentary:
“…As our knowledge increases, the crude Darwinian scheme seems progressively
remote from the evidence…Still, the real infirmities of Darwin’s theory are
conceptual and not empirical. Darwin’s theory of evolution remains little more
than a collection of anecdotal remarks.”
But one would never know this from reading the scientific literature; literature
which constantly assures the world that evolution is a scientific fact.
Evolutionists often belittle creationists as “non-scientists” and ask, “If
creationist theories are really scientific, why are they never published in
reputable scientific journals?” As the McLean trial pointed out, “There is…not
one recognized scientific journal which has published an article espousing the
creation science theory…” Well, the reason is because scientific journals refuse
to publish such articles because they don’t like creationism. It is a
well-known fact that most scientific journals refuse to accept legitimate
creationist scientific papers merely because they do not like their
implications.
Many contemporary examples show that most scientists have biases against
creation science. When one of the greatest thinkers and scholars of modern
times, Mortimer J. Adler of the University of Chicago, referred to evolution as
a “popular myth,” the well known materialist and critic Martin Gardner
actually included him in his study of quacks and frauds in Fad and Fallacies
in the Name of Science. Philosopher and historian Dr. Rousas Rushdoony was
entirely correct when he observed of evolution, “To question the myth or to
request proof is to be pilloried as a modern heretic and fool.”
The principal reason evolution “must” be a scientific fact is because of the
naturalistic bias that pervades the scientific world – a bias which, in the
end, is unnecessary and in many ways even harmful to the cause of science.
Scientists who declare that evolution is a fact should recognize the damage they
do to the credibility of science – and not just evolutionary science but all
of science. As more and more people gradually learn the truth that, deliberately
or innocently, science has misled them on an extremely crucial issue, their
trust in the authority of science will be over. The implications are hardly
small.
The public trusts the scientific world to know the difference between fact and
speculation, between the proper interpretation of observable data that can be
proven valid and unwarranted conclusions derived from faulty premises. When
scientists everywhere assert that a highly suspect, indeed incredible, theory is
“an established fact of science,” why should anyone trust scientists to tell
them the truth in other areas? If the scientific world won’t tell the truth in
so critical an area as our own origins, with vast implications for each of us,
why should it tell the truth in matters of lesser import?
In fact, the public’s trust in science has already eroded significantly
because of consequences stemming from its adherence to naturalism, and because
of sloppy science generally, as the recent book Junk Science illustrates.
This trust is not likely to improve, unless and until scientists are willing to
let “facts be facts” and stop trying to force data to prove their own pet
theories.
One frequently reads in evolutionary literature such declarations as “evolution
is a fact” and “the weight of the evidence for it is beyond persuasive.”
On the other hand, one reads just as commonly in antievolutionary literature
that “evolution is a myth” and “the amount of faith it takes to believe in
evolution is beyond belief.”
How is it that we can get such extremely divergent views from the same
set of data when all these statements come from scientists? The reason is
simple: it has to do with how one interprets the data. Evolutionary
theory does not depend on the credibility of the data used but rather upon the
subjective interpretation given the data within metaphysical assumptions held by
scientists.
Data do not speak for themselves: they must be interpreted. They often say what
the individual wants them to say. Thus, if one is a scientific naturalist, then
one can only conclude the data must fit the evolutionary scenario. Indeed, all
sorts of technical scientific experimentation, argumentation, and philosophizing
are pressed to support the idea of evolution, and to be sure, the weight of tens
of thousands of technical scientific papers in support of evolution certainly
seems impressive. When scientists read this literature, especially outside of
their own field, it convinces them evolution is true.
The difficulty is that the interpretation is highly strained and that most
scientists rarely consider the evidence against evolution or the evidence
for creation. In other words, they never fairly look at the other side
because based on “the authority of science” they assume that evolution must
be true. Any supernatural or non-physical explanation for reality is entirely
unacceptable and considered unreasonable in the field of science. In essence,
what Darwin hoped to achieve with On the Origin of Species – the
eviction of God from the realm of scientific investigation – has been
achieved. Religious explanations are deemed not credible as being scientific
because religious explanations are preconceived as not credible as being
scientific.
Many are convinced that, were the case for creation presented adequately, almost
any jury in the United States would logically conclude that not only is creation
scientific and at least an equally credible option to evolution, but that
creation actually offers a far better choice scientifically. If the creationist
camp were allowed to present its case with its best legal, philosophical, and
scientific proponents including leading non-creationist antievolutionary
scientists, many think there would be little doubt as the outcome of a jury’s
decision.
Consider the comments of the late Canadian scholar, Arthur C. Custance (Ph.D.
anthropology), author of the seminal ten-volume The Doorway Papers. He
was a member of the Canadian Physiological Society, a fellow of the Royal
Anthropological Institute, and a member of the New York Academy of
Sciences.
In “Evolution: An Irrational Faith,” Custance observes “…virtually all
the fundamentals of the orthodox evolutionary faith have shown themselves to be
either of extremely doubtful validity or simply contrary to fact…So basic are
these erroneous (evolutionary) assumptions that the whole theory is now largely
maintained in spite of rather than because of the evidence…Information
or concepts which challenge the theory are almost never given a fair hearing…Evolutionary
philosophy has indeed become a state of mind, one might say almost a mental
prison rather than a scientific attitude……To equate one particular
interpretation of the data with the data itself is evidence of mental confusion…The
theory of evolution…is detrimental to ordinary intelligence and warps
judgment.”
He concludes, “In short, the premises of evolutionary theory are about as
invalid as they could possibly be…If evolutionary theory was strictly
scientific, it should have been abandoned long ago. But because it is more
philosophy than science, it is not susceptible to the self-correcting mechanisms
that govern all other branches of scientific enquiry.”
In fact, the scientific evidence is so conclusive against evolution and for
creation one is finally amazed that the idea of evolution so thoroughly
dominates modern science. As noted, the reasons are not scientific. Were they
scientific, virtually all scientists would be creationists – as they were in
preceding centuries. Even such eminent scientists as Sir Fred Hoyle and N.
Chandra Wickramasinghe, his research partner, in discussing the “theory that
life was assembled by an (higher) intelligence” state, “Indeed, such a
theory is so obvious that one wonders why it is not widely accepted as being
self evident. The reasons are psychological rather than scientific.”
One can wade through hundreds of evolutionary textbooks and notice that although
almost all are certain as to the fact of evolution, all are equally uncertain
when it comes to the details of a mechanism like evolution. One is reminded of
physicist Ernest Mach’s quip, often repeated by Einstein, which asserts: ‘When
the observed facts come into conflict with a cherished theory, then it is so
much worse for the facts.”
Evolutionists consistently lose their scientific debates to creationists
In spite of evidence to the contrary, the evolutionist shouts back, “But
creationism is really only a religion.” If indeed creationism is really only a
form of religion, why do evolutionists consistently lose their scientific
debates to creationists? Such debates have been held since 1970. In 1979, The
Wall Street Journal for June 15 reported, “The creationists tend to win”
the debates. Six months later a report in Bioscience for January 30, 1980
agreed: “Why do creationists seem to be the consistent winners in public
debates with evolutionists?”
By 1993, creationists were still leading, even according to the evolutionists.
Evolutionists had 20 years to improve their debating record and yet did not.
Today, these debates are “almost always won by creationists, according to
evolutionists…” and Dr. Morris says of Duane Gish who has had over 300
formal debates, “at least in our judgment and that of most in the audiences,
he always wins.”
In all these debates that have been conducted throughout the U.S. and in other
countries during the past 20 years, creationists have carefully avoided all
references to religious concepts and literature (the Bible, etc.) and have based
their arguments strictly on scientific evidence, such as the fossil record, the
laws of thermodynamics, the complexity of living organisms and probability
relationships, etc. The fact that evolutionists themselves admit that
creationists have won most of the debates does seem to be saying something
important.
Another interesting fact: the higher one’s level of education, the less
likely one is to accept evolution. This in spite of the fact that the student is
continually barraged with evolutionary teachings throughout high school and
college. It appears that increased education does indeed bring increased
discernment. And do you know which profession is one of the hardest for
evolutionists to penetrate? The medical profession. Most doctors and nurses have
seen enough of the mind-boggling marvels of the human body to put much truck in
the theory that it “just happened.”
But why would most scientists accept evolution in this day and age of supposed
enlightenment? A common argument they give for endorsing evolution is that it’s
the only possible explanation for our existence. Since we exist, and
evolution is the only way we could have gotten here, evolution must be true. But
this is a logical fallacy, known as faulty dilemma – limiting the
options when other legitimate explanations exist.
The reasons scientists accept evolution can be boiled down to four main reasons:
1) many scientists wrongly think that there are no other scientific alternatives
2) they misinterpret the data
3) everyone else believes it
4) they prefer its philosophical implications
Secular scientists today face the same quandary as Darwin and they respond in a
similar fashion. They cannot imagine the universe occurring by blind chance, and
yet, as materialists, they are not at all comfortable with the idea of divine
creation.
The use of extremely complex instruments, laboratories, and billions of man
hours only shows that there is no chance of life evolving on its own
spontaneously from dead matter. If intelligence is necessary to generate the
results of these experiments, it must also be necessary to generate something
far greater – life itself.
Consider that the most brilliant engineers, other scientists, and technologists,
who have used the most up-to-date equipment, are unable to create a computer as
complex as even a simple amoeba – a single celled animal. So how believable is
it for scientists to almost universally claim that chance – the complete
opposite of intelligence – could not only create an amoeba but endless things
infinitely more complex – all the varied life forms we see about us, including
humanity?
Indeed, a fertilized human egg itself, merely the size of a pinhole, has enough
information to fill a thousand books, each 500 pages thick, having print so
small you would need a microscope to read it. And if we were able to print in
books all the DNA information in the entire human body, it has been estimated
that they would fill the Grand Canyon 50 times over! And what about the marvels
of the human brain with its 12 billion brain cells and 120 trillion connections?
Does that really sound like blind chance at work?
Or consider the molecule. Molecules are so small that ¼ teaspoon of water has
10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 molecules in it (10 to the 24th power).
Molecules vary from the simple to the complex. A simple molecule may consist of
only a few bonded atoms, as in water. A complex molecule may have hundreds of
amino acids. Noted astronomer Fred Hoyle uses the Rubik cube to illustrate the
odds of getting a single molecule, in this case a biopolymer. Biopolymers are
biological polymers, i.e., large molecules such as nucleic acids or proteins. In
the fascinating illustration below, he calls the idea that chance could
originate a biopolymer “nonsense of a high order”:
“At all events, anyone with even a nodding acquaintance with the Rubic cube
will concede the near impossibility of a solution being obtained by a blind
person moving the cubic surfaces at random. Now imagine 10 to the 50th power
(the number 10 followed by 50 zeros) blind persons each with a scrambled Rubic
cube, and try to conceive of the chance of them all simultaneously
arriving at the solved form. You then have the chance of arriving by random
shuffling at just one of the many biopolymers on which life depends. The notion
that not only biopolymers but the operating program of a living cell could be
arrived at by chance in a primordial soup on the Earth is evidently nonsense of
a high order.”
Dr. George Wald, the Nobel Prize winning biologist at Harvard, states: “The
reasonable past view was to believe in spontaneous generation; the only
alternative is to believe in a single, primary act of supernatural creation.
There is no third position…Most modern biologists, having viewed with
satisfaction the downfall of the spontaneous generation hypothesis, but yet
unwilling to accept the alternative belief in special creation, are left with
nothing.”
But how wise is it to be “left with nothing”? The eminent space scientist
Dr. Wernher von Braun is, quite correctly, convinced that science and belief in
a Creator go hand in hand:
“I find it as difficult to understand a scientist who does not acknowledge the
presence of a superior rationality behind the existence of the universe as it is
to comprehend a theologian who would deny the advances of science. And there is
certainly no scientific reason why God cannot retain the same relevance in our
modern world that He held before we began probing His creation with telescope,
cyclotron, and space vehicles.”
It was not a study of nature itself that led men to search for some hypothesis
of natural evolution, but rather the desire to escape the supernatural. Thus,
even today, many frank scientists have confessed that the reasons behind their
belief in evolution are primarily philosophical, not scientific.
The modern theory of evolution has only replaced one religious faith
(supernatural creation) with another religious faith (materialistic evolution).
Few can logically deny that both theories require faith in the miraculous. But,
as we will see, evolutionists have embarrassingly discarded one miracle
of divine creation for thousands or millions of miracles of
evolution, and they must accept them endlessly. But there is no scientific
evidence for evolution that is not at least as well explained by creation, and
there are now thousands of modern scientists who have abandoned evolution and
become creationists.
After discussing aspects of design in nature Darwin himself stated, “To admit
all this, is as it seems to me, to enter into the realms of miracle and to leave
those of science.”
A look at the components of evolution: a study of pseudo-science in action
Of course, no discussion of evolution would be complete without delving into the
supposed mechanisms of evolution: mutation and natural selection. Also of
interest are other alleged evidences of evolution: the second law of
thermodynamics, the age of the earth, and the geological column.
Evolution claims to operate through beneficial mutations and natural selection.
According to Darwin, evolution occurs when an organism is confronted by a
changing environment. Some organisms in a population become better adapted for
survival than others, partly because of beneficial mutation – incredibly rare
events that alter an organism and allow it to improve. Natural selection
involves the survival of those organisms best adapted to their environment;
those less adapted die out. The best adapted then transmit their improved
genetic characteristics and populations evolve upward.
On the surface, it seems to make sense – that billions of years could produce
sufficient mutations to allow things to slowly change and improve so that all
life evolves upward. But as we will see, it actually doesn’t make sense at
all.
Darwin himself considered that the idea of evolution was unsatisfactory unless
its mechanism could be explained. For evolution to occur, obviously, there must
be some mechanism of change. But whether we are considering the three major
postulated mechanisms of evolution – mutation, natural selection, and genetic
recombination – or other factors such as migration and isolation and genetic
drift, none of these is adequate to explain how evolution could occur. Mutations
cannot account for the kinds of changes necessary, since the vast majority of
mutations are either neutral or harmful.
Regarding mutation, the evolutionist Mayr wrote, “It must not be forgotten
that mutation is the ultimate source of all genetic variation found in natural
populations and the only new material available for natural selection to work
on.” H. J. Muller won the Nobel Prize for his work on mutations, and he
observed that the vast majority of mutations are detrimental to the organism, in
fact, a good mutation would be so rare as to be considered to not exist.
Again, the difficulty is that mutations cannot account for evolutionary change.
The world-famous French evolutionist Grasse was correct when he wrote that no
matter how numerous they may be, mutations do not produce any kind of evolution.
Adaptive mutations, such as the resistance of insects to pesticides, changes in
a moth’s wing color, or adaptation of soil bacteria to new nutrients also
offer no evidence for evolution. These changes are intraspecies events. They
originate from already existing genes and constitute an innate capacity to
respond to the environment. They are not random evolutionary mutations, nor do
they add new information or capacity to the gene pool.
The problem with genetic recombination is that it merely redistributes existing
genetic material among different individuals but makes no change in it. The
evolutionist Savage declares that it “cannot be regarded as an evolutionary
force, since it never changes gene frequencies.”
What do evolutionists do with this difficulty? Basically, they ignore it.
Evolutionist George Wald concluded that even though the spontaneous generation
of a living organism was impossible, he still believed that we are here as a
result of spontaneous generation. Dobzhansky, after discussing the harmful
effects of mutations writes in a similar vein, “This is not consistent with
the recognition that useful mutations did occur in the evolutionary line which
produce man, for otherwise, obviously, mankind would not be here.”
In other words, even though there is no evidence whatsoever that mutations could
be responsible for evolutionary changes, beneficial changes must have
occurred because mankind exists!
Natural selection faces similar difficulty. Sir Julian Huxley argues, “So far
as we know, not only is natural selection inevitable, not only is it an
effective agency of evolution, it is the only effective agency of
evolution.” Yet there are so many problems facing natural selection, even
evolutionists aren’t sure what to do with the theory.
Darwin himself was troubled by it. In his various sections critiquing natural
selection, Bird cites dozens of evolutionists who have serious doubts about the
relevance and/or validity of the theory. This is so in spite of the fact that
there is no evolution possible without it. Natural selection is described by
evolutionists as: “extremely improbable”; “impossible”; “may be an
illusion”, etc. (Bird, “Origin….revisited”).
Evolutionists still accept natural selection because they have little choice. As
Norman MacBeth points out in Darwin retried, evolutionists will concede
they cannot measure it, observe it, or define it…but “will nevertheless
defend it with their heart’s blood.”
Of course, there is no doubt that minor limited changes do occur in the natural
world. This may be termed natural selection at the microevolutionary level. But
to extrapolate such change to macroevolution is a logical impossibility, since
there is simply no evidence for it. No one has ever produced a new species by
means of natural selection, no one has even gotten near it.
Creationist Jerry Berman, Ph.D. writes that there is more here than meets the
eye:
“Natural selection would not evolve upward – for example, bacteria into
humans – but at best would evolve simple bacteria into better adapted
bacteria, or flies into better adapted flies. The fossil record shows no
evidence of anything beyond this. No clear example has ever been found of a
lower, clearly less adapted animal in the fossil record which can be shown to be
evolutionarily related to a similar, or advance type of an animal living today…
“The easy-to-grasp and compelling natural selection argument is used to help
explain all biological data, but it may actually explain very little. Human life
consists of many activities which are mentally pleasurable. Walking in forests,
listening to music, creating poems, doing scientific research, aesthetic
enjoyment of nature, and myriads of other activities are often not related in
the least to survival or adaptation in the Darwinian sense….
“Music in its many variations is loved the world over, and yet certain music
preferences have not been shown to increase reproduction rates or to facilitate
survival. Many, if not almost all of our most rewarding activities, ‘peak
experience producers,’ are not only unexplainable by this theory, but
contradict it.”
The bottom line is that there is simply no way that mutations and natural
selection could have produced the entire world of life, even with endless
periods of time. Darwin was right – if we can’t explain how evolution
occurs, even 140 years later, then the theory should be considered
unsatisfactory.
There has been much discussion between creationists and evolutionists concerning
the applicability of the second law of thermodynamics as it relates to the issue
of origins. Does it make evolution impossible, as the creationists maintain, or
are there ways around the problem, as evolutionists maintain? A proper
understanding of thermodynamics and the theory of evolution as it relates to the
origin of the universe and the origin of life reveals that cosmically and
biologically evolution is not just improbable, it is basically impossible.
In laymen’s terms, the second law of thermodynamics teaches that everything in
the universe is running down. It tells us what we already know from experience;
that, sooner or later, everything deteriorates and falls apart. All things are
running down. Everything finally wears out – objects, plants, animals,
man.
The second law is perhaps the most pertinent for evolution/creation
considerations. The difficulty is that almost everything having to do with
evolution – whether the origin of the universe or the evolution of life –
contradicts the second law. If we start with the supposed Big Bang creation of
the universe, we have an initial violent explosion shot out in all directions.
As anyone knows, anytime you have an explosion, there is increasing disorder
until the force of the explosion is dissipated and everything stops.
Explosions do not produce incredible systems of complexity, order, and design,
but the Big Bang theory teaches that as this explosion moved out, things became
infinitely ordered. Planets formed of vastly different size, composition and
appearance, all kinds of moons came to orbit, galaxies formed, etc. In other
words, this violent explosion supposedly produced our incredibly beautiful and
complex planet earth, with its perfectly synchronized oceans, atmosphere, plant
and animal life, etc. How this could all happen by accident is impossible to
fathom.
Any scientist who fairly applies the second law of thermodynamics to the
possibility of evolution must logically conclude the evolution has not occurred.
Evolutionists, of course, have responses to creationists’ arguments. They try
to reason that snow flakes, ice crystals, batteries, etc, are exceptions,
therefore the law doesn’t always hold true (if it didn’t, could it still
be a law?). But their examples are not really exceptions at all.
Evolutionists reason that, since evolution is true, and the second law is true,
somehow they must be reconcilable. And so rather than accepting a disproof of
their theory, they go to great lengths to try to reconcile it with the second
law. Hence science is forced to try to shoe-horn in a bad theory because of bad
assumptions. Hampered by their own philosophical premises, scientists really
have little choice except to end up doing bad science, to the detriment of us
all.
Determining the age of the universe: more questionable science
Another area of contention between creationists and evolutionists is the age of
the universe. In The Biblical Basis for Modern Science, scientist Henry
Morris lists 68 different global processes, most of which indicate a relatively
recent creation. About 20 of these processes give ages of less than 100,000
years, obviously a vastly insufficient time for evolution to occur. The wide
variety found – from 1,750 years to 500,000,000 years – is suggestive of the
tentative nature of dating methods in general.
The fact that young ages are thrown out by evolutionists as necessarily
inaccurate, based on evolutionary presuppositions of needed old ages, is
hardly proof that the old dates are valid or that the young dates are invalid.
In fact, there are dozens of different indicators of an earth no older than
20,000 years. No one can declare that it is a scientific fact that the earth is
billions of years old. Even one of the world’s leading solar astronomers,
evolutionist John Eddy, actually stated that there isn’t much in the way of
observational evidence in astronomy to conflict with a very young age for the
sun and earth – less than 7,000 years.
Part of his reasoning came from 25 years of experiments on solar neutrinos whose
results have led to a crisis for evolutionary time spans, and a possible
confirmation of a recent creation. Not surprisingly, most evolutionists won’t
even talk about this research because of its implications.
But haven’t evolutionists been able to pretty much establish the age of the
earth through age dating techniques such as radiocarbon, uranium thorium lead,
rubidium strontium, etc.? These methods have been proven to be very unreliable.
As Dr. Wilder-Smith points out, “One is forced to admit that our dating
methods by means of radioactivity provide us with little really reliable data as
to the enormous time spans required for evolution according to Darwin. It is
relatively easy for any biological or inorganic material to simulate a great age
– or not age at all!
All these dating methods are based on certain assumptions, and all the
assumptions are incapable of proof, and cannot be tested. In fact, in most cases
the assumptions would seem to be unreasonable. Some of the assumptions made when
using these dating methods are: (1) it was a closed system, i.e., that no
material was added or subtracted, (2) it contained no already aged material, and
(3) the decay rate must have always been the same.
To illustrate the problem here, let’s say we have an ice tray with water and
we want to find the original size of the ice cube and the time it took to melt.
In order to do this, we have to assume certain things and know certain things.
We must know the rate of melting and assume the rate of melting was constant. We
must assume that no water was added at any point and that no evaporation
occurred and that no water was in the tray originally. If we know all this, then
we can calculate the size of the cube and the time it took to melt. But if any
of our assumptions are faulty, our result will also be faulty. So it is with the
various dating methods.
For example, when we find such anomalies as new wood from growing trees dated by
the carbon 14 method at 10,000 years old, or living snail shells dated at 2,300
years, or 200-year-old lava flows dated by potassium-argon at 3 billion years,
it’s obvious that these methods are not necessarily that reliable. Even if we
argue that the snails had eaten old material or that the lava brought up aged
substances, such explanations do not solve the problems with these methods.
Thus evolutionary scientists generally have blinders on when they examine the
radiometric dating results. These results must produce large ages and that is
that. The fact that these methods can be made to produce vast ages does not mean
those ages are legitimate. For example, A. Hayatsu admitted, “In conventional
interpretation of K-Ar (potassium argon) age data, it is common to discard ages
which are substantially too high or too low compared with the rest of the group
or with other available data such a the geological time scale. The discrepancies
between the rejected and the accepted are arbitrarily attributed to excess or
loss of argon.”
On a different front, evolutionary texts present the geological column as a fact
of geology and proof of evolution. The geological timetable spreads life out
over some two billion years, placing the simplest and smallest organism at the
beginning of life – making them the oldest – and moves progressively upwards
to the most complex organisms, as the youngest and most recent. Unfortunately,
the only evidence for this scheme is found in the mind of the evolutionist and
the paper on which the chart is drawn. The complete succession of fossils as
portrayed by the geologic timetable exists nowhere.
How then do geologists arrive at the geological timetable when the record of the
earth does not show it? By the means we have so often seen – assuming that
evolution is true and applying circular reasoning: the strata are dated by the
fossils they contain. The problems are that fossils are not always found in
proper evolutionary, geologic succession. The assumption of evolution alone is
used to arrange the sequence of fossils – which is circular reasoning, not
proof of evolution. No consideration is given to the possibility of a worldwide,
cataclysmic flood, for which there is ample evidence. Thus the modern-day
scientist becomes the slave of his own myopia.
Scientists could discover the truth about creation, if…
Nevertheless, the current crisis in evolution and the lack of alternate theories
other than divine creation are, thankfully, encouraging even materialistic
scientists to consider God and religious ideas concerning the origin of the
universe. Remarkably, many of these men are professed atheists who have been
forced by the weight of 20th-century discoveries in astronomy and physics to
concede the existence of an intelligent Designer behind the creation of the
universe.
For example, Paul Davies was once a leader for the atheistic, materialistic
worldview. He now asserts of the universe, “(There) is for me powerful
evidence that there is something going on behind it all…It seems as though
somebody has fine-tuned nature’s numbers to make the Universe…The impression
of design is overwhelming.” Further, the laws of physics themselves seem “to
be the product of exceedingly ingenious design.”
Actually, science has been so touched with religion in the last few years that
even many prominent scientists are talking about “knowing “ the mind of God
through scientific discovery. The theoretical physicist who is frequently held
out as the successor to Einstein, Stephen Hawking, noted in his A Brief
History of Time that our goal should be to “know the mind of God.”
Einstein himself once stated, “I want to know how God created this world…I
want to know His thoughts, the rest are details.”
What scientists will discover, if they wish, is that if they brought the same
degree of objectivity and effort they do in their scientific investigations to
the study of Christian evidences, they could literally read God’s mind
– in the Bible. Science at best only gives us hints. To really know the one
true God, one must read His revelation to mankind in Scripture.
Many fair-minded scientists readily confess today the practical necessity for
belief in a Creator. But materialistic scientists find themselves increasingly
troubled over this turn of events.
Because the hard data of science continues to mount a stronger and stronger case
for creation, they are, embarrassingly, finding themselves in the theologian’s
hair by default. And they can’t be happy about this.
As Dr. Robert Jastrow observed in his God and the Astronomers, “For the
scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like
a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer
the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a
band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”
This explains why committed evolutionists will only continue to skew the data to
even more absurd lengths in order to maintain their faith in materialism. They
really have no other choice.
>>>>!<<<<
Till next time, here’s whistlin’ at ya! ;o)
[The bulk of the above article was garnered from the book “Darwin’s Leap of
Faith,” by John Ankenberg, Ph.D., & John Weldon, Ph.D. (392 pages,
copyright 1998, Harvest House Books)]