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The Theory of Evolution Is Bad Philosophy, Not Good Science

By Eric V. Snow

Modern Western Civilization’s most important myth, or unproven collective belief, is the theory of evolution. Seemingly dressed up in the authoritative attire of objectively proven biological science, evolution’s presumed truth presides over the thinking of most of the West’s political, academic, media, and even religious worlds. Darwinism is the leading reason why modern man believes he is the accidental product of blind, purposeless material forces, not the special creation of a loving, almighty God. Declaring itself to be scientifically true, Darwinism is actually based on bad philosophy, not good science. The robe of evolution’s claims to being a scientific fact, not a philosophical myth, is stripped off below.

Using unacknowledged philosophical assumptions, evolutionists frequently assert that their theory is a “fact,” or an easily verified, objectively true statement. The famous theorist of evolution, Stephen Jay Gould, once reasoned: “Facts are the world’s data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts do not go away while scientists debate rival theories for explaining them. . . . And human beings evolved from ape-like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin’s proposed mechanism or by some other, yet to be identified.”[1] No evolutionist, however, lived millions of years ago to witness this alleged set of events take place. After all, purported developments such as the first cell’s spontaneous generation are unrepeatable, unique past events that cannot be subjected to future further experimental investigation.[2] Evolutionists suppose their theory is a “fact” because they philosophically rule out in advance special creation as impossible or “unscientific.” In order to pull this off, they use a philosophically rigged definition of “science.”[3] They covertly equate “naturalism” or “materialism” with “science.” To them, evolution must be a fact since neither the supernatural nor God exists. Without having actually observed macroevolution or special creation, they are certain the former happened, and equally certain the latter did not. Because they liken “science” to the “systematic study of physically sensed forces,” Darwinism is virtually true by definition. Then when informed critics attack macroevolution’s grand claims on empirical grounds, evolutionists dismiss any anomalous evidence by labeling belief in a Creator or any miracles as “unscientific.” Obviously, if “God” is ruled out in advance while setting up the premises of scientific reasoning, “God” could never be in any conclusion. But this is a matter of free philosophical choice before experience, not compelling scientific results after experience.

In addition, Gould’s statement overlooks science’s core function, which requires it to provide explanations of the “efficient cause” or “how” something happened, including the purported mechanism for evolution. By contrast, so long as written revelation’s details do not deal with the “how,” religious explanations primarily account for the “final cause” or “why” an event took place. So why should anyone believe in the “fact” of evolution if science cannot give specific reasons about “how” it occurred? Then Darwinism is no more empirical (i.e., based on data from the senses) than any ancient pagan creation myth.

Scientific knowledge is based upon reasoning using direct observations. By contrast, historical knowledge, which is derived by interpreting old written records, is a sharply different method for knowing something. For example, the theory of gravity can be tested immediately by dropping apples and measuring how fast they fall. But the natural evolution of fundamentally different kinds of plants and animals has never been observed scientifically at a level higher than the “species” classification.[4] Macroevolution, or large-scale natural biological changes, cannot be tested directly in a laboratory or witnessed clearly in the wild. Belief in macroevolution is a matter of historical reasoning and presumptuous extrapolation, not scientific observation and personal experience.

Now another philosophical prop behind the reasoning of evolutionists should be kicked down. Often evolutionists conceitedly criticize perceived flaws in the structure, number, geography, and/or inter-relationship of plants and animals in order to claim God could not have created them. For example, the philosopher Philip Kitcher argued the panda’s “thumb,” used for stripping bamboo shoots before eating them, is a clumsy, inefficient design: “It does not work well. Any competent engineer who wanted to design a giant panda could have done better.”[5] First of all in response, evolutionists have a hard time proving a specific anatomical structure is really “poor” (i.e., unambiguously hinders survival). For example, does a male cricket’s chirp help its species to survive? Chirping gives away its position to both prospective mates and potential predators.[6] The only “hard” evidence that the “fittest” organism survives to leave the most offspring is (well) it is an organism that leaves the most offspring. Such a “tautology,” or repetitious statement, explains nothing specifically about how mono-cells became men.[7] Second, evolutionists fail to realize that they are philosophers, not scientists, when making these kinds of arguments. For if it is “unscientific” to conclude that a particular complex wonder of nature proves God’s existence, it is equally philosophical to argue purported defects in nature disprove God’s creative power. The Apostle Paul taught that the existence and design of the universe confirm God’s existence and characteristics (Romans 1:20, NASB): “For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse.” Theologians call this kind of reasoning “natural theology,” since it avoids using the Bible (i.e., written revelation) in order to find out truths about God. Evolutionists are engaged in negative natural theology, not empirical scientific research, when skeptically complaining about “nature’s defects.” They are philosophizing in order to support materialism under the cover of “science.” Third, they mistakenly believed certain natural organs and structures were “defective” and “unnecessary” before further scientific research revealed their value and importance. For instance, by the year 1900 evolutionists had drawn up a list of around 180 vestigial organs in the human body. Today, all these supposedly “useless” organs, even the appendix and the tailbone, are medically known to have a helpful function.[8] Ironically, the theory of evolution’s belief in these supposedly unneeded organs retarded medical research about their actual functions, thus showing by actual experience how scientifically dysfunctional this theory is.

Many evolutionists, seeing all the pain, cruelty, and death in nature, also complain about God’s allowing so much evil. Charles Darwin himself denied that “a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created . . . the cat [to] play with mice.”[9] Here Darwin wrote as a disbelieving theologian, not an empirical scientist. From what field study’s investigation could have the following reasoning emerged? “Evolution is true because a good, almighty God never would have made nature full of suffering.” Because the problem of evil in nature drives so much of the emotional rationalizing that justifies faith in evolution as a replacement for faith in God, their complaints still deserve a detailed response. First of all, suffering in the natural world is a temporary intruder, not a permanent resident, before Christ returns (Romans 8:18-22). The Bible prophesies that animal predation is only a passing condition of the world, not the original intent of God (Isaiah 11:6-7), “The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the young goat . . . the lion shall eat straw like the ox.” Second, this world’s evils resulted originally from the free choices of people and angels who should have chosen more wisely. Satan’s great revolt (Genesis 1:2; Isaiah 14:12-15), Adam and Eve’s sin (Genesis 3:17-18), and God’s great flood for punishing humanity’s sins (Genesis 6:5-17) all combined to damage terribly the physical world’s environment. As a result, nobody should look out at nature today, and then believe the Creator originally planned to leave it as it is today. Third, people should humbly admit how much greater God’s knowledge is than mankind’s own. Evolutionists fail to perceive that the “improvements” that could be done to natural structures if they were God may result in unanticipated, unintended consequences. For instance, a larger brain size for men and women sounds great until it is realized that babies with larger skulls pose bigger problems for mothers giving birth. Like Job, the evolutionists ignorantly question the Creator’s wisdom and righteousness. In principle, God replies to them (Job 38:2), “Who is this who darkens counsel by words without knowledge?” Finally, if evolutionists do not believe in moral absolutes, they cannot criticize God for allowing evil into the world. For if moral relativism is true, then evil does not exist. Most serious evolutionists are atheists and agnostics who deny objective values or moral commands that are true in all places at all times. Ironically, only moral absolutists, who are a rare breed among unbelievers, can use the problem of evil to deny God’s existence. After all, if you do not believe in evil, you cannot condemn God for permitting it![10] So in general, evolutionists should ask scientific questions instead of questioning God’s motives if they are to be regarded as scientists instead of as philosophers. Blasphemy should not be misidentified with scientific reasoning.[11]

Evolutionists make a prime analytical error when they extrapolate from small biological changes within species or genera (related groupings of species) to draw sweeping conclusions about how single cell organisms became human beings after so many geological eras go by. In short, it is illegitimate to infer from microevolution that macroevolution actually happened. Just because some biological change occurs is not enough to prove that biological change has no limits.[12] As law professor Phillip Johnson comments (“Defeating Darwinism,” p. 94), evolutionists “think that finch-beak variation illustrates the process that created birds in the first place.” Despite appearing repeatedly in textbooks for decades, does the case of peppered moths evolving from a lighter to darker variety on average really prove anything about macroevolution? Even assuming that the researchers in question did not fudge the data, the moths still were the same species, and both varieties had already lived naturally in the wild.[13] Darwin himself leaned heavily upon artificial breeding of animals, such as pigeons and dogs, in order to argue for his theory. Ironically, because intelligent purpose guides the selective breeding of farm animals for humanly desired characteristics, it is a poor analogy for an unguided, blind natural process that supposedly overcomes all built-in barriers to biological variation. After all the lab experiments and selective breeding, fruit flies and cats still remained just fruit flies and cats. They did not even become other genera despite human interventions can apply selective pressure to choose certain characteristics in order to produce changes much more quickly than nature does. As Johnson explains, dogs cannot be bred to become as big as elephants, or even be transformed into elephants, because they lack the genetic capacity to be so transformed, not from the lack of time for breeding them.[14] To illustrate, between 1800 and 1878, the French successfully raised the sugar content of beets from 6% to 17%. But then they hit a wall; no further improvements took place. Similarly, one experimenter artificially selected and bred fruit flies in order to reduce the number of bristles on their bodies. After 20 generations, the bristle count could not be lowered further.[15] Clear empirical evidence demonstrates that plants and animals have intrinsic natural limits to biological change. The evolutionists’ grand claims about bacteria’s becoming men after enough eons have passed are merely speculative fantasies.

Normally evolutionists assert that small mutations, natural selection, and millions of years combined together to slowly develop complicated biological structures and processes. This theory is called “neo-Darwinism.” But gradual evolution can never convincingly leap the hurdle termed “irreducible complexity” by Michael Behe, a professor of biochemistry. Basically, all the related parts of an entirely new and complete anatomical structure, such as the eyes of humans or the wings of birds, would have to mutate at once together to have any value. Even Darwin himself once confessed, “the eye to this day gives me a cold shudder.” He remained uncomfortable about explaining the human eye’s origins by the gradual processes of natural selection alone.[16] In order to function, these structures must be perfect, or else they will be perfectly useless. Even Stephen Jay Gould, an ardent evolutionist who questioned gradual evolution, once asked: “Of what possible use are imperfect incipient stages of useful structures? What good is half a jaw or half a wing?”[17] Partially built structures resulting from minor mutations will not help a plant or animal to survive. In order to explain the problem with gradual evolution developing intricate organs, Behe makes an ingenious analogy between a mousetrap and an organ’s successful functioning. In order for a snap mousetrap to work, all five parts (the spring, hammer, holding bar, catch, and platform) must be present together and connected properly. If even one part is missing, unconnected, or broken, the rest of mousetrap is completely worthless for catching mice.[18] In light of this analogy, consider how slight flaws in the immensely complicated hemoglobin molecule, which carries oxygen in the bloodstream, can cause deadly blood diseases. Sickle cell anemia and hemophilia, which can easily cause its sufferers to bleed to death when their blood fails to clot properly, are two key examples.[19] Therefore, either an incredibly unlikely chance set of mutations at once created the whole hemoglobin molecule, or God created it. The broad, deep canyon of functioning complex organs cannot be leaped over by the baby steps of microevolution’s mutations.[20] Indeed, if the time-honored biologists’ saying “nature makes no jumps” is historically true, then complex biological designs prove God’s existence.

Now the reason why mutations were so unlikely to produce such complex structures deserves more specific attention. In the time and space available in earth’s history, useful mutations could not have happened often enough to produce fundamentally different types of plants and animals. Time cannot be the hero of the plot for evolutionists when even many billions of years are insufficient. But this can only be known when the mathematical probabilities involved are carefully quantified, which is crucial to all scientific observations. That is, specific mathematical equations describing what scientists observed need to be set up in order to describe how likely or unlikely this or that event was. But so long as evolutionists tell a general “just-so” story without specific mathematical descriptions, much like the ancient pagan creation myths retold over the generations, many listeners will find their tale persuasive. For example, upon the first recounting, listeners may find it plausible to believe the evolutionists’ story about the first living cell arising by random chance out of a “chemical soup” in the world’s oceans. But after specific mathematical calculations are applied to their claim, it is plainly absurd to believe in spontaneous generation, which says life comes from non-living materials. The astronomers Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe once figured out that even the most simple single cell organism had to have 2,000 enzymes.[21] These organic catalysts help to speed up chemical reactions within a cell so it can live. The chance of these all occurring together was a mere 1 out of 1040,000. That is equal to one followed by 40,000 zeros, which would require about five pages of a standard-sized magazine to print. By contrast, using the largest earth-based telescopes, the number of atoms in the observable universe is around 1080. [22] At one academic conference of mathematicians, engineers, and biologists entitled, “Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution,” (published 1967) these kinds of probabilities were applied to evolutionary claims.[23] One professor of electrical engineering at the conference, Murray Eden, calculated that even if a common species of bacteria received five billion years and placed an inch thick on the earth, it couldn’t create by accident a pair of genes. Many other specific estimates like these could easily be devised to test the truthfulness of Darwinism, including the likelihood of various transitional forms of plants and animals being formed by chance mutations and natural selection.

Furthermore, even bad mutations themselves only rarely happen. One standard estimate puts it at one in a hundred million to one in a billion per base pairs of the DNA molecule.[24] As a result, the possibility is very low for a truly good mutation’s occurrence that is helpful under all or most survival conditions. For example, the gene that causes sickle cell anemia is somewhat helpful in climates where malaria is common, but it is serious genetic defect everywhere else.

At this point, knowing how unlikely even seemingly simple biological structures could arise by chance, many evolutionists will resort to yet more philosophical dodges. For example, they might assert that the universe is infinitely large and infinitely old. So then enough time and space for anything to happen by chance would exist, even for life itself. Of course, they have no observational proof for their philosophical assertion. Furthermore, their claim clashes with the big bang theory, which presently dominates astronomers’ explanations about the universe’s origin. This theory often has estimated that the universe is somewhere around 12 to 14 billion years old and has said it is still expanding.[25] If the universe had a beginning and is still getting bigger, it cannot be eternal in age and infinite in size.

Evolutionists may declare that their Christian opponents only believe in a “God of the gaps.” But do Christians only believe God created what cannot be now naturally explained? And as scientific knowledge advances, will their belief in what God did miraculously by His creative power correspondingly shrink? In actuality, the gaps in scientific knowledge have been getting much larger, not smaller. As more is discovered, more is known to be unknown. For instance, after over 150 years of intensive searching, very few, if any, transitional forms have ever been found between fundamentally different types of plants and animals.[26] Even the zealous evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould admitted, “The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology.”[27] Along with Niles Eldredge, Gould even dismissed the well-known purported reptile/bird transitional form archaeopteryx as a “curious mosaic” that didn’t count. After all, when carefully evaluating its anatomy, it is clearly a bird with a few unusual characteristics, not a “half-bird/half-dinosaur.” [28] Back in 1859, Darwin himself used the excuse that the “extreme imperfection of the geological record” resorted from a lack of research, but that explanation wears very thin nowadays. For example, of the 329 living families of animals with backbones, nearly 80% have been found as fossils. [29] Furthermore, when Victorian scientists accepted Darwin’s theory almost wholesale, they hardly knew anything about how complex single cell organisms were. Behe notes that after World War II scientists who used newly developed electron microscopes found out how much more complex bacteria were than when they had seen them before under the older light microscopes.[30]

As the knowledge of biochemistry has increased, such as about DNA and protein, the difficulties of explaining the origins of such complex structures by random chance increased correspondingly. The gaps that evolutionists have to account for have grown larger and larger, not smaller and smaller. The faith that they need in their paradigm has ironically grown greater as scientific research has turned up increasing numbers of anomalies that need to be explained away. They distract others from realizing the flaws with their theory by attacking Christians who account for nature’s miraculous origins by God’s power by asserting that is not a “scientific” explanation. If evolutionists claim that they wish to explain as much as possible without resorting to God as the answer, that is a philosophical claim about the nature of knowledge, not scientific work itself.[31] To assert, “natural processes can always be explained materialistically,” requires unbounded blind faith. In general, Darwinists have not realized a crucial principle: “Nature cannot always explain nature.” The complexity of the information encoded in biological processes cannot be explained by any slowly developing natural process itself. Therefore, in order for living things to have orderly design, they needed a still greater Creator with an orderly mind to cause them to exist.

There is a lot of subjectivity in the arguments used to “prove that an anatomical structure is more advantageous than another in promoting survival. The example of sexual reproduction is a great example, which further detailed below. One could argue either way about how it is helpful or not helpful to producing offspring that are more “fit” to survive. The evolutionists merely “interpret” the evidence by inventing an explanation that seems to fit the situation, but one a priori could “explain” the evidence in the opposite way. Evolutionists themselves have been aware of the tautological, non-falsifiable nature of defining what is the “fittest” species to survive. For example, J.B.S. Haldane in 1935 conceded, “. . . the phrase, ‘survival of the fittest,’ is something of a tautology. So are most mathematical theorems. There is no harm in saying the same truth in two different ways.” Ernest Mayr (1963) maintained, “those individuals that have the most offspring are by definition . . . the fittest ones.” George Gaylord Simpson (1964) said, “Natural selection favors fitness only if you define fitness as leaving more descendants. In fact geneticists do define it that way, which may be confusing to others. To a geneticist fitness has nothing to do with health, strength, good looks, or anything but effectiveness in breeding.” This reality that multiple unverifiable “explanations” can be read into the existence of a given species (i.e., well, it has survived, so it must have been the fittest), is why law professor Philip E. Johnson, in “Darwin on Trial,” observed (p. 20), “it is not easy to formulate the theory of natural selection other than as a tautology. It may seem obvious, that it is advantageous for a wild stallion to be able to run faster, but in the Darwinian sense this will be true only to the extent that a faster stallion sires more offspring. If greater speed leads to more frequent falls, or if faster stallions tend to outdistance the mares and miss opportunities for reproduction, then the improvement may be disadvantageous. Just about any characteristic can be either be advantageous or disadvantageous, depending on the surrounding environmental conditions. Does it seem that the ability to fly is obviously an advantage? Darwin hypothesized that natural selection might have caused beetles on Madeira to lose the ability to fly, because beetles capable of flight tended to be flown out to sea. The large human brain requires a large skull which causes discomfort and danger to the mother in childbirth.” The subjectivity of these “just-so” stories evolutionists invent to “explain” why anatomical structure is advantageous to a species is obvious modern-day mythmaking. That’s why natural selection in the past is ultimately a non-verifiable, non-falsifiable hypothesis.

Evolutionists will assert that speciation can be observed in both in the lab and in nature. However, it should be noted that informed modern creationists, unlike many past historical advocates of creationism, such as Louis Agassiz, don’t make the mistake of denying change at the species level as opposed to the genus or family level. That is, the grossly evident differences at a higher level of taxonomy are much more significant and avoid a lot of the subjectivity has occurred around the definition of term “species,” which isn’t based only upon whether reproduction of equally fertile offspring can occur. The scientific term ‘species” should never be equated with the word in Genesis 1 translated “kind” (min).  A rough, crude equivalent to “min” would be a taxonomic “family,” or perhaps “genus.”  These are the next two higher categories over ‘species” in the biologist’s taxonomic scale by which he (or she) categorizes all creatures.  The error made by Bible literalists who were scientists in the past, such as Linneaus (who devised the Latin naming system for animals, based on Aristotle’s “Categories”), was to say God created all the species during the six days of creation that now still live.  This mistake has continued to figure in most assaults on creationism by evolutionists since the time of Darwin, for there is good evidence that some evolution is possible (“microevolution.”)  All creationists need to maintain in reply is that microevolution is possible, but that fundamental changes greater than those on the level of a “family” are impossible due to the intrinsic limits on natural biological changes built into animals and plants.  Creationists must concede that changes on the species level in order to have any hope of scientific credibility.  For example, Kozhenvikov developed a new species of vinegar fly from two strains of Drosophila melangogaster, and correspondingly named it Drosophila artificialis.  In nature, the spontaneous crossing of two white flowers, A. Pavia and A. Hippocastanum created the pink flower, Aesculus Carnea (which is a horse chestnut). (Frank Lewis Marsh, Evolution or Special Creation” (Washington, D.C.:  Review and Herald Association, 1963), p. 13).  Hence, the species of finches Darwin observed on the Galapagos Islands during his famous voyage on the HMS Beagle probably were derived from one or more basic kinds that survived the Deluge of Noah’s time many thousands of years before.  These basic kinds then speciated in their relatively isolated environments on these islands.  Evolutionists can easily prove some species have changed.  However, they can’t prove anything higher than a taxonomic family has changed naturally.

So then, one can presently observe micro-evolution, such as peppered moths’ changing their coloration or bacteria’s becoming antibiotic resistant, but not macro-evolution; the latter is an unscientific extrapolation from the former to the latter. This evolutionist made a key concession about how hard it is to prove speciation presently (Hampton L. Carson, in “Chromosomes and Species Formation,” in his review of “Models of Speciation by M.J.D. White, “Evolution,” vol. 32 (December 1978), pp. 925-927): “To a very large extent, the formation of a species is a phenomenon which has occurred in the past, so the recognition of the events surrounding the actual division of an ancient gene pool cannot be directly observed. In all but a very small number of cases, the biologist must become historian and deal with evidence for the past role of proceses rather than deal with these processes in action in contemporary populations. The search for truly incipient species has been difficult and, to a considerable degree, frustrating.” So the evidence for current “speciation” isn’t as clear as evolutionists may like to claim it is when this kind of concession can be made.

It’s an interpretation based upon anti-supernaturalistic principles that people can find in nature “nested” kinds of organisms that point to common descent. That is, one uses homology as evidence for descent with modification as opposed to its being proof that these creatures had a common Designer. Neither has been directly observed, so it’s an issue of what kind of inference with what kind of philosophical assumptions we’re going to make when observing this kind of commonality. Are we going to arbitrarily discount the possibility of supernatural creation a priori or not? In this regard, both models (creation and evolution) would be equally “predictive.” However, one can’t reply the actual development of higher level changes at the genus or family level, since this is a historical process and can’t be replayed any more than the assassination of Julius Caesar by Roman senators in 44 b.c. This is why Julie Schlecter, “How Did Sex Come About?”, Bioscience, vol. 34, December 1984, p. 681, made this concession: “The problem, posed succinctly by Graham Bell of McGill University, is that the origin of sex can only be a theoretical question. This ‘origin” cannot be observed, nor theories about it verified through experimentation.”

The high number of missing links and gaps between the species of fossils have made it hard to prove speciation, at least when the neo-Darwinist model of gradual change is assumed. For example, Nillson Heribert in “Synthetische Artbildung (Lund, Sweden: Verlag, CWK Gleerup, 1953), English summary, made this kind of concession nearly a century after Darwin published “Origin of the Species, p. 1186: “It is therefore absolutely impossible to build a current evolution on mutations or on recombinations.” He also saw the problems in proving speciation based upon the fossil evidence available, p. 1211: “A perusal of past floras and faunas shows that they are far from forming continuous series, which gradually differentiate during the geological epochs. Instead they consist in each period of well distinguished groups of biota suddenly appearing at a given time, always including higher and lower forms, always with a complete variability. At a certain time the whole of such a group of biota is destroyed. There are no bridges between these groups of biota following upon one another.” The merely fact that the “punctuated equiillibria” and “hopeful monster” mechanisms have been proposed to explain this lack of evidence shows that nothing has changed since Heribert wrote then. The fossil record is simply not supportive of slow gradual speciation. Therefore, Heribert concluded, given this evidence, p. 1212: “It may, therefore, be firmly maintained that it is not even possible to make a caricature of an evolution out of paleobiological facts.”

Certain higher level structures of organisms can’t be easily “explained” by evolutionists by any kind of “step-at-time” development of random mutations as they are subjected to selective pressure. The bombardier beetle’s defense mechanism is a favorite creationist example, but many others abound. For example, Julie Schecter, in “How Did Sex Come About,” Bioscience, vol. 34 (December 1984), pp. 680, observed the problems with sexual reproduction: “Sex is ubiquitous . . . Yet sex remains a mystery to researchers, to say nothing of the rest of the population. Why sex? At first blush, its disadvantages seem to outweigh its benefits. After all, a parent that reproduces sexually gives only one-half its genes to its offspring, whereas an organism that reproduces by dividing passes on all its genes. Sex also takes much longer and requires more energy than simple division. Why did a process who blatantly unprofitable to its earliest practitioners become so widespread?” Similarly, D.V. Ager, “The Nature of the Fossil Record, “Proceedings of the Geological Association, vol. 87, no. 2, (1976), presidential address, March 5, 1976, made this concession (p. 132): “It must be significant that nearly all the evolutionary stories I learned as a student . . . have now been ‘debunked.’ . . . We all know that many apparent evolutionary bursts are nothing more than brainstorms on the part of particular paleontologists. One splitter in a library can do far more than millions of years of genetic mutation.” So he made this observation, which agrees with how the creation model examines the evidence, despite being an evolutionist, p. 133: “The point emerges that, if we examine the fossil record in detail, whether at the level of orders or of species, we find—over and over again—not gradual evolution, but the sudden explosion of one group at the expense of another.” Correspondingly, we get this remarkable concession by Mark Ridley, “Who Doubts Evolution?”, New Scientist, vol. 90 (June 25, 1981), pp. 831: “In any case, no real evolutionist, whether gradualist or punctuationist, uses the fossil record as evidence in favor of the theory of evolution as opposed to special creation.”

Historically, it was crucial for Darwin himself and evolutionists in general to make the case that God was a bad, awkward Creator in order to “prove” evolution. This point is carefully documented by Cornelius Hunter in “Darwin’s God: Evolution and the Problem of Evil.” Examples of these kinds of arguments are ubiquitous in the evolutionary literature, such as why would God make a half a million species of beetles, why would God make a bird that couldn’t fly, why would God allow for the cat to play with the mice before killing them, why would God make a parasitic wasp that lays eggs that eat a living but dormant worm from the inside, the supposed existence of a lot of “junk DNA,” the supposedly crude shape of the panda’s “thumb” for eating bamboo, why the giraffe has an unnecessarily long nerve, etc. So when evolutionists resort to this kind of argumentation, they are being theologians and philosophers, not scientists. That is, they are claiming that flaws in creation “prove” that a blind amoral random process produced the species of animals and plants that humanity observes today, not a wise benevolent Creator. So then, there’s some rigged use of metaphysics here. Evolutionists claim it is “metaphysical” and anti-scientific to make arguments for the existence of God based on the wonders and complexity of nature, but they all the time make equally “metaphysical” and philosophical arguments against God as the Creator based upon perceived blunders or evils found in nature. So to be consistent, evolutionists have to permanently end making any arguments in which they use the Creator’s perceived blunders or permitted evils to argue against God’s existence or role as the Creator. They are merely making the same kind of inference that creationists do, who conclude the supernatural exists based upon the complexity of natural structures when using natural theology, but in an inverted direction.

In any clash of broad worldviews, the evidence used to support them is inevitably not so directly tied to the broad generalizations that they proclaim. In the case of the clash of evolution and creationism, there are two competing models for interpreting nature. Henry Morris, in “Scientific Creationism,” explains these two models and their implications at length and their confirming or non-confirming evidence based upon their a priori generalizations. It’s important to note that human beings can always “interpret” and “explain” what they perceive and observe in order to fit their paradigms one way or another. The test of the creation and evolutionary models would be in explaining nature with as few anomalies and post-hoc “explanations” of the evidence as possible while successfully making repeatable predictions. For example, an evolutionist would use anatomical similarities between different species (“homology”) as evidence of the same genetic origin in the distant (unobserved) past, but a creationist would say these similarities confirm that they had a common Designer. So then, can evolution be “falsified” or “verified” any better than creationism? What conceivable state of affairs, whether they be lab results or paleontological discoveries, could be allowed to prove evolution to be false? The philosopher of science, Sir Karl Popper, who so contemptuously dismissed Freudianism and Marxism as non-falsifiable ideologies, once perceived the same kind of flaws with evolutionary theory: “Darwinism is not really a scientific theory because natural selection is an all-purpose explanation which can account for anything, and which therefore explains nothing.” Even though he repudiated this assertion after enduring the withering criticism of evolutionists, in 1983 Popper still cited in his self-defense of his (purported) mistake several leading biologists who formulated “the theory in such a way that it amounts to the tautology that those organisms that leave the most offspring leave most offspring.” (See Thomas Woodward, “Doubts about Darwin: A History of Intelligent Design,” pp. 114-115 for the specific quotes from Popper). So then, can evolution be falsified any more than creationism? Or will the defenders of evolution always find a way to keep “explaining” any seeming anomalies for their worldview through post-hoc rationalizations to “save the phenomena”?

So in this light, consider two very broad movements of the geological and paleontological/zoological academic worlds since the time of the publication of John C. Whitcomb and Henry Morris’s seminal young earth creationist work, “The Genesis Flood: The Biblical Record and Its Scientific Implications” in 1961. Notice that the creation model would predict the continuing discovery of fossil species without obvious ancestors; that the differences are sharply defined, and they are qualitative, not quantitative. Furthermore, the creation model would predict the discovery of many, many geological structures that can’t be explained by slow, gradual chance, but only by abrupt, sudden catastrophes. In the case of geology, catastrophism has become far more respectable and widespread to use as an explanation of the stratigraphic record than it was in Eisenhower’s America. For example, the commonly circulated speculation that a meteor strike at the end of the Cretaceous era led to the destruction of the dinosaurs would have been utterly rejected with contempt by almost all credentialed geologists in the early 1960s. The views of the likes of Immanuel Velikovsky in “Worlds in Collision” (1950) and “Earth in Upheaval” (1955) generated the most emphatic opposition and withering scorn at the time, since geology was totally dominated by the uniformitarian principle of Lyell. Yet over the nearly two generations since that time, the world of professional geologists has become far more accepting of catastrophism to explain geological structures, since they have realized that “the key to the past is the present” simply doesn’t explain much of what they find in nature. Derek V. Ager’s “The Nature of the Stratigraphical Record” (1973; revised in 1983) constitutes a specific example of his discipline’s sea change. Likewise, there’s been a major movement away from strict neo-Darwinism, with its belief in gradual change of species based on accumulated mutations and natural selection, to some form of the punctuated equillibria interpretation of the fossil record, in the fields of paleontology and zoology. Here the professional, academic experts simply are admitting, at some level, all the missing links and the lack of obvious transitional forms are intrinsic to the fossil record, instead of trying to explain it as Darwin himself did, as the result of a lack of research (i.e., a sampling error). So the likes of Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge have upheld that concept that species change occurs in quick bursts in isolated, local areas in order to “explain” the fossil record of the abrupt appearance of fully formed species, not realizing that such a viewpoint is at least as unverifiable as their formation by supernatural means. Gould, at one point, even resorted to supporting the “hopeful monster” hypothesis of Richard Goldschmidt, who simply couldn’t believe that accumulated micro-mutations could produce major beneficial changes in species when partial structures were useless for promoting an organism’s survival. (Here their arguments are merely an earlier version of Michael Behe’s in “Darwin’s Black Box,” with his “all or nothing” mousetrap analogy). In this kind of viewpoint, a dinosaur laid in egg, and a bird was hatched, which is the height of absurdity, when the deadly nature of massive, all-at-once mutations is recalled. (Also think about this: With what other organism could such a radically different creature successfully sexually reproduce fertile offspring?)

So then, when we consider these two broad movements within the fields of geology and paleontology/zoology, notice that both of them moved in the direction of the creationists’ view of the evidence while still rejecting a supernatural explanation for its origin. Both movements in these fields over the past 60 years embraced theories of catastrophism and “abrupt appearance” of species that would have been utterly, emphatically rejected at the time of the Darwinian Centennial in 1959 by credentialed experts in these disciplines. Deeply ironically, they are admitting implicitly that the creationists’ generalizations about the fossil record and stratigraphy were right all along, but simply still refuse to use the supernatural to explain them any. The available evidence in these fields conforms to the creationist model’s general predictions much more than to the old evolutionary model, which was committed to gradual change, which then simply “flexed” to fit the evidence over the past two generations. So then, let’s ponder this key problem concerning the predictive power and falsifiability of the evolutionary model: If evolution can embrace and “explain” the evidence through both uniformitarianism and through catastrophism, and species change through both gradual change and abrupt appearance, or even “hopeful monsters,” can this supposedly scientific theory be falsified by any kind of observations and evidence? The supposed mechanisms of evolutionary change of species are very different, as are the “interpretations” and “explanations” of the stratigraphical records, yet evolution remains supposedly “confirmed.” Thus “evolution” can “explain” anything, and thus proves nothing. The predictive implications of the creationist model are corroborated by both of these broad movements in these fields, while they repudiate what evolutionists would have “predicted” based on their model as they upheld it a century after Darwin’s seminal work on the origin of the species (1859) was published.

Let’s use vestigial structures as a specific example of the non-falsifiability of evolution. When it became clear, based on advancing medical science, that the roughly 180 anatomical structures that evolutionists had originally claimed were useless actually were useful, they resorted to a fall-back position, which is a classic post-hoc explanatory device. They now claim that these structures supposedly served some OTHER function in the past, but now they have another function. Of course, that assertion can’t be experimentally verified either through present observations. It’s merely a supposition about the unobserved past based upon skeptical assumptions. Crapo in 1985, for example, wrote: “This is precisely how a vestige should be defined: Not as a ‘functionless’ part of an organism, but as a part which does not function in the way that its structure would lead us to expected, given how that structure function in most other organisms.” Notice now Crapo’s analysis here also confirms how important attacking the belief in God as a wise, efficient, benevolent Creator is to evolutionists: “It is the existence of such vestiges in such organisms which evolutionary theory would very naturally predict, but which the belief in an efficient Designer would not lead us to expect a priori.” (Italics removed, Richly Crapo, “Are the vanishing teeth of fetal baleen whales useless?” 1985). This kind of newly formulated “explanation” for purportedly vestigial structures illustrates the non-falsifiable nature of evolution. When medical science confirms the a priori viewpoint of the creationist model, that all of these anatomical structures really are useful and God didn’t insert useless organs and structures into the human body, the evolutionists don’t admit that their paradigm is falsified. Instead, they simply retreat into other unverifiable rationalizations to keep attacking God as a shoddy, careless, unwise engineer. Here once again the viewpoint of Cornelius Hunter’s book “Darwin’s God: Evolution and the Problem of Evil” is confirmed: Evolutionists are engaged in negative natural theology when they argue against a supernatural explanation of the natural world based upon its perceived structural flaws and moral evils. Indeed, they find it crucial and vital to supporting their paradigm for them to do this. Needless to say, this kind of reasoning is every bit as metaphysical as the theologian who argues that the wonders and complexity of the natural world proves God’s existence. Any claim that evolution, when it enters the world of change above the genus or family taxonomic levels, is more “empirical” than creationism, is simply false.

The example of “vestigial” organs is also a great example of how the theory of evolution slows down scientific development and research. If an anatomical structure is a priori judged to be “vestigial,” then scientists who are evolutionists aren’t likely to study it carefully for what it really does. For example, tonsils were often removed for decades from children since they were judged to be simply “useless vestiges.” Later on, oops!, it was found out that they actually do fight disease. They weren’t so useless after all. Basically all 180 organs and anatomical structures that were once listed as “useless vestiges” have been found to have real functions. For example, the “yolk sac” is used by a developing human embryo to make its first blood cells; death would result without it. The coccyx was claimed to be a remnant of our purported evolutionary ancestors having a tail, but it’s actually a crucial point for muscle attachment needed for our upright posture (and, well, for defecation). (See Henry Morris and Gary Parker, “What is Creation Scienice?,” pp. 61-67). So to say this is about “prior functions” as opposed to current functions is a great example of how evolutionists attempt to escape falsification of their paradigm. They assume these “prior functions” really existed a priori, when that remains to be proven. This is yet another example of circular reasoning by evolutionists, in which they assume what still needs to be proven. For more on this issue from a creationists viewpoint, see Jerry Bergman and George Howe, “‘Vestigial Organs’ Are Fully Functional” (St. Joseph, MO: Creation Research Society, 1990).

Now let’s carefully consider a crucial reason why evolutionists won’t allow their theory to be falsified. A massive accumulations of anomalies, such as Michael Denton documents and explains in “Evolution: A Theory in Crisis,” won’t be permitted to overthrow this paradigm, which is why Darwinists won’t allow their theory to enter a crisis of legitimacy. In this case, unlike most other scientific theories, if Darwinism is proven false, then immediately the specter of moral accountability to the Bible’s God rears its ugly head to all evolutionists committed to naturalism, which is what their theory naturally implies. Belief in any other God, except perhaps Allah, is not a “live option” (to use the jargon of the 19^th-century pragmatist philosopher William James) in our culture; no one is going to believe in Zeus, Baal, Venus, or Thor. Instead, it’s the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Jehovah of Hosts, the God who intervened to rescue His people from slavery in Egypt and who died on the cross, who will be embraced. (A key reason for this is the evidence for the bible’s inspiration, as shown through its sublime moral nature, historical accuracy, archeological discoveries, and fulfilled prophecies, as partially documented in my essay here: http://lionofjudah1.org/Apologeticshtml/Is%20the%20Bible%20the%20Word%20of%20God.htm)

Evolution is an emotional/psychological substitute for religion for agnostics and atheists, much as Communism, Nazism, and Environmentalism have been for many in the past century. Darwinism is not just a scientific theory or law, like Newton’s laws of motion, but it undergirds their whole philosophical worldview that life is without meaning and that mankind has no moral responsibility to a Creator God. This is why they become emotionally upset when people question evolution, for it’s like an attack on their religion. Evolutionists react emotionally and psychologically to the arguments of intelligent design theorists, and especially to young earth creationists, about the same way the Taliban react to reports about the burning of the Koran or the making of cartoons of Muhammad. Blasphemy! Heretic! Infidel! When late 18^th-century chemists debated over whether oxygen or phlogiston was responsible for combustion, the outcome wasn’t going to change anyone’s fundamental worldview or religion. Sure, scientists, like most just average people, hate to admit that they are wrong about anything. Here Arthur Koestler’s “Case of the Midwife Toad,” which records the debate among biologists over whether acquired characteristics could become inheritable and passed down to their offspring (“Lamarckism,”) serves as a great example. But in the case of Darwinism, far more is riding on the outcome of this debate than even (say) did the debates over Newton’s and Einstein’s view of physics and the world. For example, could a homosexual scientist or one who supports legalized abortion ever admit that creationism is true or that evolution is false? Atheists and agnostics aren’t Vulcans, but humans.

Aldous Huxley, the atheist British intellectual perhaps best known today for being the author of the dystopian novel “Brave New World,” once admitted his motives for embracing atheism weren’t purely logical: “I had motives for not wanting the world to have meaning; consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption. . . . For myself, as, no doubt, for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essential an instrument of liberation. The liberation we desired simultaneously liberation from a certain political and economic system and liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom.” (“Report,” June 1966, p. 19) Because the dispute between the evolutionist and creationist models affects so much more than the interpretation of some scientific facts, evolutionists have a very hard time admitting error. A key reason why Michael Denton’s “Evolution: A Theory is Crisis” is so important is that it documents the informed, intelligent reasoning of an agnostic losing his faith in evolution because the arguments made on its behalf were so shoddy. Anyone who wishes to be more personally informed on this debate should open-mindedly read books such as those mentioned here by Denton, Behe, Morris, etc. Don’t just rely on what evolutionists tell you to read. Be open-minded if you have never heard a detailed case for creationism before. So the evolutionists can thunder against creationists like the Wizard of Oz did against Dorothy and her friends, but behind the Darwinian curtain, lurks nothing more than a humbug. The job of creationists is to ask the Darwinists, “Who is that behind the curtain?” They shouldn’t run away and crash through a window, as the Cowardly Lion did, when evolutionists try to intimidate them through the prestige of modern science’s image objective knowledge and their academic credentials when their paradigm based on easily exposed philosophical trickery.

To turn to a broad issue of biblical interpretation, should Christians believe that a great universal flood occurred in Noah’s time that killed all people and air-breathing land animals that weren’t on the ark? We could spend a good amount of time in literary analysis to show that Genesis 6-9 isn’t written in a poetic or allegorical form, but as a straight-forward historical narrative. But, since the space isn’t available for that, let’s short circuit this process by simply asking and answering this question: Does the New Testament accept a universal flood and Noah’s existence as actual, literal historical truths? In II Peter 3:6 (NASB), Christ’s leading apostle says, “the world at that time was destroyed, being flooded with water.” In I Peter 3:20 (NASB), he wrote, “When the patience of God kept waiting in the days of Noah, during the construction of the ark, in which a few, that is, eight persons, were brought safely through the water.”

Did Jesus believe Noah really lived and that the flood really happened? (Matthew 24:38-39, NKJV): "For as in the days before the flood, they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noah entered the ark, "and did not know until the flood came and took them all away, so also will the coming of the Son of Man be.” The author of Hebrews reported Noah’s act of faith in building the ark as a historical reality: (Hebrews 11:7, NKJV): “By faith Noah, being divinely warned of things not yet seen, moved with godly fear, prepared an ark for the saving of his household, by which he condemned the world and became heir of the righteousness which is according to faith.” So if Peter, Jesus, and the author of Hebrews say Noah really lived and built an ark that carried the only surviving people and land animals through a universal flood, that should settle the matter for Christians who take the bible seriously. I take the authority of Jesus and Peter as overriding that of any liberal seminary professor’s or atheistic geologist’s claims.

Critics of the biblical story will make arguments that the ark couldn’t have held all the animals with sufficient food and water for a year’s journey. However, the ark was simply an enormous vessel: Not until the mid-19th century did the human race build a larger ship. According to Genesis 6:15-16, the ark was 300 cubits long, the breadth 50 cubits, the height 30 cubits and it had thee decks. If we take a cubit as being 17.5 inches each (it could easily have been longer; it surely wasn’t shorter), the ark was 437.5 feet long, 72.92 feet wide, and 43.75 feet high. It has a total deck area of around 95,700 square feet, which is around 20 standard college basketball courts, and its total volume was 1,396,000 cubic feet. The gross tonnage of the ark (one ton being equal to 100 cubic feet of usable storage space), was 13,960 tons. (See the seminal “young earth” creationist work, John C. Whitcomb and Henry Morris, “The Genesis Flood: The Biblical Record and Its Scientific Implications,” p. 10). To make a relevant historical comparison. the ark dwarfed Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s “Great Western,” which was a wooden-hulled passenger steam ship 252 feet long of 1320 tons and 1,700 gross register tons. She the world’s largest ship in 1838; critics felt she was too big, for she was two and a half times bigger than any ship that had ever built in Bristol, England.

Once the sizes and numbers of animals are counted in specific, quantifiable terms and added, it becomes clear a vessel of this enormous size could have held two of each “kind” of unclean animal and seven of each kind of clean animal. For example, the young earth creationists, led by Ken Ham who built the “Ark Encounter” exhibit with a life-size replica of the ark in Williamstown, Kentucky, carefully ground through and quantified the biological taxanomical data of the animals that would have been on the ark. They calculate that there are around 34,000 land dependent species alive today. However, a biblical “kind” (Genesis 1:24-25) is a higher taxonomic category than “species” or even “genus.” They equate it roughly with a “family” in many cases. They assume a certain amount of micro-evolution would have occurred after the animals left the ark that would have differentiated the animals into the species that we see today. So they think there were 1,398 biblical “kinds” of animals in the ark represented by 6,744 individual animals. Notice that they include a bunch of extinct dinosaurs in their calculations and include them in their exhibits in many cages, which I don’t think was really the case. (I don’t believe the human race lived at the same time as the dinosaurs, but that the dinosaurs lived in the period covered by the gap between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2 before Adam’s creation, which I could explain more in another post). That assumption unnecessarily raises the total number of species represented on the ark even as their “biblical kind” (when they are inter-fertile) postulate lowers them by consolidating them.

John Woodmorappe, in “Noah’s Ark: A Feasibility Study,” used a “genus” level for biblical “kind” and came up with 8,000 kinds and about 15,745 individuals at a maximum. He calculated that about 46.8% of the ark was used to cage and hold the animals, and if hay was stored for them, about 16.3% of the ark’s space was needed for this. (See the summary in Ken Ham and Bodie Hodge’s “A Flood of Evidence: 40 Reasons Noah and the Ark Still Matter,” p. 212). The scholarly, intellectual creationists have done serious work on this matter about how the ark could have held all these animals, how their food and water could be stored on it, and how the poop would have been collected and disposed of by eight people. They have built a life-size replica of the ark that explains their calculations and assumptions in exquisite detail. The great majority of the models of animals that they had on display in cages were of species/kinds that I had never heard of

Skeptics of the universal flood story, whether they are atheists or liberal Christians, need to start by counter-attacking the detailed arguments and calculations of Whitcomb and Morris, Woodmorappe, and Ham and Hodge instead of pretending they don’t exist. Perhaps they don’t know that they exist, and are trying to make a virtue of ignorance.

References related to the scientific and biblical evidence for a universal flood:

https://www.amazon.com/Genesis-Flood-50th-Anniversary/dp/159638395X

https://www.amazon.com/Flood-Evidence-Reasons-Still-Matter/dp/0890519781

https://www.amazon.com/Noahs-Ark-Feasibility-John-Woodmorappe/dp/0932766412/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=woodmorappe+ark&qid=1634421319&s=books&sr=1-1

Evolutionists, because of their dogmatic philosophical commitment to naturalism a priori (before experience), fail to perceive the flaws of circular reasoning and affirming the consequent that plague the supposed evidence for their theory. They rule out in advance special creation as being “unscientific” and “impossible” in their disciplines because they falsely equate “naturalism” with “science.” So then, it’s no wonder that “special creation” can’t be in any conclusion when it was already covertly ruled out in the premises. For example, as Julian Huxley explained (in “Issues in Evolution,” 1960, p. 45): “Darwinism removed the whole idea of God as the creator of organisms from the sphere of rational discussion. Darwin pointed out that no supernatural designer was needed; since natural selection could account for any known form of life, there was no room for a supernatural agency in its evolution.”

Evolutionists confuse a commitment to naturalism as a methodology in science as being proof of naturalism metaphysically. Macro-evolution is based upon materialistic assumptions that make unverifiable, unprovable, even anti-empirical extrapolations into the distant historical past about dramatic biological changes that can’t be reproduced, observed, or predicted in the present or future. Therefore, their theory doesn’t actually have a scientific status.

Often their prior fervent commitment to materialism is veiled, thus deceiving themselves and/or others, but it often comes out into the open whenever they start to criticize special creation as impossible because of perceived flaws or evils in the natural world as proof for Darwinism. Cornelius Hunter, a non-evolutionist, in “Darwin’s God: Evolution and the Problem of Evil,” is particularly skilled at bringing out how important this kind of metaphysical, indeed, theological argument has historically been to evolutionists, including especially to Charles Darwin himself, whose faith in God was shattered by the death of his daughter.

Here’s a subtle version of this kind of argument, as made by the committed evolutionist (and Marxist) Stephen Jay Gould “Darwinism Defined: The Difference Between Fact and Theory,” Discover (January 1987), p. 68, while citing three main lines of evidence for the theory of evolution: “Third, and most persuasive in its ubiquity, we have the signs of history preserved within every organism, every ecosystem, and every pattern of biogeographic distribution, by those pervasive quirks, oddities, and imperfections that record pathways of historical descent.” That is, since nature isn’t “perfect,” God couldn’t have made it. Instead of arguing from the complex design of nature that God exists as many Christians do, they argue that God doesn’t exist because of the creation’s flaws and evils.

To underline this kind of theological/philosophical analysis that he made for evolution, he wrote about the design of orchids (Gould, “The Panda’s Thumb,” 1980, p. 20): “If God had designed a beautiful machine to reflect his wisdom and power, surely he could not have used a collection of parts generally fashioned for other purposes. Orchids were not made by an ideal engineer; they are jury-rigged from a limited set of available components. Thus, they must have evolved from ordinary flowers.” As Hunter (“Darwin’s God,” p. 47) observes about this passage: “Notice how easy it is to go from a religious premise to a scientific-sounding conclusion. The theory of evolution is confirmed not by a successful prediction, but by the argument that God would never do such a thing.” Similarly, evolutionist Mark Ridley (“Evolution,” 1993, pp. 49+) thinks that the Creator would never repeat a pattern, such as with DNA, when making different creatures. For example, he writes (“Science on Trial,” 1983), p. 55: “If they [species] were independently created, it would be very puzzling if they showed systematic, hierarchical similarity in functionally unrelated characteristics.”

Another fervent evolutionist, Douglas Futuyama has reasoned about the hemoglobin molecule, which carries oxygen in red blood cells: “A creationist might suppose that God would provide the same molecule to serve the same function, but a biologist would never expect evolution to follow exactly the same path.” Notice that in his case, his negative natural theology is like Ridley’s, but different from Gould’s, since Gould is fine with the same old anatomical structures being mostly repeated and reused in different species. That is, “God can’t win,” since if He repeats a pattern, that’s wrong, and if He doesn’t, that’s wrong also. Notice that Futuyma inconsistently sometimes sees the repetition of a pattern as proof God didn’t make something, and differences as proof that He didn’t make something in the quotes below as well.

In the same book (“Science on Trial,” pp. 46, 48, 62, 199) Futuyma repeatedly reasons from religious premises, but somehow thinks he is making a scientific argument:

“If God had equipped very different organisms for similar ways of life, there is no reason why He should not have provided them with identical structures, but in fact the similarities are always superficial.” [Here he says that God should have made these animals with strong similarities].

“Why should species that ultimately develop adaptations for utterly different ways of life be nearly indistinguishable in their early stages [of embryological development]? How does God’s plan for humans and sharks require them to have almost identical embryos? [Here he says that God should have made these animals to be more different].

“Take any major group of animals, and the poverty of imagination that must be ascribed to a Creator becomes evident.” [Here Futuyama confuses presumptuous blasphemy with scientific reasoning].

“When we compare the anatomies of various plants or animals, we find similarities and differences where we should least expect a Creator to have supplied them.” [Notice how, as an “explanatory device,” he can use a repeated pattern or a lack of repeated pattern at whim to criticize how God made plants and animals, which is based on unverifiable philosophical assumptions].

Consider how Charles Darwin (“Origin of the Species,” p. 468) himself would reason that God couldn’t have made animals because of the same pattern being used again and again, which violated his a priori expectations of how the creation should be constructed:

“What can be more curious than that the hand of a man, formed for grasping, that of a mole for digging, the leg of the horse, the paddle of the porpoise, and the wing of the bat, should all be constructed on the same pattern, and should include similar bones, in the same relative positions?”

When making the case for evolution based on homologies (i.e., similar anatomical structures “prove” the purported ancestral organisms are related), Darwin reasoned (“Origin,” p. 437):

“How inexplicable are the cases of serial homologies on the ordinary view of creation! Why should the brain be enclosed in a box composed of such numerous and extraordinary shaped pieces of bone, apparently representing vertebrae? . . . Why should similar bones have been created to form the wing and the leg of a bat, used as they are for such totally different purposes, namely flying and walking? Why should one crustacean which has an extremely complex mouth formed of many parts, consequently always have few legs, or conversely, those with many legs have simpler mouths? Why should the sepals, petals, stamens, and pistils, in each flower, though fitted for such distinct purposes, be all constructed on the same pattern?”

So here Darwin, as Hunter observes (“Darwin’s God,” p. 47), “didn’t know how the design of the crustacean or the flower could have been improved, [but] he believed there must have been a better way and that God should have used it.” Darwin’s criticisms here are about how God created such a boring lack of variety in the biological world by using the same pattern again and again. This isn’t scientific reasoning (observation, reproducibility, prediction), but philosophical reasoning about something that occurred in the unobserved past and theological reasoning that claims God makes mistakes.

Cornelius Hunter (“Darwin’s God, p. 49), after surveying this set of criticisms by evolutionists about how God made the world, makes an acute observation: “Behind this argument about why patterns in biology prove evolution lurks an enormous metaphysical presupposition about God and creation. If God made the species, then they must fulfill our expectations of uniqueness and good engineering design. . . . Evolutionists have no scientific justification for these expectations, for they did not come from science.”

However, the moment evolutionists do this, they are no longer scientists, but they are philosophers engaged in “negative” natural theology. They are just as metaphysical as Paley was, when he famously reasoned that something as complicated watch couldn’t habe been made by chance, but it is proof that it had a Designer. “Negative” natural theology, which aims to deny that God exists, is just as metaphysical as “positive” natural theology, that aims to prove that God exists. Arguments for materialism based on perceived flaws in the natural world are just one more version of centuries-old debates over the problem of evil; they don’t have any intrinsic scientific merit and prove nothing empirically about the origin of species and the origin of life. After all, the main purpose of the theory of evolution is to escape the argument from design by coming up with a seemingly plausible way to create design by chance without supernatural intervention.

The reasonings of evolutionists, when they are ruling out in advance special creation as impossible on philosophical grounds, presumptuously think that they know more than the Creator. From a position of near ignorance, they claim that they know more about how to make life forms than God does. As Paul alluded to Isaiah’s well-known analogy (Romans 9:20): “On the contrary, who are you, O man, who answers back to God? The thing molded will not say to the molder, “Why did you make me like this,” will it?”

Questioning the motives of God in order to rig the definition of “science” to rule out special creation in advance, isn’t science, but philosophy of the most metaphysical sort.

They use the seemingly bad design of nature to argue against God’s existence instead of for God’s existence, thus placing themselves metaphysically on the same grounds as theists who argue from the good design of nature that God exists. Thus, a major motive of evolutionists, when they are naturalists, for advancing their theory is to remove the argument from design from theists and to make mankind not be accountable to a personal God.

From a philosophical viewpoint, does the theory of evolution, meaning “monocell to man” macro-evolution, actually have a scientific status? Can it even hypothetically be falsified? Or can the Darwinians always devise yet another ad hoc “explanation” to save their theory against any anomalies that show up?

L. Harrison Matthews, a British biologist and evolutionist, candidly admitted in his introduction to a 1971 edition of Darwin’s “Origin of the Species” that evolution wasn’t more provable scientifically than special creation:

“The fact of evolution is the background of biology, and biology is thus in the peculiar position of being a science founded on an unproven theory—is it then a science or a faith? Belief in the theory of evolution is thus exactly parallel to belief in special creation—both are concepts which believers know to be truth but neither, up to the present, has been capable of proof.”

After all, if naturalists demand that creationists “prove” the supernatural exists by showing the direct effects of the supernatural, creationists can retort by saying the evolutionist should take them into the past to show them exactly how reptiles evolved into birds or mammals or the first cell was formed by chance millions of years ago. Neither claim is immediately directly provable, but is a matter of inference and inductive reasoning based on sense data about the natural world. However, the creationist’s conclusion that a complex structure doesn’t happen by random chance but by conscious reasoning is constantly validated by daily experience, such as with complicated machinery. The naturalists’ claim that random chance can create far more complicated structures (biological organisms and consciousness) than cars or computers by random action on matter over millions of years can’t be verified by present-day experience of anyone.

Sir Karl Popper, the famed philosopher of science who interpreted the mission of science as being the falsification of incorrect explanations of reality, perceived the problems with Darwinism’s ability to be a testable theory (“Science, Problems, Aims, Responsibilities,” Proceedings, Federation of American Society of Experimental Biology, vol. 22 (1963), p. 964):

“There is a difficulty with Darwinism. . . . It is far from clear what we should consider a possible refutation of the theory of natural selection. If, more especially, we accept that statistical definition of fitness which defines fitness by actual survival, then the survival of the fittest becomes tautological and irrefutable.” [A “tautology” is a statement that effectively repeats itself. The subject and predicate are really the same, such as “It’s not over until it’s over” or “What I have written is what I have written.” It effectively explains nothing].

After harsh criticisms from his fellow evolutionists, Popper repudiated publicly this judgment that placed Darwinism in the same category with Marxism and Freudianism, which are ideologies capable of explaining everything and thus nothing. However, one can infer that privately he remained suspicious of Darwinism’s ability to be falsifiable. Michael Ruse, a fervent evolutionist and philosopher of science, perceived that Popper hadn’t really backed down when explaining the latter’s views (“Darwinism Defended,” 1982, pages 131+): “But then moving on to biology [after evaluating Freudianism as unfalsifiable], coming up against Darwinism, they [Popper and his followers] feel compelled to make the same judgment: Darwinian evolutionary theory is unfalsifiable.” Ruse quotes Popper as saying in a 1974 publication (italics removed), “I have come to the conclusion that Darwinism is not a testable scientific theory but a metaphysical research programme—a possible framework for testable scientific theories.” Ruse then comments that he suspects “that even now he does not really believe that Darwinism in its modern form is genuinely falsifiable. If one relies heavily on natural selection and sexual selection, simultaneously downplaying [genetic] drift, which of course is what the neo-Darwinian does do, then Popper feels that one has a nonfalsifiable theory. And, certainly, many followers agree that there is something conceptually flawed with Darwinism. (See Bethell, 1976; Cracraft, 1978; Nelson, 1978, Patterson, 1978; Platnick and Gaffney, 1978; Poppper, 1978, 1980, and Wiley, 1975.”

Ruse then summarizes the views of the apparent non-creationist evolutionist critics of Darwinism. They note that testing requires predictions first. Then one checks if the predictions turn out to be true or false. However, this can’t be done with Darwinism because how can one predict “what will happen to the elephants trunk twenty-five million years down the road?” No one would be around to see if the prediction about future macro-evolution would be true. Conversely, explaining further the criticisms of apparent fellow evolutionists, “no one could step back to the Mesozoic to see the evolution of mammals and check if indeed natural selection was at work, nor could anyone spend a week or two (or century or two) in the Cretaceous to see if the dinosaurs, then going extinct, failed in the struggle for existence.”

The basic problem with natural selection and “survival of the fittest” as explanatory devices of biological change in nature is the tautological, unverifiable nature of this terminology, which occasionally even candid evolutionists admit. That is, any anatomical structure can be “explained” or “interpreted” as being helpful in the struggle to survive, but one can’t really prove that explanation to be true since its interpreting the survival of organisms in the unobserved past or which would take place in the unobserved far future. The traditional simplistic textbook story about (say) the necks of giraffes growing longer over the generations in order to reach into trees higher is simplistic when there are also drawbacks to having long necks and other four-legged species survive very well with short necks. In reality, the selective advantages of changed anatomical structures are far less clear in nearly all cases. For example, most male birds are much more colorful than their female consorts. An evolutionists could “explain” that helps in helping them reproduce more by being more attractive than the duller coated females of the same species. However, it’s also explained that the duller colors of the females protect them from being spotted by predators, such as when they are warming eggs. However, doesn’t the colorful plumage of the males also make them more conspicuous to predators? Overall, how much aid do the bright colors give to males when they mate but work against them when they may become prey? How much do the dull colors of the females work against them when they mate compared to how much they help them become more camouflaged against predators? How does one quantify or predict which of the two factors is more important, except by the (inevitably tautological) criterion of leaving the most offspring behind?

Arthur Koestler (“Janus: A Summing Up,” 1978), pp. 170, 185 confessed the problems that evolutionary theory has in this regard:

“Once upon a time, it looked so simple. Nature rewarded the fit with the carrot of survival and punished the unfit with the stick of extinction. The trouble only started when it came to defining ‘fitness.’ . . . Thus natural selection looks after the survival and reproduction of the fittest, and the fittest are those which have the highest rate of reproduction—we are caught in a circular argument which completely begs the question of what makes evolution evolve.”

“In the meantime, the educated public continues to believe that Darwin has provided all the relevant answers by the magic formula of random mutation plus natural selection—quite unaware of the fact that random mutations turned out to be irrelevant and natural selection a tautology.”

Despite being a zealous evolutionist himself, Douglas Futuyama (“Science on Trial,” 1983), p. 171, still admitted that concerns about natural selection’s being a tautology have appeared in respectable places: “A secondary issue then arises: Is the hypothesis of natural selection falsifiable or is it a tautology? . . . The claim that natural selection is a tautology is periodically made in scientific literature itself.”

One of the past leading scientific evolutionists of the 20th century, Theodosius Dobzhansky admitted the intrinsic epistemological (“how do you know that you know”) limitations that arose when trying to apply scientific methods to (supposedly) study what occurred in the distant, humanly-unobserved past (“On Methods of Evolutionary Biology and Anthropology” (Part I—Biology), American Scientist, December 1957, p. 388):

“On the other hand, it is manifestly impossible to reproduce in the laboratory the evolution of man from the australopithecine, or of the modern horse from an Eohippus, or of a land vertebrate from a fish-like ancestor. These evolutionary happenings are unique, unrepeatable, and irreversible. It is as impossible to turn a land vertebrate into a fish as it is to effect the reverse transformation. The applicability of the experimental method to the study of such unique historical processes is severely restricted before all else by the time intervals involved, which far exceed the lifetime of any human experimenter. And yet, it is just such impossibility that is demand by antievolutionists when they ask for ‘proofs’ of evolution which they would magnanimously accept as satisfactory. This is about as reasonable a demand as it would be to ask an astronomer to recreate the planetary system, or to ask a historian to reenact the history of the world from Caesar to Eisenhouwer. Experimental evolution deals of necessity with only the simplest levels of the evolutionary process, sometimes called microevolution.”

So then, evolutionists committed to naturalism demand of creationists proof of special creation by asking them to present the supernatural on the spot for them. In this regard, they are like Philip on the night of the Passover, who asked Christ, “Lord, show us the Father, and it is enough for us” (John 14:8). However, at this time, before the day Christ the Creator will return and every eye will see Him (Revelation 1:7), the supernatural is known by inference: Complex systems and machinery requiring high levels of ordered information (i.e., DNA) don’t happen by blind chance in our present-day experience, but through carefully reasoned work consciously performed, such as the assembly of cars in assembly plants. The point Dobzhansky made above about the intrinsic limitations of our knowledge of the past remains valid: Likewise, creationists ask evolutionists to prove their theory by directly showing the process of reptiles becoming birds or mammals or fish becoming amphibians millions of years ago. Of course, a non-reproducible historical event can’t be repeated again. It’s no more possible for evolutionists to directly prove “monocell-to-man” macro-evolution by direct observation than creationists can prove special creation by direct observation, since both occurred in the humanly unobserved past and can’t be reproduced or predicted. Both are making inferences based upon their philosophies into the unobserved past. The creationists’ inference, however, is much more reasonable a priori that God made complex structures than blind chance did when we consider our own daily experience, in which random processes create nothing of complex design. There isn’t enough time or matter in the known universe to turn dirt into the first living cell by chance, let alone produce human intelligence, as the calculations of Hoyle and other critics of purely naturalistic Darwinism have made.

Let’s now return to Michael Ruse’s summary of what evolutionists themselves have said when trying to “explain” how a particular anatomical structure aids in a creature’s survival. The fuzziness and uncertainty of the explanations given are obvious when skilled, well-educated, experts in biological sciences can come up with such different stories at the same time. It’s much more akin to primitive tribesmen who are sitting around fires and making up stories and myths than verifiable, observable, predictable reproducible “science” (“Darwinism Defended,” italics removed): “Take something much discussed by evolutionists: the sail on the back of the Permian reptile, Dimetrodon. The possibility that this may have absolutely no adaptive value is given no credence at all, as Darwinians plunge into their favorite parlour game: ‘find the adaptation.’ The sail was a defense mechanism (it scared predators), or it served for sexual display (not much chance of mistaking someone’s intentions with that thing along one’s backside), or, as many evolutionists (including Raup and Stanley) suppose, it worked as a heat-regulating device to keep the cold-blooded Dimetrodon at a more constant temperature in the fluctuating environment. The animal would move the sail around in the sunlight and wind, heating or cooling the blood in the sail, which could then be passed through to the rest of the body. In short, as this example shows, there has to be some reason for anything and everything. One can be sure that if the Darwinian can think of no potential value in the struggle for existence, then value will be found in the struggle for reproduction. Even the most absurd and grotesque of physical features are supposed to have irrepressible aphrodisiac qualities. Like the Freudians, Darwinians get a lot of mileage out of sex.”

So then, isn’t this just guesswork parading under the cover of “science”? To try to explain how an anatomical structure aids in survival in a truly testable, predictable way is nearly impossible, especially for creatures that became extinct (supposedly) millions of years ago. Since macro-evolution precedes at such a slow rate, “survival of the fittest” can’t be rigorously tested on anything currently living, except through the fallacious exercises of massively extrapolating from trivial changes in coloration or other minor characteristics of the same species, such as the peppered moth case. It’s nothing like the predictability and practical precision of Newton’s laws of motion and the inverse square law of gravitation is for physicists and engineers. The actual practice of trying to figure out how a given anatomical structure makes an organism more fit is hardly “hard science.”

At the Darwinian Centennial in 1959, the zealous neo-Darwinist C.H. Waddington was so confident in his naturalism that he gave away the store on this issue (“The Evolution of Life,” 1960, p. 385): “Natural selection, which at first considered as though it were a hypothesis that was in need of experiment or observational confirmation turns out, on closer inspection to be a tautology, a statement of an inevitably although previously unrecognized relation. It states that the fittest individuals in a population (define as those which leave more offspring) will leave most offspring. If one tries to test “fitness” in a more rigorous way, the procedure will degenerate into tautology since the survival of offspring is the only way to check for that characteristic, although it won’t seem to be that way initially when the principle is first stated. Ronald H. Brady, a professor of philosophy, explained this problem in “Natural Selection and the Criteria by Which a Theory is Judged” (“Systematic Zoology,” Vol. 28, 1979):

“Natural selection is free of tautology is any formulation that recognizes the causal interaction between the organism and its environment, but most recent critics have already understood this and are actually arguing that the theory is not falsifiable in its operational form. Under examination, the operational forms of the concepts of adaptation and fitness turn out to be too indeterminate to be seriously tested, for they are protected by ad hoc additions drawn from an indeterminate realm.”

Cynically, although he remains an evolutionist, H.S. Lipson perceives the subjectivity of the explanations given by Darwinists (“A Physicist Looks at Evolution,” Physics Bulletin, vol. 31 (May 1980), p. 138, italics removed): “I have always been slightly suspicious of the theory of evolution because of its ability to account for any property of living things.” G.W. Harper perceives how plastic evolution is in its ability to explain just about anything somehow (“Darwinism and Indoctrination,” School Science Review, vol. 59, no. 207 (December 1977), p. 265:

“There is a close similarity, for instance, between the Darwinist and the Marxist in the example quoted earlier. Both can take any relevant information whatever, true or false, and reconcile it with their theory. The Darwinist can always make a plausible reconstruction of what took place during the supposed evolution of a species. Any difficulties in reconciling a given kind of natural selection with a particular phase in evolution can be removed by the judicious choice of a correlated character.”

Paul Ehrlich and L.C. Birch, “Evolutionary History and Population Biology” (“Nature,” vol. 214, April 22, 1967, p. 352) concluded that there was no theoretical way to prove evolution to be false:

“Our theory of evolution has become . . . one which cannot be refuted by any possible observations. Every conceivable observation can be fitted into it. It it thus ‘outside of empirical science’ but not necessarily false. No one can think of ways in which to test it. Ideas, either without basis or based on a few laboratory experiments carried out in extremely simplified systems have attained currency far beyond their validity. They have become part of an evolutionary dogma accepted by most of us as part of our training.”

As a practical example of this plasticity of evolution to be able to explain just about anything, consider the seemingly seismic shift among evolutionists over the past generation away from gradual neo-Darwinism to the rapid, local bursts of evolution of the punctuated equilibria interpretation of biological evolution. “Evolution” somehow can explain both views equally well despite they are opposite interpretations of the fossil and biological evidence in many regards.

Hence, the best the evolutionists can come up to “prove” their theory is to make wild extrapolations from trivial biological changes, such as bacteria that become antibiotic resistant and sickle cell anemia, that don’t change even the species involved, let alone on a higher taxonomic level (genus, family, order, etc.) Furthermore, the empirically provable natural limits to biological change within basic created kinds should destroy any faith that enough time, mutations, and natural selection would (say) make it possible to make a dog as big as an elephant or make a reptile or mammal acquire the “flow through” lungs of a bird. For example, the fruit fly has a very fast gestation rate (12 days) and X-rays have been used to increase the mutation rate by some 15,000 percent, yet still fruit flies remain fruit flies. The species doesn’t change fundamentally into another genus or even species despite all the methods of artificial breeding that have been used in a lab setting. Even with this incredible speed up compared to natural conditions, no change even at the species level has occurred of note. (See Jeremy Rifkin’s analysis, “Algeny,” 1983, p. 134. So the theory of macro-evolution, at the “monocell to man” level, is no more scientifically provable than special creation at the minimum, and it’s actually much worse than that, since complex systems in our everyday experience don’t create themselves by chance, but require an enormous amount of concentrated mental attention to be constructed. Paley is still much more right than Darwin.

The history of concessions by some candid evolutionists that I have assembled here bears witness to problems that can’t be easily swept under the rug, although it will be claimed otherwise by equally biased evolutionists who insist on a materialistic interpretation of the origin of life and the different kinds of plants and animals. Let’s make some kind of summary reply here about methodology. To merely cite a link to a biased pro-evolutionist article with a brief comment or insult isn’t enough. Instead, the argument of what is linked to should be briefly summarized, such as in a paragraph, as well. It shouldn’t be necessary to go elsewhere to evaluate a truth claim. Furthermore, to note that a (creationist) source is “old” isn’t proof that it is “false,” except based on what C.S. Lewis called “chronological snobbery.” “Such and so “turns back the clock,” so it must be false.” After all, Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas both believed the world was round. To cite what they wrote on that point doesn’t make it automatically false. Similarly, Darwin’s own key book on “The Origin of the Species” was published in 1859. Does that make it automatically wrong to cite anything Darwin said, especially when he didn’t know about Mendelian genetics during his lifetime? A key assumption behind citing this or that academic source is to implicitly shield atheistic, materialistic philosophy with the prestige of “OBJECTIVE TRUTH FROM MODERN SCIENCE.” However, whenever human beings are confronted with arguments or truth that involve moral and value judgments, their objectivity evaporates, regardless of how many academic credentials they have. A similar process is seen all the time in the great endless debate between capitalism/free market system and some version of socialism and/or the welfare state and those politicians or pundits that uphold either. People, such as journalists, who claim objectivity or that they aren’t biased are typically deceiving themselves and/or others. It’s for this reason why a Jehovah’s Witness book dealing with evolution versus creation is no less biased than any academic source written by a determined atheistic or agnostic evolutionist; both are biased, but the former at least admits that it is an evangelistic effort. Furthermore, we know all the time that “experts” make blunders, the most obvious of which would be doctors who make medical errors that often kill or injure people. To assume that “experts” never make mistakes and never are collectively wrong is simply false, as the history of science itself proves. For example, not that long ago, frontal lobotomies were hailed as a miracle cure for mental illness. Today, because of the power of academics to squelch dissent at three key choke points of their disciplines (when doctoral defenses occur, when tenure is granted, and when peer review determines which articles are to be published), a prevailing consensus can permanently crush dissent and expel dissidents, especially when reinforced by peer pressure. Furthermore, when surveying these kinds of forbidding barriers and the difficulties of getting good academic jobs even when agreeing with the paradigms their disciplines uphold, many would-be aspiring dissenters will turn practical and not even try to enter such a profession to begin with. Furthermore, that consensus isn’t driven really by a particular set of “facts” that “compel” accepting a particular theory or interpretation of the evidence, but also by their fear of being judged by Jehovah for their sins if they let a supernatural camel nose under the tent’s edge. The reason for all the vitriol, insults, and verbal abuse isn’t because the evidence is really so clear, but because to question evolution is to question many atheists and agnostics’ emotional/psychological equivalent of religion. After all, when I did research for my book dealing with Jewish arguments against Christianity, and I had to read four or five books by the advocates of Rabbinical Judaism against Christ as the Savior, the level of vitriol, insults, and verbal abuse was about the same. Atheistic evolutionists, even if they are well-credentialed academics, are emotional creatures too, as the tone of this kind of debate demonstrates, who have a clear motive to avoid any concession to their theistic opposition.

Instead of laboriously trying to hack off each twig of objections made by evolutionists, a creationist can simply examine certain general philosophical observations that show evolution is materialistic philosophy masquerading as objective science. Fundamentally, the conflict between the creation and evolutionary models is about how the facts are interpreted, not the facts themselves. Evolution uses a rigged definition of “science” that excludes a priori any possibility of supernatural explanations in the unobserved, prehistoric past about events and processes that can’t be reproduced. It objects to belief in miracles as non-reproducible events that unpredictably violate the laws of nature. However, at the same time as it has to posit that the First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics didn’t apply to the big bang, which obviously violates both, and that spontaneous generation occurred once, which violates the law of biogenesis, which means materialistic evolutionists have to assume unobserved exceptions to natural laws also have occurred in the pre-historic past to fit their paradigm as well. Furthermore, a theist can explain the free will of God as the reason why something suddenly changed, but an evolutionist can’t explain why the laws of nature based on dumb, blind matter would suddenly change if matter (or “something”) didn’t change any. Evolutionists, including Darwin himself, long have argued that animal predation or some animal or plant has a defective or “vestigial” anatomy proves evolution because God is a sloppy, careless, overly attentive, and/or evil Creator. To them, the inference involved from nature against the supernatural or negative natural theology is not “metaphysical.” But if a theist argues that the wonders and/or complexity of nature prove God to exist, that’s natural theology, an inference from the natural to the supernatural, and thus an illegitimate inference based on philosophical assumptions. It’s not obvious metaphysically why arguments against God as the Creator by scientists are “science,” but arguments for God aren’t except by an a priori rigged definition of “science.” To argue that, “Spontaneous generation seems to be impossible, but we got here by it,” assumes that evolution (and the corresponding atheism) that still need to be proven. A crucial prop to evolution is circular reasoning and begging the question, such as the old “index fossil” conundrum: Do the rocks date the fossils or do the fossils date the rocks? Evolution extrapolates natural processes uncritically into the past, such as uniformitarian geology has, even when many natural geological structures simply can’t be explained that way. Based on both artificial breeding and other experiments, such as with fruit flies, there are experimentally, empirically provable limits to biological change for selected characteristics when guided deliberately by human beings, but evolution uncritically extrapolates blindly without limits from (guided) micro-evolution within species to (unguided) macro-evolution above the genus and family levels. As neo-Darwinism was increasingly “on the rocks” over the decades because mutations and selective pressure as a theory of gradual change didn’t fit the abrupt appearance and disappearance of species in the fossil record, evolutionists resorted to either the self-evidently absurd “hopeful monster” solution or (more generally) to quick, local, untraceable, unverifiable bursts of evolution (“punctuated equilibria”) to explain the fossil record’s missing links/lack of transitional forms between species. Evolutionists also resort to “just so” stories to “explain” why a given anatomical structure is supposedly an aid to survival when even they often have conceded that differential reproduction based on the survival of the fittest really only explicable by a tautology. Likewise, the problem of “all or nothing,” such as colorfully summarized by Behe’s mousetrap analogy, has long troubled honest evolutionists, which was why the likes of Schindewolf, Goldschmidt, and even Gould were willing to endorse “hopeful monsters” as the source of speciation; there’s no real difference between Behe’s “mousetrap” and Gould’s asking, What good is half a jaw or half a wing? Both see the problem with believing in gradual change through a few mutations at a time when many biological structures simply can’t be explained as having selective value when they aren’t fully developed, such as the eye or the feathered wing. Evolutionists will not allow their theory to be falsified, but simply will “explain” any fact to fit their paradigm by any necessary means, even when it has meant accommodating neo-Darwinism, punctuated equilibria, and “hopeful monsters,” as well as uniformitarian geology (“the present is the key to the past”) and catastrophism (“a meteor killed all the dinosaurs”) somehow all under one roof. But to explain “everything” and to make no risky predictions based on future reproducible events is actually to explain nothing. Evolution is fundamentally simply atheistic, materialistic philosophical speculations about the past done under the cloak of “science” to give them the aura of respectability and objectivity. Unlike the case for other branches of science, the past can’t be reproduced and predicted with some kind of practical usefulness by evolution that exceeds the creation model’s ability to “explain” and to “interpret” the evidence. An evolutionist looks at similar anatomical structures in different species and “explains” them by saying they are proof of common descent (homology), but a creationist looks at them, and interprets them to mean that they had a Common Designer. Neither “interpretation” can be directly proven false by a lab result or fieldwork. So when I survey all of these philosophical problems with the paradigm of evolution, the academic evolutionists are like the big bad wolf who is huffing and puffing; they think, self-deceptively, that the creationist “pig” is in a house of straw, but they actually are trying to blow down a house of brick.

As shown above, the theory of evolution is based on philosophical assumptions, not scientific evidence. Although evolutionists will intellectually intimidate their critics into silence by commanding all the prestige of modern science that they can muster, their theory is like a mighty fortress built upon conceptual quicksand. They claim the evils of the natural world prove that no God exists, but as moral relativists, they contradict themselves by generally asserting that evil does not exist either. They also define “science” in materialistic terms so that any supernatural explanations of nature have to be rejected in advance for philosophical reasons only. But above all, the Darwinists irrationally attempt to explain nature’s complex designs by random natural processes alone. Although Paul was describing how ancient pagans rejected the true God, his words fit equally well the Western scientists who rejected God as the Creator over the past two centuries (Romans 1:21-22): “Although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools.” May we reject the theory of evolution’s false declaration that our lives have no meaning when the God of the Bible will fill them with true purpose!

Those who are somewhat uncommitted and open-minded, and may wish to investigate the evidence for creation, are encouraged to do further research on their own, independently of whatever any evolutionist would say, by reading books such as these:

Phillip E. Johnson, “Darwin on Trial.” https://www.amazon.com/Darwin-Trial-Phillip-Johnson/dp/0830838317

Phillip E. Johnson, “Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds.” https://www.amazon.com/Easy-Understand-Defeating-Darwinism-Opening/dp/0830813608/ref=pd_lpo_2?pd_rd_i=0830813608&psc=1

Michael Denton, “Evolution: A Theory in Crisis.” Many years ago, John Morris, the head of ICR at the time, told me that he would reread this book before any major academic debates on evolution versus creation. Being a record of an agnostic who has almost entirely lost his faith in Darwinism, this book particularly devastating to the evolutionists’ cause. https://www.amazon.com/Evolution-Theory-Crisis-Michael-Denton/dp/091756152X

Michael J. Behe, “Darwin’s Black Box.” https://www.amazon.com/Darwins-Black-Box-Biochemical-Challenge/dp/0743290313/ref=pd_lpo_1?pd_rd_i=0743290313&psc=1

Cornelius J. Hunter, “Darwin’s God: Evolution and the Problem of Evil.” Hunter is particularly good at analyzing the philosophical assumptions of evolutionists.

https://www.amazon.com/Darwins-God-Evolution-Problem-Evil/dp/1587430118

Cornelius J. Hunter, “Science’s Blind Spot.” https://www.amazon.com/Sciences-Blind-Spot-Scientific-Naturalism/dp/158743170X

Henry Morris, “Scientific Creationism.” https://store.icr.org/dr-henry-morris-scientific-creationism.html

Henry Morris and Gary Parker, “What Is Creation Science?” https://www.amazon.com/What-Creation-Science-Henry-Morris/dp/0890510814

Duane T. Gish, “Evolution: The Fossils Still Say No!” https://www.amazon.com/Evolution-Fossils-Still-Say-No/dp/0890511128

Marvin L. Luebenow, “Bones of Contention: A Creationist Assessment of Human Fossils.” https://www.amazon.com/Bones-Contention-Creationist-Assessment-Fossils/dp/0801065232

“Life—How Did It Get Here? By Evolution or by Creation?” This basic book does an excellent job, despite it endorses the “day-age” interpretation of Genesis, which is mistaken compared to the “gap theory” interpretation. https://www.jw.org/en/library/books/Life-How-Did-It-Get-Here-By-Evolution-or-by-Creation-2/Life-How-Did-It-Get-Here-By-Evolution-or-by-Creation/

W.R. Bird, “The Origin of Species Revisited: The Theories of Evolution and of Abrupt Appearance.” https://www.amazon.com/Origin-Species-Revisited-Evolution-Appearance/dp/0840768818

Duane T. Gish, “Creation Scientists Answer Their Critics.” https://www.amazon.com/Creation-Scientists-Answer-Their-Critics/dp/0932766285

John C. Whitcomb and Henry M. Morris, “The Genesis Flood: The Biblical Record and Its Scientific Implications.” Historically, this is the seminal “young earth” creationist book, but readers who haven’t taken a class in geology would most likely need a dictionary close-at-hand to read some parts of it. https://store.icr.org/dr-henry-morris-the-genesis-flood-50th-anniversary.html

For relevant essays on this subject on this Web site: http://lionofjudah1.org/Apologeticshtml/Evolution%20Based%20on%20Philosophy%20not%20Science.htm

http://lionofjudah1.org/Apologeticshtml/Darwins%20God%20Review.htm

http://lionofjudah1.org/Apologeticshtml/Does%20God%20Exist%20MSU.htm

http://lionofjudah1.org/Apologeticshtml/Should%20the%20Bible%20and%20God%20Be%20Proven%20Fideism%20%20vs%20WCG.htm

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[1] Stephen Jay Gould, “Evolution as Fact and Theory,” Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes, as quoted in Philip Johnson, Darwin on Trial (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1991), pp. 66-67.

[2] Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (Bethesda, MD: Adler & Adler, Publishers, 1986), p. 75.

[3] Phillip E. Johnson, Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1997), pp. 43-44.

[4] Frank Lewis Marsh, Evolution or Special Creation? (Washington, DC: Review and Herald, 1963), pp. 12-13, 42, discusses a number of arbitrarily scientifically labeled, even created, “species” of animals and plants that are still inter-fertile. Henry Morris, The Biblical Basis of Modern Science (Grand Rapids, MI: 1984), p. 374, believes that the “family” level roughly corresponds with the basic created Genesis “type.”

[5] Philip Kitcher, Abusing Science: The Case Against Creationism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982), p. 139, as quoted by Duane T. Gish, Creation Scientists Answer Their Critics (El Cajon, CA: Institute for Creation Research, 1993), p. 226.

[6] http://www.psu.edu/dept/nkbiology/naturetrail/speciespages/cricket.htm

[7] Johnson, Darwin on Trial, pp. 20-22.

[8] Jerry Bergman and George Howe, “Vestigial Organs” Are Fully Functional (St. Joseph, MO: Creation Research Society Books, 1990), p. x; Gish, Creation Scientists Answer Their Critics, p. 219.

[9] Letter to Asa Gray in 1860, as quoted in Greene, Science, Ideology and World View, p. 138, as quoted in Hunter, Darwin’s God, p. 140; see also pp. 17-18.

[10] Hunter, Darwin’s God, p. 154.

[11] Citing Phillip Johnson, Darwin on Trial, Hunter, Darwin’s God, p. 155.

[12] Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, p. 87.

[13] Henry M. Morris, “Evolutionists and the Moth Myth,” Back to Genesis, August 2003, pp. a-d; Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, pp. 79-80.

[14] See Johnson, Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds, p. 44; Darwin on Trial, pp. 17-18.

[15] Examples taken from Duane Gish, Evolution: The Challenge of the Fossil Record (El Cajon, CA: Master Books, 1985), pp. 33-34.

[16] As quoted in Bird, The Origin of Species Revisited, p. 73.

[17] Stephen Jay Gould, “Return of the Hopeful Monsters,” Natural History 86(6), as quoted by Dwayne Gish, Evolution: The Challenge of the Fossil Record (El Cajon, CA: Creation-Life Publishers, 1985), p. 236.

[18] Michael J. Behe, Darwin’s Black Box (New York: The Free Press, 2003), pp. 39-45; see also pp. 111-112).

[19] W.R. Bird, The Origin of Species Revisited The Theories of Evolution and of Abrupt Appearance (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, Inc., 1991), pp. 74, 81; Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, p. 267; http://www.chemguide.co.uk/organicprops/aminoacids/dna6.html; http://www.pathlights.com/ce_encyclopedia/Encyclopedia/20hist12.htm; http://www.occc.edu/biologylabs/Documents/Real/Gene_Mutation_script.htm

[20] See Behe, Darwin’s Black Box, pp. 13-14.

[21] Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, Evolution from Space (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1981), p. 24.

[22] http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_atoms_are_in_the_observable_universe

[23] See Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, p. 314; http://www.pathlights.com/ce_encyclopedia/Encyclopedia/20hist12.htm

[24] Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, p. 267.

[25] http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/universe/uni_age.html

[26] Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, pp. 345-346.

[27] Gould, “Evolution’s Erratic Pace,” Natural History, May 1977, pp. 12, 14, as quoted in Bird, The Origin of Species Revisited, vol. 1, p. 58.

[28] Paleobiology, 3:147 (1977), as quoted by Gish, Evolution: The Challenge of the Fossil Record, p. 115; see generally pp. 110-117.

[29] Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, pp. 189, 191.

[30] Behe, Darwin’s Black Box, p. 10; See also p. x.

[31] Ibid., pp. 238-239.