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The
Theory of Evolution Is Bad Philosophy, Not Good Science
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 19th-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 18th-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
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
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teachings: /doctrinal.html
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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.