Thought Provoking Questions: Lesson 10

Evolution & Intelligent Design

1. Definitions.

A. Evolution has many meanings.

1. In its most general sense it simply means “change over time” – the present is different from the past.

2. Darwin’s term for biological evolution was “descent with modification.”

a. However, Darwinism claims much more than that simple definition would suggest.

b. In Origin of the Species he wrote: “I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings.”

c. Darwinism consists of the following claims:

i. All living things are modified descendants of a common ancestor.

ii. The principal mechanism of modification has been natural selection acting on undirected variations that originate in DNA mutations.

iii. Unguided processes are sufficient to explain all features of living things, so whatever may appear to be design is just an illusion.

3. Terms used for these two very different definitions are microevolution and macroevolution.

4. Darwinists use these different definitions deceptively.

a. One advises, “Define evolution as an issue of the history of the planet: as the way we try to understand change through time. The present is different from the past. Evolution happened, there is no debate within science as to whether it happened, and so on... I have used this approach at the college level.”

b. No college student doubts that the present is different from the past and once they start nodding in agreement they are gradually introduced to the idea that all species are related through descent from a common ancestor.

B. Intelligent design.

1. William Dembski, a leading proponent of intelligent design, defines it as “specified complexity”:

1) an event that is contingent and not necessary;

2) an event that is complex and therefore not readily repeatable by chance; and

3) an event that is specified in the sense of exhibiting an independently given pattern.

a. A merely improbable event is not enough to eliminate chance; flip a coin long enough and you’ll witness a highly complex or improbable event, but you’ll have no reason not to attribute it to chance.

b. Specification must be objectively given and not just imposed on an event after the fact, e.g., an archer shooting arrows into a wall and then painting a bull’s-eyes around them.

2. In determining whether biological organisms exhibit specified complexity, design theorists focus on identifiable systems – such as individual enzymes, metabolic pathways, molecular machines, etc.

a. These systems are specified in virtue of their independent functional requirements, and they exhibit a high degree of complexity.

b. Once an essential part of an organism exhibits specified complexity, then any design attributable to that part carries over to the organism as a whole, i.e., you need not demonstrate that every aspect of the organism was designed; in fact, some aspects may be the result of purely natural causes.

2. Michael Behe, another intelligent design theorist, connects it with irreducible complexity.

a. A system is irreducible complex if it consists of several interrelated parts for which removing even one part completely destroys the system’s function.

b. The bacterial flagellum, an acid-powered rotary motor with a whip-like tail that spins at twenty thousand revolutions per minute and whose rotating motions enables a bacterium to navigate through its watery environment, is an example of irreducible complexity.

i. The intricate machinery in this molecular motor – including a rotor, a stator, O-rings, bushings and a drive shaft – requires the coordinated interaction of at least thirty complex proteins, and the absence of any one of these proteins would result in the complete loss of motor function.

ii. He argues that the Darwinian mechanism cannot account for such irreducibly complex systems.

c. A more simple example is the mouse trap; remove any one of its parts and see how many mice it catches.

3. These concepts render intelligent causes empirically detectable and make intelligent design a full-fledged scientific theory, distinguishing it from the design arguments of philosophers and theologians, or what has been traditionally called natural theology.

4. Seven things are worth noting.

i. The word intelligent emphasizes that “design” in this case is not just a pattern, but a pattern produced by a mind that conceives and executes a plan.

ii. ID is not a substitute for ignorance.

a). The fact that we don’t know the cause of something does not mean that it was designed.

b). When an inference of design is made, it is made on the basis of evidence – the more evidence the more reliable the design inference.

iii. Since intelligent design relies on scientific evidence rather than on Scripture or religious doctrines, it is not biblical creationism.

a). ID makes no claims about biblical chronology, and biblical creationists have distinguished their views from ID.

b). A person does not even need to believe in God to believe in ID.

c). Well known atheist Anthony Flew is a case in point.

iv. ID does not tell us the identity of the designer.

v. ID does not claim that design must be optimal -- something may be designed even if it is flawed, e.g., automobiles.

vi. ID is compatible with some definitions of evolution; it does not deny the reality of variation and natural selection, it just denies that those phenomena can accomplish all that Darwinists claim it can.

vii. ID applies on two different levels:

1) specific features of living things, and

2) in natural laws and the structure of the cosmos.

2. Only two alternatives exist – we either evolved from mud through millions or billions of years of random chemical accidents, or we were intentionally designed and created; there are no other options.

A. Renowned astronomer Robert Jastrow clearly states the choices: “Perhaps the appearance of life on the earth is a miracle. Scientists are reluctant to accept that view, but their choices are limited. Either life was created on the earth by the will of a Being outside the grasp of scientific understanding, or it evolved on our planet spontaneously, through chemical reactions occurring in nonliving matter lying of the surface of the planet. The first theory places the question of the origin of life beyond the reach of scientific inquiry. It is a statement of faith in the power of a Supreme Being not subject to the laws of science. The second theory is also an act of faith. The act of faith consists in assuming that the scientific view of the origin of life is correct, without having the evidence to support that belief.

B. The theory of evolution is based on four assumptions:

1. Spontaneous generation. Life began through the chance encounter of highly complex chemicals.

2. Random mutation and natural selection. For evolution to work, there needs to be a means of adding complex, coded genetic information to add new traits to organisms as they evolve from “simple” to advanced. Mutations (accidental changes) destroy information; they do not create it. Natural selection can eliminate misfits generated by mutations, but it cannot promote evolution, since mutations cannot provide new genetic information.

3. Enormous time. That the earth must have been inhabitable for hundreds of millions of years for random mutation and natural selection to have time to develop humans and other advanced animals. Commonly used dating methods are flawed at best. There is considerable evidence pointing to a young earth.

4. Fossil record full of transitional forms. If evolution is indeed true, then over the many millions of years there must have lived vast numbers of transitional creatures. Just as we have discovered many thousands of dinosaur fossils, we should also have discovered many tens of thousands of transitional creatures, human or otherwise.

3. What is the evidence for Darwinian evolution and does it support the theory?

A. Spontaneous generation.

1. The better we appreciate the complexity of living things, the better we can appreciate the likelihood of life’s beginning by chance alone.

a. Blood, the brain, the eye, the pumping heart, and the pituitary gland are fantastically elaborate organs.

b. However, within each of these organs are structures even more fantastic than the organ itself: deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA.

2. DNA is the genetic material that carries all the instructions for the function of the cell.

a. DNA determines what structures a cell will build, what chemicals or hormones it will produce, and where the cell will locate itself in the body; it directs the burning of energy, disposal of waste products, and reproduction of the cell. In short, it contains a vast amount of biochemical information.

b. Richard Dawkins, one of the most dogmatic of evolutionists, substantially underestimates the complexity of the genetic code when we writes: “There is enough information capacity in a single human cell to store the Encyclopedia Britannica, all 30 volumes of it, three or four times over.

c. Werner Gitt, describes DNA information storage as: “Not only is the amount of information in cellular DNA staggering, it’s also incredibly compact. We marvel at computer storage disks with ever greater capacity. Yet the quantity of information that could be stored in a pinhead’s volume of DNA is equivalent to the content of a pile of paperback books spanning the distance from earth to the moon 500 times – each book being unique from the others.”

3. Since DNA contains the information needed to make the chemicals and structures of life, we’d expect the most similar creatures to have the most similar DNA, and this is in fact the case.

a. Apes and humans have numerous physical similarities, and have somewhat similar DNA.

b. The DNA of scorpions is more different from that of humans, but still contains some resemblance.

c. The DNA of bacteria is only slightly similar.

4. Evolutionists insist that these similarities indicate that living things evolved from one another, but there exists some other findings that are far beyond evolution’s ability to explain: resemblances between creatures that evolutionists say evolved separately.

a. Hemoglobin, the molecule that carries oxygen in blood, is found in all vertebrates, including humans. But hemoglobin also exists in earthworms, crustaceans, starfish, and even in some microorganisms.

b. Crocodile hemoglobin is more similar to chicken hemoglobin than that of snakes and other reptiles.

c. Human lysozyme, an enzyme for digesting food, is more similar to chicken lysozyme than to that of any other mammal.

d. An identical particular protein is found on the cell wall of both camels and nurse sharks. Yet speaking in terms of evolution, these animals are completely unrelated.

5. DNA not only contains an enormous amount of information, but almost all of it must be present for a cell to function.

a. A new car will not function if a couple of sparkplugs are missing.

b. An airplane is grounded if just a wing flap is missing.

c. The minimal number of components necessary for a machine to function is called its irreducible complexity.

6. At the cellular level, irreducible complexity is critically important.

a. Remove the cell membrane and the cell collapses.

b. Separate the mitochondria and the cell has no energy.

c. Displace the nucleus and most chemical functions of the cell cease immediately.

7. Many organs also demonstrate irreducible complexity; all of their components must be present for the organ to perform its function.

a. A small number of abnormally dark cells on the cornea will make the entire system of vision inoperative.

b. A few atypical fibers on the heart’s electrical conduction system will cause it to pump irregularly or not at all.

c. A tiny clot of blood in a vessel of the brain will cause immediate paralysis of an arm or leg, or even death.

d. A tiny anomalous growth on the bone touching the ear drum will render the person deaf in that ear.

e. Living things require an enormous quantity of information, functioning in concert together, yet many people don’t grasp just how fantastic even one “simple” cell is.

8. Michael Denton, a critic of Darwinian evolution, gives some idea of the inner workings of a cell: “Perhaps in no other area of modern biology is the challenge posed by the extreme complexity and ingenuity of biological adaptations more apparent than in the fascinating new molecular world of the cell... . To grasp the reality of life as it has been revealed by molecular biology, we must magnify a cell a thousand million times until it is twenty kilometers in diameter and resembles a giant airship large enough to cover a great city like London or New York. What we would then see would be an object of unparalleled complexity and adaptive design. On the surface of the cell we would see millions of openings, like the portholes of a vast space ship, opening and closing to allow a continual stream of materials to flow in and out. If we were to enter one of these openings we would find ourselves in a world of supreme technology and bewildering complexity. Is it really credible that random processes could have constructed a reality, the smallest element of which – a functional protein or gene – is complex beyond our own creative capacities, a reality which is the very antithesis of chance, which excels in every sense anything produced by the intelligence of man? Alongside the level of ingenuity and complexity exhibited by the molecular machinery of life, even our most advanced artifacts appear clumsy... . It would be an illusion to think that what we are aware of at present is any more than a fraction of the full extent of biological design. In practically every field of fundamental biological research, ever-increasing levels of design and complexity are being revealed at an ever-accelerating rate.”

9. The DNA of even a single microscopic human cell is composed of 3 billion units, and contains all of the information necessary to construct an entire adult human.

10. The study of single cell organisms is challenging enough, but multiply this effort times one trillion and we can just begin to understand the complex challenges of understanding human life. Consider some of the facts:

a. Cells.

i) The human body has 100 trillion cells.

ii) All the cells in the human body lined up side-by-side would encircle the earth 200 times.

iii) If all DNA in a human were placed end to end, it would reach the sun and back 400 times.

b. The eye.

i) The human eye can handle 1.5 million simultaneous messages.

ii) The eye moves 100,000 times in a day. The body would have to walk 50 miles to exercise the leg muscles an equal amount.

iii) 137 million nerve endings within each eye pick up every visual message the eye sends to the brain.

c. The ear – a single inner ear contains as many circuits as the telephone system of a large city.

d. The heart.

i) The heart beats 40,000,000 times a year.

ii) In a life time the heart will pump 600,000 metric tons of blood.

iii) All veins, arteries and capillaries lined end-to-end would extend 80,000 miles.

iv) A single drop of blood can be delivered anywhere in the body within 20 seconds.

e. The brain.

i) The information in the brain equals that contained in 20 million separate books.

ii) The brain has 10 billion circuits and a memory of 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bits (1 trillion gigabytes). Think of the memory required to store all of the faces of people that we know by sight. Although efforts have been made to create computers that can recognize faces, there has been limited to no success. Yet infants can do it without outside human programming and without training.

iii) Duane Gish describes it well: “Of all creatures on earth, only man has the ability to use language. Not only does man have the ability to remember the past, to cope with complicated problems in the present, and to plan for the future, but he has the ability to express all of these thoughts both verbally and in written form. The human brain, with its twelve billion brain cells and 120 trillion connections, is the most complex arrangement of matter in the universe. Thus endowed, man’s ability to express himself verbally and in written form is truly incredible.”

11. A fact rarely mentioned by evolutionists is that for evolution to ever get started there must first have been a very highly complex, intact, living, self-reproducing creature. According to evolution, all of this started by spontaneous generation.

a. Spontaneous generation is the proposal that the first life arose impromptu from the random chemicals that happened to be present. All of the minimum (and incredibly complex) cellular structures that were needed just happened to be in the same place at the same time. This pool of lifeless chemicals gave rise to a very simple bacteria-like cell. Life was off and running.

b. Encyclopedia Britannica explains it this way: “Whether the earth cooled from a molten mass or condensed out of cold dust, life could not have existed when the earth was formed some 5,000,000,000 years ago; it must have originated since. As both processes (automatic synthesis and ultraviolet light energy) are the characteristics of life, it is not unreasonable to suppose that life originated in a watery “soup” of prebiological organic compounds and that living organisms arose later by surrounding quantities of these compounds by membranes that made them into “cells.” This is usually considered the starting point of organic (“Darwinian”) evolution.”

c. Sound like a reasonable idea? Hardly, and even less so when we consider that for even the simplest cell to ever get started requires an awesomely complex assembly of chemical structures. That this could have happened through random chance is statistically impossible.

i) DNA – containing the code for this first living cell – is very complex and does not naturally occur. In fact, the chance of your being able to jump high enough to reach the moon is greater than the chance that DNA would form by chance. Its existence can only be reasonably explained by some external, organizing force.

ii) Louis Pasteur proved over a century ago that non-life cannot produce life, that dead objects cannot produce living ones, that each organism requires parents, and that only parents produce the new life. Since Pasteur it has been universally held that life always arise from life of the same kind – the law of biogenesis.

d. Spontaneous generation and chance.

i) Spontaneous generation is said to have been a random, chance event, with no outside, purposeful influence.

ii) What does “chance” look like? a) If you flip a coin your chance of heads is one in two; 100 straight heads on a coin would be 1 in 1030.

b) Rolling a six on a die is one in six; rolling nine straight sixes would be one in 10 million; 50 straight sixes would be 1 in 1039.

iii) British astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle calculated the probability of spontaneous generation: “The likelihood of the formation of life from inanimate matter is 1 to a number with 40,000 zeros after it (10 to the 40,000th power)... . It is big enough to bury Darwin and the whole theory of evolution. There was no primeval soup, neither on this planet nor any other, and if the beginnings of life were not random, they must therefore have been the product of purposeful intelligence.” He further explains his position, using the example of a Rubik’s cube: “At all events, anyone, even a nodding acquaintance with the Rubik’s cube, will concede the near impossibility of a solution being obtained by a blind person moving the cubic faces at random. Now imagine 10 to the 50th power (that’s a number 1 with 50 zeros after it) blind people, each with a scrambled Rubik’s cube, and try to conceive of the chance of them all simultaneously arriving at the solved form. You then have the chance of arriving by random shuffling at just one of the many biopolymers on which life depends. The notion that not only biopolymers but the operating program of a living cell could be arrived at by chance in a primordial organic soup here on the earth is evidently nonsense of a high order.” He illustrates the probability of spontaneous generation like this: “Supposing the first cell originated by chance is like believing a tornado could sweep through a junkyard filled with airplane parts and form a Boeing 747.”

iv) Professor Harold Morowitz puts the chance of spontaneous generation as being much less than even that of Sir Frederick Hoyle. “The probability for the chance of formation of the smallest, simplest form of living organism known is 10 to the 340 millionth power! The size of this figure is truly staggering, since there are only supposed to be approximately 10 to the 80th power electrons in the whole universe!

v) Dr. Carl Sagan, perhaps the most renowned atheist of the 20th century, estimated that the mathematical probability of the simplest form of life emerging from non-living matters has the unbelievable odds of one chance in 10 to the 2 billionth power (a one followed by 2 billion zeros) – even less probability than predicted by sir Hoyle or Dr. Morowitz. The enormity of this figure is revealed by the fact that it would take 6,000 books of 300 pages just to write the number.

vi) Just how likely is such an event? Dr. Emile Borel, who pioneered many of the laws of probability, says: “The occurrence of any event where the chances are beyond one in 10 followed by 50 zeros is an event which we can state with certainty will never happen, no matter how much time is allotted and no matter how many conceivable opportunities could exist for the event to take place.”

vii) Chemist and physicist Dr. John Grebe explains how remote the possibility is that functional DNA itself – let alone a functioning cell – could randomly come together on its own: “The 15,000 or more atoms of the individual sub-assemblies of a single DNA molecule, if left to chance as required by the evolutionary theory, would go together in any of 10 to the 87th power different ways.” In other words, there are trillions times trillions times trillions of different ways for a single gene to come together, but only one way that would lead to a functioning DNA molecule.

viii) Evolutionists claim that the universe is about 5 billion years old. There are less than 10 to the 17th power seconds in 20 billion years. Therefore, even if a trial and error combination occurred every second from the beginning of time until today, the odds still appear hopelessly high against the natural assembly of even this single molecule.

ix) Further, there is always a mention of some pre-biotic soup in which the spontaneous generation occurred. But assuming that it was not already ruled out by the laws of probability and insufficiency of time even in 5 billion years, was there such a soup?

a) Dr. Wilder-Smith, a chemist and former evolutionist, concludes: “It is emphatically the case that life could not arise spontaneously in a primeval soup of any kind.” He goes on to say, “Furthermore, no geological evidence indicates an organic soup ever existed on this planet. We may therefore with fairness call this scenario ‘the myth of the pre-biotic soup.’”

b) Dr. Michael Denton, noted molecular biologist agrees: “Considering the way the pre-biotic soup is referred to in so many discussions of the origin of life as an already established reality, it comes as something of a shock to realize that there is absolutely no positive evidence for its existence.” Dr. Denton also says: “The complexity of the simplest known type of cell is so great that it is impossible to accept that such an object could have been thrown together by some kind of freakish, vastly improbable event. Such an occurrence would be indistinguishable from a miracle.”

x) But hasn’t science demonstrated that the building blocks of life can be generated in a laboratory in a “soup” designed to replicate the assumed atmosphere in which life was created? This popular naturalistic scenario draws its alleged scientific credibility from a series of supposedly historic experiments carried out at Chicago University by a young PhD. Student, Stanley Miller, working in collaboration with his research supervisor Harold Urey, in 1953. Others had speculated about such things as an energy source such as ultraviolet light might have acted on the earth’s atmosphere to produce increasing concentrations of organic molecules such as sugars and amino acids, and that life eventually evolved from these. Miller’s experiment was simple: it consisted of heating a mixture of the common gases methane, hydrogen and ammonia together with water in a laboratory flask. This flask contained a pair of tungsten electrodes providing a spark discharge to simulate the probable action of lightning. After several days Miller observed the formation of discolored residue, which on analysis was found to contain several types of amino acids – fundamental building blocks of proteins, the primary substance of living systems. Miller’s prebiotic simulation experiments were heralded by many as vindication of the Oparin-Haldane hypothesis that life evolved by purely naturalistic processes on the ancient earth. Great excitement, both in the popular press and in sections of the scientific community, followed the publishing of the Miller-Urey experiments. Time magazine reported the following in a feature called “Semi-Creation”: What they have done is to prove that complex organic compounds found in living matter can be formed, by chemical reactions, out of the gases that were probably common in the earth’s first atmosphere. If their apparatus had been as big as the ocean, and if it had worked for a million years instead of one week, it might have created something like the first living molecule.”

a) Evolutionists considered this announcement an angelic herald, and it was proclaimed by such atheist leaders as David Attenborough, Carl Sagan, and Isaac Asimov.

b) It confirmed their belief that qualitative development derives from the merely quantitative; lots of matter plus lots of energy plus lots of time results in lots of complexity.

c) The truth is that Miller’s experiment in which he obtained his broth of amino acids tells us virtually nothing about how the first proteins essential to a living organism might have been produced. This is because actual proteins require scores or hundreds of these amino acids to be arranged in a unique, non-random, meaningful sequence. In other words, the structure of the protein is immensely rich in coded information, and this simply cannot be achieved in the sort of experiment carried out in a laboratory flask like Miller’s.

d) The formation of amino acids from simple reducing gases such as methane, ammonia and hydrogen involves chemical reactions in which more energy is released than is consumed. Technically, this is called a negative enthalpy change, and it largely explains why they were produced with relative ease in Miller’s prebiotic simulation experiment. However, protein formation from these amino acids is a very different story. Not only is energy required to form a chain of amino acids, but also work must be done to “code” them, or arrange them in a meaningful sequence.

xi) Assuming that the “miracle” occurs, what must then happen?

a) Once the first living cell gets started, two things must happen to make the organism become progressively more complex – random mutation and natural selection, called “the mechanism of evolution.”

b) Random mutation – errors in the cell’s DNA, outside radiation, and outside chemicals are said to cause minor changes in the creatures; most of these are attributed to “accidents” that happen when its own genetic code is copied at the time of reproduction. The result of these random mutations is a new creature, slightly different from the first.

c) Natural selection – This new, slightly different creature will either be better or less well prepared to live in its environment. The “weaker” creature would cause its early elimination, with the “superior” creature having an advantage in the struggle for existence.

xii) Does the evidence demonstrate or detonate this mechanism of evolution?

a) In Darwin’s day very little was known about genetics. Much more is known today. For example, we know today that genes are ordinarily very stable and are almost invariably passed from generation to generation without any alteration in structure whatsoever.

b) Very rarely, however, the chemical structure of a gene does undergo a change or mutation. Mutations may be caused by ultraviolet light, cosmic rays, x-rays, and chemicals, as well as copying errors during reproduction. Most mutations result in one change amid the several thousand subunits within a particular gene. Although tiny, the result may be drastic on the plant or animal. Almost all mutations are harmful to the creature, and very often prove lethal. Evolutionists assert, however, that a very small number of these mutations may be beneficial, perhaps one in 10,000. This is not based on any evidence of favorable mutations. It is most likely assumed because evolutionists know that favorable mutations are necessary for evolution to work.

B. Mutations – rare and harmful. Since almost all mutations are harmful, a very high number must occur to increase the chances of a positive mutation. These hypothetically alter the creature to increase its ability to survive and/or reproduce. These favorable mutations, most believe, must be small, because a mutation that would result in more than a slight change would be too disruptive and thus harmful to the creature.

1. After many thousands of generations, the “superior mutant” that developed would eventually replace the original variety of the creature through natural selection.

2. Moreover, this rare mutation cannot occur just anywhere, it must occur in the genes of the specific reproductive cells, and these make up only a fraction of most creature’s cells.

3. Further, this rare mutation must circumvent the cell’s many special safeguards to protect against genetic errors occurring. DNA information cannot be copied except with many different enzymes which “check” one another for errors. Scientists are convinced that the cell’s system of checks and safeguards is the best possible for protecting against DNA errors.

4. Evolutionists claim that to slightly change one species into a new species requires many thousands of these hypothetical favorable mutations, and at least hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years. Greater changes, such as transforming a reptile into a bird, would require an extremely large number of beneficial mutations, and demand trillions of years.

5. The changes under consideration are not adaptations within a species.

6. Mutations – “New Information” machines?

a. Once a rare beneficial mutation has occurred, the job is still not over – the cell must generate enormous quantities of new information since new DNA code is essential to manufacture skin, eyes, nerves, bones, hearing, muscles, blood cells, and so forth.

b. The problem for evolutionists here is that modern genetic research shows that mutations lead to a net loss of information, not any overall gain.

c. Biophysicist Dr. Lee Spetner, who worked at John Hopkins University, states: “In this chapter I’ll bring several examples of evolution, particularly mutations, and show that information is not increased... . But in all the reading I’ve done in the life sciences literature, I’ve never found a mutation that added information. All point mutations that have been studied on the molecular level turn out to reduce the genetic information and not to increase it. The NDT [neo-Darwinian theory] is supposed to explain how the information of life has been built up by evolution. The essential biological differences between a human and a bacterium is in the information they contain. All other biological differences follow from that. The human genome has much more information than does the bacterial genome. Information cannot be built up by mutations that lose it. A business can’t make money by losing it a little at a time.”

d. But is there that much information to generate when the similarity between human and ape DNA is said to be 96% by one limited technique? This overlooks the fact that the cells of every creature contain enormous quantities of information content, so even a small percentage difference means that tremendous quantities of information would be required to turn one kind into another. Since Humans have an amount of information equivalent to one thousand 500-page books, a 4 percent difference amounts to 40 large books of information.

e. Now evolutionists say that random mutation plus natural selection generated the information equivalent to these 40 large books – 12 million words arranged in intelligible sentences. Creating this amount of new genetic code is impossible, even if we give it the 10 million years that evolutionists say were required for apes to evolve into humans. Population genetics calculations show that animals with 20 years between each generation could pass on no more than about 1,700 mutations in these 10 million years.

f. By the sixth edition of his own book, Darwin himself abandoned his own theory. He wrote: “Natural selection is incompetent to account for the incipient states of useful structures.

g. Mutations do not produce new information; no scientific evidence exists to the contrary. Dr. Pierre-Paul Grasse,, who held the Chair of Evolution at the Sorbonne in Paris for 20 years, adamantly affirms: “No matter how numerous they may be, mutations do not produce any kind of evolution. The opportune appearance of mutations permitting animals and plants to meet their needs seem hard to believe. Yet the Darwinian theory is even more demanding. A single plant or a single animal would require thousands and thousands of luck, appropriate events. Thus, miracles would become the rule: events with infinitesimal probability could no longer fail to occur... . There is no law against day dreaming, but science must not indulge in it.”

h. What good is half a wing?

1) A new challenge – for natural selection to work, the new feature must be superior to the former one, but mutation-induced changes occur only incrementally. If the new feature is incomplete and functionless, the creature will be less likely to survive.

2) Dr. Colin Patterson, as chief paleontologist at the British Museum of Natural History, pointed out this obstacle to the concept of natural selection: “The adaptive value of the perfected structure is easily seen, but intermediate steps seem to be useless, or even harmful. For example, what use is a lens in the eye unless it works? A distorting lens might be worse than no lens at all... . How can the segments of an animal like the earthworm or centipede arise bit-by-bit? An animal is either segmented or it is not. The usual answer to such a question is that they are due only to the failure of the imagination.”

3) Stephen J Gould, evolutionary paleontologist, agrees: “Even though we have no direct evidence for smooth transitions, can we invent a reasonable sequence of intermediate forms, that is, viable, functioning organisms, between ancestors and descendants? Of what possible use are the imperfect incipient states of useful structures? What good is half a jaw or half a wing?”

C. Massive amounts of time – evolution’s third requirement.

1. The existence of an inhabitable earth for trillions of years is required for evolution to account for gradual change from one-celled creatures to modern humans. What evidence exists to show the age of the earth?

a. The age of the earth is usually based on the study of sedimentary rock which may be formed in two ways: 1) a small amount of water depositing layers of dirt and sand over a long period of time, or 2) a vast amount of water making such deposits over a short period of time. Sedimentation today generally follows the first, and this leads many to conclude that this is the way it has always been. The general theory that assumes that events in nature always occur at a constant rate is called uniformitarianism.

b. Both experience and experiments reveal that sedimentary layers can be deposited quickly. In fact for fossilization to occur, speed of deposition is essential. If such does not occur, the creature will decompose or be eaten by predators. Additionally, the body must absorb the minerals in the water, rock and soil, which causes the body to become hard due to the presence of the minerals. This means days or weeks, not millions of years.

1) One of the striking examples is a fossilized tree trunk oriented vertically. It extends through several layers of sedimentary rock, all of which must have been deposited at the same time since, had they not been, the upper layers of the tree would have decomposed long before the passing of millions of years.

2) Other examples are of an extinct animal fossilized while giving birth and of a fish in the act of swallowing another fish.

c. There is enough water to accomplish a universal flood of Biblical proportions; recent calculations on the quantity of water on earth show that if the surface of the planet were smooth, the earth would be entirely covered with water to a depth of 1. 7 miles.

d. Determining the age of rocks and fossils is inexact at best. It is commonly characterized by circular reasoning. R. H. Rastall, lecturer in economic geology at Cambridge University notes: “It cannot be denied that from a strictly philosophical standpoint geologists are here arguing in a circle. The succession of organisms has been determined by a study of their remains embedded in the rocks, and the relative ages of the rocks are determined by the remains of organisms that they contain.”

e. The Genesis Flood is the only thing that can account for many of the deposits that have been found.

1) Marine crustaceans have been discovered on 12,000-foot mountaintops.

2) Pillow lava is formed only under water, and yet geologists have found a field of pillow lava as high as 15,000 feet on Mount Ararat.

3) Hippopotamuses, now living only in Africa, have been found buried together with other creatures that did not share the same habitat.

4) The Norfolk forest beds in England contain fossils of northern cold-climate animals, tropical warm climate animals, and temperate zone plants all mixed together.

5) Moose-deer (natives of America) have been found buried in England; elephants (natives of Asia and Africa) buried in the midst of England; crocodiles (natives of the Nile) in the heart of Germany; shell-fish (never known in the American seas) together with the entire skeletons of whales in the most inland regions of England.

2. Are there methods of determining the age of the earth?

a. Radiometric dating – this involves several techniques, one method of which –radiocarbon dating – is especially intended to date fossils of living things. It is based on the fact that some radioactive elements undergo decay to produce new elements. In the case of uranium lead dating, uranium 238 (the “parent element”) will eventually decompose to produce lead 206 (the “daughter element”). Scientists can measure the quantities of radioactive elements in rocks today, and estimate how long it’s been since the rock cooled from its molten state. This gives an age for the rock.

1) Radiometric dating is based on some assumptions which, if false, render the method useless. For it to be accurate several critical facts must be known or true:

a) the quantity of radioactive elements that were in the rock when it was first formed;

b) The rate of radioactive decay must be constant over time.

c) The rocks being measured must be isolated from outside factors.

2) This may be illustrated this way: a police investigator discovers a car used in a robbery. To locate the thief’s hideout he needs to figure how far the car has been driven. First, he needs to measure the amount of gasoline in tank when discovered. But to locate the hideout he must consider three other factors, each corresponding to the radiometric facts above:

a) How much gasoline was in the tank when it left the hideout;

b) What is the car’s fuel consumption rate in miles per gallon; and

c) Does the tank have a fuel leak, or has any fuel been added since leaving the hideout.

3) You may never find the hideout by this method because items 1 and 3 are likely impossible to know. It is the same with radiocarbon dating.

a) What quantity of radioactive elements were in the rock when it was first formed is impossible to know. In most cases it is assumed that there was no “daughter element” in the present, but there is no way to prove this. Analysis of recently created lava rock establishes that sometimes the daughter element is already present when the rock is created.

b) The rate of decay must be constant over time, but current evidence suggests that radioactive decay is indeed constant, and is not affected by heat or pressure. However, decay rates have been examined for only about 100 years. Nuclear physicist Dr. Russell Humphreys demonstrates research known as radiohalo analysis that suggests that decay used to be faster. Frederic B. Jueneman states in an article from the reputable journal Industrial Research and Development: “There has been in recent years the horrible realization that radio decay rates are not as constant as previously thought, nor are they immune to environmental influences.” We have no assurance what the radioactive decay rates were thousands, and certainly not billions, of years ago.

c) The rocks being measured must be insulated from outside factors, but argon, one of the most measured radioactive elements, is a gas and can easily diffuse out of rock. Potassium and uranium (two other commonly measured elements) are easily dissolved in water. Water seeping through rock could easily dissolve away these elements, leading to inaccurate measurement. In reality, both parent and daughter elements migrate into the rocks from tectonic, metamorphic, and hydrologic forces.

4) Though radiometric dating has been perfected for many years, the measurements are often very inaccurate.

a) Analysis of wood from Australia by the radiocarbon (C-14) method revealed it to be 45,000 years old. But analysis by the potassium-argon method put the wood at about 45 million years old.

b) Fossilized wood from the Upper Permian rock layers was found to have radioactive carbon 14 present. The radiometric age assigned to these rock layers was 250 million years. Yet other research reveals that all detectable carbon 14 should have disintegrated if the wood were older than 50,000 years.

c) A particular rock from Mount St. Helens volcano was obviously formed in 1986 when it cooled. But examination with the potassium-argon (K-Ar) radiometric method determined it to be 350,000 years old, give or take 50,000 years.

d) Newly formed rocks from the Mount Ngauruhoe volcano in New Zealand were also examined; the radiometric age of the rocks ranged between 270,000 and 3,500,000 years. However, these rocks were formed during eruptions between 1949 and 1975.

e) Radiocarbon analysis of specimens obtained from mummified seals in southern Victoria has yielded ages ranging from 615 to 4,600 years. A seal freshly killed at McMurdo had an apparent age of 1,300 years.

f) Studies on submarine basaltic rocks from Hawaii, known to have formed less than 200 years ago, when dated by the potassium-argon method, revealed “ages” from 160 million to almost 3 billion years.

g) By radiocarbon dating living snails “died” 27,000 years ago.

5) Given these inaccuracies, it is no wonder that many scientists broadly question the usefulness of radiometric dates:

a) Dr. William D. Stansfield, instructor at California Polytechnic State University states: “It is obvious that radiometric techniques may not be the absolute dating methods that they are claimed to be. Age estimates on a given geological stratum by different radiometric methods are often quite different (sometimes by hundreds of millions of years). There is no absolutely reliable long-term radiological “clock.” The uncertainties inherent in radiometric dating are disturbing to geologists and evolutionists.”

b) Dr. Richard L. Mauger, associate professor of geology at East Carolina University, admits with reference to radiometric dating: “In general, dates in the “correct ball park” are assumed to be correct and are published, but those in disagreement with other data are seldom published nor are discrepancies fully explained.”

c) Robert E. Lee writes in “Radiocarbon: Ages in Error”: “The radiocarbon method is still not capable of yielding accurate and reliable results. There are gross discrepancies, the chronology is uneven and relative, and the accepted dates are actually selected dates. This whole blessed thing is nothing but 13th century alchemy, and it all depends upon which funny paper you read.” b. Its not as old as you’ve been told based on other measures.

1) Magnetic field intensity. The earth’s magnetic field is rapidly decreasing in strength. Assessing the rate of decrease tells us about the planet’s age. Dr. Thomas Barnes, one of the most respected magnetic field physicists in the world, explains: “If we went back about ten thousand years, the earth’s magnetic field would have been as strong as the field in a magnetic star. A magnetic star is like our sun; it has a nuclear power source. Surely our earth never had a nuclear source like the sun. Surely our earth never had a magnetic field stronger than that of a star. That would limit the age of the earth to ten thousand years.” Calculations by other investigators have reached the same conclusion.

2) Concentration of ocean salt. The concentration of salt in the ocean is steadily growing. Yet the oceans are not nearly salty enough to have existed for billions of years. Even with generous allowances, the salt concentration suggests they could be no more than 62 million years old.

3) Preserved red blood cells. Preserved red blood cells and hemoglobin have been discovered in unfossilized dinosaur bones. Evolutionists date the dinosaur as living 65 million years ago. However, research shows that such cells could not survive more than a few thousand years. The dinosaur must have lived recently.

4) Absent supernova. Supernova is the name given for the tremendous explosion of a star. It creates a brief light far brighter than any other object in a galaxy. Calculations suggest that the remains of supernovas continue shining for hundreds of thousands of years. Yet observations of our own Milky Way Galaxy do not show any old supernova. This fact suggests that the galaxy has not existed long enough for these to have occurred.

5) Helium concentration. Helium concentration in our atmosphere is gradually increasing. Yet the current amount is only about 1/2000 of what we’ expect if the atmosphere were billions of years old. The helium concentration suggests a much younger atmosphere.

6) World population growth. Experts estimate world population growth at about 2% per year. If it were only 0.5% per year, with liberal allowance for famine, pestilence, and sword, in 1,000,000 years, the evolutionists’ estimated age of man on earth, there would be 10 to the 2100 people somehow stacked on the earth. (This overlooks the fact that this many people could populate countless trillions of entire universes.) Even if an almost 0 growth rate were assumed, in a million years the earth would have housed 3,000,000,000,000 people by now. There is no cultural or fossil evidence for numbers anywhere near that number. By the way, assuming a 0.5% growth rate, it would take about 4,000 years to produce today’s population from a single couple. This is the approximate time elapsed since the great deluge when only Noah’s family was spared.

7) Earth-moon distance. Measurements show that the moon is slowly withdrawing from the earth. Each year, the distance increases by about 1.5 inches, though the rate was likely greater than that in the past. Calculations show that even if the moon had been in contact with the earth, it would have taken only 1.37 billion years to reach its present distance. This gives a maximum possible age of the moon – not the actual age. This maximum age is still far too young for evolution to have had time to occur, and much younger than the radiometric “dates” assigned to moon rocks. Since the precise distance of the moon from the earth is critical for regulating ocean tides, the age must be a fraction of that amount of time.

8) Absent meteorites. Where are the meteorites in the multi-billion-year-old geological column? While most meteors burn up before they reach the earth’s surface, many (up to 60 tons each day) land on the earth. If the supposed geological layers were laid down over millions of years, where are the meteorites in the layers? Few such meteors have been found in the geological layers.

9) “Short period” comets. Our solar system has an abundance of “short period” comets, that is, comets whose life span averages only 1,500 to 10,000 years. Yet if the universe is billions of years old, these comets would have disintegrated long ago. Evolutionists have had to scramble to try and explain their existence.

c. Age is not a requirement.

1) Petrifaction. The time for petrifaction is said to be thousands of years, but consider the finding of H.G. Ladubdda of Kingaroy in southeast Queensland, Australia, who specializes in the collection of petrified objects. Among the articles of his collection is a perfectly petrified orange. Oranges were not raised in the area until 1868.

2) Coal formation. In many places fossilized trees penetrate through several coal layers. This indicates that the surrounding coal was formed so quickly that termites did not have time to consume the wood. Rather than taking millions of years to form, available evidence indicates that coal may form in a very short time, geologically speaking, if conditions are favorable.

3) Coral formation. Coral is said to grow only slowly, and that reefs take millions of years to form. Yet underwater explorers recently found a five-foot diameter coral growth on the bow gun of a sunken ship. Coral can indeed grow much more rapidly than previously thought.

4) Canyon formation. Some geologists have declared that, given its depth, the Grand Canyon and other geological strata must have taken more than eight million years to form. However, we know today that some comparatively small “natural disasters” can have the same affect must more quickly. On March 19, 1982, Mount St. Helens’ volcano exploded with a force equal to 20,000 Hiroshima-sized atom bombs. As an aftermath of the eruption, a 140-feet-deep canyon (the “Little Grand Canyon”) was formed in just one day. At this rate the Grand Canyon could have been formed in just 40 days. Since the eruption, new layered strata of rock (like walls of the Grand Canyon) have continued to form at the rate of 100 feet per years (in one case 25 feet in one day). Furthermore, the walls of the Grand Canyon reach over 6,000 feet above sea level. The river that supposedly “carved” these walls “billions of years ago” enters the canyon at only 2,800 feet above sea level. Rivers don’t flow uphill! To “carve” those walls, the river would have had to flow uphill over 3,200 feet vertically. Clearly, the river did not form the Grand Canyon. Eastern Washington has its “channeled scablands” – 15,000 square miles of steep-walled canyons, gouged out of crystalline lava rock. Researches initially assumed these canyons were the aftermath of a river eroding the earth over many millions of years. United States Geological Survey, however, published the fact that the scablands were actually formed from the “Great Spokane Flood” in just two days.

c. How old is planet earth? For evolution to be true requires an inhabitable planet of “billions of years old” (actually trillions of years old) to give time for life to emerge and develop. Any time less and evolution is impossible to support. Everett Koop, former U. S. Surgeon General, vividly describes the challenge: “When I make an incision with my scalpel, I see organs of such intricacy that there simply hasn’t been enough time for natural evolutionary processes to have developed them”

1) A great temptation faced by evolutionists is to stretch logic to the near breaking point, assigning vast ages to fossils and other artifacts, when the scientific evidence is contrary. It’s a very hard fact to confess, but more and more evolutionists are admitting the truth about our young earth.

2) Dr. Harold Slusher, an astrophysicist and geophysicist, says: “There are a number of indicators that seem to indicate an age of no more than 10,000 years are the very most, for the solar system and the earth.”

D. The fossil record.

1. Evolution predicts:

a. The oldest rocks that bear evidence of life would contain the most primitive forms of life capable of fossilization.

b. Younger rocks would contain evidence of more complex forms of life.

c. There would be a gradual change in life forms from simple to complex.

d. There would be huge numbers of transitional forms.

2. While there was scant information on the fossil record at the time of Charles Darwin, there is now an abundance of fossil discoveries; the results do not support evolution.

a. Stephen Gould, professor of geology and paleontology at Harvard University: [All quotes are from Gould, though they are from two different works.] “All paleontologists know that the fossil record contains precious little in the way of intermediate forms; transitions between major groups are characteristically abrupt.” “The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary states between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualistic accounts of evolution.” “The extreme study of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trace secret of paleontology. The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches: the rest is inference however reasonable, not the evidence of the fossils ... yet to preserve our favored account of evolution by natural selection we view our data as so bad that we never see the very process we profess to study.”

b. Dr. Colin Patterson, former senior paleontologist at the British Museum of Natural History: “I fully agree with your comments on the lack of direct illustration of evolutionary transitions in my book (Evolution). If I knew of any, fossil or living, I would certainly have included them... . Yet Gould and the American Museum people are hard to contradict when they say there are no transitional fossils... . I will lay it on the line – there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument.”

c. Dr. Mark Ridley,, Oxford zoologist: “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.”

d. One of the greatest problems for the evolutionist in the fossil record is the Cambrian explosion. When Darwin wrote the oldest known fossils were from a geological period known as the Cambrian, named after rocks in Cambria, Wales. But the Cambrian fossil record doesn’t start with one or a few species that diverged gradually over millions of years into genera, then families, then order, then classes, then phyla. Instead, most of the major animal phyla – and many of the major classes with them – appear together abruptly in the Cambrian, fully formed. The Cambrian explosion is considered too big to be masked by flaws in the fossil record. In fact, as more fossils are discovered it becomes clear that the Cambrian explosion was even more abrupt and extensive than previously envisioned. So the major phylum-level differences that Darwin predicted would appear last in the fossil record actually appeared first.

3. “Ape men” (missing links).

a. Evolutionists frequently propose that modern humans evolved from apes through the following new species or missing links:

1) Ramapithecus.

2) Australopithecus.

3) Homo habilis.

4) Homo erectus (Java man, Peking man).

5) Homo sapiens (modern man).

b. Features of the fossils.

1) In analyzing fossils, scientists look at many features, comparing them with what is known about modern apes, modern man, and other similar fossils.

a) Specifically, scientists look at the size and shape of the skull, the form of the brow ridges above the eyes, and the way the cheek bones are swept back relative to the jaw.

b) They also pay attention to the length and shape of teeth, jaw configuration, length and shape of arms and legs, slant of the pelvis and lower back, form of the feet, and volume of the cranium – which suggests the size of the brain.

c) Few skeletons are completely intact; often the only remains found are pieces of skull, pelvis, and scattered extremities, which makes the task of proving what they are even more difficult.

2) Other complicating factors.

a) Few ape-human transitional fossils have been found.

i) The dinosaur lived (according to evolutionary reckoning) some 220 million years ago, and tens of thousands of almost perfect dinosaur fossils have been found on all seven continents.

ii) Why are there so few fossils even remotely thought to be from “ape-men”? iii) The total number of collected fossils of proposed ape-human transitional forms that they wouldn’t even fill the top of a billiard table.

iv) The small number of fossils makes a case for human evolution every difficult to support.

b) Age of the fossils.

i) If Animal A evolved into Animal B, dating methods should show that Animal A existed before Animal B.

ii) Assigning dates to proposed human ancestors is, however, a cause for disagreement even among evolutionists themselves.

4. What is the evidence relative to each of the “ape-men” above?

a. Ramapithecus.

1) Initially discovered in India in 1932, similar fossilized remains were also found in Kenya, Europe, and Yunan Province of China, based on similarities between a few teeth and jaw fragments and those of modern humans, he was declared to be a branch on the evolutionary tree leading to humans.

2) One researcher, Dr. Robert Eckhardt of the anthropology department at Pennsylvania State University, sums up his findings and those of may others regarding Ramapithecus and other supposed human ancestors: “Neither is there compelling evidence for the existence of any distinct hominid species (“Hominid” and “homo” are frequently used to identify species thought to be human-like.)

3) The following is a list of some of the scientists, mostly evolutionists, who have documented their abandonment of the claim that Ramapithecus is a link between ape and man.

a) Richard Leakey and Roger Leewin.

b) W. C. O. Hill

c) David Pilbeam

d) Peter Andrews

e) Allen L. Hammon

f) Adrienne L. Zihlman

g) Leonard D. Greenfield.

4) Most scientists today classify Ramapithecus as an extinct ape.

b. Australopithecus.

1) This creature, first discovered in 1924 by Dr. Raymond Dart, who drew attention to the ape-like feature of the skull, but thought the teeth were more human-like is said to have lived 1-4.5 million years ago.

2) Other creatures were also discovered and given names reflecting their similarity.

a) Australopithecus africanus.

b) Australopithecus robustus.

c) Australopithecus afarensis.

3) All these creatures had small brains (taking up about 500cc or less of space, about 1/3 that of modern humans), large, ape-like jaws, with cheek teeth similar to modern gorillas.

4) In 1974 Donald Johanson discovered several pieces of Afarensis.

a) He claimed these were human ancestors.

b) One he named Lucy; it was three and one-half feet tall, with a brain size of 380 to 450 cc.

c) The media attention to this find was enormous, but in time Lucy was reexamined.

i) Anatomist Charles Oxnard, a respected expert on this subject, concluded that this creature was very unlike either humans or chimpanzees. After more research, which included Lucy, he announced that he did not find any of the australopithecines to be related to humans: “It is now recognized widely that the australopithecines are not structurally closely similar to humans, that they must have been living at least in part in arboreal [tree] environments, and that many of the later specimens were contemporaneous or almost so with the earlier members of the genus Homo.

ii) Evolutionist and paleontologist, professor Joseph Weiner, agrees: “The first impression given by all the skulls from the different populations of Australopithecus is so pronounced that its outline can be superimposed on that of a female Chimpanzee with a remarkable closeness of fit. In this respect and also in the lack of chin and in possession of strong supra-orbital ridges, Australopithecus stands in strong contrast to modern (man) Homo sapiens.

iii) Sir Solly Zuckerman, secretary of the Zoological Society of London and chief scientist advisor to the British government, pleads for integrity among overzealous evolutionists: “The australopithecine skull is in fact so overwhelmingly simian [ape-like] as opposed to human that the contrary proposition could be equated to an assertion that black is white.

iv) Richard Leakey, director of National Museum in Kenya, son of the famous paleontologist Louis Leakey, also issues a plea for integrity: “Lucy’s skull (Australopithecus afarensis) was so incomplete that most of it was imagination, made of plaster of Paris, thus making it impossible to draw any firm conclusion about what species she belonged to.”

5) Ultimately the evidence became so overwhelming that Donald Johanson himself, the discoverer of Lucy, later concluded that Lucy was not related to humans at all.

c. Homo Habilis.

1) Several claims have been made of fossilized creatures that initially seemed more man-like than was Australopithecus; Homo habilis is the name assigned to one such series of fossils.

2) The adults were about 3.5 feet tall, with brains about 1/3 the size of humans, and long heavily built arms.

3) The research of this classification is made more difficult by that fact that the number of fossils assigned to it has led it to be called the “waste basket.”

4) After much study, paleontologists today believe that Homo Habilis is not related to humans but is a variety of Australopithecus ape, more on the order of a chimpanzee or orangutan.

5) Another fact confusing the proposed evolution of Australopithecus to Homo habilis is the fact that both lived at the same time.

6) Paleontologist Stephen J. Gould of Harvard university sums up the difficulty of showing any proof of human evolution regarding Homo habilis: “What has become of our ladder if there are three co-existing lineages of hominids (Australopithecus africanus, Australopithecus robustus, and Homo habilis), none clearly derived from one another? Moreover, none of the three display any evolutionary trends during their tenure on earth; none became brainier or more erect as they approached the present day.

d. Homo Erectus from Java, Indonesia

1) Homo erectus is supposed to be the link just before modern humans; the two best known are Java Man and Peking Man.

2) The story of Java Man begins in 1887 when a Dutch physician, Eugene Dubois, began searching Indonesia for “missing links.”

a) Four years later he came across the top portion of a skull, with a femur found about 50 feet away.

b) From this skull cap he imagined what the face might have looked like and this, with the femur, led him to believe that the creature was an ancestor to humans.

c) He named it Pithecanthropus erectus (“erect ape-man), popularly known as Java Man.

d) Dubois announcement generated both attention and doubt.

i) German zoologists tended to think Java Man was actually an ape; the British considered it human; the French, something between the two.

ii) It was not until 30 years later that Dubois confessed to what else he had found at the same site; two skulls of modern humans.

iii) This immediately explained the human likeness of the femur.

iv) It also assured the scientific community that Java Man was not a missing link at all, but actually a cover-up.

e. Homo Erectus from Peking.

1) Peking Man (Sinanthropus pekinensis) is another find that was later identified as Homo erectus.

2) This story starts near Peking (Beijing) in the 1920s and 30s, where a group of skulls jaws and teeth were found; nothing else was left of these creatures.

3) Dr. Davidson Black, a professor of anatomy at Union Medical College in Peking, examined just one tooth, thought it to be human-like, and declared that a new ape-man creature had been discovered.

4) Once again, the announcement generated a wave of publicity; once again researchers who studied the findings were not as convinced.

5) Marcellin Boule and H. V. Vallois, both paleontologists, examined the fossils and wrote: “In its totality, the structure of the Sinanthropus skull is still very ape-like.” They also found that its brain was considerably less than human and concluded that they were actually macaques or baboons that were likely killed and eaten by humans.

6) Tielhard de Chardin, wrote: “Sinanthropus manifestly resembles the great apes closely.”

7) All the Peking Man fossils disappeared sometime between 1941 and 1945, never to be seen again.

f. Neanderthal Man.

1) First discovered in a cave near Dusseldorf, Germany, Neanderthal Man is one of the most popularized “prehuman” creatures. It is usually portrayed as a semi-erect figure, carrying a club and with a brutish expression.

2) We now know that N. M. suffered from the disease known as rickets. Caused by vitamin D deficiency, rickets leaves bones unusually soft and easily malformed. This explains the often stooped appearance once attributed to the Neanderthals.

3) Recent DNA evidence indicates that Neanderthal was fully human. Analysis of the DNA within a Neanderthal skeleton was found to be markedly similar to that of modern humans, even when accounting for the fact that it was thousands of years old.

g. Nebraska Man – Deception.

1) In 1922 a simple tooth was discovered in western Nebraska. After examination, renowned paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborne announced that the tooth belonged to yet another ape-man ancestor; this one named Hesperopithecus, publicly known as Nebraska Man. Widely published as a “missing link,” it was used as pro-evolution evidence in the famous “monkey trial” in Dayton, Tennessee.

2) Within five years other studies were carried out by authorities who declared that the tooth from Nebraska Man was actually that of a species of wild pig extinct in North America, and now only living in Paraguay. There was no other evidence of Nebraska Man even left to consider.

h. Piltdown Man – Fraud.

1) Another blow to the credibility of searching for human ancestors occurred in 1912, Arthur Smith Woodward, director of the Natural History Museum of London, and Charles Dawson, a medical doctor, declared their discovery of a jaw and part of a skull. Uncovered in a gravel pit near Piltdown, England, they named the creature Eoanthropus dawsoni – or Piltdown Man, and estimated him to be about 500,000 years old. Once again, their announcement generated enormous international attention and praise.

2) However, by 1950 a new technique was perfected to determine the age of bones. It was based upon measuring the concentration of fluoride that the bones had absorbed from the surrounding soil. Piltdown Man’s jaw was tested and found to contain no fluoride, proving that it was not a fossil at all and was only about a year old. The skull did contain fluoride, enough to date it at about 5,000 years old.

3) This discrepancy caused the jaw and skull to be carefully re-examined. Scientists discovered that the bones had been soaked in a special chemical to make them appear old.

4) Ultimately the jaw was identified as that of an orangutan ape, and the skull as that of a modern human. Piltdown Man was judged to be a complete sham.

5) Clearly, the haste to prove evolution’s expectations at any cost – even deliberate fraud – exposes the bias of many in the scientific community. Anthropologist Jaquetta Hawkes correctly observes: “Accepting this as inevitable and not necessarily damaging, it still comes as a shock to discover how often preconceived ideas have affected the investigation of human origins. There is, of course, nothing like a fake for exposing such weaknesses among the experts. For example, to look back over the bold claims and subtle anatomical distinctions made by some of our greatest authorities concerning the recent human skull and modern ape’s jaw which together composed “Piltdown Man,” rouses either joy or pain, according to one’s feelings for the scientists.”

6) Has the situation improved today? In 1983 a group of experts in Europe announced the discovery of a fossil declared to be the oldest human ever found, “Orce Man” from southern Spain. French scientists investigated the claim and declared that Orce Man was actually the skull of a four-month-old donkey.

i. The Ape that’s late.

1) Further confounding efforts to show an evolutionary trend is the fact that fossils of modern humans have been discovered which appear older than even the oldest ape fossils. This fact would indicate that humans could not have evolved from apes.

2) The australopithecines are thought to have lived between 1 and 4 million years ago, yet human footprints have also been found that are thought to be about 3.5 million years old. One observer stated: “Make no mistake about it... . They are like modern human footprints. If one were left in the sand of a California beach today, and a four-year old were asked what it was, he would instantly say that somebody walked there.”

3) As if this evidence were not enough contradiction against evolution, consider the age of other fossils of modern humans. Homo sapien bones were recently found in the Cretaceous stratum – a geologic rock layer in Moab, Utah, thought to be 100 million years old, and far older than the 1 million year maximum age evolutionists assign to modern humans.

4) Even more remarkable are footprints of modern humans far older than those. A. E. Wilder-Smith wrote: “Human footprints have been repeatedly discovered in the Upper Carboniferous period (supposedly 250 million years old). If we believe the evolutionist’s own dating, modern humans living 100-250 million years ago would mean that they were present far earlier than even the dinosaurs.

4. Comments on the fossil record of “missing links.”

a. Dr. Charles Oxnard, professor of anatomy and human biology, University of Western Australia: “In each case although initial studies suggest that the fossils are similar to humans, study of the complete evidence readily shows that the reality is otherwise.”

b. Sir Solly Zuckerman spent his entire career searching out proof for evolution, and finding none. He then exposed the dilemma evolutionists are up against in proving that man evolved: “ No scientist could logically dispute the proposition that man, without having been involved in any act of divine creation, evolved from some ape-like creature in a very short space of time (speaking in geological terms) without leaving any fossil traces of the steps of transformation. As I have already implied, students of the fossil primates have not been distinguished for caution... . The record is so astonishing that it is legitimate to ask whether much science is yet to be found in this field at all.”

c. Zuckerman’s honesty is commendable, and is also voiced by Lyall Watson in Science Digest: “Modern apes, for instance, seem to have sprung out of nowhere. They have no yesterday, no fossil record. And the true origin or modern humans – of upright naked tool-making, big brained beings – is, if we are to be honest with ourselves, an equally mysterious matter.”

d. Commenting on books on evolution, Dr. Robert Martin, senior research fellow at the Zoological Society of London, concludes: “In recent years several authors have written popular books on human origins which were based more on fantasy and subjectivity than on fact and objectivity.”

e. Evolutionist and paleontologist Joseph Weiner sums up the study of human evolution: “It is quite obvious that modern man could not have arisen from any ape, let alone a monkey, at all similar to those of today... . It is ridiculous to describe man as a “naked” or any other kind of ape.

f. Dr. A. V. Ager, president of the British Geological Association, summarizes the lack of fossil evidence for transitions in general: “It must be significant that nearly all the evolutionary stories I learned as a student have now been debunked... . 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.”

C. The conclusion concerning the truthfulness of evolution.

1. To support their position evolutionists employ a great deal of speculation, occasional fraud, and lastly very little, if any, real evidence. Still, the “pledge of allegiance” to Darwin and his doctrine has been adhered to by virtually every editing board of America’s major scientific textbooks.

2. Many of the world’s most renowned scientists flatly disagree with Darwin on strictly scientific grounds.

a. William Fix, in his book, The Bone Peddlers, opens the evolutionists secret tomb: “Scientists are the forefront of inquiry have put the knife to classical Darwinism. They have not gone public with this news, but have kept it in their technical papers and inner counsels.”

b. Dr. Colin Patterson, senior paleontologist at the British Museum of Natural History in London, points out evolution’s untruths: “Darwin’s evolutionary explanation of the origins of man has been transformed into a modern myth, to the detriment of science and social progress... . The secular myths of evolution have had a damaging effect on scientific research, leading to distortion, to needless controversy, and to the gross misuse of science... . I mean the stories, the narratives about change over time. How the dinosaurs became extinct, how the mammals evolved, where man came from. These seem to me to be little more than story telling.”

c. Albert Fleishman, professor of zoology and comparative anatomy at Eriangen University, Germany, concluded: “The Darwinian theory of descent has not a single fact to confirm it in the reality of nature. It is not the result of scientific research but purely the product of imagination.”

d. Scientist B. Leith admits what may scientists already realize; that support for evolution is unraveling. “The theory of life that undermined nineteenth-century religion has virtually become a religion itself and in its turn is being threatened by fresh ideas... . In the past ten years has emerged a new breed of biologists who are considered scientifically respectable, but who have their doubts about Darwinism.”

e. Pierre-Paul Grasse,, of the University of Paris and past president of the French Academy of Science, commented on the lack of evidence for evolution: “The deceit is sometimes unconscious, but not always, since some people, owing to their sectarianism, purposely overlook reality and refuse to acknowledge the inadequacies and the falsity of their beliefs.”

f. Dr. S. Lovtrup is emphatic in his analysis: “I believe that one day the Darwinian myth will be ranked the greatest deceit in the history of science. When this happens, many people will pose the question, ‘How did this ever happen?’”

3. It’s time this fairy tale is exposed. Evolution is unfounded; it is not a fact, but a fraud. Hsu, a well-known geologist at the Geological Institute in Zurich called for such: “We have had enough of the Darwinian fallacy. It is time that we cry: ‘The emperor has no clothes.’”

4. Why do evolutionists find the theory so persuasive? A. To be fair, remember that Charles Darwin was writing in the 1800s when much of what we have pointed out was not only unknown, it was unknowable given the equipment with which they worked. Scientific equipment and knowledge have advanced exponentially since Darwin’s day.

1. Given our present knowledge, note the conclusions of some noted scientists.

a. Professor Louis Bounoure, former president of the Biological Society of Strasbourg and director of the Strasbourg Zoological Museum, contends that: “Evolution is a fairy tale for grown-ups. This theory has helped nothing in the progress of science. It is useless.”

b. Dr. T. N. Tahmissian of the United States Atomic Energy Commission declares: “Scientists who go about teaching that evolution is a fact of life are great con-men, and the story they are telling may be the greatest hoax ever. In explaining evolution, we do not have one iota of fact.”

c. H. S. Lipson, a British physicist and Fellow of the Royal Society, wrote: “I have always been slightly suspicious of the theory of evolution because of its ability to account for any property of living beings (the long neck of the giraffe, for example). I have therefore tried to see whether biological discoveries over the last thirty years or so fit in with Darwin’s theory. I do not think that they do... . To my mind, the theory does not stand up at all.”

d. Malcom Muggeridge, world famous journalist and philosopher, anticipates the future rejection of evolution: “I myself am convinced that the theory of evolution, especially the extent to which it’s been applied, will be one of the great jokes in the history books of the future.”

e. Loren Eisley provides a critique of Darwin’s writings suggesting that Darwin himself developed increasing doubts about the truth of his own theory: “A close examination of the last edition of the Origin reveals that in attempting on scattered pages to meet the objections being launched against his theory, the much labored-upon volume had become contradictory... . The last repairs to the Origin reveal ... how very shaky Darwin’s theoretical structure had become. His gracious ability to compromise had produced some striking inconsistencies. His book was already a classic, however, and these deviations for the most part passed unnoticed even by his enemies.”

2. Why is an idea with so little merit clung to so strongly? Why do some people persist in clinging to evolution as a fact when so little proof exists? The answer is this: EVOLUTION IS THE ONLY WAY TO EXPLAIN LIFE WITHOUT GIVING CREDIT TO GOD!

a. If evolution’s leaders admit that life was created, they also must admit that a Creator exists, and if people admit that a Creator exists, they might have to change their lives. They might have to be accountable to a greater power. Change is often uncomfortable and obedience means giving up on personal pride and arrogance.

b. It comes as no surprise that most evolutionists are also atheists or agnostics.

1) A survey published in the July 1998 Nature documented the religious makeup of the National Academy of Sciences, an organization committed to propagating evolution, reported that one half of all 517 NAS members in biological and physical sciences responded, 72.2% were overtly atheistic, 20.8% agnostic, and only 7% believed in a personal God. In fact, belief in God was lowest among biologists.

2. Evolution is popular not because it fits the science, but because it fits the world view of these people.

c. The famous Nobel prize-winning scientist from Harvard, Dr. George Wald, enlightens the honest student with the underlying bias which causes the rapid proliferation of Darwin’s theory in the hallways of science: “When it comes to the origin of life on this earth, there are only two possibilities: creation or spontaneous generation (evolution). There is no third way. Spontaneous generation was disproved 100 years ago, but that leads us only to one other conclusion: that of supernatural creation. We cannot accept that on philosophical grounds (personal reasons), therefore, we choose to believe the impossible; that life arose spontaneously by chance.”

d. Harold Urey, Nobel Prize laureate of the Miller-Urey experiment fame [see, p. 11 of this outline], recognized the extent of his “faith” in evolution in spite of its impossibility: “All of us who study the origin of life find that the more we look into it, the more we feel it is too complex to have evolved anywhere. We all believe as an article of faith that life evolved from dead matter on this planet. It is just that life’s complexity is so great, it is hard for us to imagine that it did.”

e. E. J. H. Corner, professor of tropical botany at Cambridge University, confesses: “I still think that, to the unprejudiced, the fossil record of plants is in favor of special creation... yet mutations and natural selection are the bricks with which the taxonomist has built his temple of evolution, and where else have we to worship?”

f. Well-known scientist Heribert Nilsson of Lund University spent his entire career trying to artificially foster evolution between creatures. He concluded that the idea was more like a religion than a science.” My attempts to demonstrate evolution by an experiment carried on for more than 40 years have completely failed... . It is not even possible to make a caricature of evolution out of paleobiological facts... . The idea of evolution rests on pure belief.”

g. Professor Richard Lewontin, a geneticist, is a renowned leader in promoting the concept of evolutionary biology. He penned this very revealing statement that demonstrates his prejudice against creation, regardless of whether or not the facts support it. The emphasis is his: “We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.

h. Darwin’s bias was made clear in Origin: “The Old Testament, from its manifestly false history of the earth, was no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindus, or the beliefs of any barbarian. The New Testament is a damnable doctrine. (I can) hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true.

i. Julian Huxley is one of the best-known naturalists and humanist philosophers. Of religion and evolution he wrote: “In the evolutionary pattern of thought there is no longer either need or room for the supernatural. The earth was not created, it evolved. So did all the animals and plants that inhabit it, including our human selves, mind and soul as well as brain and body. So did religion.”

3. This battle will be fought in the classrooms of the world.

a. Wendell Bird wrote: “These teachers must embody the same selfless dedication as the most rabid fundamentalist preachers, for they will be ministers of another sort, utilizing a classroom instead of a pulpit to convey humanist values in whatever subject they teach, regardless of the educational level, preschool day care or large state university. The classroom must and will become an arena of conflict between the old and the new, the rotting corpse of Christianity, together with all its adjacent evils and misery, and the new faith of humanism... . It will undoubtedly be a long, arduous, painful struggle replete with much sorrow and many tears, but humanism will emerge triumphant. It must if the family of humanity is to survive.”

b. We need to understand that the difference between a “philosophy” like humanism and naturalism, and a “religion” is not definable. Both describe a particular way of viewing the world, history, human nature, and morality.

1. A religion may or may not include reference to a supernatural being.

2. Beyond this trait, however, philosophy and a religion are largely indistinguishable.

3. Buddhism, as an example, is recognized as a religion, but it has no “god” and its teachings are recognized as philosophy.

c. The scientific support for creation and arguments against evolution can stand alone. They do not rely upon any particular philosophy, religion, or even world view for adequate defense.

4. If the battle is lost the results will be disastrous.

a. The value of human life will be destroyed (it is already well on the way). An author for Scientific American wrote: “Yes, we are all animals, descendants of a vast lineage of replicators sprung from primordial pond scum.”

b. Morality will be destroyed. The implications of this thinking was revealed in a conversation between Jaron Lanier, a computer scientist, and Richard Dawkins, Oxford professor, evolutionist, and the foremost author of pro-evolution books for the general public, such as The Blind Watchmaker: Lanier: “There’s a large group of people who simply are uncomfortable with accepting evolution because it leads to what they perceive as a moral vacuum, in which their best impulses have no basis in nature.” Dawkins: “All I can say is, that’s just tough. We have to face up to the truth.”

c. If there is no God, no absolute authority, then morality has no firm foundation. If there is no God, there are no universal criteria for true and false, right and wrong. Whatever ethics, justice, and law we develop are only relative to the values of those people at that time.

d. Evolution is founded on atheism: that is, life without God. It denies that God exists or has any part at all in our world. It teaches that we are utterly alone, struggling in the world where every man and woman must compete. Hardly neutral in its implications, the concept of evolution has likely driven more people away from trusting God than any other idea.

e. Sir Julian Huxley in his keynote address at the 1959 Dawrinian Centennial declared: “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... we can dismiss entirely all idea of a supernatural overriding mind being responsible for the evolutionary process.”

5. But isn’t there another way – what about theistic evolution? A. Since the Enlightenment continuing efforts have been made to harmonize scripture and man’s reason.

1. Unfortunately, most, if not all, of those efforts have sacrificed Scripture to “science.” The most glaring example is neo-orthodoxy that harmonized Scripture and science by demythologizing Scripture – anything that smacked of the miraculous was rejected and given non-miraculous meanings. This included even the resurrection of Jesus Christ. For example, Rudolf Bultmann felt that the miraculous must be demythologized to reveal the true Christian message. He said that the resurrection was a call to "authentic existence in the face of death. " Bultmann said that if the bones of Jesus were discovered in Palestine tomorrow then all of the essentials of Christianity would remain unchanged.

2. While it is true that Galileo made discoveries that conflicted with some understandings of Scripture, it is not true that he discovered anything that conflicted with a correct understanding of Scripture.

a. While it is not true that the earth is the physical center of the universe, it is true that the earth is central to the meaning and moral nature of the universe. God made the earth for a habitation of man.

b. Man, not the sun, is the crowning creation of God according to Scripture.

B. Darwinism, old or new, cannot be harmonized with Christianity.

1. If “natural selection” is used to mean changes within a particular species (microevolution), there is no conflict. But this is not the meaning used by Darwinian evolutionists (except when they are being deceitful). Their true definition is that natural selection is a major part of the process that brought man into existence from the “common ‘spark’ of life” (macroevolution).

2. Not only is there no increasing evidence for Darwinian natural selection, there is increasing evidence against it. There are any number of books that you can read that, if honestly read, can lead to no other conclusion. For example, a number of books by Phillip Johnson: Darwin on Trial; The Wedge of Truth, Splitting the Foundations of Naturalism; Reason in the Balance, the Case Against NATURALISM in Science, Law & Education; and The Right Questions, Truth, Meaning & Public Debate. Add to these such books as: Doubts about Darwin, A History of Intelligent Design, by Thomas Woodward; Total Truth, Liberating Christianity from its Cultural Captivity by Nancy Pearcey; The Design Revolution, Answering the Toughest Questions About Intelligent Design, by William Dembski; What Darwin Didn’t Know, by Geoffrey Simmons; and How Blind is the Watchmaker? Nature’s Design & the Limits of Naturalistic Science by Neil Broom.

3. The truth is that if Darwin’s theory were being published in this day of peer review and under the high standards of truly scientific journals, it would never see the light of day. It is replete with unproved and improvable assumptions. No scientific theory has been based on more incorrect information and supported by more fraud than the theory of evolution. See, The Icons of Evolution, by Jonathan Wells.

C. The battle is not and has never been between Scripture and science.

1. There has always been and will be as long as the earth stands a battle between Scripture and science falsely so-called. 1 Tim. 6:20-21.

2. There can be no armistice or compromise. Theistic evolution is not a possibility because the very concept of evolution (theistic or otherwise) is that the species are always improving.

a. If this is true, there has never been a “fall” of man. The fact of a “fall” necessarily implies a reversal of evolution’s upward rise.

b. If there has never been a “fall,” there is no need for a Redeemer because evolved man needs no redemption.

c. Thus, the very center of the Gospel is false.

D. The theory of evolution does not require the amount of faith required to believe in God – it requires even more faith.

1. Norman Geisler and Frank Turek wrote an interesting book entitled I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist.

2. Being an atheist and believing in the theory of evolution both require faith.

3. No man can consistently believe in God and Christ as His Son and believe in the theory of evolution. The two beliefs are diametrically opposed.

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God's Plan of Salvation