Part 3: The Basics of Evolution Disproven

     Naturalism states that nature (or the universe) is all that is, or was, or ever will be. But someone would have to have infinite knowledge to know this. This also means that there is no supernatural. Everything in existence can eventually be explained by natural forces like gravity, electro-magnetism, etc. It also means there is no God.
While this theory existed before Darwin published his book on “The Origin of Species” in 1859, it wasn’t taken seriously. Darwin’s theory gave it “scientific legitimacy”. The essence of Darwin’s theory is that minor adaptations in a species (sometimes called micro-evolution) over vast periods of time will evolve into another species (sometimes called macro-evolution). Does the accumulated evidence support this? Let’s look at the following examples that darwinists have used:
–Darwin’s finches…one of the most widely cited pieces of evidence for evolution is the variation among finches beaks on the Galapagos Islands off the coast of South America. The proof was that during a drought, the length of the finches beak size increased by a few tenths of a millimeter as the larger, tougher seeds that the finches ate survived better. The slightly larger beaked finches survived better. But what they’re not telling you is that when the drought ended, the beak sizes returned to normal. The finches were still finches. This was micro-evolution (which even creationists agree with) but not macro-evolution (the finches changing into another species). When the National Academy of Sciences puts out a booklet on evolution for teachers, they didn’t mention that the longer beak size returned to normal once the drought ended.

— Fruit flies…this is often used to show that radiating fruit flies will sometimes produce larger wings. But sometimes it has produced smaller wings. Other times it has produced no wings or shredded wings. One time they even got a fly with legs growing out of its head. This does not prove evolution. All it produces are dysfunctional fruit flies. A PBS Evolution series showed one mutation producing a 4-winged fruit fly instead of the normal 2 wings. Is this proof of advancing evolution? What PBS didn’t tell you was that the extra 2 wings didn’t move because they had no muscles. They just hang there, weighing down the fly.
After experimenting with fruit flies for nearly 50 years, geneticist Richard Goldschmidt said that thousands of mutations would only produce an extremely odd fruit fly, not another species.
— Peppered moths…remember your high school biology textbook saying how peppered moths were an example of natural selection? During the Industrial Revolution, factories poured out smoke & soot that settled on trees, making it easier for birds to eat the lighter colored moths as they landed on the tree trunks. Over time, the darker colored moths predominated. However, in recent years we’ve discovered that moths don’t land on tree trunks. What happened then? Moths landing on tree trunks were staged. Dead moths were glued on the tree trunks. Yes, this really happened. WOW! That’s downright fraudulent. This scandal has now been thoroughly published in the scientific literature. Yet, amazingly, the peppered moths still appear in science textbooks as examples of evolution.

— Haeckel’s embryos…German scientist Ernest Haeckel lined up embryos side-by-side of fish, amphibian, reptile, bird & human. He showed how the human embryo went thru the stages of growth from fish to amphibian to reptile to bird and finally finished at the human stage. He said this proved Darwin’s theory of evolution. This is known as Haeckel’s principle of recapitulation. In essence, Haeckel is saying that we start out at conception as less than human. Until we go thru the stages of evolution, we are not human. Many evolutionists accepted his findings without doing their due diligence of his methods. These drawings were quickly published in biology textbooks. Even today, some textbooks still include them. Even Gray’s Anatomy still has them in there.
     But scientists of his day knew that Haeckel had faked the sketches and they accused him of fraud. He was convicted of fraud at the University of Jena. Even the late Harvard paleontologist Stephen J. Gould has said they are fraudulent and should have NEVER been included in any textbooks. It is also no coincidence that Haeckel supported race-based eugenics. With his low view of life, he is considered one of the progenitors of National Socialism, the Nazi Party. Read Dr. Richard Weikart’s excellent book, “From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany”.

— the Cambrian fossil record…there was a landmark conference at Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History titled “Macroevolution”. Unfortunately, what paleontologists told biologists was not what they wanted to hear. That was that the fossil record DOES NOT and NEVER WILL support Darwin’s theory of a smooth, gradual progression of life forms from simple-to-complex. New life forms appear suddenly, with no transitional forms leading up to them. The late Stephen J. Gould, Harvard paleontologist, calls this the trade secret of paleontology.
Darwin himself said that the fossil record spoke against macroevolution. But he held out hope that someday the missing links would be discovered. 150 years later, they haven’t been. The Chicago conference announced that it is irrational to keep hoping that the gaps would be filled in. Roger Lewin wrote in Science magazine that the central question of the Chicago conference was whether the mechanisms underlying microevolution can be extrapolated to explain the phenomena of macroevolution. With some qualifications, the answer can be given as a clear NO!
There are several new theories that try to salvage Darwinian evolution by applying “fudge factors”. Gould’s theory is called “punctuated equilibrium”…that evolution of a species goes thru periods of stability followed by much shorter periods of erratic, accelerated change. Another scientist has a theory called “directed panspermia” that says the chemical building blocks of life (Proteins, amino acids, DNA, RNA, etc.) came from outer space on meteors. Once here, evolution took over. Because of the constant findings of human fossils, evolutionists are continually changing the evolutionary lines of human descent.
     Large scale mutations, a primary driver of evolution, are almost always deleterious and often fatal. An agnostic biologist, Dr. Michael Denton, wrote a book in 1985 called “Evolution: A Theory in Crisis”. Last year, he wrote a follow-up book to this called, “Evolution: A Theory Still in Crisis”. More and more evolutionists are questioning darwinian evolution. See my linked article on my website under “Fun Stuff….Science/Creation/Evolution…Quotations from scientists and evolutionists about Darwinian evolution”.

     So why is evolution so ensconced in scientific circles? Partly because today’s scientists have only been taught evolution. It has had near dominance in the public schools and universities for almost 100 years. When you’re not taught anything else, you tend to believe what you’re taught and work within that system. A second reason is that scientists are not unbiased when interpreting facts. A much larger percentage of scientists are agnostic/atheist than the general public. The Gallup and Pew Research polls have showed this time and time again. Evolution has provided scientists with a reason to exclude God or the supernatural from their endeavors, even when those findings point to God or an intelligent designer. Some scientists are even more blatant than that. Francis Crick & James Watson, the co-discoverers of the double helix structure of DNA, freely admit their anti-religious motivations that drove their scientific work. Crick said that he decided the two things that support religious things were the difference between living and non-living things, and the phenomenon of consciousness. He then aimed his research specifically at demonstrating a naturalistic view of both. “Religion is just so many myths from the past”, Watson said during a recent interview. “The discovery of the double helix gives grounds for thinking that the powers held traditionally to be the exclusive property of the gods might one day be ours”. Professor Steven Pinker said that “I personally feel that the teaching of modern science is corrosive to religious belief, and I’m all for that.   The hope that science would liberate people from religion is one of the things that in fact has driven me in my life…If science would bring about the end of religion, it would be the most important contribution science could make.”

The late Julian Huxley said, ”The reason we accepted Darwinism even without proof, is because we didn’t want God to interfere with our sexual mores”. This isn’t the reason most scientists accept evolution but it is a reason some do. Former atheist Lee Strobel says this was his view. Author & lecturer Ron Carlson has had several darwinists agree with this. This shouldn’t surprise us as sex and power are the motivators that underlie many of our most intense cultural debates, like abortion and homosexuality. Too often people take their views that line up with their personal desires rather than taking evidence into account. A third reason is that in the late 1800’s when Darwinism crossed the Atlantic, it was welcomed in America by a group of scholars who had founded an entire school of philosophy on it called philosophical pragmatism. This school reached into many areas like psychology, education, law, science and theology. Its adherents were people like William James (psychology), John Dewey (education), Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr (law) and Charles Sanders Pierce (science & theology). They believed that the mind evolved from matter, separating the objective sciences from values/morality, thus ensconcing the 2 story house. In law this meant that the courts made their decisions not on what the law said but by what social outcomes that the judges wanted to achieve. That’s why one Supreme Court justice says that the Constitution says what we want it to say. In education today, most educational theories are not inspired by teaching experience but by applications of a particular philosophy. John Dewey called this ‘constructivist education’. He believed that constructivism doesn’t assume an outside objective reality. It has the students construct their own reality. This was one of the moving forces behind the sexual revolution of the 1960’s and many of the social causes that originate on college campuses today. Like the acceptance of homosexuality. Forget about treating homosexuals psychologically, even if they desire it. We have evolved to the point where we can change our whole view of sexuality, even to the point of surgically altering a man into a woman and vice versa. This is why an effective method of apologetics can be to compel people to face the logical conclusions of their own choices. In the matter of transgenderism, we can show then that surgically altered people remain just as unhealthy psychologically as they were before the surgery.

     In the end, Darwinism and the other 2 books I mentioned earlier, have lead our culture to accept the 2 story division of truth that pushed Christianity into the upper story of subjective values/personal preferences. It took Christianity from a knowledge based truth to a preference based faith. Christians must find a way to talk about Christianity as objective knowledge and not personal preferences that are devoid of objective facts. These ways exist but most Christians aren’t aware of them. My website class “Prove to Me that God Exists” list some of these ways.

     Do you see how people have absorbed the fact/value dichotomy? That science is about fact while Christianity is about values/personal preferences. This is wrong! Christianity does make claims about this material world, the origin of the universe, the character of human nature and events in history, especially the resurrection of Jesus Christ. We need to return to the one story house where Christianity has been proven to be not just religious truth but TOTAL TRUTH!

For His Kingdom,
Dave Maynard
http://BSSSB-LLC.com