Evolution and Medicine

[fossten]

Evolution and medicine
by Dr. Robert “Tommy” Mitchell, M.D., USA

November 22, 2005

In the field of medicine, creationists are often considered by medical doctors as hopelessly behind the times. Endlessly we hear the same old rhetoric: “Evolution is the cornerstone of modern biology.” In a New York Times online article last month was the quote: “Evolution is the basis of biology, biology is the basis of medicine … You’re messing with something important when you mess with evolution.” (See “Seeing Creation and Evolution in the Grand Canyon,” www.nytimes.com, October 6, 2005.)

As a practicing physician, I have had to examine these claims about the importance of evolutionary thought in my daily interaction with patients. I have also sought the input of many colleagues as to whether or not any evolutionary input is needed for them to adequately serve society in their capacity as physicians. Regardless of any individual’s particular religious persuasion (many of my colleagues are avowed atheists or theistic evolutionists who mock me for my young-earth creationist stance), not one example could be put forth of the need for evolution (or belief in its tenets) in order to practice modern medicine.

Medicine and antibiotic resistance

Evolutionists are quick to use many unsupportable arguments to promote their beliefs. The most-often-used example is that of antibiotic resistance. They argue (quite vociferously at times) that one must understand that bacteria will evolve to a state of resistance to a particular antibiotic if that antibiotic is overused. Quite overlooked by the evolutionist are the multiple mechanisms of antibiotic resistance, none of which require or involve so-called evolutionary changes, which would add new information into the genome.

For instance, there are examples of antibiotic resistance found in bacteria recovered from the frozen corpses of people who died before the use of antibiotics. Much antibiotic resistance results from natural selection of populations of already-resistant bacteria. Antibiotics kill susceptible organisms, and resistant organisms survive.

Another mechanism of resistance is what occurs when a mutation takes place that might, for example, cause a defect in the bacteria’s ability to transport the antibiotic into the cell, thus rendering the bacteria resistant to that particular antibiotic. Another mutation might change a binding site used by the antibiotic within the cell, thus rendering it unable to kill the cell. What is never brought up, however, is the fact that any mutation will result in a loss of information due to the change in genetic material. Even in the very unusual occurrence of a so-called “beneficial” mutation, there is an ultimate loss of genetic information available to succeeding generations.

Recently, similar arguments have been put forth to explain resistance in certain strains of the influenza virus. These arguments fail for the same reason. This loss of information is inconsistent with a biological model that proposes to explain how organisms become more complex over time. Loss of information is the opposite of molecules-to-man evolution, and fits well into a creationist model of biology. Thus, antibiotic resistance is not a valid argument for the Darwinian evolutionist.

Medicine and “vestigial” organs

Evolutionists have also, over the years, pointed out the many so-called “vestigial organs” in the human body. It was their contention that these many organs were leftovers from millions of years of onward, upward evolutionary processes that no longer had a useful function. It can be argued that this viewpoint actually hindered the advancement of medicine, as many accepted this concept of vestigial organs and expended no effort to seek out possible functions for these organs.

For example, for many years the thymus gland was held to be a nonfunctioning leftover of evolution. Many children had this gland irradiated needlessly. We now understand the thymus gland’s important function in the development of a normal immune system.

The appendix, pineal gland, tonsils and coccyx are further examples of organs long held to be leftovers from evolution, but now are known to have important functions in the development and operation of our bodies.

Again, it would seem that evolution has been a hindrance rather than a help in the practice of medicine. In fact, there are “vestigial organs” in the human body—but left over from our embryonic development. That has nothing to do with “molecules-to-man” evolution.

The eyes have it

Another more recent controversy has revolved around the so-called “poorly designed eye.” Evolutionists argue that the human eye is poorly designed due to the photoreceptors being located behind the nerve fibers. When one understands how the photons of light are transformed into electrical energy in the retina, and the need for a massive blood supply, the marvelous design of the eye becomes apparent. For instance, the receptors respond to just one photon of light—the smallest unit of light! There is no “bad design,” just a faulty understanding (or, perhaps, faulty presupposition) on the part of the evolutionists. The eye has been wonderfully designed.

Indeed, evolution has nothing to offer in regard to operational science—in medicine or otherwise. That is, any endeavor requiring scientific experimentation in the present can be undertaken adequately and completely without any input from molecules-to-man evolution and its tenets.

Where, then, is the evidence of the foundational nature of evolution to the practice of medicine? It can only be concluded that there is an obvious need for evolutionists to hang on to a worldview that excludes a Creator God, regardless of the lack of empiric evidence to support such a view.

Medical doctors and the question of suffering/death

Thus far, we have explained that evolution cannot be shown to be in any way vital to the practice of medicine. But there is a further issue to be dealt with. What about man’s suffering? What about death? How does the evolutionist explain these things? If evolution is true (for the sake of argument, you understand), how does a physician understand illness and human tragedy?

The entire basis for evolution is that, untold millions of years ago, life began spontaneously from primordial pond scum. Over the ensuing eons, life became more and more complex and progressed via the process of survival of the fittest. This unfeeling, merciless, pitiless, unstoppable process has resulted in countless creatures being killed, torn apart and slaughtered by the “survivors.” Those less able to adapt, less able to find food, injured or in some other way found less worthy in the eyes of evolution, fell by the wayside. As Carl Sagan said, “the secret of evolution is time and death” (Carl Sagan’s Cosmic Connection, 1973).

Humans are supposedly the result of this process. Can one not argue that the evolutionist is inconsistent when insisting evolutionary thought is vital to the practice of medicine? Is it not more consistent to argue that there should be no doctors? If survival of the fittest is the mantra for evolutionists, where is there room for pity? Why does one show concern for his fellow man? Are these actions and emotions not at odds with the prime driving force of evolution—survival of the fittest?

Even Darwin addressed this issue:

With savages, the weak in body and mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed and the sick; we institute poor laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of everyone to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands who, from a weak constitution, would formerly have succumbed to smallpox. Thus the weak members of civilised society propagate their kind.

No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but, excepting in the case of man himself, hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.

The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered in the manner previously indicated more tender and more widely diffused. Nor can we check our sympathy, even without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature … We must, therefore, bear the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving and propagating their kind. (Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, 2nd ed., pp. 133–134, 1887)

On the other hand, the creationist has answers to these issues. If the Lord did, indeed, create the world in six literal days and pronounced His creation “very good,” where did suffering come from? The answer is: it’s “our fault”!

You see, when Adam rebelled against God in the Garden of Eden, he, in effect, said that he wanted to make his own decisions and live apart from God’s authority. This is where death and suffering arose. Since the time of the Fall, “the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now” (Romans 8:22). Death and suffering have been the result until this day.

The concept of helping the weak and the suffering is derived from a Christian outlook, not an evolutionary one. It has no foundation in evolution and its heartless process of survival of the fittest. To be consistent, a physician espousing an evolutionary worldview must question himself about his motives as he is actively working against the very natural processes that he claims have brought man to his present condition.

Beginning with a wrong understanding of the origin of life will actually be detrimental to medicine and technology. However, starting with the correct history of life, and understanding how suffering is a result of the effects of sin (as recorded in Genesis), one has the ability to build a consistent worldview, enabling the development of a right approach in medicine (and every other area).


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Robert T. (Tommy) Mitchell, M.D., is a graduate of Vanderbilt University School of Medicine and practices Internal Medicine in Gallatin, Tennessee. He is Board Certified in Internal Medicine and is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians. For many years he has spoken and written on issues related to the creation/evolution debate.

 

[raVeneyes]

As a practicing physician, I have had to examine these claims about the importance of evolutionary thought in my daily interaction with patients.

That's a stupid perspective. Why would anyone assume there's a link to evolution in daily interaction with patients? The link between evolution and medicine is the fact that most of medicine's treatments and research is based on evolution and/or biology which is based on evolution. What a disheartening opening from a doctor...spin, and misuse the fact so that it sounds ridiculous.

Even in the very unusual occurrence of a so-called “beneficial” mutation, there is an ultimate loss of genetic information available to succeeding generations.

WRONG! A mutation isn't always a loss of information, it can also be a misplacement of information or a recombination of information. A photon traveling faster than the speed of light hits the nucleotide bond in a molecule of a DNA strand forming, and that molecule is going to change about 30% of the time, hence skin cancer. Just as a computer re-writing the 1's and 0's of an MP3 on to a hard drive will sometimes make a mistake, or will sometimes be driven to make a mistake by a passing electro-magnetic field, or faults in the media, or many other random things, resulting in an audible pop or making the MP3 unusable or even at times no detectable flaw; so too the many many times DNA is recombined and small errors are introduced some times results in observable changes, sometimes not.

Recently, similar arguments have been put forth to explain resistance in certain strains of the influenza virus.

LOL!!! ROFLMAO!!! Not only have these arguments been put forth to explain resistance, they've been USED in PRACTICE to make strains of viruses more resistant to certain factors. HELLOOOOOO have you never heard of weaponizing a virus?

The appendix, pineal gland, tonsils and coccyx are further examples of organs long held to be leftovers from evolution, but now are known to have important functions in the development and operation of our bodies.

Oh really, the appendix, pineal gland, tonsils, and coccyx have important functions?!? Well I'm missing my appendix because it exploded in my bowel cavity at age 5...what important function am I missing out on...please doc tell me...is there some sort of appendix transplant I'm eligible for???

Where, then, is the evidence of the foundational nature of evolution to the practice of medicine? It can only be concluded that there is an obvious need for evolutionists to hang on to a worldview that excludes a Creator God, regardless of the lack of empiric evidence to support such a view.

Modern cancer research, biology, internal medicine, prescription medication research, are all evidence of the foundational nature of evolution in the practice of medicine. How the hell did this 'doctor' make it through med school?

If evolution is true..., how does a physician understand illness and human tragedy?

The same way one explains plants dying or dogs. Do dogs have souls? No? Well then why would they get ill, suffer, or die?

Are these actions and emotions not at odds with the prime driving force of evolution—survival of the fittest?

And thus the separation of man from most animals, though not all. Again there is pity and an instinctual drive to protect the population amongst all herd creatures, and even some that are not specifically herd animals, but of a higher order of intelligence. Most marine mammals protect individuals at the cost of the group, but doing so also helps the population as a whole. Apes protect individual members of their societies, even when injured or ill. This like many other human interactions is much more evolution based than anything else.

On the other hand, the creationist has answers to these issues. If the Lord did, indeed, create the world in six literal days and pronounced His creation “very good,” where did suffering come from? The answer is: it’s “our fault”!

Oh wow...how arrogant. Man...human kind...had the power to invalidate GOD's word! How simple, arrogant, and callow.

Robert T. (Tommy) Mitchell, M.D., is a graduate of Vanderbilt University School of Medicine and practices Internal Medicine in Gallatin, Tennessee. He is Board Certified in Internal Medicine and is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians. For many years he has spoken and written on issues related to the creation/evolution debate.

Thankfully I don't live in Tennessee...if I did I'd have to be sure I never get seen by Robert Mitchell, M.D.

 

[TheDude]

Another thing I don't understand about die hard creationist, why do they seek out medical care to prolong their lives? They way I see it, if they are sick and dieing it must be God's will or God's punishment, why deny God and try to defeat the illness? They mock and denouce science in the form of evolution, yet they willingly accept science in the form of medicine as that doctor above.

 

[fossten]

Another thing I don't understand about die hard creationist, why do they seek out medical care to prolong their lives? They way I see it, if they are sick and dieing it must be God's will or God's punishment, why deny God and try to defeat the illness? They mock and denouce science in the form of evolution, yet they willingly accept science in the form of medicine as that doctor above.

You're confusing Christian Science with Creationism.

You also mis-speak when you accuse Creationists of denouncing and mocking science. They only mock evolution as a mockery of science.

 

[TheDude]

You're confusing Christian Science with Creationism.

You also mis-speak when you accuse Creationists of denouncing and mocking science. They only mock evolution as a mockery of science.

History has shown that Creationist have denounced science and those who seek it as 'evil' and 'pawns of Satan'.... One simple example, Galileo, he was denounced and excommunicated because he had the nerve to come out and go against accepted religious theory that the earth wasn't the center of the universe.

If we both lived a back in say 1575, someone of your mind set would be denouncing all scientific thought as blasphemy. (IMHO)

 

[fossten]

History has shown that Creationist have denounced science and those who seek it as 'evil' and 'pawns of Satan'.... One simple example, Galileo, he was denounced and excommunicated because he had the nerve to come out and go against accepted religious theory that the earth wasn't the center of the universe.

If we both lived a back in say 1575, someone of your mind set would be denouncing all scientific thought as blasphemy. (IMHO)

You argue that creationists denounce science, whereas your example shows a scientist discrediting the religious community. As a matter of fact, Creationists use Galileo as an example supporting their positions on science versus evolution. Your use of it is a non sequitur, and your last statement is an unfounded overgeneralization, since you don't understand my mindset, nor do you accurately portray it. I don't denounce 'all scientific thought.' That assertion is ridiculous and amateurish.

 

[fossten]

‘It’s not science’
by Don Batten

Anti-creationists, such as atheists by definition, commonly object that creation is religion and evolution is science. To defend this claim they will cite a list of criteria that define a ‘good scientific theory’. A common criterion is that the bulk of modern day practising scientists must accept it as valid science. Another criterion defining science is the ability of a theory to make predictions that can be tested. Evolutionists commonly claim that evolution makes many predictions that have been found to be correct. They will cite something like antibiotic resistance in bacteria as some sort of ‘prediction’ of evolution, whereas they question the value of the creationist model in making predictions. Since, they say, creation fails their definition of ‘science’, it is therefore ‘religion’, and (by implication) it can simply be ignored.

Many attempts to define ‘science’ are circular. The point that a theory must be acceptable to contemporary scientists to be acceptable, basically defines science as ‘what scientists do’! In fact, under this definition, economic theories would be acceptable scientific theories, if ‘contemporary scientists’ accepted them as such.

In many cases, these so-called definitions of science are blatantly self-serving and contradictory. A number of evolutionary propagandists have claimed that creation is not scientific because it is supposedly untestable. But in the same paragraph they claim, ‘scientists have carefully examined the claims of creation science, and found that ideas such as the young Earth and global Flood are incompatible with the evidence.’ But obviously creation cannot have been examined (tested!) and found to be false if it’s ‘untestable’.

The definition of ‘science’ has haunted philosophers of science in the 20th century. The earlier approach of Bacon, who is considered the founder of the scientific method, was pretty straightforward:

observation → induction → hypothesis → test hypothesis by experiment → proof/disproof → knowledge.

Of course this, and the whole approach to modern science, depends on two major assumptions: causality and induction. The philosopher Hume made it clear that these are believed by ‘blind faith’ (Bertrand Russell’s words). Kant and Whitehead claimed to have solved the problem, but Russell recognized that Hume was right. Actually, these assumptions arose from faith in the Creator-God of the Bible, as historians of science like Loren Eiseley have recognized. Many scientists are so philosophically and theologically ignorant that they don’t even realize that they have these (and other) metaphysical assumptions. Being like a frog in the warming water, many do not even notice that there are philosophical assumptions at the root of much that passes as ‘science’. It’s part of their own worldview, so they don’t even notice. We at AiG are ‘up front’ about our acceptance of revelation (the Bible). Unlike many atheists, we recognize that a philosophy of life does not come from the data, but rather the philosophy is brought to the data and used in interpreting it.

Perceptions and bias
The important question is not ‘Is it science?’ We can just define ‘science’ to exclude everything that we don’t like, as evolutionists do today. Today, science is equated with naturalism: only materialistic notions can be entertained, no matter what the evidence. The prominent evolutionist Professor Richard Lewontin said:

‘We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfil 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 a 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.’1

Now that’s open-minded isn’t it? Isn’t ‘science’ about following the evidence wherever it may lead? This is where the religion (in the broadest sense) of the scientist puts the blinkers on. Our individual worldviews bias our perceptions. The atheist paleontologist, Stephen Jay Gould, made the following candid observation:

‘Our ways of learning about the world are strongly influenced by the social preconceptions and biased modes of thinking that each scientist must apply to any problem. The stereotype of a fully rational and objective “scientific method”, with individual scientists as logical (and interchangeable) robots is self-serving mythology.’

So the fundamentally important question is, ‘which worldview (bias) is correct?’, because this will determine the correctness of the conclusions from the data.

Of course the founders of modern science were not materialists (Newton, widely considered the greatest scientist ever, is a prime example) and they did not see their science as somehow excluding a creator, or even making the Creator redundant. This recent notion has been smuggled into science by materialists.

Michael Ruse, the Canadian philosopher of science also made the strong point that the issue is not whether evolution is science and creation is religion, because such a distinction is not really valid. The issue is one of ‘coherency of truth’. In other words, there is no logically valid way that the materialist can define evolution as ‘science’ and creation as ‘religion’, so that he/she can ignore the issue of creation.

A valid distinction
However, we can make a valid distinction between different types of science: the distinction between origins science and operational science. Operational science involves discovering how things operate in today’s Creation—repeatable and observable phenomena in the present. This is the science of Newton. However, origins science deals with the origin of things in the past—unique, unrepeatable, unobservable events. There is a fundamental difference between how the two work. Operational science involves experimentation in the here and now. Origins science deals with how something came into existence in the past and so is not open to experimental verification / observation (unless someone invents a ‘time machine’ to travel back into the past to observe). Studying how an organism operates (DNA, mutations, reproduction, natural selection etc.) does not tell us how it came into existence in the first place.

Of course it suits materialists to confuse operational and origins science, although I’m sure with most the confusion arises out of ignorance. Tertiary (college / university) courses in science mostly don’t teach the philosophy of science and certainly make no distinction between experimental / operational and historical / origins sciences. Organometallic chemist Dr Stephen Grocott, although having been through at least seven years of university training, later remarked [see The Creation Couple]:

‘Though I’d been working as a scientist for 10 years, I really only learnt what science was through Answers in Genesis. Some of the things people call “science” are really outside the realms of science; they’re not observable, testable, repeatable. The areas of conflict are beliefs about the past, not open to experimental testing.

Both evolution and creation fall into the category of origins science. Both are driven by philosophical considerations. The same data (observations in the present) are available to everyone, but different interpretations (stories) are devised to explain what happened in the past.

The inclusion of historical science, without distinction, as science, has undoubtedly contributed to the modern confusion over defining science. This also explains the statement by Gould (above), who, as a paleontologist, would like to see no distinction between his own historical science and experimental science. Gould rightly sees the paramount importance of presuppositions in his own ‘science’ and assumes that it applies equally to all science. Not so.

Creationists have absolutely no problem with operational science, because the evidence drives operational science. It does not matter if you are a Christian, a Moslem, a Hindu, or an Atheist, pure water still boils at 100°C at sea level. However, the true Hindu might still think it is all an illusion, and some atheists embracing postmodernism espouse that ‘truth’ is an illusion. However, origins science is driven by philosophy. One’s belief system is fundamental to what stories you accept as plausible. Now if the majority of practitioners of origins / historical science have the wrong belief system (materialism), then the stories they find acceptable will also be wrong. So a majority vote of ‘contemporary scientists’ is hardly a good way to determine the validity of the respective stories. And origins science, or historical science, is essentially an exercise in story telling—Lewontin alluded to this story telling in the quote above. See also Is it science?

Define terms consistently!
It also suits materialists to shift the definition of evolution to suit the argument. Let’s be clear that we are discussing the ‘General Theory of Evolution’ (GTE), which was defined by the evolutionist Kerkut as ‘the theory that all the living forms in the world have arisen from a single source which itself came from an inorganic form.’ Many, perhaps inadvertently, perform this switching definitions trick in alluding to mutations in bacteria as corroborating ‘evolution’. This has little to do with the belief that hydrogen changed into humans over billions of years. The key difference is that the GTE requires not just change, but change that increases the information content of the biosphere.

Predictions or ‘postdictions’?
Many evolutionists proffer mutations and antibiotic resistance in bacteria (operational science) as being some sort of prediction of evolution (origins science). In fact, genetics (operational science) was an embarrassment to evolution, which is probably the major reason that Mendel’s pioneering genetics research went unrecognized for so many years (Mendel’s discovery of discrete genes did not fit Darwin’s idea of continuous unlimited variation). When mutations were discovered, these were seen as a way of reconciling Darwinism with the observations of operational science—hence the neo-Darwinian synthesis of Mayr, Haldane, Fisher, etc.

So, Darwinism never predicted anything, it was modified to accommodate the observations. In fact, because Darwinism is so malleable as to accommodate almost any conceivable observation, science philosopher Karl Popper proclaimed that it was not falsifiable, and therefore not a proper scientific theory in that sense.

What about the predictions of evolution vs creation? The track record of evolution is pretty dismal. On the other hand, modern science rides on the achievements of past creationists — and Contributions of creationist scientists. For a clear example of modern-day scientific predictions based on a creationist model, see Beyond Neptune: Voyager II Supports Creation.

Popper’s notion that evolution is not a falsifiable scientific theory is underlined by the many ‘predictions’ of evolutionary theory that have been found to be incompatible with observations; and yet evolution reigns. For example, there is the profound absence of the many millions of transitional fossils that should exist if evolution were true (see Are there any Transitional Fossils?). The very pattern in the fossil record flatly contradicts evolutionary notions of what it should be like—see, for example, Contrasting the Origin of Species With the Origin of Phyla. The evolutionist Gould has written at length on this conundrum.

Dr Spetner, an Israeli biophysicist and expert information theorist, has dealt a death-blow at the heart of the neo- Darwinian story. The crucial battle- ground has always been the origin of new genetic information. Spetner shows that random mutations plus natural selection are an inadequate explanation of the encyclopedic information content in living organisms. This book is a must for everyone who desires to defend the Bible in this increasingly ‘educated’ society.See also the review by Dr Carl Wieland.
MORE INFO / PURCHASE ONLINE

Contrary to evolutionists’ expectations, none of the cases of antibiotic resistance, insecticide resistance, etc. that have been studied at a biochemical level (i.e. operational science) have involved de novo origin of new complex genetic information (see the book Not By Chance (right). In fact, evolution never ‘predicted’ antibiotic resistance, because historically it took the medical field by surprise—see Anthrax and antibiotics: Is evolution relevant?

Contrary to evolutionists’ expectations, breeding experiments reach limits; change is not unlimited. See the article by the creationist geneticist, Lane Lester. This matches exactly what we would expect from Genesis 1, where it says that God created organisms to reproduce true to their different kinds.

Evolutionists expected that, given the right conditions, a living cell could make itself (abiogenesis); creationists said this was impossible. Operational science has destroyed this evolutionary notion; so much so that many evolutionists now want to leave the origin of life out of the debate. Many propagandists claim that evolution does not include this, although the theories of abiogenesis are usually called ‘chemical evolution’. See Q&A Origin of Life for papers outlining the profound problems for any conceivable evolutionary scenario.

Falsified but not abandoned
So, why do evolutionists persist with their spurious theory? For many it’s because they have never heard anything else. For avowed materialists it’s the ‘only game in town’—the only materialistic story available to explain how everything came to be; the materialist’s creation myth. It’s a bit like the proverbial ostrich putting its head in the sand, thinking that all that exists is what it can see under the sand. The ostrich’s worldview excludes everything that it does not find convenient. In the darkness of the sand, all unacceptable facts cease to exist.

Light in the darkness!
Jesus Christ came as ‘the light of the world’ (John 8:12), when the Second Person of the Trinity took on human nature. He came to shed the light of God in dark places. The greatest darkness is to live without God; to live as if you are a cosmic accident, just ‘re-arranged pond-scum’, as one evolutionist put it. Sadly, many are being duped into thinking that way and we are seeing the horrendous consequences in escalating youth suicide, drug problems, family break-up, violence, etc. How much we need the light of Jesus to shine! God will hold each one of us accountable—all of us deserve His condemnation. But the Bible says that He has provided a way of escape through Jesus Christ for all that turn to God, humbly admitting our need of forgiveness. See Here’s the Good News.

For more information about the above issues, and more, check out the Q&A section, or use the search window to search for articles on subjects of interest.

References
Richard Lewontin, ‘Billions and billions of demons’, The New York Review, January 9, 1997, p. 31. Return to Text.

Stephen Jay Gould, 1994, Natural History 103(2):14. Return to Text.

Kerkut, G. Implications of Evolution, Pergamon, Oxford, UK, p. 157, 1960. Return to Text.

 

[TheDude]

You argue that creationists denounce science, whereas your example shows a scientist discrediting the religious community. As a matter of fact, Creationists use Galileo as an example supporting their positions on science versus evolution. Your use of it is a non sequitur, and your last statement is an unfounded overgeneralization, since you don't understand my mindset, nor do you accurately portray it. I don't denounce 'all scientific thought.' That assertion is ridiculous and amateurish.

Wow, so I guess Galileo's excommunication, tried by the Inquisition, and forced to renounce his belief that the planets revolved around the sun was not brought upon him by the religious community because they supported him.(?) I wonder who it was then, maybe pagans or the atheist of that day, they sure loved the Inquisition.

My last statement was my opinion on how someone of your mindset (a religious, creationist type) would of been 400 years ago. You can disagree with my opinion. No worries there mate.

 

[TheDude]

‘It’s not science’
by Don Batten

Anti-creationists, such as atheists by definition, commonly object that creation is religion and evolution is science. .

II cut the story out to save space.... But I gotta ask, Evolution theory has close to a hundred years of research, data, scientific thought, fossil proof etc. etc. Creation theory has a passage in the Bible. With the exception of what started evolutionary life, how come it is so hard to belief proof you can see, touch and read, but so easy to have faith in a written passage?

Anyhow, science is progressing faster and faster, a problem that took mankind ten years to solve a few decades ago takes a few days now. Probably not in any or our lifetimes, but science will be able to eventually prove how evolution works with 100% undeniable certainty. Or course, there will still be those backwoods people ranting and raving about heresy and the like.

 

[fossten]

II cut the story out to save space.... But I gotta ask, Evolution theory has close to a hundred years of research, data, scientific thought, fossil proof etc. etc. Creation theory has a passage in the Bible. With the exception of what started evolutionary life, how come it is so hard to belief proof you can see, touch and read, but so easy to have faith in a written passage?

Actually, Creation was taught for thousands of years before Darwin ever developed his theories. So your statement is wrong and false.

Furthermore, your question is rhetorical and doesn't deserve an answer, although I could discuss it with you if I knew you weren't just itching for an opportunity to be snide and sarcastic. However, the purpose of this thread is for you evolutionists to pose your evidence while I pose mine. Making assertions without backing them up won't get any responses from me.

Anyhow, science is progressing faster and faster, a problem that took mankind ten years to solve a few decades ago takes a few days now. Probably not in any or our lifetimes, but science will be able to eventually prove how evolution works with 100% undeniable certainty. Or course, there will still be those backwoods people ranting and raving about heresy and the like.

Again, another assertion that is, in fact, false. The more we learn about the inner workings of cells and atoms, the harder it is for evolutionists to hold to their theories, although they try mightily.

An example is how many of Darwin's assumptions were based on what he thought the composition of a cell was way before science revealed its complexity. The book 'Darwin's Black Box' shows how wrong he was scientifically.

You evolutionists believe that we are all just the result of some random selection process without the design of God involved. Well, then obviously your brain, and your thought processes, are also the product of randomness. So you don’t know whether it evolved the right way, or even what right would mean in that context. You don’t know if you’re making correct statements or even whether you’re asking me the right questions. If you don't believe in absolutes, how can you be so sure you just posted, or even that you just read my post? How can you be sure that you're even alive, or that you even have a point to make? What if you're right and there is no point to this existence?

If you're right and I'm wrong, I'm no worse off. I'll die and be dead and that's it.

But what if I'm right? What will you do then? By the time you realize it, it might be too late and you'll be standing before God and He'll be judging you.

 

[raVeneyes]

your question is rhetorical and doesn't deserve an answer

But you just *had* to give one anyway...

 

[TheDude]

Actually, Creation was taught for thousands of years before Darwin ever developed his theories. So your statement is wrong and false..

I never mentioned a time span on how long it has been taught.

Furthermore, your question is rhetorical and doesn't deserve an answer, although I could discuss it with you if I knew you weren't just itching for an opportunity to be snide and sarcastic. However, the purpose of this thread is for you evolutionists to pose your evidence while I pose mine. Making assertions without backing them up won't get any responses from me...

Evolution theory has proof........... If you choose to ignore scientific reasoning, educated deduction and proof (ie Fossils) that you can hold and see for yourself, that's your own shortcomings.

Again, another assertion that is, in fact, false. The more we learn about the inner workings of cells and atoms, the harder it is for evolutionists to hold to their theories, although they try mightily.

Sorry, wrong.

An example is how many of Darwin's assumptions were based on what he thought the composition of a cell was way before science revealed its complexity. The book 'Darwin's Black Box' shows how wrong he was scientifically.

You evolutionists believe that we are all just the result of some random selection process without the design of God involved. Well, then obviously your brain, and your thought processes, are also the product of randomness. So you don’t know whether it evolved the right way, or even what right would mean in that context. You don’t know if you’re making correct statements or even whether you’re asking me the right questions. If you don't believe in absolutes, how can you be so sure you just posted, or even that you just read my post? How can you be sure that you're even alive, or that you even have a point to make? What if you're right and there is no point to this existence?

If you're right and I'm wrong, I'm no worse off. I'll die and be dead and that's it.

But what if I'm right? What will you do then? By the time you realize it, it might be too late and you'll be standing before God and He'll be judging you.

You assume that you need a God to have a point to exist, not all share that view. Lol. You also assume that all evolutionist do not believe it God at all, after all what started/created evolution, what started/created the universe.

Well, If I am right and you a wrong, then all your actions come into question, how do you know if anything you did in life was the right?

If you're right, I have no problem being judged by God, he/she will either see me as a good person and open the pearly gates, or cast me into hell. Only he/she can make that choice if your views are correct.

 

[fossten]

Sorry, wrong.

Actually you're wrong. Darwin himself said so.

[snip from article]


Darwin's Theory of Evolution - A Theory In Crisis

Darwin's Theory of Evolution is a theory in crisis in light of the tremendous advances we've made in molecular biology, biochemistry and genetics over the past fifty years. We now know that there are in fact tens of thousands of irreducibly complex systems on the cellular level. Specified complexity pervades the microscopic biological world.

Molecular biologist Michael Denton wrote, "Although the tiniest bacterial cells are incredibly small, weighing less than 10^12 grams, each is in effect a veritable micro-miniaturized factory containing thousands of exquisitely designed pieces of intricate molecular machinery, made up altogether of one hundred thousand million atoms, far more complicated than any machinery built by man and absolutely without parallel in the non-living world."

And we don't need a microscope to observe irreducible complexity. The eye, the ear and the heart are all examples of irreducible complexity, though they were not recognized as such in Darwin's day. Nevertheless, Darwin confessed, "To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree."

http://www.darwins-theory-of-evolution.com/

 

[fossten]

Evolution theory has proof........... If you choose to ignore scientific reasoning, educated deduction and proof (ie Fossils) that you can hold and see for yourself, that's your own shortcomings.

Okay, show me the proof. So far I've shown proof whereas you've just wasted space posturing.

 

[fossten]

WRONG! A mutation isn't always a loss of information, it can also be a misplacement of information or a recombination of information. A photon traveling faster than the speed of light hits the nucleotide bond in a molecule of a DNA strand forming, and that molecule is going to change about 30% of the time, hence skin cancer. Just as a computer re-writing the 1's and 0's of an MP3 on to a hard drive will sometimes make a mistake, or will sometimes be driven to make a mistake by a passing electro-magnetic field, or faults in the media, or many other random things, resulting in an audible pop or making the MP3 unusable or even at times no detectable flaw; so too the many many times DNA is recombined and small errors are introduced some times results in observable changes, sometimes not.

You're wrong, my friend.

Doesn't matter. For evolution to work, the genetic mutations MUST have new information added. Even in your straw man example using a (nonliving) computer (for crying out loud, that's the best you've got?), there is no new information added in order to improve the system, and in fact, you've admitted that there are errors involved.


Argument: Some mutations are beneficial

Evolutionists say, ‘Mutations and other biological mechanisms have been observed to produce new features in organisms.’

by Jonathan Sarfati, with Michael Matthews

First published in Refuting Evolution 2
Chapter 5

When they begin to talk about mutations, evolutionists tacitly acknowledge that natural selection, by itself, cannot explain the rise of new genetic information. Somehow they have to explain the introduction of completely new genetic instructions for feathers and other wonders that never existed in ‘simpler’ life forms. So they place their faith in mutations.

In the process of defending mutations as a mechanism for creating new genetic code, they attack a straw-man version of the creationist model, and they have no answer for the creationists’ real scientific objections. Scientific American states this common straw-man position and their answer to it.

10. Mutations are essential to evolution theory, but mutations can only eliminate traits. They cannot produce new features.

On the contrary, biology has catalogued many traits produced by point mutations (changes at precise positions in an organism’s DNA)—bacterial resistance to antibiotics, for example. [SA 82]

This is a serious misstatement of the creationist argument. The issue is not new traits, but new genetic information. In no known case is antibiotic resistance the result of new information. There are several ways that an information loss can confer resistance, as already discussed. We have also pointed out in various ways how new traits, even helpful, adaptive traits, can arise through loss of genetic information (which is to be expected from mutations).
Mutations that arise in the homeobox (Hox) family of development-regulating genes in animals can also have complex effects. Hox genes direct where legs, wings, antennae, and body segments should grow. In fruit flies, for instance, the mutation called Antennapedia causes legs to sprout where antennae should grow. [SA 82]

Once again, there is no new information! Rather, a mutation in the hox gene (see next section) results in already-existing information being switched on in the wrong place.1 The hox gene merely moved legs to the wrong place; it did not produce any of the information that actually constructs the legs, which in ants and bees include a wondrously complex mechanical and hydraulic mechanism that enables these insects to stick to surfaces.2

These abnormal limbs are not functional, but their existence demonstrates that genetic mistakes can produce complex structures, which natural selection can then test for possible uses. [SA 82]

Amazing—natural selection can ‘test for possible uses’ of ‘non-functional’ (i.e., useless!) limbs in the wrong place. Such deformities would be active hindrances to survival.
Gene switches: means of evolution?

William Bateson (1861–1926), who added the word ‘genetics’ to our vocabulary in 1909, found that embryos sometimes grew body parts in the wrong place. From this he theorized that there are underlying controls of certain body parts, and other controls governing where they go.

Ed Lewis investigated and won a Nobel Prize in 1995 for discovering a small set of genes that affect different body parts (Hox or Homeobox). They act like ‘architects of the body.’ Mutations in these can cause ‘dramatic’ changes. Many experiments have been performed on fruit flies (Drosophila), where poisons and radiation induced mutations.

The problem is that they are always harmful. PBS 2 showed an extra pair of wings on a fly, but failed to mention that they were a hindrance to flying because there are no accompanying muscles. Both these flies would be eliminated by natural selection.

Walter Gehring of the University of Basel (Switzerland) replaced a gene needed for eye development in a fruit fly with the corresponding gene from a mouse. The fly still developed normal fly eyes, i.e., compound eyes rather than lens/camera. This gene in both insects and mammals is called eyeless because absence of this gene means no eyes will form.

However, there is obviously more to the differences between different animals. Eyeless is a switch—it turns on the genetic information needed for eyes. But evolution requires some way of generating the new information that’s to be switched on. The information needed to build a compound eye is vastly different from that needed to build a lens/camera type of eye. By analogy, the same switch on an electric outlet/power socket can turn on a light or a laptop, but this hardly proves that a light evolved into a laptop!

All the same, the program says that eyeless is one of a small number of common genes used in the embryonic development of many animals. The program illustrated this with diagrams. Supposedly, all evolution needed to do was reshuffle packets of information into different combinations.

But as shown, known mutations in these genes cause monstrosities, and different switches are very distinct from what is switched on or off. Also, the embryo develops into its basic body plan before these genes start switching—obviously they can’t be the cause of the plan before they are activated! But the common genes make perfect sense given the existence of a single Creator.
Increased amounts of DNA don’t mean increased function

Biologists have discovered a whole range of mechanisms that can cause radical changes in the amount of DNA possessed by an organism. Gene duplication, polyploidy, insertions, etc., do not help explain evolution, however. They represent an increase in amount of DNA, but not an increase in the amount of functional genetic information—these mechanisms create nothing new. Macroevolution needs new genes (for making feathers on reptiles, for example), yet Scientific American completely misses this simple distinction:

Moreover, molecular biology has discovered mechanisms for genetic change that go beyond point mutations, and these expand the ways in which new traits can appear. Functional modules within genes can be spliced together in novel ways. Whole genes can be accidentally duplicated in an organism’s DNA, and the duplicates are free to mutate into genes for new, complex features. [SA 82]

In plants, but not in animals (possibly with rare exceptions), the doubling of all the chromosomes may result in an individual which can no longer interbreed with the parent type—this is called polyploidy. Although this may technically be called a new species, because of the reproductive isolation, no new information has been produced, just repetitious doubling of existing information. If a malfunction in a printing press caused a book to be printed with every page doubled, it would not be more informative than the proper book. (Brave students of evolutionary professors might like to ask whether they would get extra marks for handing in two copies of the same assignment.)

Duplication of a single chromosome is normally harmful, as in Down’s syndrome. Insertions are a very efficient way of completely destroying the functionality of existing genes. Biophysicist Dr Lee Spetner in his book Not By Chance analyzes examples of mutational changes that evolutionists have claimed to have been increases in information, and shows that they are actually examples of loss of specificity, which means they involved loss of information (which is to be expected from information theory).

The evolutionist’s ‘gene duplication idea’ is that an existing gene may be doubled, and one copy does its normal work while the other copy is redundant and non-expressed. Therefore, it is free to mutate free of selection pressure (to get rid of it). However, such ‘neutral’ mutations are powerless to produce new genuine information. Dawkins and others point out that natural selection is the only possible naturalistic explanation for the immense design in nature (not a good one, as Spetner and others have shown). Dawkins and others propose that random changes produce a new function, then this redundant gene becomes expressed somehow and is fine-tuned under the natural selective process.

This ‘idea’ is just a lot of hand-waving. It relies on a chance copying event, genes somehow being switched off, randomly mutating to something approximating a new function, then being switched on again so natural selection can tune it.

Furthermore, mutations do not occur in just the duplicated gene; they occur throughout the genome. Consequently, all the deleterious mutations in the rest of the genome have to be eliminated by the death of the unfit. Selective mutations in the target duplicate gene are extremely rare—it might represent only 1 part in 30,000 of the genome of an animal. The larger the genome, the bigger the problem, because the larger the genome, the lower the mutation rate that the creature can sustain without error catastrophe; as a result, it takes even longer for any mutation to occur, let alone a desirable one, in the duplicated gene. There just has not been enough time for such a naturalistic process to account for the amount of genetic information that we see in living things.

Dawkins and others have recognized that the ‘information space’ possible within just one gene is so huge that random changes without some guiding force could never come up with a new function. There could never be enough ‘experiments’ (mutating generations of organisms) to find anything useful by such a process. Note that an average gene of 1,000 base pairs represents 41000 possibilities—that is 10602 (compare this with the number of atoms in the universe estimated at ‘only’ 1080). If every atom in the universe represented an ‘experiment’ every millisecond for the supposed 15 billion years of the universe, this could only try a maximum 10100 of the possibilities for the gene. So such a ‘neutral’ process cannot possibly find any sequence with specificity (usefulness), even allowing for the fact that more than just one sequence may be functional to some extent.

So Dawkins and company have the same problem as the advocates of neutral selection theory. Increasing knowledge of the molecular basis of biological functions has exploded the known ‘information space’ so that mutations and natural selection—with or without gene duplication, or any other known natural process—cannot account for the irreducibly complex nature of living systems.

Yet Scientific American has the impertinence to claim:

Comparisons of the DNA from a wide variety of organisms indicate that this [duplication of genes] is how the globin family of blood proteins evolved over millions of years. [SA 82]

This is about the vital red blood pigment hemoglobin that carries the oxygen. It has four polypeptide chains and iron. Evolutionists believe that this evolved from an oxygen-carrying iron-containing protein called myoglobin found in muscles, which has only one polypeptide chain. However, there is no demonstration that gene duplication plus natural selection turned the one-chained myoglobin into the four-chained hemoglobin. Nor is there any adequate explanation of how the hypothetical intermediates would have had selective advantages.

In fact, the proposed evolution of hemoglobin is far more complicated than Scientific American implies, though it requires a little advanced biology to understand. The α- and β-globin chains are encoded on genes on different chromosomes, so they are expressed independently. This expression must be controlled precisely, otherwise various types of anemia called thalassemia result. Also, there is an essential protein called AHSP (alpha hemoglobin stabilizing protein) which, as the name implies, stabilizes the α-chain, and also brings it to the β-chain. Otherwise the α-chain would precipitate and damage the red blood cells.

AHSP is one of many examples of a class of protein called chaperones which govern the folding of other proteins.3 This is yet another problem for chemical evolutionary theories—how did the first proteins fold correctly without chaperones? And since chaperones themselves are complex proteins, how did they fold?4

Identifying information-increasing mutations may be a small part of the whole evolutionary discussion, but it is a critical ‘weak link’ in the logical chain. PBS, Scientific American, and every other pro-evolution propaganda machine have failed to identify any evidence that might strengthen this straw link.

LOL!!! ROFLMAO!!! Not only have these arguments been put forth to explain resistance, they've been USED in PRACTICE to make strains of viruses more resistant to certain factors. HELLOOOOOO have you never heard of weaponizing a virus?

Again, you're giving an example of a change that is guided by another hand, not happening on its own. Sorry, that doesn't support evolution.

Oh really, the appendix, pineal gland, tonsils, and coccyx have important functions?!? Well I'm missing my appendix because it exploded in my bowel cavity at age 5...what important function am I missing out on...please doc tell me...is there some sort of appendix transplant I'm eligible for???

You're using anecdotal evidence here, which is a weak argument. I could post link after link explaining what the purposes of the appendix, pineal gland, tonsils, and coccyx are, and you would be refuted.

Modern cancer research, biology, internal medicine, prescription medication research, are all evidence of the foundational nature of evolution in the practice of medicine. How the hell did this 'doctor' make it through med school?...

The same way one explains plants dying or dogs. Do dogs have souls? No? Well then why would they get ill, suffer, or die?

Your questions are rhetorical. I doubt you really want an answer to that.

Oh wow...how arrogant. Man...human kind...had the power to invalidate GOD's word! How simple, arrogant, and callow.

Interesting. You sarcastically attribute arrogance to man for the ability to sin, yet don't attribute arrogance to man for the ability to deny God's existence. Need I remind you that God doesn't have to explain Himself to little ol' you?

Thankfully I don't live in Tennessee...if I did I'd have to be sure I never get seen by Robert Mitchell, M.D.

Always a hater - attack the person.

 

[MAllen82]

How can you or any other human being claim to know how or why God does or did what he did. You can't. The Bible is not the answer to everything. It's strict people like you that Jesus was against in the Bible. It's not every word and letter, but rather what these words and letters mean when put together. In other words, who gives a rat's ass how God made us, you don't know, and never will until YOU stand before him in judgement, and even then, you don't know if he will reveal it to you. Isn't it more important to know that He DID create us in his own likeness? Do you think there is an entrance test to heaven, and one of the essay questions is "Recite word for word the two creation stories of Genesis". Cocky zealots are just as bad as those who think they are more enlightened because they aren't burdened by religion or think it's a crutch. You spend too much time trying to humble others, while you pump out your own religious chest.

 

[fossten]

How can you or any other human being claim to know how or why God does or did what he did. You can't. The Bible is not the answer to everything. It's strict people like you that Jesus was against in the Bible. It's not every word and letter, but rather what these words and letters mean when put together. In other words, who gives a rat's ass how God made us, you don't know, and never will until YOU stand before him in judgement, and even then, you don't know if he will reveal it to you. Isn't it more important to know that He DID create us in his own likeness? Do you think there is an entrance test to heaven, and one of the essay questions is "Recite word for word the two creation stories of Genesis". Cocky zealots are just as bad as those who think they are more enlightened because they aren't burdened by religion or think it's a crutch. You spend too much time trying to humble others, while you pump out your own religious chest.

You sound really angry. It appears that this subject is a touchy one with you, or you wouldn't be attacking me ad hominem. You just made a bunch of wild assertions without actually contributing any evidence to this thread.

1. I CAN claim to know how God created us because it's in the Bible and, as I've shown here, science backs it up.
2. Jesus wasn't against strict people like me, He was against hypocritical spiritual and intellectual leaders (Pharisees) who taught lies to the people while building up their own power base. Sort of like the intellectual evolution crowd of today.
3. The Bible says, "Man shall not live by bread alone, but by EVERY WORD that proceedeth out of the mouth of God."
4. It DOES matter how God created us, because if you acknowledge that death happened before sin, then you eliminate sin as the cause of death, even though the Bible says the opposite. ("Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so
death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned:" Romans 5:12) Evolution seeks to eliminate God from the equation so that man doesn't have to live by a set of morals nor account for his actions.
5. I'm assuming you're calling me a cocky zealot, but you lend credibility by responding. If you have a problem with me personally, you could have just pm'ed me. Instead you pound on your keyboard and name-call.

 

[raVeneyes]

It DOES matter how God created us, because if you acknowledge that death happened before sin, then you eliminate sin as the cause of death, even though the Bible says the opposite. ("Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so
death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned:" Romans 5:12) Evolution seeks to eliminate God from the equation so that man doesn't have to live by a set of morals nor account for his actions.

I don't have a word that can cover your personal set of problems that you won't call a personal attack. So I'll just say this: Contrary to your beliefs evolution does not seek to eliminate anything nor does it seek to validate anything. Evolution, being a scientific theory, only seeks to prove truth through observation and reason.

 

[fossten]

:blah: Contrary to your beliefs evolution does not seek to eliminate anything nor does it seek to validate anything. Evolution, being a scientific theory, only seeks to prove truth through observation and reason.

Actually, that is where you are incorrect. You try to equate evolution (which as a theory is amoral) with evolutionists, which are biased toward it. You cannot in good conscience say that any human being is completely unbiased. Every piece of evidence, as I pointed out with my previous article, is subject to interpretation. Everyone has a bias. Evolutionists continue to grasp to their beliefs despite mounting scientific evidence that destroys their theories. They continue to make up new theories to fit their constant worldview.

Here's an article on bias:


Evolution & creation, science & religion, facts & bias
by Jonathan Sarfati, Ph.D., F.M.

First published in Refuting Evolution
Chapter 1

Many evolutionary books, including Teaching about Evolution and the Nature of Science, contrast religion/creation opinions with evolution/science facts. It is important to realize that this is a misleading contrast. Creationists often appeal to the facts of science to support their view, and evolutionists often appeal to philosophical assumptions from outside science. While creationists are often criticized for starting with a bias, evolutionists also start with a bias, as many of them admit. The debate between creation and evolution is primarily a dispute between two worldviews, with mutually incompatible underlying assumptions.

This chapter takes a critical look at the definitions of science, and the roles that biases and assumptions play in the interpretations by scientists.

The bias of evolutionary leaders
It is a fallacy to believe that facts speak for themselves—they are always interpreted according to a framework. The framework behind the evolutionists’ interpretation is naturalism—it is assumed that things made themselves, that no divine intervention has happened, and that God has not revealed to us knowledge about the past.
Evolution is a deduction from this assumption, and it is essentially the idea that things made themselves. It includes these unproven ideas: nothing gave rise to something at an alleged ‘big bang,’ non-living matter gave rise to life, single-celled organisms gave rise to many-celled organisms, invertebrates gave rise to vertebrates, ape-like creatures gave rise to man, non-intelligent and amoral matter gave rise to intelligence and morality, man’s yearnings gave rise to religions, etc.

Professor D.M.S. Watson, one of the leading biologists and science writers of his day, demonstrated the atheistic bias behind much evolutionary thinking when he wrote:

Evolution [is] a theory universally accepted not because it can be proven by logically coherent evidence to be true, but because the only alternative, special creation, is clearly incredible.1

So it’s not a question of biased religious creationists versus objective scientific evolutionists; rather, it is the biases of the Christian religion versus the biases of the religion of secular humanism resulting in different interpretations of the same scientific data. As the anti-creationist science writer Boyce Rensberger admits:

At this point, it is necessary to reveal a little inside information about how scientists work, something the textbooks don’t usually tell you. The fact is that scientists are not really as objective and dispassionate in their work as they would like you to think. Most scientists first get their ideas about how the world works not through rigorously logical processes but through hunches and wild guesses. As individuals, they often come to believe something to be true long before they assemble the hard evidence that will convince somebody else that it is. Motivated by faith in his own ideas and a desire for acceptance by his peers, a scientist will labor for years knowing in his heart that his theory is correct but devising experiment after experiment whose results he hopes will support his position.2

It’s not really a question of who is biased, but which bias is the correct bias with which to be biased! Actually, Teaching about Evolution admits in the dialogue on pages 22–25 that science isn’t just about facts, and it is tentative, not dogmatic. But the rest of the book is dogmatic that evolution is a fact!

Professor Richard Lewontin, a geneticist (and self-proclaimed Marxist), is a renowned champion of neo-Darwinism, and certainly one of the world’s leaders in promoting evolutionary biology. He recently wrote this very revealing comment (the italics were in the original). It illustrates the implicit philosophical bias against Genesis creation regardless of whether or not the facts support it:

We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfil 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 a 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.3

Many evolutionists chide creationists not because of the facts, but because creationists refuse to play by the current rules of the game that exclude supernatural creation a priori.4 That it is indeed a ‘game’ was proclaimed by the evolutionary biologist Richard Dickerson:

Science is fundamentally a game. It is a game with one overriding and defining rule:

Rule #1: Let us see how far and to what extent we can explain the behavior of the physical and material universe in terms of purely physical and material causes, without invoking the supernatural.5

In practice, the ‘game’ is extended to trying to explain not just the behavior, but the origin of everything without the supernatural.

Actually, evolutionists are often not consistent with their own rules against invoking an intelligent designer. For example, when archaeologists find an arrowhead, they can tell it must have been designed, even though they haven’t seen the designer. And the whole basis of the SETI program is that a signal from outer space carrying specific information must have an intelligent source. Yet the materialistic bias of many evolutionists means that they reject an intelligent source for the literally encyclopedic information carried in every living cell.

It’s no accident that the leaders of evolutionary thought were and are ardently opposed to the notion of the Christian God as revealed in the Bible.6 Stephen Jay Gould and others have shown that Darwin’s purpose was to destroy the idea of a divine designer.7 Richard Dawkins applauds evolution because he claims that before Darwin it was impossible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist, as he says he is.8

Many atheists have claimed to be atheists precisely because of evolution. For example, the evolutionary entomologist and sociobiologist E.O. Wilson (who has an article in Teaching about Evolution on page 15) said:

As were many persons from Alabama, I was a born-again Christian. When I was fifteen, I entered the Southern Baptist Church with great fervor and interest in the fundamentalist religion; I left at seventeen when I got to the University of Alabama and heard about evolutionary theory.9

Many people do not realize that the teaching of evolution propagates an anti-biblical religion. The first two tenets of the Humanist Manifesto II (1973), signed by many prominent evolutionists, are:

Religious humanists regard the universe as self-existing and not created.
Humanism believes that Man is a part of nature and has emerged as a result of a continuous process.
This is exactly what evolution teaches. Many humanist leaders are quite open about using the public schools to proselytize their faith. This might surprise some parents who think the schools are supposed to be free of religious indoctrination, but this quote makes it clear:

I am convinced that the battle for humankind’s future must be waged and won in the public school classroom by teachers who correctly perceive their role as the proselytizers of a new faith: a religion of humanity that recognizes and respects the spark of what theologians call divinity in every human being. 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 humankind is to survive.10

Teaching about Evolution, while claiming to be about science and neutral on religion, has some religious statements of its own. For example on page 6:

To accept the probability of change and to see change as an agent of opportunity rather than as a threat is a silent message and challenge in the lesson of evolution.

However, as it admits that evolution is ‘unpredictable and natural,’ and has ‘no specific direction or goal’ (p. 127), this message is incoherent.

The authors of Teaching about Evolution may realize that the rank atheism of most evolutionary leaders would be repugnant to most American parents if they knew. More recently, the agnostic anti-creationist philosopher Ruse admitted, ‘Evolution as a scientific theory makes a commitment to a kind of naturalism’ but this ‘may not be a good thing to admit in a court of law.’11 Teaching about Evolution tries to sanitize evolution by claiming that it is compatible with many religions. It even recruits many religious leaders in support. One of the ‘dialogues’ portrays a teacher having much success diffusing opposition by asking the students to ask their pastor, and coming back with ‘Hey evolution is okay!’ Although the dialogues are fictional, the situation is realistic.

It might surprise many people to realize that many church leaders do not believe their own book, the Bible. This plainly teaches that God created recently in six consecutive normal days, made things to reproduce ‘after their kind,’ and that death and suffering resulted from Adam’s sin. This is one reason why many Christians regard evolution as incompatible with Christianity. On page 58, Teaching about Evolution points out that many religious people believe that ‘God used evolution’ (theistic evolution). But theistic evolution teaches that God used struggle for survival and death, the ‘last enemy’ (1 Cor. 15:26) as His means of achieving a ‘very good’ (Gen. 1:31) creation.12 Biblical creationists find this objectionable.

The only way to assert that evolution and ‘religion’ are compatible is to regard ‘religion’ as having nothing to do with the real world, and being just subjective. A God who ‘created’ by evolution is, for all practical purposes, indistinguishable from no God at all.

Perhaps Teaching about Evolution is letting its guard down sometimes. For example, on page 11 it refers to the ‘explanation provided in Genesis … that God created everything in its present form over the course of six days,’ i.e., Genesis really does teach six-day creation of basic kinds, which contradicts evolution. Therefore, Teaching about Evolution is indeed claiming that evolution conflicts with Genesis, and thus with biblical Christianity, although they usually deny that they are attacking ‘religion.’ Teaching about Evolution often sets up straw men misrepresenting what creationists really do believe. Creationists do not claim that everything was created in exactly the same form as today’s creatures. Creationists believe in variation within a kind, which is totally different from the information-gaining variation required for particles-to-people evolution. This is discussed further in the next chapter.

More blatantly, Teaching about Evolution recommends many books that are very openly atheistic, like those by Richard Dawkins (p. 131).13 On page 129 it says: ‘Statements about creation … should not be regarded as reasonable alternatives to scientific explanations for the origin and evolution of life.’ Since anything not reasonable is unreasonable, Teaching about Evolution is in effect saying that believers in creation are really unreasonable and irrational. This is hardly religiously neutral, but is regarded by many religious people as an attack.

A recent survey published in the leading science journal Nature conclusively showed that the National Academy of Sciences, the producers of Teaching about Evolution, is heavily biased against God, rather than religiously unbiased.14 A survey of all 517 NAS members in biological and physical sciences resulted in just over half responding: 72.2% were overtly atheistic, 20.8% agnostic, and only 7.0% believed in a personal God. Belief in God and immortality was lowest among biologists. It is likely that those who didn’t respond were unbelievers as well, so the study probably underestimates the level of anti-God belief in the NAS. The percentage of unbelief is far higher than the percentage among U.S. scientists in general, or in the whole U.S. population.

Commenting on the professed religious neutrality of Teaching about Evolution, the surveyors comment:

NAS President Bruce Alberts said: ‘There are very many outstanding members of this academy who are very religious people, people who believe in evolution, many of them biologists.’ Our research suggests otherwise.15

The basis of modern science
Many historians, of many different religious persuasions including atheistic, have shown that modern science started to flourish only in largely Christian Europe. For example, Dr Stanley Jaki has documented how the scientific method was stillborn in all cultures apart from the Judeo-Christian culture of Europe.16 These historians point out that the basis of modern science depends on the assumption that the universe was made by a rational creator. An orderly universe makes perfect sense only if it were made by an orderly Creator. But if there is no creator, or if Zeus and his gang were in charge, why should there be any order at all? So, not only is a strong Christian belief not an obstacle to science, such a belief was its very foundation. It is, therefore, fallacious to claim, as many evolutionists do, that believing in miracles means that laboratory science would be impossible. Loren Eiseley stated:

The philosophy of experimental science … began its discoveries and made use of its methods in the faith, not the knowledge, that it was dealing with a rational universe controlled by a creator who did not act upon whim nor interfere with the forces He had set in operation … . It is surely one of the curious paradoxes of history that science, which professionally has little to do with faith, owes its origins to an act of faith that the universe can be rationally interpreted, and that science today is sustained by that assumption.17

Evolutionists, including Eiseley himself, have thus abandoned the only rational justification for science. But Christians can still claim to have such a justification.

It should thus not be surprising, although it is for many people, that most branches of modern science were founded by believers in creation. The list of creationist scientists is impressive.18 A sample:

Physics—Newton, Faraday, Maxwell, Kelvin
Chemistry—Boyle, Dalton, Ramsay
Biology—Ray, Linnaeus, Mendel, Pasteur, Virchow, Agassiz
Geology—Steno, Woodward, Brewster, Buckland, Cuvier
Astronomy—Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Herschel, Maunder
Mathematics—Pascal, Leibnitz, Euler

Even today, many scientists reject particles-to-people evolution (i.e., everything made itself). The Answers in Genesis (Australia) staff scientists have published many scientific papers in their own fields. Dr Russell Humphreys, a nuclear physicist working with Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico, has had over 20 articles published in physics journals, while Dr John Baumgardner’s catastrophic plate tectonics theory was reported in Nature. Dr Edward Boudreaux of the University of New Orleans has published 26 articles and four books in physical chemistry. Dr Maciej Giertych, head of the Department of Genetics at the Institute of Dendrology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, has published 90 papers in scientific journals. Dr Raymond Damadian invented the lifesaving medical advance of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).19 Dr Raymond Jones was described as one of Australia’s top scientists for his discoveries about the legume Leucaena and bacterial symbiosis with grazing animals, worth millions of dollars per year to Australia.20 Dr Brian Stone has won a record number of awards for excellence in engineering teaching at Australian universities.21 An evolutionist opponent admitted the following about a leading creationist biochemist and debater, Dr Duane Gish:

Duane Gish has very strong scientific credentials. As a biochemist, he has synthesized peptides, compounds intermediate between amino acids and proteins. He has been co-author of a number of outstanding publications in peptide chemistry.22

A number of highly qualified living creationist scientists can be found on the Answers in Genesis website.23 So an oft-repeated charge that no real scientist rejects evolution is completely without foundation. Nevertheless, Teaching about Evolution claims in this Question and Answer section on page 56:

Q: Don’t many scientists reject evolution?

A: No. The scientific consensus around evolution is overwhelming … .

It is regrettable that Teaching about Evolution is not really answering its own question. The actual question should be truthfully answered ‘Yes,’ even though evolution-rejecting scientists are in a minority. The explanation for the answer given would be appropriate (even if highly debatable) if the question were: ‘Is it true that there is no scientific consensus around evolution?’ But truth is not decided by majority vote!

C.S. Lewis also pointed out that even our ability to reason would be called into question if atheistic evolution were true:

If the solar system was brought about by an accidental collision, then the appearance of organic life on this planet was also an accident, and the whole evolution of Man was an accident too. If so, then all our thought processes are mere accidents, the accidental by-product of the movement of atoms. And this holds for the materialists’ and astronomers’ as well as for anyone else’s. But if their thoughts, i.e., of Materialism and Astronomy are merely accidental by-products, why should we believe them to be true? I see no reason for believing that one accident should be able to give a correct account of all the other accidents.24

The limits of science
Science does have its limits. Normal (operational) science deals only with repeatable observable processes in the present. This has indeed been very successful in understanding the world, and has led to many improvements in the quality of life. In contrast, evolution is a speculation about the unobservable and unrepeatable past. Thus the comparison in Teaching about Evolution of disbelief in evolution with disbelief in gravity and heliocentrism is highly misleading. It is also wrong to claim that denying evolution is rejecting the type of science that put men on the moon, although many evolutionary propagandists make such claims. (Actually the man behind the Apollo moon mission was the creationist rocket scientist Wernher von Braun.25)

In dealing with the past, ‘origins science’ can enable us to make educated guesses about origins. It uses the principles of causality (everything that has a beginning has a cause26) and analogy (e.g., we observe that intelligence is needed to generate complex coded information in the present, so we can reasonably assume the same for the past). But the only way we can be really sure about the past is if we have a reliable eyewitness account. Evolutionists claim there is no such account, so their ideas are derived from assumptions about the past. But biblical creationists believe that Genesis is an eyewitness account of the origin of the universe and living organisms. They also believe that there is good evidence for this claim, so they reject the claim that theirs is a blind faith.27

Creationists don’t pretend that any knowledge, science included, can be pursued without presuppositions (i.e., prior religious/philosophical beliefs). Creationists affirm that creation cannot ultimately be divorced from the Bible any more than evolution can ultimately be divorced from its naturalistic starting point that excludes divine creation a priori.

 

[raVeneyes]

OK...how about this...is there any way God could make you shut the hell up? I hate it when you misquote me or put "Blah" in for my words. I don't do it to you no matter how much you ramble on why don't you provide me the same courtesy?

 

[fossten]

OK...how about this...is there any way God could make you shut the hell up? I hate it when you misquote me or put "Blah" in for my words. I don't do it to you no matter how much you ramble on why don't you provide me the same courtesy?

OH, I'm sorry, is it that time of the month for you? Or did somebody pss in your Wheaties?

Gee, you sound angry. I must be hitting a nerve. Interesting that the more facts I post, the more you bellow and the less you present facts. Interesting that you hijack a thread anytime you want to, but when somebody else has something to say, you get mad and pss and moan.

The way to make me shut up is to factually refute what I say. You haven't ever been able to do that, so voila. Of course, you can always just NOT READ THIS FORUM. But keep on whining, it amuses me.


Evolution or Creation:
What difference does it make?

What difference does it make whether one believes the world was created or evolved? Can't one embrace Christianity and Evolution? An outspoken evolutionist answered this question in the American Atheist magazine with the following reply:

"Christianity is - must be! - totally committed to the special creation as described in Genesis, and Christianity must fight with its full might against the theory of evolution. And here is why.
In Romans we read that 'sin entered the world through one man, and through sin - death, and thus death has spread through the whole human race because everyone has sinned.' (5:12)

...the whole justification of Jesus' life and death is predicated on the existence of Adam and the forbidden fruit he and Eve ate. Without the original sin, who needs to be redeemed? Without Adam's fall into a life of constant sin terminated by death, what purpose is there to Christianity? None.

Even a high school student knows enough about evolution to know that nowhere in the evolutionary description of our origins does there appear an Adam or an Eve or an Eden or a forbidden fruit. Evolution means a development from one form to the next to meet the ever-changing challenges from an ever-changing nature. There is no fall from a previous state of sublime perfection.

Without Adam, without the original sin, Jesus Christ is reduced to a man with a mission on a wrong planet!"


Did this opponent of Christianity understand the issues more clearly than most Christians? How important it is that we as Christians be consistent in our thinking. We must accept all of the Bible as God's Word. In it God says what He means and He means what He says.
We are reminded of the words of the apostle John who wrote, "The word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth." (John 1:14)

No, Christ was not merely a man with a mission on the wrong planet. He was truly God incarnate of a love mission to the right planet. "For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life." (John 3:16)

 

[raVeneyes]

The way to make me shut up is to factually refute what I say

THAT is just a plain out LIE! And it's not very christian of you to lie...

I've factually refuted almost everything you've ever said, and still you keep talking...

 

[TheDude]

Okay, show me the proof. So far I've shown proof whereas you've just wasted space posturing.

Do you want to post articles on evolution? Or you could go down to a natural history museum and see animals and humans evolving through the course of millennia through their fossil remains.

 

[TheDude]

How can you or any other human being claim to know how or why God does or did what he did. You can't. The Bible is not the answer to everything. It's strict people like you that Jesus was against in the Bible. It's not every word and letter, but rather what these words and letters mean when put together. In other words, who gives a rat's ass how God made us, you don't know, and never will until YOU stand before him in judgement, and even then, you don't know if he will reveal it to you. Isn't it more important to know that He DID create us in his own likeness? Do you think there is an entrance test to heaven, and one of the essay questions is "Recite word for word the two creation stories of Genesis". Cocky zealots are just as bad as those who think they are more enlightened because they aren't burdened by religion or think it's a crutch. You spend too much time trying to humble others, while you pump out your own religious chest.

Very good point(s).

 

[fossten]

Do you want to post articles on evolution? Or you could go down to a natural history museum and see animals and humans evolving through the course of millennia through their fossil remains.

Boy have you been duped. These fossils represent the largest problem evolutionists have in explaining their theories, yet they continually get away with it in museums. Just because they say it doesn't make it so.

Where are all the human fossils?
by Don Batten (editor), Ken Ham, Jonathan Sarfati, and Carl Wieland
First published in The Revised and Expanded Answers Book
Chapter 15

Why are human fossils not found with trilobites, for example? If humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time, why aren’t their fossils found together? How could the Flood produce the order in the fossil record?


The Bible teaches (Genesis 1) that man was here from Day Six of the creation week—created the same day as land animals (which includes dinosaurs) and one day after the sea creatures and the birds.

Evolutionists claim that the order in the fossil record (e.g. trilobites deep down and humans near the top) is due to a succession of life forms on earth, which occurred over many hundreds of millions of years. In this view, the rock strata represent huge periods of time.

On the other hand, creationists believe that most of the fossils were formed during the year-long global Flood recorded in Genesis chapters 6-9 (see Was the Flood Global?). Thus creationists believe that the order in the fossil record is due to the order of burial during the Flood, and the local catastrophes that followed. So, skeptics ask, why are human fossils not found with dinosaur fossils, for example?

Do the rock strata represent eons of time?
There is a wealth of evidence that the rock strata do not represent vast periods of time. For example, the huge Coconino sandstone formation in the Grand Canyon is about 100 m thick and extends to some 250,000 km2 in area. The large-scale cross-bedding shows that it was all laid down in deep, fast-flowing water in a matter of days. Other rock layers in the Grand Canyon indicate that they were rapidly deposited also, and without substantial time-breaks between the laying down of each unit. Indeed, the whole Grand Canyon sequence is bent at the Kaibab Upwarp, in some spots quite radically, and without cracking. This indicates that the strata, which supposedly represent some 300 million years of evolutionary time, were all still soft when the bending occurred. This is consistent with the layers being deposited and bent quickly, during the Genesis Flood.

Some other evidence for the non-existence of the eons of time and for the rapid deposition of the layers are:

polystrate fossils—tree trunks, for example, running through strata supposedly representing many millions of years (these are common in coal) show that the strata must have been deposited in quick succession, otherwise the tops of the trunks would have rotted away.

delicate surface features preserved on underlying rock units—such as ripple marks and footprints—indicate that there was no long time gap before the next unit was deposited.

lack of fossilized soil layers in the rock strata, indicating no long time gaps.

lack of erosion features in the rock layers or between the rock units (any significant time break would result in channels being formed in the exposed strata from the action of water or wind).

limited extent of unconformities. Although unconformities (clear breaks in deposition) indicate time breaks, such unconformities are localized, with no break evident in rocks of the same strata elsewhere, thus indicating that any time break was localized and brief.

clastic dykes and pipes—where a sand/water mixture has squeezed up through overlying layers. Although the underlying sand is supposed to be millions of years older than the overlying layers, it obviously did not have time to harden.

and much else.

Uluru (Ayers Rock), in central Australia, is also supposed to have formed slowly over hundreds of millions of years, but the structure of the rock shows that it must have formed very quickly and recently.

The existence of many ‘living fossils’ also challenges the supposed hundreds of millions of years of ‘earth history.’ For example, starfish, jellyfish, brachiopods, clams and snails, which are known as fossils dated by evolutionists as 530 million years old, look like those living today. Dr Joachim Scheven, a German scientist, has a museum with over 500 examples of such ‘living fossils.’ Furthermore, some of these fossils are missing from intervening strata that supposedly represent many millions of years of evolutionary time, again indicating that there were no time gaps.

Evidence that dinosaurs and humans co-existed
Much evidence suggests that people and dinosaurs lived together, not separated by 65 million years or more, as evolutionists believe:

Many historical accounts of living animals, which were known as ‘dragons,’ are good descriptions of what we call dinosaurs—such as Triceratops, Stegosaurus, Tyrannosaurus and Ankylosaurus. The video The Great Dinosaur Mystery documents some of these. The account in Job 40 of behemoth sounds like one of the big dinosaurs, such as Apatosaurus or Brachiosaurus.

Unmineralized (‘unfossilized’) dinosaur bones. How could these bones, some of which even have blood cells in them, be 65 million years or more old? It stretches the imagination to believe they are even many thousands of years old.

Rocks bearing dinosaur fossils often contain very little plant material—e.g., in the Morrison formation in North America. This is another indication that the strata do not represent eras of life on earth. If the strata represent an age of dinosaurs, what did they eat? A large Apatosaurus would need over three tonnes of vegetation per day, yet there is no indication of significant vegetation in many of these dinosaur-bearing strata. In other words, we see buried dinosaurs, not buried ecosystems or an ‘Age of Dinosaurs.’

Out-of-sequence fossils
Many fossils and artifacts have been found ‘out of place.’ That is, they are in strata that the evolutionist says represent a period of time when, for example, that organism did not live, or human artifacts could not have been made. There are plenty of examples; some published in respectable journals before the evolutionary paradigm became locked in. Such examples do not get published in modern standard evolutionary journals, possibly because it is inconceivable that such could exist in the evolutionary worldview. In another context, Nobel Prize winner Sir Fred Hoyle said,

‘Science today is locked into paradigms. Every avenue is blocked by beliefs that are wrong, and if you try to get anything published by a journal today, you will run up against a paradigm, and the editors will turn it down.’8

Forbidden Archeology, by Cremo and Thompson, lists some out-of-place human artifacts.9 They wrote the book from a westernized Hindu perspective to show that humans were present from antiquity, as required for the eons of multi-cycles of reincarnation of Hindu belief. (True Hindus are not concerned about such rationalizing, believing the physical world to be illusory.10) Cremo and Thompson are not worried about the millions of years, just whether humans were there. They are ‘fellow-travelers’ with creationists only in the sense that we also believe that people were here almost all along, except we do not accept the billions of years. Cremo and Thompson have done a thorough job, with the final work being 914 pages long.

Human fossils have been found, hundreds of them, but generally in deposits which most creationists would think were post-Flood (e.g. buried in caves during the post-Flood Ice Age—see What about the Ice Age?). However, in at least one case, human bones have been found in ‘older’ strata.11 Unfortunately, the lack of detailed documentation associated with their removal makes it impossible to say with certainty that they were not the result of subsequent intrusive burial, although nothing we know of suggests they were.

In regard to whether things found together necessarily lived and died together, paleontologists can inspect fossils for damage due to ‘re-working’ for clues that the organisms did not necessarily live or die together. However, the ‘re-worked’ or ‘stratigraphic leak’ (where something ‘young’ is found in ‘old’ rock) explanation is almost invariably invoked for ‘out-of-place’ fossils.

What about the general pattern?
Although the rock strata do not represent a series of epochs of earth history, as is widely believed, they still follow a general pattern. For example, relatively immobile and bottom-dwelling sea creatures tend to be found in the lower strata that contain complex organisms, and the mobile land vertebrates tend to be found in the top layers. Consider the following factors:

Vertebrate fossils are exceedingly rare compared with invertebrate (without a backbone) sea creatures. The vast proportion of the fossil record is invertebrate sea creatures, and plant material in the form of coal and oil. Vertebrate fossils are relatively rare and human fossils are even rarer.2

If there were, say, 10 million people at the time of the Flood and all their bodies were preserved and uniformly distributed throughout the 700 million cubic kilometers of fossil-bearing sedimentary rock layers, only one would be found in every 70 cubic kilometers of rock. Thus you would be unlikely to find even one human fossil.

A global Flood beginning with the breaking up of the fountains of the great deep would tend to bury bottom-dwelling sea creatures first—many of these are immobile, or relatively so. They are also abundant and generally robust (for example, shellfish). As the waters rose to envelop the land, land creatures would be buried last. Also, water plants would tend to be buried before land-based swamp plants, which, in turn would be buried before upland plants.

On the other hand, land animals, such as mammals and birds, being mobile (especially birds), could escape to higher ground and be the last to succumb. People would cling to rafts, logs etc. until the very end and then tend to bloat and float and be scavenged by fish, with the bones breaking down rather quickly, rather than being preserved. This would make human fossils from the Flood exceedingly rare.

Further, the more mobile, intelligent animals would tend to survive the Flood longest and be buried last, so their remains would be vulnerable to erosion by the receding floodwaters at the end of the Flood and in the aftermath of the Flood. Hence their remains would tend to be destroyed. The intelligence factor could partly account for the apparent separation of dinosaurs and mammals such as cattle, for example.

Another factor is the sorting action of water. A coal seam at Yallourn in Victoria, Australia, has a 0.5 m thick layer of 50% pollen. The only way such a layer of pollen could be obtained is through the sorting action of water in a massive watery catastrophe that gathered the plant material from a large area and deposited it in a basin in the Yallourn area.

‘Cope’s Rule’ describes the tendency of fossils (e.g. shellfish) to get bigger as you trace them upward through the geological strata. But why should evolution make things generally bigger? Indeed, living forms of fossils tend to be smaller than their fossil ancestors. A better explanation may be the sorting action of water.

See geologist Woodmorappe’s paper for an in-depth treatment of the fossil record of cephalopods (such as octopuses and squid) and how it concurs with Creation and the Flood.

These are some factors that could account for the patterns seen in the fossil record, including the general absence of human fossils in Flood deposits. Most of the fossil record does not represent a history of life on earth, but the order of burial during the Flood. We would expect a pattern with a global Flood, but not an entirely consistent pattern, and this is what we find in the geological strata.

There are problems in reconstructing any historical event, but especially one that has no modern analogue. And such is the Flood. So we have problems imagining the precise sequence of events by which the Flood eroded and deposited material, creating fossils. It may well be that some enterprising creationist scientists will come up with a model of the Flood that will fully account for the fossil and rock sequences.

Of interest in this regard is the TAB (Tectonically Associated Biological) provinces model of Woodmorappe. Dr Tasman Walker has suggested a model of the Flood that also seems to explain much of the data. The catastrophic plate tectonics model of Drs Austin, Baumgardner and colleagues also looks interesting in explaining much of the fossil distribution (see What about continental drift?). Other models are being developed which may also be helpful in explaining the evidence.

One can be confident that the evolutionary view of earth history is wrong and the record in the rocks and fossils, including the distribution of human fossils, makes much more sense in the light of the Bible’s account of Creation, the Fall and the Flood.
When God pronounced judgment on the world, He said, ‘I will destroy [blot out] man whom I have created from the face of the earth’ (Gen. 6:7). Perhaps the lack of pre-flood human fossils is part of the fulfillment of this judgment?