Evolution - It's Pretty Much Bunk

A week or so ago (from today October 3, 2007) I posted a myspace bulletin saying that the theory of Evolution as we know it is just that, a theory, and a broken one at that. It's weak, and it should have stopped being taught as fact by now. I decided to write this after coming across a few pro-evolution articles online, and I was frustrated that people are being misinformed.

Before I start I would like to say that these are not all my original ideas. This is kind of going to go like a research paper, where I quote from things. I'm actually taking most things from one source, but that source is heavily researched from many other sources. I'll provide notes in the end of what those sources are. I’m positive that I can show you that evolution as the popular theory taught as fact is wrong, and I’ll even be using Science and facts. So let's get to it then!

First of all I'd like to point out that most people are not Atheistic. This means that most people do not believe that everything evolved on it's own with no outside intelligent influence. How many is most? Well, only 12% of Americans believe that human beings evolved over millions of years with nothing like God in the picture.(1)

I'm sure everybody is familiar with being lied to. It's something that happens far too often. So you'll probably understand the saying that goes something like, "if you tell a lie often enough, eventually people will start to believe and accept it." This is precisely what has happened with evolution. And who are the ones telling us that evolution is fact? Well, it's the ones who we should be able to trust and believe about things like this, the scientists. Why would they do that though? A survey done in 1998 of "elite scientists... those who have been elected to the National Academy of Sciences.... [shows that] disbelief in supernatural theism among Academy members was over 90 percent, for biologists it was 95 percent." (2) This says that a huge percentage of the most influential scientists and biologists reject the thought of a supernatural intelligence as the guiding force behind the universe. Their philosophical beliefs tell them that life cannot have come from a Creator, so they cling to something else even when the evidence shows otherwise.

Evolutionists can't agree on one theory of evolution. Let's look at three top theories. First, Richard Dawkins of Cambridge University in England believes that evolution happened over a long period of time with random mutations in DNA and natural selection guiding things. The mutations in DNA are good for the organism and after so many lucky DNA changes, it becomes a new organism that's different from it's now extinct ancestors. This happens over millions of years with millions of genetic mutations. This is probably the most well known theory.
Steven Jay Gould of Harvard (now deceased) proposed that evolution happened very rapidly at times, and then did nothing for long periods. He did not take up the slow gradual process theory because he knew that the fossil records don't support it.
Frances Crick, a Nobel Prize winner (also deceased) had another theory. He knew that life could not just happen out of non-life (called abiogenesis) and so he thought that something from outer space came to earth and left something that seeded the beginning of evolution. This could have been something like space aliens that left bacteria behind on a visit to Earth.

Evolution is a popular term, but the brightest of its defenders can't agree on how it works. The reason many hold so tight to evolution is not based on scientific fact, it's based on something philosophical. Phillip E. Johnson has written a lot about this, and he observes that "the doctrine that some known process of evolution turned a protozoan into a human is a philosophical assumption, not something that can be confirmed by experiment or by historical studies of the fossil record."(3) An evolutionist has already closed themselves to any possibility that an outside super intelligent force was the cause of the origin of humans. This is not a scientific move, this is philosophical. Phillip Johnson wrote in another piece:
"Darwinists know that the mutation-selection mechanism can produce wings, eyes, and brains not because the mechanism can be observed to do anything of the kind, but because their guiding philosophy assures them that no other power is available to do the job. The absence from the cosmos of any Creator is therefore the essential starting point for Darwinism....As an explanation for how complex organism came into existence in the first place, it is pure philosophy."(4)

What about the question of how the world began? I don't have too much of a problem with the Big Bang theory, the only question is what caused it? How can all the matter and energy we have around us come from nothing? This idea violates the science that some put so much stock in for disproving a Creator. The First Law of Thermodynamics (conservation of energy) is widely accepted as one of the most secure basic laws of science. This law states that energy cannot be created or destroyed. "In any process, the total energy of the universe remains constant." So where in the nothingness of space before the Big Bang did the energy come from to start our world?
Even if we put aside the issue of how matter came into being, how did life come into the picture? How can living things come from non-living things? Life from non-life has never been observed. Nobody has been able to reproduce anything proving this theory. Where is the evidence that a primordial soup ever existed for us to rise out of? Well how about if we did start out as tiny organisms, how then did we (and everything else) evolve into hugely complex organisms? What would you say the statistical chance of their being a Creator is? 1 in what? 1 in a million? Hugh Ross, an Astrophysicist, shows the statistics of non life evolving into complex life:
"The problems of primordial soups are big, but bigger yet is the infeasibility of generating, without supernatural input, and enormous increase in complexity... Years ago, molecular biophysicist Harold Morowitz calculated... that if one were to take the simplest living cell and break every chemical bond within it, the odds that the cell would reassemble under ideal natural conditions (the best possible chemical environment) would be one chance in 10^100,000,000,000. Most of us cannot even begin to picture a speck of chances so remote.
With odds as remote as 1 in 10^100,000,000,000 the time scale issue becomes completely irrelevant. What does it matter if the earth has been around for ten seconds, ten thousand years, or ten billion years? The size of the universe is of no consequence either. If all the matter in the visible universe were converted into building blocks of life, and if assembly of these building blocks were attempted once a microsecond for the entire age of the universe, then instead of the odds being 1 in 10^100,000,000,000 they would be 1 in 10^99,999,999,916."(5)

Also, Cell Theory, a widely accepted theory in biology states that

1. All living things are made of cells

2. Cells come from other cells

3. Cells are the basic unit of structure of all living things

This theory backs up the fact that in our world, life cannot come from non-life. There must be something outside of the rules of our world that caused life.

Now here is where we get into some fun facts about fossils. First, I’d like to do a little defining though with the term “evolution.” There are two types of evolution, Macroevolution and Microevolution. Macroevolution is the widely known concept of organisms evolving into whole new species over long periods of time. Microevolution is small, limited changes in organisms as a result of adapting to their living conditions, making them a variation of their original animal type. Here’s a good example of this:

“The first time I was in Yellowstone National Park, a friend I was hiking with photographed what we believed to be a wolf. To our chagrin, we discovered later that it was only a coyote. Yellowstone coyotes are much larger and grayer than the small brown variety I often see in Southern California. The high mountains and cold temperatures of Yellowstone have resulted in a different variety of coyote.”(M)

So microevolution is small changes within a certain animal group, as opposed to changes into new animals. I have no problem with microevolution.

Now on to fossils. It’s generally agreed that the fossil record is an excellent way to identify animals/organisms from the past. Most people probably think that the fossil record supports macroevolution. It does not. Transitional fossils are fossils of organisms showing their gradual change into whatever new species they were to become. The fact is though, that these transitional fossils don’t exist. There have been some hoaxes with transitional fossils, but those have been disproved when they came under examination. Also, there are no in-between species of animals running around. Darwin himself noticed this and wrote about it in his book The Origin of Species. “First, why, if species have descended from other species by fine gradations, do we not everywhere see innumerable transitional forms? Why is not all nature in confusion, instead of the species being, as we see them, well defined?”(6) Darwin himself acknowledged the oddity of his theory in relation to reality.

If you still have trouble believing that scientists/biologists would stand behind evolution as fact, maybe this will help clear things up. It’s an interview done by George Caylor with a molecular biologist that wished to remain anonymous. The interview was for an article called “The Biologist,” that ran in February of 2000. “G” is the interviewer; “J” is the biologist.

G: “Do you believe that the information in the human DNA code evolved?”

J: “George, nobody I know in my profession believes it evolved. It was engineered by ‘genius beyond genius,’ and such information could not have been written any other way. The paper and ink did not write the book! Knowing what we know, it is ridiculous to think otherwise.”

G: “Have you ever stated that in a public lecture, or in any public writing?”

J: “No. I just say it evolved. To be a molecular biologist requires some to hold on to two insanities at all times. One, it would be insane to believe in evolution when you can see the truth for yourself. Two, it would be insane to say you don’t believe in evolution. All government work, research grants, papers, big college lectures—everything would stop. I’d be out of a job, or regulated to the outer fringes where I couldn't earn a decent living.”

G: ‘I hate to say it, but that sounds intellectually dishonest.”

J: “The work I do in genetic research is honorable. We will find the cures to many of mankind’s worst diseases. But in the meantime, we have to live with the ‘elephant in the living room’.”

G: “What elephant?”

J: “Creation design. It’s like an elephant in the living room. It moves around, takes up an enormous amount of space, loudly trumpets, bumps into us, knocks things over, eats a ton of hay, and smells like an elephant. And yet we have to swear it isn’t there!” (M)

Perhaps that sheds some light on why evolution is still a topic with so much support despite the evidence.

I had one final thing to include about the Second Law of Thermodynamics and how systems tend to become more chaotic if left alone, instead of more organized. I didn’t feel like I could present this point well enough for it to be effective, so I’ve left it out. Perhaps when I learn more I’ll throw it in to something else.

So do you think evolution is an airtight scientific fact? Or do you think more like I do, that it’s a broken, weak theory held to tightly by those who simply refuse to believe that there’s any chance of something bigger than our world behind our existence. The belief in evolution is a philosophical choice, not a result of scientific evidence.

As a friend reminded me, all the facts and scientific evidence in the world cannot convince somebody to believe something if they just refuse to believe it. Facts and science are great for proof to those who claim that only objective evidence will change their mind or views. The changed lives of Christians and their testimony are the more important evidence for God’s existence and what He can do in your life. People mess up, nobody is perfect. We can be redeemed and forgiven for everything, we can start new. Nothing is beyond God’s love. Love each other, love everyone.

Sources

M. “M” stands for master source. This is where almost all of my information came from. The information in this source came from many different places, which I listed below when I used those same sources. This source is a book called The Christian Combat Manual, by Dan Story. I wrote to the publisher of the book and got permission to use the information in it. It’s definitely a great book for instructing Christians on how to defend their faith.

1. Quoted in “Coral Ridge Ministries Launches Creation Outreach, Impact,

May 2004, p.5. A similar statistic from an earlier Gallup poll reports that “about fifty percent of Americans believe in creationism, forty percent in theistic evolution [God guided or, at least, initiated evolution], and ten percent in materialistic or Darwinian evolution.” Tony Carnes, Christianity Today, Nov. 15, 1999, 27.

2. Phillip E. Johnson, The Wedge of Truth; Splitting the Foundations of Naturalism (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2000), 86.

3. Phillip E. Johnson, Defeating Darwinism (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1997), 34-35.

4. Phillip E. Johnson, Darwin on Trial (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1991), 115.

5. Hugh Ross, The Creator and the Cosmos: How the Greatest Scientific Discoveries of the Century Reveal God (Colorado Springs, Navpress, 1993), 139-140.

6. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species by Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life (New York: Random House), 124.

Note: I tried to keep my writing style fairly informal, as the internet tends to be. If you see any typos or things like that, feel free to point them out to me. Spell check doesn’t always find everything J. Being rude about it though will not make you any cooler. I promise.