Creation or Evolution?
by: Winkie Pratney
Over a century and a half ago, an academic controversy swept the world, as a liberal, materialistic philosophy collected data to give Man a new view of his origins. Strong religious reaction began; foolish and unfounded statements were made by uninformed church people. Science and faith quarrelled, and for the first time in a great many years, received a virtual divorce. Early viewpoints became clouded, ignored, or discarded; our century has thus inherited almost wholly humanistic thought. For over a hundred years we have accepted this philosophy and tried to live with it; till again, on the brink of nuclear disaster, we seem to have tried everything from drugs, sex, mysticism, and UFO hunting to find a new future. Now the chips are down, the facts are coming in, and it’s time we had a long, hard look at what an idea can do to a world.
The Origin Of Life-The Final Frontier
We’ve certainly come a long way since the day a researcher stood up to declare there was nothing significant left to discover. (Shortly before the invention of the atomic bomb, the transistor, and the laser.) Yet for all our advances, Life itself is the ‘final frontier” for a bewildering complex of sciences.
“Indeed, only two major questions remain shrouded in a cloak of not-quite fathomable mystery: (1) the ORIGIN OF LIFE (i.e. the events that first gave rise to the remarkable cooperative-operative functioning of nucleic acids and proteins … ) and (2) the MIND-BODY problem (i.e. the physical basis for self-awareness and personality). Great strides have been made in the approaches to both these problems … but the ultimate explanations are perceived very dimly indeed.”‘
Well, what ARE the options? Really only TWO. It all depends on your premises and presuppositions. Everything comes down to ONE OF TWO ALTERNATIVES, summarized up like this:
(1) in the beginning, GOD CREATED the heavens and the earth . . .” (Genesis 1:1) and “By FAITH we understand that worlds were framed by the Word of God … so that which is seen does not owe its existence to that which is visible.’ (Hebrews 11:3 Weymouth Translation)
(2) ‘Once upon a time … perhaps two and a half billion years ago, under a deadly sun, in an ammoniated ocean topped by a poisonous atmosphere in the midst of a soup of organic molecules, a nucleic acid molecule came accidentally INTO BEING that could SOMEHOW BRING ABOUT the existence of another like itself.”2
Two choices. Pick the FIRST, and you see all natural history as divinely guided towards Man’s coming; with it the conviction that man has special destiny and moral responsibility (with a probable judgment on the horizon as well). Pick the SECOND, and you are left with no God, Heaven, Hell, or for that matter, any confidence in humanity and its future. The choice is really quite narrow. Of course both sides have their creeds, authorities, and prophets, and both in the final analysis are religious – are matters of faith. The only question is, which one has the facts going for it?
“A man consists of some seven octillion (7×10 to the 27th) atoms grouped in about 10 trillion cells (10 to the 13th). This agglomeration of cells and atoms has some astounding properties. It is alive, feels joy and suffering, discriminates between beauty and ugliness, and distinguishes good from evil.”3
How much ARE you worth? Old estimates (from the book Time, Chance & Matter= Man & The Whole Universe) put your value (with inflation) at around $7.50; the new reckonings are greatly revised. Your proteins, steroids, and hormones alone are terribly complex and costly, and as for LIVING ORGANS, how much is a replacement heart worth if you need a transplant? The point is, your value has been reappraised because we now appreciate much better the scarcity and sophistication of your molecules. Man IS marvelously complex, and complexity shows one of TWO THINGS: incredible luck or intricate engineering. The seven system-command computers on the Columbia space shuttle (crosschecking suing each other’s facts and figures, and voting on the re didn’t mutate from some engineer’s lost four-function calculator; yet Man’s design leaves the computers’ far behind!
Tackling The Evolutionary Obstacle Course
Naturally enough, since this theory was accepted by so many for such a long time, it takes some courage and conviction to change your position now, especially to the dismay or ridicule of professional colleagues. Evolutionary theory still runs right through many, many sciences, and its collapses in one field are not always heard in others. People seeing real problems in their ONE area assume researchers in OTHER fields have the missing evidences; this forms a series of interdependent ‘hurdles,’ making it difficult for honest researchers to see the situation clearly. Thus, “Expert Opinion” assumes “The Specialist is Always Right’-which dismays the poor specialist, who (as careful as he or she can be) is after all, only human. ‘Specialized Biology,’ for instance, may assume “the rocks are as old as the fossils”; while ‘Specialized Geology” assumes “the fossils are as old as the rocks.” Hopefully, geochronology (dating-methods data) will unhesitatingly confirm the age both! But if all else fails, won’t a majority opinion prevail anyway? (I mean, that’s right isn’t it? How could so many be so wrong! … Lie still, and try not to think of Hitler.) Then again, if you are terribly committed to the premise that there “cannot possibly be a God” (Who will one day call us into account for all the funny ideas we had about His creation), you would no doubt always find some objections to what Creationists are saying.
“Now Just A Minute”
Pick up almost any magazine today to see how hot the Creation-Evolution debate has become. Creationists openly challenge Evolutionists to packed, public debates in university forums around the world. There is a growing body of creation-favoring research and literature, thousands of procreation scientists, and many Evolutionists willing to carefully and honestly consider both possibilities. Yet almost without exception, the secular media (accepting evolutionary theory uncritically for decades) has been deeply threatened; their “rebuttal” articles sound increasingly shrill, or are based on the idea, “say it often enough and people will keep on believing it-despite the facts.”
Many of the biased articles say:
(1) Creationists ‘misuse the word “”theory” to convey the
false impression that Evolutionists are ‘covering up the
rotten core’ of their premise.” Translation: It is “not fair”
to point out well established rules of science, especially if according to these rules evolution doesn’t even qualify as a scientific THEORY much less as proven FACT. (The key to the scientific method is to SEE it and REPEAT it; with macroevolution you can do neither) .4
(2) Creationists “misuse a popular philosophy of science to argue they are behaving scientifically in attacking evolution.” (Really? Improper
to criticize an idea in the light of DIRECT SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE-such as the fossil record, laws of probability, thermodynamics, and laws of genetics?) Current media tactics also repeatedly CALL evolution ” a fact’ then discuss how it is BOTH fact AND theory, getting fact and theory hopelessly (purposely?) confused.5 Stanley Weinberg recommends that Evolutionists do not publically debate as they will not win. He says this is “Plain because Creationists use ‘selective quotations”;
They put them together in such a way as to make an argument which the writer had no intention of making.”6 Creationist authors usually do two things: quote directly from evolutionist sources and document everything, so the quotes can be checked out in context.
“Watch Them Sneaky Creationists!”
Gould says the Evolutionists’ best approach is to say: (a) “creation isn’t science” as it is universally defined today”;(b) “tearing down a scientific theory doesn’t make that critics’ program scientific”; and (c) “a scientific argument against evolution is not automatically an argument for creation .”7
Is creation really not “science” as it is ‘universally defined today”? The whole world of research is undergoing tremendous change; once again it appears science is rapidly moving AWAY from materialistic world-views as new discoveries breakdown our last centuries limited and totally inadequate picture of reality–Much of the life-sciences, locked into a century of old physics, are now under intense scrutiny and challenge. What is significant about all this is one fact-the cutting edge of research today points DIRECTLY TOWARDS THE SPIRITUAL.
On Mollusks To Monoliths In Media . . .
Some magazines’ editorial policies seem peculiarly devoted to evolutionary thought, like Time/Life, Science Digest, and of course, Scientific American. Evolution is a basic idea in popular movies of the past like “King Kong,” “Planet of the Apes,” and its sequels. More recently in the sci-fi field, the theme develops still further: Man may eventually reach a “God-like” state, as in the conclusion of what A.C. Clarke called “the first ten and a half million dollar religious film”-the classic `2001: A Space Odessy,’ and more recently, ‘Star Trek-The Motion Picture.”
On T.V. we had “Battlestar Galactica” with its city of lights, and Carl Sagan’s multi-million dollar “Cosmos” T.V. series. It seems there is too much evidence for design on Earth, but since we can’t go on talking about God,we might as well come up with a novel solution to the design problem: “There IS intellect and personality behind Man’s creation all right – super-beings from space!” Bring on Eric_VonDanniken,and his Characteristic the Gods or Gods from Outer Space. (And let’s not talk about how THEY got there, shall we? Perhaps “long, long ago, in a galaxy far, far away . . .” If we move the problem back far enough and long ago enough, maybe it’ll go away.)
Premises, Premises . . .
Do Christian researchers ‘bring in God’ just to explain what cannot currently be explained? Is He invoked to ‘fill gaps” for faulty theories, perhaps to be squeezed out by the next scientific advance? No way. We honor Him as Creator God, evident in His Universe NOT because other explanations fail, but because studies point to His mind, His purpose, and His planning. Can there be ‘gaps” about origins” To acknowledge God as Creator is to honor Him where science reaches its limits and cannot ever expound.
A lot depends on your PREMISES. A ‘premise’ is an idea you start with (a “presupposition”) before you collect facts to try to answer questions. Very often it is not the facts that cause arguments; conflicts come because two people start with very different BASES by which they interpret what they see.
For instance, a fish and a submarine are alike in some ways; they both have tails, move underwater, and so on. The FACTS are: they are SIMILAR in many ways. Now assume the PREMISE: “Similarity equals COMMON ANCESTRY.” With all the right FACTS (the noted similarities), we decide therefore that “the fish is a highly-advanced, miniaturized great-nephew
of the submarine.” This is no doubt offensive to fishes as well as to
common sense, but “facts are facts!’ CHANGE your PREMISE to “Similarity equals common DESIGN,’ and with the SAME SET OF FACTS you see something very different: “Both fish and submarines were DESIGNED TO WORK UNDERWATER’ (one by Man, one by Man’s Creator). With the right FACTS but a wrong PREMISE, you can come up with the WRONG answer for all the RIGHT reasons.
Some Of The Facts
Great fussing is going on today about “the origins of life.’ We had Miller and Ureys’ experiments, shooting little sparks through organic gases in concentrations carefully picked to favor the formation of some of life’s building blocks. Not surprisingly, some were formed. Never mind that Earth’s original atmosphere couldn’t hold HEAVY gases like xenon and krypton (shades of Superman!) let alone the LIGHTER ones used in the experiments (like methane and ammonia), or that a REAL lightning bolt would effectively FRY a darling little amoeba-in-the-making. It is bothersome also that ultraviolet light from our sun knocks out ammonia faster that it can form, and old sedimentary rocks ought to show significant amounts of organic stuff in them if this is the way it was, but they don’t.”8
A Left-Handed Creation?
Add to that what Louis Pasteur, Linus Pauling, and Francis Crick (evolutionist co-discoverer of the DNA structure) all pointed out: The amino acids of life, from mold up to Man, are all of ONE SPECIAL FORM. John Maddox, English biologist, calls this “an intellectual thunderbolt’: Randomized experiments always give a “racemic” mixture,9 approximately EQUAL proportions of D- and L-, righthanded and left-handed amino acids (chemically identical, but ‘mirror images” of each other)-whereas life proteins consist of LEFT-HANDED MOLECULES ONLY!
Now why in the world should that be so ACCIDENTAL? It’s enough to drive poor scientists batty trying to dig up some exotic catalyst that might shift the yield in some tiny way (to date always less than 10%) in the “right” direction (left!).” What is even more disappointing is that NO
high-order, information-carrying molecules like those life uses EVER arrive in the soup, let along anything remotely looking as if it could
move, eat, or reproduce itself.
Foxy Microspheres
Then there is Sidney Foxes’ingenius “microsphere” idea. “Perhaps,” he thinks, “volcanoes did it.” Cook a dry mix of L-amino acids and you get a “thermal pan-polymer” or “proteinoid.” Drop these amino acid chains into water and they clump into little groups he calls “microspheres.” Since these little shapes look and act physically in many ways like living things, Mr. Foxe believes this is the way it happened. Top marks
for ingenuity, but proteinoids resemble life like a junkyard resembles
a Ferrari. and they grow like a wet toilet roll, not like an orange.
Real life proteins are unique because of their structure and information-carrying sequence. “Proteinoid” is not at all Protein;
the name looks the same to the innocent, but they lack tertiary 12
form, their structural mix of amino acids is hopelessly different,
and they are essentially random, too fragile, and too simple. Other
than superficial, physical similarities, they have nothing complex enough going for them inside or outside to ever grow up to be real proteins .13
Life In A Test-Tube?
“But didn’t scientists make life in a test-tube somewhere?’ No Virginia, they did NOT. (Some have TRANSPLANTED little lives-the “test-tube babies”-but that is another story.) Neither DNA nor protein are molecules that can duplicate themselves; DNA is the servant of the cell. Likewise the virus is absolutely dependent on the cell for its survival, and either came AFTER the cell or was created WITH it.14 Gary Parker, an ex-evolutionary biologist and geologist (whose excellent little book Creation-The Facts of Life, along with Wysong’s detailed volume was one of the best resources for this article), has written DNA: The Key to Life,15 a programmed textbook on the subject. He asks, ‘What does it take to make a living cell alive? The answer is something every scientist recognizes and uses in his laboratory, something every scientist can infer from his observations of DNA and protein … CREATIVE DESIGN and ORGANIZATION. What we know about the DNA-protein relationship suggests that living cells have the CREATED KIND of design.”16
Frankenstein Had A Better Idea:
People have shot long-suffering pools of chemicals with everything they can think of-sound, light, heat, gamma-rays, even bullets, but naturally enough, they stay dead.17 All this with the express and intelligent PURPOSE of creating life by ACCIDENT.
We could save a lot of trouble and revisit Dr. Frankenstein who had a better idea. All the material we need is in the morgue. Why bother battering around poor old amino acids when there are all the cells, DNA, enzymes, and proteins you need ready assembled in the proper order in your local cemetery (or even the supermarket?). Save the taxpayers millions; hit, burn, and shoot sparks into corpses or chicken gizzards. When all is said and done, there’s a great deal more said than actually done. “Chemistry is not then our ancestor, it’s our problem. When cells lose their biological order and start reacting in chemical ways, we die. . what’s lost at death is balance and biological order that otherwise uses food to put us together faster than chemistry can pull us
apart!” 18 If the ultimate computer/researcher interface successfully synthesizes an egg, no self-respecting hen will touch it. Life is not merely chemical complexity, but a gift from the Living God.
Dust Or Destiny
Take your pick. We are either (1) the product of a cosmic crap-game; or (2) imagined by Wisdom, Love, and Power beyond comprehension. Those are the options; accident or design, chance or creation. You either have three impersonals: Time, Chance, and Matter, adding up to Impersonal Man and an Impersonal Universe; or you have Pre-existent Personality imposing order on creation, giving meaning to love, truth, and dignity. These options have profound implications for the way you feel about yourself and others in this world. What, for instance, do you do when overwhelmed by the beauty and awesome, orderly arrangement of a flower? Vote scenario two and say “Thank You God!” Vote scenario one and be stuck with “Praise and honor be to Gases, Geology, and Genes.” And did you ever think it odd that a brilliant man could spend fifty years of his life in a lab trying to duplicate life to show NO INTELLIGENCE WAS NECESSARY to form it in the beginning?
Footnotes
1) Biology and the Future of Man- Ed. Philip Handler.
2) Issac Asimov, science-fiction author: The Well-Springs of Life.
3) Genetics of the Evolutionary Process- Theodosius Dobzhansky.
4) As opposed to micro-evolution, which means changes within kind,
or “species”- as in the development over the centuries of different
breeds of dogs, cattle, etc. which of course, obviously occurs.
5) S.J. Gould: DISCOVER Magazine, “Evolution as Fact and Theory'” pgs.
34-37, May 1981.
6) Stanley Weinberg: Science Council of New York, December 1980.
7) Jim Adams: St. Louis Post Dispatch- “Evolution- An Old Debate With
A New Twist,” May 17, 1981.
8) P. Abelson: “Some Aspects of Paleobiochemistry,” Annuals of New York
Academy of Science, 69:275, 1957; “Chemical Events on the Primative
Earth,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, 55:1365,
1966.
9) A mixture of both right and left-handed molecules.
10) Francis H.C. Crick: Molecules and Men, Seattle, University of Wash-
ington Press, 1966, pg. 60; John Maddox: Revolution in Biology, New
York, Macmillian Company, pg. 59.
11) James F. Coppedge: “The Mystery of Left-anded Molecules in
Proteins”; Evolution- Possible or Impossible? pgs. 55-79.
12) A technical term involving a three-fold arrangement of molecules.
13) S.L. Miller and H.C. Urey: “Organic Compounds Synthesis on the
Primative Earth,” Science, 130:247, 1959; Fox, Harada, Woods, and
Windsor: Archives of Bilchemistry and Biophysics 102:439, 1963;
H. Holter: “How Things Get Into Cells,” Scientific American, 205:
167-180, 1961; M. and L. Hokin: “The Chemistry of Cell Membranes,”
op.cit. 213:78-86,1965.
14) R.L. Wysong: “Is Life Definable?,” The Creation-Evolution Contro-
versy, Inquiry Press, 1978, pgs. 190-220.
15) Educational Methods Inc., Chicago.
16) Parker: Creation- The Facts of Life, pgs.14-15.
17) J. Keosian: The Origin of Life, N>Y> Reinhold 28,68,1968.
18) Parker, op.cit. pgs. 8-10.
Creation or Evolution?
Part II- The Historical Record
by : Winkie Pratney
The idea that “creation halts human Inquiry,” and that a picture of reality starting with God “finishes off any ideas of research, “is modern fiction. Once again, life scientists have many Christian researchers like those in the past, such as Linnaeus, the great Swedish botanist, and his predecessor John Ray (whose book The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of Creation blocked evolutionary thought in science for 200 years). History is filled with the genius of men like Kepler, Galileo, Bacon, the brilliant Isaac Newton, Pascal, and Leibnitz, who (despite the strange silence on this aspect of their lives from the secular researcher) all outspokenly and unashamedly loved God and studied His world with joy. Darwin’s time was no exception.1
In 1831, when Darwin was a backslidden, 22 year-old ministerial student starting out his five-year voyage on the “Beagle,” Michael Faraday, then 40, began a series of experiments that demonstrated the principle of electrognetic induction. “Very few men,” said Sir William Bragg, “have
changed the face of the world as Faraday has done. He Was one of the greatest experimental philosophers that ever appeared in this country or indeed in all the world. The whole world of electricity started with a simple experiment carried out in the Royal Institute by one of the greatest scientists of all time.”
Born the year John Wesley died (1791), at 44 recognized as the leading man of science and honored with a doctorate by Oxford University, he became an elder at 50 in the Chapel Meeting House in Pauls Alley, London, preaching there every Sunday, often to fellow scientists. Near his death in 1867, and holding no less than 97 unsought distinctions from international academies of science, he said, ‘My worldly faculties are slipping away day by day. Happy it is for all of us that the true good does not lie in them. As they ebb, may they leave us as little children trusting in the Father of Mercies and accepting His unspeakable gift. I bow before Him who is Lord of all.” Significantly, the principal men to follow him in constructing the electrical age all owned the same Christ as their Lord-Lord Kelvin (William Thompson), James Clerk Maxwell, and Sir John Ambrose Fleming.
The Absolute Temperature Scale still bears Lord Kelvin’s name, but other exploits in his day, like the submarine cable, revolutionary ships compass and 69 other patented brainwaves, made him a household word. He died in 1907 with over 600 published scientific papers to his credit, 70 patented inventions and 21 honorary degrees. Elected unanimously at 22 as Glasgow University’s youngest professor ever, he opened every lecture with prayer. ‘A firm believer in creation for his entire life … he often insisted that the power to analyze, to look for causes, was itself a creation of God. He never ceased to look for causes, causes of causes, and for causes of these in return. Seeking a cause for the escape of heat from the Earth, he became in the end a founder of geophysics and the joint discoverer of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.” He was 35 in 1859, when Darwin published his “Origin of the Species.”
Could he have dreamed then that the Law he helped co-discover would today be one of the biggest headaches to Darwin’s theory? ‘The sheer venturesomeness of Kelvin’s speculations were possible only because of his underlying certainty that behind everything lay the power of the Creator God. Science, in his view, could never lead a man to disbelieve in God.” Kelvin wouldn’t buy today’s common objection that creation is somehow “unscientific.” When his sister in later years read to him Darwin’s early statement of “disbelief in Divine revelation and evidence of creative design in the Universe,” Lord Kelvin “unhesitatingly announced it as utterly unscientific.”
Darwin apparently published his theory with much apprehension, fearing the scorn of fellow scientists; in the first edition of his ‘Origin,’ he prepared a line of retreat along Lamark’s ideas in case his theory of natural selection was found indefensible.2 Professor C.D. Darlington was of the opinion that Darwinism began “as a theory that could be explained
by natural selection; it ended as a theory that evolution could be
explained by natural selection; it ended as a theory that evolution could be explained just as you would like it to be explained.”3
John Fleming’s “Valve”
John Ambrose Fleming (inventor of the vacuum tube) was 11 when Darwin published “The Origin.” Charles Williams’ YMCA and William Booth of the soon-to-be founded Salvation Army, had both been ministering in England 15 years; John’s father was a pastor. A great spiritual awakening took place that year with many people in his father’s church becoming Christians. Although his early life was financially difficult, John grew up to contribute some of the greatest discoveries of his day in physics and electrical engineering. “Busy though he was at scientific affairs, he had another loyalty to the Friend he had found as a young man. He began to be less quiet as a Christian believer and to use his remarkable powers as a lecturer in speaking about the Bible. He loved the Bible and studied it as the Word of God. “It contains,” he said, “the record of events quite out of line with normal human experience and predictions-some of which have already been remarkably fulfilled … it is, and always has been, revered as the communication to us from the Creator of the Universe, the Supreme and Everlasting God.”‘
Few other men could equal his skill in completely enthralling an audience. He was a brilliant speaker, getting popular scientific lectures across to non-scientific audiences; copies of his published works kept in University College fill five volumes. He was an outspoken opponent of Evolution theory, and could not bear to look on quietly while an ” unproven and unscientific theory was blatantly taught as fact to the ordinary public.” From 1904, under the title Evidence of Things Not Seen, he lectured on the unadorned facts about Evolution.
When J.W. Swan of Newcastle made a carbon-filament lamp, it was further improved by Edison, who appointed Fleming to be his chief electrician. Fleming was later also called in by Marconi to help get his wireless telegraph to work; progress was held up without an essential technology that Fleming finally designed in 1904-the “valve” as he called it, or the vacuum tube.
Son of Darwin Meets Multiprocessor
(A Science-Fact Horror-Movie For An Old Theory)
Darwin had been dead 33 years. He had no idea that his theories could ever be practically tested. Charles Babbage’s ‘analytical engine” had failed to get off the ground 70 years before, awaiting the very technology that Fleming launched. It was left to John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert in 1946 to build the first nail for the coffin of Darwin’s time-protected theory in ENIAC, a clanking, hard-wired monstrosity weighing 30 tons that used 19,000 of these vacuum-tubes, prototypes of the modern microchip.
Some of us forget how long ago Darwin lived. Born the same year as Abe Lincoln (1809), nine years after Volta re-invented the electric battery, it would have really blown his circuits to see a home micro-computer, let alone to run a CRAY-1 or a S1 Mark I [A Multiprocessor with the capacity of eight BILLION operations a second. In Darwin’s day, the great salvation of his theory was that no one could live long enough to disprove it. For over a century the standard argument ran like this: “Just because you can’t see it working today doesn’t mean it didn’t; you haven’t looked long enough, so there! Given enough time and chance, anything can happen-and probably did.”
Enter digital logic, integrated circuitry, the programmable computer: and with it a whole new ball game. You see it is now possible to duplicate millions of years and billions of random variations, simulate original conditions, accelerate any possible spontaneous process-to practically shrink awesome numbers into time slots of months, weeks, sometimes days or hours. Darwin’s theory can be tested, today, NOW.
And it has been. With embarrassing results. Put simply, it doesn’t work. Put bluntly, nothing else outside of INTELLIGENT DIRECTED CONTROL does anything more than jam test programs into chaos. This has led to interesting shouting matches between the cyberneticists (those who ran the tests on the computers), and the neo-Darwinists, and some mad scrambles for some exotic new catalyst or concept to account for the disappointing facts. Leave a system to itself and all you have at the end of a long time is a bigger mess than you started with. And new discoveries on the complexity of molecules and the conditions necessary to create them only seem to make the problem worse.4
The Master-Law if Nature-Entropy
Remember Lord Kelvin and his co-discovery of the Second Law of Thermodynamics?
The Second Law defines that all things run down, not up. Complex things break down; life becomes more disorganized (look at your desk or bed). Time and Chance make things WORSE, not better. Afield, a room, a person, left alone and unattended, fall apart. “Entropy,”-5 says Jeremy Rifkin, in applying the law in his radical book to both economics and politics, “is the universal master-law, an unbroken reality written all around you.”
When you think about it, there are only two basic ways to get order out of disorder:
(1) Chance and Time. These two factors form one alternative. Say we start with these, nothing and no one else. Does it help? Not a lot. A chance garden is called a jungle. Time passing makes things fall apart, not fall together. Both only tend to make things worse, so that really seems to rule them both out.
(2) An Agent and a degradable Energy supply. That is to say: Someone deliberately acting on the disorder with the power to use in fixing it up. Of course, the Agent must pre-exist the system, and must be at least as complex as the order you want in the system.
Putting all this more simply, if you want to dig ditches, you have to BE THERE first-with the energy and the tools to do it. You also have to be smarter than the ditch!
Refrigerators make water (less complex) into ice (more complex) because an AGENT of GREATER WISDOM than the ice blocks (Frigidaire design team?) put together a MACHINE (on special at Sears) that uses DEGRADABLE ENERGY (your astonishing power bill!). The “randomness’ was transferred out of the water into heating air behind your fridge, and you finally got something to put into your lemonade-paying only for a fridge, electricity, sales tax and commission, and your service contract when the whole thing succumbs to the Second Law again on Tuesday and breaks down.
That is why some have made an open challenge for anyone to prove that MACRO-evolution is scientifically possible. Like R.G. Elmendorf, who offers a $5,000 cash reward for anyone who can find a natural process in which available energy, structure, and information INCREASE with time-WITHOUT requiring PRIOR and HIGHER energy, structure, and information:
‘Evolution is here defined as a real, natural, self-caused, continuing, uphill process -involving energy, structure, and information-which goes from disorganized to organized, from random to ordered, from lower to
higher, from simple to complex, from atom to amoeba, from molecules to man. All uphill processes (photosynthesis, growth, etc.) are local and temporary, and all require a creative trio of prerequisites in order to operate:
(1) ENERGY – an appropriate outside source of energy.
(2) ENERGY CONVERSION MACHINE – a fit structure or mechanism to
use and transform the above energy.
(3) INTELLEGENCE – an intelligent information and control system
to direct the machine (found only in life).6
Do not put off getting right with God. Do not say to yourself, ‘Give me time and I’ll be okay.’ Entropy contradicts you. Time will never make you better; time only INCREASES disorder. Are you going to take the awful chance that you are right and the Word of God is wrong? Some things are not a gamble-they are suicide. The testimony of the Universe is against you. Chance offers no safety. Her deck is stacked in favor of the house. All that can bring order out of disorder is greater Power and higher Intelligence. Such is the Second Law-in physics or in life.
1. R.E.D. Clark: Creator God or Cosmic Magician? Symposium on Creation,
vol.IV, pages 117-118; Peter Masters: Men of Purpose, pgs. 9-20,
93-101, 114-121.
2. Life and Letters of Charles Darwin-Ed. Francis Darwin, D. Appleton
& Company, 1888, vol.2, pgs.12-15.
3. Darlington: “The Origin of Darwinism,” Scientific American, 200,
5:60; May 1959, pgs. 60-61.
4. Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evo-
lution-Ed. Moorhead & Kaplan, Philadelphia: Wistar Institute, 1967;
Murray Eden: Inadequacies of Neo-Darwinism Evolution as a Scientific
Theory, pg.11; M.P. Shutzenberger, pgs. 73-75; A.E. WilderSmith: The
Creation of Life- A Cybernetic Approach to Evolution, Baker: James F.
Coppedge: Evolution- Possible or Impossible? Zondervan, 1973.
5. The tendency of an energy system to run down – Webster’s New World
Dictionary.
6. R.G. Elmendorf- “$5,000 Reward,” September 1, 1976; Bible-Science
Association Western Penn., Bairdford, PA 15006.
Creation or Evolution?
Part III- The Fossil Record
by: Winkie Pratney
Strange as it may seem, Darwin himself said that the fossil record is “one of the most obvious and serious objections which could be urged against the theory” and “the absence of transitional forms between species…presses hardly on my theory.”
He realized what many people today do not realize: the record of the rocks is more a testimony to EXTINCTION than to evolution. We see CHANGE all right between fossil and modern forms, but only of the “variation within kind” accepted by Creationists. Fossil forms on the whole are MORE COMPLEX and VARIED than their counterparts today the except from those creatures like the Coelacanth, the Tuatara, cockroaches, ants, and dragonflies. Like other “living fossils,” they have not charnged significantly at all-a real problem in a theory that assumes- life-forms tend to change!”1
Darwin hoped that further research by the science of paleontology (then still in its infant stages) would SUPPORT his theory; he thought he just didn’t yet have enough data. “He who rejects this view of the imperfection of the geological record will rightly reject the whole theory. For he may ask in vain where are the numberless transition
(mising) links which must formerly have connected the closely allied or representative species … “2
“Missing Links” Still Missing
Few scientists are still looking for “missing links;’ it looks as if they will STAY missing. The most famous, “Archaeopteryx,” once considered the link between reptiles and birds, is now generally acknowledged as one of the first birds; the discovery of another bird femur in the same strata has ruled her out as being the ancestor of birds, because they ALREADY EXISTED in her time.3
“The fossil record” says Douglas Dewar, a British naturalist and once an ardent evolutionist, ‘cannot be regarded as other than a HOSTILE witness against evolution; the earliest known fossils of each class and order are not half-developed but have all the essential characteristics of their class and order.”4
“As we look at the main groups of fossil flora, we find there that at definite intervals they are all at once and quite suddenly there, in full bloom in all their manifold forms. Any change is entirely lacking.
This all stands as crass a contradiction to the evolution theory as
could possibly be imagined … all my investigations have led to contradictions … on account of which the theory of evolution ought to be entirely abandoned … it is a serious obstruction to biological research. My attempts to demonstrate evolution by experiments carried out for over 40 years have completely failed.”5
“Hopeful Monsters?”
More recently, some like Stephen Gould of Harvard, have returned to the “hopeful monster” theory (“saltatory” [jumping] evolution, or the “punctuated equilibrium” of Richard Goldschmidt in the 1930s; the idea that radical change in genes or chromosomes made a lizard, for instance, give birth to a bird- a “hopeful” idea indeed. Gould himself points out
problems with this. (How VERY lucky can you get? And if you think people have problems finding a mate, how about our hopeful monster?)6
Fossil Footprints
There are some big (and I do mean BIG) problems getting the facts to fit-in Sir Charles Lyell’s geology. The neat “geological ages” chart you see on school walls is a MYTH-it never exists like that anywhere on earth or it would be a hundred miles high. Then there are the many examples of totally REVERSED “strata layers” that no known force could
have produced that way- some are THOUSANDS of square miles (the Lewis
overthrust for instance, weighs in at around 800,000 BILLION TONS, but
shows no signs of grinding or sliding that a true “overthrust” would
produce).7 But some of the most embarrassing discoveries of modern
times are entirely “misplaced fossils,” millions of years in the
wrong place, such as human footprints found in Mexico, Arizona, Texas, Illinois, New Mexico, Kentucky, and other states, in rocks supposedly 250,000,000 years old. Only two explanations of these are possible: (1) Modern man lived in the earliest years of evolutionary history; (2) History must be shrunk to the time of man. Neither of these is acceptable to a geology based on uniformist principles. Albert C. Ingalls said, “If man … existed as far back as the Carboniferous period in any shape, then the whole science of geology is so completely wrong that all geologists will resign their jobs and take up truck driving. Hence, for the present at least, science rejects that attractive explanation that man made these mysterious prints.”8 Dinosaur
AND giant human tracts cut from the same “Cretaceous” strata are an em-
barrassing find, if these lizards were extinct 70 MILLION YEARS before
man “evolved.”9
Though the dino tracks (in the Paluxy River Bed in Glen Rose, Texas; for instance) are real, perhaps the human prints were later “clever carvings” by Indians (who must have gotten around other states a lot). Recent research, however, has shown that they CONTINUE under shale bulldozed away,and paleontologists like Dr. Camp of the University of California and Dr. G. Westcott of Ypsilanti, Michigan, have pronounced of other similar finds have come in: gold chains, and an iron pot in coal; human skulls in the Pliocene strata; pollen and anthropods, in Pre-Cambrian layers; even pictographs of a dinosaur among other animals on ancient canyon walls, which would knock some 70 million years out of
the geologic column!10
How About Dating Methods?
A brief word on radioactive and other dating methlods. We do not have space to go into the problems of some of the different methods used to establish the “long ages’ of Earth’s fossil records in a short treatment like this-; suffice to say that although these systems have value in confirming the age of more recent creatures or artifacts, much is based on ASSUMPTIONS that no radical changes have taken place in Earth’s atmosphere or radiation decay rates.11
Twenty-Three Century Snails
This may lead, for instance, to numerous ridiculous findings, like LIVING snails being dated (C-14 method) at 2,300 years old, NEW wood from growing trees at and Hawaiian lava flows KNOWN to be less centuries dated by the potassium-argon years old!12 Wyscong and others give a large list of factors that point to a young Earth, like Gentry’s
“pleochroic halos,” oil gusher pressure, decay of Earth’s magnetic move
ment and its slowing spin rate, the shallow dust layer of the moon, and
much more.13
For nearly a century and a quarter, people have attempted to improve this “imperfection of the geologic record.” Darwin would have been sick
if he had seen what has been collected. The Curator of the Field Museum
For Natural History in Chicago (housing 20% of all known fossil species)
says,”…Ironically we have even FEWER examples of evolutionary transition than in Darwin’s time. By this I mean that some of the classic cases of Darwinian change in the fossil record, such as the evolution of the horse in North America, have had to be discarded or paleontologists at Harvard, the American and even the British Museum say we have NOT A SINGLE EXAMPLE of evolutionary transition at all.”15
Am I My Keeper’s Brother?
How about fossil men classed as pre-humanoid? How about all the pictures of beetle-browed, club-lugging Neanderthal muggers? How about them, indeed! Although some textbooks and magazines don’t seem to search, it seems as if “apemen” are largely figments of the artistic “reconstructor’s” IMAGINATION. The vast majority of fossil finds (which include thousands of apes and a great many skeletons of MODERN man) have been shown to be eiher fictitious or mistaken classification. We shall
not_mention in detail embarrassing cases from the past like the elephant’s knee-cap assigned to ‘Pithecanthropus” in 1926, or the “Hesperopithecus” tooth of 1922 introduced as evidence in the famous Scopes trial, but which turned out to be that of a pig! Others like the DuBois “Java Man” and “Peking Man’ (whose remains “mysteriously disappeared”) have been quietly removed from the textbooks, along with “Piltdown Man,” the clever but shameful hoax Charles Dawson that fooled specialists and men of science for nearly 40 years.
More recently, “Australopithecus’ (“southern ape”) was news; that is now quite probably all Donald Johanson’s “Lucy” is.16 Louis Leaky found tools at the site, and assumed Australopithecus made them; his son found “bones virtually indistinguishable from modern man’ (the toolmaker?) underneath them 13 years later, and said then his discovery ‘shattered standard beliefs in evolution.17 Many fossilized skeletons of MODERN man have been unearthed at locations as OLD or OLDER than the supposedly less advanced humanoids, found.18 The “Cro-Magnon” men of Europe have superior size and brain capacity than modern man; a number of men of great age, but truly human, of gigantic size have been unearthed in the
Far East, especially in Java. All these findings add to the principle
that developmental evolution is not the universal law of biology, but
rather DETERIORATION or degeneration.
The World That Then Was Perished
How did the fossils form? James Hutton introduced to geology “uniformitarianism,” an idea popularized by Sir Charles Lyell and deeply influencing Darwin’s work – that “the present is the key to the past.” Sometimes it is indeed. Erosion, sedimentation, and the occasional island formation or flood, give us pictures of what has happened in some places. Of course, this all takes TIME and lots of it. And fossils do not form like that. Creatures that die today quickly vanish from decay or scanvengers. Fossils are the children of CATASTROPHE-a living thing is buried suddenly by eruption, flood, or landslide. The world is filled with these “graveyards” of more than 100,000 different species; some fossil beds have not less than-10 BILLION individual fossils! COAL is a classic example. Trillions of tons of vegetation, much of it perfectly preserved even to flowers and leaves, are buried, with some seams as much as 3040 feet thick. Forget your grade school image of trees failing into a swamp and “millions of years later” becoming coal. Under the right conditions, coal can be formed in a few DECADES, and plants failing into water only rot unless SUDDENLY compressed and cut off from oxidation by a large dump of soil or clay. No known peat bog in the world grades into coal, and some coal seams have 75 or more stratas each representing up to 300-400 feet of original vegetable matter! And what about large tree trunks that go right through SEVERAL sedimentary strata?
A Warning In The Rocks
It looks very much indeed as if the fossil record is one of great CATASTROPHE, an order of DEATH, not an order of ascending life. One creation model much researched today is that of Flood Geology, which postulates that much of the fossil record is an order of DEPOSITION, as a terrible judgment swept the world the first time.19
All life was buried by walls of water, and so-called “iages” are actually ecological ZONES that were buried and choked in mud. In the Noarchian Flood, waters swirled over the planet face for 371 days, with tides 5,000 to 10,000 feet high creating tremendous pressure on all buried matter, providing the power to fossilize forests and petrify wood in a matter of months. Recently there have been popularized searches for the location of he last resting place of the Ark (NOAH’S Ark, not the one Indiana ]ones was after!) It was a massive vehicle of some 4.3,300 tons, displacement, around 450 X 75, X 45 feet in size, with a total deck area of 101,250 square feet and a carrying capacity equal to 8 freight trains of 65 cars each! (1,396,000 cubic ft.) Ernest Mayr, leading systematic taxonomist, lists around 1,000,000 different species of modern animal life, of which, (even according to modern “kinds”) only some 35,00O were land-based.
With around 240 large animals to a standard 2-deck rail car, 2 trains hauling 73 such cars could carry the full load; the Ark had space for 522 cars this size, so there was plenty of room (even for the elephants’ bathrooms)! It should be obvious that without supernatural CARE, Noah’s little family would never have survived; without supernatural INTERVENTION, ourworld would STILL be buried in water. (See Isaiah 54:9-10) Scripture indicates a possible mammoth re-structuring of Earth’s topology (Psalms 104:6-9-“The mountains ascend, the valleys descend-), creating our present deep ocean basins to drain off the floodwaters, and our ancestors finally stepped off into a new world. (Genesis 6:20, 7:15-16, 6:1)
How Long Can We Tread Water?
“For the coming of the Son of Man will be just like the days of Noah,” said Jesus, “For as in those days which were before the flood they were eating and drinking, they were marrying and giving in marraige, until the day that Noah entered the ark, and they did not understand until the flood came and took them all away; so shall the coming of the Son of Man be.”(Matt. 24:37-39) The first time He came as a baby; the next time He comes as the rightful King of the Earth. The Apostle Peter said: “Know this first of all, that in the last days scoffers will come with their mocking, following after their own lusts, and saying, “Where is the promise of His coming?”… For this they willingly are ignorant of… the world that then was being overflowed with water perished; but the present heavens and earth by His Word are being reserved for fire, kept for the day of judgment and destruction of ungodly men.” (II Pet. 3:3-7)
Water then, FIRE next time. It is the considered conviction of thousands of respected researchers and scientists that, based on the evidence, it is time to return to the Lord. They say this not because they are blind, prejudiced, or stupid, but because the FACTS do not fit the alternative. if both the Creationist and Evolutionist picture are, in the final analysis, matters of FAITH, it is better to stick with the faith that best coincides with the facts. It is a big gamble indeed to risk your soul and your future on the hope that you are nothing more than the blind product of time, chance, and matter, when you may have to-stand on y before the Creator you rejected-DESPITE THE FACTS-and explain to Him your logic. It is also our conviction that you will not have to wait very long. Time’s final drama is about to take place, and as C.S. Lewis put it-“When the Author walks on stage, the play is over.” It is time to seek the Lord. The next move is over to you …
Footnotes
1. James Millot: Scientific American, Dec. 1995, pg.37; Charles M.
Bogert: Scientific Monthly, 1953, pg.167; “Insects in Amber,”
Scientific American, Nov. 1951, pgs. 57-58, 60-61; “The Dragon-
Fly- Fossil on Wings,” Science Digest, May 1961, pg.6.
2. Darwin, op. cit. 179.
3. Gary Parker: Creation-The Facts of Life, pgs. 101-102.
4. Why We Believe In Creation, pg. 312.
5. (Dr. Herbert Nilsson, Professor of Botany, Univ. of Lund, Sweden,
after a LIFETIME STUDY of genetics and the fossil record.)
6. Stephen Gould: “The Return of Hopeful Monsters,” Natural History,
June-July 1977.
7. William G. Pierce: Bulletin of Amer. Association of Petroleum Geo-
logists, Vol.41, 1958, pg.596; John G. Read: Experiences in Over-
thrust Areas, Bible-Science Association, op.cit.pgs.1-6.
8. “The Carboniferous Mystery,” Scientific Monthly, vol. 162, January
1940, pg. 14.
9. Natural History, May 1939, pg. 255.
10. Otto Stulzer: Geology of coal, Chicago, University of Chicago, 1940,
pg.271; R.L. Wysong, op. cit. pgs. 370-383; E. Scoyen: Arizona High-
ways, 27, July 1951, pgs. 36-39.
11. W.F. Libby: Radiocarbon Dating, Chicago, Univ. of Chicago, 1952;
F.B. Juneman: Industrial Research, 14, 1972, pg.15; Anderson and
Spangler: “Radiometric Dating” Is the ‘Decay Constant’ Constant?”
12. Keith & Anderson: “Radiocarbon Dating: Fictitious Results with
Mollusk Shells,” Science 141, 1963, pg. 634;
Funkhouser & Naughton: Hournal of Geophysical Research, 73, 1968,
pg. 4606; Laghlin: Excess Radiogenic Argon in Pegmatite Minerals,
op. cit. 74, 1969, pg. 6684. R.L. Wysong: “Youth or Antiquity?”
op. cit. pgs. 145-179.
13. op.cit. pgs. 158-178.
14. David Raup: “Conflicts Between Darwin and Paleotology”, Field Museum
Bulletin, January 1979.
15. Parker, op.cit. 95.
16. Time, January 29, 1979.
17. Parker, op. cit. 117-118.
18. Men of Galley Hill, Swanscombe, Foxhall, Grimaldi, Oldoway, Wadjak,
and others.
19. Whitcombe & Morris: The Genesis Flood; George Howe, ed: Speak to the
Earth, Pres. & Reformed Publishing Co., Duane Gish: Evolution- The
Fossils Say No!, Creation-Life Publishers.
