Sunday Sermons
Origins - Part 2
Origins II
Over the years it appears that a certain segment of society has considered the Evolution-Creation Debate settled and that Evolution won this debate back in the 1920’s and 30’s. Yet a front-page article in the June 15, 1979 issue of theWall Street Journal commented on how creationists, when engaging in debates with evolutionists, “tend to win” the debates, and that acceptance of is making progress. On November 28, 1991, a Gallop Poll on origins found that 47% of Americans believed God created man within the last 10,000 years (up 3% from a similar poll in 1982). 40% believed man evolved over millions of years, but that God guided the process, and only 9% believed that man evolved over millions of years without God. The numbers were exactly the same for a poll taken in 1999. What this means is that Evolution, although it is commonly taught in public institutions, has very little support among the public and is clearly not the “consensus” view of the majority. Such results were unexpected by evolutionists, who after decades of indoctrination, virtually no competition in the public places of learning, textbooks, and full support of the media, had expected the public to believe by now that evolution is a “fact”.
Creation and Scientists
· The first myth that we need to remove is that being a scientist or “expert” in anything does not necessarily mean that one is being totally objective. We need to remember that scientists and other experts struggle with sin (Romans 3:23) and temptation (1 Corinthians 10:13) just like anyone else. David Berlinski observes, “Almost all cosmologists have a favored scheme; when not advancing their own, they occupy themselves enumerating the deficiencies of the others…having constructed an elaborate scientific orthodoxy, cosmologists have acquired a vested interest in its defense” “Was There a Big Bang?, Commentary, pp. 28-38, 1998).
· Another myth is that scientists who doubt evolution and/or embrace creation are not real scientists but are merely “kooks” and “quacks”. My proof for such a comment is found in the following quotations from Scientists:
The Words of Scientists
· “One morning I woke up and something had happened in the night, and it struck me that I had been working on this stuff for twenty years and there was not one thing I knew about it. That’s quite a shock to learn that one can be misled so long. Either there was something wrong with me, or there was something wrong with evolution theory”. This quotation is stated by the late Colin Patterson, and is from a lecture presented at the American Museum of Natural History, November 5, 1981. Mr. Patterson was a one time senior paleontologist at the British Museum of Natural History in London, and who was widely recognized as one of the world’s foremost authorities on evolution.
· “The likelihood of the spontaneous formation of life from inanimate matter is one to a number with 40,000 noughts after it…It is big enough to bury Darwin and the whole theory of evolution. There was no primeval soup, neither on this planet nor on any other, and if the beginnings of life were not random, they must therefore have been the product of purposeful intelligence” (The late British astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle). This quotation is from Nature, November 12, 1981, “Hoyle on Evolution” Volume 294, p. 148).
· “Science and religion are very much alike. Both are imaginative and creative aspects of the human mind. The appearance of a conflict is the result of ignorance. We come to exist through a divine act. It is the religious view. It is the only view consistent with all the evidence”. Sir John Eccles, 1963 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his pioneering research on the synapse. Quoted in “The Intellectuals Speak Out About God”, 1984, p. 50.
· “If nature is so ‘clever’ as to exploit mechanisms that amaze us with their ingenuity, is that not persuasive evidence for the existence of intelligent design behind the universe? If the world’s finest minds can unravel only with difficulty the deeper workings of nature, how could it be supposed that those workings are merely a mindless accident, a product of blind chance”. Australian astrophysicist Paul Davis, in his book Superforce: The Search for a Grand Unified Theory of Nature, 1984, pp. 235-236).
Predictions concerning the Fossil Record
The theory of evolution would contend that:
· The “oldest” rocks would contain evidence of the most primitive forms of life capable to be fossilized.
· The “younger” rocks would exhibit more complex forms of life.
· A gradual change from simple-to-complex would be apparent.
· Large numbers of transitional forms would be present.
If Creation as described in the Bible is true, then the fossil record would reveal:
· A sudden explosion of both diverse and highly complex forms of life.
· A lack of transitional forms.
· Animals remaining basically the same.
“The Cambrian strata of rocks, vintage about 600 million years (evolutionists are now dating the beginning of the Cambrian at about 530 million years), are the oldest in which we find most of the major invertebrate groups. And we find many of them already in an advanced state of evolution, the very first time they appear. It is as though they were just planted there, without any evolutionary history” (The Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins, 1986, p. 229).
“Most of evolutions’ dramatic leaps occurred rather abruptly and soon after multicellular organisms first evolved, nearly 600 million years ago. The body plans that evolved in the Cambrian by and large served as the blueprints for those seen today. Few new major body plans have appeared since that time” (“The Big Bang of Animal Evolution”,Jeffrey S. Levinton, Scientific American, Volume 267, November 1992, p. 84).
“The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualistic accounts of evolution”. Late Harvard paleontologist Stephen J. Gould, quoted in, “Is a New and General Theory of Evolution Emerging?”, Paleobiology, Winter, Volume 6(1): p. 127).
“It must be significant that nearly all the evolutionary stories I learned as a student… have now been debunked…. The point emerges that, if we examine the fossil record in detail, whether at the level of orders or of species, we find over and over again—not gradual evolution, but the sudden explosion of one group at the expense of another” (Derek V. Ager in his 1976 presidential address before the British Geological Association). Quoted in “The Nature of the Fossil Record”, Proceedings of the Geological Association, 87(2): pp. 132-13).
The Human Fossil Record
“Let’s be blunt about one thing. Of all the branches to be found on that infamous ‘evolutionary tree of life’, the one leading to man should be the best documented. After all, as the most recent evolutionary arrival, pre-human fossils supposedly would have been exposed to natural decay processes for the shortest length of time, and thus should be better preserved and easier to find than any others. Consider, for example, how many dinosaur fossils we possess, and those animals were supposed to have existed over a hundred million years before man! In addition, since hominid fossils are of the greatest interest to man, because they are supposed to represent his past, it is safe to say that more people have been searching for them longer than for any other type of fossils. If there are any real transitional forms anywhere in the world, they should be documented most abundantly in the line leading from the first primate to modern men” (The Scientific Case for Creation, Bert Thompson, Ph.D., p. 163).
In Science Digest, Lyall Watson said, “The fossils that decorate our family tree are so scarce that there are still more scientists than specimens. The remarkable fact is that all the physical evidence we have for human evolution can still be placed, with room to spare, inside a single coffin” (May1982, Volume 90, p. 44). Taken with the previous quotations in the last section, it is clear the fossil record reveals that over the centuries apes have remained apes, men have remained men, just like all other animals have produced after their kind from one generation to another (Genesis 1:11ff).
The Genetic Code
In a recent interview Richard Dawkins argued that the most convincing evidence for Evolution is the fact that the genetic code in all living things is universal, irrespective of how different living things are in their external appearance. That is, whatever animal, plant, bug or organism on the planet one is looking at, if it is alive, it will use the same “dictionary” and know the same code. Every living thing uses the same genetic language. Dawkins argues that this proves that all living things are related on an evolutionary tree. Yet, a much better interpretation is that such a common code proves a single Creator for all living things, and an obvious over-all Intelligent Designer of all living things. It does strain one’s faith to believe that time, chance and random accidents would produce such a wise system.
· We should be impressed that the entire chemical information required to construct a man, elephant, frog or orchid is compressed into two miniscule reproductive cells.
· Once a fertilized, a single human cell begins to develop, the original plans are faithfully copied each time the cell divides so that every one of the thousand million, million cells in my body contains a perfect replica of the original plans for the whole body. Each cell contains one thousand (500 page) volumes of information, and it is copied in just twenty minutes.
Mark Dunagan/Beaverton Church of Christ/5-3-644-9017
www.beavertonchurchofchrist.net/mdunagan@easystreet.com
