COMMON SENSE and SCIENCE

(CREATION/EVOLUTION – Pt. 1)

                The Scopes’ Monkey trial took place in Tennessee in 1925,  and was a very significant event in American history, but I don’t think the facts are well-remembered by a lot of people. It is commonly called a landmark victory for the theory of evolution. This “so-called” victory opened the door for evolution to be taught in American classrooms, and for this reason it is also often hailed as a victory for educational freedom.

                But the reason I say that many people don’t remember what actually happened in Tennessee is because the same thing is happening again, right now, in classrooms all across this nation. The difference now is that the theory that is not allowed to be taught is the theory of creation. In fact, there may be less freedom in the public schools in the United States today than there is in many foreign nations whose governments were once totally Communist and anti-Christian.

                The argument in the Scopes trial was that students should have access to all of the scientific information that was available, so that they could then judge for themselves which view was correct. Many people were opposed to that idea, but in retrospect, we can see that it makes sense to allow for the freedom of information. However, once again we have a situation where one side wants only “their” view to be heard, while they continually denigrate anyone who disagrees.

                Of course this is completely unfair, as a certain biology teacher understood, –“Education….means broadening, advancing, and if you limit a teacher to only one side of anything, the whole country will eventually have only one thought.”   Those are the words of John Scopes, the biology teacher who wanted the freedom to teach evolution. Another very influential man said, …”A fair result can be obtained only by fully stating and balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question.” This quote comes from the introduction to Charles Darwin’s, The Origin of Species. Even Clarence Darrow, the famous attorney who volunteered to defend Scopes said, “the theory of beginning should not be taught to the exclusion of the other.” So obviously, those on the side of evolution easily understood the concept of freedom back in the 1920’s, but that is exactly what is not happening today. We have come full circle, so that evolution is almost always the only view currently accepted in our popular culture today.

“Nothing is so unscientific as…seeking to suppress or conceal dissent rather than grappling with it.”         (Eldra Pearl Solomon – 1974)^[1]

                The question is, how has this happened? Has evolution been proven beyond all doubt, so that everyone now agrees that this is so? This is what many leading evolutionists would have us believe, but as you will see, the facts do not support such a claim for several reasons.

                To start with, despite the hold evolutionary thinking seems to have gained on our popular culture, many people still believe that the Biblical story of creation tells the true origin of the universe, and a large group of scientists are presently studying, researching, and writing books which refute evolution and reveal the scientific evidence for creation. But because most of our media outlets support evolution only, it is nearly impossible to get this information published in high-profile magazines and newspapers, or on television. And secondly, even within the ranks of evolutionists, a staggering number of scientists in recent years have repudiated much of what has been commonly taught about evolution. But this is another fact left virtually unreported by today’s liberal-leaning media.

                Two of the more influential books written to reveal the flaws in evolutionary thinking are Evolution – A Theory in Crisis, by Michael Denton (1985), and Darwin’s Black Box, the Biochemical Challenge to Evolution (1990), by microbiologist Michael Behe.   Also among the more well-known evolutionists who have gone on record to share their numerous doubts about many of the claims of Darwinism are the late Stephen J. Gould, the late Sir Fred Hoyle, a Nobel prize-winner, and a number of others.

                So what are some of the evolutionary claims that are being questioned? First, I would bring to your attention the “ape-men” pictures we have all seen in science books. They usually start with some kind of a monkey or ape, and then progress through a series of more human-looking creatures until you arrive with modern man. The problem is that none of these ape-men have been proven to have existed, and almost all have been proven false – several have even been fakes and complete hoaxes! Have you ever heard that on PBS, or the evening news? Of course not! But it is a known fact that practically all scientists accept. Nevertheless, it doesn’t keep this kind of inaccurate information from being used in textbooks in our public schools. (many other instances of this kind of deception could be cited, such as Ernst Haeckel’s “faked” drawings of embryos^[2], O.C.Marsh’s oft-used series of horse drawings^[3], and Stanley Miller’s laboratory experiments,^[4] which are dismissed by almost all scientists today.)  

                Another fact, which is well known in the scientific world, but rarely talked about in our popular culture, is that the fossil record does not prove evolution. Over and over, we are told that the proof of evolution is in the fossils, but that is just not the case. The fossil record does many things, but proving evolution is not one of them. In fact, Oxford University Professor of Zoology, Mark Ridley (1981), has said that no real scientist uses the fossil record to prove evolution.^[5] You will probably still hear this fallacy (that the proof is in the fossils) often on television documentaries, but anyone who takes the time to study the fossil record will quickly find out that this whole argument is fraught with circular reasoning. The so-called “geologic column” (the chart with all the long, unpronounceable words – such as Pleistocene, Paleocene, Cretaceous, Jurassic, Triassic, etc., etc.), which you will find in most science textbooks, actually exists ONLY in the textbooks. It is entirely based on the “assumption” that evolution has occurred

                One of the major things fossils do tell us is that animals appeared on earth very abruptly, and not as simple, one-celled organisms that slowly, over millions of years, changed into more complex organisms, and then into fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals, and man. The truth is, many of the same kinds of creatures that we find in the earliest sedimentary rocks, look just like many of the same animals we see running around today! Though there may be a small amount of variation, the species are basically the same. Charles Darwin himself admitted that in order for his theory to be confirmed, we must find evidence that it happened in the fossil record.^[6] But one thing that virtually all scientists are agreed upon is that the missing links, examples of living things changing from one kind into another, are still missing! Gould even referred to this fact as being “the trade secret of paleontology.”^[7] This is confirmed by David Raup (1979), who says, “we are now about 120 years after Darwin…and we have even fewer examples of transition[al] fossils than we had in Darwin’s time.”^[8] Dr. Derek Ager (1976) agrees, -“if we examine the fossil record in detail…we find…not gradual evolution…but sudden explosion [of new species].”^[9] David Kitts (1974) concurs, -“Evolution requires intermediate forms between species and paleontology does not provide them.”^[10] Professor D.S. Woodruff (1980) says, “the [fossil] record fails to contain a single example of a significant transition,”^[11] and Colin Patterson (1979) concedes, “if I knew of any [transitional fossils],…I would have included them [in my book, however], there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument…It is easy to make up stories of how one form gave rise to another…But such stories are not part of science–“^[12] Finally, a quote from Soren Lovtrups’s book, Darwinism: The Refutation of a Myth, “it is a great misfortune if an entire branch of science becomes addicted to a false theory. But this has happened in biology…I believe that one day the Darwinian myth will be ranked the greatest deceit in the history of science.”^[13]

                Since fossils could not prove evolution, the next mechanism put forth has been mutations. This is one I truly cannot understand. A mutation is a mistake, pure and simple. I thought everyone accepted that. But somehow evolutionists have postulated that there could be some mutations that could have a “beneficial” effect. And if enough of these happened over time (millions and billions of years), then possibly natural selection could act upon these to bring macroevolution (macroevolution refers to changing from one species to another, as opposed to microevolution, which refers to adaptations within a species, which creationists do not disagree with).  Common sense should be enough to disprove such nonsense, but when it comes to evolutionary theories, a large majority of them have little to do with common sense, or even with the observable laws of nature. It has been estimated, by George Wald (1967), that to establish one non-harmful mutation in the population of a species would take on the order of 10 million years!^[14] So, considering the fact that it would probably take millions or billions more mutations to see anything close to macroevolution, this process does not sound very promising as an evolutionistic mechanism. And this is why many scientists have abandoned it and are searching elsewhere. However, the chances for finding a new mechanism for evolution were dealt a severe blow in 1980, when 150 leading evolutionists met in Chicago and came away without agreement on any viable mechanism.^[15]

                I am certainly not a scientist, far, far from it, but I can tell you what many evolutionists have said about their own theory. Many will tell you that much of what is being taught as fact is much closer to fairy tales and imagination than true science. Quoting Michael Denton, “the myth [of evolution] has created a widespread illusion that the theory of evolution was all but proved one hundred years ago…Nothing could be further from the truth…Darwin himself had increasing doubts as to the validity of his views…[and] his theory…still is, as it was in Darwin’s time, a highly speculative hypothesis entirelywithout direct factual support and very far from that self-evident axiom some of its more aggressive advocates would have us believe.”^[16]

                The late Paul Lemoine, president of the Geologic Society of France and director of the Natural History Museum of Paris wrote, “the theories of evolution, with which our studious youth have been deceived, constitutes a dogma that all the world continues to teach but each in his specialty, the zoologist or the botanist, ascertains that none of the explanations furnished is adequate.”^[17] Ronald Good, a botany professor from the University of Hull, said, “much of this [evolutionary] literature has something of the alluring but elusive quality of a mirage…which…gradually dissolves as it is more closely approached. ^[18]

                Nobel prize laureate, Harold C. Urey, has admitted, “All of us who study the origin of life find that the more we look into it, the more we feel it is too complex to have evolved anywhere. We all believe as an article of faith…[but] its complexity is so great, it is hard to imagine that it did.”^[19] British zoologist, W.H. Thorpe (1974) has said, “The most elementary type of cell constitutes a mechanism unimaginably more complex than any machine yet thought up, let alone constructed by man.”^[20] This kind of complexity has caused Hoyle to comment that “the notion that…the operating programme of a living cell could be arrived at by chance is evidently nonsense of a high order…”^[21] And Denton is equally pessimistic saying, “The hold of the evolutionary paradigm is so powerful that an idea which is more like a principle of medieval astrology…has become a reality for evolutionary biologists.”^[22] Professor Robert Shapiro (1986) says, “We have reached a situation where a theory has been accepted as fact…and…contrary evidence is shunted aside. This condition, of course, describes mythology rather than science.”^[23]

                No doubt the “faith”-full in the evolutionary camp will not be too affected by all the deterioration within their ranks, but at some point the public must start to wonder how these evolutionists can continue to hold their ground in the face of such unsettling revelations. This is especially true when it is revealed that even some of the most ardent evolutionists have expressed their misgivings about the evidence which seems to point away from evolution instead of toward it. For example, Darwin, himself, admitted that the information content in the feather of a peacock’s tail is so vast that it made him sick just to see one.^[24] He also wrote, way back in 1860, that “the eye to this day gives me a cold shudder,” and went on to exclaim that, “to suppose that the eye [because of its complexity]…could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I confess, absurd in the highest possible degree.”^[25] Another stalwart evolutionist, Richard Dawkins, has noted that “there is enough information capacity in a single human cell to store the Encyclopedia Brittanica, all 30 volumes of it, three or four times over.”^[26] And none other than the late Carl Sagan, of PBS fame, also said, “The information content of the human brain…would fill some 20 million volumes, as many as in the world’s largest libraries.”^[27]So, how can these leading evolutionary figures look squarely into the face of an incomprehensibly immense and complex creation and still cling to their “highly speculative” hypotheses? Michael Denton calls this blind allegiance to evolution “anaffront to reason,” that “is accepted without a ripple of doubt..” because “the paradigm takes precedence.”^[28] Or, as evolutionist Richard Lewontin once put it, “Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is….because we have a prior commitment….to materialism (the theory that physical matter is the only reality)….materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine foot in the door.”^[29]

                However, it is becoming obvious that, for many discerning scientific minds, patience for unsubstantiated theories is growing thin while the evidence consistently points in other directions. A growing number of scientists have come to the conclusion that the real scientific evidence points away from random chance and toward creation by intelligence. Behe’s book was definitely a breakthrough, taking the lid off the living cell to reveal an elaborate and intricate system of “factories,” “assembly lines,” “machines.” “sensors,” “gates,” “pumps,” “identification markers,” and even “rotary outboard motors[!]” Other features resemble “power plants,” “automated workshops,” “recycling units,” and “miniature monorails.” This kind of complexity clearly points to a super-intelligent Source, that is if what you are looking for is the truth, and not just a way to explain how evolution has happened.

                Unfortunately, it seems apparent that something other than a common sense search for truth remains to be the priority within much of American society. Those who promote the dominant, anti-God philosophy of evolution by random chance continue to make sure that their “paradigm takes precedence,” regardless of whether or not the facts support it. Tyranny of thought, rather than freedom of thought, is now the rule, but truth will prevail in the end, I have no doubt. It simply takes too much energy to hide the truth forever, and many scientists, as well as non-scientists, are finally beginning to see the light.

                Paul Davies, professor of theoretical physics at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne has written, “Everywhere we look in the universe…we encounter order…central to the idea of a very special, orderly universe is the concept of information…where did all the information…come from originally?”^[30] Physicist and Nobel prize recipient, Ernst Planck, also notes, “There is evidence of an intelligent order in the universe…”.^[31]   W. Press has ventured even further in using the dreaded “d” word, – “there is a grand design in the universe….”^[32]

                In 1981, astronomer Hoyle concluded that there had to be some kind of intelligence involved in the origin of our planet after he and Chandra Wickramasinghe’s mathematical analyses convinced them that life could not be the result of simply time, chance, and the properties of matter.^[33] That is, at least, more of a common sense approach than most of the drivel we usually hear on PBS documentaries, and I pray that this kind of common sense and logic will lead the way back to a more honest and fair approach to the search for truth in our nation and the world.  

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Notes

^[1] W.R. Bird, The Origin of Species REVISITED, Volume I, Regency (1991), p.9

 [2] Ibid, p. 197

[3]  Ibid, p. 223-225

[4]   Ibid, p. 362-366

[5]   Ibid, p. 2

[6]   Ibid, Darwin on the fossil record, p. 50

[7]   Ibid, p. 58

[8]   Ibid, p. 48

[9]   Ibid, p. 55

[10]  Ibid, p. 59

[11]  Ibid, p. 58

[12]  Ibid, p. 59

[13]  Ibid, p. 40

^[14]  Ibid, p. 88,89

[15]  Ibid, p. 156

[16]  Ibid, p. 142

[17]  Ibid, p. 151

[18]  Ibid, p. 151

[19]  Ibid, p. 325

[20]  Ibid, p. 299

[21]  Ibid, p. 304

[22]  Ibid p.202

[23]  Ibid, p.329

[24]  Ibid, p. 75

[25]  Ibid, p. 73

[26]  Ibid, p. 71

[27]  Ibid, p.72-73

[28]  Ibid, p.72

[29]  Lewontin, Richard, quote from a New York Book Review, Jan. 1997

[30]  Bird, p. 402

[31]  Ibid, p. 402

[32]  Ibid, p. 409

[33]  Ibid, p. 82