Comment by James Robertson on May 2, 2011 at 7:26am

THE THEORY OF EVOLUTION
PART 1

By Dennis L. Cuddy, Ph.D.
May 2, 2011
NewsWithViews.com

The public has been told for many years that evolution is a scientific fact. NASA even issued a report, “Earth System Science: A Program for Global Change,” which repeatedly presents this view. For example, on page 14 is included the assertion that some 3.5 billion years ago, primitive living cells evolved the process of photosynthesis and transformed the earth’s atmosphere into one dominated by free oxygen. The problem with this type of pronouncement is that even evolutionists Harry Clemmey and Nick Badham have acknowledged in Geology (March 1982) that there was oxygen in the pre-Cambrian atmosphere, which would have made it impossible for amino acids, life’s basic elements, to bind together!

Evolution is supposed to have begun by chance, but the statistical odds against one protein molecule forming by chance would be 100160 to one against that happening. Moreover, Cambridge University’s Sir Fred Hoyle (originator of the Steady-State Theory of the Universe) has remarked: “The notion that not only biopolymers but the operation programme of a living cell could be arrived at by chance in a primordial organic soup here on earth is evidently nonsense of a high order.” Dr. Paul LeMoine, who was an editor of L’Encyclopedie Francais, has concluded that “evolution is a fairy tale for adults.”

There is simply no evidence that simple forms of life developed from dead matter, or that complex forms of life developed from simple forms. The problem that evolutionists face in this regard is one of “required immediate functionality of specialized organs” (a term I coined several decades ago). They propose that land plants simply evolved from marine plants, for example, ignoring the fact that land plants immediately need a vascular system not needed by aquatic plants. And if life evolved from the simple (e.g., a frog) to the complex (e.g., humans), why do frogs have more genetic material than humans? The scientific fact of the matter is that evolution violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which says natural processes always tend toward disorder, and the simple will never produce the more complex.

Another problem evolutionists face is that the fossil record does not provide us with transitional forms of life, which must be evidenced if life has evolved slowly supposedly over tens of millions of years (Darwinian evolution). The Smithsonian Institution has displayed a characterization of Archaeopteryx, which evolutionists have claimed is the transition from reptile to bird (but which actually has been proven to be clearly a warm-blooded bird with perfect feathers). This bothered the late Luther Sunderland, author of Darwin’s Enigma, who gave me a copy of a letter he had received from evolutionist Colin Patterson, Curator of the British Museum of Natural History (which has perhaps the greatest collection of fossils in the world), who admitted there is no scientific evidence of transitional life forms.

In Algeny, Jeremy Rifkin noted that in a November 5, 1981 speech before a group of experts on evolutionary theory at the American Museum of Natural History, Patterson revealed: “Last year I had a sudden realization. For over twenty years I had thought I was working on evolution in some way. 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 so misled so long…. So for the last few weeks I’ve tried putting a simple question to various people and groups of people…. Can you tell me anything you know about evolution, any one thing, any one thing that is true?... All I got… was silence…. The absence of answers seems to suggest that… evolution does not convey any knowledge, or, if so, I haven’t yet heard it…. I think many people in this room would acknowledge that during the last few years, if you had thought about it at all, you have experienced a shift from evolution as knowledge to evolution as faith. I know that it’s true of me and I think it is true of a good many of you here…. Evolution not only conveys no knowledge but seems somehow to convey antiknowledge.”

Comment by James Robertson on May 4, 2011 at 7:18am

Evolutionists blithely ignored
All the proof in the Book we've adored.
This Darwinian menace is
Answered by Genesis!
"Done in a week. Love, the Lord."
By Nitelaf

Comment by Dave Gosse on May 6, 2011 at 7:05am

Darwin’s argument contains so many questionable assumptions, starting with his views about God, that it cannot be evaluated strictly as a work of hard science. It is not rigorously empirical in the way Mendel’s “Experiments in Plant Hybridization” is. To pick up Mendel’s concise and carefully reasoned paper after reading the circular and often cloudy arguments of the Origin is to enter a different realm of thought. Unlike Mendel’s, Darwin’s case depends on extra-scientific suppositions, the first of which is that the explanation of all natural phenomena is strictly material.

 

- Catholic writer George Sim Johnston: Did Darwin Get It right?: Catholics and the Theory of Evolution (Our Sunday Visitor. P. 23)

 

Quoted at Uncommon Descent

Comment by James Robertson on May 6, 2011 at 7:17am

Ab origine, God was creating;
He constructed with will unabating.
First he made light and dark,
Then put Man in a park
(Evolutionists find this tale grating). - By David Schildkret
(ab uh-RIH-jih-nee): Latin for "from the beginning," it usually means to go back to the very start of an idea, conception, or story.

Comment by James Robertson on May 8, 2011 at 3:40pm

6 Common Misconceptions About Evolution

Posted on May 7, 2011 by Zazu

Constitution Club

There are certain falsehoods about evolution that are surprisingly wide spread among both creationists and believers in evolution. The goal of this article is not to argue for or against evolution, but rather to dispel certain myths that both sides often fall for when debating the issues. Hopefully, this will result in better and more informed debate.

6. An organism can pass to its offspring traits it acquired over its lifetime; for example a giraffe stretches its neck to reach some leaves on a tall tree, as a result its neck gets slightly longer and it passes the trait to its progeny. This theory is false and has nothing to do with evolution. It is called Lamarckism, a theory debunked by Darwin. Evolution teaches that there is variation in every generation of an organism, natural selection causes only the fit to survive to reproduction. For example a litter of two giraffes consists of one with a longer neck and one with a shorter neck, the giraffe with the short neck cannot reach the leaves of a tree and starves, the long necked giraffe lives to reproduce and pass on his long neck genes. If Lamarckism was true, then after thousands of years of circumcision, Jewish boys would be born circumcised, I will save you the embarrassment of asking a Jewish friend and reveal to you that this is not the case.

5. Evolution has a goal or direction it is progressing towards, big to small, simple to complex, low intelligence to high intelligence etc. This misconception is surprisingly common among those that believe in evolution and position man as its ultimate product. In fact evolution only makes organisms better fit for their current environment, and since the environment changes, evolution has no direction whatsoever. Size, complexity, and intelligence are simply byproducts of evolution. An organism can evolve into a smaller, less complex, and less intelligent one, but still be better fit to its current environment. A human being can be killed by a simple bacteria, this shows that a man’s immune system can be weaker than the bacteria’s ability to fight off that immune system, the man’s size, complexity, and intelligence does not help him in this fight.

4. Evolution violates the second law of thermodynamics. This reveals a misunderstanding of entropy, not a weakness in evolution theory. The second law of thermodynamics states that the total entropy (randomness) of the universe is always increasing. This does NOT mean that entropy in any particular system cannot decrease (things become more ordered) as long as overall entropy of the universe still increases. If entropy was only increasing, random water particles would not freeze into ordered ice crystals, and a moving car would not be able to slow down. Evolution is therefore consistent with the laws of thermodynamics.

3. There is such a thing as micro (small changes within a species) and macro (large changes that result in new species) evolution. The public schools are at fault here, and most believers in evolution repeat this misconception, though creationists also sometimes use it to split hairs and say they believe in micro but not macro evolution. In truth the concept of a species is little more than a helpful classification system, biology itself does not care if two organisms can no longer interbreed and become different species. Members of two different species can be virtually identical, and members of the same species can be very different. A single tiny mutation may give rise to a new species, and a million mutations may not. The whole concept falls apart completely when dealing with the trillions of asexual organisms that do not require other similar organisms to reproduce, every single one is its own species, for such organisms the concept of micro vs macro evolution becomes completely meaningless.

2. Evolution teaches that life came from non-life. False, evolution deals only with changes in gene frequencies over time. How life came to be is a completely different (though fascinating) question. Evolution kicks in when living organisms are already around, it does not deal with non-living things. To fault evolution for not explaining the origins of life is like faulting Christianity for not explaining how to cook lasagna, it is simply outside its scope.

1. Evolution comes with a religious worldview, a belief that both sides of the debate seem to have embraced. In reality, it does not. Evolution is simply the central unifying theory of biology. It states nothing about the existence or non-existence of God or the merits of any religion. One can take the view that life emerged without God and is now evolving, or that God created the first life form and let evolution produce diversity from it, or that God is actively directing every tiny evolutionary change. Evolution does not mandate atheism nor does it undermine Christianity, it is science, and does not come with a moral, metaphysical, or epistemological framework.

Comment by James Robertson on May 10, 2011 at 4:04pm

A Big Hurdle For Darwinian Evolutionary Hypotheses

Mathematicians and physicists, even assuming that our time scale for the universe is billions of years, have consistently demonstrated that the numbers of random genetic mutations postulated by Darwinians would require more time than the presumed history of the earth, or in many cases, than of the universe itself.

The View from 1776

Comment by James Robertson on May 16, 2011 at 9:01am

THE THEORY OF EVOLUTION
PART 2

By Dennis L. Cuddy, Ph.D.
May 16, 2011
NewsWithViews.com


Besides former Senior Paleontologist at the British Museum Colin Patterson (in a letter which I have), another individual questioning Darwinian evolution because of the lack of transitional life forms was Harvard University professor Stephen Jay Gould. In “Is A New and General Theory of Evolution Emerging?” (Paleobiology, January 1980), Gould stated: “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.” In The Panda’s Thumb (1980) by Gould, he also stated: “….Can we invent a reasonable sequence of intermediate forms—that is, viable, functioning organisms—between ancestors and descendants in major structural transitions? I submit, although it may only reflect my lack of imagination, that the answer is no.”

The fossils show only perfected kinds (e.g., turtles but no semi-turtles). Evolutionists argue that fish supposedly evolved into amphibians, but there are no fossils with part-fins and part-feet. The so-called “walking catfish” actually slithers and flops along on its belly. Failing to find any evidence of evolving new creatures, evolutionists fall back upon the “horse theories,” averring that the modern horse came from Eohippus. This is not demonstrable, however, because after Eohippus, which had 18 ribs, Orohippus had 15 ribs, then Pliohippus had 19 ribs and the modern horse has 18 ribs.

With the clear failure of evolution to demonstrate that the accumulation of micro mutations over long periods of time had produced many new kinds of creatures, some evolutionists next proposed the theory of “Punctuated Equilibria” (the old “hopeful monster theory”), which proclaimed that occasionally there were dramatic mutations which caused striking changes in creatures. This, however, was not supported by experiments with fruit flies, which were given doses of radiation speeding up their mutation rate by 15,000 percent and still did not turn into any other kind of creature.

While the fossil record does not show mutations changing fruit flies to bees, for example, it does show new creatures appearing suddenly and highly specialized (e.g., trilobytes, coral, starfish, etc.) in Cambrian rocks. The fossils show fully formed (though varying in size) dinosaurs and flying Pterosaurs, but no half-dinosaurs or half-Pterosaurs.

Concerning the fossil record and man, there have been a number of so-called “missing links” discovered during the past century; however, they (e.g., Piltdown Man) eventually have been shown to be hoaxes, non-human or human, but not a combination of non-human and human. Evolutionists used to point to “gill slits” and “tails” in preborn humans as proof of their theory, but we now know the “gills” are really visceral arches with blood vessels, and the “tail” is the coccyx with ligaments and muscles attached to it that control the anus.

Why did evolutionists make a religion out of something (theory of evolution) requiring such “faith” to accept when the scientific evidence was weighted against it? One reason was, and for some still is, a consummate desire to have naturalism replace supernaturalism. The second reason may be described as an elitist tendency, because as liberal Judge Braswell Dean has noted, the writings of Darwin were somewhat racist, with the full title of his famous 1859 volume being On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. Another example of Darwin’s racism can be found in his The Descent of Man (1871), wherein he declared there would be a break “between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, than the Caucausian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as at present between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.”

Today, the theory of evolution taught in our schools is considered by many as anti-Judeo-Christian (i.e., if man came from apes, then he can be treated like an ape relatively speaking, experimenting on or sterilizing him involuntarily, infanticide, euthanasia, etc.).

A great deal of scientific evidence against evolution may be found in Evolution: A Theory In Crisis by religious agnostic, molecular biologist Dr. Michael Denton. For example, he refers to “the difficulties associated with attempting to explain how a family of homologous proteins could have evolved at constant rates.” There is also an excellent series of videotapes titled “Incredible Creatures That Defy Evolution” by Dr. Jobe Martin, who has written: “The European Green woodpecker’s tongue goes down the throat, out the back of the neck ‘…around the back of the skull beneath the skin, and over the top between the eyes, terminating usually just below the eye socket.’ In some woodpeckers the tongue exits the skull between the eyes and enters the beak through one of the nostrils! How would this evolve?” And the 2008 film “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” with Ben Stein also contains some useful information.

While there is conclusive scientific evidence for the adaptation of species to their surroundings, there is a great lack of evidence that every living entity is the product of a slow evolutionary process from a single source (Darwinian evolution) as is now taught in most public schools. I would strongly recommend that if schools are going to continue to teach the theory of evolution, we should demand that they also teach the scientific evidence against evolution as well.

Comment by James Robertson on May 25, 2011 at 1:30pm

Comment by James Robertson on June 7, 2011 at 11:49am

Where We Stand
No Adam, No Eve, No Gospel
The historical Adam debate won't be resolved tomorrow, so stay engaged.
A Christianity Today editorial | posted 6/06/2011


Science as we know it grew from pagan, occult, and biblical roots.

Christianity Today likes to emphasize the biblical sources. The story of creation, told in Genesis and elaborated in the New Testament, pictures a rational intelligence creating an orderly and predictable cosmos.

Without that predictability in the natural world, neither Newton nor Einstein would have been possible. There are times, however, when a careful reading of the natural world seems to conflict with our reading of Scripture.

Sometimes, Christian ways of thinking must adjust. Two famous names—Copernicus and Galileo—tell that tale. Other times, Christian thinkers adopt some of what scientific research suggests, but hold firm on key aspects of biblical knowledge. The name B. B. Warfield tells that tale: The Princeton theology professor (d. 1921) taught in the wake of the Darwinian revolution. He and fellow evangelical leaders saw good reasons to believe that humanity's physical form was descended from other animals. However, two key biblical teachings kept these theologians from eating the whole Darwinian apple.

First, in Darwinian thought, pure randomness was the engine of evolution. But randomness denies the divine Reason (the Logos in the language of John's Gospel) behind the creative process. Christians must root for intelligence over chance.

Second, Darwinian evolution challenged the belief that human beings were created in the image of God. This doctrine was a hedge against racist theories that would be used to subjugate, exploit, and eradicate undesirable people. Warfield rightly saw the dangers in Darwin, while trying to learn from the biological science of his time.

Now we come to another great moment of tension between Christian readings of Scripture and science. This issue's cover story, "The Search for the Historical Adam," reports the claims of recent genetic research that the human race did not emerge from pre-human animals as a single pair, as an "Adam" and an "Eve." The complexity of the human genome, we are told, requires an original population of around 10,000.

Christians have already drawn the line: there must be an original pair of humans endowed with souls—that is, the spiritual capacity to relate to God in the special way Genesis describes. In 1996, John Paul II stressed Pius XII's dictum that "if the origin of the human body comes through living matter which existed previously, the spiritual soul is created directly by God." And institutional statements of faith, such as Wheaton College's, set limits by affirming that original couple's existence: "… God directly created Adam and Eve, the historical parents of the entire human race … in his own image, distinct from all other living creatures, and in a state of original righteousness."

The complexity of the human genome, we are told, requires an original population of around 10,000.
What is at stake?

First, the entire story of what is wrong with the world hinges on the disobedient exercise of the will by the first humans. The problem with the human race is not its dearth of insight but its misshapen will.

Second, the entire story of salvation hinges on the obedience of the Second Adam. The apostle Paul, the earliest Christian writer to interpret Jesus' work, called Adam "a type of the one who was to come" (Rom. 5:14, ESV), and wrote that "[j]ust as we have borne the image of the man of dust [Adam], we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven [Jesus]" (1 Cor. 15:49, ESV). He elaborated an "Adam Christology" that described a fallen humanity, headed by Adam, and a new, redeemed humanity with Christ as its head.

Comment by James Robertson on June 14, 2011 at 8:42am

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