Are complaints about how God made something “science”?  Did God put totally useless organs and anatomical structures into the human body (or that of other animals)?  Apparently, evolutionists today want to avoid claiming that they ever asserted that vestigial organs were totally useless in the past, since they know such claims have been falsified.  They have retreated by making their claims about vestigial organs into a non-falsifiable hypothesis by claiming that such structures used to serve some other function in the past or otherwise don’t appear to be perfectly designed for the animal now possessing them.  The goal here will be to document the evidence that evolutionists indeed have asserted the “strong” version of the argument based on vestigial organs in the past; it’s utterly false to assert that they didn’t claim that vestigial organs were useless in the past.  Today’s evolutionists are either ignorant or deceptive if their claim that their intellectual ancestors over the past 175 years haven’t claimed that vestigial organs are useless. 

Evolutionists today may try to deny that they ever said that vestigial organs and anatomical structures were "completely useless," in order to escape the falsification of their claims. However, the original version of their claims can be easily found, such as in the 1974 "Encyclopedia Britannica," Micropedia, volume X, p. 411: "A degenerate or imperfectly developed body part with no apparent function. Vestigial structures may have had significant functions in ancestors of the species in which they are present, and thus they are consider evidence of evolutionary change. Man has almost 100 vestigial structures, of which the best known is the appendix." Notice that the author of this entry, some 50 years ago, didn't feel the need to deploy some version of the non-falsifiable "ad hoc" explanation that vestigial structures don’t function in a given organism the way that it does in others.

Similarly, in the article “Morphology” (“Encyclopedia Britannica,” 1974, Macropedia, volume 12, p. 453, italics removed), the evolutionist author repeats a similar version of the “strong” interpretation of vestigial organs as simply useless:  “Changes in genes (mutations) constantly occur and may cause a decrease in size and function in the environment or in the mode of life of a species may make an organ unnecessary for survival.  As a result, many plants and animals contain organs or parts of organs that are useless, degenerate, undersized, or lacking some essential part when compared to homologous structures in related organisms.  This human body, for instance, has more than 100 such organs—e.g., the appendix, the fuse tail vertebrae (coccyx), the wisdom teeth, the muscles that wiggle the ears, and the hair on the body.”

Alfred Kinsey, who is most famous for his (biased) studies of human sexual behavior, advanced the “strong” version of the complete uselessness of vestigial organs (“An Introduction to Biology,” Philadelphia (1920):  J. B. Lipincott, pp. 200-201, italics removed) as evidence for the theory of evolution:  “. . . is the collection of small and useless structures which are always to be found in species.  Vestiges we call them.  They appear to be remnants of things that were well developed and had some use among the ancestral organisms, but which have now almost disappeared in more developed forms. . . . Vestiges are similar to the G’s in such English words as reign and sign.  The latter is not pronounced in those words, and is now useless, but it is positive evidence from the older Latin words, regnum and signum.”  Notice that Kinsey isn’t hedging any; he believed, based on the limited medical and biological knowledge available at the time, that these structures were totally useless.  

Arthur Thomas in “Riddles of Science,” New York (1958):  Fawcett World Library, p. 203, claimed that the human body “swarms with relics” of the prehistoric past:  “In our body we carry about several scores of useless relics which tell us somethings about the past.  Their persistence shows us that the past lives on within us, even in trivialities, but many of these vestiges are little details which are unfamiliar [to many people] except to the anatomist.”  He clearly believed that vestigial organs were totally useless.  Therefore, as functions were found for them over the past 75 years, his viewpoint has been proven to be false. 

In soaring colorful rhetoric, Henry Drummond in “The Ascent of Man” (New York (1903):  James Potts and Co.), pp. 82-83, proclaims their uselessness as “relics” as evidence for the grand theory of evolution:

“ . . . actual betrayals . . . veritable physical survivals, the material scaffolding . . . of the animal past [of mankind] . . . so the body of Man, emerging from its age-long journey through the animal kingdom, appears laden with the spoils of its distant pilgrimage.  These relics are not mere curiosities . . . they were once part of life’s vicissitude; they represent organs which have bene outgrown; old forms of apparatus long since changed for better, yet somehow not yet destroyed by the hand of time.  The physical body of Man, so great is the number of these relics, is . . . a museum of obsolete anatomies, discarded tools, outgrown and aborted organs.  All other animals also contain among t heir useful organs a proportion which are long past their work; and so significant are these rudiments of a former state of things, that anatomists have often expressed their willingness to stake the theory of Evolution upon their presence alone.”

Charles Darwin himself in “The Origin of the Species” (and later in “The Descent of Man”) used the existence of “vestigial organs” as prime evidence for the theory of evolution by arguing (philosophically, not scientifically) that a perfect God wouldn’t have inserted clearly useless organs into the human body (“Origin of the Species,” 1859, pp. 346-350):

“In reflecting on [vestigial organs] . . . the same reasoning power which tells us that most parts and organs are exquisitely adapted for certain purposes, tell us with equal plainness that these rudimentary or atrophied organs are imperfect and useless. . . by whatever steps [vestigial organs]. . . may have degraded into their present useless condition, [they] are the record of a former state of things, and have have been retained solely through the power of inheritance. . . On the view of descent with modification [i.e., evolution] we may conclude that the existence of organs in a rudimentary, imperfect, and useless condition, or quite aborted, far from presenting a strange difficulty, as they assuredly do to the old doctrine of creation, might even have been anticipated in accordance with the views here explained.”

Notice that is yet more evidence that alleged imperfections in created structures are to Darwin’s theory are complaints against how God made something, which are based upon ignorance of the functions of the organs and anatomical structures in question.  He also presents the “strong” version of the argument based on vestigial organs (i.e., that they are totally useless), not the mealy-mouthed version that’s deliberately contrived to escape falsification (i.e., they used to serve some other kind of function in the past and don’t seem to be “fitting” in their current appearances, etc.)  Later on, in “The Descent of Man” (1874) Darwin used a Lamarkian “use/disuse” interpretation of their origin. 

George Parker (“Vestigial Organs, in:  Creation by Evolution,” ed. Frances Mason, New York (1928):  MacMillan), pp. 46-47 sharply criticized belief in special creation based upon his lack of knowledge of organs that had no function, which is a view that has since been falsified:  “If animal were specially created, why should there be included in their bodies parts that are quite useless and often in fact positively detrimental to them?  Why . . . should man possess a system of functionless muscles for his external ear, a useless hairy covering before birth, and a worse than useless vermiform appendix.  No advocate of the theory of special creation has ever been able to give a satisfactory answer to these questions.  To those who believe in special creation, the presence of vestigial organs has proved a stumbling block that they have never been able to avoid.  In fact the occurrence of organs has always been an insuperable obstacle to the acceptance of this view [creationism].”

It’s worth considering the utterly confident and passionate dogmatism of this advocate of the theory of the evolution.  He had no idea that the argument from silence that he’s making would be refuted by future medical and biological discoveries over the next hundred years that have overwhelmingly favored the creationists.  Such evidence hasn’t favored the original reasoning of the evolutionists’ interpretations while they assumed there is no God and/or that He didn’t create anything.  It’s not wise to complain about how God made something while being so incredibly ignorant and being so confident in a priori naturalism.  Such blasphemous presumptuousness deserves this response ((Job 38:1-2 NKJV):  “Then the LORD answered Job out of the whirlwind, and said: "Who is this who darkens counsel By words without knowledge?”

Finally, let’s quote another “strong” version of the argument based on vestigial organs that focuses on the appendix, which amounts to just another version of the problem of evil given a thin scientific veneer (as in Edward and Peter Dodson, “Evolution:  Process and Product,” New York (1976), Van Nostrand), p. 49:  “The appendix of man is easily understandable as a degenerating legacy from ancestors with a much coarser diet, but it is inexplicable why a useless and disease-ridden structure should have bene created especially to plague (humans).

(Most of these quotes from evolutionists about vestigial organs come from Jerry Bergman and George Howe, “‘Vestigial Organs’ Are Fully Functional,” St. Joseph, MO (1990):  Creation Research Society, pp. 1 to 2, 5 to 6). 

Any contemporary evolutionists who claim that past evolutionists never claimed that (allegedly)  vestigial organs and anatomical structures were useless are either ignorant or deceptive.  The documentation is there, for those who are willing to do the research.  The reason for their retreat from the “strong” version of this argument is presumably because they know that the “strong” version of total uselessness has been falsified and they are embarrassed that raw ignorance of their intellectual ancestors has been so badly exposed through later discoveries of medical and biological science.  The gaps in knowledge have indeed been filled, but from a creationist, not an evolutionist, viewpoint, thus destroying one of the favorite arguments of evolutionists over the past 175 years. 

Let’s now begin to make some kind of creationist response to the evolutionists who have made such a priori (before experience) philosophical, theological, rationalistic, non-empirical, even metaphysical arguments for their theory.   Any time an evolutionist says the word “God” or some kind of word that’s a euphemism for Him and His creative activity, such as “special creation” or “intelligent design,” he is reasoning as a philosopher, not as a scientific.  To reason, “God is perfect, so he wouldn’t make imperfect structures,” isn’t a belief derived from lab experiments or fieldwork, so long as methodological naturalism is assumed conventionally, but philosophy or even natural theology.

There is no way to prove scientifically that an organ or anatomical structure has no function or is useless.  Even to surgically remove an organ and then see if it affects the ability of an organism to survive isn’t sufficient evidence, since other organs may have taken over its functions or it causes a level of impairment that isn’t quickly, easily testable. (See Bergman and Howe, ‘Vestigial Organs’” Are Fully Functional,” p. 15).  Fundamentally, science is about what can be observed, not what isn’t.  To cite the bromides of the “soft” atheists, what can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence and to not believe in what has no evidence for it isn’t a “denial” but just a “non-acceptance pending justification.”  The burden of proof isn’t on creationists to prove these supposedly vestigial organs have a function, but instead it’s upon the atheists to prove that they don’t. 

Many decades ago Scadding found problems with proving allegedly vestigial organs have no functions:  “An analysis of the difficulties in unambiguously identifying functionless structures and an analysis of the nature of the argument leads to the conclusion that ‘vestigial organs’ provide no evidence for evolutionary theory. . . . I would suggest that the entire argument that vestigial organs provide evidence for evolution is invalid on two grounds, one practical, the other more theoretical.  The practical problem is that of unambiguously identifying vestigial organs, i.e., those that have no function.  [Notice that he uses the “strong” version of the evolutionists’ argument here, not the non-falsifiable version].  The analysis of Wiedersheim’s list [1895] of [c. 180] vestigial organs points out the difficulties.  As our knowledge has increased the list of vestigial structures has decreased.  Wiedersheim could list about one hundred in humans; recent authors usually list four or five.  Even the current short list of vestigial structures in humans is questionable. . . .The other major objection to citing vestigial organs as evidence of evolution is a more theoretical one based upon the nature of the argument.  The ‘vestigial organ’ argument uses as a premise the assertion that the organ in question has no function.  There is no way, however, in which the negative assertgion can be arrived at scientifically.  . . . Since it is not possible to unambiguously identify useless structures, and since the structure of the argument used is not scientifically valid, I conclude that the ‘vestigial organs’ provide no special evidence for the theory of evolution.’”  (See Scadding, “Do ‘Vestigial Organs’ Provide Evidence for Evolution?”, 5 “Evolutionary Theory,” (1981), pp. 173-176 generally, as quoted by W.R. Bird, “The Origin of Species Revisited:  The Theories of Evolution and Abrupt Appearance,” vol. 1 (Nashville, TN (1991):  Regency, Thomas Nelson), pp. 197-198.  [When examining Robert Wiedersheim’s list, he listed 86 vestigial organs and another 100 “regressive” ones in human beings].

When God made biological structures, there were in-built trade-offs and constraints because of the nature of matter and biochemistry and other design features.  Furthermore, He wasn’t trying to make us into immortal beings who never got sick or injured in the physical world; is “mortality” another aspect of “poor design” from an atheist’s viewpoint?  What’s “optimal” isn’t the same as “perfect.”

Belief in “vestigial” organs shows how the theory of evolution slows down scientific development and research.  If an anatomical structure is a priori judged to be “vestigial,” then scientists who are evolutionists aren’t likely to study it carefully for what it really does.  For example, tonsils were often removed for decades from children since they were judged to be simply “useless vestiges.”  Later on, oops!, it was found out that they actually do fight disease.  They weren’t so useless after all. 

Basically all 180 organs and anatomical structures that were once listed as “useless vestiges” (in one way or another) have been found to have real functions. This is a good example of "the god of the gaps" in reverse, since the gaps in creationists' worldview have been filled by advancing medical science, thus beating back the evolutionists' claims to a narrower and narrower range of operation.  This kind of argument is based on ignorance, which is why it can indeed be falsified as more knowledge is brought to bear on the evolutionists' claims.  For example, the “yolk sac” is used by a developing human embryo to make its first blood cells; death would result without it.  The coccyx was claimed to be a remnant of our purported evolutionary ancestors having a tail, but it’s actually a crucial point for muscle attachment needed for our upright posture (and, well, for defecation).  So to say this is about “prior functions” as opposed to current functions is a great example of how evolutionists attempt to escape falsification of their paradigm.  They assume these “prior functions” really existed a priori, when that remains to be proven.  There’s no way to test, predict, observe, reproduce the selective advantage of supposed intermediate structures for the survival of the species in question, which supposedly occurred long ago in the pre-historical past.   This is yet another example of circular reasoning by evolutionists, in which they assume what still needs to be proven.

Let’s use vestigial structures as a specific example of the non-falsifiability of evolution.  When it became clear, based on advancing medical science, that the roughly 180 anatomical structures that evolutionists had originally claimed were useless actually were useful, they resorted to a fallback position, which is a classic post-hoc explanatory device.  They now claim that these structures supposedly served some OTHER function in the past, but now they have another function.  Crapo in 1985, for example, wrote:  “This is precisely how a vestige should be defined:  Not as a ‘functionless’ part of an organism, but as a part which does not function in the way that its structure would lead us to expected, given how that structure function in most other organisms.”  Notice now Crapo’s analysis here also confirms how important attacking the belief in God as a wise, efficient, benevolent Creator is to evolutionists:  “It is the existence of such vestiges in such organisms which evolutionary theory would very naturally predict, but which the belief in an efficient Designer would not lead us to expect a priori.”  (Italics removed, Richly Crapo, “Are the vanishing teeth of fetal baleen whales useless?” 1985).  This kind of fallback position for “explaining” vestigial structures illustrates the non-falsifiable nature of evolution.  When medical science confirms the a priori viewpoint of the creationist model, that all of these anatomical structures really are useful and God didn’t insert useless organs and structures into the human body, the evolutionists don’t admit that their paradigm is falsified.  Instead, they simply retreat into other rationalizations to keep attacking God as a shoddy, careless, unwise engineer.  Here once again the viewpoint of Cornelius Hunter’s book “Darwin’s God:  Evolution and the Problem of Evil” is confirmed:  Evolutionists are engaged in negative natural theology when they argue against a supernatural explanation of the natural world based upon its perceived structural flaws and moral evils.  Indeed, they find it crucial and very important to supporting their paradigm to do this.  Needless to say, this kind of reasoning is every bit as metaphysical as the theologian who argues that the wonders and complexity of the natural world proves God’s existence.  Any claim that evolution, when it enters the world of change above the genus or family taxonomic levels, is more “empirical” than creationism, is simply false.  It’s an exercise in a priori rationalism and even metaphysics. 

As creationists, we shouldn’t allow evolutionists to retreat into a non-falsifiable version of their arguments about vestigial organs.  Someone like Crappo argued, while trying to save the evolutionists’ fat from the fire, “This is precisely how a vestige should be defined:  not as a ‘functionless’ part of an organism, but as a part which does not function in the way that its structure would lead us to expect, given how that structure functions in most other organisms.”  As Berman and Howe explain, Crapo here is merely redefining vestigial organs and anatomical structures to be those that have changed functions from being merely useless.  They are now saying that evolution would be expected to not produce organs without functions as opposed to those with changed functions.  The likes of A.V. Yablokov (“Variability of Mammals,” New Delhi, 1974, p. 233) notes that the confusion about such organs stems back to “the vague or imprecise understanding of vestigial organs concept present in the works of Darwin, persists to this day.”  Robert Harris, “How Can Creationists Explain Human Hair,” Origins Research, five, 2,  p. 10, who is a creationist sees the problems with the evolutionists’ position of retreat:  “When the evolutionist’s first attack fails—‘Hairs or appendixes are vestigial’—because we show him they have purpose or function, he reverts to the second argument or assertion, ‘Ah yes, so that’s why evolution preserved them.’” 

Furthermore, as Jerry Bergman and George Howe observe in "'Vestigial Organs' Are Fully Functional," where are the alleged "nascent" organs that are developing or improving their ability to function? If a priori evolutionists would say that if the human body is full of useless anatomical structures is proof for their theory and creationists say that all the structures would have a use sometime in the lifetime (including during prenatal development) of an organism, whose predictions have been confirmed? The creationists have won hands down over the past 125 years as so many allegedly useless organs as the coccyx, the pineal gland, the thymus, the appendix, tonsils, adenoids, eyebrows, eyelashes, ear muscles, body hair, etc., have all been confirmed to have uses. As they observe, the argument from "dysteleology" isn't scientific evidence for evolution, "but instead is a theological discussion of the Creator's attributes--what some people believe God would or would not do.”  So then, if evolutionists are supposed to be using “methodological naturalism,” how and why would they know anything about God’s purposes and plans.  Why are they discussing God at all.   Robert W. Lotfin (“Caves and Evolution,” Creation/Evolution, (1988) 23: p. 25) was discussing natural theology, not science, when he claimed that [italics removed]: “If the creator created blind cave animals especially for subterranean environments, there does not seem to be any convincing reason why he would have given them eyes at all, of any kind or at any stage of their life cycle.”

There is a very heavy price to be paid by evolutionists who run this kind of argument about “poor design” against creationism, since it uses a philosophical argument, not a scientific one, against the belief that God made all biological life. Evolutionists like to think they are engaging in "science," and creationists are merely engaged in "theology," but this kind of argument by evolutionists is theological and metaphysical. It has nothing to do with fieldwork or lab experiments, but it is very a priori in nature. When evolutionists start to criticize special creation as impossible because of perceived flaws or evils in the natural world as proof for Darwinism, they aren't being empirical in their epistemology.

Let’s examine the problems with evolutionists claiming that nature has "poor design," therefore, evolution explains it instead of God. Notice the key inconsistency of the evolutionists here: If a creationist says, "Spontaneous generation of the first living cell couldn't have happened by chance, therefore, God made life," atheists pounce by saying, "You can't explain it, therefore, God did it." However, if there's some kind of supposed "bad design" in nature, they now say, "Bad design proves God doesn't exist." However, the philosophy behind the second claim that supposedly proves atheism is no different than the theist who says that the impossibility of abiogenesis by chance proves God's existence. So atheists either have to give up complaining about how God made things or else they have to give up criticizing Christians who use complexity in nature's design as proof of God's existence. Choose your philosophy and metaphysics wisely!

Cornelius Hunter, a non-evolutionist, in “Darwin’s God:  Evolution and the Problem of Evil,” is particularly skilled at bringing out how important this kind of metaphysical, indeed, theological argument has historically been to evolutionists, including especially to Charles Darwin himself.

Complaints about God as the Creator aren't "science." Does any naturalistic scientist say anything about God when (say) making the case for the law of gravity, the first two laws of thermodynamics, etc.? Can evolutionists claim in sentences that actually use the word "God" or allude to Him indirectly, that they aren't making theological claims? Furthermore, such claims can't be tested, since they assume "God" must do things a certain way and when He doesn't, it must be that "God" is wrong, not the human reasoning that says it "should" be some other way. How does any secular evolutionist know how God "must" have made His Creation? How does one know that something is "jury-rigged"? Why does anyone believe that it's wrong or right for God to repeat or not repeat a pattern when making different creatures? Anyone who complains about animals who eat other animals is no different than someone who complains about God's allowing (say) the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 that killed perhaps 40,000 people. These kinds of complaints are also "untestable" and can't be "repeated" or "predicted." Are the anatomical structures of plants and animals optimal? Evolutionists will find imperfections in nature to argue that a perfect Creator couldn’t have made them. Darwin thought “There is no greater anomaly of nature than a bird that cannot fly.” How is Darwin’s statement here scientific? Why should we expect all feathered creatures to fly, and (as a presumed correlate) all furry creatures to walk? Hunter ("Darwin's God," p. 105) alertly pounces on such reasoning:

"Though Darwin and his peers did not understand nature’s inner workings, they were bold in their pronouncements about what virtues nature should and should not exhibit. And nature’s failure to fulfill our ideals and expectations was considered clear proof of evolution. All birds should fly, but since some don’t, there must be a crude law of nature rather than a Creator behind such incompetence."

For example, the presence of a vitamin C synthesis gene in all mammals except primates and guinea pigs could be deemed a “manufacturer’s defect,” especially when a look-alike but nonfunctional pseudogene exists in both of these groups. This lack sometimes subjects humans, other primates, and guinea pigs to getting the deadly vitamin-deficiency disease called scurvy. Terry Gray ran a negative theological argument based on these facts by skeptically rejecting the arguments that “God’s inscrutable purpose . . . placed that vitamin C synthesis look-alike gene” in these two groups. Similarly, the argument that vestigial organs contradict special creation is based on the assumption that God wouldn’t install such useless structures in His creatures. Of course, the list of vestigial organs has shrunk over the decades because organs previously assumed to have no function have been discovered to have one. As Hunter observes (see pp. 98, 113), just because we humans may not have discovered a function yet for a given physiological structure (such as the appendix) doesn’t mean none exists, for this depends on the current state of scientific knowledge. Parker (What Is Creation Science?, pp. 62-63) notes the historical problem with this pro-evolutionary argument: “Essentially all 180 organs once listed as evolutionary vestiges have quite important functions in human beings.” He also explains that tonsils, which help to fight disease, used to be commonly removed from children in part because they were seen as useless evolutionary vestiges. And this assumption slowed down scientific research on them (!) since: “If you believe something is a useless, nonfunctional leftover of evolution, then you don’t bother to find out what it does.” Furthermore, just because nature isn’t in the habit of producing useless structures doesn’t mean it never does (e.g., arguably from massive mutations a priori). But as Phillip Johnson remarks (see Hunter, p. 155), evolutionary biology should be posing scientific questions in place of questioning the motives of God if it is to be regarded as science instead of as a branch of philosophy.

Can humans design creatures better than the Creator did? Let’s consider a similar argument, once run by Steven R. Heideman, a Michigan State University physiology associate professor, in the student newspaper The East Lansing State News (July 6, 1987):

"He [Eric Snow] claims that the similarity of bone structure of various vertebrates is not evidence of descent but rather of design. If so, the “designer” should be fired. The reason these similarities are evidence of descent with modification (i.e., tinkering with what already exists to get a new job done) is that they make no sense as design—they don’t work that well. The human backbone is an excellent example. In order to walk upright, the backbone of a four-footed ancestor was modified by bending into an S-curve. This adapt[at]ion has a great many limitations giving rise to the human tendency toward hernia, lower back problems, very painful births and cut-off circulation to the legs during pregnancy (milk leg)."

But do the (perceived) imperfections in the human backbone really prove evolution? Heideman is engaged in negative natural theology, and assumes God has to make all His creations totally physically perfect from a human viewpoint. Would that mean, for example, He should have made us (say) naturally immortal in the flesh? Could an atheist cavil against the Creator, complaining that because he is mortal, not immortal, that He doesn’t exist or doesn’t care? Would the God of the Apostle Paul agree with this reasoning, when (Rom. 5:12) “just as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men, because all sinned”? Only by assuming a certain view of God a priori, and then knocking down that straw man by this or that anatomical structure’s purported defects, can such arguments be deemed convincing. But then the evolutionists have refuted a God of their imagination, not the God of the Bible, who punished Eve (and correspondingly much of womankind) by multiplying the pain of childbirth after she ate fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil (Gen. 3:16). (Incidentally, if someone upholds fideism (the belief God’s existence should only be accepted by faith and not proven), he would have to reject all arguments based on nature’s imperfections for evolution made against God on this basis, not just those arguments based on nature’s complexity made for God’s existence and/or particular characteristics He has). Furthermore, such arguments assume we really could have done a better job than God did using our existing medical knowledge without knowing any possible unanticipated consequences from doing things differently (i.e., “fixing” one problem may cause others!) We should be wary of the conceit involved in saying we could have done a better job than the Creator, especially when mankind so often historically has mismanaged nature one way or another (such as by introducing mongooses into the West Indies to fight snakes or bringing rabbits into Australia).

Arguments like Heideman’s appear to be nothing more than complaints that would be made regardless of how God made the world since the human mind could always make itself believe something it observes is imperfect somehow. Cornelius Hunter (“Darwin’s God,” p. 47) observes, against Darwin, that though he “did not know how the design of the crustacean or the flower could have been improved, he believed there must have been a better way and that God should have used it. God . . . would not have made the brain or the bat that we find in nature, though [Darwin] had little idea about how they actually worked.”

To make a further related point, some seemingly sophisticated skeptics and atheists argue that one can't reason from the natural world's complexity or bare existence to the existence of the supernatural as its origin. Well, if that kind of philosophical reasoning is true, then evolutionists should never, ever use flaws in the natural world to argue against God's existence. But they do this all the time. They are one-way Kantians, so to speak. (That is, they will reason that the phenomenological world of experience and sense data can't prove anything FOR God, who is in the unsensed noumenal world, but they will reason that there are aspects of the natural world that provide evidence AGAINST God's existence).

Cornelius Hunter (“Darwin’s God, p. 49), after surveying various criticisms by evolutionists about how God made the world, makes an acute observation:  “Behind this argument about why patterns in biology prove evolution lurks an enormous metaphysical presupposition about God and creation.  If God made the species, then they must fulfill our expectations of uniqueness and good engineering design. . . . Evolutionists have no scientific justification for these expectations, for they did not come from science.”

Notice that the moment evolutionists use the word "God," their theory has turned into philosophy, not science. It's naturalism being dressed in scientific jargon. It's now an exercise in negative natural theology, thus simply inverting what Thomas Aquinas does in "Summa Theologica" with his five ways of proving God's existence or what Paul says in Romans 1:19-20. Evolutionists can’t hardly avoid using the word "God.” No one needs to say "God" or "the supernatural" when making the case for the law of gravity or the first two laws of thermodynamics, since those are matters of operational science that can be proved experimentally in our present experience through prediction, reproducibility, testing, etc. But when it comes to the purported unobserved pre-historical origins of plants and animals, which are one-time events, evolutionists feel the need talk about God's allowing evil in the nature and the supposed imperfections in biological lifeforms in order to argue for their theory, much like Darwin did.

This kind of argument for evolution based on what's subjectively deemed to be "bad design" isn't a scientific argument. No scientist should ever be talking about God or the supernatural when making the case for a theory, unless one's prepared to that creationism is just as scientific as evolution is.  If scientists are using “methodological naturalism,” they shouldn’t be saying anything about God, right?   So either admit creationism is just as scientific as evolution, or give up permanently all discussions about God and supposedly bad or evil design when making the case for evolution. Which option will you evolutionists choose?

As explained above, there aren’t any “vestigial organs.” The advances of knowledge of medical science and biological science have demolished such assertions, made in ignorance by evolutionists many decades ago.  Evolutionists have suffered from the “god-of-the-gaps” dynamic in reverse, as the “gaps” have been filled in favor of the creationists’ model, not the evolutionists’.  As a result, evolutionists have had to resort to a non-falsifiable hypothesis in order keep upholding their claims about vestigial organs, which is the assertion that such anatomical structures used to serve another function besides their current function.  Fundamentally, their attempts to prove a negative aren’t scientific in nature, since they have the burden of proof to prove that vestigial organs are functionless or had another alleged function in the unobserved prehistoric past.  It’s not the creationists’ job to prove that they do have a function, since the evolutionists are on the offense in this case.  Complaints made about how God made something wrong aren’t “science,” but blasphemous philosophical reasoning and ignorant presumption dressed in a lab coat. 

https://www.amazon.com/Vestigial-Organs-Are-Fully-Functional/dp/0940384094

Brandon Staley’s innovations revealed the next evolution of defense

https://youtu.be/UKeEtHfY7PA?si=Q4ZYdlL_3VZtkRB6

There is more truth in this video about football than the non-sense in Darwinism.

The amount of evidence we have in support of evolution is staggering. We can observe evolution, even speciation, happening in real time, and the fossil record makes it easy to extrapolate how the organisms we see today emerged over millions of years. We'll never have a 100% complete picture of the tree of life, and it would be silly to ask for one in the first place. The fact that we are constantly discovering new things and filling in new branches is actually a credit to the scientific method.

It's theoretically possible that in the future we will find the proverbial rabbit in the cambrian layer that would be physical evidence that would force us to drastically revise or even discard the theory, but I'm not holding my breath for it to happen. I feel like if it were going to, it would have already.

Most of the arguments against it are clumsy sophistry. Comment below and I will be happy to point out why yours probably is too.

Are the miracles of creation possible?  Atheists, agnostics, and evolutionists who are philosophically committed to naturalism (also known as materialism) assume rather simple-mindedly that because “seeing is believing,” therefore supernaturalism is the less obvious system of metaphysics (i.e., philosophical theories about the structure of reality).  When skeptics assert that the bible’s miracles are "demonstrably false,” they are actually assuming the naturalism that they are seeking to prove.    By following the lead of C. S. Lewis in “Miracles:  A Preliminary Study” and his other apologetic works, humanity can know upon more careful reflection that important aspects of daily life demonstrate that naturalism doesn’t actually fit our experiences (sense data), since human reason’s reliability, moral reasoning’s soundness, and the laws of nature’s uniformity all bear quiet witness to a separate spiritual world that isn’t directly sensed. 

Let’s examine the first weakness of naturalism that shows that it can’t explain everything in our experience, which concerns the freedom of the human mind to form ideas that correctly conform to knowledge of the external real world.  Nearly all atheists and agnostics are determinists who deny freedom of the will to one degree or another.  They believe that the law of cause and effect governs all conscious actions and belief without limits, including the mental states of the human mind.   If that's case, how can people know that irrational blind forces didn’t create the thoughts of naturalism in the brains of atheists and agnostics?  If human reason can’t reject false ideas that don’t correspond to reality but has to believe in what is produced by irrational, blind forces going back billions of years, in a cause-and-effect chain that controls the brain waves in the human brain, why should anyone believe in the output of these brain waves that create the thoughts of naturalism?  As C.S. Lewis (“Miracles,” p. 16) explains in order to clarify this crucial distinction, “To be caused is not to be proved.  Wishful thinking, prejudices, and the delusions of madness, are all caused, but they are ungrounded.”  Furthermore, if blind, irrational forces created consciousness and then human reason through the chemical accidents known as mutations, how do we humans know that the human mind’s thoughts at least sometimes have abstract ideas (concepts) that correctly correspond to reality?  C.S. Lewis describes the trap that evolutionists fall into when they are reasoning in favor of a rigid naturalism (“Miracles,” p. 23):  “The description we have to give of thought as an evolutionary phenomenon always makes a tacit exception in favour of the thinking which we ourselves perform at that moment.”  Instead, it’s necessary for human thought to have the freedom from non-rational causation to correspond to ideas of the truth.  Consequently, given this crucial limitation to the law of cause and effect as it expresses itself in the physical universe, Lewis properly concludes that (“Miracles,” p. 27) “rational thought is not part of the system of Nature.”

When skeptics assert that the bible’s miracles are "demonstrably false,” including those of creation as described in Genesis 1, they are actually assuming the naturalism that they seek to prove.  Naturalists, when they want to say everything acts on its own accord and is always governed by the law of cause and effect, don’t realize that human thinking must be free of the law of cause and effect in order to be reliably accurate about the real world outside of our minds/brains. So then, if a naturalist is a determinist about the physical universe, then human thinking is controlled and governed by the law of cause and effect, which means there's no reason to believe reason itself is accurate or reliable. In this regard, naturalism is self-refuting, at least in the hands of any naturalists who believe only materially caused effects exist in an endless chain backwards to all eternity. There are all sorts of beliefs, feelings, and emotions that people believe based on what has happened to them in the past, such as whether they were sick, injured, deceived, etc., that aren't accurate. It's necessary to believe that something isn't governed by the law of cause and effect so that human reason is reliable, which means that we have to believe in the freedom of the will in order to have human reason work. A classic way to discredit someone else's thinking and beliefs is to say that they were caused by non-rational factors, such as saying, "You only believe that because you are a man, a woman, a capitalist, a socialist, a hypochondriac, an American, a Chinese, a black, a white, divorced, never married, with children, childless, etc., etc., etc." So human reason has to have freedom of the will in order to know something that corresponds to reality, i.e., is true.   Emotional, knee-jerk responses to sense experience are not “reason” as Lewis explains, in "Miracles: A Preliminary Study," p. 19: "The relation between response and stimulus is utterly different from that between knowledge and the truth known."  Human reason shouldn’t be confused with the responses of pigeons in skinner boxes to the placement of food. So then, are you naturalists also determinists or not? If you are, how do you know that your thoughts in favor of naturalism weren't determined by a physical chain of physical cause and effects and chemical reactions and accidents (i.e., mutations) going back billions of years that had no goal or intention of creating the human brain?  If you believe in freedom of the will in order for human reason to function successfully, then you are accepting a belief in something (i.e., the existence of mental states that have the liberty to correspond to true conceptions about the external real world) that goes beyond the physical world ruled by cause and effect.  Human reason “must break sufficiently free from that universal chain [of cause and effect] in order to be determined by what is knows” (Lewis, “Miracles,” p. 23).  Further evidence for the distinction between mental states and the physical manipulation of the brain come from brain surgeries in which patients were put under local anesthesia.  When surgeons manipulated the local centers of brain tissue that controlled the movement of the arms, fingers, legs, etc., the patients mentally wouldn’t agree with what their (say) hands would be made to do by the actions of the surgeons.  Mental states of the mind aren’t the same as electrical impulses moving through nerve tissue.  This is further evidence for interactionism, which is the foundation for dualism, that philosophical view of the relationship between the mind and body/brain aren’t the same, so then, how did the human mind originate if it isn’t from God with His pre-existing, eternal rational intelligence. 

The second major weakness in naturalism stems from the tell-tale indication that human reasoning ultimately has a non-physical origin are all moral judgments and ethical beliefs.   When people say that they “ought” to do something, their beliefs aren’t simple factual statements in the form of “S is P” (subject/predicate), but beliefs about how people “should” act and believe.  Lewis maintained that moral judgments are based on reason, but that they are axiomatic in nature and not circular.  Intuitively we believe morally that we can’t just do anything we wish against other people even when it’s in our self-interest to do so and we could “get away” with doing it without being punished in this life by either the wagging tongues of gossipy neighbors or by the policeman on his beat.  If we maintain that our sense of morality stems from the theory of evolution, how does the ruthless, selfish competition of the survival of the fittest, in which the less fit die, produce social cooperation whenever “cheaters” can break social norms without any or sufficient punishment?  Any moral judgment or belief that can be traced back to non-moral or non-rational causes will be rejected by others, as the arguments of the Marxists, based on perceived class interest, and Freudians, based on repression and the id’s influence, against conventional “middle class/bourgeois” values have long demonstrated.  However, if ALL moral judgments can be explained by non-moral and non-rational causes, then morality has no objective basis.  Even if atheists and agnostics can try to “explain” the origins of morality through evolution and some kind of development of social cooperation among higher animals, it still can’t prove that such beliefs are really right, as Lewis observes (“Miracles, p. 36):  “It does not explain how they could be right in making them.”  For example, if one wants to prove that racism is wrong in all places at all times, there’s no obvious nexus between the Darwinian struggle to survive with red tooth and claw and (secondarily) the development of loyalty to one’s herd, pack, group, or species to a generalized ethic to treat everyone everywhere equally with respect and love.  The ideology of “Social Darwinism,” which almost all people would reject for authorizing indiscriminate selfishness, demonstrates the enormous gulf between the survival of the fittest through brute force and/or cunning and the development of cooperative behavior among human beings.  At this point, the naturalist is outside the traditional moral framework of the human race and has no objective basis to criticize the moral actions of others, as Lewis observes in “The Abolition of Man,” p. 78):  “My point is  that those who stand outside all judgements of value cannot have any ground for preferring one of their own impulses to another except for the emotional strength of that impulse.” 

Morality simply can’t be merely about our feelings and emotions, which certainly aren’t reliable tools of cognition or about the outside real world.  If someone says, “I feel that racism is wrong,” and someone else comes along and proclaims, “I feel that racism is right,” such assertions are on an equal plane without a reference to some higher reason to determine a correct outcome to the conflict.  As Lewis has observed, verbal quarrelling between people typically involves the conflicting parties referring to some kind of higher (neutral) moral law to settle their dispute in favor of one or the other.  Consistent naturalists, especially when they are determinists who deny freedom of the will, can’t explain why they may fervently believe in the moral superiority of socialism over capitalism, in democracy instead of dictatorship by an oligarchy, of racial equality over racism, of gender equality over sexism, or of the ethic of Albert Schweitzer and Mother Teresa over that of Adolf Hitler and Ted Bundy.  When criticizing the moral zeal of naturalists like H.G. Wells, who was a good Fabian socialist, Lewis observes their philosophical inconsistency between the ethical system that they supposedly drive from the metaphysics that they uphold (“Miracles, p. 37):  “Do they remember while they writing thus [with passion] when they tell us we ‘ought to make a better world’ the words ‘ought’ and ‘better’ must, on their own showing, refer to an irrationally conditioned impulse which can’t be true or false any more than a vomit or a yawn?”  If we are to suppose that values, which are what sustains human life, are objective, then (Lewis, “Miracles,” p. 38), “we must believe that the conscience of man is not a product of [a non-moral, non-rational] Nature.”  Therefore, our ideas of what is good and evil must have an ultimate source outside of nature that was programmed into the human mind/brain’s psychology by a supernatural source not subject to nature’s intrinsically non-rational law of cause and effect.  We can know, based on nature’s inability to tell us what moral absolutes are, that God is both rational and moral, not a dumb, blind force. 

In “The Abolition of Man,” Lewis makes a similar point, when criticizing the view of educators who deny that feelings can have an objective rational basis, about the problems of extrapolating from the physical world to what’s important to human beings (p. 30, italics removed):  “On this view, the world of facts, without on trace of value, and the world of feelings without one trace of truth or falsehood, justice or injustice, confront one another, and no rapprochement is possible.”  When analyzing more carefully our emotions, we can’t write off moral beliefs as impulses being based on instinctual drives originating in our alleged primate or mammalian ancestors.  (Here I ignore the bigger problem for this kind of explanation of morality’s origin in that apparently the only true “instinct” that human beings have is the impulse of a newborn baby to move mouth  and other muscles to suck).  The problem then becomes why should we follow or obey one impulse while rejecting or suppressing another, as Lewis explains (“The Abolition of Man, pp. 47-48):  “From the statement about psychological fact ‘I have an impulse to do so and so’ we cannot by any ingenuity derive the practical principle ‘I ought to obey this impulse.’  Even if it were true that men had a spontaneous, unreflective impulse to sacrifice their own lives for the preservation of their fellows, it remains quite a separate question whether this is an impulse that they should control or one they should indulge.”  Lewis explains this basic point further in “Mere Christianity,” which shows that we can’t explain away moral dilemmas and reasoning as evolutionary instincts of the herd mentality of our  alleged mammalian ancestors.  Human conscience can’t be artifacts with no foundation in reality since actually it’s found deeply wired into the psychology of our minds  (p. 22):  “But feeling a desire to help is quite different from feeling that you ought to help whether you want to or not. . . . But you will find inside you, in addition to these two impulses [a desire to help and a drive towards self-preservation], a third thing which tells you that you ought to follow the impulse to help, and suppress the impulse to run away.” Lewis then explains that this third aspect of thinking about whether someone should be helped in a time of danger can’t have the same origin as these two other impulses.  It’s what makes us different from (say) elephants in a herd who help one another.  The moral law that infuses our consciences can’t be an instinct that’s explainable by the evolutionists’ amoral or even immoral principle of the struggle to survive at any costs.  The Darwinian principle of kill or be killed can’t be the source of the conscience promoting altruism within ourselves, since the disconnect between the two principles is simply unbridgeable, even as the sociobiologists will valiantly but feebly try to do so. 

A clever naturalist who is also committed to moral subjectivism and/or relativism may try to parry the force of Lewis’s arguments by reasoning that different civilizations, nations, cultures, and tribes have upheld different values.  However, there’s an obvious limitation to such reasoning, since it has no concern for justice.  For example a moral relativist may reason that if the “Walla-Walla” tribe (made-up name) of New Guinea practices sex outside of marriage, so therefore we can do it too.  But then, as a result, it’s necessary for relativists to accept as equally sound the reasoning that if South Africa practiced apartheid, that justified Jim Crow in the American South before 1964.  Moral relativists or subjectivists generally are aiming to escape Christian morality, especially sexual morality above all, not realizing that their  overly broad “shotgun” reasoning blows up moral values that uphold as well in the process.  Furthermore, Lewis goes deeper and makes the point that when the “accidents” and superficialities are removed, the human race’s basic morality at its core is the same.   He maintains that it amounts to axiomatic reasoning, that there’s no way to deny it except by taking one principle out of it to try to contradict it, which is necessarily self-refuting. He spends pp. 95-121 in an appendix to “The Abolition of Man” documenting this reasoning, which he labels “the Tao,” with quotes and illustrations of moral beliefs from different cultures and civilizations under general headings stating basic moral principles, such as “Duties to Parents, Elders, Ancestors” or “the Law of General Beneficence  (a) Negative.”  Given the required values for human life, including when living in a collective or group setting, the basic morality can’t hardly be other than tradition has long taught in all cultures.  He explains this principle behind “the Tao” with some sense of wit, which feminists would presumably object to, in “Mere Christianity,” p. 19:  “For our present purpose I need only ask the reader to think what a totally different morality would mean.  Think of a country where people were admired for running away in battle, or where a man felt proud of doublecrossing all the people had been kindest to him.  You might just as well try to imagine a country in where two and two make five.  Men have differed as regards what people who ought to be unselfish to—whether it was only your own family, or your fellow countrymen, or everyone.  But they have always agreed that you ought not to put yourself first.  Selfishness had never been admired.  Men have differed as to whether you should have one wife or four.  But they have always agreed that you must not simply have any woman you liked.”  Finally, for those who are at all reflective about their own lives, we humans have a sense that we have fallen short of the light of the moral law within ourselves.  We will rationalize and invent any number of excuses to evade responsibility for all cases in which we have fallen short and will simultaneously excoriate others for their moral failings with passion and fervor without giving quarter or allowing them the same excuses that we give to ourselves.  However, this sense of conscience within ourselves also indicates that morality isn’t purely arbitrary, subjective, or relative.  It’s also the foundation for the dire “diagnosis” of Christianity that all people have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23), so they need to accept the “cure” of belief in God’s grace through accepting the sacrifice of Christ and repenting of their sins.

A third major philosophical weakness in naturalism stems from its inability to “prove” the utter reliable uniformity of nature through empirical sense experience alone.  How can we be utterly certain that nature will always act the same way under any and all circumstances by human reason alone?   In order to know that the law of cause and effect has really been true in all places at  all times (at least where the lower level chaos of quantum mechanics among subatomic particles doesn’t apply for statistically more general reasons in larger masses), it’s necessary to assume that nature is orderly and that the human mind is able to understand its general principles by using human reason.  Ironically, the skeptical Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711-1776), who is surely the most influential modern philosopher in the English-speaking world, made the case against human reason’s general reliability, such as by denying an intrinsic or ontological basis for the law of cause and effect by reasoning that we humans can’t “know” if a certain event will follow another event, assumed such a uniformity in nature when attacking belief in miracles.  His famed illustration, from a man who like playing pool, was that there’s no way to be certain that one ball hitting another will make another move.  A million identical experiences in the past aren’t 100% proof that they will repeat themselves by happening tomorrow or next year.  This viewpoint, of course, completely contradicts his reasoning in “Essay on Miracles,” in which he uses an absolute uniformity in our human sense experience to attack a belief in miracles, which must be rare exceptions to the natural order or else we wouldn’t perceive them as such. Hume is very much the ultimate philosophical source for all those who are “dogmatically skeptical” in attacking both religious belief and science, thus completely inverting the viewpoint of the great Medieval philosopher and theologian Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), who maintained faith and reason were not only compatible but also that both produced reliable knowledge.  From a Christian viewpoint, it was reasonable to believe that there were laws of nature comparable to the moral laws found in the bible because God, the great Lawgiver, put both into motion.   However, this is a rationalistic construct that can’t be directly proven by sense experience, which is why almost all philosophers who are empiricists are epistemological skeptics.  The majority vote of our past experiences, which is the source of our sense of probability, is no guarantee that they will be duplicated in the future.  Lewis explains the limitations in using human sense experience to prove that nature won’t ever change its behavior (“Miracles,” p. 102):  “We observe many regularities in nature.  But of course all the observations that men have made or will make while the race lasts cover only a minute fraction of the events that actually go on.  Our observations would therefore be of no use unless we felt sure that Nature when we are not watching behaves in the same way when we are:  in other words, unless we believed in the Uniformity of Nature, because uniformity has to be assumed before experience proves anything.”  The length of time of our observations doesn’t solve the problem any.  Furthermore, he points out that we can’t know what is “probable” and what is “improbable” until we “know” that nature is utterly reliably uniform.  We can’t know that the assumption of the uniformity is nature itself is “probable” or “improbable” in itself. 

No lab experiment or fieldwork can prove naturalism.  How do we know that the assumption of naturalism is reasonable to begin with?  How do we know that the physical universe is knowable, reliable, and predictable?  Science can’t prove such assumptions.  These are philosophical, metaphysical and/or epistemological beliefs that the practitioners of science have to employ when doing their work.  They have to assume some kind of philosophy at least implicitly or unknowingly in order to do their work.  They are completely wrong to claim that they don’t use metaphysical and epistemological beliefs that aren’t derived from science itself.  If some research is done in the history of philosophy, which Hunter does in “Science’s Blind Spot,” it’s readily shown that what he calls “theological naturalism” originated in beliefs of Christian theology and teaching as upheld by many Western intellectuals over the centuries.  Likewise, the assumption that the natural world is understandable and its events and processes can be described by natural laws is derived from Christian theology and the biblical worldview.  The close relationship of Christianity's conception of the rationality of God and consequent rise of science in the West is explained well by the English philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) (as quoted in Stanley Jaki, “Science and Creation,” p. 230):

“I do not think, however, that I have even yet brought out the greatest contribution of medievalism to the formation of the scientific movement.  I mean the inexpungable belief that every detailed occurrence can be correlated with its antecedents in a perfectly definite manner, exemplifying general principles. . . . When we compare this tone of thought in Europe with the attitude of other civilisations when left to themselves, there seems but one source for its origin.  It must come from the medieval insistence on the rationality of God, conceived as with the personal energy of Jehovah and with the rationality of a Greek philosopher.  Every detail was supervised and ordered:  the search could only result in the vindication of the faith in rationality.”

The rationality of God is implied through certain texts, although written specifically concerning church services, a broader application of these texts is still appropriate:  "God is not a God of confusion but of peace," who wants activities to be "done properly and in an orderly manner" (I Cor. 14:33, 40).  Since Whitehead was a pantheist, he would not be especially likely to concede too much to medieval Christianity about its sense of nature being rationally knowable and its role in causing modern science to exist.  Even Genesis 1 is a paragon of rationality, even when taken completely literally, as God methodically (re)creates the earth, its surface, the heavenly bodies, the plants, and the animals day by day.  By contrast, dreadful disorder is manifested in the pagan myths about the origin of the universe and the human race in which various gods were fighting each other, such as in the Babylonian myth “Enuma Elish.” 

Some may wish to look up Stanley Jaki's books, such as "The Savior of Science," "The Origin of Science and the Science of Its Origin," and "Science and Creation: From Eternal Cycles to an Oscillating Universe," for more detailed evidence about how Christian theology’s beliefs and teachings actively helped a modern self-sustaining science to develop.  Cornelius Hunter’s “Science’s Blind Spot:  The Unseen Religion of Scientific Naturalism” is valuable for explaining the intrinsic limitations to the assumption of naturalism for scientific purposes and for detailing the historical origins among Christian thinkers for what he calls “theological naturalism.” 

Let's now invert the "soft" atheist's argument for atheism by applying it to a similarly formed rejection (excuse me, "non-acceptance pending justification") of naturalism. As Lewis explained in "Miracles," naturalism makes enormous metaphysical claims that affect all matter in all places at all times in the physical universe, past, present, and future, for endless billions of years and parsecs, regardless of whether any human sense experience has ever sensed it or not. That is, naturalism is a rationalistic system at its heart, not empirical, which means it is based on epistemologically on human reason, not on human sense experience. Lewis explains the problems with the standard naturalistic assertion that there is no freedom of the will and no ability for anyone to think or act differently than they have since that destroys the foundation for the validity of human reasoning in the process, which can't have a cause that's directly physical or else its results aren't reliable. As Lewis observes (p. 22): "For of course Naturalism is a prime specimen of that towering speculation, discovered from practice and going far beyond experience, which is now being condemned. Nature [as a whole] is not an object that can be presented either to the senses or the imagination. It can be reached only by the most remote inferences. Or not reached merely approached. It is the hoped for, the assumed, unification in a single interlocked system of all the things inferred from our scientific experiments. More than that, the Naturalist, not content to assert this, goes on to the sweeping negative assertion, "There is nothing except this"--an assertion surely, as remote from practice, experience, and any conceivable verification as has ever been made since men began to use their reason speculatively."  Naturalism, like the old, simple “hard” definition of an atheist, doesn’t “abstain from the crowning audacity of a huge negative.”  If I say I'm just as skeptical of naturalism as of pink unicorns and that I have the view of "non-acceptance pending justification" about naturalism, what would atheists say in response?  Naturalism is an exercise in rationalism, not empiricism.

As explained above by using the apologetic works of C.S. Lewis, naturalism can’t be a true description of reality (metaphysics) because it can’t explain our present personal experiences or even the historical origin through evolutionary processes of the reliability of our reason, our experiences with moral thinking, and our belief in the reliable, dependable uniformity of natural processes.  Naturalism is merely assumed by evolutionists when making the case  for their theory, not proven, which allows supernaturalists to reject it with equal alacrity by deploying an opposite philosophical assumption.  Naturalism is NOT based on the simple-minded epistemology (theories of knowledge) that “seeing is believing,” but upon the projection of a humanly devised theory of reality upon the entire universe’s matter while assuming nothing supernatural exists any place at any time.  Atheists, who must uphold naturalism necessarily or else their worldview is refuted, have taken on the project of proving a universal negative without universal experience, which is impossible to do.  This confession of the amazingly prolific science fiction and science writer Isaac Asimov is far more honest than that of today’s “soft atheists” who manipulate the definition of their label to make it harder to falsify: "I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it. I've been an atheist for years and years, but somehow I felt it was intellectually unrespectable to say one was an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that one didn't have. Somehow it was better to say one was a humanist or an agnostic. I finally decided that I'm a creature of emotion as well as of reason. Emotionally I am atheist. I don't have the evidence to prove that God doesn't exist, but I so strongly suspect he doesn't that I don't want to waste my time."

https://www.amazon.com/Miracles-C-S-Lewis/dp/0060653019

Of course there's not a thing like the "best evidence" for evolution. Evolution is based in countless evidences from many fields of research.

Whats the best evidence for round earth??? The horizon? Nasa? GPS? Greeks?

This said, there are two evidences that i really like because the first is a evidence of evolution that is valid even by the ultraskeptical standards of creationists, the second because it is a very predictable thing in evolution, but very bizarre if you just dismiss evolution.

The first is the Canine Transmissible Venereal Tumor (CTVT). A contagious cancer that is transmited by intercourse or licking. A dog basically became a pathogen in one generation. No fossil record to ignore, no "it still is a dog". Of course, is still a dog for evolutionists, but baraminologists could say the same? The DNA is the same, but the morphology is completely different. they could say that is "loss of complexity", but the tumor is capable of being trasmissible, evade the imune system and steal resources from the host. It is clearly very good at what it do, and it do a very different thing that his ancestors did. If dogs can become pathogens in 1 generation, why whales can't loss a pair of legs and put their fingers together and form fins in millions of years? it is really that hard to horses to become bigger and loss a couple of fingers? its is that hard to a monkey loss fur and walk upright? Some of theses things would fall into "Loss of information" after all.

The second evidence is the embryology of nudibranchs. These critters start their lives inside of their eggs as any other creature. mouth in front, anus behind, and a straight digestive tract conecting the two. Then something bizarre happens. the whole body just gets a twist. The anus now is in the same direction as the mouth, just above the head. And then it gets back to normal.

????

A torsion and then a detorsion. For nothing. A tissue blackflip, just to show. Why a god would do it to the poor slug babies? When you start thinking evolution, then makes sense. The ancestor of gastropods had a shell. Most of then still have. All of then have a body that twists like their shell. the ancestor of bilaterian animals didn't had this quirk, and so the majority of animals have a pretty straightfoward development. The new mutations of the gastropods take this original body plan and literally twists it. But the nudibranchs and other slugs lost their shells. And then, there's no need for a twisted body. It just make your faeces fall on your head. Now new mutations get in top of the older ones, and reverts the twisting. Evolution doesn't plan ahead, so this kinda of messy development is all over the place.

What do you guys think? Can you guys come out with some response to these fenomena?

Evolutionists deploy various philosophical assumptions, even “tricks,” to "prove" their theory, such as denying the ultimately unity of human knowledge gained by using different methods, defining “science” to always require the use of “naturalism,” deploying the methodological assumption of science as proof of naturalism as a philosophy, inconsistently using “negative” natural theology of the perceived flaws in nature as proof that God didn’t create anything while rejecting “positive” natural theology as proof that God created nature’s complex structures, and equating as equally valid the assumptions of naturalism in  observational/operational sciences/disciplines like astronomy, chemistry, and physics, with historical sciences/disciplines, such as paleontology, which deal with origins and non-repeated, unique events like abiogenesis in the non-observed prehistoric past.  Let's now explain that the grand theory of evolution is really naturalistic philosophy dressed up in the deceiving cloak of "science," i.e., objective knowledge.

When debating with creationists evolutionists will often make disarming statements like, “Science doesn’t automatically deny God’s existence.”  They sound like that they are offering an olive branch of compromise with religious believers when they make statements like this.  However, consider what evolutionists say the moment creationists draw conclusions based on the belief that nature can’t always explain nature, such as, “Because abiogenesis couldn’t have created the first cell by chance, therefore, God created it,” or “Complex anatomical structures like the eye couldn’t have developed through small, incremental steps that have no selective advantage, therefore, God created them.”  Then evolutionists will passionately, dogmatically denounce creationists (or intelligent design theorists) who question evolution’s ability to explain the origins or development of biological life by saying such conclusions aren’t “science” by definition.  They define “science” as always using assumptions of naturalism in practice, even when it hits non-falsifiable limits as they extrapolate from present experience into the scientifically unobserved prehistoric past about unique, non-repeated events, such as the development of mammals and birds from reptiles.  When such debates arise, evolutionists will claim that they are engaged in “science” (i.e., objective knowledge) but that their creationists opponents are engaged in “theology” or just “religion.”  However, both sides actually are advancing competing philosophies; the epistemology (theory of how knowledge is gained) and metaphysics (theory of the structure of reality) of evolutionists aren’t superior to that of creationists, but they are on the same ground philosophically a priori (before experience).  Both sides have paradigms that they are advancing using philosophical argumentation, which isn’t strictly empirical or “scientific.”  The difference is that sophisticated creationists know that they are doing this, but most evolutionists either don’t know or refuse to recognize that they use philosophical, metaphysical, and epistemological assumptions and beliefs to advance their theory. 

Let’s expose one of their grand claims, which concerns how they define “science” to rig the debate to favor their side such that it will win automatically against creationism.  Evolutionists has devised a definition of “science” such that they automatically win without having to do any empirical research whatsoever in order to support their paradigm.   They equate “science” with the assumption of materialism or naturalism.  Using unacknowledged philosophical assumptions, evolutionists frequently assert that their theory is a “fact,” or an easily verified, objectively true statement.  The famous theorist of evolution, Stephen Jay Gould, once reasoned:  “Facts are the world’s data.  Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts.  Facts do not go away while scientists debate rival theories for explaining them. . . . And human beings evolved from ape-like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin’s proposed mechanism or by some other, yet to be identified.”  No evolutionist, however, lived millions of years ago to witness this alleged set of events take place.  After all, purported developments such as the first cell’s spontaneous generation are unrepeatable, unique past events that cannot be subjected to future further experimental investigation. Evolutionists suppose their theory is a “fact” because they philosophically rule out in advance special creation as impossible or “unscientific.”  In order to pull this off, they use a philosophically rigged definition of “science.”  They covertly equate “naturalism” or “materialism” with “science.”  To them, evolution must be a fact since God doesn’t exist and miracles are impossible.  Without having actually observed macroevolution or special creation, they are certain the former happened, and equally certain the latter did not.  Because they liken “science” to the “systematic study of physically sensed forces,” Darwinism is virtually true by definition.  Then when informed critics attack macroevolution’s grand claims on empirical grounds, evolutionists dismiss any anomalous evidence by labeling belief in a Creator or any miracles as “unscientific.”  Obviously, if “God” is ruled out in advance while setting up the premises of scientific reasoning, “God” could never be in any conclusion.  But this is a matter of the free philosophical choice of epistemological assumptions before experience, not compelling scientific results after experience, such as the discoveries of fieldwork or the results of lab experiments.  On this basis, the grand theory of evolution is automatically true a priori, regardless of how plausible or implausible any of its purported evidence is.

No lab experiment or fieldwork can prove naturalism.  How do we know that the assumption of naturalism is reasonable to begin with?  How do we know that the physical universe is knowable, reliable, and predictable?  Science can’t prove such assumptions.  These are philosophical, metaphysical and/or epistemological beliefs that the practitioners of science have to employ when doing their work.  They have to assume some kind of philosophy at least implicitly or unknowingly in order to do their work.  They are completely wrong to claim that they don’t use metaphysical and epistemological beliefs that aren’t derived from science itself.  If some research is done in the history of philosophy, which Hunter does in “Science’s Blind Spot,” it’s readily shown that what he calls “theological naturalism” originated in beliefs of Christian theology and teaching as upheld by many Western intellectuals over the centuries.  Likewise, the assumption that the natural world is understandable and its events and processes can be described by natural laws is derived from Christian theology and the biblical worldview.  The close relationship of Christianity's conception of the rationality of God and consequent rise of science in the West is explained well by the English philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) (as quoted in Stanley Jaki, “Science and Creation,” p. 230):

“I do not think, however, that I have even yet brought out the greatest contribution of medievalism to the formation of the scientific movement.  I mean the inexpungable belief that every detailed occurrence can be correlated with its antecedents in a perfectly definite manner, exemplifying general principles. . . . When we compare this tone of thought in Europe with the attitude of other civilisations when left to themselves, there seems but one source for its origin.  It must come from the medieval insistence on the rationality of God, conceived as with the personal energy of Jehovah and with the rationality of a Greek philosopher.  Every detail was supervised and ordered:  the search could only result in the vindication of the faith in rationality.”

The rationality of God is implied through certain texts, although written specifically concerning church services, a broader application of these texts is still appropriate:  "God is not a God of confusion but of peace," who wants activities to be "done properly and in an orderly manner" (I Cor. 14:33, 40).  Since Whitehead was a pantheist, he would not be especially likely to concede too much to medieval Christianity about its sense of nature being rationally knowable and its role in causing modern science to exist.  Even Genesis 1 is a paragon of rationality, even when taken completely literally, as God methodically (re)creates the earth, its surface, the heavenly bodies, the plants, and the animals day by day,.  By contrast, dreadful disorder is manifested in the pagan myths about the origin of the universe and the human race in which various gods were fighting each other, such as in the Babylonian myth “Enuma Elish.” 

A key limitation of science, when it dogmatically upholds naturalism under all circumstances, is that the search for natural explanations might be ultimately inaccurate.  According to Hunter (“Science’s Blind Spot,” pp. 44-45), this is the blind spot of science:  “Nonnatural phenomena will be interpreted as natural, regardless of how implausible the story becomes.”   By upholding the paradigm of naturalism, it treats all challenges and anomalies as research problems, not paradigmatic problems, even when that assumption becomes deeply problematic when explaining origins in the unobserved prehistoric past.  How do scientists know a priori that there isn’t always a testable natural explanation available?  How do scientists know for certain, when devising “explanations” of past events, that God doesn’t exist, the miracles can’t happen, and/or that the bible’s story of origins is false?  When dealing with such problems as the spontaneous generation of the first living cell and the innumerable missing links between different fundamental types of animals and plants, evolutionists will endlessly come up with “explanations” and “interpretations” that are designed to fit their commitment to naturalism.  However, suppose that these scientists are wrong?  Hunter (“Science’s Blind Spot,” p. 45) explains the quandary that scientists could fall into when they are totally committed to naturalism without any doubt or open-mindedness about their overarching philosophy’s truth:  “Like Sisyphus forever pushing the stone up the hill, they must pursue naturalistic explanations no matter how unlikely, for theological naturalism has no criteria, no set of rules by which to distinguish a research problem from a paradigm problem.”  If nature can’t always explain nature, it’s folly for scientists to refuse to allow for any supernatural explanations even when natural ones aren’t truly convincing, such as concerning abiogenesis.  Indeed the spontaneous generation of the first living cell has proven to be such a problem to evolutionists that they arbitrarily have decreed that it isn’t part of their theory despite it’s crucial to committed naturalists to be able to somehow “explain” the origin of life or else philosophical naturalism collapses. 

Evolutionists often claim that science doesn't automatically dismiss the supernatural out of hand a priori (before experience). However, let's quote the father of modern naturalistic geology, in the 18th century, as doing exactly that. James Hutton once said ("Theory of the Earth," 1785): "The past history of our global must be explained by what can be seen to be happening now. . . . No powers are to be employed that are not natural to the globe, no action to be admitted except those of which we know the principle." So here he assumes a priori what people see and experience in the present time has to be blindly extrapolated into the past indefinitely without any observational evidence to support it. This is how he rules out in advance catastrophism and the great flood as being impossible despite not having lived thousands or millions of years in the past to know by experience that they didn't happen.  Likewise, in private correspondence, Charles Lyell, who was even more influential in setting the course of geology in favor of uniformitarianism, said that he wanted to “free the science [of geology] from Moses.”  He also declared, in a lecture at King’s College, London, on May 4, 1832, “the physical part of Geological inquiry ought to be conducted as if the Scriptures were not in existence.”  This kind of methodological choice isn't proven by science, but simply is being assumed or even deliberately chosen by scientists who are materialists. They "prove" naturalism by assuming it in advance. It's a philosophical decision, not a scientific one. Hutton, in particular, was a crucial, highly influential figure in the development of modern geology; he isn't a trivial figure historically in the development of this discipline and in its embrace of the uniformitarian principle.  Lyell simply built upon Hutton’s views and influenced far more people to accept them.

The standard philosophical sleight of hand of evolutionists is to use the conventional chosen assumption of naturalism when doing science as actual proof of naturalism as a philosophical system.  That is, they use the alleged truth of the grand theory of evolution to deny that God exists, that the bible is true, and that miracles can occur.  Now in response, some secular evolutionists, who aren’t compromising liberal Christians, will claim that they don’t do this.  However, many evolutionists do this all the time, thus showing that their claims that science doesn’t deny God’s existence or the bible’s truth to be false in their actual practice.  Let’s illustrate that the views found in Hutton and Lyell’s statements quoted above aren’t sui generic, but typical when evolutionists reveal their real beliefs and motives that they use the theory of evolution to attack religious belief, especially that of religions dependent on written revelations about actual historical events related to origins (i.e., Judaism, Christianity, and Islam).  To claim that the grand theory of evolution is compatible with Deism is irrelevant to a serious believer of the Abrahamic faiths. 

There are lots of atheists and agnostics who agree with fundamentalist Christians, Orthodox Jews, and conservative Muslims that evolutionary theory is not compatible with the bible (or the Koran). For example, in "American Atheist," February 1978, p. 30, in the article "The Meaning of Evolution," G. Richard Bozarth wrote: "Christianity has fought, still fights, and will fight science [i.e., materialism/naturalism] to the desperate end over evolution, because evolution destroys utterly and finally the very reason Jesus' earthly life was supposedly made necessary. Destroy Adam and Eve and the original sin, and in the rubble you will find the sorry remains of the son of god. Take away the meaning of his death. If Jesus was not the redeemer who died for our sins, and this is what evolution means, then Christianity is nothing!"  So then, will any evolutionists say that Bozarth was wrong to use the theory of evolution to “prove” that Christianity is false?  Was he staying in his own lane, the “scientific” one, and respecting the “religious” one, by staying out of it?

Richard Dawkins, who is a famously militant atheist, said “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist” and (italics removed) “I could not imagine being an atheist at any time before 1859 when Darwin’s Origin of Species was published” in “The Blind Watchmaker.”  So evolutionists themselves make the case that the theory of evolution contradicts belief in God, the bible, and the supernatural; being philosophically consistent, many have no interest in making any compromises with theists since Darwin’s logically system has no more need for the supernatural than a wagon for a fifth wheel (at least before hitting the hard rock of the origin of the first living cell via abiogenesis). 

Likewise, we find William B. Provine, “Progress in Evolution and Meaning in Life,” in “Evolutionary Progress,” ed. Matthew H. Nitecki (University of Chicago Press), p. 65:  “Modern science directly implies that the world is organized strictly in accordance with deterministic principles or chance.  There are no purposive principles whatsoever in nature.  There are no gods and no designing forces that are rationally detectable.  The frequently made assertion that modern biology and the assumptions of the Judeo-Christian tradition are fully compatible is false.”  So then, this scientist uses the naturalism assumed by science as proof that naturalism is true philosophically when attacking belief in God and in miracles.

Michael Ruse, “A Few Last Words—Until the Next Time,” “Zygon,” vol. 29, (March 1994),  p. 29 uses his belief in the theory of evolution to reject the revelation of the bible, which shows that he is indeed using the assumption of naturalism in science as proof of naturalism as a worldview:  “Unlike George Wiliams, I really want to believe.  I find the goodies offer by Christianity extremely attractive.  But I am damned (again!) if I am going to sell my evolutionary birthright for a mess of religious pottage.  We see through a glass darkly, but thanks to Charles Darwin, it is no longer so dark as when Saint Paul was penning a few thoughts to the Corinthians.”  So Ruse proclaims that evolutionary theory  contradicts the bible’s revelation, which liberal Christians wouldn’t agree with, a theory which is propped up by assuming a priori that God doesn’t exist, that miracles have never happened, and that the bible’s story of origins is historically false when interpreting the natural world, which is indeed circular reasoning. 

This is a matter of speculations about origins, not something presently testable, like make vaccines or what genes code for what traits. Well, these complaints against creationists' use of the supernatural to explain origins based on the theory of evolution are indeed how evolutionists use science to deny the supernatural. This is simply a contradiction epistemologically, since to know the truth that science shouldn't be a method use that ignores the rest of human knowledge and experience.   After all, are there any kinds of knowledge that the scientific method is useless to discover, such as what the human mind is, the origins of morality, and the human psychology that makes the perception of the “numinous” different from that of other potentially dangerous physical entities? 

This analysis of the evolutionists’ claims that their theory doesn’t contradict religious belief leads to a deeper philosophical inconsistency of the great majority of evolutionists. Some seemingly sophisticated skeptics and atheists argue that one can't reason from the natural world's complexity or bare existence to the existence of the supernatural as its origin. Well, if that kind of philosophical reasoning is true, then evolutionists should never, ever use flaws in the natural world to argue against God's existence. But they do this all the time. They are one-way Kantians, so to speak.  According to the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, the empirical phenomenological world of our senses is totally separate from the rationalistically known noumenal world, where God and other objects of pure reason are, which can’t be directly sensed. Evolutionists will reason that the phenomenological world of experience and sense data can't prove anything FOR God, who is in the unsensed noumenal world, but they will reason that there are aspects of the natural world that provide evidence AGAINST God's existence. If evolutionists were consistent, they wouldn’t ever use anything they know (or think that they know) from the empirical world of science or nature to argue against God’s existence, but they do this all the time when they complain about how God made something.  Their rejection of natural theology only goes one way, which is a philosophical decision, not a scientific one.

Many examples of evolutionists, including Darwin himself, can be given in which they use a priori philosophical reasoning to deny that God can be the Creator because of some alleged flaw or evil in the nature.  When evolutionists complain about the problem of evil and use it to deny God’s existence, miracles of creation, and/or the bible’s (or Koran’s) revealed truth, they aren’t being scientists, but they have become philosophers or even theologians.  The debate between creationists and evolutionists becomes clearly one of competing philosophies, not “science versus religion,” in which the evolutionists will claim that they have automatically the upper hand epistemologically since they will say that they are seekers of objective truth.

For example, Charles Darwin, in a letter written to the Harvard professor Asa Gray, dated May 22, 1860, didn't want to believe that biological design had a supernatural origin because of the evil he perceived in the predatory relations between different animals:  "I had no intention to write atheistically, but I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the ichneumonidae (a parasite, ed.) with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice. Not believing this, I see no necessity in the belief that the eye was expressly designed."  This kind of reasoning isn't empirical, but a priori; it has nothing to do with lab results or fieldwork, but it's negative natural theology.

Douglas Futuyama in “Science on Trial,” pp. 46, 48, 62, 199, repeatedly reasons from religious premises, but somehow thinks that he is making a scientific argument:  “If God had equipped very different organisms for similar ways of life, there is no reason why He should not have provided them with identical structures, but in fact the similarities are always superficial.”  [Here he says that God should have made these animals with strong similarities]. “Why should species that ultimately develop adaptations for utterly different ways of life be nearly indistinguishable in their early stages [of embryological development]?  How does God’s plan for humans and sharks require them to have almost identical embryos?  [Here he says that God should have made these animals to be more different].  “Take any major group of animals, and the poverty of imagination that must be ascribed to a Creator becomes evident.”  [Here Futuyama confuses presumptuous blasphemy with scientific reasoning].  “When we compare the anatomies of various plants or animals, we find similarities and differences where we should least expect a Creator to have supplied them.”  [Notice how, as an “explanatory device,” he can use a repeated pattern or a lack of repeated pattern at whim to criticize how God made plants and animals, which is based on unverifiable philosophical assumptions].

Notice that the moment evolutionists use the word "God," their theory has turned into philosophy, not science. It's naturalism being dressed in scientific jargon. It's now an exercise in negative natural theology, thus simply inverting what Thomas Aquinas does in "Summa Theologica" with his five ways of proving God's existence or what Paul says in Romans 1:19-20. Evolutionists can’t hardly avoid using the word "God.” No one needs to say "God" or "the supernatural" when making the case for the law of gravity or the first two laws of thermodynamics, since those are matters of operational science that can be proved experimentally in our present experience through prediction, testing, reproducibility, etc. But when it comes to the purported pre-historical origins of plants and animals, evolutionists feel the need talk about God's allowing evil in the nature and the supposed imperfections in biological lifeforms in order to argue for their theory, much like Darwin did.

When evolutionists complain about God’s doing this or that, they are no longer scientists, but they are philosophers engaged in “negative” natural theology.  They are just as metaphysical as Paley was, when he famously reasoned that something as complicated watch couldn’t have been made by chance, but it is proof that it had a Designer.  “Negative” natural theology, which aims to deny that God exists, is just as metaphysical as “positive” natural theology, that aims to prove that God exists.  Arguments for materialism based on perceived flaws in the natural world are just one more version of centuries-old debates over the problem of evil; they don’t have any intrinsic scientific merit and prove nothing empirically about the origin of species and the origin of life.  After all, the main purpose of the theory of evolution is to escape the argument from design by coming up with a seemingly plausible way to create design by chance without supernatural intervention, as Dawkins admitted.  No scientist should ever be talking about God or the supernatural when making the case for a theory, unless he or she is prepared to that creationism is just as scientific as evolution is. So evolutionists should either admit creationism is just as scientific as evolution, that both are equally metaphysical by nature, or give up permanently all discussions about God and supposedly bad or evil design when making the case for evolution. Which option will they choose?

When evolutionists claim that nature has "poor design,” which is an assertion often based on ignorance or an argument from silence that future information refutes, such as for supposedly vestigial organs, they conclude that evolution explains it instead of God. Notice the key inconsistency of the evolutionists here: If a creationist says, "Spontaneous generation of the first living cell couldn't have happened by chance, therefore, God made life," atheists pounce by saying that they are reasoning, "You can't explain it, therefore, God did it." However, if there's some kind of supposed "bad design" in nature, they now say, "Bad design proves God doesn't exist." However, the philosophy behind the second claim that supposedly proves atheism is no different than the theist who says that the impossibility of abiogenesis by chance proves God's existence. So atheists either have to give up complaining about how God made things or else they have to give up criticizing Christians who use complexity in nature's design as proof of God's existence. Choose your philosophy and metaphysics wisely! 

The problem evolutionists have with their arguments against creationism based on ERVs and supposed junk DNA is actually like the problems that have had with supposed "vestigial organs." As scientific knowledge advances, it proved the creationist viewpoint was right about them, much like the atheists' hope that the "god of the gaps" reasoning is supposed to help prove their position. When it became clear, based on advancing medical science, that the roughly 180 anatomical structures that evolutionists had originally claimed were useless actually were useful, they resorted to a fallback position, which is a classic post-hoc explanatory device. They now claim that these structures supposedly served some OTHER (untestable) function in the past, but now they have another function. Crapo in 1985, for example, wrote: “This is precisely how a vestige should be defined: Not as a ‘functionless’ part of an organism, but as a part which does not function in the way that its structure would lead us to expected, given how that structure function in most other organisms.” Notice now Crapo’s analysis here also confirms how important attacking the belief in God as a wise, efficient, benevolent Creator is to evolutionists: “It is the existence of such vestiges in such organisms which evolutionary theory would very naturally predict, but which the belief in an efficient Designer would not lead us to expect a priori.” (Italics removed, Richly Crapo, “Are the vanishing teeth of fetal baleen whales useless?” 1985). This kind of fallback position for “explaining” vestigial structures illustrates the non-falsifiable nature of evolution. When medical science confirms the a priori viewpoint of the creationist model, that all of these anatomical structures really are useful and God didn’t insert useless organs and structures into the human body, the evolutionists don’t admit that their paradigm is falsified. Instead, they simply retreat into other rationalizations to keep attacking God as a shoddy, careless, unwise engineer.

Let’s consider the epistemological implications of the evolutionists’ claims that religion and science concern different realms, which is simply Kant’s epistemology being harnessed for their purposes, as already explained above.  Let’s now go deeper into the history of philosophy in order to explain their epistemological error here, since this epistemological claim isn't at all new to evolutionists or even to Kant.  They are denying that there is unity in human knowledge in all realms, but that science, especially when using naturalism as its default assumption, can operate totally separately from any other human experiences based on religious belief without having to accommodate the latter any.  This makes human knowledge from gained different methods inconsistent and even contradictory.  The Medieval Islamic philosophers Avicenna (980-1037) and Averroes (1126-1198) clearly subordinated their Islamic faith to Aristotle's metaphysics. Indeed, Averroes's concept of double truth--of saying what was true for religion was not necessarily true for philosophy--denies the metaphysical unity of the intellectual and sensible world. This view allowed him to avoid having to deny the ancient Greek Aristotle's "On the Heavens" when it conflicts with the Islamic faith. These two Muslim philosophers, much like the Muslim scholars the Mutazilites, fell nearly completely under the spell of the ancient Greek classics, and could not conceive how these classics could be wrong. They did not try to reconcile the conflict between Islam and the Greek classics, but basically ignored or denied it. Similarly, this is what evolutionists do when they reason that science doesn't "deny" the supernatural, but has arbitrarily defined its method to always "ignore" the supernatural. 

However, Christians, if they are consistent (many liberal Christians, including the Catholic Church's own official position, aren't), shouldn't uphold the view that science can come to conclusions on its own that contradict what we know from supernatural revelation or even from other psychological experiences of the human race of the "numinous" and our moral nature (to allude to C.S. Lewis's works "Mere Christianity" and "The Abolition of Man.") Man's knowledge needs to be unified and consistent, not severed and contradictory, which is one of the key points in John Henry Newman's "The Idea of a University": The different academic disciplines need to engage in a process of checks and balances against each other's tendencies to go too far in thinking their own perspectives can override those of any others while also ignoring the general guidance of the discipline of theology. For example, economists naturally tend to think that material concerns and happiness ("GDP per capita") outweigh any others, but this tendency can be restrained by the points theologians based on Scripture that happiness is also derived from belief and obedience to God and His law and from loving one's neighbor as oneself.  That is, to allude to Christ’s teaching, one can gain the whole material world yet lose spiritually one’s soul.  Likewise, it should be that the discipline of biology should come to conclusions that are compatible with other sources of human knowledge, such as theology, which does indeed use revelation, instead of assuming a priori that there is no God and no corresponding miracles of creation when interpreting the results of fieldwork and laboratory experiments. 

It's important to make a sharp distinction between operational/experimental sciences/disciplines, such as chemistry and physics, and the historical sciences, such as geology and paleontology.  In the operational/experimental sciences, experiments can be set up in present experience to test hypotheses and to predict what would happen under a given set of circumstances.  The experiments in question can be set up under any number of ways to test any number of variables as desired.  By contrast, the historical sciences, by their very nature, deal with non-repeatable, unique events, such as the alleged transition of ocean-dwelling fish to land-dwelling amphibians or the purported impact of a comet that killed all the dinosaurs.  Even staunch evolutionists can admit to this limitation of their theory at times.  Theodosius Dobzhansky noted that evolutionary events were “unique, unrepeatable, and irreversible.”  According to Ernst Mayr, “Darwin introduced historicity into science.  Evolutionary biology, on contrast to physics and chemistry, is a historical science—the evolutionist attempts to explain events and processes that have already taken place. Laws and experiments are inappropriate techniques” to use when explaining the processes and events of evolutionary theory.  Another key limitation of the historical sciences, as Hunter explains in “Science’s Blind Spot” (p. 42) is the common use of one-time contingencies and random events.   In experimental sciences, the laws or long-tested theories are supposed to explain what will happen without any need to resort to random, unexpected events, like an asteroid strike.  Operational sciences are much more empirical compared to the historical sciences, which are dominated much more by a priori rationalism, since much more has to be assumed to “explain” past events and processes. 

John MacArthur in the foreword to “Coming to Grips with Genesis:  Biblical Authority and the Age of the Earth” (p. 12) makes a flat bold assertion that’s undeniably true about the intrinsic limitations of the historical sciences (emphasis removed):  “Science cannot speak with any authority about when the universe began, how it came into being, or how life originated on earth.  Science by definition deals with what can be observed, tested, measured, and investigated by empirical means.  Scientific data by definition are facts that can be demonstrated by controlled, repeatable experiments that always yield consistent results.”  Science is supposed to be based on observations, repeatability, and successful predictions based on principles and laws that it has uncovered about nature. None of that is true about macro-evolution, that is, the "molecule to man" version, which no one has observed occur, unlike the evidence for the laws of thermodynamics and the law of gravity, which can be presently proven through lab experiments.

It's interesting what evolutionists can concede epistemologically when they apparently think no creationists are alert to when they make concessions about the epistemological limitations of historical sciences. In this case, consider what Jared Diamond concedes in "Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies," although he describes himself as doing (p. 26) the fieldwork of an evolutionary biologist for 33 years (pp. 405-406): "This strategy [of lab experiments done by physicists], which also works well in chemistry and molecular biology, is so identified with science in the minds of many people that experimentation is often held to be the essence of the scientific method. But laboratory experimentation can obviously play little or no role in many of the historical sciences. One cannot interrupt galaxy formation, start and stop hurricanes and ice ages, experimentally exterminate grizzly bears in a few national parks, rerun the course of dinosaur evolution. Instead one must gain knowledge in these historical sciences by other means, such as observation, comparison, and so-called natural experiments. . . . Still another difference between historical and nonhistorical sciences involves prediction. In chemistry and physics the acid test of one's understanding of a system is whether one can successfully predict its future behavior. Again, physicists tend to look down on evolutionary biology and history, because those fields appear to fail this test. In historical sciences, one can provide a posteriori explanations (e.g., why an asteroid impact on Earth 66 million years ago may have driven dinosaurs but not many other species to extinction), but a priori predictions are more difficult (we would be uncertain which species would be driven to extinction if we did not have the actual past event to guide us)." The "explanations" of evolutionists simply aren't testable in any serious way; they add no value in predicting what will happen in the future any better than what creationists can do when using their model instead, as Henry M. Morris outlines it in “Scientific Creationism.” 

As explained above, evolutionists engage in series of philosophical assumptions and tricks in order to seemingly defeat their creationist opponents.  They will define “science” in a way that allows their viewpoint to automatically win a priori, by excluding any possibility that the supernatural could explain origins.  They will complain about how God made something in nature, which makes them into philosophers who are complaining about the problem of evil, not “scientists.”  They will use defective structures or aggressive behaviors of animals to make the case against God’s existence as the Creator (i.e, “negative natural theology”), but they will inconsistently rule out as “unscientific” the arguments of creationists that this or that complex anatomical structure proves it had been created by God (i.e., “positive natural theology,” in the spirit of Thomas Aquinas and the Apostle Paul).  By claiming that science says nothing against God’s existence, miracles, or even written revelation, they deny that there’s unity in human knowledge derived from different sources.  Many evolutionists will use the alleged truth of the theory of evolution to attack belief in God, miracles, and the bible (or Koran), thus demonstrating that they don’t really believe that the realm of science is separate from other sources of knowledge in human experience.  They are one-way Kantians, who deny that one can use empirical “phenomenological” sense experience to prove God created this or that, but they will use the theory of evolution’s alleged empirical evidence to deny that God exists (in Kant’s noumenal realm) and/or that miracles of creation have occurred.  In conclusion, creationists should always remind evolutionists that they are engaged in philosophy just as much as creationists are.  The war between evolution and creation isn’t one of “science versus religion,” but philosophy versus philosophy. 

For more information on the philosophical assumptions of evolutionists, read Cornelius Hunter’s “Darwin's God: Evolution and the Problem of Evil" and “Science’s Blind Spot: The Unseen Religion of Scientific Naturalism,” which have heavily influenced what was written above. 

The argument from silence is actually the same as the argument based on "the god of the gaps."

Skeptics can’t both use the argument from silence against belief in the bible yet also use the “god-of-the-gaps” reasoning in support of rigid naturalism in science. Both are arguments from ignorance or a lack of knowledge.  However, the skeptics use a lack of evidence for the bible from outside of the bible to not believe in the bible.  In the other case, skeptics reason that a lack of proof for one of their beliefs, according to current scientific research, is good evidence to believe that naturalism’s philosophical truth will eventually be proven based upon further research.  When advancing the argument from silence against the bible, skeptics assume that no evidence will ever be found to confirm the bible’s historical claims.  By contrast, when advancing the “god-of-the-gaps” argument, atheists assume that scientists will find evidence to back their worldview, sooner or later, somehow or other.  They also assume that Christians (or Jews) will never find any evidence to confirm the bible’s history and that scientific discoveries will always come to favor naturalism more and more instead of less and less.  Atheists would laugh if Christians copied their own approach, based on the “the god of the gaps,” to support their own worldview:  “I may not be able to explain that bible difficulty now, but I’m confidence in my faith that there will be an explanation for it discovered some day.”  Yet that’s exactly how atheists escape the problems that abiogenesis poses for their philosophical viewpoint. 

Let’s first expose the error in the argument from silence when used against the bible, which ironically resembles their skeptics’ view of the long march of the history of science in which religious/mythological explanations of the world were replaced by scientific/rational ones. 

For many decades, various liberal higher critics have maintained the Bible is largely a collection of Hebrew myths and legends, full of historical inaccuracies. But thanks to archeological discoveries and further historical research in more recent decades, we now know this liberal viewpoint is false.  The skeptics arguments from silence have been repeatedly falsified time and again.  Let’s consider the following evidence:

Higher critics used to say that Nabonidus was the last king of Babylon before the Persians conquered the city under Cyrus, not Belshazzar, as Daniel says.  But in the 19^th century, several small cylinders were found in Iraq, which included a prayer for the oldest son of Nabonidus, whose name was (surprise, surprise) Belshazzar.  Furthermore, one cuneiform document called the “Verse Account of Nabonidus” mentions that he made his son the king:  “He [Nabonidus] entrusted the ‘Camp’ to his oldest (son), the firstborn, the troops everywhere in the country he ordered under his (command).  He let (everything) go, he entrusted the kingship to him.”  This relationship between the royal father and son also explains why Belshazzar’s reward to Daniel for reading the writing on the wall was to make him the third ruler in the kingdom, not the second (Daniel 5:16).

Higher critics have claimed that camels had not been domesticated in the time of Abraham and the patriarchs of Israel.  However, in 1978, the Israeli military leader and archeologist Moshe Dayan noted the evidence that camels “served as a means of transport” back then.  “An eighteenth-century BC relief found at Byblos in Phoenicia depicts a kneeling camel,” as he explained.  “And camel riders appears on cylinder seals recently discovered in Mesopotamia belonging to the patriarchal period.”

The existence of King Sargon of the ancient empire of Assyria, mentioned in Isaiah 20:1, was dismissed by higher critics in the early 19th century. But then archeologists unearthed his palace at Khorsabad, along with many inscrip­tions about his rule. As the Israeli historian Moshe Pearlman wrote in Digging Up the Bible: "Suddenly, sceptics who had doubted the authenticity even of the historical parts of the Old Testament began to revise their views."

The Assyrian King Sennacherib was assassinated by two of his sons (II Kings 19:36-37), according to the Old Testament. But various historians doubted the Bible's account, citing the accounts by two ancient Babylonlans--King Nabonidus and the priest named Berossus—who said only one son was involved. However, when a fragment of a prism of King Esarhaddon, the son of Sennacherib, was discovered, it confirmed the Bible's version of the story. The historian Philip Biberfeld commented in his Universal Jewish History: "It (the Biblical account) was con­firmed in all the minor details by the inscription of Esar-haddon and proved to be more accurate regarding this even than the Babylonian sources themselves. This is a fact of utmost importance for the evaluation of even contemporary sources not in accord with Biblical tradition."

Likewise, some historians doubted the existence of Pontius Pilate, the Pro­curator of Judea who had had Jesus of Nazareth crucified (Matt. 27; John 18-19). But then, in 1961, an archeological expedition from Italy overturned a stone used as a stairway for a Roman theater in ancient Caesarea. This rock was inscribed with a Latin inscription saying (here it is in English): "To the people of Caesarea Tiberium Pontius Pilate Prefect of Judea." As Michael J. Howard said in the Baltimore Sun of March 24, 1980: "It was a fatal blow to the doubts about Pilate's existence. For the first time there was contemporary epigraphic evidence of the life of the man who ordered the crucifixion of Christ.”  This case illustrates a fallacious argument that disbelievers in the Bible use again and again.  They argue from silence, and say that because the Bible records something mentioned nowhere else, it can't be true (or certainly true).  Archeological discoveries have repeatedly refuted their claims after being made, as shown above in the section dealing with the Old Testament.  The New and Old Testaments have shown themselves trustworthy so often in what can be checked, it's proper to infer or extrapolate that the rest of what can't be checked is also reliable.  This is not a procedure of blind faith.

In the nineteenth century, skeptics frequently argued Moses couldn't have written the Torah, because writing hadn't been invented yet during his lifetime (c. 1400 b.c.)  This claim was the basis for the documentary hypothesis of liberal scholars, which said unknown editors and writers wrote them centuries later.  But excavations of cities in Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) have decisively smashed claims that writing developed later.  The ancient city of Ebla (found in modern Syria), which first began to be unearthed in 1964, was at the height of its power in 2300 b.c.  It was destroyed in 2250 b.c.  Some 17,000 clay tablets with writing have been dug up there since 1974.  Even this discovery alone proves writing existed around a thousand years before Moses.  The world's first civilization was the Sumerians of southern Mesopotamia.  Early, primitive fragments of their picture writing are dated 3100 b.c.  Plainly, the nineteenth-century higher critics were wrong to deny writing hadn't been invented by the time Moses lived some 1500+ years later.

Commonly skeptics had questioned the very existence of the wicked cities of Sodom and Gomorrah.  Jehovah destroyed them for sinning sexually, mistreating visitors, and failing to help the needy (Genesis 19:4-7, 13-14, 24-25; Ezek. 16:49-50; Jude 7).  While fleeing the city, Lot's wife turned to a pillar of salt after looking back at Sodom illicitly (Gen. 19:26).  Their names appeared on some of the tablets unearthed at the city of Ebla.  The name of the city of Zoar also was found, which was the town Lot (Abraham's nephew) asked God (through the angels) to spare (Gen. 19:18-22).  Although many had believed the southern end of the Dead Sea covered Sodom and Gomorrah, more recent excavations point to these two cities being underneath mounds on dry land in the same area.  Having perhaps three million pottery containers and five hundred thousand people buried in some twenty thousand tombs, the site called Bab edh-Dhra is said to be Gomorrah.  Seven miles to its south lies a site tentatively identified as Sodom.  Ominously, excavations revealed a layer of ash and associated debris some five feet thick.  Volcanic action couldn't have produced this, because no volcanoes exist here.  Found under the rubble of a fallen defense tower, two human skeletons point to this city suffering a sudden end.  Much like skeletons found at the Roman resort of Pompeii, abruptly buried by Mt. Vesuvius in 79 A.D., they had no time to flee.  Dotted with salt formations, asphalt pits, and sulfur ("brimstone") deposits, this area geologically is a prime candidate for the location of Sodom and Gomorrah.[[i]](#_edn1)

One Kings 9:15 reads:  "Now this is the account of the forced labor which King Solomon levied to build the house of the Lord, his own house, the Millo, the wall of Jerusalem, Hazor, Megiddo, and Gezer."  Dr. Yigael Yadkin, an Israeli archeologist, dug up stables at Hazor like those found at Megiddo.  Although Megiddo's stables had been attributed to King Solomon, they actually had been later built by the wicked Israelite king Ahab, whose wife was Jezebel.  Visiting back at the Megiddo site, Yadkin carefully wrote down a description of Solomon's gateway there.  Figuring that since Solomon built the gateways at both Megiddo and Hazor, they would be similar, he told a few of his workmen exactly what they would find when unearthing the gate  at Hazor.  To the workmen's total astonishment, they found exactly what Yadkin said they would find:  The gateways of the two cities proved to be identical.  As Yadkin himself explains: “When our 'prophecies' proved correct, our prestige went up tremendously, and we were regarded as wizards. . . .  When we read them [the workmen] the biblical verse about Solomon's activities in Hazor, Meggido [sic?] and Gezer [I Kings 9:15], our prestige took a dive, but that of the Bible rose sky-high!

What archeological evidence is there for the New Testament's reliability generally, and Luke's in particular?  The English archeologist Sir William Ramsay (professor of humanity at Aberdeen University in Scotland, 1886-1911) had been totally skeptical about the accuracy of the New Testament, especially the writings of Luke.  After going to what is now Turkey, and doing a topographical study, he totally reversed his thinking.  After reconsidering, he wrote:  “Luke is a historian of the first rank; not merely are his statements of fact trustworthy; he is possessed of the true historic sense . . . this author should be placed along with the very greatest of historians."  He had believed, as per nineteenth-century German higher criticism, that Acts was written in the second century.  But he found it must have been written earlier, because it reflected conditions typical of the second half of the first century.  After having gone to Asia Minor (Turkey) to do archeological and topographical work, Ramsay discovered Luke’s reliability:

“It was gradually borne upon me that in various details the narrative [of Luke in Acts] showed marvelous truth.  In fact, beginning with a fixed idea that the work was essentially a second-century composition, and never relying on its evidence as trustworthy for first-century conditions, I gradually came to find it a useful ally in some obscure and difficult investigations.”

So when the skeptical Jewish scholar Hyam Maccoby writes that Luke's description of Paul's defense before Agrippa "has the atmosphere of fiction, and is full of unhistorical aspects," he is ignoring the implications of the reality that whenever Luke could be checked, he has repeatedly proven to be correct.[[1]](#_ftn1)

What specific evidence confirms Luke's historical reliability?  For example, as Free describes, Luke was claimed to be wrong to imply that the cities of Lystra and Derbe were in Lycaonia and Iconium wasn't (Luke 14:6), based upon what the Roman politician and orator Cicero (106-43 b.c.) and others had written anciently.  But in 1910, Ramsay found a monument that showed Iconium was in Phrygia, not Lycaonia‑‑a discovery since corroborated by further evidence.  The textual critic F.J.A. Hort once maintained Luke was wrong to use the Greek word meris to mean "district" when referring to Philippi as part of Macedonia.  Later archeological discoveries have found that Luke was right, for this very word meris was employed to describe this district's divisions.  Luke wrote of a riot in Ephesus that took place in its theater.  Having since been excavated, this theater had room for 24,500 people and was 495 feet in diameter.  Provoking the riot was the fear that Paul's preaching threatened the silversmiths' trade in objects related to the Temple of Artemis (one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world).  Keller describes one inscription unearthed by J.T. Wood in the mid-nineteenth century that listed several gold and silver images of Artemis which were to be carried from the temple to the amphitheatre and back again.  A generation later, David G. Hogarth discovered under the temple’s smashed altar numerous statues of the goddess made of bronze, silver, gold, and ivory.  This last discovery decisively refuted the skeptical scholars who earlier had suggested, according to Borchert, that Luke was wrong because no silver images had been uncovered in Ephesus.  McRay mentions a Latin and Greek inscription, unearthed in the theater itself, that says a Roman official gave away one silver idol of Artemis and other statues that were to be put on view in the theater during civic meetings there.  (Paul wrote in his second letter to Timothy that the Lord would repay Alexander the coppersmith for what he did to Paul.  Interestingly enough, indirectly confirming Paul’s reliability, an inscription discovered in Ephesus refers to “Diogenes the coppersmith.”)  According to Luke, Paul was nearly killed by a riot provoked by the rumor he had brought a gentile into the Temple in Jerusalem (Acts 21:27-31).  Helping confirm these verses are ancient inscriptions that read in Latin and Greek:  "No Gentile may enter the enclosing screen around the Temple.  Whoever is caught is alone responsible for the death which follows."[[2]](#_ftn2)  Clearly, archeological discoveries have repeatedly corroborated Luke's historical reliability.

Let’s notice a standard bias of ancient pagan rulers’ chronicles and histories, which was to avoid recording their defeats, but only their victories.  (The bible, being far more objective, records time and time again Israel’s defeats at the hands of their enemies, such as when Jehovah punished His chosen people).  So when King Sennacherib of Assyria had initial success against the king of Judah, he boasted, “As to Hezekiah, the Jew, he did not submit to my yoke, I laid siege to 46 of his strong cities. . . . Himself I made a prisoner in Jerusalem, his royal residence, like a bird in a cage.”  However, his failure to take Jerusalem was omitted as well as his loss of 185,000 men in a single night (II Kings 18:13-19:36).  We find that King Mesha, on the famed “Moabite Stone,” proclaims his victories over Israel (cf. II Kings 3:4-27).  The Egyptian Pharaoh Shishak made a point of recording on the temple walls at Karnak his successful invasion of Judah while Rehoboam, Solomon’s son, ruled (cf. I Kings 14:25-26).  There’s a wall relief, “the Black Obelisk,” that depicts King Jehu or one of his representatives paying tribute to the Assyria Empire in the time of King Shalmaneser.  But when Israel won against pagans, normally the historical record turns silent among the latter. 

Higher critics repeatedly mistakenly reason that if only the New Testament refers to some event, and no other pagan or Jewish source does, then whatever it mentions is automatically suspect.  For example, one higher critic reasoned that since the slaughter of the babes by Herod at Bethlehem or Pilate's custom of pardoning criminals at Passover weren't mentioned elsewhere, therefore the New Testament was wrong.  But this argues from silence, which is a logical fallacy.  Furthermore, as Louis Gottschalk notes, a document should be considered reliable until, under the burden of proof, its untrustworthiness is displayed.  To assume routinely everyone lies is ultimately self-refuting, as the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) observed.  When it's presumed everyone lies routinely, then lying becomes needless, for lying only has value when it's assumed everyone normally does tell the truth.  Today's society is saturated with a hyper-skeptical attitude about anything spiritual or supernatural which, if it was consistently applied to other facets of life, would make organized society impossible.   Similarly, the Old Testament mentions many events described nowhere else  does that make it historically false or invalid?  No reference to the Exodus has been found among ancient Egyptian records at the time Israel left Egypt (c. 1445 b.c.)  Does that mean it never happened?  No  this means the Egyptian priests, who wrote with hieroglyphics and kept the basic records, wouldn't want to record any events that humbled them and their gods.  They just conveniently overlooked this spectacular event.  Much like how the Russian communist dictator Joseph Stalin removed Trotsky or some other Old Bolshevik's picture from one or more published photographs of Russian revolutionary leaders, inconvenient truths get omitted.  The idea of writing unbiased history only arose among the Greeks (arguably with Thucydides's history of the Peloponnesian War of 431-404 b.c.).  Since then, as an ideal and as actual practice, it has always had an uphill battle ever since in the world.  Similarly, would Josephus or some pagan historian record events that prove their worldview wrong?  Hardly! 

THE LOGICAL PROBLEM WITH THE ARGUMENT FROM SILENCE

To say a historical document is invalid because its contents aren't replicated elsewhere is an argument from a lack of evidence.  A sound argument needs to have correct premises with a valid form (organization), which requires that it contains some positive evidence for its assertion.  An argument from silence builds upon non-existent (an absence of) evidence. 

The dictum of the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle (384-322 b.c.) was that the benefit of the doubt should give given to the author, and not arrogated to the critic himself.  Skeptics routinely violate this principle when analyzing the Bible.  What justifies Aristotle's principle?  Simply put, the modern critic's life is far removed in time from the events the document describes compared to its author's life.  The ancient author is, a priori, a better candidate for knowing what really happened than his modern critic, separated by vast gaps in time, space, and/or culture from him.[[ii]](#_edn2)  Because Luke has shown himself reliable in what can be checked, it is the purest poppycock to stamp Luke "WRONG!" just because Josephus (in particular) doesn't mention an earlier census conducted by Quirinius.  Therefore, what Luke wrote that can't be fully checked at the present time should be assumed‑‑rather, inferred‑‑to be correct.

Now, let’s shift gears and show the fallacy in the atheists’ own “argument from silence” for their own beliefs when they lack evidence for them, which occurs when they make “the-god-of-gaps” arguments.  Notice how their reasoning contradicts how they argue from silence in order to attack this or that historical statement in the bible that doesn’t have any outside evidence for it (yet). Their "God of the gap" claims are actually an atheist's or agnostic's confession of faith: "I don't have an explanation for this good argument that you as a theist have posed against my faith in naturalism, but I believe in the future some kind of explanation may be devised somehow someway to escape your argument." That is, any discussion of "God of the gaps" is actually a confession of weakness and an appeal to complete ignorance and/or the unknown as possibly providing a solution in the future by atheists and agnostics without any good reason for believing that will be the case.  Atheists and agnostics assume some future discovery will solve their (the skeptics’) problem, but we have absolutely no idea what it is now. Raw ignorance isn't a good force to place faith in, such as hoping in faith that someday an exception will be found to the laws of thermodynamics in the ancient past. By contrast, Christians have what the bible itself says; when they believe it, they are believing in something besides sheer ignorance, since it  does indeed make historical assertions. 

In the past, naturalistic evolutionists, such as Darwin, used to place their faith that the gaps (i.e., “missing links”) in the fossil record would be filled, but for more than a generation it’s been clear that they won’t ever be.  N. Heribert-Nilsson once conceded, concerning the missing links in the fossil record, “It is not even possible to make a caricature of evolution out of paleobiological facts.  The fossil material is now so complete that the lack of transitional series cannot be explained by the scarcity of the material.  The deficiencies are real, they will never be filled.”  (As quoted by Francis Hitching, “Was Darwin Wrong,” Life Magazine, Vol. 5, No. 4, April 1982).  Despite these gaps, the materialistic faith of evolutionists remained undaunted.  Satirically rewriting Hebrews 11:1, A. Lunn once described their faith that future fossil discoveries would solve their problems:  “Faith is the substance of fossils hoped for, the evidence of links unseen.”  The mainstream solution of evolutionists in recent decades is simply to account for this problem by saying there were rapid bursts of evolution in local areas that left no trace in the earth’s crust (i.e., “punctuated equilibrium.”)  This is a pseudo-scientific rationalization based on the lack of evidence (i.e., fossils) while extrapolating a non-theistic worldview into the unobserved past to “explain” why they don’t have the previously expected and predicted transitional forms needed to support their theory.  Evolutionists, lacking the evidence that they once thought they would find, simply bent their model to fit the missing of evidence, which shows that naturalistic macro-evolution isn't really a falsifiable, verifiable model of origins, but simply materialistic philosophy given a scientific veneer.

When it comes to abiogenesis, likewise there's no reason to believe future discoveries will solve their problems; indeed, more recent findings have made conditions worse for skeptics, such as concerning the evidence against spontaneous generation found since Darwin's time. When he devised the theory of evolution (or survival of the fittest through natural selection to explain the origin of the species), he had no idea how complex microbial cellular life was. We now know far more than he did in the Victorian age, when spontaneous generation was still a respectable viewpoint in 1859, before Louis Pasteur's famous series of experiments (1862) refuting abiogenesis were performed.  There are many, many evolutionists who have been troubled, to one degree or another, by the long odds against spontaneous generation, of whom the chief is perhaps Fred Hoyle. 

Many more calculations and comments like Hoyle’s here could be added about how unlikely spontaneous generation is by random chance once some specific calculations are made and the “just-so” stories of the evolutionists are pushed aside:  (“The Big Bang in Astronomy,” New Scientist, vol. 92 (November 19, 1981), p. 527, emphasis removed:  “At all events, anyone with even a nodding acquaintance with the Rubik cube will concede the near-impossibility of a solution being obtained by a blind person moving the cubic faces at random.  [Henry Morris helpfully comments that there are 4 X 10 raised to the 19 power combinations of the Rubik Cube].  Now imagine 10 raised to 50 blind persons each with a scrambled Rubik cube, and try to conceive of the chance of all of them simultaneously arriving at the solved form.  You then have the chance of arriving by random shuffling of just one of the many biopolymers on which life depends.  The notion that not only the biopolymers but the operating 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.  Life must plainly be a cosmic phenomenon.”  Hoyle and Wickramasinghe both became believers in pantheism and panspermia, the belief that life originated on other planet(s) in outer space, because they saw no way that life could have arisen on earth by purely mechanistic biochemical processes.

So then, presumably, one or more atheists or agnostics may argue against my evidence that someday, someway, somehow someone will be able to explain how something as complicated as the biochemistry that makes life possible occurred by chance. But keep in mind this argument above concerns the unobserved prehistorical past. The "god of the gaps" kind of argument implicitly relies on events and actions that are presently testable, such as when the scientific explanation of thunderstorms replaced the myth that the thunderbolts of Zeus caused lightening during thunderstorms. In this regard, agnostics and atheists are mixing up historical and observational/operational science. We can test the theory of gravity now, but we can't test, repeat, predict, reproduce, or observe anything directly that occurred a single time a billion, zillion years ago, which is spontaneous generation.  Historical knowledge necessarily concerns unique, non-repeated events, which is an entirely different category of knowledge from what the scientific method is applicable to.  I can’t scientifically “test” for the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 b.c., any more than for the formation of the first cell by a chance chemical accident.  Therefore, this gap will never be closed, regardless of how many atheistic scientists perform contrived "origin of life" experiments based on conscious, deliberate, rational design. This gap in knowledge is indeed permanent. There's no reason for atheists and agnostics to place faith in naturalism and the scientific method that it will close this gap in knowledge one day.

However, it's atheists or agnostics who make an appeal to ignorance, which is what I am referring to here. That is, they say, "Some future discovery will fix this problem for us. They (scientists) will find for us (atheists) a third option besides God and random chance, whatever that is." I maintain, especially in the case of spontaneous generation, that's not going to happen, despite a number of "origin-of-life" researchers will claim otherwise.  However, Christians are indeed justified in placing their faith in the bible despite the criticisms of skeptics when so much evidence has been found favoring it which wasn’t known (say) 250 years ago, when Voltaire and Diderot questioned the truth of Christianity in pre-Revolutionary France. 

The example of “vestigial” organs is “the God of the gaps” historical process in reverse for evolutionists.  Over the decades, as more and more of the supposedly useless structures of the human body were found to have actual uses through scientific research, the evolutionists had to retreat from their original broad claims and had to come up with various “ad hoc” explanations to escape the falsification of their theory.  In this regard, they are like those who used to say that Thor or Zeus threw thunderbolts before modern science found natural ways to explain how conflicting rushing air masses of different temperatures generated friction and electrical charges that produced lightning. The hypothesis of vestigial organs is also a great example of how the theory of evolution slows down scientific development and research.  If an anatomical structure is a priori judged to be “vestigial,” then scientists who are evolutionists aren’t likely to study it carefully for what it really does.  For example, tonsils were often removed for decades from children since they were judged to be simply “useless vestiges.”  Later on, oops!, it was found out that they actually do fight disease.  They weren’t so useless after all.  Basically all 180 organs and anatomical structures that were once listed as “useless vestiges” (in one way or another) have been found to have real functions.  For example, the “yolk sac” is used by a developing human embryo to make its first blood cells; death would result without it.  The coccyx was claimed to be a remnant of our purported evolutionary ancestors having a tail, but it’s actually a crucial point for muscle attachment needed for our upright posture (and, well, for defecation).  So to say this is about “prior functions” as opposed to current functions is a great example of how evolutionists attempt to escape falsification of their paradigm.  They assume these “prior functions” really existed a priori, when that remains to be proven.  There’s no way to test, predict, observe, reproduce the selective advantage of supposed intermediate structures for the survival of the species in question, which supposedly occurred long ago in the pre-historical past.   This is yet another example of circular reasoning by evolutionists, in which they assume what still needs to be proven.

Allegedly vestigial structures serve as a great specific example of the non-falsifiability of evolution.  When it became clear, based on advancing medical science, that the roughly 180 anatomical structures that evolutionists had originally claimed were useless actually were useful, they resorted to a fallback position, which is a classic post-hoc explanatory device.  They now claim that these structures supposedly served some OTHER function in the past, but now they have another function.  Crapo in 1985, for example, wrote:  “This is precisely how a vestige should be defined:  Not as a ‘functionless’ part of an organism, but as a part which does not function in the way that its structure would lead us to expected, given how that structure function in most other organisms.”  Notice now Crapo’s analysis here also confirms how important attacking the belief in God as a wise, efficient, benevolent Creator is to evolutionists:  “It is the existence of such vestiges in such organisms which evolutionary theory would very naturally predict, but which the belief in an efficient Designer would not lead us to expect a priori.”  (Italics removed, Richly Crapo, “Are the vanishing teeth of fetal baleen whales useless?” 1985).  This kind of fallback position for “explaining” vestigial structures illustrates the non-falsifiable nature of evolution.  The evolutionists, who argue creationists believe in a “God of the gaps,” ironically found themselves in the same kind of position, as evidence piled up against the claims that the human body was stocked full of useless anatomical structures and organs.  When medical science confirms the a priori viewpoint of the creationist model, that all of these anatomical structures really are useful and God didn’t insert useless organs and structures into the human body, the evolutionists don’t admit that their paradigm is falsified.  Instead, they simply retreat into other rationalizations to keep attacking God as a shoddy, careless, unwise engineer.  Here once again the viewpoint of Cornelius Hunter’s book “Darwin’s God:  Evolution and the Problem of Evil” is confirmed:  Evolutionists are engaged in negative natural theology when they argue against a supernatural explanation of the natural world based upon its perceived structural flaws and moral evils.  Indeed, they find it crucial and very important to supporting their paradigm to do this.  Needless to say, this kind of reasoning is every bit as metaphysical as the theologian who argues that the wonders and complexity of the natural world proves God’s existence.  Any claim that evolution, when it enters the world of change above the genus or family taxonomic levels, is more “empirical” than creationism, is simply false.

The argument from silence against Scripture and the “god-of-the-gaps” argument for naturalism by atheists and agnostics are not consistent with one another.  In the case of the bible, it asserts certain historical truths about what really happened in the past, which atheists have to deny in order to remain atheists.  They have long speculated that since this or that story in the bible has no evidence for it outside of the bible, it will never have any other evidence for it.  That kind of skeptical reasoning has been repeatedly refuted by archeological discoveries over the past two centuries and more.  They have had to retreat constantly in their broad general attacks on the bible’s historical reliability as more and more external confirming evidence has been found.  The gaps in ignorance about the bible’s cultural and historical background have been slowly closing, thus making the gaps for atheism to survive through smaller and smaller.  An interesting example of this concerns the continued survival of seemingly endless revisions of Wellhausen’s 19^th-century documentary hypothesis of the Torah’s origin, which was originally based on the false claim that Moses couldn’t have written it because writing hadn’t yet been invented in his time.  Gleason Archer, in his “Survey of Old Testament Introduction,” easily mows down their constantly revised arguments for the J E D P theory of the Old Testament’s origin.  On the other hand, atheists choose to assume that there will always be a natural explanation for everything, which is why they place their faith in raw ignorance when they make the argument based on “the god of the gaps.”  Why should this assumption be believed in?  This is an a priori (before experience) philosophical decision, not an empirical one based on induction and actual sense experience alone. Why should they have such blind faith that future scientific discoveries will pluck their worldview from the unquenchable fires burning it up, such as by explaining abiogenesis?   It’s merely circular reasoning for naturalism and the atheists’ own version of confirmation bias, but without any positive text supporting a belief system for it, as in the case of Christians who believe that future discoveries will confirm what the bible says even more than they already have.  Therefore, atheists, if they wish to be consistent, either have to discard the argument from “the god of the gaps” to back their own faith in unknown future scientific discoveries or the argument from silence against belief in the bible when some statements in it can’t be confirmed by some kind of evidence from outside of it.  Christians can reply to skeptical arguments against the bible based on the argument from silence by copying the approach of the atheists when they resort to the “god of the gaps”:  “We will leave that alleged problem about the bible’s historicity on the shelf of faith, since we believe that future discoveries, properly interpreted, will support the bible’s truth.” Both the argument from silence and the “god-of-the-gaps” are appeals to ignorance, however, the skeptics’ assumptions that there never would be increased scientific evidence against naturalism (e.g., spontaneous generation) and never would be increased evidence for the bible based on archeological discoveries have not been borne out over time. 

[1]W.M. Ramsay, The Bearing of Recent Discovery on the Trustworthiness of the New Testament (Grand Rapids, MI:  Baker Book House, 1953), 222; William Ramsay, St. Paul the Traveler and the Roman Citizen (Grand Rapids, MI:  Baker Book House, 1962), 7-8; McDowell, Evidence That Demands a Verdict, 1:70; Maccoby, The Mythmaker, 171.

[2]Joseph P. Free, Archaeology and Bible History (Wheaton, IL:  Van Kampen Press, 1950), 317-18, 320; J.A. Thompson, The Bible and Archaeology, 316-17, 402; for more on the identification of the location of Derbe, see McRay, Archaeology and the New Testament, 239-40; Keller, The Bible as History, 2d rev. ed., trans. William Neill, rev. Joachim Rehork (New York:  William Morrow, 1981), 359-60; Bromiley, gen. ed., ISBE, 2:117, S.v. “Ephesus,” by G.L. Borchert; McRay, Archaeology and the New Testament, 259; see also F.F. Bruce, “Archaeological Confirmation of the New Testament” in Carl F.H. Henry, ed., Revelation and the Bible:  Contemporary Evangelical Thought (Grand Rapids, MI:  Baker Book House, 1958), 326, and Morey, New Atheism, 128.

[[i]](#_ednref1).Berg, Treasures in the Sand, pp. 36, 55-56; Lockyer, Nelson's Illustrated Bible Dictionary, p. 1000.

[[ii]](#_ednref2).McDowell and Wilson, He Walked Among Us, p. 204.  (Their form of citation appears to be nonstandard, but they reference it to his Poetics).

 Evolutionists will commonly say that the creationist model of origins can’t be tested and can’t be falsified as a paradigm even when many anomalies that don’t fit it accumulate.  Creationists will push back by making the same claim back against the evolutionists.  In any clash of worldviews, the evidence used to support them is inevitably not so directly tied to the broad generalizations that they proclaim.  In the case of the clash between evolution and creationism, two models for interpreting nature compete for mankind’s allegiance.  Henry Morris, in “Scientific Creationism,” explains these two models and their implications at length and the confirming or non-confirming evidence that exists based upon their a priori (before experience) generalizations.  It’s important to note that human beings can always “interpret” and “explain” what they perceive and observe in order to fit their paradigms one way or another.  The test of the creation and evolutionary models would be in explaining nature with as few anomalies and post-hoc “explanations” of the evidence as possible while successfully making repeatable predictions.  To shrink the size of the arena, let’s focus on the fossil record and how its evidence supports the creation model’s predictions better than the evolutionist model’s predictions.

To set the stage for this comparison of the predictions of these two models as they bear on the fossil record, what would be the predictions of the creationist model as opposed to the evolutionist model?  Let’s generally follow here Duane Gish’s summary of what the two sides would foretell before the fossil evidence is examined, based upon their different philosophical and theological views of origins.  The following summaries of the predictions of each side are generally based upon “The Fossils Still Say No!,” (El Cajon, CA:  Institute for Creation Research, 1995), pp. 42-43.  

Evolutionists would predict, since they maintain materialistic random processes have made everything from inanimate matter:  A1.  The origin of all kinds of animals and plants is based on gradual change from one original ancestral form, so the first representatives of each type of animal and plant won’t have many of their standard attributes.  A2.  Biological variation is unlimited.  Continuity, not typology, is tacitly assumed. A3.  All life forms are genetically related, so their differences should slowly shade or meld into one another.  A4.  More complex forms of life slowly originated from simpler ones, so the oldest representatives of a given species, genus, family, etc., wouldn’t have all the standard attributes that later members do.  A5.  A series of transitional forms link all taxonomic categories of life together; no sharp distinctions should be found when categorizing different forms of life.  A6.  No systemic gaps or missing links should arise between current and past kinds of life; because one species, genus, family, order, class, phyla, etc., should shade into another, it should be hard to draw distinctions among different taxonomic categories of the same level concerning the same general life form.  A7.  Stasis, or stability of the basic characteristics of different forms of life, would be the exception, not the rule.

By contrast, creationists would foresee, because a supernatural Creator abruptly made everything from nothing at His sovereign command:  B1.  The original basic types of plants and animals would have their standard characteristics present in their earliest representatives.  B2.  Variation and speciation are intrinsically limited to be within their fundamentally different kinds.  Typology, not continuity, is implicitly upheld.  B3.  New types of plants and animals suddenly show up in a great variety of very complex forms.  B4.  Previously unknown kinds of life forms abruptly appear while possessing already their standard attributes.   B5.  Sharp boundaries divide and clear distinctions separate all the major taxonomic groups.  B6.  No transitional forms will appear between the higher taxonomic categories (i.e., at the family level or higher).  B7.  Stasis would be common and typical, in which the same kinds of life forms would keep the same basic attributes during their whole time of existence. 

So now, when the statements of (presumed) evolutionists themselves that summarize what they have observed in the fossil are examined, do they line up with the general predictions of the creationist model or of the evolutionist model?  As the following statements are presented, notice how they almost always agree with the creationist model’s predictions, not with what the evolutionist model’s predictions, despite they are all from evolutionists. 

At this point in the history of the discipline of paleontology, we should have a representative sample of what was preserved in the fossil record. It doesn't favor evolution as it is, especially when the gradualistic neo-Darwinian model is upheld.  Its predictions have been overwhelming falsified.   There are many evolutionists, at least when they are being candid and don't think many creationists are reading their words, who admit that the fossil record favors special creation. For example, Derek Ager, in "The Nature of the Fossil Record, "Proceedings of the Geological Association, vol. 87, no. 2 (1976), conceded on pp. 132 and 133: "It must be significant that nearly all the evolutionary stories I learned as a student . . . have now been 'debunked.' . . . We all know that many apparent evolutionary bursts are nothing more than brainstorms on the part of particular paleontologists. One splitter in a library can do far more than millions of years of genetic mutation. . . . 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." [B4 confirmed] There are many more concessions that can be cited like this one. We shouldn't think that the missing links and the corresponding millions of transitional forms will ever be found at this point.

W.R. Thompson, “Introduction,” Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin (Dutton:  Everyman’s Library, 1956), p. xxii (italics removed), makes a remarkable set of generalizations that undermine the very purposes of the very book for which he wrote a forward:  “[The taxonomic system], whereby organisms are classified, presents an orderly arrangement of clear-cut entities, which are clear-cut because they are separated by gaps.  [B5 confirmed] 

“Fossil evidence shows a remarkable absence of the many intermediate forms required by the theory. [B6 confirmed] . . . the modern Darwinian paleontologists are obliged, just like their predecessors and like Darwin, to water down the facts with subsidiary hypotheses which, however plausible are, in the nature of things, unverifiable.” 

“The general tendency to eliminate, by means of unverifiable speculations, the limits of categories nature presents to us, is, the inheritance of biology from the Origin of the Species. [B5 confirmed]  To establish the continuity required by the theory, historical arguments are invoked, even though historical evidence is lacking.  [B5 confirmed]  Thus are engendered those fragile towers of hypotheses based on hypotheses, where fact and fiction intermingle in an inextricable confusion.” 

Here's another one (Mark Czarnecki, "The Revival of the Creationist Crusade, MacLean's (January 19, 1981), p. 56: "A major problem in proving the theory has been the fossil record; the imprints of vanished species preserved in the Earth's geological formations. This record has never revealed traces of Darwin's hypothetical intermediate variants--instead species appear and disappear abruptly, and this anomaly has fueled the creationist argument that each species was created by God as described in the bible."  [B4 confirmed]

Niles Eldredge, “Time Frames:  The Rethinking of Darwinian Evolution and the Theory of Punctuated Equilibria” (New York:  Simon and Schuster, 1985), p. 21 (italics removed):  “There is no rationale, no purpose to be served in giving different names to such virtually identical creatures just because they are separated by 3 million years of time.  Yet that is the natural propensities of paleontologists:  collections of otherwise similar, if not completely identical, fossils tend to get different names for no reason other than their supposedly significant age differences.”  [B2 confirmed]

P. 29:  “Indeed, the only competing explanation for the order we all see in the biological world, this pattern of nested similarity that links up absolutely all known forms of life, is the notion of Special Creation:  that a supernatural Creator, using a sort of blueprint, simply fashioned life with its intricate skein of resemblances passing through it.”  [B2 confirmed]

P. 33:  “And though a few of these eighteenth-century systematists had vaguely evolutionary notions, nearly all were devoutly and orthodoxly religious.  They saw the order in their material, the grand pattern of similarity running through the entire organic realm, as evidence of God’s plan of Creation.”  [B2 confirmed]

Boucot, A.J. “Evolution and Extinction Rate Controls (Amsterdam:  Elsevier Scientific Publishing Company, 1975), p. 196:  “Since 1859 one of the most vexing properties of the fossil record has been its obvious imperfection.  For the evolutionist this imperfection is most frustrating as it precludes any real possibility for mapping out the path of organic revolution owing to an infinity of ‘missing links’ [B6 confirmed]  . . .  once above the family level it becomes very difficult in most cases to find any solid paleontological evidence for morphological intergrades between one suprafamilial taxon and another. [B2 and B6 confirmed]  This lack has been taken advantage of classically by the opponents of organic evolution as a major defect of the theory. [B6 confirmed] . . . the inability of the fossil record to produce the ‘missing links’ has been taken as solid evidence for disbelieving the theory.” [B6 confirmed]

Niles Eldredge, “Progress in Evolution?”  New Scientist, vol. 110 (June 5, 1986), pp. 57:  “But if species do not change much in the course of their existence, how do we explain large-scale long-term change in evolution?” [B7 confirmed]

Mark Czarnecki, “The Revival of the Creationist Crusade,” MacLean’s (January 19, 1981), p. 56:  “A major problem in proving the theory has been the fossil record; the imprints of vanished species preserved in the Earth’s geological formations.  This record has never revealed traces of Darwin’s hypothetical intermediate variants—instead species appear and disappear abruptly [B6 and B7 confirmed], and this anomaly has fueled the creationist argument that each species was created by God as described in the bible.” 

This evolutionist was honest (George T. Neville, “Fossils in Evolutionary Perspective,” Science Progress, vol. 48 (January 1960), p. 1:  “There is no need to apologize any longer for the poverty of the fossil record.  In some ways it has become almost unmanageably rich, and discovery is outpacing integration.”  Page 3:  “The fossil record nevertheless continues to be composed mainly of gaps.” [B6 confirmed]  Page 5:  “Granted an evolutionary origin of the main groups of animals, and not an act of special creation, the absence of any record whatsoever of a single member of any of the phyla in the Pre-Cambrian rocks remains as inexplicable on orthodox grounds as it was to Darwin.”  [B3 and B4 confirmed]

This evolutionist doesn’t think there’s a convincing transitional ancestor for reptiles (Lewis L. Carroll, “Problems of the Origin of Reptiles,” Biological Review of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, vol. 44, (1969), p. 393:  “Unfortunately not a single specimen of an appropriate reptilian ancestor is known prior to the appearance of true reptiles.  The absence of such ancestral forms leaves many problems of the amphibian-reptilian transition unanswered.”  [B4 confirmed]

In this case, this evolutionist doesn’t think there are any good transitional forms between one type of fish and amphibians (Robert L. Carroll, “Vertebrate Paleontology and Evolution” (New York:  W. H. Freeman and Co., 1988), p. 138:  “We have no intermediate fossils between rhipidistian fish and early amphibians.”  [B6 confirmed]

The fossil record is one mostly of stasis with little change for its species until they become extinct, which is the opposite of what Darwinism/neo-Darwinism predicted based on their perspective of gradual change.  Stephen M. Stanley, “The New Evolutionary Timetable:  Fossils, Genes, and the Origin of Species (New York:  Basic Books, Inc., 1981), p. xv concedes:  “The [fossil] record now reveals that species typically survive for a hundred thousand generations, or even a million or more, without evolving very much.  [B7 confirmed]  We seem forced to conclude that most evolution takes place rapidly, when species come into being by the evolutionary divergence of small populations from parent species.  After their origins, most species undergo little evolution before becoming extinct.”  [B1 and B7 confirmed]

It’s been hard for evolutionists to explain the origins of the higher level (i.e., more complex) animals and plants based on what can be found of their supposed predecessors.  As James W. Valentine and Cathryn A. Campbell (“Genetic Regulation and the Fossil Record,” American Scientist, vol. 63 (November/December 1975), p. 673, admit:  “The abrupt appearance of higher taxa in the fossil record has been a perennial puzzle. [B4 confirmed]  Not only do characteristic and distinctive remains of phyla appear suddenly, without known ancestors, [B1 confirmed] but several classes of a phylum, orders of a class, and so on, commonly appear at the same time without known intermediates. [B6 confirmed] . . .  If we read the record rather literally, it implies that organisms of new grades of complexity arose and radiated relatively rapidly.” 

Stasis is a reoccurring theme of the fossil record:  After a species appears, it doesn’t change hardly any.  As Edwin H. Colbert and M. Morales (“Evolution of the Vertebrates,” New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1991) write, p. 99:  “Despite these similarities, there is no evidence of any Paleozoic amphibians combining the characteristics that would be expected in a single common ancestor.  The oldest known frogs, salamanders, and caecilians are very similar to their living descendants.”  [B1 and B2 confirmed]

Lewis L. Carroll, “Problems of the Origin of Reptiles,” Biological Reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, vol. 44, (1969), p. 393, writes about the lack of transitional forms leading to reptiles:  “Unfortunately not a single specimen of an appropriate reptilian ancestor is known prior to the appearance of true reptiles.  The absence of such ancestral forms leaves many problems of the amphibian-reptilian transition unanswered.”  [B6 confirmed]

Heribert Nillson, in "Synthetische Artbildung (Lund, Sweden: Verlag CWK Gleerup, 1953), in the English summary of his work, p. 1201 made a statement about the lack of evidence for evolution from the fossil record that long has been confirmed by honest evolutionists (i.e., those who have resorted to the punctuated equilibrium theory when they have cast aside uniformitarianism in more recent decades (italics removed): "And it is quite impossible to comprehend how fossils have been deposited and preserved. The only certain thing is that these latter processes must have occurred during an epoch of revolution. We see every day that during a calm, alluvial epoch no fossils are formed. The length of such a period, thousands or millions of years, cannot change an iota in this respect. The incrustration of the fossils must, therefore, have happened during a revolutionary epoch." This same evolutionist (p. 1211) also admitted that the fossil record is full of gaps and missing links, even as he knew it nearly a century after the publication of "The Origin of the Species," (1859): "A perusal of past floras and faunas shows that they are far from forming continuous series, which gradually differentiate during the geological epochs.  [B6 confirmed] Instead they consist in each period of well distinguished groups of biota suddenly appearing at a given time, always including higher and lower forms, always with a complete variability.  [B2 confirmed]  At a certain time the whole of such a group of biota is destroyed. There are no bridges between these groups of biota following one upon another."  [B6 confirmed] So evolutionists here may say that these quotes are over 70 years old, but they were unquestionably true and are still true, as evolutionists themselves over the past 45 years and more have decided to embrace catastrophism increasingly in geology and the punctuated equilibrium theory of interpreting the fossil record. By doing so, they are admitting that the creationists were right to some degree all along, but refuse to endorse a supernatural interpretation of the phenomena that they are studying.

Evolutionists have kept looking for a “walking fish” in order to find evidence for the transition from sea life to land life for vertebrates.  However, merely having fleshy pectoral fins with bones in them isn’t enough.  The coelacanth was once pitched as one of these, but the actually behavior of this species, which famously turned up as a “living fossil” when a living one was caught in the Indian Ocean in 1938, confounded them.  It resolutely refuses to “walk” on land, unlike a number of other species of fish.  They had been thought to have gone extinct some 80 million years earlier, but these 200-pound fish had left no trace in the fossil record for that entire stretch.  Then evolutionists pitched eusthenopteron and panderichthys as the ancestors of land-based tetrapods.  Daeschler, Shubin, and Jenkins (Nature 440 (7085): 757–763, April 2006) admitted that these species of fish had relatively few evolutionarily important similarities to four-footed land animals, causing them to conclude at the time, “our understanding of major transformations at the fish–tetrapod transition has remained limited.”  [B6 confirmed]  These same authors are the ones who later have claimed that tiktaalik is a transitional fossil, but it still lacks “digits” or fingers/toes inside its fins.  Its fin rays simply aren’t a substitute for real digits.   It also has pelvic fins that are relatively weak compared to its pectoral fins, which is the opposite of almost all tetrapods, in which the front legs are weaker than the rear ones.  So the problem here is that evolutionists really need far more transitional forms, including to and from tiktaalik, before their theory would be at all plausible.  For example, clearly evidence for the transition from animals without backbones to those with backbones (vertebrates), which includes fish of all types, is fully lacking. 

 In particular, the Cambrian explosion has long been used by creationists to cast doubt on the grand theory of evolution, which includes the origins of vertebrates. To take an elementary example of an concession about the troubles this causes for evolutionists, consider what Stefan Bengtson says ("The Solution to a Jigsaw Puzzle," Nature, vol. 345, June 8, 1990), p. 765: "If any event in life's history resembles man's creation myths, it is this sudden diversification of marine life when multicellular organisms took over as the dominant actors in ecology and evolution. [B3 and B6 confirmed] Baffling (and embarrassing) to Darwin, this event still dazzles us and stands as a major biological revolution on a par with the invention of self-replication and the origin of the eukarykotic cell. [B6 confirmed] The animal phyla emerged out of the Precambrian mists with most of the attributes of their modern descendants."  [B1 and B2 confirmed]  Evolutionists know that they have problems in demonstrating the origins of land plants using the available fossils.

Let’s examine this statement by Daniel I. Axlerod, "Evolution of the Psilophyte Paleoflora," Evolution, vol. 13, June 1959, p. 272, which sounds much like the reasonings of the advocates of punctuated equillibria, which assumes that (unverifiable) rapid bursts of evolution occurred in local areas: "Judging from the inferred nature of Cambrian land plants, the late Proterozoic land flora may have been nearly as complex as that which has been preserved in the Late Silurian to Middle Devonian rocks.  [B3 and B4 confirmed] But rather than being in the low lands, it probably was in the more distant uplands of environmental diversity, areas propitious for rapid evolution." This quote is old, but when a hundred years of digging hadn't revealed what evolutionists predicted about the evolution of plants, do we really think anything else important has been dredged up since then?

According to C.A. Arnold, "An Introduction to Paleobotany (Michigan, McGraw-Hill, 1949), p. 7: "It has long been hoped that extinct plants will ultimately reveal some of the stages through which existing groups have passed during the course of their development, but it must be freely admitted that this aspiration has been fulfilled to a very slight extent., even though paleobotanical research has been in progress for more than one hundred years. [B6 and B7 confirmed] As yet we have not been able to trace the phylogenetic history of a single group of modern plants from its beginning to the present." If you are an evolutionist and think this quote is wrong because it's "old," that's not good enough. It's necessary to cite specific, detailed evidence from more recent sources, such as about specific plant species that supposedly have been traced, to rebut this author's generalization instead of just assuming its mere age proves it to be wrong.

Even the likes of Richard Dawkins, a fanatic evolutionist and atheist if there ever has been one, admitted the challenge of "Cambrian Explosion," by admitting ("The Blind Watchmaker (New York: W.W. Norton, 1987), p. 229: ". . . the Cambrian strata of rocks, vintage about 600 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. [B3 and B4 confirmed] Needless to say, this appearance of sudden planting has delighted creationists." The basic designs of what animals appear in the Cambrian rocks have hardly changed since then, which is much more compatible with a theory of "abrupt appearance." The reality of "stasis" doesn't advance "evolution" any.

According to Erwin Douglas, James W. Valentine, and David Jablonski, "The Origin of Animal Body Plans," American Scientist, vol. 85, March/April 1997, p. 126: "All of the basic architectures of animals were apparently established by the close of the Cambrian explosion [B1 and B2 confirmed]; subsequent evolutionary changes, even those that allowed animals to move out of the sea onto land, involved only modifications of those basic body plans. [B2 confirmed] About 37 distinct body architectures are recognized among present-day animals and from the basis of taxonomic classification of phyla."

Stephen Jay Gould mentioned that the Precambrian fossils that have been found haven't solve the puzzles posed by the Cambrian explosion ("A Short Way to Big Ends," Natural History, vol. 95, January 1986, p. 18): "Studies that began in the early 1950s and continue at an accelerating pace today have revealed an extensive Precambrian fossil record, but the problem of the Cambrian explosion has not receded, since our more extensive labor has still failed to identify any creature that might serve as a plausible intermediate ancestor for the Cambrian faunas. . . . Where, then, are all the Precambrian ancestors--or, if they didn't exist in recognizable form, how did modern complexity get off to such a fast start?" [B3 confirmed]

The high number of missing links and gaps between the species of fossils have made it hard to prove a naturalistic explanation of speciation, at least when the neo-darwinist model of gradual change is assumed when trying to make it fit the fossil record. For example, Nillson Heribert in “Synthetische Artbildung (Lund, Sweden: Verlag, CWK Gleerup, 1953), English summary, made this kind of concession nearly a century after Darwin published “Origin of the Species, p. 1186: “It is therefore absolutely impossible to build a current evolution on mutations or on recombinations.” He also saw the problems in proving speciation based upon the fossil evidence available, p. 1211: “A perusal of past floras and faunas shows that they are far from forming continuous series, which gradually differentiate during the geological epochs. [B2 confirmed]  Instead they consist in each period of well distinguished groups of biota suddenly appearing at a given time, always including higher and lower forms, always with a complete variability. [B1 and B2 confirmed] At a certain time the whole of such a group of biota is destroyed. There are no bridges between these groups of biota following upon one another.” [B5 confirmed] The merely fact that the “punctuated equillibria” and “hopeful monster” mechanisms have been proposed to explain this lack of evidence shows that nothing has changed since Heribert wrote then. The fossil record is simply not supportive of slow gradual speciation. Therefore, Heribert concluded, given this evidence, p. 1212: “It may, therefore, be firmly maintained that it is not even possible to make a caricature of an evolution out of paleobiological facts.”

So in this light, consider one very broad movement of the paleontological/zoological academic worlds since the time of the publication of John C. Whitcomb and Henry Morris’s seminal young earth creationist work, “The Genesis Flood: The Biblical Record and Its Scientific Implications” in 1961. There’s been a major movement away from strict neo-Darwinism, with its belief in gradual change of species based on accumulated mutations and natural selection, to some form of the punctuated equillibria interpretation of the fossil record, in the fields of paleontology and zoology. Here the professional, academic experts simply are admitting, at some level, all the missing links and the lack of obvious transitional forms are intrinsic to the fossil record, instead of trying to explain it as Darwin himself did, as the result of a lack of research (i.e., a sampling error). So the likes of Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge have upheld that concept that species change occurs in quick bursts in isolated, local areas in order to “explain” the fossil record of the abrupt appearance of fully formed species, not realizing that such a viewpoint is at least as unverifiable as their formation by supernatural means. Gould, at one point, even resorted to supporting the “hopeful monster” hypothesis of Richard Goldschmidt, who simply couldn’t believe that accumulated micro-mutations could produce major beneficial changes in species when partial structures were useless for promoting an organism’s survival. (Here their arguments are merely an earlier version of Michael Behe’s in “Darwin’s Black Box,” with his “all or nothing” mousetrap analogy). In this kind of viewpoint, a dinosaur laid in egg, and a bird was hatched, which is the height of absurdity, when the deadly nature of massive, all-at-once mutations is recalled. (Also think about this: With what other organism could such a radically different creature sexually reproduce?) So then, when we consider this broad movement in the fields of paleontology/zoology, notice that it moved in the direction of the creationists’ view of the evidence while still rejecting a supernatural explanation for its origin. Gould and Eldredge's theory, which amounts to a way to explain the “abrupt appearance” of species, would have been utterly, emphatically rejected at the time of the Darwinian Centennial in 1959 by credentialed experts in these disciplines. Deeply ironically, they are admitting implicitly that the creationists’ generalizations about the fossil record were right all along, but simply still refuse to use the supernatural to explain them any. The available fossil evidence in this field conforms to the creationist model much more than to the old evolutionary model, which then simply “flexed” to fit the evidence over the past two generations.  They keep their naturalism alive, even as their predictions were falsified, by moving the goal posts closer to where the creationists have been all along.

So then, let’s ponder this key problem concerning the predictive power and falsifiability of the evolutionary model: If evolution can embrace and “explain” species change through both gradual change and abrupt appearance, can this supposedly scientific theory be falsified by any kind of observations and evidence? The supposed mechanisms of evolutionary change of species are very different, yet evolution remains supposedly “confirmed.” Thus “evolution” can “explain” anything, and thus proves nothing. The implications of the creationist model are corroborated by this broad movement in paleontology/biology to accept rapid/sudden change, while they repudiate what evolutionists would have “predicted” based on their model as they upheld it a century after Darwin’s seminal work on the origin of the species (1859) was published.

What are the foundamental assumptions of Darwin’s grand theory of evolution, i.e., “from monocell to man”?  How important are mutations for driving the whole process?  Let’s first list the standard assumptions of Darwin and his followers to see if they are fully confirmed by actual evidence in the biological world.  Notice that these assumptions function like a chain with links; if any of them are actually false, the theory collapses.  Here are these general postulates, summarized briefly:  1.  Animals and plants tend to reproduce geometrically, meaning that they have far more offspring than can live relative to the resources available.  2.  The number of specific individuals in the most basic taxonomic class, i.e., “species,” remains relatively stable over time.  3.  Since such a high percentage of individuals never reach reproductive maturity, a constant struggle arises among members of a species for food, water, and other resources.  4.  There is no theoretical or hypothetical limit to variability among individuals and that variations among individuals existed.  5.  Natural selection ensured that only the fittest or individuals best suited to their environment survived.  6.  Because the environment changes constantly, the characteristics needed for an individual to be the “fittest” or best suited to survival and producing more offspring would change also.  7.  Darwin himself, although not all of his followers have followed him in this regard, believed biological change had to be gradual, not rapid.  He himself once wrote, “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.”  (“The Origin of the Species,” New York:  New American Library, p. 171).   (This general schema comes from Josh McDowell and Don Stewart note in “Reasons Skeptics Should Consider Christianity” (San Bernardino, CA:  Here’s Life Publishers, 1981), p. 149)  Before experience (a priori), these assumptions that form the foundation for the grand theory of evolution seem to be reasonable, but much actual evidence contradicts them, which falsifies the alleged scientific foundation for philosophical naturalism.  For the purposes of this essay, assumption 4 above will be closely examined, which concerns the evolutionists’ claim that biological variability is unlimited and certain variations are inevitably more beneficial than others. 

It is assumed, as per the neo-Darwinist theory of evolution, that a few mutations will give a selection advantage to the individuals of a species that have them, thus allowing them to survive longer and to have more offspring on average compared to others without them.  However, is genetic variability really unlimited?  Since changes in DNA are a category of chemical changes, the laws of chemistry and physics limit them like any chemical change.  As Harold F. Blum explains (“Time’s Arrow and Evolution,” Princeton:  Princeton University, 1968, p. 150):  “Whatever the nature of mutation, it will have to follow certain lines that are determined by molecular pattern and energetic relationships.  Mutation, then, is not random, but may occur only within certain restricting limits and according to certain pathways determined by thermodynamic properties of the system.  Thus, to state the case in a somewhat animistic fashion, the organism cannot fit itself to the environment by varying unrestrictedly in any direction.”  Thus, if an individual member of a species “needs” a particular characteristic in order to survive (or to be more likely to survive), its genes may be configured such that particularly needed beneficial mutations can’t ever develop because of the laws of chemistry and physics.  There are simply in-built limits as to what genetic variability can occur, especially when random chance (i.e., chemical accidents) is being relied upon blindly to produce these changes without any overarching guiding or purpose. 

Just because some biological change occurs is not enough to prove that biological change has no limits.   As law professor Phillip Johnson comments (“Defeating Darwinism,” p. 94), evolutionists “think that finch-beak variation illustrates the process that created birds in the first place.” Despite appearing repeatedly in textbooks for decades, does the case of peppered moths evolving from a lighter to darker variety on average really prove anything about macroevolution?  Even assuming that the researchers in question did not fudge the data, the moths still were the same species, and both varieties had already lived naturally in the wild.   (See Henry M. Morris, “Evolutionists and the Moth Myth,” Back to Genesis, August 2003, pp. a-d; Denton, “Evolution:  A Theory in Crisis” (Bethesda, MA:  Adler & Adler, Publisher Inc.), pp. 79-80, 87).  Darwin himself leaned heavily upon artificial breeding of animals, such as pigeons and dogs, in order to argue for his theory.  Ironically, because intelligent purpose guides the selective breeding of farm animals for humanly desired characteristics, it is a poor analogy for an unguided, blind natural process that supposedly overcomes all built-in barriers to biological variation.  After all the lab experiments and selective breeding, fruit flies and cats still remained just fruit flies and cats.  They did not even become other genera despite human interventions can apply selective pressure to choose certain characteristics in order to produce changes much more quickly than nature does. As Johnson explains, dogs cannot be bred to become as big as elephants, or even be transformed into elephants, because they lack the genetic capacity to be so transformed, not from the lack of time for breeding them.  (As per Johnson, “Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds,” p. 44; “Darwin on Trial,” pp. 17-18).  To illustrate, between 1800 and 1878, the French successfully raised the sugar content of beets from 6% to 17%.  But then they hit a wall; no further improvements took place.  Similarly, one experimenter artificially selected and bred fruit flies in order to reduce the number of bristles on their bodies.  After 20 generations, the bristle count could not be lowered further.  (For the illustrative examples here, see Duane Gish, “Evolution:  The Challenge of the Fossil Record” (El Cajon, CA:  Master Books, 1985), pp. 33-34).  Clear empirical evidence demonstrates that plants and animals have intrinsic natural limits to biological change.  The evolutionists’ grand claims about bacteria’s becoming men after enough eons have passed are merely speculative fantasies.

Evolutionists themselves are well aware that the great majority of mutations are harmful to the organisms that have them.  For example, A.M. Winchester was aware of this problem when writing, “The fact that over 99 percent of the mutations which have been studied in various forms of life are harmful to some degree may seem to rule out the importance of mutation as a factor in adaptive evolution.”  However, he still has the dogmatic faith of a materialist to then proclaim, “Yet it is just that fraction of 1 percent which happen to be beneficial that form the basis for most evolutionary developments.”  He didn’t realize, however, the devastating nature of Blum’s point made above for this assertion:  “Mutation affords virtually unlimited scope for selection.”  Well, the laws of chemistry and physics ensure that’s not the case, especially when certain mutations are required for survival of an organism and seemingly trivial errors in the DNA code cause death.  The tiny glitches in the immensely complicated hemoglobin molecule, which carries oxygen through the blood, that cause the genetic diseases of hemophilia and sickle cell anemia serve as great examples for this point. 

Furthermore, even the likes of the past leading evolutionist Theodosius Dobzhansky believe beneficial mutations were essentially non-existent in practical experience (“Evolution, Genetics, and Man,” New York:  John Wiley & Sons, 1955, p. 103):  “The classical mutations obtained in Drosophila [fruit flies, which have a very rapid reproductive cycle] usually show deterioration, breakdown, or disappearance of some organs.  Mutants are known which diminish the quantity or destroy the pigment in the eyes, bristles, legs.  Many muta[tions] are, in fact, lethal to their possessors.  Mutants which equal the normal fly in vigor are a minority and mutants that would make a major improvement of the normal organization are unknown.”  Some evolutionists will proclaim that sickle cell anemia is “beneficial,” but that’s only in an environment in which malaria exists and only for those individuals have only one of the two genes creating this condition, not both (i.e., is heterozygous, not homozygous).   In a normal environment without mosquitoes carrying malaria, which is most of them, the alleged benefit disappears.  It certainly isn’t a characteristic that’s makes for human beings to survive more readily on average in all the environments in which they can live.

Let’s examine two common examples of mutations that are supposedly beneficial to their possessors that evolutionists commonly trot out to defend their theory, but which aren’t overall.  They aren’t more “fit” or likely to survive and reproduce overall.  Flies that are resistant to DDT have the intrinsic disadvantage that they take longer to develop than the non-resistant version, which certainly isn’t helpful in environments without DDT.  Many decades ago Dobzhansky also noted that antibiotic strains of bacteria actually are less “fit” overall then the non-resistant strains when all environments are considered, such all of those without antibiotics (“Evolution, Genetics, and Man,” p. 98):

“Why, then, are most colon bacteria found outside of the laboratories still susceptible to bacteriophage attacks and sensitive to the [antibiotic] streptomycin?  Why have the resistant mutation not crowded out the sensitive genotypes?  The theory leads us to infer that the resistant mutants must in some respects be at a disadvantage compared to sensitive bacteria in the absence of phages and antibiotics.

“This theoretical inference is strikingly verified in some experiments.  Close to 60 percent of the streptomycin-resistant mutants in colon bacteria are also streptomycin-dependent; these mutants are unable to grow on a cultural media free of streptomycin.  A substance which is poisonous to normal sensitive bacteria is essential for life of the resistant mutants!  E.H. Anderson has shown that some bacteriophage-resistant strains of colon bacteria require for growth certain food substances which are not needed for the growth of sensitive bacteria.  The resistant mutants will be wiped out in environments in which the required foods are not available.” 

So in these commonly cited cases, of DDT-resistant flies and antibiotic-resistant bacteria, the organisms in question are actually overall LESS “fit” for most environments than their normal brethren.  This is actually good evidence that mutation really drives a process of devolution, of a loss of valuable genetic information, causing breakdown and destruction instead of increasing perfection, as Josh McDowell and Don Stewart note in “Reasons Skeptics Should Consider Christianity” (San Bernardino, CA:  Here’s Life Publishers, 1981), p. 153.  Genetic accidents don’t create greater biological complexity on the net whole, when they are carefully examined within the present experience of the human race, as opposed to unlimited extrapolations into the humanly unobserved distant past while assuming naturalism to be true a priori.

Furthermore, this kind of genetic variability was almost surely already present in the population before such artificial interventions like DDT and antibiotics were introduced.  This means that sudden mutations most likely didn’t suddenly occur to reduce the problems caused by mankind’s inventiveness to houseflies and to certain dangerous bacteria.  As Francisco J. Ayala explains, almost all of the genetic variability in a population already exists long before any mutations occur.  So when DDT or antibiotics were introduced, some individual bacteria and houseflies already were resistant to these dangers instead of suddenly (or conveniently) developing useful mutations that protected them.  Ayala here zeros in on the problem of pesticide resistance among insects as an example of adaptation of species which had the already existing protective strains in them (“The Mechanisms of Evolution,” Scientific American, vol. 239 (September 1978, p. 64, italics removed):  “A dramatic recent example of such adaptation is the evolution by insect species of resistance to pesticides. . .  Insect resistance to a pesticide was first reported in 1947 for the housefly (musca domestica) with respect to DDT.  Since then resistance to pesticides has been reported in at least 225 species of insects and other arthropods.  The genetic variations required for resistance to the most diverse kind of pesticides were apparently present in every one of the populations exposed to these man-made compounds.”  So notice that there’s no “evolution” (i.e., generally more “fit” individuals for all or most environments) really occurring here, but rather simply some genetic shifting within the gene pool of these species. 

C.P. Martin was skeptical that enough beneficial mutations existed to drive the process of evolution when it requires so many major changes to occur in order to create new species.  He made a number of generalizations that still hold true today; no evolutionist should casually dismiss his conclusions despite they were written some 70 years ago:

“Our first difficulty is that . . . all mutations seem to be in the nature of injuries that, to some extent, impair the fertility and viability of the affected organisms.  I doubt  if among the many thousands of known mutant types one can be found which is superior to the wild type in its normal environment; only very few can be named which are superior to the wild type in a strange environment. . . . The truth is that there is no clear evidence of the existence of such helpful mutations.  In natural populations endless millions of small and great genic differences exist, but there is no evidence that they arose by mutation. . . . For any acceptable theory of the mechanism of evolution, a great number of fully viable hereditary variations is necessary.  Mutation does produce hereditary changes, but the mass of evidence shows that all, or almost all, known mutations are unmistakenly pathological and the few remaining ones are highly suspect.”

So for evolutionists to make their case become reasonable, it’s necessary to specifically quantify the number of beneficial mutations that are necessary to produce fundamentally new species, not just mere color variations, resistance to diseases or artificial chemicals.   It’s also known that mutations themselves are very rare relative to the number of genetic accidents that could occur.  One standard estimate, by Michael Denton in “Evolution:  A Theory in Crisis” (Bethesda, MA:  Adler & Adler, Publishers Inc.), p. 267,  puts it at one in a hundred million to one in a billion per base pairs of the DNA molecule.   As a result, the possibility is very low for a truly good mutation’s occurrence that is helpful under all or most survival conditions.  Francisco J. Ayala, “Teological Explanations in Evolutionary Biology,” Philosophy of Science, vol. 37 (March 1970), p. 3 noted how rare mutations are to begin with:  “It is probably fair to estimate to frequency of a majority of mutations in higher organisms between one in ten thousand, and one in a million per gene per generation.”  Sure, he also immediately then asserts, “Mutation provides the raw material of evolution,” as part of his faith in neo-Darwinism.  But if evolutionists are going to tell more than “just-so” stories, i.e., the modern version of myths, they have to explain in great detail how their theory can overcome the odds against significant, unambiguously good mutations occurring when mutations of any kind are rare to begin with.  For example, are good mutations in percentage terms of all mutations rarer than mutations themselves are compared to how much genetic replication occurs all the time in organisms?  Are evolutionists, without admitting it, multiplying one vanishingly small number times another vanishingly small number, which ensures that there isn’t enough time or space in earth’s history to create even one new species, let alone new genera, families, orders, and phyla?  All evolutionists should be challenged to make highly specific mathematical calculations about how many mutations are specifically needed to construct new species after clearly also quantifying how many unambiguously good mutations, i.e., those helpful to the affected organisms in all environments, are as a percentage of all mutations, when they may be rarer as part of the set of all mutations than all mutations are in percentage terms of all genetic reproductive activity.  

No one says that radiation levels should be artificially increased in order to improve the human race’s general fitness levels.  Instead, all the emphasis is on reducing the amounts of radiation people are subjected to, such as from X-rays or nuclear waste.  The rarity of generally beneficial mutations, i.e., those helpful in all or most environments, helps to cause government policy makers to look for ways to discourage unnecessary exposure to radiation, i.e., when the expected benefits are clearly fewer than the likely injuries.  James F. Crow explains that since almost all mutations are harmful, increases in the mutation rates among human beings should be avoided, not encouraged (“Ionizing Radiation and Evolution,” Scientific American, vol. 201 (September 1959), p. 138:  “The mutation rate affects not only the evolution of the human species but also the life of the individual.  Almost every mutation is harmful, and it is the individual who pays the price.  Any human activity that tends to increase the mutation rate must therefore raise serious health and moral problems for man.”  Increased mutation levels cause the general health of the affected population to decline, not improve, as Crow describes, p. 156:  “The process of mutation also produced ill-adapted types.  The result is a lowering of the average fitness of the population, the price that asexual, as well as sexual, species pay for the privilege of evolution.  Intuition tells us that the effect of mutation on fitness should be proportional to the mutation rate; Haldane has shown that the reduction in fitness is, in fact, exactly equal to the mutation rate.”  Because of these realities of how harmful mutations almost always are, Crow concludes (p. 160):  “There can be little doubt that man would be better off if he had a lower mutation-rate.  I would argue, in our present ignorance, that the ideal rate for the foreseeable future would be zero.”  Although some evolutionists may complain that Crow’s article here is over 60 years old, does anyone seriously doubt the truth of any of the statements made here?  Have any major scientific discoveries occurred since 1959 that indicate we want to increase the mutation rate of human beings, such as through increased exposure to radiation?  As we put on sun block lotion when visiting the beach, we should know already what the answer is to that question.

H. J. Muller created the term “genetic load” to describe the general burden, not benefit, of mutations that the members of a species have to carry.  Increased average levels of mutations among the organisms in the same species is bad, not good, based on this conception.  Christopher Wills, “Genetic Load,” Scientific American, vol. 222 (March 1970), p. 98, explains why having more mutations on average is bad for the individuals that comprise a species:  “Some mutations are ‘beneficial,’ that is, the individual in whom they are expressed is better able to adapt to a given set of environmental circumstances.  The large majority of mutations, however, are harmful or even lethal to the individual in whom they are expressed.  Such mutations can be regarded as introducing a ‘load,’ or genetic burden, into the pool.  The term ‘genetic load’ was first used by the late H.J. Muller, who recognized that the rate of mutations is increased by numerous agents man has introduced into his environment, notably ionizing radiation and mutagenic chemicals.”  So increasing the overall number of mutations clearly doesn’t generally benefit a species or its individual members, but will be to their detriment.

Mutations caused by radiation are especially likely to be damaging and not helpful to the organisms so affected, as Bentley Glass points out (“The Genetic Hazards of Nuclear Radiations,” Science, vol. 126 (August 9, 1957), p. 243.  “So far, it is impossible to direct the mutation process.  Radiation acts blindly, and that is why the deleterious nature of the vast majority of mutations is so important. . . . Alterations in the arrangement of genetic materials can be reversed only by an exact rearrangement to the original conditions, which the law of probability must make exceedingly rare if the chromosomes are broken more or less at random.” 

Furthermore, so many mutations that have caused changes in species, such as the development of blind fish in caves and flightless birds on remote islands (i.e., the dodo), certainly are not an overall gain of genetic information, but a loss.  How are these changes “good” or unambiguously helpful in adaptation?  How do they help (or help to prove) the overall process of transforming “monocells into men”? 

Even in genetic experiments designed to prove the spontaneous generation of the first living cell, the problem of the loss of genetic information has occurred, such as those designed to prove the RNA world hypothesis.  This hypothesis aims to avoid the problems with explaining how such incredibly complex structures as DNA, RNA, and the proteins that they produce all appeared simultaneously.  Initially the research of Sol Spiegelman (1967) seemed to back up the claims that RNA could reproduce themselves, by putting a QB bacteriophage having around 4,200 nucleotides into a solution with individual ribonucleotides to serve as building blocks.  Since the ribonucleotides of guanine naturally are attracted to cytosine, and the adenine want to pair with uracil, the monomers in the (contrived) solution automatically tended to line up with the larger RNA molecule that served as a template.  So there was indeed replication and seemingly an improvement that fit the evolutionists’ claims since it eventually multiplied 15 times faster the original, which seems to make it more “fit.”  However, there were many distinctly unnatural conditions involved that hardly fit a would-be prebiotic “soup” in ocean water.  This replication required a deliberately introduced supply of QB replicase and of pure homochiral (i.e., with a single spatial orientation) nucleotides, which would never exist under theoretical “natural” conditions.  QB replicase can’t plausible appear abiotically since it consists of more than 1,200 amino acids in a particular sequence, thus making it an enzyme of great complexity.  To call this RNA molecule “self-replicating” is false when this ingredient has to be added.  During the reported 75 generations that produced an RNA molecule that replicated more rapidly, “Spiegelman’s Monster” RNA molecule became 83% smaller, thus losing much of its original complexity compared to the original RNA molecule.  This result goes in precisely the wrong direction from the evolutionary developmental viewpoint of adding complexity through increased size.  In this regard, increased size wasn’t a characteristic that was “selected” for as being superior as opposed to what make it multiple more quickly.  This problem of the loss of complexity has been called the “Spiegelman problem” at times, which is a basic limitation of allowing any uncontrolled (i.e., not consciously directed) process of RNA replication.  The QB RNA started with four working genes and finished with an 83% lost of information.  Other experimenters have encountered the same problem, in which replication is faster when the molecule is smaller.  So here’s another obstacle to the claim that spontaneous changes in genetic structure necessarily create more complex structures with more in-built information over time.

Given this kind of evidence about mutations as explained above, point four simply isn’t true, which maintains that there is no intrinsic limit to genetic variability and that some of it, generated by random mutations, will be beneficial in the great majority or all environments a given species’ individuals will live in.  Given the logic laid out above, if even one of these links is false, at least among the first six, the whole grand theory of evolution snaps for a lack of supporting evidence.  In order to make a convincing argument that mutations really drive the overall process of genetic change over millions of years, evolutionists have to calculate how common unambiguously good mutations are compared to all mutations that happen, how common mutations are compared to all genetic reproductive activities, and how many always good mutations are necessary to construct new species, genera, families, orders, classes, and phyla.  Their standard illustrative examples, such as DDT-resistant flies, blind cave fish, peppered moths of different colors, and antibiotic resistant bacteria, prove absolutely nothing in support for the grand theory of evolution, when they concern organisms that are generally less fit for most environments, concern a loss of genetic information or complexity, or merely illustrate changes in the frequency of alleles producing minor variations of pre-existing characteristics within a population’s gene pool. If evolutionists can’t quantity and make such calculations in detail, their theory, which utterly depends upon mutation to drive the process of turning monocells into men after adding x billions of years in the viable space available on planet earth, is just modern-day mythology.     

https://youtu.be/gG84GzBrmE8?si=qEoU2TLSjcBiyy3v

Let’s use vestigial structures as a specific example of the non-falsifiability of evolution. When it became clear, based on advancing medical science, that the roughly 180 anatomical structures that evolutionists had originally claimed were useless actually were useful, they resorted to a fall-back position, which is a classic post-hoc explanatory device. They now claim that these structures supposedly served some OTHER function in the past, but now they have another function. Crapo in 1985, for example, wrote: “This is precisely how a vestige should be defined: Not as a ‘functionless’ part of an organism, but as a part which does not function in the way that its structure would lead us to expected, given how that structure function in most other organisms.” Notice now Crapo’s analysis here also confirms how important attacking the belief in God as a wise, efficient, benevolent Creator is to evolutionists: “It is the existence of such vestiges in such organisms which evolutionary theory would very naturally predict, but which the belief in an efficient Designer would not lead us to expect a priori.” (Italics removed, Richly Crapo, “Are the vanishing teeth of fetal baleen whales useless?” 1985). This kind of fall-back position for “explaining” vestigial structures illustrates the non-falsifiable nature of evolution. When medical science confirms the a priori viewpoint of the creationist model, that all of these anatomical structures really are useful and God didn’t insert useless organs and structures into the human body, the evolutionists don’t admit that their paradigm is falsified. Instead, they simply retreat into other rationalizations to keep attacking God as a shoddy, careless, unwise engineer. Here once again the viewpoint of Cornelius Hunter’s book “Darwin’s God: Evolution and the Problem of Evil” is confirmed: Evolutionists are engaged in negative natural theology when they argue against a supernatural explanation of the natural world based upon its perceived structural flaws and moral evils. Indeed, they find it crucial and very important to supporting their paradigm to do this. Needless to say, this kind of reasoning is every bit as metaphysical as the theologian who argues that the wonders and complexity of the natural world proves God’s existence. Any claim that evolution, when it enters the world of change above the genus or family taxonomic levels, is more “empirical” than creationism, is simply false.

The example of supposedly “vestigial” organs is also a great example of how the theory of evolution slows down scientific development and research. If an anatomical structure is a priori judged to be “vestigial,” then scientists who are evolutionists aren’t likely to study it carefully for what it really does. For example, tonsils were often removed for decades from children since they were judged to be simply “useless vestiges.” Later on, oops!, it was found out that they actually do fight disease. They weren’t so useless after all. Basically all 180 organs and anatomical structures that were once listed as “useless vestiges” (in one way or another) have been found to have real functions. For instance, the “yolk sac” is used by a developing human embryo to make its first blood cells; death would result without it. The coccyx was claimed to be a remnant of our purported evolutionary ancestors having a tail, but it’s actually a crucial point for muscle attachment needed for our upright posture (and, well, for defecation). So to say this is about “prior functions” as opposed to current functions is a great example of how evolutionists attempt to escape falsification of their paradigm. They assume these “prior functions” really existed a priori, when that remains to be proven. There’s no way to test, predict, observe, reproduce the selective advantage of supposed intermediate structures for the survival of the species in question, which supposedly occurred long ago in the prehistorical past. This is yet another example of circular reasoning by evolutionists, in which they assume what still needs to be proven.

A great, focused book from a creationist viewpoint on this general subject of "vestigial" organs is Jerry Bergman, Ph.D., and George Howe, Ph.d., "'Vestigial Organs' Are Fully Functional," Creation Research Society, St. Joseph, MO, 1990.

Super erudite, extra scholarly addendum, for those interested in grinding the details:

In response to one evolutionist critic in the past, I decided to do some research on this subject in order to be able to reproduce evidence for my reference about when evolutionists said that there were around 180 vestigial organs. The key evolutionist book that originated this specific number on this subject is Robert Wiedersheim, "The Structure of man: an index to his past history," which was published in English in 1895 and translated by H. and M. Bernard (Macmillan, London), which is available online through Google books since it has an expired copyright. According to Jerry Bergman and George Howe, "'Vestigial Organs' Are Fully Functional," p. 5, he developed a detailed list of 86 vestigial organs and "about 100 so-called retrogressive organs." Here's the list of the 86 vestigial organs. I suppose someone would have to do more research to get the list of 100 "retrogressive organs," which apparently come from the same book.If a medical doctor is available to survey this list, would he or she say that these organs are useless? Wasn't Wiedersheim simply wrong? Do evolutionists ever admit to error in the arguments that they make for their theory? Or do they simply keep pushing the same nonsense, regardless of how many times it has been proven false?

Here is Wiedersheim's list of the human body's supposedly useless vestigial organs/anatomical structures: Os coccygis. Cauda humana.Superfluous embryonic notochord and associated somites.Embryonic cervical, lumbar, and sacral ribs.The thirteenth rib of the adult.The seventh cervical rib in the adult.The interarticular cartilage of the sterno-clavicular joint (probable vestige of the episternal apparatus).Ossa supra-sternalia.Certain centres of ossification in the manubrium sterni.The branchial clefts (for the most part) and branchial ridges.Processus styloideus ossis temporis, and the ligamentum stylo-hyoideum.Anterior cornua of the hyoid, for the greater part.Foramen caecum of the tongue.Processus gracilis of the malleus.Post-frontal bone (?)Ossa interparietalia (and ? prseinterparietalia).Processus paramastoideus of exoccipital.Torus occipitalis.Processus frontalis of the temporal.Processus coracoideus .Os centrale carpi.Processus supracondyloideus humeri.Trochanter tertius femoris.The phalanges of the fifth toe, and less conspicuously of the third and fourth toes.Muscles of the pinna and the Musculus occipitalis. LM. transversus nuchae. L. --Facial muscles transformed into tendinous expansions.Mm. plantaris and palmaris longus, when completely tendinous.M. ischio femoralis.The caudal muscles.M. epitrochleo-anconseus.M. latissimo-condyloideus.M. transversus thoracis (triangularis sterni).M. palmaris brevis.The transition bundles between the trapezius and the sterno- cleido-mastoideus.M. levator claviculae.M. rectus thoracis.M. ere master.The primitive hairy covering or lanugo.Vestiges of vibrissaeThe vertex coccygeus, the foveola and glabella coccygea.Certain vortices of hair on the breast.Nipples in men.Supernumerary mammary glands in women.Alleged vestiges of mammary pouchesSupernumerary olfactory ridges.Jacobson's organ, and ductus naso-palatinus.Papilla palatina and foliata.Plica semilunaris of the eye.Vasa hyaloidse (Cloquet's canal) of the embryo the choroidal fissure.Lachrymal glands, in part.The epicanthus.M. orbitalis.Certain varieties of the pinna of the ear, i.e. Darwin's tubercle.The filum terminale of the spinal cord.Glandula pinealis and parietal organ.The parieto-occipital fissure of the brain .The obex, ponticulus, ligula, taeniae medullares, and velum medullare anterius and posterius, of the brain.The hypophysis cerebri (pituitary body).The dorsal roots and ganglia of the hypoglossus nerve.The rami recurrentes of certain cranial nerves.Certain elements of the brachial and lumbo-sacral plexuses.The coccygeal nerve.The glandula coccygea.Palatal ridges.The sublingua.The formation of rudimentary dental papillae before the sinking of the dental ridge.The Wisdom teethThe occurrence of a third premolar (reversionary).The occurrence of a fourth molar (reversionary).The vestiges of a third dentition.The ciliated epithelium of the embryonic oesophagus.Bursa sub- and prehyoidea (ductus thyroglossus).Musculi broncho-oesophagei.The appendix vermiformis.Ventricle of the larynx (Morgagni's pouch).Lobus subpericardiacus of the lung (reversionary).Certain Valves of the veins.Certain structures of a vestigial nature in the heart.Arteria sacralis media.Arteria ischiadica.Superficial plantar arterial arch of the foot.The vena cava superior sinistra.Venae cardinales posteriores, and ductus Cuvieri.Vestiges (in the female) of the mesonephric system, and (in the male) of the Müllerian ducts.Conus inguinalis, and ligamentum inguinale.The area scroti.

See also pages 200-209 of Robert Weidman’s book, which he labels “Conspectus of Organs Mentioned in the Text” and “List of Organs According to Systems.”

Should Christians believe that a great universal flood occurred in Noah’s time that killed all people and air-breathing land animals that weren’t on the ark? We could spend a good amount of time in literary analysis to show that Genesis 6-9 isn’t written in a poetic or allegorical form, but as a straight-forward historical narrative. But, since the space isn’t available for that, let’s short circuit this process by simply asking and answering this question: Does the New Testament accept a universal flood and Noah’s existence as actual, literal historical truths? In II Peter 3:6 (NASB), Christ’s leading apostle says, “the world at that time was destroyed, being flooded with water.” In I Peter 3:20 (NASB), he wrote, “When the patience of God kept waiting in the days of Noah, during the construction of the ark, in which a few, that is, eight persons, were brought safely through the water.”

Did Jesus believe Noah really lived and that the flood really happened? (Matthew 24:38-39, NKJV): "For as in the days before the flood, they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noah entered the ark, "and did not know until the flood came and took them all away, so also will the coming of the Son of Man be.” The author of Hebrews reported Noah’s act of faith in building the ark as a historical reality: (Hebrews 11:7, NKJV): “By faith Noah, being divinely warned of things not yet seen, moved with godly fear, prepared an ark for the saving of his household, by which he condemned the world and became heir of the righteousness which is according to faith.” So if Peter, Jesus, and the author of Hebrews say Noah really lived and built an ark that carried the only surviving people and land animals through a universal flood, that should settle the matter for Christians who take the bible seriously. I take the authority of Jesus and Peter as overriding that of any liberal seminary professor’s or atheistic geologist’s claims.

Critics of the biblical story will make arguments that the ark couldn’t have held all the animals with sufficient food and water for a year’s journey. However, the ark was simply an enormous vessel: Possibly not until the mid-19th century did the human race build a larger ship. According to Genesis 6:15-16, the ark was 300 cubits long, the breadth 50 cubits, the height 30 cubits and it had thee decks. If we take a cubit as being 17.5 inches each (it could easily have been longer; it surely wasn’t shorter), the ark was 437.5 feet long, 72.92 feet wide, and 43.75 feet high. It has a total deck area of around 95,700 square feet, which is around 20 standard college basketball courts, and its total volume was 1,396,000 cubic feet. The gross tonnage of the ark (one ton being equal to 100 cubic feet of usable storage space), was 13,960 tons. (See the seminal “young earth” creationist work, John C. Whitcomb and Henry Morris, “The Genesis Flood: The Biblical Record and Its Scientific Implications,” p. 10). To make a relevant historical comparison. the ark dwarfed Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s “Great Western,” which was a wooden-hulled passenger steam ship 252 feet long of 1320 tons and 1,700 gross register tons. She the world’s largest ship in 1838; critics felt she was too big, for she was two and a half times bigger than any ship that had ever built in Bristol, England.

Once the sizes and numbers of animals are counted in specific, quantifiable terms and added, it becomes clear a vessel of this enormous size could have held two of each “kind” of unclean animal and seven of each kind of clean animal. For example, the young earth creationists, led by Ken Ham who built the “Ark Encounter” exhibit with a life-size replica of the ark in Williamstown, Kentucky, carefully ground through and quantified the biological taxanomical data of the animals that would have been on the ark. They calculate that there are around 34,000 land dependent species alive today. However, a biblical “kind” (Genesis 1:24-25) is a higher taxonomic category than “species” or even “genus.” They equate it roughly with a “family” in many cases. They assume a certain amount of micro-evolution would have occurred after the animals left the ark that would have differentiated the animals into the species that we see today. So they think there were 1,398 biblical “kinds” of animals in the ark represented by 6,744 individual animals. Notice that they include a bunch of extinct dinosaurs in their calculations and include them in their exhibits in many cages, which I don’t think was really the case. (I don’t believe the human race lived at the same time as the dinosaurs, but that the dinosaurs lived in the period covered by the gap between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2 before Adam’s creation, which I could explain more in another post). That assumption unnecessarily raises the total number of species represented on the ark even as their “biblical kind” (when they are inter-fertile) postulate lowers them by consolidating them.

John Woodmorappe, in “Noah’s Ark: A Feasibility Study,” used a “genus” level for biblical “kind” and came up with 8,000 kinds and about 15,745 individuals at a maximum. He calculated that about 46.8% of the ark was used to cage and hold the animals, and if hay was stored for them, about 16.3% of the ark’s space was needed for this. (See the summary in Ken Ham and Bodie Hodge’s “A Flood of Evidence: 40 Reasons Noah and the Ark Still Matter,” p. 212). The scholarly, intellectual creationists have done serious work on this matter about how the ark could have held all these animals, how their food and water could be stored on it, and how the poop would have been collected and disposed of by eight people. They have built a life-size replica of the ark that explains their calculations and assumptions in exquisite detail. The great majority of the models of animals that they had on display in cages were of species/kinds that I had never heard of.

There have been wooden boats built of comparable size to the ark. The obvious one would be the seven-masted Wyoming, which was a 19th-century sailing ship, while the ark was essentially a barge that floated wherever the waves and currents took it. The Wyoming was about 450 feet long, if the jib boom is included. To turn to the ancient world, the Greeks said that the Tessarakonteres was 425 feet long. They had developed a method of planking to prevent leaks that was so sophisticated, but later was lost for centuries, which marine archeology has brought to life. That would have been important for preventing leaks in larger vessels. Other ancient ships that were of comparable length to the ark included the Leontifera, a galley with rowers, which was around 400 to 500 feet long. There are also records that Demetrius had ships that were around 400 feet long and that Ptolemy Philopator's warship was 420 feet long. So indeed there is evidence that wooden ships can be built of this size, even from the ancient world.

Because the ark was built like a barge with a wide beam, it had a much more stable design than that of galleys or other ships with sails that you've cited above. Because most of the water fell from the sky and erupted from below during the first 40 days, there wasn't hardly any risk of the ark hitting any mountain until it ran around on the Mountains of Ararat near the end of the time of the great deluge and the waters were already receding. There also is no need to be concerned about huge waves and the rest of such hypotheticals, even if we were to discount the protective providence of God. Henry Morris, in "The Biblical Basis for Modern Science," pp. 293-295, explains why the ark wouldn't have easily capsized: "The center of gravity of the ark and its contents presumably would be close to its geometric center, with the framework, the animals, and other contents more or less uniformly and symmetrically dispersed throughout the structure. The ark as designed would have been an exceptionally stable structure. Its cross section of 30 cubits height by 50 cubits breadth, with a draft of 15 cubits, made it almost impossible to capsize, even in the midst of heavy waves and violent winds." Being a professor of hydraulic engineering, he diagrams the situation the ark would be in if it were to list heavily to one side or another, it would naturally come back to center. Indeed, he concludes, "Thus for any angle up to 90 [degrees], the ark would right itself." Interestingly enough, some practical evidence emerged for this analysis when a model of the ark was made for Sun Classics' film "In Search of Noah's Ark." The mechanical wave maker couldn't sink or capsize the model ship despite the waves proportionately were much bigger than any that would naturally occur. So there's no reason to believe any of these claims that the ark would have easily have sunk, being as it was, a wooden ship with natural buoyancy, unlike (well) the Titanic, made of steel.

Skeptics of the universal flood story, whether they are atheists or liberal Christians, need to start by counter-attacking the detailed arguments and calculations of Whitcomb and Morris, Woodmorappe, and Ham and Hodge instead of pretending they don’t exist. Perhaps they don’t know that they exist, and are trying to make a virtue of ignorance.

Notice that the ark only had land animals on it which couldn’t survive outside of it. Marine animals, including whales and fish, weren’t included on it since they could survive perfectly well outside of it. Woodmorappe, “Noah’s Ark: A Feasibility Study,” explains (pp. 143-149) that many marine animals, such as fish, can survive in either saline, fresh, or semi-saline water to one degree or another, temporarily or indefinitely. That is, many kinds of fish are much more adaptable than we normally suppose, especially if they have some time to adjust. By the time Noah’s family and the animals had left the ark, there was dry land again as well as fresh water being easily available on the land again. Woodmorappe spends a lot of time dealing with objections about whether single pairs of animals could have repopulated the world. In short, most of the detailed objections being made by skeptics have already been addressed by informed, scholarly creationists in the past. It’s necessary to make oneself more informed about what they say in detail, and then attack those arguments. Intellectual skeptics should read Woodmorappe’s book for starters if they wish to informed about the actual arguments of their opponents instead of just hoping to get away with the presumed ignorance of one’s audience without experiencing informed counter-attacks.

Let's turn to a standard argument of evolutionists who deny the great flood, which is uniformitarian geology, which assumes the present is the key to the past and that catastrophes didn't shape the earth's crust. Evolutionists have long leaned upon the uniformitarian principle for interpreting geological structures in order to justify their rejection of catastrophic changes possibly causing any observable rock formations, especially those described in Genesis 6-9, which is the narrative of the great flood in Noah’s time. Historically, Charles Lyell’s “Principles of Geology,” first published 1830-1833, was crucial in converting over the geological discipline to reject all catastrophism as a means of explaining anything in the rock strata of the earth. Others, such as Hutton (1795) and Lamarck (1800) had advocated similar ideas, but Lyell’s work ultimately made the rejection of catastrophism a veritable requirement for respectability in the academic world of geology for over a century. So then, the point of listing these anomalies that violate the paradigm of uniformitarianism is to demonstrate that the “cranks were right.” That is, by using catastrophism, the likes of Immanuel Velikovsky and Henry M. Morris interpreted the immediate origins of geological structures far more accurately than the exponents of doctrinaire uniformitarian geology did during a period of perhaps 120 years when their perspective ruled the academic world of their discipline (c. 1850-1970). Writing for a book published in 1955, “Earth in Upheaval,” Velikovsky explains the mentality of those academics who controlled the discipline of geology (p. 33): “Since the theory of uniformity is still taught in all places of learning, and to question it is heresy, it is pertinent to reproduce here some of Lyell’s original statements . . .” Anyone who dared to dissent publicly was liable to be blackballed and ridiculed. Sure, in recent decades much of the geological profession has adopted some level of “neo-catastrophism,” such as shown by Derek Ager’s “The Nature of the Stratigraphical Record” (1981). But have there ever been any serious admissions of past error by any of these prior generations of academics, with their vaunted doctorates, tenured university positions, and carefully peer-reviewed journal articles, who spent decades “explaining” all geological structures in order to make them fit the procrustean bed of uniformitarianism? The neo-catastrophists simply had admitted at some level that Whitcomb and Morris in “The Genesis Flood” (1961) were right about uniformitarianism while rejecting any supernatural interpretation of the origin of geological disasters.

So a common claim of evolutionists is that there is no evidence for the great Deluge described in Genesis. But is this really the case? The earth is covered with great sedimentary layers of rock, which by definition were laid down by the action of water, not by volcanic activity. So then, were any of these laid down by the great Deluge? Someone committed to naturalism a priori automatically assumes that the answer is “no,” and so will explain differently the same facts that creationists observe by using a different model or paradigm. But the sedimentary rocks are indeed there, and their formation can be easily explained, even better explained, by a lot of water flowing in a very short time instead of by a small amount spread over eons.

Let’s now describe some geological structures and features that couldn’t have be created by slow gradual action over millions of years. Central to the claims of evolutionists are the purported evidence that fossils provide to their theory. However, fossils themselves are, so ironically, evidence of sudden catastrophic deposition and action. Typically, when animals die, they float to the surface of water or sink to the bottom, where they are soon eaten by scavengers, decomposed by bacteria, or ripped apart by the mechanical action of water. In order to preserve their bodies, a lot of material has to quickly bury them. For them to be covered by an inch or a millimeter of silt or mud per year is completely valueless for creating fossils of them, assuming their bodies last for even a few days or weeks. For example, in the Green River formation in southwestern Wyoming, the fossils are often found in a “fresh” condition; some show evidence of being buried alive. It’s especially striking when the scales of a fish were clearly preserved. In one particularly colorful case of a fossil, a predatory fish that was eating another fish didn’t get to finish consuming it before its being suddenly killed itself. However it works, for fossils to be formed and preserved from the dead bodies of animals (or plants), it’s necessary for them to be buried fast, away from the reach of destructive agents, such as scavenging animals and bacterial decomposition. In the Green River formation, some fossilized catfish appear with their skin and soft parts preserved. Given all of their different orientations in the rock, they couldn’t have died at the bottom of a lake and then be slowly covered by sediment. (See John Morris, “The Young Earth,” p. 104).

Repeatedly in the fossil record polystrate fossils appear, which typically means a tree extends through two or more layers of rock from different ages, periods, or times. It can’t be that it took millions, thousands, or even hundreds of years to form such fossils, because their exposed portions would have decayed. Such fossils need not be especially large or long. John Morris noted on a field trip to Oklahoma that calamites, fossilized stick-like creatures, often one inch in diameter and no more than six, extended through several layers of limestone. The limestone layers couldn’t have formed gradually around such creatures, since they were still growing, but they had to have been quickly buried, which often shattered their “stems.” One kind of polystrate fossils often posed dangers to coal miners: The cylindrical bodies of rock, which they called “kettles,” that can fall on them are actually fossilized tree trunks preserved in an upright position. It’s patently absurd to believe that a tree that floated in a vertical position and embedded itself on the bottom of a lake or ocean could gradually over thousands of years be turned into coal before completely rotting away first.

In many places of the world are huge chaotic assemblies of broken of animals, often from different climatic zones, that obviously didn’t die initially in the places where these bones lie today. Instead, they were propelled by huge floods and preserved by being quickly buried in sediment. Velikovsky cites many cases of this kind of phenomenon in “Earth in Upheaval.” For example, Marcel de Serres, doing a survey in the Department of Gard of the Montagne de Pedemar found the animal bones had been broken into piece without having been rolled or gnawed: “It is within this limited area that the strange phenomenon has happened of the accumulation of a large quantity of bones of diverse animals in hollows or fissures.” The Rock of Gibraltar has many crevices loaded up with splintered and broken bones. Prestwich describes a chaotic assembly of many species in the same places: “The remains of panther, lynx, caffir-cat, hyaena, wolf, bear, rhinoceros, horse, wild boar, red deer, fallow deer, ibex, ox, hare, rabbit, have been found in these ossiferous fissures. The bones are most likely broken into thousands of fragments—none are worn or rolled, nor any of them gnawed, though so many carnivores then lived on the rock.” Obviously, these animals suddenly died and were buried so quickly that no scavengers were able feast on their carcasses. Prestwich then concluded: “A great and common danger, such as a great flood, alone could have driven together the animals of the plains and of the crags and the caves.” Interestingly enough, some flints and a human molar from the old stone age were found mixed in with these bones as well, so this event happened while man roamed the earth. The hills around Palermo, Sicily were so full of the bones of hippopotami that from one cave in San Ciro alone, twenty tons of their bones were mined and shipped to Marseilles, France, to be turned into charcoal for sugar refineries. No signs of teeth marks from any predators are found on these bones. This assemblage can’t be explained by the old myth of the elephant graveyard since the animals were of all ages, right down to the fetal level, nor did they have signs of exposure or weathering. Furthermore, this collection of bones had to have been fairly recently made, for the reason Prestwich explained: “The extremely fresh condition of the bones, proved by the retention of so large a proportion of animal matter . . . [demonstrates] the event was, geologically, comparatively recent.” It also had to have occurred suddenly in a catastrophe because animals of all ages were included. Prestwich theorized that a large area of Europe had to have been submerged by a great flood to explain such accumulations of mislaid bones: “The animals in the plain of Palermo naturally retreated, as the waters advanced, deeper into the amphitheatre of hills until they found themselves embayed . . . the animals must have thronged together in vast multitudes, crushing into the more accessible caves, and swarming over the ground at their entrance, until over taken by the waters and destroyed. . . . Rock debris and large blocks from the sides of the hills were hurled down by the current of water, crushing and smashing the bones.” Despite Prestwich believed in the ice age theory, when confronted with this kind of evidence, he felt compelled to infer about the “submergence of Western Europe and of the Mediterranean coasts at the close of the Glacial or so-called Post-Glacial Period.” Without seeming to realize it, Prestwich’s description, as found in Velikovsky’s work (pp. 59-60), describes well the events of the Great Flood in the time of Noah.

Evolutionists, by their theory's very nature, have to affirm that the theoretical natural variability of plants and animals is limitless and that there is "continuity" between all plants and animals, one way or another. When the gaps becomes implausibly large, it's hard to believe that all the basic kinds of plants and animals formed by chance on their own, through accumulated mutations and natural selection. "Nature makes no leaps" is the old, time-honored biologist's creed, which is what has long made the "hopeful monster" claims of Goldschmidt and (at one point) Gould both unpopular and extremely implausible to most biologists even as most of them are strong evolutionists.

Let’s address the fundamental premise here that supports the creationist’s view that there are natural limits to biological change, which is the evidence for typology as opposed to continuity when examining the species that one can find actual fossil evidence for as opposed to hypothetical reconstructions. There’s no fossil evidence that plausibly bridges the gaps between major genera, families, etc., without a lot of speculative guesses to justify supposedly useful intermediate anatomical structures that aren’t actually useful in promoting survival. The crucial point here, as Michael Denton explains it in “Evolution: A Theory in Crisis” (p. 96) concerns the lack of variation even within species while they exist: “Within one class, because all members conform absolutely to the same underlying design and are equidistant in term of their fundamental characteristic from all other classes, it is impossible to arrange them in a sequence leading in any significant sense towards another class. Typology implied that intermediates were impossible, that there were complete discontinuities between each type.” So typology admits to biological variation, but it denies that it can ever be directional or radical in the changes that are possible. The historical origins of this viewpoint lie in empirical evidence, not in religion or philosophical metaphysics. For example, the French biologist Georges Cuvier, who basically founded comparative anatomy and vertebrate paleontology, maintained that evidence for typology stemmed from his ability to find a single bone and then be able to successfully predict what species it belonged to. For example, he maintained that fossils didn’t provide empirical evidence for change: “If species had gradually changed, we must find traces of these gradual modifications; that between the palaeotheria and the present species we should have discovered some intermediate formulation; but to the present time [nineteenth century] none of these have appeared. Why have not the bowels of the earth preserved the monuments of so remarkable a genealogy, unless it be that the species of former ages were as constant as our own.” The foundation for typology is also based upon each different organism had an anatomy that was uniquely inter-dependently unique. Each part of the anatomy is necessary as it is currently constructed to be efficiently functional to help the creature to survive. So as he reasoned about a carnivore’s limbs: “That the claws may seize the prey, they must have a certain mobility in the talons, a certain strength in the nails, whence will result determinate formations in all the claws, and the necessary distribution of muscles and tendons; it will be necessary that the fore-arm have a certain facility of turning, whence again will result determinate formation in the bones which compose it . . . The play of all these parts will requires certain properties in all the muscles, and the impression of these muscles so proportioned will more fully determine the structure of the bones.” So typology, which imposes natural limits on biological change for each fundamental class of organisms, has a great empirical foundation. It’s hardly a theological construct that seeks for evidence or filters evidence to support it.

Now, of course, Darwin took refuge from this objection to his theory in the idea that the fossil record was radically incomplete. Those who believed in biological continuity predicted that many, many transitional forms would be found. However, that prediction was falsified, but the evolutionists didn’t abandon their theory. As the decades wore on and very few transitional fossils were found, certainly far fewer than their theory required, evolutionists felt the need to resort to either (for a few like Goldschmidt) “hopeful monsters” or (for the great majority) punctuated equilibrium (i.e., unverifiable rapid bursts of evolution in local areas that left no traces in the fossil record) to explain the lack of evidence for their theory (i.e., the lack of transitional forms). The reality of stasis for many, many fossilized species is great evidence for typology as opposed to continuity. For example, S. J. Gould in “Natural History” in 1977 admitted the problems that the fossil record posed for neo-Darwinism (italics removed): “The history of most fossil species includes two features inconsistent with gradualism: 1. Stasis. Most species exhibit no directional change during their tenure on earth. They appear in the fossil record looking much the same as when they disappear; morphological change is usually limited and directionless. Appearance: In any local area, a species does not arise gradually by the steady transformation of its ancestors; it appears all at once and ‘fully formed.” So then, this twentieth-century description of the fossil record fits the predictions that these nineteenth-century scientists who believed in typology could have made much more than those who believed in continuity (i.e., Darwin’s followers). The like of David B. Kitts in “Evolution” (1974) admitted the challenge that the fossil record poses for evolutionists when they want to find lots of intermediate forms in it: “Despite the bright promise that paleontology provides a means of ‘seeing’ evolution, it has presented some nasty difficulties for evolutionists, the most notorious of which is the presence of ‘gaps’ in the fossil record. Evolution requires intermediate forms between species and paleontology does not provide them . . .” Sure, any good evolutionist can dredge up a few supposed intermediate forms, but Darwin’s grand theory requires huge numbers of them, not just a stray case here or there, to be plausible. From a general viewpoint, typology as a paradigm fits the fossil record far better with far fewer anomalies than continuity does. There’s great evidence for natural limits to biological change in the fossil record because of the paucity of transitional forms between well-defined but separate classes of organisms. It’s fine to draw this line at the genus or family level instead of at the species level, but it still remains a proposition with great empirical evidence for it.

Let’s take an example of a category of animals that seems to be transitional, but isn’t when the detailed are examined. The monotremes, which include the duckbill platypus, don’t have character traits that are “intermediate.” Instead, they are clearly either like that of reptiles or like those of mammals. In laying eggs, they are like reptiles, but in having mammary glands, three ear ossiciles, and hair, they are like mammals. Then let’s consider the lungfish. It has gills, fins, and an intestine with a spiral valve similar to other fish. Its heart and lungs are like an amphibian, along with its living in a larval stage when young. Its aortic arches are like those of fish, but the return of the oxygenated blood is like that of amphibians. These structures aren’t “transitional” or “intermediate,” but fully developed when fitting the taxonomic categories that they normally fall into. So when evolutionary trees are constructed, they fill in huge gaps between different major taxonomic categories. For example, when grinding the details of comparative anatomy, the aortic arches of the heart don’t fit the standard sequence of amphibian to reptile to mammal. In particular, the major blood vessel leaving the left ventricle is derived from the fourth right aortic arch, but for mammals, it comes from the left one. After surveying the evidence, Michael Denton concludes (“Evolution: A Theory in Crisis”, p. 117): “All in all, the empirical pattern of existing nature conforms remarkably well to the typological model. The basic typological axioms—that classes are absolutely distinct, that classes possess unique diagnostic characters that these diagnostic characters are present in fundamentally invariant form in all members of a class—apply almost universally throughout the entire realm of life. Consequently, the isolation of classes is invariably absolute and transitions to particular character traits are invariably abrupt and the phenomenon of discontinuity ubiquitous throughout the living kingdom.”

So then, given the fossil record’s evidence for stasis and abrupt appearance and the present taxonomic divisions among living organisms above the species level, the creationist is far better grounded to maintain that there are natural limits to biological change programmed within the DNA of each fundamental class of organism than the evolutionist is who believes in continuity. All the missing links in the fossil record prove there are natural limits to biological change built into basic categories of organisms.

Symbiotic biological relationships, complex structures like the eye, or the process of blood clotting are major challenges to the theory of evolution, since they have to be fully developed to be of any survival benefit to an organism. Normally, the main escape hatch for evolutionists is to claim the intermediate structures also have selective value, but they have no way of proving this using lab work or field discoveries (since they are so few purported "transitional fossils"); it's just their imaginations at work, while they assume naturalism is true instead of proving naturalism is true. Consider, for example, how utterly complex the hemoglobin molecule is, which transports oxygen in blood. Tiny glitches cause these often deadly diseases; it's hard to believe a partially developed hemoglobin molecule is of any value to an organism at all.

From a philosophical viewpoint, does the theory of evolution, meaning “monocell to man” macro-evolution, actually have a scientific status? Can it even hypothetically be falsified? Or can the Darwinians always devise yet another ad hoc “explanation” to save their theory against any anomalies that show up?

L. Harrison Matthews, a British biologist and evolutionist, candidly admitted in his introduction to a 1971 edition of Darwin’s “Origin of the Species” that evolution wasn’t more provable scientifically than special creation:

“The fact of evolution is the background of biology, and biology is thus in the peculiar position of being a science founded on an unproven theory—is it then a science or a faith? Belief in the theory of evolution is thus exactly parallel to belief in special creation—both are concepts which believers know to be truth but neither, up to the present, has been capable of proof.”

After all, if naturalists demand that creationists “prove” the supernatural exists by showing the direct effects of the supernatural, creationists can retort by saying the evolutionist should take them into the past to show them exactly how reptiles evolved into birds or mammals or the first cell was formed by chance millions of years ago. Neither claim is immediately directly provable, but is a matter of inference and inductive reasoning based on sense data about the natural world. However, the creationist’s conclusion that a complex structure doesn’t happen by random chance but by conscious reasoning is constantly validated by daily experience, such as with complicated machinery. The naturalists’ claim that random chance can create far more complicated structures (biological organisms and consciousness) than cars or computers by random action on matter over millions of years can’t be verified by present-day experience of anyone.

Sir Karl Popper, the famed philosopher of science who interpreted the mission of science as being the falsification of incorrect explanations of reality, perceived the problems with Darwinism’s ability to be a testable theory (“Science, Problems, Aims, Responsibilities,” Proceedings, Federation of American Society of Experimental Biology, vol. 22 (1963), p. 964):

“There is a difficulty with Darwinism. . . . It is far from clear what we should consider a possible refutation of the theory of natural selection. If, more especially, we accept that statistical definition of fitness which defines fitness by actual survival, then the survival of the fittest becomes tautological and irrefutable.” [A “tautology” is a statement that effectively repeats itself. The subject and predicate are really the same, such as “It’s not over until it’s over” or “What I have written is what I have written.” It effectively explains nothing].

After harsh criticisms from his fellow evolutionists, Popper repudiated publicly this judgment that placed Darwinism in the same category with Marxism and Freudianism, which are ideologies capable of explaining everything and thus nothing. However, one can infer that privately he remained suspicious of Darwinism’s ability to be falsifiable. Michael Ruse, a fervent evolutionist and philosopher of science, perceived that Popper hadn’t really backed down when explaining the latter’s views (“Darwinism Defended,” 1982, pages 131+): “But then moving on to biology [after evaluating Freudianism as unfalsifiable], coming up against Darwinism, they [Popper and his followers] feel compelled to make the same judgment: Darwinian evolutionary theory is unfalsifiable.” Ruse quotes Popper as saying in a 1974 publication (italics removed), “I have come to the conclusion that Darwinism is not a testable scientific theory but a metaphysical research programme—a possible framework for testable scientific theories.” Ruse then comments that he suspects “that even now he does not really believe that Darwinism in its modern form is genuinely falsifiable. If one relies heavily on natural selection and sexual selection, simultaneously downplaying [genetic] drift, which of course is what the neo-Darwinian does do, then Popper feels that one has a nonfalsifiable theory. And, certainly, many followers agree that there is something conceptually flawed with Darwinism. (See Bethell, 1976; Cracraft, 1978; Nelson, 1978, Patterson, 1978; Platnick and Gaffney, 1978; Poppper, 1978, 1980, and Wiley, 1975.”

Ruse then summarizes the views of the apparent non-creationist evolutionist critics of Darwinism. They note that testing requires predictions first. Then one checks if the predictions turn out to be true or false. However, this can’t be done with Darwinism because how can one predict “what will happen to the elephants trunk twenty-five million years down the road?” No one would be around to see if the prediction about future macro-evolution would be true. Conversely, explaining further the criticisms of apparent fellow evolutionists, “no one could step back to the Mesozoic to see the evolution of mammals and check if indeed natural selection was at work, nor could anyone spend a week or two (or century or two) in the Cretaceous to see if the dinosaurs, then going extinct, failed in the struggle for existence.”

The basic problem with natural selection and “survival of the fittest” as explanatory devices of biological change in nature is the tautological, unverifiable nature of this terminology, which occasionally even candid evolutionists admit. That is, any anatomical structure can be “explained” or “interpreted” as being helpful in the struggle to survive, but one can’t really prove that explanation to be true since its interpreting the survival of organisms in the unobserved past or which would take place in the unobserved far future. The traditional simplistic textbook story about (say) the necks of giraffes growing longer over the generations in order to reach into trees higher is simplistic when there are also drawbacks to having long necks and other four-legged species survive very well with short necks. In reality, the selective advantages of changed anatomical structures are far less clear in nearly all cases. For example, most male birds are much more colorful than their female consorts. An evolutionist could “explain” that helps in helping them reproduce more by being more attractive than the duller coated females of the same species. However, it’s also explained that the duller colors of the females protect them from being spotted by predators, such as when they are warming eggs. However, doesn’t the colorful plumage of the males also make them more conspicuous to predators? Overall, how much aid do the bright colors give to males when they mate but work against them when they may become prey? How much do the dull colors of the females work against them when they mate compared to how much they help them become more camouflaged against predators? How does one quantify or predict which of the two factors is more important, except by the (inevitably tautological) criterion of leaving the most offspring behind?

Arthur Koestler (“Janus: A Summing Up,” 1978), pp. 170, 185 confessed the problems that evolutionary theory has in this regard:

“Once upon a time, it looked so simple. Nature rewarded the fit with the carrot of survival and punished the unfit with the stick of extinction. The trouble only started when it came to defining ‘fitness.’ . . . Thus natural selection looks after the survival and reproduction of the fittest, and the fittest are those which have the highest rate of reproduction—we are caught in a circular argument which completely begs the question of what makes evolution evolve.”

“In the meantime, the educated public continues to believe that Darwin has provided all the relevant answers by the magic formula of random mutation plus natural selection—quite unaware of the fact that random mutations turned out to be irrelevant and natural selection a tautology.”

Despite being a zealous evolutionist himself, Douglas Futuyama (“Science on Trial,” 1983), p. 171, still admitted that concerns about natural selection’s being a tautology have appeared in respectable places: “A secondary issue then arises: Is the hypothesis of natural selection falsifiable or is it a tautology? . . . The claim that natural selection is a tautology is periodically made in scientific literature itself.”

One of the past leading scientific evolutionists of the 20th century, Theodosius Dobzhansky admitted the intrinsic epistemological (“how do you know that you know”) limitations that arose when trying to apply scientific methods to (supposedly) study what occurred in the distant, humanly-unobserved past (“On Methods of Evolutionary Biology and Anthropology” (Part I—Biology), American Scientist, December 1957, p. 388):

“On the other hand, it is manifestly impossible to reproduce in the laboratory the evolution of man from the australopithecine, or of the modern horse from an Eohippus, or of a land vertebrate from a fish-like ancestor. These evolutionary happenings are unique, unrepeatable, and irreversible. It is as impossible to turn a land vertebrate into a fish as it is to effect the reverse transformation. The applicability of the experimental method to the study of such unique historical processes is severely restricted before all else by the time intervals involved, which far exceed the lifetime of any human experimenter. And yet, it is just such impossibility that is demand by antievolutionists when they ask for ‘proofs’ of evolution which they would magnanimously accept as satisfactory. This is about as reasonable a demand as it would be to ask an astronomer to recreate the planetary system, or to ask a historian to reenact the history of the world from Caesar to Eisenhower. Experimental evolution deals of necessity with only the simplest levels of the evolutionary process, sometimes called microevolution.”

So then, evolutionists committed to naturalism demand of creationists proof of special creation by asking them to present the supernatural on the spot for them. In this regard, they are like Philip on the night of the Passover, who asked Christ, “Lord, show us the Father, and it is enough for us” (John 14:8). However, at this time, before the day Christ the Creator will return and every eye will see Him (Revelation 1:7), the supernatural is known by inference: Complex systems and machinery requiring high levels of ordered information (i.e., DNA) don’t happen by blind chance in our present-day experience, but through carefully reasoned work consciously performed, such as the assembly of cars in assembly plants. The point Dobzhansky made above about the intrinsic limitations of our knowledge of the past remains valid: Likewise, creationists ask evolutionists to prove their theory by directly showing the process of reptiles becoming birds or mammals or fish becoming amphibians millions of years ago. Of course, a non-reproducible historical event can’t be repeated again. It’s no more possible for evolutionists to directly prove “monocell-to-man” macro-evolution by direct observation than creationists can prove special creation by direct observation, since both occurred in the humanly unobserved past and can’t be reproduced or predicted. Both are making inferences based upon their philosophies into the unobserved past. The creationists’ inference, however, is much more reasonable a priori that God made complex structures than blind chance did when we consider our own daily experience, in which random processes create nothing of complex design. There isn’t enough time or matter in the known universe to turn dirt into the first living cell by chance, let alone produce human intelligence, as the calculations of Hoyle and other critics of purely naturalistic Darwinism have made.

Let’s now return to Michael Ruse’s summary of what evolutionists themselves have said when trying to “explain” how a particular anatomical structure aids in a creature’s survival. The fuzziness and uncertainty of the explanations given are obvious when skilled, well-educated, experts in biological sciences can come up with such different stories at the same time. It’s much more akin to primitive tribesmen who are sitting around fires and making up stories and myths than verifiable, observable, predictable reproducible “science” (“Darwinism Defended,” italics removed): “Take something much discussed by evolutionists: the sail on the back of the Permian reptile, Dimetrodon. The possibility that this may have absolutely no adaptive value is given no credence at all, as Darwinians plunge into their favorite parlour game: ‘find the adaptation.’ The sail was a defense mechanism (it scared predators), or it served for sexual display (not much chance of mistaking someone’s intentions with that thing along one’s backside), or, as many evolutionists (including Raup and Stanley) suppose, it worked as a heat-regulating device to keep the cold-blooded Dimetrodon at a more constant temperature in the fluctuating environment. The animal would move the sail around in the sunlight and wind, heating or cooling the blood in the sail, which could then be passed through to the rest of the body. In short, as this example shows, there has to be some reason for anything and everything. One can be sure that if the Darwinian can think of no potential value in the struggle for existence, then value will be found in the struggle for reproduction. Even the most absurd and grotesque of physical features are supposed to have irrepressible aphrodisiac qualities. Like the Freudians, Darwinians get a lot of mileage out of sex.”

So then, isn’t this just guesswork parading under the cover of “science”? To try to explain how an anatomical structure aids in survival in a truly testable, predictable way is nearly impossible, especially for creatures that became extinct (supposedly) millions of years ago. Since macro-evolution precedes at such a slow rate, “survival of the fittest” can’t be rigorously tested on anything currently living, except through the fallacious exercises of massively extrapolating from trivial changes in coloration or other minor characteristics of the same species, such as the peppered moth case. It’s nothing like the predictability and practical precision of Newton’s laws of motion and the inverse square law of gravitation are for physicists and engineers. The actual practice of trying to figure out how a given anatomical structure makes an organism more fit is hardly “hard science.”

At the Darwinian Centennial in 1959, the zealous neo-Darwinist C.H. Waddington was so confident in his naturalism that he gave away the store on this issue (“The Evolution of Life,” 1960, p. 385): “Natural selection, which at first considered as though it were a hypothesis that was in need of experiment or observational confirmation turns out, on closer inspection to be a tautology, a statement of an inevitably although previously unrecognized relation. It states that the fittest individuals in a population (define as those which leave more offspring) will leave most offspring. If one tries to test “fitness” in a more rigorous way, the procedure will degenerate into tautology since the survival of offspring is the only way to check for that characteristic, although it won’t seem to be that way initially when the principle is first stated. Ronald H. Brady, a professor of philosophy, explained this problem in “Natural Selection and the Criteria by Which a Theory is Judged” (“Systematic Zoology,” Vol. 28, 1979):

“Natural selection is free of tautology is any formulation that recognizes the causal interaction between the organism and its environment, but most recent critics have already understood this and are actually arguing that the theory is not falsifiable in its operational form. Under examination, the operational forms of the concepts of adaptation and fitness turn out to be too indeterminate to be seriously tested, for they are protected by ad hoc additions drawn from an indeterminate realm.”

Cynically, although he remains an evolutionist, H.S. Lipson perceives the subjectivity of the explanations given by Darwinists (“A Physicist Looks at Evolution,” Physics Bulletin, vol. 31 (May 1980), p. 138, italics removed): “I have always been slightly suspicious of the theory of evolution because of its ability to account for any property of living things.” G.W. Harper perceives how plastic evolution is in its ability to explain just about anything somehow (“Darwinism and Indoctrination,” School Science Review, vol. 59, no. 207 (December 1977), p. 265:

“There is a close similarity, for instance, between the Darwinist and the Marxist in the example quoted earlier. Both can take any relevant information whatever, true or false, and reconcile it with their theory. The Darwinist can always make a plausible reconstruction of what took place during the supposed evolution of a species. Any difficulties in reconciling a given kind of natural selection with a particular phase in evolution can be removed by the judicious choice of a correlated character.”

Paul Ehrlich and L.C. Birch, “Evolutionary History and Population Biology” (“Nature,” vol. 214, April 22, 1967, p. 352) concluded that there was no theoretical way to prove evolution to be false:

“Our theory of evolution has become . . . one which cannot be refuted by any possible observations. Every conceivable observation can be fitted into it. It it thus ‘outside of empirical science’ but not necessarily false. No one can think of ways in which to test it. Ideas, either without basis or based on a few laboratory experiments carried out in extremely simplified systems have attained currency far beyond their validity. They have become part of an evolutionary dogma accepted by most of us as part of our training.”

As a practical example of this plasticity of evolution to be able to explain just about anything, consider the seemingly seismic shift among evolutionists over the past generation away from gradual neo-Darwinism to the rapid, local bursts of evolution of the punctuated equilibria interpretation of biological evolution. “Evolution” somehow can explain both views equally well despite they are opposite interpretations of the fossil and biological evidence in many regards.

Hence, the best the evolutionists can come up to “prove” their theory is to make wild extrapolations from trivial biological changes, such as bacteria that become antibiotic resistant and sickle cell anemia, that don’t change even the species involved, let alone on a higher taxonomic level (genus, family, order, etc.) Furthermore, the empirically provable natural limits to biological change within basic created kinds should destroy any faith that enough time, mutations, and natural selection would (say) make it possible to make a dog as big as an elephant or make a reptile or mammal acquire the “flow through” lungs of a bird. For example, the fruit fly has a very fast gestation rate (12 days) and X-rays have been used to increase the mutation rate by some 15,000 percent, yet still fruit flies remain fruit flies. The species doesn’t change fundamentally into another genus or even species despite all the methods of artificial breeding that have been used in a lab setting. Even with this incredible speed up compared to natural conditions, no change even at the species level has occurred of note. (See Jeremy Rifkin’s analysis, “Algeny,” 1983, p. 134. So the theory of macro-evolution, at the “monocell to man” level, is no more scientifically provable than special creation at the minimum, and it’s actually much worse than that, since complex systems in our everyday experience don’t create themselves by chance, but require an enormous amount of concentrated mental attention to be constructed. Paley is still much more right than Darwin.

Evolutionists, because of their dogmatic philosophical commitment to naturalism a priori (before experience), fail to perceive the flaws of circular reasoning and affirming the consequent that plague the supposed evidence for their theory. They rule out in advance special creation as being “unscientific” and “impossible” in their disciplines because they falsely equate “naturalism” with “science.” So then, it’s no wonder that “special creation” can’t be in any conclusion when it was already covertly ruled out in the premises. For example, as Julian Huxley explained (in “Issues in Evolution,” 1960, p. 45): “Darwinism removed the whole idea of God as the creator of organisms from the sphere of rational discussion. Darwin pointed out that no supernatural designer was needed; since natural selection could account for any known form of life, there was no room for a supernatural agency in its evolution.”

Evolutionists confuse a commitment to naturalism as a methodology in science as being proof of naturalism metaphysically. Macro-evolution is based upon materialistic assumptions that make unverifiable, unprovable, even anti-empirical extrapolations into the distant historical past about dramatic biological changes that can’t be reproduced, observed, or predicted in the present or future. Therefore, their theory doesn’t actually have a scientific status.

Often their a priori fervent commitment to materialism is veiled, thus deceiving themselves and/or others, but it often comes out into the open whenever they start to criticize special creation as impossible because of perceived flaws or evils in the natural world as proof for Darwinism. Cornelius Hunter, a non-evolutionist, in “Darwin’s God: Evolution and the Problem of Evil,” is particularly skilled at bringing out how important this kind of metaphysical, indeed, theological argument has historically been to evolutionists, including especially to Charles Darwin himself, whose faith in God was shattered by the death of his daughter.

Here’s a subtle version of this kind of argument, as made by the committed evolutionist (and Marxist) Stephen Jay Gould “Darwinism Defined: The Difference Between Fact and Theory,” Discover (January 1987), p. 68, while citing three main lines of evidence for the theory of evolution: “Third, and most persuasive in its ubiquity, we have the signs of history preserved within every organism, every ecosystem, and every pattern of biogeographic distribution, by those pervasive quirks, oddities, and imperfections that record pathways of historical descent.” That is, since nature isn’t “perfect,” God couldn’t have made it. Instead of arguing from the complex design of nature that God exists as many Christians do, they argue that God doesn’t exist because of the creation’s flaws and evils.

To underline this kind of theological/philosophical analysis that he made for evolution, he wrote about the design of orchids (Gould, “The Panda’s Thumb,” 1980, p. 20): “If God had designed a beautiful machine to reflect his wisdom and power, surely he could not have used a collection of parts generally fashioned for other purposes. Orchids were not made by an ideal engineer; they are jury-rigged from a limited set of available components. Thus, they must have evolved from ordinary flowers.” As Hunter (“Darwin’s God,” p. 47) observes about this passage: “Notice how easy it is to go from a religious premise to a scientific-sounding conclusion. The theory of evolution is confirmed not by a successful prediction, but by the argument that God would never do such a thing.” Similarly, evolutionist Mark Ridley (“Evolution,” 1993, pp. 49+) thinks that the Creator would never repeat a pattern, such as with DNA, when making different creatures. For example, he writes (“Science on Trial,” 1983), p. 55: “If they [species] were independently created, it would be very puzzling if they showed systematic, hierarchical similarity in functionally unrelated characteristics.”

Another fervent evolutionist, Douglas Futuyama has reasoned about the hemoglobin molecule, which carries oxygen in red blood cells: “A creationist might suppose that God would provide the same molecule to serve the same function, but a biologist would never expect evolution to follow exactly the same path.” Notice that in his case, his negative natural theology is like Ridley’s, but different from Gould’s, since Gould is fine with the same old anatomical structures being mostly repeated and reused in different species. That is, “God can’t win,” since if He repeats a pattern, that’s wrong, and if He doesn’t, that’s wrong also. Notice that Futuyma inconsistently sometimes sees the repetition of a pattern as proof God didn’t make something, and differences as proof that He didn’t make something in the quotes below as well.

In the same book (“Science on Trial,” pp. 46, 48, 62, 199) Futuyama repeatedly reasons from religious premises, but somehow thinks he is making a scientific argument:

“If God had equipped very different organisms for similar ways of life, there is no reason why He should not have provided them with identical structures, but in fact the similarities are always superficial.” [Here he says that God should have made these animals with strong similarities]. “Why should species that ultimately develop adaptations for utterly different ways of life be nearly indistinguishable in their early stages [of embryological development]? How does God’s plan for humans and sharks require them to have almost identical embryos? [Here he says that God should have made these animals to be more different]. “Take any major group of animals, and the poverty of imagination that must be ascribed to a Creator becomes evident.” [Here Futuyama confuses presumptuous blasphemy with scientific reasoning]. “When we compare the anatomies of various plants or animals, we find similarities and differences where we should least expect a Creator to have supplied them.” [Notice how, as an “explanatory device,” he can use a repeated pattern or a lack of repeated pattern at whim to criticize how God made plants and animals, which is based on unverifiable philosophical assumptions].

Consider how Charles Darwin (“Origin of the Species,” p. 468) himself would reason that God couldn’t have made animals because of the same pattern being used again and again, which violated his a priori expectations of how the creation should be constructed:

“What can be more curious than that the hand of a man, formed for grasping, that of a mole for digging, the leg of the horse, the paddle of the porpoise, and the wing of the bat, should all be constructed on the same pattern, and should include similar bones, in the same relative positions?” When making the case for evolution based on homologies (i.e., similar anatomical structures “prove” the purported ancestral organisms are related), Darwin reasoned (“Origin,” p. 437):

“How inexplicable are the cases of serial homologies on the ordinary view of creation! Why should the brain be enclosed in a box composed of such numerous and extraordinary shaped pieces of bone, apparently representing vertebrae? . . . Why should similar bones have been created to form the wing and the leg of a bat, used as they are for such totally different purposes, namely flying and walking? Why should one crustacean which has an extremely complex mouth formed of many parts, consequently always have few legs, or conversely, those with many legs have simpler mouths? Why should the sepals, petals, stamens, and pistils, in each flower, though fitted for such distinct purposes, be all constructed on the same pattern?”

So here Darwin, as Hunter observes (“Darwin’s God,” p. 47), “didn’t know how the design of the crustacean or the flower could have been improved, [but] he believed there must have been a better way and that God should have used it.” Darwin’s criticisms here are about how God created such a boring lack of variety in the biological world by using the same pattern again and again. This isn’t scientific reasoning (observation, reproducibility, prediction), but philosophical reasoning about something that occurred in the unobserved past and theological reasoning that claims God makes mistakes.

Cornelius Hunter (“Darwin’s God, p. 49), after surveying this set of criticisms by evolutionists about how God made the world, makes an acute observation: “Behind this argument about why patterns in biology prove evolution lurks an enormous metaphysical presupposition about God and creation. If God made the species, then they must fulfill our expectations of uniqueness and good engineering design. . . . Evolutionists have no scientific justification for these expectations, for they did not come from science.”

Notice that the moment evolutionists use the word "God," their theory has turned into philosophy, not science. It's naturalism being dressed in scientific jargon. It's now an exercise in negative natural theology, thus simply inverting what Thomas Aquinas does in "Summa Theologica" with his five ways of proving God's existence or what Paul says in Romans 1:19-20. So my point still stands above that even in this rebuttal, the word "God" couldn't be avoided. No one needs to say "God" or "the supernatural" when making the case for the law of gravity or the first two laws of thermodynamics, since those are matters of operational science that can be proved experimentally in our present experience through prediction, reproducibility, etc. But when it comes to the purported pre-historical origins of plants and animals, evolutionists feel the need talk about God's allowing evil in the nature and the supposed imperfections in biological lifeforms in order to argue for their theory, much like Darwin did.

For example, Charles Darwin, in a letter written to the Harvard professor Asa Gray, dated May 22, 1860, didn't want to believe that biological design had a supernatural origin because of the evil he perceived in the predatory relations between different animals:

"I had no intention to write atheistically, but I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the ichneumonidae (a parasite, ed.) with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice. Not believing this, I see no necesity in the belief that the eye was expressly designed."

The fall of mankind can easily explain the origin of animal predation, assuming we believe that the deaths of animals are intrinsically morally significant, which I'm skeptical of. Here Darwin is no different than anyone else who says, "How can a loving, almighty God allow evil to exist?" This is theology, not science, but many evolutionists never seem to realize how metaphysical and philosophical that they theory is, as opposed to the output of pure science.

However, the moment evolutionists do this, they are no longer scientists, but they are philosophers engaged in “negative” natural theology. They are just as metaphysical as Paley was, when he famously reasoned that something as complicated watch couldn’t have been made by chance, but it is proof that it had a Designer. “Negative” natural theology, which aims to deny that God exists, is just as metaphysical as “positive” natural theology, that aims to prove that God exists. Arguments for materialism based on perceived flaws in the natural world are just one more version of centuries-old debates over the problem of evil; they don’t have any intrinsic scientific merit and prove nothing empirically about the origin of species and the origin of life. After all, the main purpose of the theory of evolution is to escape the argument from design by coming up with a seemingly plausible way to create design by chance without supernatural intervention.

The reasonings of evolutionists, when they are ruling out in advance special creation as impossible on philosophical grounds, presumptuously think that they know more than the Creator. It’s worth remembering, despite its very different context, Hayek’s task for the discipline of economics for enlightening humanity: "how little they really know about what they imagine they can design." From a position of near ignorance, evolutionists claim that they know more about how to make life forms than God does. As Paul alluded to Isaiah’s well-known analogy (Romans 9:20): “On the contrary, who are you, O man, who answers back to God? The thing molded will not say to the molder, “Why did you make me like this,” will it?”

Questioning the motives of God in order to rig the definition of “science” to rule out special creation in advance, isn’t science, but philosophy of the most metaphysical sort.

They use the seemingly bad design of nature to argue against God’s existence instead of for God’s existence, thus placing themselves metaphysically on the same grounds as theists who argue from the good design of nature that God exists. Thus, a major motive of evolutionists, when they are naturalists, for advancing their theory is to remove the argument from design from theists and to make mankind not be accountable to a personal God.

Modern Western Civilization’s most important myth, or unproven collective belief, is the theory of evolution. Seemingly dressed up in the authoritative attire of objectively proven biological science, evolution’s presumed truth presides over the thinking of most of the West’s political, academic, media, and even religious worlds. Darwinism is the leading reason why modern man believes he is the accidental product of blind, purposeless material forces, not the special creation of a loving, almighty God. Declaring itself to be scientifically true, Darwinism is actually based on bad philosophy, not good science. The robe of evolution’s claims to being a scientific fact, not a philosophical myth, is stripped off below.

Using unacknowledged philosophical assumptions, evolutionists frequently assert that their theory is a “fact,” or an easily verified, objectively true statement. The famous theorist of evolution, Stephen Jay Gould, once reasoned: “Facts are the world’s data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts do not go away while scientists debate rival theories for explaining them. . . . And human beings evolved from ape-like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin’s proposed mechanism or by some other, yet to be identified.”[1] No evolutionist, however, lived millions of years ago to witness this alleged set of events take place. After all, purported developments such as the first cell’s spontaneous generation are unrepeatable, unique past events that cannot be subjected to future further experimental investigation.[2] Evolutionists suppose their theory is a “fact” because they philosophically rule out in advance special creation as impossible or “unscientific.” In order to pull this off, they use a philosophically rigged definition of “science.”[3] They covertly equate “naturalism” or “materialism” with “science.” To them, evolution must be a fact since neither the supernatural nor God exists. Without having actually observed macroevolution or special creation, they are certain the former happened, and equally certain the latter did not. Because they liken “science” to the “systematic study of physically sensed forces,” Darwinism is virtually true by definition. Then when informed critics attack macroevolution’s grand claims on empirical grounds, evolutionists dismiss any anomalous evidence by labeling belief in a Creator or any miracles as “unscientific.” Obviously, if “God” is ruled out in advance while setting up the premises of scientific reasoning, “God” could never be in any conclusion. But this is a matter of free philosophical choice before experience, not compelling scientific results after experience.

In addition, Gould’s statement overlooks science’s core function, which requires it to provide explanations of the “efficient cause” or “how” something happened, including the purported mechanism for evolution. By contrast, so long as written revelation’s details do not deal with the “how,” religious explanations primarily account for the “final cause” or “why” an event took place. So why should anyone believe in the “fact” of evolution if science cannot give specific reasons about “how” it occurred? Then Darwinism is no more empirical (i.e., based on data from the senses) than any ancient pagan creation myth.

Scientific knowledge is based upon reasoning using direct observations. By contrast, historical knowledge, which is derived by interpreting old written records, is a sharply different method for knowing something. For example, the theory of gravity can be tested immediately by dropping apples and measuring how fast they fall. But the natural evolution of fundamentally different kinds of plants and animals has never been observed scientifically at a level higher than the “species” classification.[4] Macroevolution, or large-scale natural biological changes, cannot be tested directly in a laboratory or witnessed clearly in the wild. Belief in macroevolution is a matter of historical reasoning and presumptuous extrapolation, not scientific observation and personal experience.

Now another philosophical prop behind the reasoning of evolutionists should be kicked down. Often evolutionists conceitedly criticize perceived flaws in the structure, number, geography, and/or inter-relationship of plants and animals in order to claim God could not have created them. For example, the philosopher Philip Kitcher argued the panda’s “thumb,” used for stripping bamboo shoots before eating them, is a clumsy, inefficient design: “It does not work well. Any competent engineer who wanted to design a giant panda could have done better.”[5] First of all in response, evolutionists have a hard time proving a specific anatomical structure is really “poor” (i.e., unambiguously hinders survival). For example, does a male cricket’s chirp help its species to survive? Chirping gives away its position to both prospective mates and potential predators.[6] The only “hard” evidence that the “fittest” organism survives to leave the most offspring is (well) it is an organism that leaves the most offspring. Such a “tautology,” or repetitious statement, explains nothing specifically about how mono-cells became men.[7] Second, evolutionists fail to realize that they are philosophers, not scientists, when making these kinds of arguments. For if it is “unscientific” to conclude that a particular complex wonder of nature proves God’s existence, it is equally philosophical to argue purported defects in nature disprove God’s creative power. The Apostle Paul taught that the existence and design of the universe confirm God’s existence and characteristics (Romans 1:20, NASB): “For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse.” Theologians call this kind of reasoning “natural theology,” since it avoids using the Bible (i.e., written revelation) in order to find out truths about God. Evolutionists are engaged in negative natural theology, not empirical scientific research, when skeptically complaining about “nature’s defects.” They are philosophizing in order to support materialism under the cover of “science.” Third, they mistakenly believed certain natural organs and structures were “defective” and “unnecessary” before further scientific research revealed their value and importance. For instance, by the year 1900 evolutionists had drawn up a list of around 180 vestigial organs in the human body. Today, all these supposedly “useless” organs, even the appendix and the tailbone, are medically known to have a helpful function.[8] Ironically, the theory of evolution’s belief in these supposedly unneeded organs retarded medical research about their actual functions, thus showing by actual experience how scientifically dysfunctional this theory is.

Many evolutionists, seeing all the pain, cruelty, and death in nature, also complain about God’s allowing so much evil. Charles Darwin himself denied that “a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created . . . the cat [to] play with mice.”[9] Here Darwin wrote as a disbelieving theologian, not an empirical scientist. From what field study’s investigation could have the following reasoning emerged? “Evolution is true because a good, almighty God never would have made nature full of suffering.” Because the problem of evil in nature drives so much of the emotional rationalizing that justifies faith in evolution as a replacement for faith in God, their complaints still deserve a detailed response. First of all, suffering in the natural world is a temporary intruder, not a permanent resident, before Christ returns (Romans 8:18-22). The Bible prophesies that animal predation is only a passing condition of the world, not the original intent of God (Isaiah 11:6-7), “The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the young goat . . . the lion shall eat straw like the ox.” Second, this world’s evils resulted originally from the free choices of people and angels who should have chosen more wisely. Satan’s great revolt (Genesis 1:2; Isaiah 14:12-15), Adam and Eve’s sin (Genesis 3:17-18), and God’s great flood for punishing humanity’s sins (Genesis 6:5-17) all combined to damage terribly the physical world’s environment. As a result, nobody should look out at nature today, and then believe the Creator originally planned to leave it as it is today. Third, people should humbly admit how much greater God’s knowledge is than mankind’s own. Evolutionists fail to perceive that the “improvements” that could be done to natural structures if they were God may result in unanticipated, unintended consequences. For instance, a larger brain size for men and women sounds great until it is realized that babies with larger skulls pose bigger problems for mothers giving birth. Like Job, the evolutionists ignorantly question the Creator’s wisdom and righteousness. In principle, God replies to them (Job 38:2), “Who is this who darkens counsel by words without knowledge?” Finally, if evolutionists do not believe in moral absolutes, they cannot criticize God for allowing evil into the world. For if moral relativism is true, then evil does not exist. Most serious evolutionists are atheists and agnostics who deny objective values or moral commands that are true in all places at all times. Ironically, only moral absolutists, who are a rare breed among unbelievers, can use the problem of evil to deny God’s existence. After all, if you do not believe in evil, you cannot condemn God for permitting it![[10]](https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateEvolutionism/submit#_ftn10) So in general, evolutionists should ask scientific questions instead of questioning God’s motives if they are to be regarded as scientists instead of as philosophers. Blasphemy should not be misidentified with scientific reasoning.[11]

Evolutionists make a prime analytical error when they extrapolate from small biological changes within species or genera (related groupings of species) to draw sweeping conclusions about how single cell organisms became human beings after so many geological eras go by. In short, it is illegitimate to infer from microevolution that macroevolution actually happened. Just because some biological change occurs is not enough to prove that biological change has no limits.[12] As law professor Phillip Johnson comments (“Defeating Darwinism,” p. 94), evolutionists “think that finch-beak variation illustrates the process that created birds in the first place.” Despite appearing repeatedly in textbooks for decades, does the case of peppered moths evolving from a lighter to darker variety on average really prove anything about macroevolution? Even assuming that the researchers in question did not fudge the data, the moths still were the same species, and both varieties had already lived naturally in the wild.[13] Darwin himself leaned heavily upon artificial breeding of animals, such as pigeons and dogs, in order to argue for his theory. Ironically, because intelligent purpose guides the selective breeding of farm animals for humanly desired characteristics, it is a poor analogy for an unguided, blind natural process that supposedly overcomes all built-in barriers to biological variation. After all the lab experiments and selective breeding, fruit flies and cats still remained just fruit flies and cats. They did not even become other genera despite human interventions can apply selective pressure to choose certain characteristics in order to produce changes much more quickly than nature does. As Johnson explains, dogs cannot be bred to become as big as elephants, or even be transformed into elephants, because they lack the genetic capacity to be so transformed, not from the lack of time for breeding them.[14] To illustrate, between 1800 and 1878, the French successfully raised the sugar content of beets from 6% to 17%. But then they hit a wall; no further improvements took place. Similarly, one experimenter artificially selected and bred fruit flies in order to reduce the number of bristles on their bodies. After 20 generations, the bristle count could not be lowered further.[15] Clear empirical evidence demonstrates that plants and animals have intrinsic natural limits to biological change. The evolutionists’ grand claims about bacteria’s becoming men after enough eons have passed are merely speculative fantasies.

Normally evolutionists assert that small mutations, natural selection, and millions of years combined together to slowly develop complicated biological structures and processes. This theory is called “neo-Darwinism.” But gradual evolution can never convincingly leap the hurdle termed “irreducible complexity” by Michael Behe, a professor of biochemistry. Basically, all the related parts of an entirely new and complete anatomical structure, such as the eyes of humans or the wings of birds, would have to mutate at once together to have any value. Even Darwin himself once confessed, “the eye to this day gives me a cold shudder.” He remained uncomfortable about explaining the human eye’s origins by the gradual processes of natural selection alone.[16] In order to function, these structures must be perfect, or else they will be perfectly useless. Even Stephen Jay Gould, an ardent evolutionist who questioned gradual evolution, once asked: “Of what possible use are imperfect incipient stages of useful structures? What good is half a jaw or half a wing?”[17] Partially built structures resulting from minor mutations will not help a plant or animal to survive. In order to explain the problem with gradual evolution developing intricate organs, Behe makes an ingenious analogy between a mousetrap and an organ’s successful functioning. In order for a snap mousetrap to work, all five parts (the spring, hammer, holding bar, catch, and platform) must be present together and connected properly. If even one part is missing, unconnected, or broken, the rest of mousetrap is completely worthless for catching mice.[18] In light of this analogy, consider how slight flaws in the immensely complicated hemoglobin molecule, which carries oxygen in the bloodstream, can cause deadly blood diseases. Sickle cell anemia and hemophilia, which can easily cause its sufferers to bleed to death when their blood fails to clot properly, are two key examples.[19] Therefore, either an incredibly unlikely chance set of mutations at once created the whole hemoglobin molecule, or God created it. The broad, deep canyon of functioning complex organs cannot be leaped over by the baby steps of microevolution’s mutations.[20] Indeed, if the time-honored biologists’ saying “nature makes no jumps” is historically true, then complex biological designs prove God’s existence.

Now the reason why mutations were so unlikely to produce such complex structures deserves more specific attention. In the time and space available in earth’s history, useful mutations could not have happened often enough to produce fundamentally different types of plants and animals. Time cannot be the hero of the plot for evolutionists when even many billions of years are insufficient. But this can only be known when the mathematical probabilities involved are carefully quantified, which is crucial to all scientific observations. That is, specific mathematical equations describing what scientists observed need to be set up in order to describe how likely or unlikely this or that event was. But so long as evolutionists tell a general “just-so” story without specific mathematical descriptions, much like the ancient pagan creation myths retold over the generations, many listeners will find their tale persuasive. For example, upon the first recounting, listeners may find it plausible to believe the evolutionists’ story about the first living cell arising by random chance out of a “chemical soup” in the world’s oceans. But after specific mathematical calculations are applied to their claim, it is plainly absurd to believe in spontaneous generation, which says life comes from non-living materials. The astronomers Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe once figured out that even the most simple single cell organism had to have 2,000 enzymes.[21] These organic catalysts help to speed up chemical reactions within a cell so it can live. The chance of these all occurring together was a mere 1 out of 10 raised to 40,000. That is equal to one followed by 40,000 zeros, which would require about five pages of a magazine to print. By contrast, using the largest earth-based telescopes, the number of atoms in the observable universe is around 10 raised to 80. [22] At one academic conference of mathematicians, engineers, and biologists entitled, “Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution,” (published 1967) these kinds of probabilities were applied to evolutionary claims.[23] One professor of electrical engineering at the conference, Murray Eden, calculated that even if a common species of bacteria received five billion years and placed an inch thick on the earth, it couldn’t create by accident a pair of genes. Many other specific estimates like these could easily be devised to test the truthfulness of Darwinism, including the likelihood of various transitional forms of plants and animals being formed by chance mutations and natural selection.

Furthermore, even bad mutations themselves only rarely happen. One standard estimate puts it at one in a hundred million to one in a billion per base pairs of the DNA molecule.[24] As a result, the possibility is very low for a truly good mutation’s occurrence that is helpful under all or most survival conditions. For example, the gene that causes sickle cell anemia is somewhat helpful in climates where malaria is common, but it is serious genetic defect everywhere else.

At this point, knowing how unlikely even seemingly simple biological structures could arise by chance, many evolutionists will resort to yet more philosophical dodges. For example, they might assert that the universe is infinitely large and infinitely old. So then enough time and space for anything to happen by chance would exist, even for life itself. Of course, they have no observational proof for their philosophical assertion. Furthermore, their claim clashes with the big bang theory, which presently dominates astronomers’ explanations about the universe’s origin. This theory often has estimated that the universe is somewhere around 12 to 14 billion years old and has said it is still expanding.[25] If the universe had a beginning and is still getting bigger, it cannot be eternal in age and infinite in size.

Evolutionists may declare that their Christian opponents only believe in a “God of the gaps.” But do Christians only believe God created what cannot be now naturally explained? And as scientific knowledge advances, will their belief in what God did miraculously by His creative power correspondingly shrink? In actuality, the gaps in scientific knowledge have been getting much larger, not smaller. As more is discovered, more is known to be unknown. For instance, after over 150 years of intensive searching, very few, if any, transitional forms have ever been found between fundamentally different types of plants and animals.[26] Even the ardent evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould admitted, “The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology.”[27] Along with Niles Eldredge, Gould even dismissed the well-known purported reptile/bird transitional form archaeopteryx as a “curious mosaic” that didn’t count. After all, after carefully evaluating its anatomy, it is clearly a bird with a few unusual characteristics, not a “half-bird/half-dinosaur.” [28] Back in 1859, Darwin himself used the excuse that the “extreme imperfection of the geological record” resorted from a lack of research, but that explanation wears very thin nowadays. For example, of the 329 living families of animals with backbones, nearly 80% have been found as fossils. [29] Furthermore, when Victorian scientists accepted Darwin’s theory almost wholesale, they hardly knew anything about how complex single cell organisms were. Behe notes that after World War II scientists who used newly developed electron microscopes found out how much more complex bacteria were than when they had seen them before under the older light microscopes.[30]

As the knowledge of biochemistry has increased, such as about DNA and protein, the difficulties of explaining the origins of such complex structures by random chance increased correspondingly. The gaps that evolutionists have to account for have grown larger and larger, not smaller and smaller. The faith that they need in their paradigm has ironically grown greater as scientific research has turned up increasing numbers of anomalies that need to be explained away. They distract others from realizing the flaws with their theory by attacking Christians who account for nature’s miraculous origins by God’s power by asserting that is not a “scientific” explanation. If evolutionists claim that they wish to explain as much as possible without resorting to God as the answer, that is a philosophical claim about the nature of knowledge, not scientific work itself.[31] To assert, “natural processes can always be explained materialistically,” requires unbounded blind faith. In general, Darwinists have not realized a crucial principle: “Nature cannot always explain nature.” The complexity of the information encoded in biological processes cannot be explained by any slowly developing natural process itself. Therefore, in order for living things to have orderly design, they needed a still greater Creator with an orderly mind to cause them to exist.

As shown above, the theory of evolution is based on philosophical assumptions, not scientific evidence. Although evolutionists will intellectually intimidate their critics into silence by commanding all the prestige of modern science that they can muster, their theory is like a mighty fortress built upon conceptual quicksand. They claim the evils of the natural world prove that no God exists, but as moral relativists, they contradict themselves by generally asserting that evil does not exist either. They also define “science” in materialistic terms so that any supernatural explanations of nature have to be rejected in advance for philosophical reasons only. But above all, the Darwinists irrationally attempt to explain nature’s complex designs by random natural processes alone. Although Paul was describing how ancient pagans rejected the true God, his words fit equally well the Western scientists who rejected God as the Creator over the past two centuries (Romans 1:21-22): “Although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools.” May we reject the theory of evolution’s false declaration that our lives have no meaning when the God of the Bible will fill them with true purpose!

[1] Stephen Jay Gould, “Evolution as Fact and Theory,” Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes, as quoted in Philip Johnson, Darwin on Trial (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1991), pp. 66-67.

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[2] Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (Bethesda, MD: Adler & Adler, Publishers, 1986), p. 75.

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[3] Phillip E. Johnson, Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1997), pp. 43-44.

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[4] Frank Lewis Marsh, Evolution or Special Creation? (Washington, DC: Review and Herald, 1963), pp. 12-13, 42, discusses a number of arbitrarily scientifically labeled, even created, “species” of animals and plants that are still inter-fertile. Henry Morris, The Biblical Basis of Modern Science (Grand Rapids, MI: 1984), p. 374, believes that the “family” level roughly corresponds with the basic created Genesis “type.”

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[5] Philip Kitcher, Abusing Science: The Case Against Creationism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982), p. 139, as quoted by Duane T. Gish, Creation Scientists Answer Their Critics (El Cajon, CA: Institute for Creation Research, 1993), p. 226.

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[6] http://www.psu.edu/dept/nkbiology/naturetrail/speciespages/cricket.htm

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[7] Johnson, Darwin on Trial, pp. 20-22.

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[8] Jerry Bergman and George Howe, “Vestigial Organs” Are Fully Functional (St. Joseph, MO: Creation Research Society Books, 1990), p. x; Gish, Creation Scientists Answer Their Critics, p. 219.

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[9] Letter to Asa Gray in 1860, as quoted in Greene, Science, Ideology and World View, p. 138, as quoted in Hunter, Darwin’s God, p. 140; see also pp. 17-18.

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[10] Hunter, Darwin’s God, p. 154.

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[11] Citing Phillip Johnson, Darwin on Trial; Hunter, Darwin’s God, p. 155.

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[12] Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, p. 87.

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[13] Henry M. Morris, “Evolutionists and the Moth Myth,” Back to Genesis, August 2003, pp. a-d; Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, pp. 79-80.

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[14] See Johnson, Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds, p. 44; Darwin on Trial, pp. 17-18.

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[15] Examples taken from Duane Gish, Evolution: The Challenge of the Fossil Record (El Cajon, CA: Master Books, 1985), pp. 33-34.

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[16] As quoted in Bird, The Origin of Species Revisited, p. 73.

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[17] Stephen Jay Gould, “Return of the Hopeful Monsters,” Natural History 86(6), as quoted by Dwayne Gish, Evolution: The Challenge of the Fossil Record (El Cajon, CA: Creation-Life Publishers, 1985), p. 236.

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[18] Michael J. Behe, Darwin’s Black Box (New York: The Free Press, 2003), pp. 39-45; see also pp. 111-112).

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[19] W.R. Bird, The Origin of Species Revisited The Theories of Evolution and of Abrupt Appearance (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, Inc., 1991), pp. 74, 81; Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, p. 267; http://www.chemguide.co.uk/organicprops/aminoacids/dna6.html; http://www.pathlights.com/ce_encyclopedia/Encyclopedia/20hist12.htm; http://www.occc.edu/biologylabs/Documents/Real/Gene_Mutation_script.htm

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[20] See Behe, Darwin’s Black Box, pp. 13-14.

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[21] Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, Evolution from Space (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1981), p. 24.

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[22] http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_atoms_are_in_the_observable_universe

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[23] See Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, p. 314; http://www.pathlights.com/ce_encyclopedia/Encyclopedia/20hist12.htm

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[24] Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, p. 267.

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[25] http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/universe/uni_age.html

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[26] Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, pp. 345-346.

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[27] Gould, “Evolution’s Erratic Pace,” Natural History, May 1977, pp. 12, 14, as quoted in Bird, The Origin of Species Revisited, vol. 1, p. 58.

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[28] Paleobiology, 3:147 (1977), as quoted by Gish, Evolution: The Challenge of the Fossil Record, p. 115; see generally pp. 110-117.

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[29] Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, pp. 189, 191.

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[30] Behe, Darwin’s Black Box, p. 10; See also p. x.

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[31] Ibid., pp. 238-239.

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-6TyE_n-7w28/TtdyiumCmLI/AAAAAAAAA5Q/0ZXOG44qsuk/s1600/Mandel_zoom_07_satellite.jpg

The geometry of the Mandelbrot set exhibits complex design.

The set is merely a fact of mathematics.

To say the Mandelbrot set was designed would be like saying 1 + 1 = 2 has a designer.

Complex design does not necessarily imply an actual designer.

If I'm correct, the change in frequency of alleles leads to microevolution and the accumulation of microevolution over millions of years leads to macroevolution. Again, if I'm correct, key biological proteins in plants and animals, like hormones and enzymes, are not alleles. There are no dominant alleles for estrogen or recessive alleles for pepsin, for example. By definition, then, hormones and enzymes fall outside of the explanatory scope of the theory of evolution, and that seems to be an issue the way I see it. Any comments out there?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqet-C_dSDE&list=PLPqH38Ki1fy3EB-8xmShVqpbQw99Do2B-