THE HOAX OF EVOLUTION
Col. 1:13-17
INTRODUCTION
A. HUMOR: ONLY HEARING ONE SIDE
1. A Judge was about to swear in a member of a jury when he was told that the man was deaf in one ear.
2. “You really can’t serve on the jury.” “Why not?”
3. “Because you can only hear one side!” We’re going to look at an area where people often only hear one side.
B. TEXT
“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth!” Gen. 1:1.13 For he has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves, 14 in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. 15 He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. 16 For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him. 17 He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.” Colossians 1:13–17.
C. THESIS
1. The Bible is clear that Jesus Christ is the Creator of all things.
2. The big question is this: Did God make man, or did man make God? That is, is man in the image of God, or is God in the imagination of man? Is man just an animal, just a clever creature?
3. This morning we’re going to take a critical look at evolution, its weaknesses, and the alternative. This message is entitled, “The Hoax of Evolution.”
I. WHAT IS EVOLUTION?
A. MODERN PROPAGANDA
1. We all know the propaganda -- billions of years ago a primordial ooze or slime somehow – magically – developed into a living one-celled organism, a protozoa, which over billions of years became an un-segmented worm, then fish, then amphibian, then reptile, bird, mammal, and somehow, turned into man.
2. How did this miraculous process take place? Two things: One is mutation—that things keep changing; and then, next, natural selection, which has led to the survival of the fittest.
3. Evolution teaches that nothing plus time plus chance changes amoebas to astronauts, molecules to monkeys to man. Like the Princess who kissed the frog and it turned into a Prince – but this one’s a fairytale for adults!
4. ANCESTRY MIXUP HUMOR
A child asked his mother, "How were people born?" So his mother said, "Adam and Eve made babies, then their babies became adults and made babies, and so on." The child then went to his father, a scientist, and asked him the same question and he told him, "We were monkeys then we evolved to become like we are now." The child ran back to his mother and said, "You lied to me!" His mother replied, "No, your father was talking about HIS side of the family."
B. MANY SCIENTISTS REJECT IT
1. Christians never have had the idea that you have to check your brain at the door not to study science or evolution. Many intelligent and well-trained scientists are moving away from evolution, not because they are Bible believers, but because of the lack of evidence and the contradictions they see to science.
2. Dr. Newton Tahmisian, a physiologist for the Atomic Energy Commission: “Scientists who go about teaching that evolution is a fact of life are great conmen, and the story they are telling may be the greatest hoax ever. In explaining evolution, we do not have one iota of fact.”
3. Sir Ambrose Fleming, electrical engineer and physicist, said: “The evolution theory is purely the product of the imagination.”
4. Swedish embryologist, Dr. Søren Løvtrup: “I believe that one day, the Darwinian myth will be ranked the greatest deceit in the history of science. When this happens, many people will pose the question, ‘How did this ever happen?’”
5. Most of the great scientists of the past were creationists: Michael Faraday, Lord Kelvin, Joseph Lister, Louis Pasteur, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Sir William Ramsey, Lord Francis Bacon, Samuel Morris.
6. Recently 200 scientists joined the ranks of Intelligent Design proponents. Science textbook authors Percival Davis & Dean H. Kenyon published Of Pandas and People in 1989, 1993, & 2007, promoting Intelligent Design.
7. WHAT’S THE EVIDENCE AGAINST EVOLUTION?
II. FOSSIL EVIDENCE
1. First of all, EVOLUTION IS NOT HAPPENING NOW. If evolution were true, we should be able to point to many examples of it occurring -- there should be many "transitional" forms that we could observe. What we see instead are distinct species with unbridgeable gaps between them. For example, there are many varieties of dogs and many varieties of cats, but no "dats" or "cogs."
2. Further, the fossil evidence is clear that EVOLUTION NEVER HAPPENED IN THE PAST! If evolution were true, the fossil record should be filled with transitional forms, but it’s NOT!
A. GREATEST FOSSIL EXPERTS SAY, “NO EVIDENCE!”
1. “I will lay it on the line—there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument.” Dr. Colin Patterson, curator of Fossils at the British Museum of Natural History [Colin Patterson, letter dated April 10, 1979 to Luther Sunderland, quoted in L. D. Sunderland, Darwin's Enigma, p. 89.]
2. "120 years after Darwin….we have even fewer examples of evolutionary transition than we had in Darwin’s time!” Dr. David Raup the leading paleontologist at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. ["Conflicts between Darwin and Paleontology," in the Field Museum of Natural History Bulletin].
3. "No one has found any such in-between creatures….There is a growing conviction among many scientists that these transitional forms never existed." Dr. Niles Eldredge, head of New York City’s American Museum of Natural History in New York City. ["Alternate Theory of Evolution Considered," in Los Angeles Times, November 19, 1978].
4. The evidence is so nonexistent that Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe (an atheist & a Buddhist) wrote Evolution from Space, positing that life must have been flown here from outer space!
5. DARWIN SAID, “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.” [Darwin, The Origin of the Species, 6th ed., London: John Murray, 1859, p. 182].
6. HUMOR. Speaking of transitional species, I heard about a marine biologist who tried to take one of these beautiful shell creatures called an abalone and cross it with a crocodile. What he got was a crock of baloney. And, anytime anybody tries to cross species, that’s exactly what they come up with.
B. COMPUTER SIMULATION BREAKS DOWN
1. Murray Eden, a professor of electrical engineering at MIT teamed up with French mathematician Marcel P. Schutzenberger to develop a computer program to simulate evolution happening from the dawn of time to today, using natural selection and random mutations.
2. After repeated attempts to get mutations to produce positive results in producing new species—Eden’s group were astounded by the fact that, mathematically, none of the mechanisms of evolution could ever produce the positive changes required by evolutionary theory.
C. MACROEVOLUTION IMPOSSIBLE
1. "The reasons for rejecting Darwin's proposal are many, but first of all that many innovations cannot possibly come into existence through the accumulation of many small steps, and even if they can, natural selection cannot accomplish it, because incipient and intermediate stages are not advantageous." Evolutionist Soren Lovtrup.
2. "You can't fly with 2% of a wing..." [Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould in “Not Necessarily a Wing,” Natural History, Oct. 1985, pp. 12-13.]
3. "The central question of the Chicago conference was whether the mechanisms underlying microevolution can be extrapolated to explain the phenomena of macroevolution….the answer can be given as a clear, No." Evolutionist Roger Lewin, [“Evolutionary Theory Under Fire,” Science, Vol. 210, Nov. 21, 1980, p. 883.]
III. COMPLEXITY POINTS TO DESIGN
A. THE BRAIN
In man is a 3 pound brain which has a 100 billion neurons intricately linked to each other. The total number of connections in the brain approaches 1015 or 1,000 million million.
B. THE EYE
1. Charles Darwin wrote in his book, The Origin of Species, when contemplating the miracle of the eye, "To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.
2. "Ask yourself how the lens, the retina, the optic nerve, and all the other parts that play a role in seeing not only appeared from nothing, but evolved into interrelated and working parts.
3. Think about what the theory of evolution claims: the eyes, in working pairs, of all creatures, slowly developed over millions of years. Each of them was blind until all the parts miraculously came together and interrelated with the others, because all parts are needed for the eye to function. Then each creature had its two eyes work in harmony with the brain to interpret those images. Fortunately, each of these creatures simultaneously evolved whatever matching parts each would need: sockets, skin, eyelids, eyelashes, tear ducts, muscles to blink, etc.
4. Your retina is thinner than paper, yet its tiny surface (only 1 inch square) contains 137 million light-sensitive cells. These retina cells perform up to 10 billion calculations per second in determining the nature of the image transmitted to the eye by light photons. No supercomputer on earth is capable of matching these virtually instantaneous calculations.
C. HEMOGLOBIN
Isaac Asimov in The Genetic Code estimated 135 followed by 165 zeros as the different combinations of hemoglobin. This number is larger than all the atoms in the universe! To
produce the one combination of hemoglobin that our body uses would require a hemoglobin factory that would consume 10 sextillion universes every second and would require 10 trillion trillion years (not 14 billion) to produce all the different combinations!
D. DNA
1. DNA is a code, a language of the highest order. The language of DNA is a molecular language, made up of nucleotide letters. The DNA is a blueprint that tells, step by step, how to assemble lifeless chemicals into a complete organism; from one cell to trillions!
2. It would take a person typing 60 words per minute, eight hours a day, around 50 years to type the human genome. And if all the DNA in your body’s 100 trillion cells was put end to end, it would reach to the sun (90,000,000 miles away) and back over 600 times!
3. Francis Collins, the scientist who led the team that cracked the human genome, says, "When you have for the first time in front of you this 3.1 billion letter instruction book that conveys all kinds of information…you can't survey that…without a sense of awe….and…a vague sense that this is giving me a glimpse of God's mind." Steven Swinford [“I’ve found God, says man who cracked the genome,” June 11, 2006; www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article673663.ece]
E. SYMBIOSIS: HUMAN MICROBIOME
1. Over 10,000 species of bacteria, fungi, and other microbes numbering 100 trillion share our bodies. Your skin is like a rain forest; your intestines are teeming with different species like an ocean. You have 10 times more microbial cells than human cells, weighing up to 3 pounds. Experts declare that these microbe's "provide a wide range of metabolic functions that humans lack," and "they work to keep humans healthy." In other words, we could not live without them. It's a symbiotic relationship. [“10,000 Germs Species Live In & On Healthy People” Lauran Neergaard, June 2012, Associated Press]
2. Harvard biologist Stephen Jay Gould described humans as "a glorious accident" of evolution which required 60 trillion contingent events. That would require more than 36 necessary events per day, each day for 4.55 billion years – just to get Homo sapiens. And conveniently, each of these 36 daily events had to occur in the right place at the right time in the right sequence.
3. ILLUS. If you would take the parts of a new car, and fly at the height of 10,000 feet, and dump them out, would they assemble themselves into a car before they hit the ground? No. Well, the evolutionist would say, “Well, you just don’t have enough time.” Ok, drop the parts from 100,000 feet; will they assembly themselves any better into a car? No!
4. HUMOR. A guide was showing some visitors around a museum. "That fossil in the glass case over there is two million and nine years old" he told them. "How can you date it so precisely?" someone asked admiringly. "That’s easy," said the guide. "I’ve been working here nine years and it was two million years old when I came."
IV. THE ORIGIN OF THE UNIVERSE
A. THE UNAVOIDABLE FIRST CAUSE
1. The Big Bang theory claims that "nothing" suddenly became time, matter, and energy, forming a vast, complex, orderly universe composed of over 100 billion galaxies and containing an estimated trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion tons of matter.
2. Now scientists have an even greater dilemma: Where did the initial matter come from? Who triggered the ignition point?
B. FINE TUNING: EVIDENCE OF DESIGN
1. “The universe and the laws of physics seem to have been specifically designed for us. If any one of about 40 physical qualities had more than slightly different values, life as we know it could not exist: Either atoms would not be stable, or they wouldn’t combine into molecules, or the stars wouldn't form the heavier elements, or the universe would collapse before life could develop, and so on.” Stephen Hawking, Austin American-Statesman, 10/19/97.
2. “But there are so many odd coincidences essential to life that some explanation seems required to account for them." [Fred Hoyle, The Intelligent Universe (London, Michael Joseph, 1983),p. 220]
3. “The Laws of Physics…are almost always deadly. In a sense the laws of nature are like East Coast weather:
tremendously variable, almost always awful, but on rare occasions, perfectly lovely. [O]ur own universe is an extraordinary place that appears to be fantastically well designed for our own existence. This specialness is not something we can attribute to lucky accidents, which is far too unlikely. The apparent coincidences cry out for explanation.” Leonard Susskind [The Cosmic Landscape (2005), p. 343. He’s a Cosmologist at Stanford Univ., and one of the fathers of string theory].
4. “In the view of such harmony in the cosmos which I, with my limited human mind, am able to recognize, there are yet people who say there is no God.” Albert Einstein [The Expanded Quotable Einstein, Princeton University, p. 214]
C. APPEAL TO THE MIRACULOUS
1. "[The Big Bang] represents the instantaneous suspension of physical laws, the sudden, abrupt flash of lawlessness that allowed something to come out of nothing. It represents a true miracle -- transcending physical principles." [Physicist Paul Davies, The Edge of Infinity (New York: Simon & Schuster,1981), p. 161].
2. "The irony is devastating. The main purpose of Darwinism was to drive every last trace of an incredible God from biology. But the theory replaces God with an even more incredible deity -- omnipotent chance." [Prof. Theodore Roszak, Unfinished Animal (Harpercollins, 1975), p. 101-102.]
D. WHY DO MANY TURN A BLIND EYE TO EVIDENCE THAT CONTRADICTS EVOLUTION?
1. “Evolution is promoted by its practitioners as more than mere science. Evolution is promulgated as an ideology, a secular religion -- a full-fledged alternative to Christianity, with meaning and morality . . . . Evolution is a religion. This was true of evolution in the beginning, and it is true of evolution still today. [Evolutionist Michael Ruse, "Saving Darwinism from the Darwinians," National Post (May 13, 2000), p. B-3].
2. Aldous Huxley said he supported it because “the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation….We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom; we objected to the political and economic system because it was unjust.” Ends and Means (1937).
3. “And I use that trust [professor-student] to effectively brainwash them. . . . our teaching methods are primarily those of propaganda. We appeal -- without demonstration -- to evidence that supports our position. We only introduce arguments and evidence that supports the currently accepted theories and omit or gloss over any evidence to the contrary.” [Singham, Mark, "Teaching and Propaganda," Physics Today (vol. 53, June 2000), p. 54.]
CONCLUSION
A. ILLUSTRATION: VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN
1. Heffernan is a writer for Yahoo News, formerly of the New York Times and formerly-formerly a TV critic for Slate. July 11, 2013, she wrote an article in Yahoo News entitled, “Why I'm a creationist.” In it she tells her story of going from evolution to creationism.
2. “Like many people, I heard no end of Bible stories as a kid, but in the 1970s in New England they always came with the caveat that they were metaphors. So I read the metaphors of Genesis and Exodus and was amused and bugged and uplifted and moved by them. And then I guess I wanted to know the truth of how the world began, so I was handed the Big Bang.”
3. But she felt like Dr. Lewis Thomas, The Author of Lives Of A Cell: “Biology needs a better word than error for the driving force in evolution. . . . I cannot make my peace with the randomness doctrine; I cannot abide the notion of purposelessness and blind chance in nature. And yet I do not know what to put in its place for the quieting of my mind. [Lewis Thomas, “On the Uncertainty of Science,” Key Reporter, Vol. 46 (Autumn 1980), p. 2.]
4. So Virginia Heffernan delved deeper into the Bible and became a Creationist, that is to say, she became a believer.
5. In Romans 1:20-22, Paul said, “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood
from what has been made, so that people are without excuse. For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools…”
6. There is a sense of the Creator pervading the universe. Blaise Pascal said there’s a God-shaped vacuum in the heart
of every person that only God can fill. Will you let Him fill that place?
B. THE CALL
1. A bigger question than the Origin of Man is, “Where is he going?” Where you’re going is not yet settled, if you don’t know Jesus.
2. And, I want to tell you, the best thing you could ever do—would be to be concerned not with your origin, but with your own personal destiny.
3. Do you want to know your Creator? He promises to make Himself known to you if you seek Him.
4. Let’s pray and ask Him to do that!
[Notable among the many sources mined for this message were “How to Know God Exists” by Ray Comfort and Adrian Roger’s message “Why I Reject Evolution,” and evolution-fact.org, etc.]
