*Note...after years of further research and study, I am now in firmly in the camp that embraces Historic Christianity and theistic evolution. It is backed by the very best research and is, in my current understanding, most credible in following the truths of science and scripture.
**www.biologos.org
***Book recommendation: Origins: Christian Perspectives on Creation, Evolution, and Intelligent Design, by Drs. Loren and Deborah Haarsma
https://www.amazon.com/Origins-Christian-Perspectives-Evolution-Intelligent/dp/159255573X/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=Deborah+Haarsma&qid=1591581744&sr=8-1
****Amazon's #1 book on Religion and Philosophy: The Language of God, by Dr. Francis Collins
https://www.amazon.com/Language-God-Scientist-Presents-Evidence/dp/1416542744/ref=zg_bs_12460_1?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=C014J1YKNA04KWE0VT91
Creation Vs. Atheism: The Great Debate
Debate is not over Creation and Evolution. There is a third very popular proposition on how life began. Summed up in Time Magazine article. "Forget bubbles, comets or ocean vents. Scientists should be looking at pizza for the answer. I can remember when my college roommates and I routinely created life every week in our refrigerator. My theory is that around 4.5 billion years ago, the earth was bombarded by intergalactic pizzas. These then provided the ideal breeding ground in which early organisms could thrive and later evolve." Mark D. Greene, "How Life Began," Time, 142:8, November 1, 1993
Big Bang has come under a lot of controversy lately. Titles of "Down with the Big Bang;" "The Big Bang Theory Goes Kerplooey;" "The Big Bang Theory Explodes;" "Sorry, Big Bang Theory is a Dud;" "Map Challenges Theory of Universe;" "Astronomers' New Data Jolt Vital Part of Big Bang Theory;" "Quasar Clumps Dim Cosmological Theory." These have been titles of a few of the articles found in newspapers and science journals in the last two or three years, as the Big Bang theory has received one body blow after another "but the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up" (II Peter 3:10)
Gallup Poll in July of 1982, 1,518 people sampled from 300 areas across the nation: 44% agreed we’re here by special creation. 38% God guided the evolution of man. Only 9% believe God is not in the picture.
Right off: Science and the Bible are not in conflict. The conclusions of both are sometimes biased. But we have nothing to be afraid of by honest evaluation. There are thousands of Christians who are scientists–they just so happen to be outnumbered by thousands who are evolutionists. Yet they are both looking at the same evidence. Next week we’re going to find out why this is. We’ll look more into astronomy, time, Einstein, see a video clip of a creation/evolution debate, and hear some amazing quotations.
Hugh Ross, an Christian astrophysicist, who earned his PH.D in astronomy, wrote "The work of secular scientists is the friend, not the foe, of Christians. Their efforts have given us some of the strongest evidences for our Creator, God, and Savior."
Let’s first of all look at the claims of the bible about creation...
Genesis 1:1 "In the beginning God created." Bible nowhere says when God created. No time line.
Jesus said in Mark 10:6 "But at the beginning of creation God ‘made them male and female.'"
Psalms 19:1-4 "The heavens declare the glory of God and the skies announce what his hands have made. Day after day they tell the story; night after night they tell it again. They have no speech or words; they have no voice to be heard. But their message goes out through all the world; their words go everywhere on earth."
Romans 1:20 "There are things about God that people cannot see--his eternal power and all the things that make him God. But since the beginning of the world those things have been easy to understand by what God has made. So people have no excuse."
Three bedrock assumptions that evolutionists have given for our origins have all been shown to be on shaky ground. We’re going to look at these three tonight.
Spontaneous Generation
How did we get the conditions on planet earth that brought us our first one-celled animal from which all life forms supposedly evolved? For many years, evolution explained our origins by "spontaneous generation". Simply stated, this means that under the proper conditions of temperature, time, place, etc., decaying matter simply turns into organic life.
“This simplistic idea dominated scientific thinking until 1846, when Louis Pasteur completely shattered the theory by his experiments. He exposed the whole concept as utter foolishness. Under controlled laboratory conditions, in a semi-vacuum, no organic life ever emerged from decaying, nonliving matter. Reluctantly it was abandoned as a valid scientific issue. Today no reputable scientist tries to defend it on a demonstrable basis. That is why Webster says it is "now abandoned." It never has been and never can be demonstrated in the test tube. No present process is observed that could support the idea of spontaneous generation. Obviously, if spontaneous generation actually did take place in the distant past to produce the first spark of life, it must be assumed that the laws that govern life had to be completely different from what they are now. But wait a minute! This won't work either, because the whole evolutionary theory rests upon the assumption that conditions on the earth have remained uniform throughout the ages” (How Evolution Flunked the Science Test)
Astrophysicists have found that there are over 60 criteria that are necessary for life on earth. For you to live. Life could not exist or form if any one of the following were true:
Earth’s rotation was slower, or faster
We were 2% closer or further from the sun.
Earth had a 1% change in sunlight.
Earth was smaller or larger
Taco Bell closed at 3 p.m.
The moon was smaller or larger
We had more than one moon
Earth’s crust was thinner or thicker
Pizza Hut only served thin crust
Oxygen/Nitrogen ratio was greater or less
Ozone layer was greater or less
This creates a dilemma. To believe that life spontaneously emerged requires great faith in the impossible-- no evidence-- the same accusation hurled at those who believe the world was created by an intelligent God.
Dr. George Wald, Nobel Prize recipient from Harvard University, states is clearly from an evolutionary position: "One has only to contemplate the magnitude of this task to concede that the spontaneous generation of a living organism is impossible. Yet here we are - as a result, I believe, of spontaneous generation" (How Evolution Flunked the Science Test).
Note that the great evolutionary scientist says it could not have taken place. Why did he receive a Nobel Prize? What can we say to that kind of reasoning?
For example, “If someone told you they could pick a winning lottery number out of the air—and then did it—you’d be impressed…and rightly so because, the odds of doing that are 1 in 10 to the 7th power. Now—suppose they did it twice in a row. That’s one chance in a hundred thousand billion. If they did this you would go from being impressed—to being SUSPICIOUS. You’d rightly assume something is up…this guy must have some sort of inside knowledge. He’s cheating. Well, the odds of evolution being true are like someone randomly winning not one—not two—but thousands of lotteries in a row. It is statistically possible—but it is also statistically absurd. The probability of a single cell forming on its own by evolution through limitless time, particles, and events has been calculated by a Swiss mathematician named Charles Eugene Guy. He found that the odds are one chance in 10 to the 160th power. This is a number too big to calculate. Statisticians point out that anything beyond 1 to the 50th power is beyond reason, essentially impossible—ABSURD. So belief in the THEORY of evolution is belief in spite of the fact that’ is statistically absurd. I mean for evolution to happen would require a miracle of God. Even Charles Darwin, the father of evolution said, “To suppose that the human eye could have been formed by natural selection seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.” (Creation: The Beginning of Life as We Know It).
MUTATIONS
Another one of the backbone theories of evolution is the evidence of mutation. Not growing fangs and long hair during a full moon. Mutation is where minor changes take place within animals. Butterflies change spots.
“Every species has its own particular number of chromosomes that contain the genes. Within every human being are 46 chromosomes containing an estimated 100,000 genes, each one of which is able to affect in some way the size, color, texture, or quality of the individual. The assumption is that these genes, which provide the inherited characteristics we get from our ancestors, occasionally become affected by unusual pairing, chemical damage, or other influences, causing them to produce an unusual change in one of the offspring” (How Evolution Flunked the Science Test).
Like having a child with 12 fingers, or one blue eye and one brown eye. This is a mutation development.
“Through gradual changes wrought in the various species through mutation, it is assumed by the evolutionists that the amoeba turned into an invertebrate, which became an amphibian, then a reptile, a quadruped, an ape form, and finally a man. In other words, the species are not fixed in the eyes of the evolutionists. Families are forever drifting over into another higher form as time progresses. This means that all the fossil records of animal history should reveal an utter absence of precise family boundaries. Everything should be in the process of changing into something else—with literally hundreds of millions of half-developed fish trying to become amphibious, and reptiles halfway transformed into birds, and mammals looking like half-apes or half-men” (How Evolution Flunked the Science Test).
Now, there is a difference between micro-evolution and macro-evolution. Micro-evolution are adaptations and mutations that do effect minor changes within certain species and animals, but these never produce a new family or type. Creationists believe in micro-evolution. You’d have to. But evolution theory demands a belief in macro-evolution: that mutations occur over enough time to create whole new kinds of animals. A frog becomes a bird becomes a slug becomes a televangelist. Never been any evidence of this. Huge blow to the evolutionary theory.
Ten times in the book of Genesis we read God's decree concerning the reproduction of His creatures - "after its kind." Gen:1:25: And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and everything that creeps upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good." “The word "kind" refers to species, or families. Each created family was to produce only its own kind. This forever precludes the drifting, changing process required by organic evolution where one species turns into another” (How Evolution Flunked the Science Test). This is exactly what the fossil records reveal.
“Take note that God did not say there could be no changes within the family. He did not create all the varieties of dogs, cats, horses, fish, etc. in the very beginning. There was only a male and female of each species, and many changes have since occurred to produce a wide assortment of varieties within the family. But the reality is that cats have always remained cats, dogs are still dogs, and men are still men” (How Evolution Flunked the Science Test).
Mutation has only been responsible for producing a new variety of the same species, but never originating another new kind. Democrats and Republicans are both varieties of the same species from the vulture family. “Selective breeding has also brought tremendous improvements such as hornless cattle, white turkeys, and seedless oranges, but all the organisms continue to reproduce exactly as God decreed at Creation - after its kind” (How Evolution Flunked the Science Test).
“The "common ancestor" that evolution demands has never existed. There is not a "missing link." Man and monkeys are supposed to stem from the same animal ancestry! Even chimpanzees and many monkey groups vary tremendously. Some are smart, others dumb. Some have short tails and some long. Some have no tails at all. Their teeth vary in number. A few have thumbs and others do not. Their genes are different. Their blood is different. Their chromosomes don't jibe. Interestingly enough, apes only breed with apes, chimpanzees with chimpanzees, and monkeys with monkeys” (How Evolution Flunked the Science Test).
Darwin confessed: "There are two or three million species on earth. A sufficient field one might think for observation; but it must be said today that in spite of all the evidence of trained observers, not one change of the species to another is on record." Life and Letters, Vol. 3, p. 25.
Charles Singer, who wrote "A Short history of Science in the 19th Century" that "Evolution is perhaps unique among major scientific theories in that the appeal to its acceptance is not that there is evidence for it...!"
Mt. St. Helens
Mt. St. Helen's eruption has done more to disprove the theory of evolution than any event in history. Prior to the May 18, 1980, eruption of Mt. St. Helens it was a beautiful symmetrical cone-shaped volcano covered by old-growth trees 150-200 feet tall. In an explosion the equivalent of 20 million tons of TNT or 1500 atomic bombs, Mt. St. Helens and the surrounding area was changed forever. (See Micah 1:3-4)
“Mt. St. Helens continued to spew for 15 hours with the force of 400 million tons of TNT or 30,000 atomic bombs. That is the equivalent of one atom bomb exploding every second for 15 hours straight. It took three days for the jet stream to carry ash to the east coast. It had to be shoveled like snow. Street lights turned on automatically in the daytime because the ash blocked the light of the sun all across the eastern seaboard.
Geologists used to believe layers of volcanic rock were set apart by time. Mt. St. Helens proved to the world forever that sediment is laid down in multiple layers in a matter of hours. In one place 25 feet of sediment was laid down in a single pass of an ash flow forming multiple layers.
Ash flows 550 degrees Fahrenheit traveling 200 mph raged down the sides of the mountain taking with it one hundred fifty square miles of timber in a matter of 6 minutes time. Over 20,000 rootless trees were deposited in Spirit Lake.
The trees became waterlogged and sank in the upright position. Some rested on top of sediment and others were buried deeply in multiple layers. Some were buried lying sideways. All were deposited there in a matter of a few hours. Specimen Ridge in Yellowstone has 27 layers of forests which scientists claimed were deposited millions of years apart. In fact there used to be a sign there (maybe it’s still there, because evolutionists are slow learners) that says as much.
The 27 layers of trees in Yellowstone look exactly like those deposited at the bottom of Spirit Lake by Mt. St. Helens in a matter of hours. Multiple layers of trees with no roots buried in the same kind of sediment now have been shown that they are laid down all at once. Mt. St. Helens eruption is by no means the only evidence for creation and a young earth. An 80 foot Baleen whale was discovered standing on its tail in the Lampoc region of southern California in diatomaceous earth which evolutionists claim takes 1,000 years to form one foot deep. Fossils need to be buried deeply and quickly, otherwise they decay or are eaten by scavengers. How do you suppose that whale managed to stand on its tail for thousands of years without decaying or being eaten by scavengers while all those layers of diatomaceous earth formed years apart?” (Evolution, Dr. D. Armond)
“Specimen Ridge in Yellowstone has 27 layers of forests which scientists claimed were deposited millions of years apart. In fact there used to be a sign there that says as much. The 27 layers of trees in Yellowstone look exactly like those deposited at the bottom of Spirit Lake by Mt. St. Helens in a matter of hours. Multiple layers of trees with no roots buried in the same kind of sediment now have been shown that they are laid down all at once” (Evolution, Dr. D. Armond)
God gave us undeniable proof on May 18, 1980, that vast amounts of time were not needed to create things as previously thought necessary. It’s clear that God can do in a moment what it takes evolutionary theory billions of years to imagine.
Mystery of the Empty Strata
“As one digs deep into the earth, one layer or stratum after another is revealed. Often we can see these layers clearly exposed in the side of a mountain or roadbed cut. Geologists have given names to the succession of strata which pile one on top of another. Descending into Grand Canyon for example, one moves downward past the Mississippi, Devonian, Cambrian, etc., as they have been tagged by the scientists.
Now here is the perplexity for the evolutionary theory: The Cambrian is the last stratum of the descending levels that has any fossils in it. All the lower strata below the Cambrian have absolutely no fossil record of life other than some single-celled types such as bacteria and algae. Why not? The Cambrian layer is full of all the major kinds of animals found today except the vertebrates. In other words, there is nothing primitive about the structure of these most ancient fossils known to man. Essentially, they compare with the complexity of current living creatures. But the big question is: Where are their ancestors? Where are all the evolving creatures that should have led up to these highly developed fossils? According to the theory of evolution, the Precambrian strata should be filled with more primitive forms of these Cambrian fossils in the process of evolving upward” (How Evolution Flunked the Science Test).
Dr. Daniel Axelrod of the University of California calls it: "One of the major unsolved problems of geology and evolution."
George Gaylord Simpson, the "Crown Prince of Evolution", summarized it: "The sudden appearance of life is not only the most puzzling feature of the whole fossil record but also its greatest apparent inadequacy." (The Evolution of Life, p. 144).
ILLUS: Time magazine headline--evolutions big bang. Evolution happened rapidly. All at once. Sounds like creation to me.
“The absence of Precambrian fossils points to one great fact, unacceptable to the evolutionists - a sudden creative act of God which brought all the major creatures into existence at the same time. The preponderance of the evidence in fossils indicate creation of many species all at once, instead of any gradual process from one species to another” (How Evolution Flunked the Science Test).
Quotes
Great scientist and cartoonist, Scott Adams, draws Dilbert, made a prediction in chapter 14 of his latest book "The Dilbert Future". "Prediction 63: The theory of evolution will be scientifically debunked in your lifetime."
Sir Frederick Hoyle, the famous British astronomer and agnostic, "The current scenario of the origin of life is about as likely as a tornado passing through a junkyard beside Boeing Airplane Company accidentally producing a 747 airplane,"
In an article in Scientific American (February, 1991), Sir Francis Crick wrote, "The origin of life appears to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to be satisfied to get it going."
"The more one studies paleontology, the more certain one becomes that evolution is based on faith alone. . .exactly the same sort of faith which it is necessary to have when one encounters the great mysteries of religion."—*Louis Trenchard More, quoted in Science and the Two-tailed Dinosaur, p. 33.
"What is it [evolution] based upon? Upon nothing whatever but faith, upon belief in the reality of the unseen—belief in the fossils that cannot be produced, belief in the embryological experiments that refuse to come off. It is faith unjustified by works."—*Arthur N. Field.
Darwin himself wrote "I was a young man with unformed ideas. I threw out queries, suggestions, wondering all the time over everything; and to my astonishment the ideas took like wildfire. People made a religion out of them!"
Evolution was only a speculation of Darwin’s imagination. In his books, Origin of the species and The Descent of Man you may count over 800 times the phrase "we may suppose" or similar phrases—in other words, guess work or presumption. Evolution takes more faith than basic religion does, because it is based on theory and speculation, rather than empirical science or historical documents.
Why is it then that numerous scientists still believe in evolution then? We’ll find out in their own words next week.
Why is the creation vs. evolution issue so important? Because it reveals prejudices against openly and honestly dealing with truth. Some Christians will neglect to answer scientific questions out of fear, while numerous evolutionists will neglect to admit the serious holes in their theory.
Issue important, not just about science, but faith. Evolution has been used by many as an excuse not to have faith in God. Sin? No big deal. God. Just a myth. And there is no empirical proof for their claims. If Genesis is true, who sets the rules? God does. If Genesis can be discredited, who then sets the rules? You do. If you believe Genesis to be a myth, then you are not accountable to anyone but yourself. You can make up your own rules. Nothing right or wrong. Kill, lie, steal, cheat. All part of the survival of the fittest. Love has no meaning.
What world view does evolution leave us with...in the words of Oliver Wendell Holmes "I see no reason for attributing to man a significance in kind different from that which belongs to a baboon or a grain of sand."
If I can believe that I am an animal, it will be easy to live like a baboon. If survival goes to the fittest, I can eliminate the weak. Charles Darwin's book, Origin of the Species, was subtitled The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life. Evolution laid the foundation for international violence and bloodshed. Mao and other Communists can murder or mutilate undesirable people. Racism is normal. Karl Marx, Joseph Stalin, Friedrich Nietzsche, Adolf Hitler, and Benito Mussilini were all avowed evolutionists. It mattered to millions of Jews and Russians who were killed what people believed.
Evolution says Life is Chance. Creation says God created with intelligence and design
Evolution says you’re just an overgrown ape. Creation says you were made in the image of God.
Evolution can’t place any value on love. Creation says God loves beauty, and love is meaningful.
Evolution–survival of the fittest. Creation and scripture reveal that God looks out for the weak, the beaten up, the hurting.
Evolution says Jesus is a fraud. The bible says he created us and wants to recreate us.
Evolution is based on faith and science. Creation is based on faith and science. Both valid. But both are worlds apart.
John 1:1-5, 9, 14
