What is it with this evolution?

By Mirosław Rucki,
Love One Another! 2015-33

When Jesus Christ knocked on my heart twenty-five years ago, he first had to crush the foundation of my belief in the non-existence of God. That foundation was based on the theory of evolution, attempting to explain the origin and development of life through automatic natural processes, such as random mutations and natural selection.

When Jesus Christ knocked on my heart twenty-five years ago, he first had to crush the foundation of my belief in the non-existence of God. That foundation was based on the theory of evolution, attempting to explain the origin and development of life through automatic natural processes, such as random mutations and natural selection. I was sure that the existence of the material world and the diversity of life in it could be explained naturalistically, without reference to God the Creator. There is nothing surprising in this, since “for many decades, and perhaps even a coupleof centuries, ‘the world of natural science’ (the fields of astronomy, biology and psychology) has been associated with atheism, materialism […], and the entire program of ‘learning about nature’ for children and teenagers is — in the countries of the European civilisation — based on the ideology of materialism, panmaterialism” (Fr P. Lenartowicz, SJ, People or Manapes? (Cracow, 2010), p. 38). As a result, our textbooks, encyclopaedias, educational and popular science programmes are constructed in such a way as to give the impression that it is possible for nature and man to exist without God.

“There is more evidence to suggest an abrupt arrival of man rather than a gradual process of evolving” (Dr R. Leakey)

A powerful hoax

It turns out, however, that the materialistic and evolutionary vision largely ignores the reality discovered by scientists. This is evidenced by the statements of eminent scientists who are carefully ignored by the popular media. For example, A. Knoll, a professor of biology at Harvard University, admitted in an interview: “We don’t know how life started on this planet. We don’t know exactly when it started. We don’t know under what circumstances” (Quoted by Sean McDowell and Jonathan Morrow, Is God Just a Human Invention? (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2010), p. 84). A. Lazcano, president of The International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life (ISSOL), in his article “The Origins of Life” (Natural History, February 2006), said: “Life could not have evolved without a genetic mechanism – one able to store, replicate, and transmit to its progeny information that can change with time.” The genetic mechanism exists and functions only in living organisms, so without life there is no life and life cannot evolve from inanimate matter. And who but the president of the International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life should have the most current scientific knowledge about the origins of life?

“As the number of imaginary letters [denoting transitional stages in evolution] increases, the tendency is to get further and further away from real chemistry” (Prof. M. Behe)

The theory of biological evolution by means of gradual changes driven by random mutations and natural selection encounters more serious problems, impossible to solve without reference to God the Creator (even though textbooks and popular media are trying to create a different impression). J. Maddox, a retired former editor of the scientific journal Nature, points out: “The overriding question is when (and then how) sexual reproduction itself evolved. Despite decades of speculation, we do not know” (the book What Remains to Be Discovered (New York, 1998), p. 252). Let us note that attempts to match the established scientific facts to the theory of evolution are pure speculation… In the article “The Origin of Life: More Questions than Answers”, K. Dose confessed: “More than 30 years of experimentation on the origin of life in the fields of chemical and molecular evolution have led to a better perception of the immensity of the problem of the origin of life on Earth rather than to its solution. At present all discussions on principal theories and experiments in the field either end in stalemate or in a confession of ignorance.” (“The Origin of Life: More Questions than Answers”, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, 13 (1988), p. 348).

At the same time, in textbooks and in the media, statements of this type are repeated: “Evolution is currently considered to be a process which objectively occurs in nature and which is comprehensively confirmed by a great deal of empirical evidence” (Biology. School Encyclopaedia (Warsaw: WSiP, 2005), p. 190). As you can see, this is more of a wish by the authors of the encyclopaedia than the state of scientific knowledge.

Lack of evolutionary mechanisms

As an engineer, I can say that today’s technologies offer us great opportunities to gain control over matter. Looking at science in all honesty, we can clearly state: anything that comes into existence by chance, we can recreate in the laboratory. If we cannot recreate something, and cannot even describe how it came into being, this means that it was done by someone smarter and more powerful than today’s engineers. Therefore biology leads us inevitably to conclude that there must be a God who designed and created living creatures, especially since huge efforts are being made to prove the naturalistic origin and development of life on Earth.

I was sure that the existence of the material world and the diversity of life in it could be explained naturalistically, without reference to God the Creator

In 1945, N. H. Horowitz wrote: “Since natural selection cannot preserve nonfunctional characters, the most obvious implication of the fact would seem to be that a stepwise evolution of biosyntheses, by selection of a single gene mutation at a time, is impossible.” In an attempt to somehow defend the hypothesis of gradual transformations, Horowitz suggested a complicated path of change, marking the hypothetical stages with letters: A, B, C and D. Unfortunately, the further development of sciences not only failed to confirm the existence of such stages, but it even refuted this assumption, forcing successive supporters of gradual evolutionary development (including Kauffman and de Duve) to create increasingly more complex schemes. However, because these schemes had no basis in reality, Prof. J. M. Smith called them “fact-free science”. As Prof. M. Behe notes: “Kauffman and de Duve identify a real problem for gradualistic evolution. The solutions they propose, however, are merely variations on Horowitz’s old idea. Instead of A→B→C→D, they simply propose A→B→C→D times hundred. Worse, as the number of imaginary letters increases, the tendency is to get further and further away from real chemistry and to get trapped in the mental world of mathematics” (Darwin’s Black Box (New York, 2003), p. 156).

Having analysed all the issues of The Journal of Molecular Evolution, published in 1971, devoted exclusively to issues of gradual evolution on the molecular level, Professor Behe wrote: “In fact, none of the paperspublished in JME over the entire course of its life as a journal has ever proposed a detailed model by which a complex biochemical system might have been produced in a gradual, step-by-step Darwinian fashion” (Darwin’s Black Box, p. 176). And this journal has published thousands of articles! The same applies to the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which has published approx. 400 articles in ten years: none of them have provided any scientific explanation whatsoever for the alleged evolutionary mechanisms.

When will we finally find something?

A few years ago, I wrote a letter to the editor of the scientific journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution. The point was that after reviewing several years of this journal I had not found a single piece of evidence that gradual evolution driven by mutations and natural selection, leading to the creation of new organs and new designs for body structure, had occurred at all. For example, studying the echolocation organs in bats, Prof. E. C. Teeling was not able to even approximately answer the question as to how and from where those organs evolved (“Hear, hear: the convergent evolution of echolocation in bats?”, Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 24/7 (2009), pp. 351–354). The author honestly admitted that she knows less than she does not know, and expressed the hope that soon there will be found numerous transitional forms, allowing the bridging of the gap between a real bat, equipped with a perfect complex system of echolocation, and its hypothetical ancestors, equipped with hypothetical underdeveloped non-functional components of the system. To be honest, the author stood in the exact same place as Darwin 150 years ago, when he promised to provide “in a short time, a huge amount of evidence” for the evolution of species.

I wrote about this to the chief editor, asking him to point me to at least three concrete pieces of evidence for evolution as described by Darwinism, because I could not find anything in his journal. In response, he encouraged me to continue looking, because there was a lot of evidence for evolution. In reality, when one scientist responds to another scientist, “there is a lot of evidence, find it yourself”, it means that he does not have any evidence at all, particularly since a large number of articles in his own journal contain the results of research and scientifically established facts which stand in evident contradiction to Darwinism (in any form). If we removed the numerous sentences full of ideology and wishful thinking which express blind faith in the existence of evolutionary processes and transitional forms which haven’t been found in the last 150 years, we would get a great creationist magazine.

Zero evidence

As you can see, the evidence for gradual evolution is simply lacking today, just as it was lacking in 1858, when the work of C. R. Darwin and A. R. Wallace was first published. Besides, Darwin himself wrote in his work On the Origin of Species: “Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory”.

After 150 years, nothing has changed in this matter. The lack of fossilized transitional forms is emphasised by Prof. S. Jones: “The fossil record – in defiance of Darwin’s whole idea of gradual change – oftenmakes great leaps from one form to the next. Far from the display of intermediates to be expected from a slow advance through natural selection, many species appear without warning, persist in fixed form, and disappear, leaving no descendants. Geology assuredly does not reveal any finely graduated organic chain, and this is the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against the theory of evolution” (Almost Like a Whale (Doubleday, 1999), p. 252). “It is not that the continuous transitional sequences hardly ever happen, in fact, they just do not exist”, explains G. G. Simpson, a professor of zoology at Columbia University.

Several teeth, a few skulls and a few skeletal bones would not allow us to reconstruct the appearance of even one individual

When reading evolutionist materials without a critical approach, you can gain a different impression. However, brief consideration of the facts suffices to notice a problem. For example, in the textbook Biology — A Handbook for Junior High School Exam (Gdynia, 2011), on page 159, the evidence for evolution is divided into direct and indirect, and the direct evidence includes fossils, prints, castings and living fossils. This would mean that at the junior high school level a pupil should list without thinking the paleontological record as direct evidence of evolution. You can also read in a popular encyclopaedia that evolution (especially in the case of skeletal changes) is well attested in the fossil record (Biology. School Encyclopaedia (Warsaw: WSiP, 2005), p. 786). On page 399 of the same book, however, we read the following: “The origin of monkeys is one of the most difficult problems of modern paleozoology. Although the findings are limited to a small number of teeth, jaw fractions, skeleton fragments and a few complete skulls, they allow one to conclude that currently living primates and insectivores are derived from a common evolutionary node.”

It is a little too little, if that is the only total direct evidence for evolution. Several teeth, a few skulls and a few skeletal bones would not allow us to reconstruct the appearance of even one individual, let alone the course of evolutionary changes over sixty million years (the time span for the evolution of monkeys found two sentences below on page 399 of the Encyclopaedia). And over that periodthere must have been tens of millions of generations following one after another, which gives billions of individual monkeys, with a population of at least one hundred individuals in each generation. How can you form an opinion about them based on several skulls and a dozen or so pieces of other bones? It is as if someone had at their disposal a small number of teeth, jaw fractions, skeleton fragments and just a few complete skulls of modern man, and tried to speak of demographics and to characterise people living on the planet in the twenty-first century. It’s a logical disaster. This kind of thinking reminds me of a joke about how archaeologists found nothing, and therefore they concluded that as far back as 2000 years ago there must have existed a wireless telegraph…

Apemen — a product of imagination

Distorted, and sometimes even falsified, scientific data, media and educational programmes tend to “apeify” human ancestors, or “beast-ify” early hominids (Fr P. Lenartowicz, op. cit., p. 330 ff.). They are given the appearance of apes, their behaviour is described as animal-like, they are given names referring to apes (“pithecanthropus” means “ape”, “australopithecus” is “southern ape”), etc. It turns out, however, that “skulls of both modern and ancient native Australian aborigines have been shown to possess characteristics very similar to Homo erectus. Remains dated between 10,000 and 30,000 years ago and even very recently have been found to differ in only one of the seven anatomical points of the skull”, and other skulls assigned to hominids certainly belong to apes (G. Barnard, A. McIntosh and S. Taylor, Origins: Examining the Evidence, St Neots: Truth in Science, 2011, pp. 142–143).

Dr Richard Leakey admitted: “If pressed about man’s ancestry, I would have to unequivocally say that all we have is a huge question mark. […] If further pressed, I would have to state that there is more evidence to suggest an abrupt arrival of man rather than a gradual process of evolving” (from the PBS documentary, 1990). And yet since childhood he has been involved in archaeological work with his parents, and later as a researcher, together with his team, he discovered and described species such as Paranthropus boisei, Homo rudolfensis, Homo erectus, Homo ergaster and Australopithecus aethiopicus. And it was Dr Leakey’s own parents who discovered in Laetoli, about 40 km south of Olduvai Gorge (Tanzania), fossils of what looked like human footprints. However, radiometric dating of the layers covering the footprints pointed to 3.8 million years. On the basis of the evolutionary dogma that the existence of man in those days was not possible, the footprints were assigned to australopithecus, even though it was clearly declared: “In discernible features, the Laetoli G prints are indistinguishable from those of habitually barefoot Homo sapiens” (R. Tuttle, “Did a. afarensis make the Laetoli G footprint trails?”, American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 1991, supplement, p. 175).

“Evidence for the existence of God is not coercion […], for it is not about ‘proof’ in the narrow sense, but about the evidence, which is not exactly the same” (Fr A. Mien)

Cremo and Thompson, in their book Forbidden Archeology (Torchlight Publishing, 1998), provide a fourteenpage list of other discoveries rejected due to their incompatibility with the current evolutionary dogma. I will mention here only those that seem most interesting to me:

1) in Utah, in Cambrian layers (505–590 million years ago), a human shoe print was found; a similar print of a shod human foot was found in layers of Triassic period (213–248 million years ago) in Nevada,

2) in Scotland, fossilised remains of prehistoric trees have been found; an iron nail was found embedded in one of them, apparently driven into the wood before it petrified (360–408 million years ago),

3) in England, in Carbon layers (dating back 320–350 million years), a stone was found with an ingrown golden thread,

4) in Oklahoma, an iron cup was found in intact layers dated to 312 million years ago,

5) in Illinois, a nearly complete human skeleton was found in intact layers dated to 286–320 million years ago; similarly, human skeletons were found in Oligocene layers (33–55 million years ago) in California and in Eocene layers (38–45 million years ago) in Switzerland,

6) metal pipes were found in intact Cretaceous layers (65–114 million years ago).

Unfortunately, those who decide what is “scientific” and what is “unscientific” carefully select their material to create a sense of coherence to the theory of evolution and the existence of ample evidence for the animal origin of man, natural evolution and the self-creation of life.

Intellectual honesty

Father Alexander Mien emphasised that “by definition, logical proof is of a coercive nature. […] Evidence for the existence of God is not coercion […], for it is not about ‘proof’ in the narrow sense, but about the evidence, which is not exactly the same” (Истоки религии (Moscow, 2001), pp. 73–74). It must be forcefully emphasised that the scientific evidence in favour of the existence of God the Creator is very convincing and unambiguous.

The Nobel laureate G. Wald, known for his earlier declaration that, not wanting to acknowledge God, he preferred to believe in the accidental origin of life, realising that it was scientifically impossible, admitted in the article “Mind and Life in the Universe”: “This is with the assumption that mind, rather than emerging as a late outgrowth in the evolution of life, has existed always as the matrix, the source and condition of physical reality” (“Mind and Life in the Universe”, in Cosmos, Bios, Theos (La Salle, 1992)).

And it is this mind, created in us in the image and likeness of the mind of God, which demands that we honestly stand before the Creator, worship Him and confess our dependence on Him, “so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” (Phil. 2:10–11).

Source: https://loamagazine.org/archive/2015/2015-33/what-is-it-with-this-evolution

The above article was published with permission from Miłujcie się! in September 2020.

Read more Christian articles (English)

Top

Recommend this page to your friend!