In Texas, the State Board of Education has given nearly final approval to new science curriculum standards that would dramatically change how Texas schools teach evolution.
The new curriculum standards specify that teachers and students will no longer be forced to discuss the "strengths and weaknesses" of evolution. Many educators in Texas are hailing this move as a positive step towards halting the meddling of "creationists" in scientific education.
Texas is one of the more "conservative" states in the U.S., and thus this is a big blow for those who oppose Darwinism.
Yet the debate will rage on. The theory of evolution is making great strides in the American education system, but there are still those who stubbornly cling to the idea of "intelligent design".
But should there even be a debate? What does the scientific evidence say?
After all, shouldn't the actual science be more important than what people would like to believe?
Shouldn't logic, reason and hard facts trump any personal agenda that anyone is trying to push?
So let's look at what the science actually shows us.....
"I myself am convinced that the theory of evolution, especially the extent to which it's been applied, will be one of the great jokes in the history books of the future. Posterity will marvel that so very flimsy and dubious an hypothesis could be accepted with the incredible credulity that it has."
-Malcolm Muggeridge (world famous journalist and philosopher), Pascal Lectures, University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.
The following are three key points which clearly show that creation science clearly fits the scientific evidence better than Darwinian evolution:
1) If evolution was true, we should have millions upon millions of transitional fossils.
But the reality that we find in the fossil record is this:
"I fully agree with your comments on the lack of direct illustration of evolutionary transitions in my book. If I knew of any, fossil or living, I would certainly have included them. You suggest that an artist should be used to visualise such transformations, but where would he get the information from? I could not, honestly, provide it, and if I were to leave it to artistic license, would that not mislead the reader?"
-Dr. Colin Patterson, senior paleontologist at the British Museum of Natural History (and a hardcore evolutionist), in a letter to Luther Sunderland, April 10, 1979.
In response to this point, Darwinists will usually trot out the same handful of incredibly weak, totally laughable examples of "transitional forms" that have been debunked and discredited time after time (for example Archaeopteryx):
http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v1/i1/archaeopteryx.asp
However, the truth is that if Darwinian evolution was true there would be millions upon millions of very clear transitional fossils in the fossil record.
But their "theory" has a huge problem.
The fossils are simply not there.
"Lastly, looking not to any one time, but to all time, if my theory be true, numberless intermediate varieties, linking closely together all the species of the same group, must assuredly have existed. But, as by this theory, innumerable transitional forms must have existed, why do we not find them embedded in countless numbers in the crust of the earth?"
-Charles Darwin
"In fact, the fossil record does not convincingly document a single transition from one species to another."
-Evolutionist Stephen M. Stanley, Johns Hopkins University
So, what the science actually reveals is that the "missing links" have always been missing and they always will be missing because they were never there.
2) If evolution was true, then we should see an "evolutionary tree" in the fossil record, with complex life developing very slowly from earlier, less complex forms. Instead, what we do see is the sudden, instant appearance of complex life in the fossil record (evolutionists refer to this as the Cambrian explosion):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambrian_explosion
The truth is that complex life first appeared on the earth in a very sudden, explosive manner.
"The earliest and most primitive members of every order already have the basic ordinal characters, and in no case is an approximately continuous series from one order to another known. In most cases the break is so sharp and the gap so large that the origin of the order is speculative and much disputed"
-Paleontologist George Gaylord
The reality is that complex life appears in the fossil record fully formed and fully functional.
There is no denying it.
There is no getting around it.
Now which worldview does the sudden appearance of fully formed, fully functional complex life in the fossil record support?
Creation science of course.
3) In addition, evolutionists are at a complete and total loss for how to explain the creation of new information that is required for one animal to turn into another animal.
As one creation scientist explained:
"The key issue is the type of change required — to change microbes into men requires changes that increase the genetic information content, from over half a million DNA ‘letters’ of even the ‘simplest’ self-reproducing organism to three billion ‘letters’ (stored in each human cell nucleus)."
Evolutionists cannot show us a single example of functional new information being added to any creature.
Evolutionist Stephen J. Gould, Harvard:
"Every paleontologist knows that most species don't change. That's bothersome....brings terrible distress. ....They may get a little bigger or bumpier but they remain the same species and that's not due to imperfection and gaps but stasis. And yet this remarkable stasis has generally been ignored as no data. If they don't change, its not evolution so you don't talk about it." Lecture at Hobart & William Smith College, 14/2/1980.
Christians, when you are in a debate with a Darwinist, the following is an outstanding question to ask of them:
"Do you have enough blind faith to believe that life just popped into existence from nonlife, and that such life just happened to have the ability to take in the nourishment it needed, to expel waste, and to reproduce itself, all the while having everything it needed to survive in the environment in which it suddenly found itself?"
Here are three questions which I would love to hear evolutionists try to answer:
1) Which evolved first: the mouth, the stomach, the digestive fluids, or the ability to poop?
2) Which evolved first: the windpipe, the lungs, or the ability of the body to use oxygen?
3) Which evolved first: the bones, ligaments, tendons, blood supply, or the muscles to move the bones?
Conceivably, you could continue this exercise forever. The reality is that the body has a huge variety of incredibly complex systems which completely rely on other incredibly complex systems that cannot function on their own. Evolutionists just tend to completely ignore this bit of common sense.
In addition, we have a standing challenge for any evolutionists, skeptics or atheists to go and try to debunk these videos:
http://www.leestrobel.com/Creator.htm
If you can actually debunk those videos then you are better than any evolutionist we have ever met.
"Evolutionism is a fairy tale for grown-ups. This theory has helped nothing in the progress of science. It is useless."
-Professor Louis Bounoure, past president of the Biological Society of Strassbourg, Director of the Strassbourg Zoological Museum, Director of Research at the French National Center of Scientific Research.
So do you still believe in the theory of evolution? Do you actually still believe that the science backs it up? Feel free to post your response to this article in the comments section below.
I've got a few things to say:
ReplyDeleteA) What actual evidence is there for creationism? Even if there were some sort of consensus that evolution was incorrect, evidence would have to be found supporting creationism. It's not like creationism is somehow the default explanation.
Also, if creationism is actually a science, it has to be falsifiable. In other words, there has to be some sort of discovery that, if true, could potentially disprove the idea. (Ex.: Evolution could be falsified if a fossil were discovered that was siginificantly out of place chronologically, such as a precambrian rabbit.) How is creationism falsifiable?
B) Transitional fossils: There are lots of transitional fossils (and technically every species is transitional since evolution still goes on today). Here's an abbreviated list: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-transitional.html. (Just because you're not impressed by Archaeopteryx doesn't invalidate all the other transitional fossils.) A video list that's more thorough can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=F9729F67CD4034C9. For more examples, just google the phrase "transitional fossils."
C) I think most of your issues with evolution are addressed pretty thoroughly on youtube by a user named DonExodus2. His explanations are more in depth than what I'm saying right now, so I'd recommend watching a bunch of his videos.
D) You said to ask this to evolutionists: "Do you have enough blind faith to believe that life just popped into existence from nonlife, and that such life just happened to have the ability to take in the nourishment it needed, to expel waste, and to reproduce itself, all the while having everything it needed to survive in the environment in which it suddenly found itself?"
Here's the evolutionist answer:
i. The theory of how life was first formed is abiogenesis. Evolution deals with the change in living organisms starting from when organisms were already in existence. Please note the difference between the two theories. Evolution makes no claim about the creation of the first life forms on Earth.
ii. According to the theory of abiogenesis, life didn't just pop up. Rather carbon-based molecules were subjected to environmental conditions suitable for the formation of organic compounds, such as amino acids, lipids, and RNA nucleotides (see Urey-Miller Experiment among others). RNA could have replicated itself based on its molecular properties and that RNA can act as a catalyst for chemical reactions. (I presume you know about ribozymes, right?) This could lead to replicating organice matter.
iii. Doesn't creationism state that life just popped up in 6 days? If you can't have enough faith to believe that self-replicating molecules gradually led to the development of protobionts and later cells over time, then how can you accept that organisms quickly arose from the dust of the Earth?
iv. If you can't believe that simple cells formed on their own, how can you believe an infinitely complex deity formed on his own?
v. Science is agnostic. It deals with phenomena in the natural world. Creationism would be a supernatural phenomenon.
E) Now I'd like to address the 3 questions you posed near the end of your post:
1. The answer depends on how you define digestive fluids and the ability to poop. (These 2 things can be found in simple microorganisms, whereas the mouth and stomach are found in more complex, multicellular animals.) If you define digestive fluids as fluid that enables metabolic processes, this is probably what came first. The idea is that early RNA would become surrounded by lipid bubbles. These "protobionts" could have broken down simple molecules with either polypeptides or their rybozymes. Either way, this could be considered digestive fluid. However, some of the products from the breakdown of other molecules would be released from the cell after chemical reactions in a manner that could be interpreted as pooping.
2. The ability to utilize oxygen. It's believed that the earliest animals were marine and that gills came before lungs.
3. Bones, believe it or not, are believed to have first been formed to store excess Ca ions found in marine environments. As for whether or not they appeared before blood, blood came first. To explain it simply, there are animals with blood and no bones, but no animal has bones, but no blood.
F) I'd like to respond to the videos you linked to, but they total well over an hour in length and I don't have that much time on my hands.
1) Which evolved first: the mouth, the stomach, the digestive fluids, or the ability to poop?
ReplyDeleteThey all evolved at once. Ever heard of a tubular digestive tract? Mouth, stomach, and anus are all one. See, Phylum Rotifera.
2) Which evolved first: the windpipe, the lungs, or the ability of the body to use oxygen?
The ability to use oxygen. It was originally absorbed through the skin, this process still exists in many amphibians such as frogs.
3) Which evolved first: the bones, ligaments, tendons, blood supply, or the muscles to move the bones?
The blood. Many primitive creatures have hydraulic based muscular systems that work by flooding different chambers with blood in order to produce movement. See Phylum Mollusca.