Posted by
Jason Drexler on Monday, May 26, 2008 3:02:51 AM
I'm still trying to sort out my thinking on evolution. As a Christian, I firmly believe that God created everything -- and that He could have created via any means: sudden creation, gradual evolution over time, you name it (of course, it could be both: ardent Darwinists have no idea how life originated -- a separate matter from how existing life evolves -- so perhaps God created many original species and then evolution took place from there).
At any rate, Stephen Jay Gould, a dyed-in-the-wool evolutionist, states that evolution is a fact of nature, as well established as the fact that the Earth revolves around the Sun. Though I give some credit to Gould for being more gentle than many of his colleagues towards religion, his aforementioned statement is absurd: we can physically observe, in real time, the Earth revolving around the Sun; no one has ever seen an amoeba turn into a fish, or a marmoset morph into a gorilla.
That said, paleontologist Colin Patterson believes that both creationism and evolution are scientifically vacuous concepts held primarily on the basis of faith. I'm quite willing to admit that God cannot be empirically "proved," in the strict sense of the word ... but most Darwinists won't admit the same thing about evolution -- not publicly, at least. Yet Patterson showed that there has been much doubt on the matter in the scientific establishment. He posed a question that he'd asked other scientists -- "Can you tell me anything you know about evolution, any one thing ... that is true?" -- and this is his account of the responses he got: "I tried that question on the geology staff at the Field Museum of Natural History and the only answer I got was silence. I tried it on the members of the Evolutionary Morphology seminar in the University of Chicago, a very prestigious body of evolutionists, and all I got there was silence for a long time and eventually one person said 'I do know one thing -- it ought not to be taught in high school.' "
Patterson suggests, according to author and legal scholar Phillip E. Johnson, that "both evolution and creation are forms of pseudo-knowledge, concepts which seem to imply information but do not. One point of comparison was particularly striking. A common objection to creationism in pre-Darwinian times (and, Jason Drexler adds, even now) was that no one could say anything about the mechanism of creation. Creationists simply pointed to the 'fact' of creation and conceded ignorance of the means. But now, according to Patterson, Darwin's theory of natural selection is under fire and scientists are no longer sure of its general validity. Evolutionists increasingly talk like creationists in that they point to a fact but cannot provide an explanation of the means."
Patterson came under heavy fire for this, but his point is well-taken by yours truly: one-species-to-another evolution is labeled and talked about as "fact," yet not only has no human ever witnessed such an event, but no one I've ever come across has been able to explain all the "whys" and "hows" involved -- why would a cell mutate in the first place? and how would any cell/organism know what to evolve into, or that it even needed to evolve? For example, it's said that eyes developed when light-sensitive cells evolved into the magnificent sight-capturing organs we now possess. But why would these cells even initiate such a transformation? How would it initiate it? How could cells that were merely "light-sensitive" transform into a fully functioning eye? As novelist James Rollins postulates in "Black Order," it's as though evolution, if it exists, is itself an intelligence, or at least guided by an intelligence -- a theory that lends much more credibility to creationism than to purely naturalistic Darwinian evolution/natural selection. All this isn't to mention the fact -- the very real and true fact -- that most mutations are negative, and that even if Darwinism were completely true, it still fails to account for how life came to be in the first place. (And no, the explanation by one Darwinist in Ben Stein's "Expelled" that life began when "germs piggy-backed on proteins" (my paraphrase) doesn't hold up: Germs are life, so how did they come into existence?)
I realize that this post has come across as less favorable to evolution, but that's where I am at the moment. Evolution within species is, in my opinion, indisputable. But evolution as the driving force in the natural world, transforming one species into another, moving life from simple to complex, is a theory that leaves a lot to be desired at this point in history. And it certainly fails as the catalyst for life -- how can something evolve from nothing? And genetic and physiological similarities do nothing to empirically prove evolution -- as my pastor said just today, if one God created everything, and created it all to live on the same planet in the same basic type of ecosystem, wouldn't you expect to see a lot of similarities between species?