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What’s wrong with Evolution.
1. Extrapolation in the Extreme.
2. Evidence is Embellished.
3. Explanations are Egregious.
4. Evangelism gets Eviscerated.
5. Extraordinary Evil Encouraged.
What’s wrong with Evolution.
1. Extrapolation in the Extreme.
2. Evidence is Embellished.
3. Explanations are Egregious.
4. Evangelism gets Eviscerated.
5. Extraordinary Evil Encouraged.
What’s wrong with Evolution.
1. Extrapolation in the Extreme.
2. Evidence is Embellished.
3. Explanations are Egregious.
4. Evangelism gets Eviscerated.
5. Extraordinary Evil Encouraged.
What’s wrong with Evolution.
1. Extrapolation in the Extreme.
(a) Cosmic Evolution
(b) Chemical Evolution
(c) Biological Evolution
“Extrapolate”: — To project beyond
the range of known values on the
basis of values already determined;
to infer a possibility beyond the strict
evidence of a series of facts,
events, observations, etc.
“Unfortunately, there is no science
of extrapolation. It is, at best, an art,
and a highly fallible art at that.”
— Robert Root-Bernstein, Discover, Nov.
1993, p. 44
What’s wrong with Evolution.
1. Extrapolation in the Extreme.
(a) Cosmic Evolution
“Big Bang”
If we allow that the universe
seems to be expanding . . .
then the evolutionary cosmologist will
grab that idea, throw it into reverse, and
shrink the whole cosmos backward in time —
to yield an infinitely hot, dense point
much smaller than a proton!
“10–26 m, one hundred billion
times smaller than a proton”
— Alan H. Guth and David I. Kaiser. 2005 (Feb. 11).
“Inflationary Cosmology: Exploring the Universe
from the Smallest to the Largest Scales.”
Science 307:885.
What’s wrong with Evolution.
1. Extrapolation in the Extreme.
(b) Chemical Evolution
“Origin of Life”
If we agree that chemical reactions
involving simple gases can
produce amino acids in the lab . . .
then the evolutionary origin-of-life researcher
will see no problem in principle
with creating life in the test tube!
“[Stanley Miller’s] discovery gave a huge boost to the scientific
investigation of the origin of life. Indeed, for some time it
seemed like creation of life in a test tube was within reach of
experimental science. Unfortunately, such experiments have not
progressed much further than their original prototype, leaving
us with a sour aftertaste from the primordial soup.”
— Massimo Pigliucci. 1999 (Sep.-Oct.). “Where Do We Come From?
A Humbling Look at the Biology of Life’s Origin.” Skeptical Inquirer 23(5):24.
What’s wrong with Evolution.
1. Extrapolation in the Extreme.
(c) Biological Evolution
Microevolution → Macroevolution
If we grant that the current generation of
organisms does vary from the previous one . . .
then the evolutionary biologist will amplify this
admission into a process that, given billions of
years, turns prokaryotes into people!
“. . . I was not prepared to find creationists . . . actually
accepting the [peppered] moths as examples of smallscale evolution by natural selection! . . . That, to my
mind, is tantamount to conceding the entire issue, for .
. . there is utter continuity in evolutionary processes
from the smallest scales (microevolution) up through
the largest scales (macroevolution).”
— Niles Eldredge. 2000. The Triumph of Evolution and the Failure
of Creationism. New York: W. H. Freeman and Co. p. 119.
“A long-standing issue in evolutionary biology
is whether the processes observable in extant
populations and species (microevolution)
are sufficient to account for the larger-scale
changes evident over longer periods of life’s
history (macroevolution). Outsiders to this
rich literature may be surprised that there is
no consensus on this issue, and that strong
viewpoints are held at both ends of the
spectrum, with many undecided.”
— Sean B. Carroll. 2001 (Feb. 8). “The big picture.” Nature 409:669.
“One scale doesn’t translate into another.”
— Stephen Jay Gould. 1998 (Jan.). “The Paradox of the
Visibly Irrelevant.” Natural History 106(11):64.
What’s wrong with Evolution.
1. Extrapolation in the Extreme.
2. Evidence is Embellished.
What’s wrong with Evolution.
2. Evidence is Embellished.
Classic Example:
Ernst Häckel’s Diagrams of
Vertebrate Embryos
“Generations of biology students may have been misled
by a famous set of drawings published 123 years ago
by the German biologist Ernst Haeckel.
They show vertebrate embryos of different animals
passing through the identical stages of development.
But the impression they give, that the embryos are
exactly alike, is wrong, says Michael Richardson,
an embryologist at St. George’s Medical School
in London. He hopes once and for all to discredit
Haeckel’s work, first found to be flawed
more than a century ago.”
“Richardson had long held doubts
about Haeckel’s drawings because
they didn’t square with his
understanding of the rates at which
fish, reptiles, birds, and mammals
develop their distinct features.
So he and his colleagues did their own
comparative study, reexamining and
photographing embryos roughly
matched by species and age with those
Haeckel drew. Lo and behold, the
embryos ‘often looked surprisingly
different,’ Richardson reports in the
August issue of Anatomy and
Embryology.”
“Not only did Haeckel add or omit features,
Richardson and his colleagues report, but he
also fudged the scale to exaggerate similarities
among species, even when there were 10-fold
differences in size. Haeckel further blurred
differences by neglecting to name the species in
most cases, as if one representative was
accurate for an entire group of animals.
In reality, Richardson and his colleagues note,
even closely related embryos such as those of
fish vary quite a bit in their appearance and
developmental pathway. ‘It looks like it’s
turning out to be one of the most famous fakes
in biology,’ Richardson concludes.”
“This news might not have been so shocking
to Haeckel’s peers in Germany a century ago:
They got Haeckel to admit that he relied
on memory and used artistic license in
preparing his drawings, says Scott Gilbert,
a developmental biologist at
Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania.
But Haeckel’s confession got lost after
his drawings were subsequently used in a
1901 book called Darwin and After Darwin
and reproduced widely
in English-language biology texts.”
— Elizabeth Pennisi. 1997 (Sept. 5). “Haeckel’s Embryos:
Fraud Rediscovered.” Science 277:1435.
Ernst Haeckel’s Influence (according to Stephen Jay Gould)
“Haeckel’s forceful, eminently comprehensible, if not
always accurate, books appeared in all major languages
and surely exerted more influence than the works of any
other scientist, including Darwin and Huxley (by
Huxley’s own frank admission), in convincing people
throughout the world about the validity of evolution.”
“. . . we do, I think, have the right to be both astonished
and ashamed by the century of mindless recycling that
has led to the persistence of these drawings in a large
number, if not a majority, of modern textbooks!”
— Stephen Jay Gould. 2000 (Mar.). “Abscheulich! (Atrocious!)”
Natural History 109(2):42,45.
Ernst Haeckel’s Influence (Michael Behe’s personal story)
[After citing Elizabeth Pennisi’s article, Behe says:]
“. . . the misleading drawings were used in biology texts
for a hundred years because they were thought to support
Darwinian evolution. In seventh grade in parochial school my
wife’s science class was shown Haeckel’s drawings by their
teacher, a Holy Cross brother. ‘Evolution is true,’ the good
Brother told them with a flourish, ‘get used to it.’ He certainly
thought he was giving his students the straight facts, and he
wanted them to form their views in weighty matters based on
those facts. But, unknown to him, the facts were fraudulent.”
— Michael Behe. In William A. Dembski (ed.). 2004.
Uncommon dissent: intellectuals who find Darwinism unconvincing.
Wilmington, Delaware: ISI Books. p. 147.
Charles Darwin’s Favourite Evidence
“Hardly any point gave me so much satisfaction when I
was at work on the Origin, as the explanation of the wide
difference in many classes between the embryo and the adult
animal, and of the close resemblance of the embryos within
the same class. . . . Within late years several reviewers have
given the whole credit to Fritz Müller and [Ernst] Häckel,
who undoubtedly have worked it out much more fully,
and in some respects more correctly than I did.”
— Francis Darwin (ed.). The Autobiography of Charles Darwin and Selected Letters.
1958. (original: 1892). New York: Dover Publications. p. 46.
What’s wrong with Evolution.
1. Extrapolation in the Extreme.
2. Evidence is Embellished.
3. Explanations are Egregious.
What’s wrong with Evolution.
3. Explanations are Egregious.
• The mechanisms evolutionists propose are
anti-scientific.
• Evolutionists propose to build complexity by
using either miracles or negative
(randomizing, destructive) processes.
Cosmic Evolution
• The “Big Bang” was an explosion!
(a negative, destructive event)
• Where did the “Big Bang” come from?
(“singularity”)
Cosmic Evolution
• The “Big Bang” was an explosion!
(a negative, destructive event)
• Where did the “Big Bang” come from?
(“singularity”) = miracle!
Chemical Evolution
• The first self-reproducing cell had to arise from
accidental motions of atoms plus raw energy
from the Sun (or from volcanoes, or lightning).
• Nobel laureate Francis Crick once wrote:
“An honest man, armed with all the knowledge
available to us now, could only state that in some
sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be
almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which
would have had to have been satisfied to get it going.”
— Francis Crick. 1981. Life Itself. New York: Simon & Schuster. p. 88.
Biological Evolution
• The wonderful diversity of living things that
we find in Earth’s biosphere arose through:
• mutations (unplanned changes in DNA —
actually a degrading of the cell’s information)
• natural selection (the early deaths of
lots of organisms, the weeding out of
the “unfit” before they can reproduce)
What’s wrong with Evolution.
1. Extrapolation in the Extreme.
2. Evidence is Embellished.
3. Explanations are Egregious.
4. Evangelism gets Eviscerated.
What’s wrong with Evolution.
4. Evangelism gets Eviscerated.
Evolutionists/atheists recognize very
clearly that evolution undermines the
gospel
(and the Bible in general).
“Evolution is the greatest engine of atheism.”
— Will Provine, noted atheist and evolutionary biologist, Cornell University.
Cited in Larry Witham. 2002. Where Darwin Meets the Bible.
Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. p. 23.
“Christianity has fought, still fights, and will fight
science to the desperate end over evolution, because
evolution destroys utterly and finally the very reason
Jesus’ earthly life was supposedly made necessary.
Destroy Adam and Eve and the original sin,
and in the rubble you will find the sorry remains
of the son of god. . . . If Jesus was not
the
redeemer who died for our sins,
and
this is what evolution means,
then
Christianity is nothing!”
— G. Richard Bozarth. 1978 (Feb.) “The Meaning of Evolution.” American Atheist. pp. 19, 30.
“Oh but of course the story of Adam and Eve was only
ever symbolic, wasn’t it? Symbolic?! Jesus had
himself tortured and executed for a symbolic sin by a
non-existent individual. Nobody not brought up in the
faith could reach any verdict other than barking mad!”
— Richard Dawkins, Oxford zoologist, the world’s leading atheist and evolutionist.
The root of all evil. Part 2: The virus of faith. 2006 broadcast. 00:30:25.
What’s wrong with Evolution.
1. Extrapolation in the Extreme.
2. Evidence is Embellished.
3. Explanations are Egregious.
4. Evangelism gets Eviscerated.
5. Extraordinary Evil Encouraged.
What’s wrong with Evolution.
5. Extraordinary Evil Encouraged.
Evolution robs God of his glory,
and diminishes human significance.
Evolution Robs God of his Glory
“What kind of God can one infer from the sort of phenomena
epitomized by the species on Darwin’s Galápagos Islands?
The evolutionary process is rife with happenstance,
contingency, incredible waste, death, pain and horror. . . .
Whatever the God implied by evolutionary theory and the
data of natural history may be like, He is not the Protestant
God of waste not, want not. He is also not a loving God who
cares about His productions. . . . The God of the Galápagos is
careless, wasteful, indifferent, almost diabolical.
He is certainly not the sort of God to whom
would be inclined to pray.”
anyone
— David L. Hull. 1991. “The God of the Galápagos.” Nature 352:485f.
Evolution Diminishes Human Significance
“Those skeptical about the role Darwinism played in the
of advocacy for involuntary euthanasia, infanticide,
abortion should consider several points.
rise
and
First, before the rise of Darwinism, there was no debate on these
issues, as there was almost universal agreement in Europe that
human life is sacred and that all innocent human lives should be
protected. Second, the earliest advocates of involuntary
euthanasia, infanticide, and abortion in Germany were devoted to
a Darwinian worldview. Third, Haeckel, the most famous
Third, Haeckel, the most famous
Darwinist in Germany, promoted these ideas in some of his bestselling books, so these ideas reached a wide audience, especially
among those receptive to Darwinism. Finally, Haeckel and other
Finally, Haeckel and other
Darwinists and eugenicists grounded their views on death and
killing on their naturalistic interpretation of Darwinism.”
— Richard Weikart, historian, California State University, Stanislaus. 2004. From
Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany. New
York: Palgrave Macmillan pp. 160f.
Ernst Haeckel’s Influence on German Society
(according to Michael Richardson’ coauthor James Hanken)
“To some a genius, to others a bigoted zealot and fraudulent
scientist, Haeckel was arguably, next to Darwin, the dominant
intellectual figure of his time. . . . He treated evolutionary
biology almost as a religion and believed that just as one could
apply the concept of natural selection to animals and plants,
one could also determine which groups of humans were
superior. Offering intellectual justification and ‘scientific’
support for racism, anti-Semitism, and eugenics, his ideas
were later a major ideological influence on the National
Socialist German Workers’ Party, better known as the
the
Nazis
Nazis
.”
— James Hanken. 1998 (Dec. 1998/Jan. 1999).
“Beauty Beyond Belief.” Natural History 107(10):56.
“Infidelity — It May Be in Our Genes”
“By studying how the process of natural selection shaped the mind, evolutionary
psychologists are painting a new portrait of human nature, with fresh detail about
the feelings and thoughts that draw us into marriage—or push us out. . . .
How can evolutionary psychologists be so sure? In part, their faith
on the whole data base of evolutionary biology. . . .
rests
The danger is that people will . . . react to the new knowledge by surrendering to
‘natural’ impulses, as if what’s ‘in our genes’ were beyond reach of self-control.
They may even conveniently assume that what is ‘natural’ is good. . . .
George Williams, whose 1966 book Adaptation and Natural Selection helped
dispel the once popular idea that evolution often works for ‘the good of the
group,’ has even taken to calling natural selection ‘evil’ and ‘the enemy.‘
The
moral life, in his view, consists largely of battling human nature. . . .”
— Robert Wright. “Our Cheating Hearts — Devotion and betrayal, marriage and divorce:
evolution shaped human love.” Time, Aug. 15, 1994, pp. 28-36.
how
Review:
What’s wrong with Evolution.
1. Extrapolation in the Extreme.
2. Evidence is Embellished.
3. Explanations are Egregious.
4. Evangelism gets Eviscerated.
5. Extraordinary Evil Encouraged.
What’s wrong with Evolution.
1. Extrapolation in the Extreme.
2. Evidence is Embellished.
3. Explanations are Egregious.
4. Evangelism gets Eviscerated.
5. Extraordinary Evil Encouraged.
What’s wrong with Evolution.
1. Extrapolation in the Extreme.
2. Evidence is Embellished.
3. Explanations are Egregious.
4. Evangelism gets Eviscerated.
5. Extraordinary Evil Encouraged.
What’s wrong with Evolution.
1. Extrapolation in the Extreme.
2. Evidence is Embellished.
3. Explanations are Egregious.
4. Evangelism gets Eviscerated.
5. Extraordinary Evil Encouraged.
What’s wrong with Evolution.
1. Extrapolation in the Extreme.
2. Evidence is Embellished.
3. Explanations are Egregious.
4. Evangelism gets Eviscerated.
5. Extraordinary Evil Encouraged.
What’s wrong with Evolution.
1. Extrapolation in the Extreme.
2. Evidence is Embellished.
3. Explanations are Egregious.
4. Evangelism gets Eviscerated.
5. Extraordinary Evil Encouraged.