All right, let’s bow for prayer. Our Father, we’re so grateful that you have made us yours. We’re grateful that you’ve chosen us, that you’ve redeemed us in your Son. We’re grateful for the privilege of walking in fellowship with you, knowing that our sins are forgiven, that justice has been satisfied in the person of our Savior. We thank you now also for this portion of your word that we’ve been looking at and now a very contemporary issue that comes up so much. We pray that you’ll give us an understanding of the issues involved and help us by it to see, again, the importance of this doctrine of creation and the greatness of our God that we see in it. We pray in Jesus’ name, amen.
All right, I said since the beginning I didn’t want to spend a lot of time on creation and evolution. I’ve spent some good bit of time on creation. I don’t mind doing that at all, because we have it in the scriptures there themselves. Dealing with evolution has not become my favorite topic, but it is something we have to do a bit. And given its prominence in the culture—and people think of this often, you hear of it in commercials and everything—we do have to spend some time on it. So I’m going to have one lesson now this morning on evolution itself. Next week we’ll look at the subject of theistic evolution. And the question there will be, “Okay, you can be a theist and an evolutionist, but our question specifically will be, can you be a Christian and an evolutionist?” Does the Bible allow it? You can have a vague idea of God and be an evolutionist, but can you say that you believe the scriptures and be an evolutionist? Are those two compatible? That’s what we’ll look at next week.
Today, though, just a broad look at the subject of evolution. And then in two weeks—I think I’ve told you before that going back a number of years, I was teaching a college and career age class. They wanted to study creation and evolution. Many of them were science majors, and that’s not my field. I had to dive into it. And I think I read 100 books on the subject and tried to strengthen my understanding of it. It was an area then of strong interest on my part. Since then, the field, the science field in particular, in dealing with this has grown and has deepened so much. And you’ll even see remarks today about creationist scientists, remarks about them like, “This is not your grandfather’s scientist.” These guys have plumbed so deeply and done such great work that I just have not had the interest to dive into it that deeply myself. I try to keep up with it, but to become the authority on it is not my thing anymore. So in two weeks, what we’ll do is begin some videos. We’ll do it for two Sundays where these guys will be talking to us and they’ll give you a feel for the science field and how it relates to the teaching of evolution.
Today I just want to give a broad introduction to that, the subject of creation and evolution. We begin with Genesis 1:1: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” That the world came about instantaneously and with all of its complexities and all of its intricacies by naturalistic processes—that is denied in the first breath of Scripture. What we have is an affirmation that all of it came about by the will and the Word of God. He spoke and it came into being. And so the anti-supernaturalism, the naturalism that is assumed in virtually all of science today, is denied outright in the first statement of Scripture. Or to put it another way, the supernaturalism that modern science dismisses is assumed in the first breath of Scripture. The Bible tells us very plainly, and as we saw a couple of weeks ago, it repeats it over and over and affirms it over and over again throughout the scriptures, that all that is came about specifically by the will and the spoken word of a sovereign creator. So the Bible, from the very beginning, puts us at odds with Darwinianism and its idea of random, unguided, natural selection, and we have it as the purposeful creation of God, making a world to accomplish his own purposes in it.
Keep in mind, we go through this distinction we made last week, and that is there’s an important difference between science and general revelation. The two are not the same. There’s an important distinction that must be made between science and scientists. Scientists interpret the material, the data that they find. We’ll have to look at some of that today. So keep in mind those distinctions that we’ve seen. Let’s start with a definition of evolution. Keep in mind evolution is not just change. Evolution is upward change, progressive change. That’s essential to the very definition of what evolution is. So evolution involves change, yes, but it’s an upward, progressive change from disorder to order, from non-life to life, from simple life to complex life, from invertebrates to vertebrates, from sea creatures to land mammals, from one—to use the language of Genesis—one kind of creature to another kind of living creature, from reptiles to mammals, finally to man. And all of that—and this is very important to evolution, it’s essential to evolution—all of that by purely naturalistic processes. So evolution is a progressive upward change in all of these ways from one category to another, and that through naturalistic, unguided, purposeless procedures and changes.
As I’ve mentioned, the field of study in recent decades has just been massive in this regard where you have Christians of all flavors and many scientists as well who don’t really claim to be Christian per se. They’ll claim to be theists, of course, but they will recognize that the scientific data is pointing them to a creator. We’ll be seeing some of that in a couple of weeks. Let me just today deal with some broad categories of some problems that we have with evolution. Next week, we’ll deal with biblical incompatibilities with it. But today, just some broader problems with evolution. Keep in mind the definition that I’ve given. It’s this progressive upward change in all of these areas through the various categories of creation and nature, and all of that purposeless and unguided through naturalistic processes.
First Problem With Evolution Is Its Uncertainty
Its uncertainty scientifically. Now, to say that is going to require a little defense because in virtually every science classroom that you find today in the secular world, it is assumed to be proven fact that evolution occurred. But what I’m going to do here is give you a string of quotes. I hope it’s not too boring for you, but I want you to see that the evolutionary scientists themselves acknowledge that this is a far from proven theory.
This is Professor Watson from the University College in London: “Evolution is accepted by zoologists not because it has been observed to occur or can be proved by logically coherent evidence, but because the only alternative is creation, which is clearly incredible.” So I believe in evolution, not because it is provable. Evolution is unproven and unprovable. I believe it because the only alternative is creation and that’s incredible and I can’t believe that. That’s quite an admission.
These are all from evolutionary textbooks. David Raup from the University of Chicago, paleontologist: “The record of evolution is still surprisingly jerky. And ironically, we have even fewer examples of evolutionary transition than we had in Darwin’s time. By this, I mean that some of the classic cases of Darwinian change in the fossil record, such as the evolution of the horse in North America, have had to be discarded or modified as a result of more detailed information. What appeared to be a nice sample of progression when relatively few data were available now appears to be much more complex and much less gradualistic.” So we don’t have the evidence we used to have. That’s what he’s saying.
This is L.T. Moore, another professor: “The more one studies paleontology”—okay, this is fossil record, particularly with reference to the skeletal findings that they find—”the more certain he becomes that evolution is based on faith. The only alternative is special creation, which may be true, but it is unreasonable.” Now we’ll talk a little bit later about how presuppositions influence the interpretation of scientific data. But here you have an admission of that from their side.
Stephen Jay Gould, who is a well-known Harvard scientist, probably the most outstanding evolutionary scientist in the United States, wrote: “The general preference that so many of us hold for gradualism”—that’s evolution—”is a metaphysical”—that is a philosophical—”stance. So the general preference that we have for gradualism is a metaphysical stance embedded in a history of Western culture. It’s not a high order empirical observation induced from the objective study of nature.” So that’s just a highfalutin way of saying, “We don’t have the evidence, but we have presuppositions that demand it.” That is, atheistic presuppositions. We can’t abide an idea of a creator, and so we have to believe this, and we’re looking for evidence.
I forgot to write down the source for this one. Another one: “Evolution happened, but it happened in such a way”—you’ve probably heard this; I’ve heard this in this classroom myself—”Evolution happened, but it happened in such a way that it leaves no evidence.” Evidence happened, but it happened in such a way that it leaves no evidence. So that lack of evidence is part of its proof. Now, you know, if this were any other field, it’d be laughed out of the classroom. Anyone who tells you that evolution has been proven fact is either lying to you or they’re just misinformed. Here you have it from the horse’s mouth themselves. Evolution has countless unanswered questions. It has many dissenters even within the scientific field itself. They have many admissions like these that you’ve seen. It’s just far from a proven idea. They will bully you into thinking that it is and you have to acknowledge that it is. You must accept it or you’re a cultist or you’re a Cro-Magnon man or something yourself. They don’t have the proof.
Michael Ruse, he’s a British-born Canadian philosopher of science. He specializes in the philosophy of biology, specializes in the relationship between science and religion and the creation-evolution debate. He used to teach, or I think he’s currently at Florida State University. He writes: “Evolution is promoted by its practitioners as more than mere science. Evolution is promulgated as an ideology, a secular religion, a full-fledged alternative to Christianity with meaning and morality. I am an ardent evolutionist and an ex-Christian, but I must admit that in this one complaint, the literalists”—that’s us—”are absolutely right. Evolution is a religion. This was true of evolution at the beginning. It is true of evolution still today. Evolution came into being as a kind of secular ideology and explicit substitute for Christianity.”
This is Richard Lewontin, another Harvard professor. He’s a geneticist: “Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense”—get that—”Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism.” We’ll talk more about that in a second. “It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation for the phenomenal world, but on the contrary, that we are forced by a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, the materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a divine foot in the door.”
Well, that’s a highfalutin way of saying, “We don’t have the evidence. We know that we don’t have it. Some of the logic of it is absurd, but we must have it because we can’t abide an idea of a creator.” And that despite the fact that the idea of a creator answers all the questions and explains everything.
Evolution’s Philosophical Pre-commitments
All right, so the first problem with evolution is its uncertainty in terms of the evidence. It’s never been proven. It’s never been more than an idea. Next problem, and we’ve already bumped into this with some of these quotes: Evolution’s philosophical pre-commitments. And we have two closely related ideas here that are interrelated. Number one, naturalism—we’ve already talked about that—and the other is scientism. Naturalism and scientism.
Naturalism is the idea that all of reality is explained in terms of natural properties and natural causes. So the famous quote here by Carl Sagan is that “the cosmos is all that is, it is all that ever was, it is all that ever will be.” Scientism—so everything that is is natural, material. And scientism, closely related to that, is the idea that we can know only that which has been demonstrated scientifically. And so the quote, the big one that you hear often: “If you can’t prove it in a laboratory, it isn’t so.” That’s philosophical materialism.
So here’s Francis Crick, another evolutionist: “You, your joys, your sorrows, your memories, your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, your ability to make decisions, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll might have phrased it,” he says, “you’re nothing but a pack of neurons.” All right, so there’s their pre-commitments: naturalism and scientism.
The brief response is scientism—the whole idea, you might remember three years ago when we looked at this in our studies on contemporary culture. Scientism, that whole idea of scientism and the very definition that they’ve given—”If you can’t prove it in a laboratory, it ain’t so”—these are self-defeating statements. You remember what that is? A self-defeating statement. My favorite example of it was from my daughter. When she was little, she couldn’t say elephant. Little kids have trouble with big words. She would say “entel, entel.” And then as she got a little bit older, we decided, no, she can say elephant now. And so Kim said to her one time, “It’s not an entel, it’s an elephant.” And she responded by saying, “My can’t say elephant.” Self-defeating. Self-defeating statement. “My can’t say elephant, my say ento.”
A self-defeating statement is like that. And we have here scientism saying, “If you can’t prove it in a laboratory, it ain’t so.” Problem with that is you can’t prove that claim in a laboratory. Can you prove in a laboratory that if you can’t prove it in a laboratory, it ain’t so? You can’t. It’s a self-defeating statement. You might remember last time, three years ago, when we looked at this a little bit more: Imagine a professor teaching you this, objecting to your cheating on his exam. Why would that be wrong? Can you prove it in a laboratory that that’s wrong? If you were to come up and punch him in the nose, can you prove in a laboratory that that’s wrong? And so on.
Darwin himself, and I’ve mentioned this before, had questions along exactly these lines. He said—this is Darwin’s quote—”With me the horrid doubt always arises whether the conviction of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of lower animals, are of any value at all or trustworthy.” In other words, “After all of this explaining that I’ve done, that everything in us is explained in so much terms of so much matter, firing of neurons and all of that, well then can I trust my mind? I’ve made decisions. Are they right? Are they legitimate? Are they mine?” And that bothered Darwin himself. In other words, then, their pre-commitments are something they can’t live with themselves.
Now we’ll take that a little bit step further. And this is what I mentioned, alluded to a little bit earlier: This presupposed naturalism—you assume it—becomes then the interpreting grid for evaluating the evidence that comes up. So you presuppose naturalism and then you look at the data accordingly. So again, here’s an evolutionary scientist, Scott Todd, he’s professor of biology at Kansas State: “Even if all the data point to intelligent design, such a hypothesis is excluded from science because it is not naturalism.” So the data comes, it points to something above nature. Nope, can’t have that because we’ve ruled out supernaturalism. So we have to evaluate it within the presupposition of naturalistic thinking.
Now this becomes important in the discussion, for example—I’ll just give one here—of junk DNA. Were any of you taught that about junk DNA in school? I was. Junk DNA is a non-coding DNA. There’s no apparent purpose to this so-called junk DNA. There’s no function to it that we know of. It’s useless. And so you look at this junk DNA that you have in your body, and on Darwinian assumptions, assuming naturalism, junk DNA—and this is what I was taught in school—this is the leftovers from the evolutionary process. Our evolutionary history for all of those many thousands of years has left stuff behind that we don’t need anymore. And that junk DNA is evidence of it. But notice again that all of that conclusion is based on the assumption that they began with, and that’s naturalism. Does the data, so-called junk DNA, does the data really tell you that? Or is your presupposition interpreting the data that way?
So let’s look at the junk DNA from a theistic or a biblical standpoint. How do we explain on our grounds, how would we explain the junk DNA? Well, pretty easy. We’ve got a common design, a common designer with a few differences. See, the problem becomes then with this junk DNA is how do you explain the differences between men and chimps, for example. So in Darwinian assumptions, you look at the junk DNA and say, “These are leftovers from an evolutionary process.” Within a theistic framework, it is either evidence of human ignorance—I don’t know what that other DNA is for; it’s just an area of ignorance. God has a purpose for all he’s created, and it’s not really junk DNA. We can say that. And in fact, further scientific research has determined that at least 80% of what was previously considered junk DNA does have a function after all. And that’s just what a theistic model would predict. But you see the data itself doesn’t tell you that. Your presuppositions tell you that.
Or we could take another tack. How do we explain the differences? Why is there this junk DNA they call leftovers? We could account for it by Genesis 3: the fall, the curse on humanity, the damage that has been done to humanity through judgment. That accounts for it all. But you see, the data itself doesn’t tell you that. Your presuppositions before you get to the data interpret that. So when they come up with this junk DNA, “See, that’s evidence for evolution,” you’ve got to be ready to say, “No, the data doesn’t tell you that. Your presupposition told you that. The data itself didn’t.” So the data is not self-interpreting.
Now here’s where I’ll take something else from—I mentioned Vern Poythress last week. By the way, I mentioned his book, Redeeming Science. I’ll mention another one here called, Did Adam Exist? He’s done a lot of work in this area. On our website, Books at a Glance, we have some summaries of these things, and you’re welcome to look at them. Our book summaries are available only to the members of Books at a Glance, paying members. If you’re a member of RBC and you think you would use Books at a Glance, let me know. I’ll give you a free membership. You’re fine with that. That’s only if you’re a member of RBC. If you’re not a member, you don’t get it. Because Jimmy is the business manager of the thing, and he’d get mad at me already for what I’ve given away. Yes, Pastor Greg. Greg is a paying member. No. Too late. But I’ll be glad to give you a membership for that if you are a member. But don’t share it outside or you’ll have to answer to Jimmy for that.
But anyway, Vern’s book, Did Adam Exist?, in one part of it he takes up the question of the complexity of the human DNA as compared to the DNA of a chimpanzee. And the claim is that 99% of the human DNA is the same as the chimpanzee. So how do we interpret that data? What does that little piece of information indicate? Keep in mind, the data itself is not self-interpreted. It depends on your presuppositions when you come to the data. So if we assume evolution—purposeless progressive change upward—if we assume that and we come to this point and say, “Okay, the 99% of the human DNA is exactly like the chimpanzee,” we are going to conclude that this is evidence for evolution. It would be expected on an evolutionary model that our DNA would be similar. But then the question comes up, how do you account for the differences?
But anyway, the evolutionary model predicts that this is evidence for evolution. The DNA is the same. But now let’s take the other position. Let’s say we assume that God is the creator. And we have 99% the same DNA as a chimp. How do we account for it? We account for it by saying there’s a common fundamental design. There’s a common designer and a common design. And on that model, we easily account for all of the similarities, and we account for all of the differences. The commonalities are no problem at all. We have a common design. We have a common designer. In fact, we have a statement of that in Genesis chapter 2 and verse 7: God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living creature. He’d made living creatures in Genesis 1. Now he makes another living creature. You’d expect the same. You’d expect much of the same.
But now how do you account for the differences between the human and the chimp? And again, we have the points to the role of presuppositions. Even if the DNA similarity were 99% across the board, which it is not, the differences are not left to be explained simply by so much chemistry, unless you have that interpretive grid already in place. On an evolutionary model, we are all so much the same chemistry because we have evolved one from the other. But on a biblical model, humanity’s distinctiveness lies in the fact that we are created in the image of God. There’s a difference. We’re made a living creature; there’s going to be similarity. We’re made in the image of God; there’s going to be a difference. But again, my point is, I haven’t proved creation with that. But I have given explanation for it, which they have not. And again, the data is not self-interpreting. It rests on the presuppositions that are already in place. They presuppose the naturalism and then impose that on the data. And that’s one of the major, major weaknesses, I think, of evolution. It’s a philosophical problem.
A couple of years, a few years ago now, a bunch of scholars got together to produce a book on theistic evolution. I have a chapter in that book dealing with Warfield’s view of evolution, because that’s such an important figure in the history of the discussion. But it deals with it on a scientific level, it deals with it on a level of the philosophy of science, and it deals with it on a biblical level—three different ways evaluating theistic evolution. That book won first place in its field that year when it came out. I’m really glad for that. I’ll talk more about it next week. But you can see a lot of this in there if you’re interested to pursue the study of creation and evolution, that’s the book now to deal with it. All right, so problem of its uncertainty, a problem of its philosophical presuppositions, and then now a problem of origins.
Problem Of Origins
This, I think, is its most important or at least most obvious limitation. Evolution, by the very definition of it, by its very nature, cannot address the question of origins. Evolution, by very definition, means change. It presumes the existence of material. So how do you explain the origins of that material? Evolution cannot touch that question. The very nature of evolution is that it deals with existing material. Our question here is where did that material come from?
Now the Big Bang theory is the current dominant scientific model for origins, 13 or 14 billion years ago. And so we have a right to ask, “What is it that banged? What is it that exploded in the Big Bang? What is it that exploded to give us all that we have?” No one today affirms the eternity of matter. Older scientists would do that for some time. We don’t affirm that today. No one does that today since the Hubble telescope confirmed that the universe is expanding. It’s expanding. It must have had a beginning back there somewhere, and something exploded, so that’s the basis for all of this. Nobody is affirming the eternity of matter anymore, so we have to ask, where did this stuff come from, this stuff that exploded? And if you say there was nothing, and then there was this explosion, and this nothing came into something, well, that’s just nonsense. It’s irrational. We are left to explain the existence of God. We’re left to explain the reality of biblical miracles and things like that. But these things, although they might have an element of mystery and they may be beyond us, they’re not irrational. What we have here is just irrational. Nothing came into something and exploded. It just won’t happen. This is not real life.
Specific questions of origins:
- Matter. Where did matter come from? How did this original stuff that supposedly exploded, this condensed material that exploded and gave us this big bang, where did it come from? How do you get from nothing to something?
- The laws and the regularities of nature. I mentioned those last week. These laws are universal. They’re rational. They point to some intelligence behind them, creating them. We can reduce them to mathematical equations. Where do they come from?
- Life. Where did life come from? We have to assume on an evolutionary model some kind of spontaneous generation that at some point non-life gave rise to life. Spontaneous generation. We don’t witness that in the real world, but we have to assume it in an evolutionary model. The origin of life is a big problem. The origin of matter, the origin of the laws and regularities of nature, the origin of life.
- DNA programming. Meaningful organization of information. The longest word ever is written in your own DNA. Who wrote that word? Scientists are able to spell it out. Who wrote it? Where’d it come from? Evolutionary scientists cannot come up with an answer to that.
- Self-awareness. Where did self, the whole idea of self, come about from unnaturalistic assumptions? How about the origin of reason? The origin of ethics and morals, the origin of conscience, the origin of the mind. Remember, Darwin had to struggle with that himself. How do you explain the origin of those things? You can talk about their developing, but where do they come from? How do you explain their origins?
And so I like to say it this way. I don’t know if this—I don’t think this is original with me—but we have three options for origins. Keep in mind, no one affirms the eternity of matter, so that’s out. So we have three options for origins: Everything came from nothing (absolutely nothing); everything came from an impersonal something; or, third, everything came from a personal something (that is, it came from someone).
Now, number one, everything came from nothing or absolutely nothing. That’s just impossible to explain. You can’t account for it. It’s really nonsense that something came out of nothing. We can easily rule that out.
The second one, everything came from an impersonal something. That’s the view of modern scientism. But it can’t explain ultimate origins that we’ve already just talked about. It has to assume some kind of eternity of matter or the idea that something arose out of nothing. Both are irrational. It can’t explain the form or the structure of creation. How does it get its order? How do we get intelligent, seemingly intelligent design? It looks like it. How do we get that out of randomness? It can’t explain that. It can’t explain the emergence of consciousness. It can’t explain the emergence of personality, of will, reason, the whole idea of self. Who am I? Why am I here? Why do I do what I do? What about my ambitions? What about ethics, morals? It can’t explain the origin of any of that.
And so our third option—everything came from a personal something, came from a someone—is all we’re left with, and that’s what the Bible affirms in the first verse. In the beginning, the eternal, self-existing, sovereign God spoke, and the world came into being. And that explains for the origin of matter. It explains the origin of design in creation. It explains the origin of consciousness, and self, and self-awareness, and morals. It accounts for all of it.
So that’s the problem of origins. Quickly here, we just have a few minutes left: the problem of scientific evidence.
Problem Of Scientific Evidence
We’ll see more of this in the videos. Here I’m just sketching out the categories. Nearly every claim that is made by evolutionary scientists is disputed by another evolutionary scientist. Many of the evidences so-called of evolution have been now disproved by other evolutionary scientists. You might remember, some of you, if you were taught evolution in school like I was, Ernst Haeckel’s famous theory of embryonic recapitulation. Remember that? As the embryo in the womb develops, it shows the various stages of our evolutionary development. And so along the way, you can see gills. And a little longer along the way, you see a tail. And see, there’s evidence of our evolutionary development. The history of our human development is shown and recapitulated in the development of the embryo in the womb. Well, the problem with that is, although it was in textbooks when I was a kid, it remained in textbooks until the 1990s. Now they’ve finally had to give it up because, “Oh, that’s not gills,” and, “Oh, that’s not a tail.” And it does seem that this is not that. They’ve had to give it up.
Evolution—another scientific problem. Evolution requires but cannot account for spontaneous generation, the origin of life. We’ll see this in the videos. There’s no such thing as the evolutionary tree of life. Have you seen that? I’m sure all of you have seen that, right? The evolutionary tree of life—you’ve got the trunk and the roots down at the ground, and then it comes up with the trunk, and then you’ve got the branches, and it’s going out in all of these different ways. And now you have all these varieties of life out here, and it all traces back to the original cell and all of that. Evolutionary tree of life. The problem with that—and we’ll see this in the video—there is the only place, the only place in the world where the evolutionary tree of life exists is in the textbooks. The only place. All we have to look at is we can picture this evolutionary tree of life with all of its branches working out. All we have is if you take the tree and cut it off right here and we have it up from here up. That’s all we have to look at. And that’s just what you would predict from Genesis. God created after their kinds.
That’s a problem for evolution. They can’t account for—they have this evolutionary tree of life that they presuppose, but they can’t demonstrate it in the fossil record. There are no transitional forms. The fossil record is just no help whatever for evolution. The fossil record demonstrates every time that creation was after its kind. We have its different kinds. Transitional forms don’t exist.
Progressive upward change—that whole idea, the very definition of evolution, progressive upward change—would seem to conflict with the second law of thermodynamics that everything tends to disorder and decay. It’s kind of like my desk in my study. It tends to disorder and decay. It’s a demonstration of the second law of thermodynamics. And this is—how do we get a world in which this proven law of thermodynamics, everything tends to disorder, how do we explain that everything has progressively worked into order and design?
Same problem with regard to the origins of new genetic information. Evolution requires massive structural changes in the organism. Invertebrates become vertebrates. Creatures without wings get their wings. Creatures without eyes get their eyes. Each of these—the wings, the eyes, the skeletons—it requires massive amounts of new genetic information. How did it come about? And how would it evolve if it only is there for the advantage? What is the advantage of a half-evolved eye? Or a half-evolved wing? Where do these assembly instructions come from? How do you account for it on a presupposition of naturalism? There have been some recent advances in molecular biology that we’ll see in the videos. They’re just fascinating. Random mutations, they will demonstrate, just don’t have—random mutations do not have that creative ability to add a skeleton, to add a wing, to add an eye, to add a heart, or a lung, and so on.
According to evolution, the information is preserved only if it’s favorable to its environment. That’s how this adaption and change came. But how do you account for a gradual formation of organs? So let’s say—this was a question that Charles Hodge back at Old Princeton, back in the 1800s, advanced. How do you account for a half-developed eye? Or what use was a proto-eye, or a proto-lung, or a proto-heart? How do you account for that in the survival of the fittest? It was of no use until it was fully developed. So what was the use of it and what kept it involved in this upward change? So you have amoebas. They reproduce by cell division. But eventually, that led to some creatures reproducing by copulation. How did that come about? How do you explain this process developing gradually over time? Of what use was a partially developed genital? How’d that come about? And if you want to explain it in terms of adapted change, we’ve had 4,000 years of circumcision. It hasn’t changed the Jewish anatomy at all. Sorry.
Well, these are some of the scientific problems with it, the various categories that we’ve looked at. You’ll see more of it and much better in a couple of weeks when we look at these videos. But I wanted to sketch out the broad categories of it. Laws of probability are another interesting category with it, stretching the laws of probability beyond their limits. But we can’t get into that now.
Bottom line: Genesis chapter 1, verse 1, explains everything. Everything. It accounts for everything. It accounts for scientific endeavor. It accounts for the origin of life. It accounts for the origin of matter. It accounts for the origin of consciousness and self-awareness and personality. Evolution creates logical problems. It creates, it labors against the evidence. And I’m convinced it’s driven, as some of these quotes that I’ve given you acknowledge, it’s driven by not just a naturalistic presupposition, but behind that, a bias against God. And I think it’s a perfect example of Romans chapter 1, the human heart suppressing the truth. We have it more today, not just in terms of creation, but we have it in terms of denying a male is a male and a female is a female, and it goes on and on. The demonstration of the rebellion of the human heart. I think evolution is a classic example of it.
All right, I only have time for a quick question. If there’s a quick one, I can take it. Otherwise, we have to dismiss. Clark?