EVOLUTION IS A FAITH -

EVOLUTION IS A FAITH - PART 1

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February 24, 1997 (Fundamental Baptist Information Service, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061-0368, fbns@wayoflife.org) - The following is part 1 of two parts of a message which was delivered by Dr. Henry Morris at the 1995 Metropolitan Tabernacle School of Theology, Metropolitan Tabernacle (Elephant & Castle, London SE1 6SD, England). This is reprinted from the Sword & Trowel, 1996 No. 4, copyright 1996 --

One of the key passages of Scripture relating to the issue of origins is 2 Peter 3, in which the apostle wrote -- "This second epistle, beloved, I now write unto you, in both which I stir up your pure minds by way of remembrance..."

These are days in which people like to have their emotions stirred up, but Peter says, "Stir up your pure minds." We must stir up our minds to understand what is going on around us, what the issues are, and to know how to deal with them.

Peter goes on to say: "Knowing this first, that there shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts, and saying, Where is the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation."

PREDICTION OF TODAY

Peter predicts that scoffers will ridicule the great promise of the coming of the Lord. There is no need to be concerned about a future judgment, or about giving account to God. If there is a God, He must be cruel and irrational, or merely a synonym for nature. You need not worry, therefore, about the return of the Lord, because everything is explained by evolution. This philosophy is now taught in schools all over the world, except in a handful of Christian schools. In every country, the rising generation is being indoctrinated with these ideas. Therefore, if you are to reach young people successfully, it is essential to know how to deal with this issue.

Peter goes on to say that people are willingly ignorant of the fact that, "the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished."

He tells us plainly here that the answer to evolutionism is creation and the flood. It was by the word of God that the heavens and the Earth came into existence. "He spake, and it was done." God did not need millions of years for His work of creation. The Bible tells us that such is the evidence for a special creation, that to reject that evidence is willful ignorance.

Evolution is not a viewpoint that people might be lured into on the basis of evidence. There is no evidence to support it. The evidence of Earth's history does not point to millions of years of history, but to a great cataclysmic deluge that left the world in a devastated condition.

No one has ever witnessed evolution taking place. Science is supposed to be what is seen. The word "science" comes from Latin. It means -- to know, observe, and experiment, and then to repeat the experiment to see that it really does work. That is science, but no one has ever seen evolution take place. You can set up all kinds of experiments in the laboratory but you can never see evolution occurring. Never has one kind evolved into a different kind in human history. No one, I emphasise, has ever seen it happen. Evolution is not occurring at present, so far as our knowledge of science goes.

The answer given to this is that it takes millions of years to produce this kind of change. So we must look for evidence to the record of the past, such as the fossils in the sedimentary rocks of the crust of the Earth. Fossils are bones, shells, footprints, any kind of evidence preserved in the rocks, of living things that once lived and died. Billions of fossils have been found, and these are often presented as proof of evolution.

Every kind of creature that is alive today can be found in the fossil record. Also to be found are many extinct animals such as dinosaurs. But extinction is not evolution. The fact that animals have become extinct tells you nothing about how they evolved in the first place.

NO TRANSITIONAL FORMS

The key fact is that out of the billions of fossils, nowhere is there a transitional fossil, showing transitional structure from one kind to another. Of course, there ought to be many of them if evolution has been occurring over billions of years. Sometimes evolutionists cite one or two, but when examined closely, they are not real transitions.

Archaeopteryx is said to be half bird and half reptile. But in reality it is a true bird with feathers and wings. A true transition would be an animal which was half reptile, half bird, having half scales and half feathers (or "sceathers"). Alternatively the creature might have "lings" -- half legs and half wings. Equally it might have a half-developed heart, or half-developed lungs. But nothing like that is found anywhere in the fossils. So with no record of transitional structures anywhere, there is no evidence in the fossil record that evolution ever took place.

AGAINST THE LAWS

The reason why there is no evidence is because it is impossible. The basic laws of science say it is impossible. There are two basic laws that govern every field of science - the laws of thermodynamics. The first law is the law of energy conservation. The second law is the law of the increase of entropy. It is important to be familiar with these.

The first law says that nothing is now being created or annihilated. Everything is being conserved. (God, Who created it all, is now conserving it all. We read in the first chapter of Colossians that the Lord Jesus Christ created all things, and is now upholding all things with the word of His power. He is no longer creating things in the ordinary course of nature.)

The second law says that everything tends to decay. As time passes, order, organisation and complexity tend to decrease. Things grow old, wear out, and finally die. Creatures may become extinct. Everything goes downhill, not uphill as evolution would require. Therefore, these basic laws say that evolution is impossible.

Creationists have been putting this argument forward for many years, and it seems that evolutionists are now beginning to feel the impact. They have changed their arguments slightly. They say the reason that you do not see transitions from one kind of creature to another is because the change takes too long to observe. In the same breath they say the reason you do not see evidence of such change in the fossil record, is because evolution took place too quickly. Evolution, they say, takes place in spurts. They call this the theory of punctuated equilibrium.

The idea is that everything remains in a period of "stasis" for a hundred thousand, maybe up to a million or ten million generations. Every species stays exactly the same through all the so-called geological ages, in a condition of stasis, until suddenly there is a rapid change. This change is the punctuation in the equilibrium. This theory is fairly new.

Evolutionists have now come to the conclusion that these sudden punctuations are brought about by some kind of world-wide cataclysm which causes extinctions. They therefore say that the essence of evolution is stasis, extinction and punctuation. This is interesting to me, because, as any Latin scholar will remember, "stasis" means standing still or stationary. Dr. Stephen Jay Gould, who is the leading evolutionist in America, says that stasis is the key to evolution. The process should be understood by the phenomenon of stasis. I am baffled by the idea of establishing evolution by studying phenomena that do not change in a hundred thousand generations! But this is what they must do, because they have no evidence of change. The changes or "punctuations" have to be assumed. There is no scientific evidence for them.

Evolutionists, as we have noted, base their ideas on records of extinction shown in the fossils. Many different animals have become extinct. They now list about fifteen world-wide, massive extinctions. The theory is that these opened up many new ecological niches in which new forms could evolve very rapidly.

Dr. Niles Eldredge, of the American Museum of Natural History, is Dr Gould's co-author of a work presenting punctuated equilibrium theory. He states that, "Extinction is the motor of evolution." Extinction makes it work. It is certainly a mystery to me how evolution over the ages, from amoeba to man, can be explained by everything standing still and then becoming extinct. It does not explain evolution, nor provide any evidence.

HOW PROBABLE IS IT?

This is why the apostle Peter describes last-days scoffers as being willingly ignorant. They ought to know better. The evidence is completely against them.

This issue can be approached from the standpoint of the laws of probability. Somehow life had to begin. If it began by evolution, it had to start with a protein molecule which could reproduce itself. Nobody has ever seen such a thing occur. SCHOLARS IN THE FIELD OF INFORMATION SCIENCE HAVE CALCULATED THAT THE SIMPLEST IMAGINABLE REPLICATING PROTEIN MOLECULE WOULD HAVE TO HAVE MORE INFORMATION IMPARTED TO IT THAN IS FOUND IN THE BOOKS OF ALL THE LIBRARIES OF ALL THE WORLD.

The evolutionist's answer to this problem is that anything can happen if you have enough time. No it cannot! The probability of a simple replicating protein molecule coming into existence by chance, even in trillions of years, is zero. (In fact, the probability is one out of a number greater than the number of events that could ever happen in space, in time, in all the universe, allowing trillions of years for the history of time.) So there is no evidence of evolution whatsoever.

The second law of thermodynamics is the law stating that everything tends to go downhill. Evolutionists obviously find that difficult to deal with also.

Their first explanation was that thermodynamics applies only to closed systems, not to open systems. However, this is not so. The law applies to open systems just as much as closed systems, indeed, more so, because if you have an influx of heat energy into an open system (like the sun's energy into the Earth), the entropy (or disorder) of that system will increase more rapidly than if it were a closed system. It will cause disorder, not order.

Even given a thousand years, the sun's energy will never organise bricks into a building. Rather, the bricks will disintegrate into dust, by the second law of thermodynamics.

Evolutionists therefore have to explain how order can evolve out of these chaotic systems; these "extinction" systems, where everything is going downhill, collapsing and becoming disorganised. To do this they have now developed a theory of chaos (along with a mathematical system for chaos) to explain how order can arise out of chaos, like the phoenix rising out of the ashes. They can do this mathematically, but not, however, in a laboratory. It never works.

The theory has developed primarily in response to the work of Ilya Prigogine, who received a Nobel Prize for developing a mathematical system which would show how "perturbations" (fluctuations far from equilibrium) would produce what he called "dissipative structures."

A GREAT "SOMEHOW"

The idea is that you have a large flow of energy into a system causing a great deal of energy dissipation -- friction, heat, and chaos -- according to the second law of thermodynamics. Within that milieu a structure will somehow develop.

An example is heat flowing in a coffee cup, where a little vortex is generated as the heat flows. That vortex is a structure. Another example is the influx of the energy of the sun to the Earth's atmosphere causing great vortices to develop, such as cyclones, tornadoes or hurricanes. These are orderly structures. They dissipate a large amount of energy, but in that context you have a structure. Prigogine thinks this is the potential way of explaining how order can arise out of chaos. But it is no such thing. It only explains how more chaos can develop.

Actually, the chaos theory traces a chaotic system back to an orderly system, and this is simply the second law of thermodynamics again. This is the point evolutionists have now reached. They theorise that you can have chaotic systems developing order and complexity. They cannot explain how, but merely think that this is so.

[Part 1 of 2 of an address entitled "The Current State of the Evolutionary Faith," given by Dr. Henry Morris at the 1995 Metropolitan Tabernacle School of Theology, Metropolitan Tabernacle, London, England.]

Part 2 of this article is at http://www.wayoflife.org/fbns/evolufaith2.htm