It was voted by the Associated Press to be the top story of 1999: the Kansas Board of Education’s
decision to de-emphasize some aspects of the teaching of evolution in Kansas’ schools set off a firestorm of controversy.
>>>”Events began in 1995, when the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) issued national standards calling for "dramatic changes" in the way public schools teach science. The Kansas Commissioner of Education and the Board of Education appointed a committee to bring state
guidelines into conformity with the standards, as many other states had already done. The new guidelines greatly increased classroom coverage of evolution, even elevating it from a theory to a “Unifying Concept" of science (along with such things as “measurement" and "evidence").
“That was too much for some members of the state board of education. They were willing to increase the teaching of microevolution -testable, observable variations caused by adaptation, natural selection, and genetic drift. But macroevolution - the "particles-to-people" variety - they regarded as speculative. The board voted to remove macroevolution from state tests, giving local school districts the freedom to set their own standards for teaching the subject.
“In short, the board did not forbid the teaching of anything. On the contrary, it actually increased
coverage of topics related to evolution, though it did not go as far as the scientific establishment wished. For that minor act of intellectual independence, board members were castigated mercilessly. A Washington Post article called them "pinheads," certain to be "eliminated through natural selection." In the London Evening Standard, A. N. Wilson fumed about the "stupidity and insularity" of America’s heartland. Science published a letter proposing that universities refuse to accept credits from Kansas high school biology courses.” (Nancy Pearcey, “We’re Not in Kansas
Anymore,” Christianity Today, May 20, 2000)
Evolution has been a deeply controversial subject ever since the 1859 publishing of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species. It remains a deeply controversial issue over 140 years later, still provoking strong reactions from all sides.
As you listen to reports in the media about the evolution controversy, it’s not too difficult to see
the way the two sides are usually characterized. Scientists supporting evolution are scholarly,
Christians opposing evolution are backwoods Neanderthals. Scientists supporting evolution are
being fair and intellectual, Christians opposing evolution are so stupid that they refuse to listen
to reason or consider the evidence.
Now, I don’t get aggravated very often, but it irks be to treated as a complete idiot simply because I refuse to believe in evolution. Anyone watching the reports in the media or reading the articles in the paper and going exclusively on what they read there would be inclined to think,
“You’d have to be stupid to believe what the Bible says.”
“Any thinking person would obviously believe the evidence of evolution.”
“If only those Christians would use their brains occasionally.”
Now, like I said, I don’t take offense very often, but I don’t appreciate being treated like an idiot.
Especially considering that, despite what you might think from watching media reports on the evolution controversy, the theory of evolution is a theory plagued with major holes in the evidence and believing what the Bible says about our being created by God is not an act of stupidity or even an act of faith, it is merely the result of looking at the evidence and coming to a logical conclusion.
What I want to do this morning is to attempt to prove just that: that refusing to believe in evolution doesn’t make you a Neanderthal, an idiot, or a person who refuses to listen to reason. That believing that we were created doesn’t make you stupid, but actually makes a lot of sense.
When I speak of evolution, I am talking about the scientific theory that one time of creature can
become another type of creature: that a fish can (given enough time and the right conditions) become a lizard, that a reptile can (given enough time and the right conditions) become a bird, that a monkey can (given enough time and the right conditions) become a human being.
First, this morning, I want you to consider the holes in the evidence.
From what you hear many evolution proponents saying or from what you hear in media reports, you would never know that there is even one little piece of evidence that refutes evolution. I am here to report to you this morning that not only is there a little evidence that calls evolution into question, but that there are major holes in the evidence. I only have time to discuss three of them this morning, but let’s consider each of them briefly.
1. There is no proof of a consistent direction.
Evolution demands change in a particular direction. Like I mentioned a second ago, the fish has to be developing in the direction of a walking reptile. The fact that the characteristics of some fish may change (for instance, during a drought, types of fish that require less oxygen may more readily survive) means nothing unless those changes add up to a particular direction. Remember, the entire theory of evolution is that we have moved from simple organisms toward more
complex organisms, from amoeba toward humans. That is, there has been a consistent direction to the changes from less complex to more complex.
>>>”Take an example that impressed Darwin: the variation in beak size among finches on the Galapagos Islands. A recent study found that during a drought, the larger birds survived better and thus the average beak size increased slightly. Evolution in action? Not exactly. When the rains came back, beak sizes returned to normal. All that researchers discovered was a cyclical variation that allows finches to survive under changing conditions. They found no evidence of
novel structures arising. Yet in a serious distortion of the evidence, a 1998 NAS booklet (Teaching About Evolution and the Nature of Science) describes the increase in beak size without mentioning the return to normal size.
“It then encourages teachers to speculate what would happen in 200 years if the increase continued indefinitely-whether "a new species of finch might arise." As Johnson comments in The Wall Street Journal (August 16, 1999), "When our leading scientists have to resort to the sort of distortion that would land a stock promoter in jail, you know they are in trouble." (Pearcey, “We’re Not in Kansas Anymore”)
The scientific evidence reveals no evidence of changes in a consistent direction. We all agree that things are always changing, but for evolution to be true, those changes have to add up to a consistent direction and there is no evidence of that being the case.
2. There is no explanation for complexities.
Evolution, with its gradual, incremental changes over vast periods of time, has no explanation for how complex systems could have come about.
Take, for example, your eye. If we are to believe evolution, it all started with single-celled organisms, which, of course, have no eyes. So, somewhere along the way, the eye must have evolved. But the problem is that an eye isn’t any good unless you have all of an eye.
To have 5% of an eye or even 50% of an eye does you no good, you can’t see unless you have 100% of the working parts of an eye, can you? With evolution’s gradual changes, the question is, “What good is 5% of an eye?” And the answer is, “It’s no good at all.” Since evolution puts forward the survival of the fittest and the idea that only that which is effective and useful survive, 5% of an eye would have gotten wiped out because it was useless.
Listen to what Charles Darwin, the father of evolution, wrote in The Origin of Species:
“To suppose that the eye, with so many parts all working together, could have been formed by
natural selection seems - I freely confess - absurd.”
At least Darwin got that much right.
3. And this is the most important and impressive of the three: The fossil record simply doesn’t confirm evolution.
Since none of us were around when all this evolution was supposedly going on, one might suspect that the evolutionists’ greatest ally would be fossils, because those records would show what happened during that time and reveal the evolutionary changes. There’s just one problem: the fossils give no support to the theory of evolution.
Prominent evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould is forced to admit in his book The Panda’s Thumb:
“The history of most fossil species includes two features particularly inconsistent with gradualism: 1. Statis. Most species exhibit no directional change . . .. 2. Sudden appearance. In any local areas, a species does not arise gradually by the steady transformation of its ancestors; it appears all at once and ‘fully formed.’”
Obviously, if you’re an evolutionist and everything is supposed to be happening by gradual changes, sudden appearance is a huge problem. In fact, the fossil record contradicts the theory of evolution to the point where evolutionist Steven Stanley confesses in his book The New Evolutionary Timetable:
“. . . the fossil record does not convincingly document a single transition from one species to
another.”
One example of the problem the fossil record poses is a phenomenon called the Cambrian explosion. This refers to a particular era of history recorded in the fossil record where all the major body plans for animals appear at the same time. Commenting on the Cambrian explosion, evolutionist Richard Dawkins writes,
“It is as though they were just planted there, without any evolutionary history.”
Charles Darwin himself, when asked to explain the fossil evidence, could only state:
“I can give no satisfactory answer.”
At one point, he admitted:
“Nature may almost be said to have guarded against the frequent discovery of her transitional or linking forms.”
All of this - the lack of proof of a consistent direction, the lack of explanation for the complexities, the lack of evidence in the fossil record - clearly display that evolution is not a
theory that has been proven true beyond the shadow of a doubt, but that evolution is a theory badly bruised and beaten by the evidence.
And so, let me further propose three questions for you to consider this morning regarding the theory of evolution that we Christians are so stupid and backward to dare to question. These are 3 questions for evolutionists to respond to. Rather than looking at the evidence against evolution, these get at the lack of logic in the essential argument for evolution.
1. If I leave my back yard alone, how long would it take for me to come back and find a garden?
One of the key ideas of evolution is that at one point, a long time ago, there was nothing like we
have today, but, in leaving the universe alone for a few billion years, that we moved from nothing to something. That is, it moved from chaos to order.
Friends, things don’t move from chaos to order if you leave them alone. They move from order to chaos.
If you’re a gardener; if you left your field alone, and came back in a year, would you find a garden? What if you came back 10 years later? 10,000? No, each time you came back it would look worse, not better, because you don’t move from a field to a beautiful garden unless you have a gardener.
If I can say it this way, this universe did not move from chaos and nothingness to the beauty we see around us today without a Gardener. And I’ve got a pretty good idea who the Gardener was.
2. If I take the pieces of a watch and put them in a box, how long will I have to shake the box before I can pull out a working watch?
Well, you could shake it for an hour and look in and you’d still just have a bunch of watch parts. You could shake it for a year and look in and you’d still just have a bunch of watch parts. What if I shook it for 10 thousand years? 10 million years?
It would still just be a bunch of watch parts.
Yet the possibility of shaking these watch parts and eventually pulling out a working watch is greater than the possibility of evolution working. After all, here all the necessary pieces are already present and in close proximity, they just have to come together in the right way. Further, a watch is infinitely less complex than a human being or some other form of life, yet you all realize this morning that it’s ridiculous to expect to pull out a working watch no matter how long I shake this box.
So the question then is: how ridiculous is it to expect the parts of the universe as they randomly
shake and collide to produce life?
3. What are the chances of me rolling a die and getting “1-2-3-4-5-6" time after time for one
straight day?
If I stood up here with a die and rolled a 1, then a 2, then a 3, then a 4, then a 5, then a 6, we’d all
say, “That was unusual.” But if I did it again, and again, and again, and again, and again, we’d all begin to suspect that someone had tinkered with the die or that something larger than us was controlling the roll. Yet that’s similar to what we see in the universe.
The chances of the multitude of conditions necessary for life to all be present is incredibly unlikely. Yet, the multitude of conditions necessary for life to exist all, somehow, actually exist. Steve Meyer of the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture in Seattle puts is this way:
“Imagine a universe-creating machine with thousands of dials representing the gravitational constant, the charge of the electron, the mass of the proton, and so on. Each dial has many possible settings, and what you discover is that even the slightest change would make a universe where life was impossible.”
Yet, strangely, each dial is set to the exact value needed to keep the universe running.
Astronomer Fred Hoyle is an atheist, but he states the implications bluntly:
“A common-sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with the physics.”
If I roll “1-2-3-4-5-6" over and over all day long, I’m going to have to believe that it’s not happening by chance. If I look around at the universe and study the particular conditions of this and that, and over and over and over and over again I discover the particular conditions are exactly what is necessary for life to exist, it’s going to be hard to believe that that happened by chance.
Now, having talked about all this, I want to take this out of the realm of the scientific and the
abstract and the theoretical and talk for a minute about the practical implications of what we’ve
talked about today, because whether our society believes in evolution or creation does not just
effect what goes on in high school biology classrooms, it has implications for what we think about who we are and what we do. Whether you believe in evolution or creation has implications for what you think about who you are and what you do.
Here are the practical implications:
1. If evolution is true, you are an accident.
It grates me a little when you hear someone refer to a child (especially a child born well after the
other children in the family and one that was not expected), saying, “He/she was an accident.”
Because I always think, “What does that do to the child to hear that, ‘You were an accident’?”
But if evolution is true, we are all accidents. Your existence and my existence, your life and my life, are purely accidental. We are just the product of an chance collision of the right elements. Evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould summarizes human life is this way:
“We are because one odd group of fishes had a peculiar fin anatomy that could transform into legs for terrestrial creatures; because the earth never froze entirely during an ice age; because a small and tenuous species . . . has managed, so far, to survive by hook and by crook. We may yearn for a higher answer - but none exists.”
If evolution is true, you are an accident.
But if the Bible is true, you are a creation. If you’ve ever seen an artist with a painting or
sculpture that is masterful, you can see the pride and love that the artist has in his or her creation.
Genesis tells us that we are God’s creation - that we are the work of His hands and the product of His talented work. You were brought into existence for a reason and a purpose. You yourself are the product of the Master’s loving artistic work.
And that is a world apart from being an accident.
2. If evolution is true, there is no such thing as “right and wrong,” only “the survival of the
fittest.”
Any ultimate right and wrong must come from God. Evolution precludes the need for God and so there is no ultimate right and wrong. The question we ask is no longer: “Is this right? Is this wrong?” but rather “Will this help me survive?” I can kill someone in cold blood and if it helps me survive, there’s nothing wrong with it. The only criteria is “does this help me survive?” And anything that does, no matter how devious or evil or horrific is fine.
If the Bible is true, then right is right and wrong is wrong. There is a God and He is the ultimate Judge of morality and sin. I am not free to do whatever I want because I know that someday I will have to stand before Him in judgment. There is such a thing as right and wrong, and that’s worlds apart from the moral-less survival of the fittest.
3. If evolution is true, your life ultimately doesn’t matter one bit.
As we said, you are an accident, there is no higher meaning or purpose to your existence. When you die, your death may matter temporarily to some people left behind, but they’ll be gone soon too. And a million years from now, all that will be left will be the universe and your existence will ultimately have been of no importance or consequence whatsoever.
But if the Bible is true, your life ultimately matters tremendously. You were specifically created by God. You are an eternal creature. Your death is not the end of your life. The things you do have an impact and consequences that echo all the way down the corridor of eternity.
If the Bible is true, our time here is not in vain, our lives are not purposeless, our existence is not
meaningless, but rather we are beings created by God, with an eternal destiny and an eternal spirit.
As you consider all that we’ve talked about this morning, the next time you hear someone say, “You’d have to be stupid to believe what the Bible says about evolution,” you can be confident in knowing that it takes more faith to believe what they are saying than to believe what God has said.
