Conclusion

Part 2

Most people have also come to think of the theory of evolution as the only scientific explanation for the origin of life. Anyone who resists the theory, it is said, lacks complete understanding of its evidence. But science does have its limits. Many people confuse origins-science with the type of science that has sent man to the moon and cured diseases. Yet the operational science that put man on the moon deals only with repeatable, testable experimentation and observation. In contrast, the kind of science that deals with the past, origins science, is not based on repeatable processes, but is based upon unrepeatable past events.

Since the theory of evolution is supposed to be a story about how life began, this means that it is based upon past events and therefore falls into the category of origins science. Thus, if a person rejects evolution, which deals with unrepeatable processes, he or she is not rejecting the type of science that put man on the moon.

Nonetheless, there will always be those who persist in making such claims, like the leading evolutionist and self-confessed atheist Stephen Jay Gould, who called creation “unscientific” and “purely religious,” and asserted that “biology without evolution is like chemistry without the periodic table.”^[2]

Of course, many scientists strongly disagree with such charges. A growing number of scientists (including noncreationists) have begun to seriously question the validity of the theory of evolution. In fact, one of the most distinguished of scientists, who also happened to be one of the most knowledgeable zoologists in the world, even went so far as to say that evolution “proves to be in conflict with reality.”^[3]

So where does all the controversy come from? Surely not from the facts alone, because everyone has the same facts — the same earth, the same fossil layers, the same animals and plants, the same genetic mutations — the facts are all the same. Rather, the controversy arises in the way we all interpret the facts. And why do we interpret facts differently? Because we start with different biases and presuppositions.^[4] Indeed, even renowned evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould has admitted on many occasions that it is how we interpret the facts, and what we say they mean about the history of life, that is obviously subject to biased ways of thinking. Thus, when creationists and evolutionists argue about the evidence, in reality they are each arguing about their interpretations based on their presuppositions. The same is also true when evolutionists argue amongst themselves (a regular occurrence).

Perhaps that might help explain these surprising remarks made in 1981 by Colin Patterson, the senior paleontologist from the British Museum of Natural History: “One of the reasons I started taking this anti-evolutionary view was . . . it struck me that I had been working on this stuff for 20 years and there was not one thing I knew about it. That’s quite a shock to learn that one can be so misled so long. . . . So for the last few weeks I’ve tried putting a simple question to various people and groups of people. Question is: Can you tell me anything you know about evolution, any one thing that is true? 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.’ ”^[5]

Today there are many specific criticisms of evolution that show some of its fundamental assumptions to be unsubstantiated. Probably the most significant criticism (despite evolutionists’ desperate attempts to the contrary) is the total failure of anyone to point to any example in which a mutation has actually improved the DNA code by adding new genetic information. Without any evidence that information can arise just by itself, from nothing, there is no indication that evolution is even scientifically possible.^[6]

[top]

Back

|

Next