[quote=SeanG]
This post is here for those who wish to participate in a discussion about the positive evidence for creation. I have shown other areas of positive evidence for creation by the observed laws of nature (Thermodynamics, background radiation, expanding universe, angular momentum [dealing with the “creation” of our galaxy], etc., as Paul Davies said of the big bang, “the one place in the universe where there is room, even for the most hard-nosed materialist, to admit God”), however, there is even more evidence dealing with positive evidence. That is the explosion of life. This is in direct violation to what nature displays by being observed, that is, conservation. Darwinian evolution requires some things that are better explained by creation. And mind you, this post is for those who wish to read the entire multiple post I will lay out, if you do not have the time to read the entire multiple posts, then do not bother joining the conversation… please. That being said, I can only respond to a few people and to a few specific points. Why? Because when 10 people start picking apart twenty things in my papers, I get overwhelmed and could not possibly respond to all of you without sitting for a week straight. So, other theists are welcome to come join the fray, as the help would be much appreciated.
SeanG
The big bang of cosmology describes a powerful explosion that eventually resulted in the universe as we see it today. But a recent issue of Time magazine (J. Madeleine Nash, “When Life Exploded,” 146, no. 23 [December 4, 1995], 66-74) heralded a new big bang, a big bang of biological evolution previously known as the Cambrian explosion. And just as some draw theistic conclusions from cosmology’s big bang, so it is possible to draw theistic conclusions from what is now being called evolution’s big bang. The cover of the issue of Time magazine declared: “New discoveries show that life as we know it began in an amazingly biological frenzy that changed the planet almost overnight.” A subheading proclaimed, “For billions of years, simple creatures like plankton, bacteria, and algae ruled the earth. Then, suddenly, life got very complicated.”
The standard evolutionary story has single-celled life forms ruling the planet for 3 billion years, starting at about 3.8 billion years ago. Then, suddenly, in the Cambrian geological period, the earth became populated with a huge diversity of complex multicellular life forms. This has always looked suspiciously like some form of creations event, and paleontologists frequently seemed rather embarrassed by the reality of the Cambrian explosion.
So, where is the documentation for the long history of the evolution of these creatures? The usual answer is that the necessary fossil layers prior to the Cambrian period have not yet been discovered yet. The fossils are just missing! This, after all, was Darwin’s excuse, and many evolutionists after him have followed suit (dealt with in “Predictions Made about the Fossil Record”). Well, recent discoveries from Canada, Greenland, China, Siberia, and Namibia document quite clearly that this period of biological creativity occurred in a geological instant virtually all around the globe. So, the usual excuse no longer holds water. You see, Darwin did not envision a major evolutionary change happening this fast. As such, evolutionists are being forced to ask tough questions concerning the nature of evolutionary change. Darwinism has always been characterized by a slow gradual change that is imperceptible in our time frame.
How Fast Is Fast?
Anomalocaris; Ottoia; Wiwaxia; Hallucigenia; Opabinia. If these names are unfamiliar to you, well, they should be. They have only become familiar to paleontologists over the past twenty years. This strange list represents a group of animals from the Cambrian period, a period that is only now being appreciated. These animals supposedly lived over 500 million years ago. . not only do they sound strange, they look it as well. so strange in fact, that most are contained in phyla (the primary subdivision of a taxonomic kingdom, grouping together all classes of organisms that have the same body plan – Webster) of which they are the only examples and which no longer exist. Keep in mind that phylum is the next category below animal kingdom, of which consists such well-known phyla as the mollusks, which contain clams, oysters, and snails. Another commonly known phylum is the annelids, to which belong earthworms. The largest of all the phyla is the arthropods. Arthropods range from insects to millipedes to spiders to shrimp. We are placed in the chordate phylum along with all other vertebrates – fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and other mammals. Representatives from different phyla are very different creatures, obviously.
The puzzle in the Cambrian level though, is for the evolutionist. All known phyla, with the exception of one, first appeared in the Cambrian level. There are neither ancestors nor intermediates. Fossil experts used to think that the Cambrian period lasted for 75 million years. Eventually, it was shortened to 30 million years, and as if that wasn’t bad enough, recently the time frame for the real work of bringing all these different creatures into existence was limited to the first 5 to 10 million years of the Cambrian period. That is, on an evolutionary understanding of the geological scale, extremely fast! Stephen J. Gould said in that Time article that, “fast is now a lot faster than we thought….”
Geologist Samuel Browning says, “we now know how fast fast is. And what I like to ask my biologist friends is, ‘How fast can evolution get before you start feeling uncomfortable?’” (Ibid) How could animals as diverse as arthropods, mollusks, jellyfish, and even vertebrates all appear within a short time span of only 5 to 10 million years without ancestors and no intermediates?
With all this in mind, let us review a paper I have posted here before.
- What Do the Fossils Say?
Let us jump into the two major models by which we can extrapolate our (humanity’s) origins. Either we evolved, or we were created, period. As Douglas Futuyma stated in his anti-creationist book, Science On Trial, “Creation and evolution, between them, exhaust the possible explanations for the origin of living things. Organisms either appeared on the earth fully developed, or they did not. If they did not, they must have developed from preexisting species by some process of modification. If they did appear in a fully developed state, they must indeed have been created by some omnipotent intelligence.” Now, for those who say that this is a religious topic, e.g., religious creationism versus non-religious science, this next part is for you.
The religions of the world that say we evolved over a very long period by a slow evolutionary process are the following:
- Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, Taoism, Shintoism, Sikhism, Jainism, Animism, Spiritism, Occultism, Satanism, Theosophy, Bahaism, Mysticism, Liberal-Judaism, Liberal-Islam, Liberal-Christianity, Unitarianism, Religious Science, Unity, Humanism.
Is Evolution a Religion?
Huxley called evolution “religion without revelation.” H. S. Lipson, FRS, Professor of Physics, Univ. of Manchester, UK, states that “In fact, evolution became in a sense a scientific religion; almost all scientists have accepted it and many are prepared to 'bend' their observations to fit in with it.”
Professor D. M. S. Watson, one of the leading biologists and science writers of his day, demonstrated the bias behind much of the evolutionary thinking when he wrote, “evolution [is] a theory universally accepted not because it can be proven by logically coherent evidence to be true, but because the only alternative, special creation, is clearly incredible.” So it’s not a question of biased religious creationists versus objective scientific evolutionists; rather, it is the biases of the Christian religion versus the biases of the religion of secular humanism resulting in different interpretations of the same scientific data. As the anti-creationists science writer Boyce Rensberger admits:
- “At this point, it is necessary to reveal a little inside information about scientists work, something the textbooks don’t usually tell you. The fact is that scientists are not really as objective and dispassionate in their work as they would like you to think. Most scientists first get their ideas about how the world works not through rigorously logical process but through hunches and wild guesses. As individuals, they often come to believe something to be true long before they assemble the hard evidence that will convince somebody else that it is. Motivated by faith in his own ideas and a desire for acceptance by his peers, a scientist will labor for years knowing in his heart that his is correct but devising experiment after experiment whose results he hopes will support his position.”
- “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 priori commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.”
- The Importance of the Fossil Record
Evolutionists should expect to clearly see, and in fact predicted over 120 years earlier, one type of animal or plant changing into another type. The prediction then is that the boundaries between kinds should blur as we look further and further back into time via their fossil history. Better put is this defining explanation by Dr. Henry Morris on the importance of the fossil record:
- “The fossil record must provide the critical evidence for or against evolution, since no other scientific evidence can possibly throw light on the actual history of living things. All other evidence is circumstantial…. The time scale of human observation is far too short to permit documentation of real evolutionary change from lower to higher kinds of organisms at the present time. The vital question, therefore, is: ‘Does the record of past ages, now preserved in the form of fossils, show that such changes have occurred?’” (Dr. Morris is a creationist [all creationists – I only quote three – are pointed out)
- “Much evidence could be drawn from the fields of cosmology, chemistry, thermodynamics, mathematics, molecular biology, and genetics in an attempt to decide which model offers a more plausible explanation for the origin of living things. In the final analysis, however, what actually did happen can only be decided, scientifically, by an examination of the historical record, that is, the fossil record.” (Dr. Gish is a creationist)
- “That evolution actually did occur can only be scientifically established by the discovery of the fossilized remains of representative samples of those intermediate types which have been postulated on the basis of the indirect evidence. In other words, the really crucial evidence for evolution must be provided by the paleontologist whose business it is to study the evidence of the fossil record.”
- “Naturalist must remember that the process of evolution is revealed only through fossil forms. A knowledge of paleontology is, therefore, a prerequisite; only paleontology can provide them with the evidence of evolution and reveal its course or mechanisms. Neither the examination of present beings, nor imagination, nor theories can serve as a substitute for paleontological documents. If they ignore them, biologists, the philosophers of nature, indulge in numerous commentaries and can only come up with hypothesis. This is why we constantly have recourse to paleontology, the only true science of evolution…. The true course of evolution is and can only be revealed by paleontology.” Elsewhere he comments: “Thus evolution actually did occur can only be scientifically established by the discovery of the fossilized remains of representative samples of those intermediate types which have been postulated on the basis of the indirect evidence. In other words, the really crucial evidence for evolution must be provided by the paleontologist whose business it is to study the evidence of the fossil record.”
- “The last word on the credibility and course of evolution lies with the paleontologist…”
- “The fossil record affords an opportunity to choose between evolutionary and creationist models for the origin of the earth and its life forms.”
Creation Model
On the basis of the creation model, we would predict an explosive appearance in the fossil record of highly complex forms of life without evidence of ancestral forms. We would predict that all of the major types of life, that is, the basic plant and animal forms, would appear abruptly in the fossil record without evidence of transitional forms linking one basic kind to another. We would thus expect to find fossilized remains, for example, of cats, dogs, bears, elephants, cows, horses, bats, dinosaurs, crocodiles, monkeys, apes, and men without evidence of common ancestors. Each major kind at its earliest appearance in the fossil record would possess, fully developed, all the characteristics that are used to define that particular kind.
Evolution Model
On the basis of the evolution model, we would predict that the most ancient strata in which fossils are found would contain the most primitive forms of life capable of leaving a fossil record. As successively younger strata were searched, we would expect to see gradual transition of these relatively simple forms of life into more and more complex forms of life. As living forms diverged into the millions of species which have existed in the past and which exist today, we would expect to find a transition of one form into another.
We would predict that new types would not appear suddenly in the fossil record possessing all of the characteristics which are used to define that group but would retain characteristics used to define the ancestral group. Dr. Gish says, “There should not be any difficulty in finding transitional forms. Hundreds of transitional forms should fill museum collections. If we find fossils at all, we ought to find transitional forms. As a matter of fact, difficulty in placing a fossil with a distinct category should be the rule rather than the exception.”
- What Do the Evolutionists Say?
- “[Since] innumerable transitional forms must have existed, why do we not find them imbedded in countless numbers in the crust of the earth? Why is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this perhaps is the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory.”
- “The abrupt manner in which whole groups of species appear in certain formations has been urged by several paleontologists… as a fatal objection to the belief of the transmutation of species. If numerous species, belonging to the same genera or families, have really started into life at once, that fact would be fatal to the theory of evolution through natural selection. For the development by this means of a group of forms all of which are (according to the theory) descended from some one progenitor, must have been an extremely slow process; and the progenitors must have lived long before their modified descendants.”
- “If it could be shown that this fact [gaps between widely distinct groups] had always existed, the fact would be fatal to the doctrine of evolution.”
- “He [Darwin] was embarrassed by the fossil record because it didn’t look the way he predicted it would, and, as a result, he devoted a long section of his Origin of Species to an attempt to explain and rationalize the differences…. Darwin’s general solution to the incompatibility of fossil evidence and his theory was to say that the fossil record is a very incomplete one…. We are now about 120 years after Darwin, and knowledge of the fossil record has been greatly expanded. We now have a quarter of a million fossil species but the situation hasn’t changed much. 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 [still on display in the Los Angeles Natural History Museum], have had to be discarded or modified as a result of more detailed information.” [Archaeopteryx as well]
- “The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology. The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils.”
- “Missing links in the sequence of fossil evidence were a worry to Darwin. He felt sure they would eventually turn up, but they are still missing and seem likely to remain so.”
- “This regular absence of transitional forms is not confined to mammals, but is an almost universal phenomenon, as has long been noted by paleontologists. It is true of almost all orders of all classes of animals, both vertebrate and invertebrate.”
- “The known fossil record fails to document a single example of phyletic evolution accomplishing a major morphologic [structural] transition and hence offers no evidence that the gradualistic model can be valid.”
- “It may, therefore, be firmly maintained that it is not even possible to make a caricature of evolution out of paleobiological facts. The fossil material is now so complete that it has been possible to construct new classes and the lack of transitional series cannot be explained as due to the scarcity of the material. The deficiencies are real, they will never be filled.”
- “It is a mistake to believe that even one fossil species or fossil ‘group’ can be demonstrated to have been ancestral to another. The ancestor-descendant relationship may only be assumed to have existed in the absence of evidence indicating otherwise.”
- “…no real evolutionist, whether gradualist or punctuationist, uses the fossil record as evidence in favor of the theory of evolution as opposed to special creation.”
- “In the fossil record, missing links are the rule: the story of life is as disjointed as a silent newsreel, in which species succeed one another as abruptly as Balkan prime ministers. The more scientists have searched for the transitional forms between species, the more they have been frustrated.”
- "...if man evolved from an apelike creature he did so without leaving a trace of that evolution in the fossil record."
- "It must be significant that nearly all the evolutionary stories I learned as student...have been debunked."
- "...I fully agree with your comments on the lack of direct illustrations of evolutionary transitions in my book. If I knew of any, fossil or living, I would certainly would have included them...Yet Gould and the American Museum people are hard to contradict when they say there are no transitional fossils...I will lay it on the line - there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument.”
- “For almost 20 years I thought I was working on evolution…. But there was not one thing I knew about it…. 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, any one thing that is true?’ [Fossils being included in this question of “Where’s the beef?”] 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, ‘Yes, I do know one thing -–it ought not to be taught in high school.’ … During the past few years… you have experienced a shift from evolution as knowledge to evolution as faith…. Evolution not only conveys no knowledge, but seems somehow to convey anti-knowledge.”
- The Cambrian “Explosion”
Dr. David Raup, curator of geology at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, and George Gaylord Simpson, the twentieth century’s foremost paleontologist, have both pointed to the fact that two-thirds of evolution was over by the time we found the first fossils. Creationists were saying that to an open-minded person (setting you’re “a priori” presuppositions aside), this would indicate agreement between the creation model and what is found in the fossil record. Eldredge goes on to say:
- “Then there was something of an explosion. Beginning about six hundred million years ago and continuing for about ten to fifteen million years [Dr. Gould rates it about five million], the earliest known representatives of the major kinds of animals still populating today’s seas made a rather abrupt appearance. This rather protracted ‘event’ shows up graphically in the rock record…. Creationists have made much of this sudden development of a rich and varied fossil record where, just before, there was none…. Indeed, the sudden appearance of a varied, well-preserved array of fossils, which geologists have used to mark the beginnings of the Cambrian Period does pose a fascinating intellectual challenges.”
In the book Darwin’s Enigma, Luther Sunderland (a creationist, although, at the time of the interviews the interviewees didn’t realize this) interviewed five top paleontologists at leading natural history museums around the world (some of which have been mentioned already), each having significant fossil collections. Those interviewed were Dr. David Pilbeam, former curator of the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale, later professor of anthropology at Harvard; Dr. Colin Patterson, senior paleontologist at the British Museum of Natural History; Dr. Niles Eldredge, curator of invertebrate paleontology at the American Museum in New York City; Dr. David M. Raup, curator of Geology at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago; and Dr. Donald Fisher, state paleontologist at the New York State Natural History Museum. This is what Sunderland said after all the above men were interviewed:
- “None of the five museum officials could offer a single example of a transitional series of fossilized organisms that would document the transformation of one basically different type to another.”
- “I admit that an awful lot of [mis]information has gotten into the textbooks as though it were true…. Many statements about prehistoric time, or a presumed fossil record, partake of imaginative narratives.”
These men are only commenting on the lack of any credible evidence that should be there if evolution were true. They are only commenting on the predictions made that are yet to be substantiated. To reject creation a priori and to defend a model that lacks any substance, whatsoever, is itself unscientific. Or, as the senior paleontologist at the British Museum of Natural History puts it, “Evolution not only conveys no knowledge, but seems somehow to convey anti-knowledge.”
Dr. Gish remarks that, “Eldredge admits that ‘The Cambrian evolutionary explosion is still shrouded in mystery.’ But creation scientists say, ‘what greater evidence for creation could the rocks give than this abrupt appearance of a great variety of complex creatures without trace of ancestors?’ Thus we see, right from the beginning, on the basis of an evolutionary scenario, the evidence is directly contradictory to predictions based on evolution but is remarkably in accord with predictions based on creation. This [Cambrian] evidence alone I sufficient to establish the fact that evolution has not occurred on the earth.”
To Conclude
When creationists look at evolution through the eyes of mathematical probabilities; the fossil record; information theory and the vast informational content in living things; the laws of thermodynamics, biogenesis and non-contradiction; comparative studies in physiology/anatomy/taxonomy/embryology/ morphology/genetics and biochemistry; and sciences such as anthropology, geology, and biology, they (we) find it hard to believe that anyone who fairly examines this issue could state that evolution is a fact – or even a credible theory. This is why creationists argue that any open-minded individual, scientist or layman, who will objectively evaluate all the evidence, will discover that such evidence comes down heavily on the side of creation.
[/quote]
