Evolution: Fact or Fiction?

I recently read a short booklet by John Blanchard called Evolution: Fact or Fiction? I have recorded notes to make a simpler version of his arguments and ideas. So, I thought I would share those notes with you, and hopefully they may be useful to you.

Evolution: Fact or Fiction?” by John Blanchard

Definitions

Evolution

“Origination of species by development from earlier forms, not special creation.”

Micro-evolution

The theory that in organisms of the same kind of different characteristics emerge as the result of adaptation to their particular environment.

Macro-evolution

The natural processes produce new species without limitation, and that all species can be traced back to a single common ancestor.

Natural selection

Populations of organisms develop new characteristics in reponse to ‘selective pressures’ in their environment (more simply, in order to survive) and that when these new characteristics become permanent, new species emerge.

Fossils

The fossils should indicate that there were countless transitional stages between the different species. However, the lack of evidence made Darwin realize this was ‘the most obvious and serious objection against the theory [of evolution].’

Since the fossil record was not agreeing with the theory of evolution some evolutionists invented the idea of punctuated equilibrium, which suggests that millions of more or less static years (equilibrium) were occasionally interrupted by worldwide cataclysms (punctuations) that resulted in wholesale extinctions made way for radically new life-forms.

David Kitts, Professor of Geology at the University of Oklahoma said, “Evolution requires intermediate forms between species and palaeontology does not provide them.”

The Cambrian Explosion is a large amount of fossils of highly developed life forms that seem to appear suddenly. However, Cambrian Explosion deasl two damaging blows to evolution.

1. Cambrian fossils represent nearly every major group of organisms living today.
2. The scientists have been unable to trace any sign of precursor life forms in earlier layers of the earth’s crust.

Molecule to Man?

Protozoans (microscopic single-cell organisms)-> first invertebrates-> fish-> amphibians-> reptiles-> birds and furry quadrupeds-> apelike mammals.

Missing-links:
1. 1857- Neanderthal Man, but ended up being part of the human family.
2. 1912- Piltdown Man, but ended up being a gigantic hoax (a human skull connected to an orangutan’s jaw).
3. 1922- single tooth, but ended up being from a peccary, a piglike wild animal.
4. 1959- Nutcracker Man, but ended up being the skull of an extinct ape.
5. 1974- Lucy, but has since been seen as false.

Since the missing-link did not work, scientists began trying to establish the evolutionary model by highlighting the similarities in the DNA of the various species. DNA has four basic elements: adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine. Apes and humans have similar DNA. However, there are confusing evidence when this is applied to other animals. They found that crocodiles were more closely linked to the chickens than their fellow reptiles, or that camels and nurse sharks has identical protein on the cell wall.

Homo sapiens are separated from all other species by characteristics that cannot be explained by evolutionists:
1. We have vastly superior intelligence.
2. We have self-awareness.
3. We can look beyond our own immediate and direct experience.
4. We use propositional language.
5. We are capable of complex reasoning.
6. We have mathematical skills.
7. We have an aesthetic dimension.
8. We have a moral dimension.
9. We have a spiritual dimension.

Many scientists say that the first organisms could have arisen in this way from a sea of lifeless ‘soup’ on the early earth. However, the Mycoplasma genitalium, which is the baterium with the smallest amount of genetic material, is still 580,000 base pairs on its 482 genes. That is staggering enough, image a human being who still needs over 200 bones, 600 muscles, 10,000 auditory nerve fibers, two million optic nerve fibres, 100 billion brain-cell nerves, and much more. What is the chance of this primordial soup producing a living cell…1 in 10 to the 161 power.

Where Did All This Matter Come From?

We have three possiblities:
1. The entire universe is infinite and eternal. This idea has ben abandoned by virtually everyone.
2. The universe is self-created. However, we know that Ex nihilo, nihil fit (‘Out of nothing, nothing comes’).
3. The universe had a beginning, it must therefore have a transcendent, eternal and self- existent cause. GOD!

The first two possibilities break two fundamental scientific laws. These have to do with energy and entropy. In the context of these laws, everything in the natural world is one form of energy or another, while entropy is the measure of a system’s lack of available energy to do or perform work. This is the First and Second Law of Thermodynamics. The First Law states that in any given system neither matter nor energy can be self-created or destroyed. This rules out the contention that the formation of the natural world began spontaneously by natural process. The Second Law implies that over time any closed physical system becomes less ordered and more random–entropy increases. This means that the universal tendency is towards decay and death, but the theory of evolution claims exactly the opposite.

Mutations

People began to realize that the general theory of evolution was running out of steam, so they began to say that maybe the genes underwent radical alterations, or mutations. Then natural selection could make use of these improved genes, and with sufficient time, result in new and better species. The reasons this does not work is:

1. Mutations occur extremly rarely, something like once in every ten million duplicattions of a DNA molecule.
2. Virtually all mutations (999 our of every 1,000) are harmful, weakening the organism or destroying it altogether.
3. Beneficial mutations leading to improved species would entail a massive increase in the gnome’s information, no such increase has ever been observed.
4. Any new, functional organ to be effective it would have to arrive on the scene all at once, as a complete, operating entity–but evolutionists say that mutation takes place in microscopic increments, each of whihc achieves almost nothing in and of itself.
5. No plant or animal lives long enough to allow the millions of micro-mutations that would be needed to transform it into a different, ‘improved’ species.

In the end, natural selection destroys unfit organisms, mutations result in a loss of genetic information, and time inevitably leads to decay and death.

Resist

There are two reasons why we should resist holding to macro-evolution:
1. Science is not a finished product, but an ongoing search for truth, a process of learning in which from time to time things previously said to be true are found to be false.
2. There are many things beyond the reach of science.

Evolution leaves too many unanswered questions.