X-Nilo Files, 1(4), January/February 1999

Did You Know?

A well-known geneticist from Harvard certainly let the 'cat out of the bag' when he told the truth about his evolutionary beliefs. In a book review, Dr Richard Lewontin wrote:

'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 prior commitment to materialism…

'We are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to created 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.'

Do you realize what he’s saying? No matter what the scientific evidence shows, he will reject any belief in God. This is his faith.
You know, I wish Christians would be just as strong and faithful in adhering to Scripture and the answers from Genesis as Lewontin is to his faith!

—Excerpt from Answers with Ken Ham radio broadcast, August 31, 1998

Evolution and Practical Science

First published in:
Creation 20(4):4,
September–November 1998

In February 1998, the journal Australasian Science carried an article by environmental biologist David Booth warning 'that scientific creationism is making unwelcome inroads into the education system.'

The usual misrepresentations/misunderstandings about creation and science aside, I was interested to see that towards the article’s end, Booth claimed that understanding evolution 'is of great practical relevance.'¹

'Decisions on the control of disease and pest resistance, the treatment of genetic diseases, the design of nature reserves and endangered species breeding programs,' he writes, 'all must be based on solid evolutionary principles.'

Compare Booth’s statement above with an interview involving a French scientist heavily involved in government research on similar questions. This geneticist is only one of many who believe in six-day creation, and he is convinced that evolutionary theory is of absolutely no practical value to his work.

This is one of the main reasons that Creation magazine routinely features articles on qualified, practicing scientists who are creationists, in a vast array of fields. It helps readers to be able to easily counter the common fallacy that belief in evolution has something to do with real, practical science that works.

Associated with this is the myth, adhered to by perhaps the majority of educated people today, that one can 'see evolution happening' today. Biologists like Booth, when they see changes such as adaptation through natural selection, etc. think they are 'seeing' the same process which allegedly turned fish into philosophers, for example. Thus, until the fallacy in this belief is explained to them, it is no wonder that they see evolution-rejecting Christians as ignorant fanatics denying a 'fact' which they can see with their own eyes.

Even more exciting is this: Not only do observations of the changes in living things not demand an evolutionary interpretation, but they actually generate a huge problem for mega-evolutionary belief, once the crucial 'information factor' is taken into account .

A point of irony in all this comes from an earlier part of Booth’s article, in which he complains that many Australian university biology curricula 'pay no more than lip service to evolution.' The reason, says Booth, is the 'move to a more utilitarian science' which demands 'more practical benefits from science.' So Booth admits that, in response to pressure to get more practical scientific results, universities are moving away from spending time on evolutionary theorising. This hardly supports his claim in the same article that evolution is 'of great practical relevance' to science!

Note

¹Booth’s claim is moderate compared to some of the inflammatory rhetoric (designed for public consumption) from the extreme wing of anti-creationism in Australia. One flamboyant atheistic crusader, widely regarded as obsessed with the issue, claims that all modern science, technology, medicine, etc. would be impossible if biblical creation were true! Return to text

Quote

'He who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and third time, till at length it becomes habitual.'
— Thomas Jefferson

Same Facts!

Q. Don’t evolutionists have different facts than creationists?

A. Actually, creationists and evolutionists have exactly the same information. Think about it! Creationists and evolutionists have the same Earth – the same fossils – the same plants and animals – in fact, they have the same universes.

You see, the FACTS are the same. What’s different is the way in which they interpret them. Because Christians start with the Bible – they build a way of thinking based on God’s Word. For instance, they know God created distinct KINDS of animals and plants – there has been a Global Flood just a few thousand years ago – there was no DEATH before sin. All of these things affect how a creationist interprets fossils, plants, animals, and so on.

Now the evolutionist starts with the belief that life arose by chance – that one KIND of animal changed into another over millions of years, and that death has always been here. Thus they have a TOTALLY DIFFERENT way of interpreting the SAME evidence.

The exciting thing, though, is the Christian can logically defend the interpretation based on the Bible – evolutionists can’t!

—Excerpt from Answers with Ken Ham radio broadcast, October 23, 1998

Science in the News

A recent story buzzing the newswires gives new clues to an old story. Creationists have long held that species at the end of the Flood filled niches left empty by catastrophe with a wondrous variety of new species. Another, more popular, example of the spread of species is Darwin’s notorious finches.

DARWIN’S FINCHES
Evidence supporting rapid post-Flood adaptation

First published in:
Creation 14(3):22-23,
June-August 1992

Thirteen species of finches live on the Galápagos, the famous island group visited by Charles Darwin in the 1930s. The finches have a variety of bill shapes and sizes, as the diagram indicates, all suited to their varying diets and lifestyles. The explanation given by Darwin was that they are all the offspring of an original pair of finches, and that natural selection is responsible for the differences.

Surprisingly to some, this is the explanation now held by most modern creationists. It would not need to be an 'evolutionary' change at all, in the sense of giving any evidence for amoeba-to-man transformation. No new genetic information would have been introduced. If the parent population has sufficient created variability (genetic potential) to account for these varied features in its descendants, natural selection could take care of the resulting adaptation, as a simplistic example will show.

Say some finches ended up on islands in which there was a shortage of seeds, but many grubs were living under tree bark. In a population with much variation, some will have longer, some shorter, beaks than average. Those birds carrying more of the 'long-beak' information could survive on those grubs, and thus would be more likely to pass the information on to their descendants, while the others would die out. In this way, with selection acting on other characters as well, a 'woodpecker finch' could arise.

The same thing is seen in artificial selection, with all the various modern breeds of dogs being more specialized than the parent (mongrel) population, but carrying less information — and thus less potential for further selection (you can’t breed Great Danes from Chihuahuas). In all these sorts of changes, finches are still finches and dogs are dogs. The limits to change are set by the amount of information originally present from which to select.

Creationists have long proposed such 'splitting under selection' from the original kinds, explaining for example wolves, coyotes, dingoes and other wild dogs from one pair on the Ark. The question of time has, however, been seized upon by anti-creationists. They insist that it would take a much longer time than Scripture allows. Artificial selection is quick, they admit, but that is because breeders are deliberately acting on each generation. The usual 'guesstimate' of how long it took for Darwin’s finches to radiate from their parent population ranges from one million to five million years.

However, Princeton zoology professor Peter Grant recently released some results of an intensive 18-year study of all the Galápagos finches during which natural selection was observed in action.¹ For example, during drought years, as finches depleted the supply of small seeds, selection favoured those with larger, deeper beaks capable of getting at the remaining large seeds and thus surviving, which shifted the population in that direction.

While that is not very surprising, nor profound, the speed at which these changes took places was most interesting. At that observed rate, Grant estimates, it would take only 1,200 years to transform the medium ground finch into the cactus finch, for example. To convert it into the more similar large ground finch would take only some 200 years.

Notice that (although the article fails to mention it) such speedy changes can have nothing to do with the production of any new genes by mutation, but are based upon the process described, that is, choosing from what is already there. It therefore fails to qualify as evidence for real, uphill (macro) evolution — though many starry-eyed students will doubtless be taught it as 'evolution in action.'

Instead, it is real, observed evidence that such (downhill) adaptive formation of several species from the one created kind can easily take place in a few centuries. It doesn’t need millions of years. The argument is strengthened by the fact that, after the Flood, selection pressure would have been much more intense — with rapid migration into new, empty niches, residual catastrophism and changing climate as the earth was settling down and drying out, and simultaneous adaptive radiation of differing food species.

Reference

¹ P.R. Grant, ‘Natural Selection and Darwin’s Finches’, Scientific American, 265(4):60–65, October 1991.

Tools for Inquiry: Logic and Observation

Excerpt from: Creation: Facts of Life. Gary Parker. pp. 13-17

Science is both a fabulous body of knowledge and a fantastic method of investigation. Most people just assume evolution can be studied scientifically—but not creation. According to a slogan popular these days, 'Evolution is science, and creation is religion', and that is supposed to stop the discussion even before it starts. Let’s start, then, with the most basic question of all: Is it really possible to talk honestly and fairly about scientific evidence of creation??

For many people, that question is a major stumbling block. Some even use it as an excuse to throw creation out of the courtroom or classroom without even hearing the evidence. But nothing is really easier for scientists and just 'ordinary people' than finding and recognizing evidence of creation.

To illustrate, let me borrow your imagination for a moment. Imagine that you are walking along a creek on a lazy summer afternoon, idly kicking at the pebbles along the bank. Occasionally you reach down to pick up a pebble that has an unusual shape. One pebble reminds you of a cowboy boot. As you roll the pebble around in your hand, you notice that the softer parts of the rock are more worn away than the harder parts, and that lines of wear follow lines of weakness in the rock. Despite some appearance of design, the boot shape of the rambled pebble is clearly the result of time, chance, and the processes of weathering and erosion.

But then your eye spots an arrowhead lying among the pebbles! Immediately it stands out as different. In the arrowhead, chip marks cut through the hard and soft parts of the rock equally, and the chip lines go both with and across lines of weakness in the rock. In the arrowhead, we see matter shaped and molded according to a plan that gives the rocky material a special purpose.

You have just done what many people dismiss as impossible. In comparing the pebble and arrowhead, you were easily able to recognize evidence of creation. I am speaking here only of human creation, of course. The arrowhead might have been carved by one of my ancestors (a Cherokee), for example. But the same approach can be used even when we do not know who or what the creative agent might have been.

What does it take to recognize evidence of creation? Just the ordinary tools of science: logic and observation.

Using your knowledge of erosional processes and your observations of hard and soft rock, you were able to distinguish a result of time and chance (the tumbled pebble) from an object created with plan and purpose (the arrowhead). If we had found such objects as arrowheads on Mars, all scientists would have recognized them immediately as the products of creation, even though in that case we would have no idea who made them or how. Carl Sagan, the evolutionist of Cosmos television fame, wanted the government to listen for signals from outer space, because he knew full well that we can tell the difference between wave patterns produced by time and chance and those sent with design and purpose.

I was in a friendly mini-debate at a California college when the evolutionist interrupted me: 'But creation cannot be scientific. Science deals only with things you can see and touch. Take energy, for example...' Then he stopped: 'Whoops! Made a mistake, didn’t I?' I hastened to agree. He and I and his students all knew that there are forms of energy, like gravity, that you cannot see or touch or put in a bottle. Yet you know 'gravity' is there (whatever it is!) because you can see the effects it has on matter. Similarly, God is a Spirit and cannot be seen—but you can see His effects on matter. Even the Bible tells us that 'the invisible things of God are clearly seen in all the things that have been made' (Romans 1:20).

You do not have to see the creator, and you do not have to see the creative act, to recognize evidence of creation. Even when we do not know who or what the creative agent is, then, there are cases where 'creation' is simply the most logical inference from our scientific observations.

Although the pebble and the arrowhead are made of the same substance, they reflect two radically different kinds of order. The tumbled pebble has the kind of order that results from time and chance operating through weathering and erosion on the inherent properties of matter. Those same factors will eventually destroy not only the pebble, but also the arrowhead, which has the kind of order clearly brought into being by plan and purpose, mind acting on matter.

In a way, the tumbled pebble represents the idea of evolution. As I once believed and taught, evolutionists believe that life itself is the result, like the tumbled pebble, of time, chance, and the inherent properties of matter. The arrowhead represents the creation idea, that living systems have irreducible properties of organization that were produced, like the arrowhead, by plan, purpose, and special acts of creation.

In our daily experience, all of us can differentiate these two kinds of order (inherent and 'exherent'). On the basis of logic and observation, for example, we recognize that wind-worn rock formations are the products of time, chance, and the inherent properties of matter. But those same techniques (logical inference from scientific observations) convince us that pottery fragments and rock carvings must be the products of plan, purpose, and acts of creation giving matter irreducible properties of organization.
So we can agree ahead of time that both classic models of origin can be compared on the basis of scientific merit.