God’s Place in Evolution

1. God’s Place in Evolution

2. Where do we come from? Creation vs. Primordial Soup A minimal cell contains over 60,000 proteins of 100 different configurations. The chance of this assemblage occurring by chance is 1 in 104,478,296. British astronomer, Sir Frederick Hoyle, says, “The likelihood of the formation of life from inanimate matter is 1 to a number with 40,000 noughts (1040,000).” He goes on to say, “At all events, anyone, even a nodding acquaintance with the Rubik’s cube will concede the near impossibility of a solution being obtained by a blind person moving the cubic faces at random. Now imagine 1050 (that’s a number 1 with 50 zeros after it) blind people, each with a scrambled Rubik’s cube, and try to conceive of the chance of them all simultaneously arriving at the solved form.” He later says, “Supposing the first cell originated by chance is like believing a tornado could sweep through a junkyard filled with airplane parts and form a Boeing 747.” ? + =

3. The Creation Story of Genesis First Day—light (so there was light and darkness) Second Day—sky and water (waters separated) Third Day—land and seas (waters gathered); vegetation Fourth Day—sun, moon, and stars (to govern the day and the night and to mark the seasons, days and years) Fifth Day—fish and birds (to fill the waters and the sky) Sixth Day—animals (to fill the earth); man and woman (to care for the earth and to commune with God) Seventh Day—God rested and declared all He had made to be very good. For each day, an almost identical narrative occurs: “God made the wild animals according to their kinds, the livestock according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good.”

4. Dr. George Wald, professor emeritus of biology at Harvard and Nobel Prize winner in biology in 1971: “There are only two possible explanations as to how life arose: Spontaneous generation arising to evolution or a supernatural creative act of God…There is no other possibility. Spontaneous generation was scientifically disproved 120 years ago by Louis Pasteur and others, but that just leaves us with only one other possibility…that life came as a supernatural act of creation by God, but I can’t accept that philosophy because I do not want to believe in God. Therefore I choose to believe in that which I know is scientifically impossible, spontaneous generation leading to evolution.” George Wald, “Origin, Life, and Evolution,” Scientific American (1978).

5. Evidence for Creation 1.) The fossil record. 2.) They decay of the earth’s magnetic field. 3.) The Global Flood. 4.) Population statistics. 5.) Human artifacts found throughout the Geological Column. 6.) Helium content in Earth’s atmosphere. 7.) Design in living systems.

6. Timemagazine’s description of Cambrian fossil findings Time magazine writes: “In a burst of creativity like nothing before or since, nature appears to have sketched out the blueprints for virtually the whole of the animal kingdom…Since 1987, discoveries of major fossil beds in Greenland, in China, in Siberia, and now in Namibia have shown that the period of biological innovation occurred at virtually the same instant in geological time all around the world. What could possibly have powered such a radical advance?” Darwin wrote in the Origin of the Species, “The abrupt manner in which whole groups of species suddenly appear in certain formations has been urged by several paleontologists…as a fatal objection to the belief in the transmutation of species. If numerous species, belonging to the same genera of families, have really started into life at once, the fact would be fatal to the theory of evolution through natural selection.” J. Madeline Nash, “When Life Exploded,” Time (December 1995), p. 68. Charles Darwin, The Origin of the Species, p. 344.

7. Even evolutionary specialists admit downfalls in the fossil record… Dr. Colin Patterson, former senior paleontologist at the British Museum of National History, London: “If I knew of any [intermediary], fossil or living, I would have certainly have included them [in my book, Evolution]…Yet Gould [Dr. Stephen J. Gould, professor of geology and paleontology at Harvard University] 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.” Paleontologist Stephen Stanley of Johns Hopkins University says, “The known fossil record fails to document a single example of phyletic evolution accomplishing a major morphologic transition, and hence offers no evidence that the gradualistic model can be valid.” Dr. Mark Ridley, a zoologist at Oxford, says, “In any case, 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.”

8. Archaeopteryx—half-bird, half-reptile?? Most evolutionists believe that birds evolved from reptiles. Archaeopteryx is thought to be an example of a transitional form—half-bird and half-reptile. However, with close examination, it looked like a modern bird—it had flying feathers, elliptical wings, both upper and lower jaws (maxilla and mandible) moved (in most reptiles, only the mandible moves), and it had a large cerebellum and cortex (just like today’s flying birds).

9. Dissention on claiming that Archaeopteryx and other fossils are “transition form” creatures Alan Feduccia of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (an evolutionist and world authority on birds) examined the characteristics of the Archaeopteryx on the previous slide, as well as examining other “transitional form” fossils, including the Sinosauropteryx prima and Mononykus. After examining these dinosaur-birds, he disproved them, concluding, “It’s biophysically impossible to evolve flight from such large bipeds [hind legs] with foreshortened forelimbs and heavy, balancing tails.”

10. The decay of the Earth’s magnetic field… Dr. Thomas Barnes, Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Texas at El Paso, is one of the most respected magnetic field physicists in the world and has published the definitive work in this field. He says, “If we went back about ten thousand years, the earth’s magnetic field would have been as strong as the field in a magnetic star. A magnetic star is like our sun; it has a nuclear power source. Surely our earth never had a nuclear source like the sun. Surely our earth never had a magnetic field stronger than that of a star. That would limit the age of the earth to ten thousand years.” Under those conditions many of the atoms necessary for life processes could not form. Scientific observations since 1829 have shown that the earth's magnetic field has been measurably decaying at an exponential rate, demonstrating its half-life to be approximately 1,400 years. These data demonstrate that earth's entire history is young, within a few thousand of years.

11. The Great Flood Remnants of this worldwide flood can be found all over the earth. Marine crustaceans have been discovered on 12,000-foot mountaintops. Pillow lava is formed only under water, and yet geologists have found a field of pillow lava as high as 15,000 feet on Mount Ararat. Hippopptamuses, now living only in Africa, have been uncovered in England. Hundreds of dinosaurs have been found buried together with other creatures that did not share the same habitat. The Norfolk forest beds in England contain fossils of northern cold-climate animals, tropical warm climate animals, and temperate zone plants all mixed together. How were such diverse creatures transported and buried thousands of miles from their normal environments, at unexplainable elevation, except by a devastating universal flood? And what about the sedimentary rocks? There is a fossilized seven-foot-long ichthyosaur (a fish-shaped marine reptile, now extinct) giving birth; they have found fossils of fish in the act of swallowing other fish. There is a fossilized tree trunk oriented vertically. It extends through several layers of sedimentary rock. These layers must have all been laid down at the same time. Otherwise, if the upper layers had taken millions of years (or even much more than one year) to form, the top of the tree would have decomposed long before it was encased in rock.

12. Population Statistics World population is estimated to grow an average of about 2% per year. To be very conservative, if the population increased only ½% per year (to allow generously for plagues, wars, starvation, etc.), in one million years (the evolutionists general estimate of the age of man on planet Earth) there would have been 102100 people somehow stacked on the earth. (That number of people would actually fill countless trillions of entire universes.) Even if an almost zero growth rate of population were assumed, in a million years the earth would have housed 3,000,000,000,000 people up until the present age. There is no cultural or fossil evidence for numbers anywhere near that level. At the ½% growth rate, it would take about 4,000 years to produce today’s population from a single couple. This is the approximate amount of time elapsed since the worldwide flood when only Noah’s family was spared. Current world population: 6,499,421,858.

13. Fossilized human evidence Man-made artifacts—such as a hammer in Cretaceous rock, a human sandal print with trilobite in Cambrian rock, human footprints and a handprint in Cretaceous rock—point to the fact that all the supposed geologic periods actually occurred at the same time in the recent past (just before the Great Flood in Genesis?). Did humans co-exist with dinosaurs? Discoveries have been made of cave-dwelling humans with drawings and carvings of dinosaurs on the walls of caves in Arizona’s Hava Supai Canyon (as well as 30 other places world-wide). Fossilized footprints of man and footprints of dinosaurs have been reported in the same geological strata in New Mexico, Arizona, Mexico, Kentucky, Missouri, Russia, Illinois, Texas, and other places. A Biblical reference? “Look at the behemoth, which I made along with you and which feeds on grass like an ox. What strength he has in his loins, what power in the muscles of his belly! His tail sways like a cedar; the sinews of his thighs are close-knit. His bones are tubes of bronze, his limbs like rods of iron” [Job 40:15-18] Creationevidence.org

14. Helium content in the Earth’s atmosphere Physicist Melvin Cook, Nobel Prize medalist found that helium-4 enters our atmosphere from solar wind and radioactive decay of uranium. At present rates our atmosphere would accumulate current helium-4 amounts in less than 10,000 years. The current amount is only about 1/2000 of what we would expect if the atmosphere were billions of years old.

15. Complexity of design in living systems The human body has 100 trillion cells. All the cells in the human body lined up side-by-side would encircle the earth 200 times. If all the DNA in a human were placed end to end, it would reach the sun and back 400 times. The human eye can handle 1.5 million simultaneous messages. In a day, the eye moves 100,000 times (it’s like walking 50 miles). 137 million nerve endings within each eye pick up every visual message the eye sends to the brain. The human heart beats 40,000,000 times a year. A single drop of blood can be delivered to anywhere in the body within 20 seconds. The information in the brain equals that contained in 20 million separate books.

16. Can Darwin’s theory explain the complexities of organisms? “To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest sense.” Charles Darwin, The Origin of the Species (London: A.L. Burt, 1859), p. 170.

17. We descended from apes? “Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them…The Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.” [Genesis 1:25-27, 2:7] Vs. Some scientist claim the reason there are no fossilized samples of humans is due to the phenomenon called “punctuated equilibrium” (stress factors cause evolution to happen on a much quicker time scale). However, Dr. Robert Jastrow, NASA Science Director disagrees, saying, “It is the nature of biological evolution that it always proceeds slowly.” Indeed, it is that same bit of evidence that evolutionists use to avoid proving that macroevolution actually happens.