Contributed the following article to the Jun '16 issue of VANAMUTHAM,
that attempts to connect the world (with its events and practical issues) to God's word.
Till the middle of 19th century, the predominant
view around the world, including the western culture, was that God created the
universe. Around that time, an unknown
scientist called Charles Darwin became fascinated by what he observed in
selective breeding experiments. He developed
a hypothesis and published it in a book in 1859, titled ‘On the Origin of
Species by Natural Selection’. He
postulated that all plants and animals
are the product of random interplay of heredity processes (RANDOM MUTATION), and differential reproduction
in which weak traits give way to stronger ones (NATURAL SELECTION).
EVOLUTION: MICRO
& MACRO
Darwin believed that it was an undirected, mechanistic
process of mutation and natural selection, and its resultant changes that led
from one life form (or few life forms) to another over years. Before we get to
whether a life form can change to another this way, let us first see if at all variations
from environmental changes are possible.
Studies in the Galapagos Islands showed that the average
size and thickness of finch beaks increased during a drought. Having to crack the few remaining hard seeds
would have toughened the beaks of the surviving birds. When the rains returned
and seeds became plentiful, the beak sizes returned to normal. Such change at a
species level is technically called MICRO EVOLUTION, is supported by scientific
evidence and is indeed possible.
MACRO
EVOLUTION on the other hand refers to innovations such as new organs like eyes,
new structures like wings and new body parts. This suggests that a unicellular
organism moved from one level of complexity to another, over millions of years
of time, all through natural selection and finally humans evolved from their
immediate ancestors in the animal kingdom such as monkeys and apes. Scientific evidence does not support Macro
Evolution.
William Paley in his book Natural Theology introduced the
‘Watchmaker’ analogy that helps us understand the improbability of Macro
Evolution. If you are walking through a
field and find a watch that tells time, you can be sure that the watch was the
result of intelligence (there was a watchmaker) and not the result of
undirected natural processes. It just could not have fallen into place by
itself.
Biochemist Michael J Behe has given a similar analogy that
puts Evolution in it right place - Micro Evolution is all the evolution that
has been happening. He compares the
Darwinian explanation for humans to an explanation for a ‘Watch with a cover’
by starting with an assumption that a factory was already making a watch
without a cover, and then going on to show what an improvement a cover would
be.
IRREDUCIBLE
COMPLEXITY
Defenders of Darwinism are offering a story for peripheral
features instead of dealing with real complexities of systems like a Retina. Darwin
himself realized, that for an organ as complex as the eye with its
interdependent features and complicated chemicals to have suddenly appeared in
one generation, would be a miracle. In Darwin’s own words in his ‘On the Origin of
Species’ book, “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 degree.”
Darwin however hoped that it too could
be shown to have developed gradually. In his words, “Reason tells me, that if
numerous gradations from a simple and imperfect eye to one complex and perfect
can be shown to exist, each grade being useful to its possessor, as is
certainly the case; if further, the eye ever varies and the variations be
inherited, as is likewise certainly the case; and if such variations should be
useful to any animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could
be formed by natural selection,
though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered as subversive
of the theory.” But the human eye is an “irreducibly complex biological
system”, no part of which can function unless all the other parts are already
working, and therefore it cannot be produced gradually.
FOSSIL
RECORD
Paleontologists have found an explosion of life around the
same period. Almost every major phylum (each a broad classification) of animal
life has appeared around the same period. On April 23, 1991, the New York Times
reported this discovery under a page-wide headline “Spectacular Fossils record Riot of Creation”.
If Darwin’s theory
had been true, plotting the fossils against Morphological distance (difference
in body architecture) along the x axis and time along the Y axis, should have
come up as Tree. It should show a common ancestor relating all living things as
the stem, a multitude of intermediary and transitional forms branching out,
gradually increasing in number and getting more diverse as you move up in time.
But the graphic depiction of the actual fossil record is not a tree. It looks like a bar-code.
Darwin looked for gradual changes of one form changing into
another in the Fossil Record, but couldn’t find it. He admitted in his Origin of Species, “The number of intermediate entities which
have formerly existed on earth, must be truly enormous. Why then is not every
geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology
assuredly does not reveal any such finely graded organic chain, and this
perhaps is the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my
theory”. About 155 years have passed
since then, and there have been tremendous fossil discovery as Darwin had
hoped. But the evidence is to the
contrary, as seen in the preceding 2 paragraphs.
The only way to scientifically prove that man descended from
apes is to show a transition between monkeys, apes and humans. But despite what
students are being taught in school, paleontologists have not uncovered any
transitional fossil not just between monkeys and apes, and between apes and
human, but between any major forms.
CREATION: THE ONLY
EXPLANATION
IN THE BEGINNING GOD
is the only plausible explanation for life.
We all need to go to town with this proclamation rather than being
bogged down by the Age of the Earth.
While all Bible believing Christians have unshakable faith
that they did not happen by chance, but were created by God, they are divided
on either side of the fence over whether the Earth is young or old. Some, labeled the ‘Young Earth Creationists’
insist on a young earth that is only about 6000 years old and a Creation Week
of 6 literal days of 24 hours duration.
Others, called the Old Earth Creationists’, with the same faith on the
creator, allow that each creation day could have been a period of thousands or
millions of years.
Science is always evolving but the Word of the Lord stands
forever. Getting us into a fight over the age of the earth could be the devil’s
deception to draw man’s attention away from the rock-solid truth of Creation.
While some think that carbon-dating the earth to be several billions of years
old is too hard a scientific fact to ignore, others think that Carbon-dating
cannot be accurate over more than a few thousands of years and that the change
in atmospheric conditions in the aftermath of Noah’s flood makes the process
irrelevant for the period prior to that.
Let us make it unambiguously clear to our
colleagues at work, our children at home, our youth in the church and to all
other we come in contact with, that the Bible’s opening statement that God
created all that is visible stands unchallenged by any contrary view – be it
Science or Philosophy. After all, Darwin’s Theory of Evolution (with words like
speculate, probable and suggest, scattered all over) is just a speculation, a
postulation, a probabilistic thinking that man happened by chance. Contrary to the popular perception created by
the ubiquitous picture of ‘Monkey morphing into Man’, and the wide currency
provided to it in today’s School Curriculum, EVOLUTION IS NOT PROVEN. IT NEVER
WILL BE.
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