ANTI EVOLUTION III: SCIENCE

Anti-evolutionists often assert scientific arguments against evolution.  This trend grew especially
strong in the later part of the twentieth century.  At that time, anti-evolutionists associated with the Institute for Creation Research in San Diego realized that their ideas would never be allowed into public school classrooms as religion.  But they could be allowed if they were used as alternative scientific explanations.  The science of creation science was born.

I personally am not convinced by these arguments.  There is plenty of evidence that those who know this stuff best—biologists, geologists, etc.—find these arguments baseless.  Nevertheless, I will attempt to summarize some of their arguments here.  As with the rest of these posts, I will not attempt to convince those already dedicated to an evolutionary worldview.  Rather, I only hope to show that there are reasons why anti-evolutionists hold their beliefs.  They do not have to be ignorant or crazy to do so.  Just as an undergraduate college student in a secular university learns about the geologic ages of the earth and the process by which one form of life evolved from another, so a college student at some religious colleges will learn that the earth was formed in the past 10,000 years and all life forms on it were created by divine fiat.  Those forms, the student will learn, developed according to kind.  Just as the student at the secular school does not have to be ignorant or crazy in order to accept the idea of an ancient earth and a long, directionless process of
evolution, so a student at a religious school does not have to be ignorant or crazy to learn an alternative science.
It is only the exceptional student at either school—usually one with a previous intellectual commitment to a different understanding of the origins of life—that will really question the big story she or he is being taught.

Another reason to cut these anti-evolution scientific arguments plenty of intellectual slack is because they are forced to argue in terms that do not fit their basic underlying ideas.  Imagine that the current mainstream scientific understanding of the origins of life had to justify itself in
Biblical terms.  It would be difficult.  So those who believe in a young earth are forced to make their scientific cases in language that has developed to explain an ancient earth.

One of the oldest scientific arguments against the notion of evolution through natural selection has been that of the development of complex organs.  This case was made long before the notion of evolution became the dominant scientific paradigm and it continued among anti-evolutionists throughout the twentieth century.  And it has been attacked by evolutionary scientists as unsatisfactory.  But for those of us who are not trained in evolutionary science, the argument makes intuitive sense.  I, for one, can’t see what’s wrong with it, and that makes me think that sensible, intelligent, rational people trained in this sort of argument have some grounds for opposing the notion of evolution.

If we understand the mechanism of natural selection to be one in which large-scale evolutionary change happens as an accumulation of tiny random beneficial mutations, then the evolution of complex organs is hard to account for.  Consider Darwin’s tentative explanation of the evolution of the eye, for instance.  He suggested that some part of an early animal’s skin would develop light sensitivity.  Then that sensitive spot would develop the parts of an eye that allowed it to see things.

How could that work?
With any complex organ, there would not be much of a selection advantage until the entire organ developed.  That is, it would not help a blind frog to mutate just a retina, without the rest of the eye.  It would not pass on its genes for retina-having at a greater rate than those blind frogs who had no such genes.  The Darwinian story of a long slow growth of beneficial mutations, even if there was only the tiniest chance of such mutations, falls apart with organs that would need several distinct parts to develop at the same time in order to offer any evolutionary benefit.

So, in order for our blind frog to be able to pass along his genes at a higher rate, there would need to be an impossibly complex mutation.  This would be a comic-book mutation, one beyond what even evolutionists posit as possible.  Our frog would need to mutate an entire, functioning eye that allowed it to see.  All at once.  The chances against even the tiniest advantageous mutation are so small it requires millions of years of accumulating mutations for evolution to make sense.  How can we believe that a complex organ would simply spring into existence?  It strains credulity.

More modern evolution doubters have offered more subtle versions of this complex-organ  argument.  Biochemist Michael Behe has examined the process of blood clotting and suggested that such processes represent what he calls an “irreducible complexity.”  A mutation might be
possible that gave an animal one part of this clotting mechanism.  But having only one part of this package would not offer any evolutionary benefit.  And the notion that all of the many interlocking biological parts necessary to produce such an effect could have simply happened by chance all at
the same time are simply too far beyond the range  of the possible to convince any rational observer.

Consider another example.  Evolutionists will tell you that one of the strongest pieces of evidence
for organic evolution is that once you start looking at evidence, it all confirms the hypothesis.  But if you start with a different hypothesis, you can also find all sorts of confirming evidence.  For example, instead of assuming that evolution created life on earth, assume instead a young earth,
less than 10,000 years old.  If you begin with this idea, it requires a very different understanding of the development of life forms.  There is no time for dinosaurs to have had their millennia, then died out.  If such creatures existed, they would have to have lived at the same time as humans.
We would predict some record of the sightings of such creatures by humans.

That prediction, one could say, has been repeatedly borne out.  By people from different cultures
in different centuries.  The evidence has been right in front of our faces, but because scientists have assumed an ancient earth, they have been blinded to it.  The obvious evidence is all the reports of giant lizards.  In Europe and Asia, the so-called ‘dragons’ have been reported by credible witnesses for centuries.  The fact that such dinosaurs died out, apparently, before the modern era does not mean that they did not coexist with humanity for a long time.

The bar of proof does not need to be very high.  The point is that the idea of a young earth can find confirming evidence from history and nature.  It can support itself with arguments about complex organs and blood-clotting mechanisms.  It does not require, as some evolutionists assert, a willful ignorance or dementia.  Just because those trained in an evolutionary worldview do not understand or agree with the scientific arguments in favor of a creationist worldview doesn’t mean that creationists are ignorant or crazy.   It only means that they are committed to a different understanding of nature and of the nature of humanity.

ANTI-EVOLUTION III: FURTHER READING:

Michael Behe, Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution, 2^nd ed. (New York: Free Press, 2006); Henry M. Morris, Scientific Creationism (Green Forest, Arkansas: Master Books, 2006); Duane T. Gish, Evolution: The Fossils Still Say No! (El Cajon, California: Institute for Creation Research), 2006); John C. Whitcomb Jr. and Henry M. Morris, The Genesis
Flood: The Biblical Record and Its Scientific Implications (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, 1966); Ken Ham, The Great Dinosaur Mystery Solved! A Biblical View of These Amazing Creatures (Green Forest, Arkansas: Master Books, 2008).