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Could blind chance create
symmetry and rhythm and light and color and melody? Or begin with
the mathematics of the universe? The great mathematicians—Euclid,
Newton, Einstein—did not create mathematical order; they uncovered
the truth that was already there. Harry Emerson Fosdick (1878–1969)1
I. What Does
Science Know About Life’s Origins?
What has
science discovered about the beginning of the universe?
[Robert Jastrow]
Astronomers now find that they have painted themselves into a corner
because they have proven, by their own methods, that the world began
abruptly in an act of creation to which you can trace the seeds of
every star, every planet, every living thing in this cosmos and on
the earth. And they have found that all this happened as a product
of forces they cannot hope to discover.2
[Sir Isaac Newton]
This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets could
only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and
powerful Being. And if the fixed stars are the centers of other like
systems, these, being formed by the likewise counsel, must be all
subject to the dominion of One.3
[Robert Jastrow] For
the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the
story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of
ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls
himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians
who have been sitting there for centuries.4
What is the
evolutionary theory concerning how life originated?
[Michael Denton]
The first stage on the road to life is presumed to have been the
buildup, by purely chemical synthetic processes occurring on the
surface of the early earth, of all the basic organic compounds
necessary for the formation of a living cell. These are supposed to
have accumulated in the primeval oceans, creating a nutrient broth,
the so-called "pre-biotic soup." In certain specialized
environments, these organic compounds were assembled into large
macromolecules, proteins and nucleic acids. Eventually, over
millions of years, combinations of these macromolecules occurred
which were endowed with the property of self-reproduction. Then
driven by natural selection evermore efficient and complex
self-reproducing molecular systems evolved until finally the first
simple cell system emerged. The existence of a pre-biotic soup is
crucial to the whole scheme. Without an abiotic accumulation of the
building blocks of the cell no life could ever evolve. If the
traditional story is true, therefore, there must have existed for
millions of years a rich mixture of organic compounds in the ancient
oceans and some of this material would very likely have been trapped
in the sedimentary rocks lain down in the seas of those remote
times. Yet rocks of great antiquity have been examined over the past
two decades and in none of them has any trace of abiotically-produced
compounds been found. Most notable of these rocks are the "dawn
rocks" of western Greenland, the earliest dated rocks on earth,
considered to be approaching 3,900 million years old.... As on so
many occasions, paleontology has again failed to substantiate
evolutionary presumptions. Considering the way the pre-biotic soup
is referred to in so many discussions of the origin of life as an
already established reality, it comes as something of a shock to
realize that there is absolutely no positive evidence for its
existence.5 [Dr. Michael Denton, an Australian medical doctor and
scientist, has lived and worked in London, England and Toronto,
Canada. This book by Dr. Denton attempts to explain the gathering
evidence against evolution in its traditional form. It points out
the growing crisis in biology and suggests that an increasing number
of research scientists are questioning strict Darwinism.]
Do
evolutionists have scientific facts to prove their theory that life
arose from inanimate material solely by accident?
[Sir Fred Hoyle]
The chance that higher life forms
might have emerged (through evolutionary processes) is comparable
with the chance that a "tornado sweeping through a junk yard might
assemble a Boeing 747 from the material therein."6 [Sir Fred Hoyle
is professor of astronomy and astrophysics at University College,
Cardiff, Wales, Great Britain, and the originator of the Steady
State theory of the origin of the universe.]
[H. P. Yockey] One
must conclude that, contrary to the established and current wisdom,
a scenario describing the genesis of life on earth by chance and
natural causes which can be accepted on the basis of fact and not
faith has not yet been written.7
[George Wald] One has
only to contemplate the magnitude of this task to concede that the
spontaneous generation of a living organism is impossible.8
[Francis Crick] An
honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could
only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the
moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which
would have had to have been satisfied to get it going.9 [Dr. Francis
Crick, Nobel Prize winner and biochemist, was the co-discoverer of
the structure of the DNA molecule.]
[William Day] A
curious flaw of human nature is to permit the imagery of a catchy
phrase to shape one’s reasoning. Haldane’s hot dilute soup became
"primordial soup," a feature that has been popularized for nearly 50
years without geologic evidence that it ever existed.10
[Michael Denton] The
intuitive feeling that pure chance could never have achieved the
degree of complexity and ingenuity so ubiquitous in nature has been
a continuing source of skepticism ever since the publication of The
Origin; and throughout the past century there has always existed a
significant minority of first-rate biologists who have never been
able to bring themselves to accept the validity of Darwinian claims.
In fact, the number of biologists who have expressed some degree of
disillusionment is practically endless. When Arthur Koestler
organized the Alpbach Symposium in 1969 called "Beyond
Reductionism," for the expressed purpose of bringing together
biologists critical of orthodox Darwinism, he was able to include in
the list of participants many authorities of world stature, such as
Swedish Neurobiologist Holgar Hyden, zoologists Paul Weiss and W. H.
Thorpe, Linguist David McNeil and Child Psychologist Jean Piaget.
Koestler had this to say in his opening remarks: "...invitations
were confined to personalities in academic life with undisputed
authority in their respective fields, who nevertheless shared that
holy discontent."11
[Chandra Wickramasinghe]
Precious little in the way of biochemical evolution could have
happened on the earth. If one counts the number of trial assemblies
of amino acids that are needed to give rise to the enzymes, the
probability of their discovery by random shufflings turns out to be
less than one in ten to the 40 thousand.12 [Dr. Chandra Wickramasinghe is professor and chairman of the Department of
Applied Mathematics and Astronomy, University College, Cardiff,
Wales.]
Do some
scientists reject the Darwinian theory of evolution?
Neither Sr.
Fred Hoyle nor Professor Wickramasinghe accept the Genesis account of
creation, but each maintains that wherever life occurs in this
universe, it had to be created. They further reject Darwinian
evolution itself.
[Emile Borel] If
anything is ten to the 50th power or less chance, it will never
happen, even cosmically, in the whole universe.13
[Scott Huse] In the
human body, DNA "programs" all characteristics such as hair, skin,
eyes, and height. DNA determines the arrangement for 206 bones, 600
muscles, 10,000 auditory nerve fibers, two million optic nerve
fibers, 100 billion nerve cells, 400 billion feet of blood vessels
and capillaries and so on. Such extraordinary sophistication can
only reflect intelligent design.14 [Scott Huse is a teacher and
principal of Pinecrest Bible Training Center, Salisbury Center, New
York. He also lectures on college campuses. He holds the following
degrees: B.S., M.S., M.R.E., Th.D., and Ph. D.]
Did Darwin
himself express some concerns about the validity of his own theory?
The eye to this day gives
me a cold shudder. [Stated by Charles Darwin in a letter to Asa
Gray, the American biologist, written in 1861—two years after the
publication of The Origin of the Species.]
[Concerning Darwin’s
statement about the eye, Michael Denton writes]: It is easy to
sympathize with Darwin. Such feelings have probably occurred to most
biologists at times, for to common sense it does indeed appear
absurd to propose that chance could have thrown together devices of
such complexity and ingenuity that they appear to represent the very
epitome of perfection.... Aside from any quantitative
considerations, it seems intuitively impossible that such
self-evident brilliance in the execution of design could ever have
occasionally hit on a relatively ingenious adaptive end, it seems
inconceivable that it could have reached so many ends of such
surpassing "perfection."15
What
problems have scientists admitted concerning Darwinian evolution?
[P. S. Moorhead and M. M.
Kaplan] Evolutionists greatly
depend on random mutations to bring about the tremendous variation
needed to produce all the life forms that now exist, including man.
But this is where the great evolutionary scientists think that the
theory of evolution has broken down. For example, Dr. Murray Eden,
Professor of Electrical Engineering at M.I.T. who at the conference
entitled Mathematical Challenges to Neo-Darwinian Interpretation
found in the Wistar Institute Press delivered a paper entitled
"Inadequacies of Neo-Darwinian Evolution as a Scientific Theory." In
this paper he commented on the possibilities of random mutations
accounting for the great variation evolutionists say must have taken
place. He states, "It is our contention that if random is given a
serious and crucial interpretation from a probabilistic point of
view, the randomness postulate is highly implausible and that an
adequate scientific theory of evolution must await the discovery and
elucidation of new natural laws, physical, chemical and biological."16
What are
some of the things about the human gene that cause concern for
evolutionary scientists?
Lewis Thomas
makes this comment in Medusa and the Snail about the information-rich
blueprint in the human gene:
The mere existence of
that cell should be one of the great astonishments of the earth.
People ought to be walking around all day, all though their waking
hours, calling to each in endless wonderment, talk of nothing except
that cell.... If anyone does succeed in explaining it, within my
lifetime I will charter a sky-writing airplane, maybe a whole fleet
of them, and send them aloft to write one great exclamation point
after another, around the whole sky, until all of my money runs out.17
Writing
about this same cell, Chandra Wickramasinghe, professor of applied
mathematics at the University of Cardiff, Wales, reminded his readers
that the statistical probability of forming even a single enzyme, the
building block of the gene, which is in turn the building block of the
cell, is 1 in 10 to the 40,000th.18
The translation of that figure is that it would require more attempts
for the formation of one enzyme than there are atoms in all the stars
of all the galaxies in the entire known universe. Though a Buddhist,
Dr. Wickramasinghe concedes this supernatural notion.19
So
"impossible" is this event that Francis Crick, the Nobel-Prize-winning
scientist who helped crack the code of human DNA, said it is "almost a
miracle."20
Have
scientists found evidence that life has come into existence by chance
anywhere else in the universe?
Since
evolutionists have not found scientific evidence for life originating
from non-life on earth they had hoped they could find evidence of life
somewhere in the universe. If they could, it would give them
circumstantial evidence that life could originate by evolution
someplace else.
[Carl Sagan] The
discovery of life on one other planet—e.g. Mars—can, in the words of
the American Physicist Phillip Morrison, of the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, "transform the origin of life from a
miracle to a statistic."21 [Dr. Carl Sagan is an American
astronomer.]
[Christianus Huygenus]
That which makes me of this opinion, that those Worlds are not
without such a Creature endowed with Reason, is that otherwise our
Earth would have too much the Advantage of them, in being the only
part of the Universe that could boast of such a Creature....22
[Michael Denton] The
discovery of life (on other planets), especially if it were to prove
widespread, would of course have a very important bearing on the
question of how life originated on earth. For it would undoubtedly
provide powerful circumstantial evidence for the traditional
evolutionary scenario, enhancing enormously the credibility of the
belief that the root from chemistry to life can be surmounted by
simple natural processes wherever the right conditions exist.23
[Michael Denton] At
present, if we are to exclude UFO’s and the claims of Von Daniken
and his fellow travelers, there is not a shred of evidence for
extra-terrestrial life, and there is no way of excluding the
possibility of life being unique to earth with all the philosophical
consequences this entails.24
[Michael Denton] It
is the sheer universality of perfection, the fact that everywhere we
look, to whatever depth we look, we find an elegance and an
ingenuity of an absolutely transcending quality, which so mitigates
against the idea of chance. Is it really credible that random
processes could have constructed a reality, the smallest element of
which—a functional protein or a gene—is complex beyond our own
creative capacities, a reality which is the very antithesis of
chance, which excels in every sense anything perused by the
intelligence of man? Alongside the level of ingenuity and complexity
exhibited by the molecular machinery of life, even our most advanced
artifacts appear clumsy. We feel humbled, as neolithic man would in
the presence of twentieth century technology.
To those who still
dogmatically advocate that all this new reality is the result of
pure chance one can only reply, like Alice, incredulous in the face
of the contradictory logic of the Red Queen:
"Alice laughed. ‘There’s
no use trying,’ she said. ‘One can’t believe impossible things.’ ‘I
dare say you haven’t had much practice,’ said the queen. ‘When I was
your age I did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I believed
as many as six impossible things before breakfast.’"25
II. What Has
the Fossil Record Revealed About Darwin’s Missing Link Between All the
Plants and Animals?
What
evidence should we expect to find in the fossil record if Darwin’s
theory of evolution is correct?
[Charles Darwin]
Innumerable transitional forms must
have existed. But why do we not find them imbedded in countless
numbers in the crust of the earth?... Why is not every geological
formation in every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology
assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain,
and this perhaps is the greatest objection which can be urged
against my theory.26
[Thomas Huxley] If it
could be shown that this fact [gaps between widely distinct groups]
had always existed, the fact would be fatal to the doctrine of
evolution.27
[Theodosius Dobzhansky]
These evolutionary happenings are unique, unrepeatable, and
irreversible. It is as impossible to turn a land vertebrate into a
fish as it is to effect the reverse transformation. The
applicability of the experimental method to the study of such unique
historical processes is severely restricted before all else by the
time intervals involved, which far exceed the lifetime of any human
experimenter. And yet, it is just such impossibility that is
demanded by anti-evolutionists when they ask for "proofs" of
evolution which they would magnanimously accept as satisfactory.28
[Niles Eldredge]
Darwin also holds out the hope that some of the gap would be filled
as the result of subsequent collecting. But most of the gaps were
still there a century later and some paleontologists were no longer
willing to explain them away geologically.29 [Dr. Niles Eldredge is
the chairman and curator of invertebrates at the American Museum of
Natural History in New York City.]
[Stephen Jay Gould]
One hundred and twenty years of paleontological research later, it
has become abundantly clear that the fossil record will not confirm
this part of Darwin’s predictions. Nor is the problem a miserably
poor record. The fossil record simply shows that this prediction was
wrong.30 [Dr. Gould taught biology, geology and the history of
science at Harvard University.]
[George Gaylord Simpson]
The reason for abrupt appearances and gaps is not the
imperfection of the fossil record. With over 200 million cataloged
specimens of about 250,000 fossil species, many evolutionist
paleontologists argue that the fossil record is sufficient: "In
part, the role of paleontology and evolutionary research has been
defined narrowly because of a false belief, tracing back to Darwin
and his early followers, that the fossil record is woefully
incomplete. Actually, the record is of sufficiently high quality to
allow us to undertake certain kinds of analysis meaningfully at the
level of the species."
It remains true, as every
paleontologist knows, that most new species, genera and families and
that nearly all new categories above the level of families appear in
the record suddenly and are not led up to by known, gradual,
completely continuous transitional sequences.31 [Dr. Simpson, one of
the world’s best-known evolutionists, was professor of vertebrate
paleontology at Harvard University until his retirement.]
[Donn Rosen]
Evolutionism has been unable to yield scientific data about the
origin, diversity and similarity of the two million species that
inhabit the earth and the estimated eight million others that once
thrived.32 [Dr. Donn Rosen is curator of fishes at the American
Museum of Natural History in New York, New York.]
[Austin Clark] On the
basis of the paleontological record, the creationist has the better
of the argument. 33 [Dr. Austin Clark was curator of paleontology at
the Smithsonian Institute, Washington, D.C.]
[Betty Farber]
Several cockroach fossils...from the carboniferous period of earth’s
history make one thing clear, even back then, about 350 million
years ago, the cockroach looked disgusting. It hasn’t changed much
since.34
What
admissions have some evolutionists reached after studying the fossil
record?
[L. Harrison Matthews]
The "peppered moth" experiments beautifully demonstrate natural
selection—or survival of the fittest—in action, but they do not show
evolution in progress, for however the populations may alter in
their content of light, intermediate or dark forms, all the moths
remain from beginning to end biston betularia.35
[Pierre-P. Grasse] We
are in the dark concerning the origin of insects.36 [Dr. Grasse is
considered the outstanding scientist of France, the dean of French
zoologists.]
[Louis L. Carroll]
Unfortunately, not a single specimen of an appropriate reptilian
ancestor is known prior to the appearance of true reptiles. The
absence of such ancestral forms leaves many problems of the
amphibian—reptilian transition unanswered.37
[Jean L. Marx] True
birds have existed at least as long as archaeopteryx so that the
latter could hardly have been their ancestor.38
[Charles Darwin]
Nothing is more extraordinary in the history of the Vegetable
Kingdom, as it seems to me, than the apparently very sudden or
abrupt development of the higher plants.39
[Gerald T. Todd] All
three subdivisions of the bony fishes first appear in the fossil
record at approximately the same time. They are already divergent
morphologically, and they are heavily armored. How did they
originate? What allowed them to diverge so widely? How did they all
come to have heavy armor? And why is there no trace of earlier,
intermediate forms?40
The
Evolutionist Julian Huxley admitted in his book Evolution in Action
that the chances for the evolution of a horse are one in one thousand
to the millionth power. (This is the number one followed by three
million zeros, or 1,500 pages of nothing but zeros!) He admitted that
no one would ever bet on anything so improbable. Yet he persisted in
believing it did happen!41
Does the
fossil record tell us anything about the origin of phyla and classes?
[Robert Barnes]
The fossil record tells us almost
nothing about the evolutionary origin of phyla and classes.
Intermediate forms are non-existent, undiscovered, or not
recognized.42
[Colin Patterson] I
fully agree with your comments on the lack of direct illustration of
evolutionary transitions in my book. If I knew of any, fossil or
living, I would certainly have included them. So, much as I should
like to oblige you by jumping to the defense of gradualism, and
fleshing out the transitions between the major types of animals and
plants, I find myself a bit short of the intellectual justification
necessary for the job.43 [Colin Patterson is a senior paleontologist
at the British Museum of Natural History in London and a life-long
evolutionist. Colin Patterson’s statement that he had left out the
evolutionary transitions in his book, if he had known of any
fossils, he certainly would have included them, is stated in
Personal Communications by Colin Patterson to Luther Sunderland,
Appalachian, New York, April 10, 1979.]
[David Raup]
Unfortunately, the origins of most higher categories are shrouded in
mystery: commonly new higher categories appear abruptly in the
fossil record without evidence of transitional forms.44 [Dr. David Raup, previously curator of geology at the Field Museum of Natural
History in Chicago, is now professor of geology at the University of
Chicago. He is a strong advocate of evolutionary theory.]
[George Gaylord Simpson]
Gaps among known species are sporadic and often small. Gaps
among known orders, classes and phyla are systematic and almost
always large.45
[Steven N. Stanley]
The known fossil record fails to document a single example of
phyletic (gradual) evolution accomplishing a major morphologic
transition and hence offers no evidence that the gradualistic model
can be valid.46 [Dr. Stanley is professor of Paleobiology at Johns
Hopkins University. He is a recipient of the Schuchert award of the
Paleontological Society and has also been awarded a Guggenheim
Fellowship.]
[Stephen Jay Gould]
Increasing diversity and multiple transitions seem to reflect a
determined and an inexorable progression toward higher things. But
the paleontological record supports no such interpretation. There
has been no steady progress in the higher development of organic
design. We have had, instead, vast stretches of little or no change
in one evolutionary burst that created the entire system.47
What
assumptions have scientists made on the basis of the lack of
transitional forms?
[British Museum
publication] We assume that
none of the fossil species we are considering is the ancestor of the
other.48
[Steven N. Stanley]
The fossil record now reveals that species typically survived for a
hundred thousand generations, or even a million or more, without
evolving very much. We seem forced to conclude that most evolution
takes place rapidly, when species come into being by the
evolutionary divergence of small populations from parent species.
After their origins, most species undergo little evolution before
becoming extinct.49
[Niles Eldredge] If
life had evolved into its wondrous profusion of creatures little by
little, then one would expect to find fossils of transitional
creatures which were a bit like what went before them and a bit like
what came after. But no one has yet found any evidence of such
transitional creatures. This oddity has been attributed to gaps in
the fossil record which gradualists expected to fill when rock
strata of the proper age had been found. In the last decade,
however, geologists have found rock layers of all divisions of the
last 500 million years and no transitional forms were contained in
them.50
[Stephen Jay Gould]
New species almost always appeared suddenly in the fossil record
with no intermediate links to ancestors in older rocks of the same
region.51
[Stephen Jay Gould]
The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record
persists as the trade secret of paleontology. The evolutionary trees
that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of
their branches...in any local area, a species does not arise
gradually by the gradual transformation of its ancestors; it appears
all at once and "fully formed."52
Do
evolutionists have a bias against the God of the Christians?
[Frederick Nietzsche]
If one were to prove this God of the Christians to us, we should be
even less able to believe in Him.53
[Clarence Darrow] It
is bigotry for public schools to teach only one theory of origin.54
[Norman Geisler]
Fifty-six years later at the Scopes II Trial in Arkansas, which was
to decide whether Creation could be taught along with Evolution, the
Secular Humanists argued in effect and won, that it is bigotry to
teach two theories of origin. Apparently what Secular Humanists mean
is that it is bigotry to teach only one view when Creation is that
view, but not when Evolution is that view.55
Why do so
many stubbornly cling to the Darwinian theory of evolution?
[Michael Denton]
...The twentieth century would be incomprehensible without the
Darwinian revolution. The social and political currents which have
swept the world in the past 80 years would have been impossible
without its intellectual sanction.... the influence of evolutionary
theory on fields far removed from biology is one of the most
spectacular examples in history of how a highly speculative idea for
which there is no really hard scientific evidence can come to
fashion the thinking of a whole society and dominate the outlook of
an age. Considering its historic significance and the social and
moral transformation it caused in Western thought, one might have
expected that a theory of such cardinal importance, a theory that
literally changed the world, would have been something more than
metaphysics, something more than a myth.... In the final analysis,
we still know very little about how new forms of life arise. The
"mystery of mysteries"—the origin of new beings on earth—is still
largely as enigmatic as when Darwin set sail on the Beagle.56
What has
caused some scientists to consider exploring creationism?
[Sir Peter Medawar]
There is a pretty widespread
sense of dissatisfaction about what has come to be thought of as the
accepted evolutionary theory in the English-speaking world, the
so-called neo-Darwinian theory.57
[H. S. Lipson] I
think, however, that we must go further than this and admit that the
only acceptable explanation is creation. I know that this is
anathema to physicists, as indeed it is to me, but we must not
reject a theory that we do not like if the experimental evidence
supports it.58
III. What is
the biblical model for creation?
In the beginning God
created the heavens and the earth. — Genesis 1:1
Before the mountains were
brought forth, Or ever You had formed the earth and the world, Even
from everlasting to everlasting, You are God. — Psalm 90:2
By faith we understand
that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that the things
which are seen were not made of things which are visible. — Hebrews
11:3
You alone are the Lord;
You have made heaven, The heaven of heavens, with all their host,
The earth and everything on it, The seas and all that is in
them, And You preserve them all. The host of heaven worships You. —
Nehemiah 9:6
For thus says
the Lord, Who created the heavens, Who is God, Who formed the earth
and made it, Who has established it, Who did not create it in
vain, Who formed it to be inhabited: "I am the Lord, and there is no
other. — Isaiah 45:18
Where were you when I
laid the foundations of the earth? Tell Me, if you have
understanding. Who determined its measurements? Surely you know! Or
who stretched the line upon it? To what were its foundations
fastened? Or who laid its cornerstone, When the morning stars sang
together, And all the sons of God shouted for joy? — Job 38:4-7
[Keil & Delitzsch]
"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth."—Heaven and
earth have not existed from all eternity, but had a beginning; nor
did they arise by emanation from an absolute substance, but were
created by God. This sentence, which stands at the head of the
records of revelation, is not a mere heading, nor a summary of the
history of the creation, but a declaration of the primeval act of
God, by which the universe was called into being.59
[Charles Ryrie]
Though there are variations within the broad category of
creationism, the principal characteristic of this view is that the
Bible is its sole basis. Science may contribute to our understanding
but it must never control or change our interpretation of the
Scriptures in order to accommodate its findings. As far as man is
concerned, Creation teaches that God created the first man in His
image from the dust of the ground and His own breath of life (Gen.
1:27 and 2:7). No subhuman creature was involved, nor was any
process of evolution.
Creationists hold to
different views regarding the days of Creation, but to be a
creationist one must believe the biblical record as factually
historical and that Adam was the first man.60
[The Westminster
Confession of Faith] 4:1 It pleased God the Father, Son, and
Holy Ghost61, for the manifestation of the glory of His eternal
power, wisdom, and goodness62, in the beginning, to
create, or make of nothing, the world, and all things therein
whether visible or invisible, in the space of six days; and all very
good.63
4:2 After God had
made all other creatures, He created man, male and female64, with
reasonable and immortal souls65, endued with knowledge,
righteousness, and true holiness, after His own image66; having the
law of God written in their hearts67, and power to fulfil it68; and
yet under a possibility of transgressing, being left to the liberty
of their own will, which was subject unto change.69 Beside this law
written in their hearts, they received a command, not to eat of the
tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which while they kept, they
were happy in their communion with God70, and had
dominion over the creatures.71
[Dr. Walter Kaiser]
[The Bible] really does talk about an absolute beginning, and the
text says, "In the beginning." It’s very, very crucial that all who
believe in the inerrancy of Scripture understand this is where it
all started. And the rest of the phrase, "heavens and earth," really
is the biblical word for "universe." It’s what we call hen dia dis:
hen, "one," dia, "through" dis, "two." So we have one idea through
two words, universe, expressed by "heaven and earth."
So, the whole shebang was
from "in the beginning." And who did it? God. God created. The word
bara is used forty-five times exclusively with God as the subject.
No other. There are other words for "make" or "form" or things like
that. But never does a human use the word bara, and never does it
have any material used as agency along with it.
So I think our commitment
ought to be to an absolute beginning, and that it was initiated by
God, and that it covers the whole universe.72
[Adam Clarke] A
general definition of this great First Cause, as far as human words
dare attempt one, may be thus given: The eternal, independent, and
self-existent Being: the Being whose purposes and actions spring
from himself, without foreign motive or influence: he who is
absolute in dominion; the most pure, the most simple, and most
spiritual of all essences; infinitely benevolent, beneficent, true,
and holy: the cause of all being, the upholder of all things;
infinitely happy, because infinitely perfect; and eternally
self-sufficient, needing nothing that he has made: illimitable in
his immensity, inconceivable in his mode of existence, and
indescribable in his essence; known fully only to himself, because
an infinite mind can be fully apprehended only by itself. In a word,
a Being who, from his infinite wisdom, cannot err or be deceived;
and who, from his infinite goodness, can do nothing but what is
eternally just, right, and kind. Reader, such is the God of the
Bible; but how widely different from the God of most human creeds
and apprehensions!73
Notes
1 Edythe Draper, Draper’s
Book of Quotations for the Christian World (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale
House Publishers).
2 Robert Jastrow, "A
Scientist Caught Between Two Faiths," Christianity Today, August 6,
1982.
3 Sir Isaac Newton,
"Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy," Encyclopedia
Britannica, Vol. 34, 1952, p. 369.
4 Robert Jastrow, God and
the Astronomers (New York: W.W. Norton Press, 1978), p. 116.
5 Michael Denton,
Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (Bethesda, MD: Adler & Adler, 1986),
pp. 260-261.
6 Sir Fred Hoyle, "Hoyle
on Evolution," Nature, Vol. 294, November 12, 1981, p. 105.
7 H. P. Yockey, "A
Calculation of the Probability of Spontaneous Biogenesis by
Information Theory," Journal of Theoretical Biology 67, 1977, p.
396.
8 George Wald, "The
Origin of Life," Life: Origin and Evolution (San Francisco: W.H.
Freeman Publishing, 1979), p. 48.
9 Francis Crick, Life
Itself (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981), p. 88.
10 William Day, Genesis
on Planet Earth: The Search for Life’s Beginning (East Lansing, MI:
House of Tabs, 1979), pp. 231-232.
11 Michael Denton,
Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, pp. 327-328.
12 Fred Hoyle and Chandra
Wickramasinghe, "Where Microbes Boldly Went," New Scientist 91,
1981, pp. 412- 15.
13 Emile Borel, Nobel
Prize Winner, Probabilities and Life (New York: Dover, 1962) ch.
1-3.
14 Scott M. Huse, The
Collapse of Evolution (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Bookhouse, 1983), p.
94.
15 Michael Denton,
Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, p. 326.
16 P.S. Moorhead and M.
M. Kaplan, eds., Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian
Interpretation of Evolution, Wistar Institute Press, Philadelphia,
1967, pp. 109. [Here is an evolutionary mathematician calculating
the probability of a single cell evolving into something as
complicated as a man and concluding that his calculations show that
the probability of a chance process to accomplish that is zero.]
17 Lewis Thomas, quoted
by Henry Brand and Philip Yancey, Fearfully and Wonderfully Made
(Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1980), p. 25.
18 Chandra Wickramasinghe,
quoted by Norman Geisler, A. F. Brooke, and Mark J. Keosh, The
Creator in the Courtroom (Milford, MI: Mott Media, 1982), p. 149.
19 Geisler, Brooke, Keosh,
p. 151.
20 Ravi Zacharias, Jesus
Among Other Gods (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, Inc.), p. 65.
21 Carl Sagan,
Intelligent Life in the Universe (London: Picador, Pan Books, Ltd.,
1977) p. 358.
22 Christianus Huygenus
[Dutch physicist], New Conjectures Concerning the Planetary Worlds,
Their Inhabitants and Productions cited by Carl Sagan in Intelligent
Life in the Universe, p. 214.
23 Michael Denton,
Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, p. 252.
24 Michael Denton,
Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, p. 260.
25 Michael Denton,
Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, p. 342.
26 Charles Darwin and
quoted in David Raup, "Conflicts Between Darwin and Paleontology,"
Field Museum of Natural History Bulletin, 22 and 23.
27 Thomas Huxley in his
three lectures on Evolution, p. 619.
28 Theodosius Dobzhansky,
American Science, 45:388, 1957.
29 Niles Eldredge and I.
Tattersall, The Myths of Human Evolution, pp. 45-46.
30 Stephen Jay Gould,
"The Return of Hopeful Monsters," Natural History, June-July, 1977,
pp. 22, 24.
31 George Gaylord
Simpson, The Major Features of Evolution, p. 360.
32 Donn Rosen,
"Evolution: An Old Debate With a New Twist," in St. Louis Post
Dispatch, May 17, 1981, quoted by James E. Adams.
33 Dr. Austin Clark,
"Animal Evolution," 3-Quarterly Review of Biology, 5-23, 539.
34 Dr. Betty Farber,
Entomologist with the American Museum of Natural History. Quoted by
M. Kusinitz, Science World, 4, February, 1983, pp. 12-19.
35 L. Harrison Matthews,
The Introduction to Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species (London:
Dent Publishers, 1959) p. 11.
36 Pierre P. Grasse,
Evolution of Living Organisms (New York: Academic, 1977), p. 30.
37 Louis L. Carroll,
"Problems of the Origin of Reptiles," Biological Reviews of the
Cambridge Philosophical Soc., #44, 1969, p. 393.
38 Jean L. Marx, "The
Oldest Fossil Bird: A Rival for Archaeopteryx?" Science Magazine,
199, January 20, 1978, p. 284.
39 Charles Darwin in a
letter to Hooker found in the book The Life and Letters of Charles
Darwin, 3 volumes, John Murray, London, Vol. 3, p. 248.
40 Gerald T. Todd,
"Evolution of the Lung and the Origin of Bony Fishes—A Causal
Relationship," The American Zoologist, #4, 1980, p. 757.
41 Julian Huxley,
Evolution in Action (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1953), pp. 45-46.
42 Stated by Robert
Barnes, Invertebrate Beginnings in "Paleobiology," 6:365-70.
43 Colin Patterson in a
letter to Luther D. Sunderland, April 10, 1979, cited by William J.
Guste, Jr. in the Plaintiff’s Pre-Trial Brief for a recent Louisiana
Trial on Creation and Evolution, June 3, 1982.
44 David Raup and Steven
N. Stanley, Principles of Paleontology, p. 306.
45 George Gaylord Simpson
at the Darwin Centenary Symposium held in Chicago in 1959. This is
also stated in Simpson’s book The Evolution of Life in the Chapter
"The History of Life," The University of Chicago Press, Chicago,
Pages 117-180: published in 1960. Specifically see page 135.
46 Steven N. Stanley,
Macro-Evolution (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Co., 1979), p. 2.
47 Stephen Jay Gould,
"The Five Kingdoms," Natural History, June-July, 1976, pp. 30, 37.
48 Stated British Museum
(Natural History), Man’s Place in Evolution. 2nd ed. (Cambridge,
England: New York, N.Y., USA: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p.
20.
49 Steven N. Stanley, The
New Evolutionary Timetable: Fossils, Genes, and the Origin of
Species, (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1981), from the Preface, p.
XV.
50 This was an article in
the British newspaper "The Guardian Weekly," November 26, 1978, Vol.
119, #22, page 1 of an interview with Niles Eldredge. The headline
of the article was entitled "Missing, Believed Nonexistent."
51 Stephen Jay Gould,
"Evolution’s Erratic Pace," Natural History 86, May, 1977, p. 12.
52 Ibid., p. 14.
53 Frederick Nietzsche,
Anti-Christ in The Portable Nietzsche (New York: Viking Press,
1968), p. 627.
54 The Secular Humanist
lawyer Clarence Darrow argued this at the Scopes Trial of 1925.
55 Norman Geisler,
Creator in the Courtroom: Scopes 2 (Milford, MI: Mott Media, 1987),
p. 203.
56 Michael Denton,
Evolution, a Theory in Crisis, p. 358.
57 Stated by Sir Peter
Medawar in his opening remarks as chairman of a symposium entitled
"Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of
Evolution" held April 25 and 26, 1966 at the Wistar Institute of
Anatomy and Biology in Philadelphia.
58 Lipson, "A Physicist
Looks at Evolution," Physics Bulletin, 138, 1980.
59 Keil & Delitzsch,
Commentary on the Old Testament Vol. 1: Pentateuch, Electronic
Edition STEP Files Copyright © 2000, Findex.Com. All rights
reserved.
60 Charles Ryrie, Basic
Theology (Victor Books)
61 Gen 1:2; Job 26:13;
33:4; John 1:2, 3; Heb. 1:2.
62 Psa. 33:5, 6; 104:24;
Jer. 10:12; Rom. 1:20.
63 Gen. 1:1-50:26; Acts
17:24; Col. 1:16; Heb. 11:3.
64 Gen. 1:27.
65 Gen. 2:7; Eccl. 12:7;
Matt. 10:28; Luke 23:43.
66 Gen 1:26: Eph. 4:24;
Col. 3:10.
67 Rom. 2:14, 15.
68 Eccl. 7:29.
69 Gen. 3:6; Eccl. 7:29.
70 Gen. 2:17; 3:8-11, 23.
71 Gen. 1:26, 28.
72 The John Ankerberg
Show, "The Biblical Account of Creation: What Information Has God
Given Us About How and When He Created?" Program transcript.
73 Adam Clarke’s
Commentary on the Old Testament, Electronic Edition STEP Files
Copyright © 1999, Parsons Technology, Inc., all rights reserved.
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