Beware that no one shall be despoiling you through philosophy and empty seduction, in accord with human tradition, in accord with the elements of the world, and not in accord with Christ, for in Him the entire complement of the Deity is dwelling bodily (Colossians 2:8-9).
The above verses from Colossians present us with a stark contrast between the truth that is said to be in Christ and the falsehoods allegedly embraced by the evo-atheists. The verses define the things that lead to the kind of human thinking which purports to contradict the truth in Christ and in the Scriptures, and we are warned to beware of them. These things include “philosophy and empty seduction.”
Evo-atheism utterly contradicts the idea that the truth of humanity’s origin and purpose is found in Christ and in the Scriptures as a whole. Now, if the passage cited above from Colossians is true, then we ought to easily be able to show that Darwinism as a theory is nothing but philosophy and empty seduction. A theory that is not empty, or not void of evidence and merit, does not need seduction to sustain it. So we’re going to start with the “empty” part, then in the next two chapters, discuss the seduction surrounding the great void in evoatheism. Philosophy—from the Greek philo-sophia, fondness for human wisdom and reasoning—is a more complicated subject, involving as it does a systematizing of the seduction and the concomitant deception. So we will devote all of Chapter 6 to philosophy and its rule over the hierarchy of the National Academy of Sciences, and over all others who embrace the notion we evolved by chance over millions of years through and from reptiles.
In order to sustain a valid theory of the evolution of the species by chance from inert matter, proponents of it need to provide evidence for three things: first, they need to show how the inert matter became alive; second, they need evidence of how the sexes evolved; and third, they need to show, step by step, how an organism, any living organism, evolved from five or so of its predecessor species, step by step. That alleged process is called speciation.
To see how much evidence the NAS has for these things, let’s picture three mason jars next to each other on a table. No, mason jars are too small. Again and again, the NAS book writers claim that the evidence for evolution is “overwhelming.” We don’t want evidence spilling out all over the floor, so we’ll use metal bushel baskets to contain it all. Let’s picture ourselves, then, taking the evidence from the evo-atheists as they offer it, and dropping it, piece by piece, into the respective bushel baskets.
THE FIRST BUSHEL BASKET
Let’s see how much evidence we can drop in the first basket. The authors of the NAS book admit that they can produce no evidence whatsoever showing that inert matter, by chance, turned into an information-based life form, writing, “Constructing a plausible hypothesis of life’s origins will require that many questions be answered” (p. 22). Let me emphasize that this is an explicit acknowledgement from the NAS that not only do they have no evidence for the origin of life, but they also have no “plausible hypothesis” for it either. The first basket must thus remain empty.
It is important to note that without any evidence at all for it, they still insist that life began by a chance occurrence: matter suddenly turned into a living cell capable of reproducing itself, and “evolving” over billions of years into the millions of different kinds of life on earth today. They cannot describe what specifically happened, how it happened, where it happened, why it happened, or when it happened, yet they adamantly maintain that it happened.
If a man kept showing up at the police station, insisting that a crime had occurred, but could not say specifically what had happened, or how, where, why, or when it happened, he’d be charged with filing a false report. Darwinism is, and always has been, a false report. Its evidence-lacking insistence on this point is just a small part of what makes Darwinism a philosophy of science, and not science itself.
THE SECOND BUSHEL BASKET
Now for the second bushel basket. Mark 10:6 tells us creationists that “from the beginning of creation God makes them male and female.” The evolutionists say that the sexes evolved over hundreds of millions of years through genetic copying errors acted upon by that elusive figure of speech, natural selection. What evidence do they have for the evolution of the sexes? They just might have some, because I’m looking at an article in The Washington Post by David Brown about genomes, chimpanzees, and mankind wherein he asserts as facts that “scientists have confirmed how sex evolved,” and that our X and Y chromosomes “are descended from the same ‘ancestor chromosome’ which existed 300 million years ago at the dawn of this form of sexual reproduction.” Before we drop these facts into the second bushel basket, all we have to do is find out where he got them, and verify them.
It turns out that Brown found these facts in another article written in The Washington Post six months earlier (March 17, 2005, page A3) by reporter Rick Weiss. Weiss is reporting on an article that appeared in Nature magazine. The headline reads, “Human X Chromosome Coded,” and the subhead line reads: “Sequence Confirms How Sex Evolved and Explains Some Male-Female Differences.” Note the word “Confirms.” To confirm means “to give new assurance of the truth of; verify; corroborate.” Is this the verification we’re looking for? Sorry, no. Despite the promising subhead line, Weiss presents no evidence at all in the text of the article confirming how sex evolved (neither did his source, Nature magazine)—just these two utterly speculative sentences:
It happened about 300 million years ago, long before the first mammals. A conventional chromosome in a forebear of humans—probably a reptile of some sort—apparently underwent a mutation that allowed it to direct the development of sperm-producing testes.
Does “Probably a reptile of some sort [which] apparently underwent a mutation” qualify as evidence? No, we really cannot put that into the second bushel basket as a fact. The Washington Post has editorialized that the evidence for evolution is “overwhelming” and “powerful.” How can such a prestigious newspaper allow such idiotic speculation to pass for proof? They do it all the time, as do hundreds of other mainstream newspapers and magazines who also “believe” in evolution. They have no evidence for how the sexes evolved, so they try to fill up the basket with “Probably a reptile of some sort [which] apparently underwent a mutation” type of stuff. Our evidence basket is no place for make-believe events, or for that matter, any other sham “evidence” they have concocted. The NAS has no evidence for how the sexes allegedly evolved. Alas, the second bushel basket must remain empty.
Our endeavor to find the evidence, however, has been instructive, for we have learned how evo-atheists try to fake “evolutionary” evidence for the origins of male and female. How many readers just skimming the article, including school-children, trusted The Washington Post and its reporter to be honest, and were thus enticed by the false subhead line to believe that scientists actually possess confirmed evidence for the evolutionary origin of the sexes?
The Washington Post article also gives us insight into an aspect of the evolutionists’ true “scientific method”—transmuting speculation into fact just by saying it is so. And don’t kid yourself—it’s not just this bushel basket they try to force counterfeit evidence into—it is all three.
THE THIRD BUSHEL BASKET
The third bushel basket is the place reserved for us to put evidence of speciation, as the NAS defines it, “The evolutionary processes through which new species arise from existing species.” Earlier, I referred to the need to take one specific species back through its immediate predecessor species, and through the one before that, etc., ultimately yielding a clear line of unbroken related descent going back to the fifth ancestor species, with each of the species being unambiguously identified. But since the effort of the NAS to fill the other baskets has been so abysmal, we are going to cut them some slack with this basket. All we are going to ask is that they provide just the one immediate ancestor-species of any existing species. With all their boasting, that should be a snap for the NAS book writers. They write the following on page 24 of their book:
Each species that lives on Earth today is the product of an evolutionary lineage—that is, it arose from a preexisting species, which itself arose from a preexisting species, and so on back through time.
This is written in the indicative mood, the mood of fact, and it is written with great confidence. We should expect then, to be told specifically what species preceded us. The NAS book says on the same page, “. . . humans are not descended from chimpanzees or from any other ape living today but from a species that no longer exists.” Do the NAS writers identify that species? If they do, we’ve got some potential evidence for the third bushel basket. But alas, no, the NAS book does not identify the specific species from which we supposedly evolved. What we have here is nothing but an unfounded assertion of speciation, and nothing else. We cannot put this in the evidence basket.
The NAS writers don’t know the identity of our immediate preexisting species, so I guess there is no point in asking them to identify the pre-existing species from which our immediate pre-existing species “evolved.” And there is surely no sense in repeating that fruitless and empty process “so on back through time.”
This patently ludicrous scenario reminds me of the newly-hired piccolo player joke. On his first day in church, he can’t play any of the hymns. When the preacher turns his back on the congregation, a person stands up and says “the piccolo player is an idiot,” and sits back down. The preacher returns to the pulpit and demands that the person who said that stand up. When the person doesn’t stand up, the preacher asks the person sitting next to the person who called the piccolo player an idiot to stand up. When that person doesn’t stand up, he asks the person sitting next to the person, sitting next to the person . . . etc. (In such a proper Sunday morning setting such as that, time can only ooze sluggishly).
After it is taken to the tenth degree, or as far as the joke audience will allow, someone stands up in the back and says, “I am not the person sitting next to the person, sitting next to the person, sitting next to the person,” etc., going back through the whole sequence, one at a time, until he finally gets to: “And I am not the person who called the piccolo player an idiot, but,” he continues, “what I and the rest of the people in this congregation want to know is: who called that idiot a piccolo player?
It is about time that, in our public school and college science classes, some students who see the real truth and the real issues, begin standing up in the back of the class, demanding of their teachers, “Who called that evolutionary speculation evidence?”
CONFUSION PORTRAYED AS EVIDENCE
The cover of the October 9, 2006 Time Magazine featured a chimp’s face juxtaposed next to a human baby’s face. Between them appeared the words, “How We Became Human. Chimps and humans share almost 99% of their DNA. New discoveries reveal how we can be so alike—and yet so different.” The reporters, Michael D. Lemonick and Andrea Dorfman wrote the article as if evolution were an absolutely proven fact. The main logical error they embrace is the idea that similar DNA in two species means that the most advanced species evolved from the other. A better explanation for the similarity is that the same Creator made humans, chimps, and every other living thing, but with such article sources as the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology, the God hypothesis is forbidden.
The Time article points out that 3 billion is the number of base pairs in the human genome, only 1.23% of which are different in the chimp genome. Suddenly, I want to eat a banana and swing through the trees! Let’s multiply that 1.23% times 3 billion (something the article writers don’t do for us): it comes to 36,900,000 different base pairs that, according to their beliefs, are the result of 36,900,000 unpredictable aberrations, or genetic copying mistakes. Remember, these represent only the so-called “beneficial” copying errors. To get these 36,900,000 good errors (if that phrase makes sense), there had to have occurred hundreds of millions, or even thousands of millions of neutral and harmful copying mistakes. How does a species which endures hundreds of millions of harmful genetic copying errors—the kind that lead to disease and deformity—survive, much less progress?
The Time article went into some detail about the most unusual findings of David Reich of the Broad Institute, whose founding director is a member of the NAS:
Reich’s team measured how the evolutionary clock varied across chromosomes in the different species. To their surprise, they deduced that chimps and humans split from a common ancestor no more than 6.3 million years ago and probably less than 5.4 million years ago. If they’re correct, several hominid species now considered to be among our earliest ancestors—Sahelanthropus tchadensis (7 million years old), Orrorin tugenenesis (about 6 million years old) and Ardipithecus kadabba (5.2 to 5.7 million years old)—may have to be re-evaluated.
And that’s not the most startling finding. Reich’s team also found the entire human X chromosome diverged from the chimp’s X chromosome about 1.2 million years later than the other chromosomes. One plausible explanation is that chimps and humans first split but later interbred from time to time before finally going their separate evolutionary ways. That could explain why some of the most ancient fossils now considered human ancestors have such striking mixtures of chimp and human traits—some could actually have been hybrids. Or they might have simply coexisted with, or even predated, the last common ancestor of chimps and humans (my emphases).
What are “scientist” Reich and the two reporters who wrote this article doing here? They are fabricating and fondling falsehood, plain and simple. Note that, at the end of the first paragraph, what used to pass for evidence now “may have to be re-evaluated.” The “evidence” for evolution always needs to be re-evaluated because there is never any substance to it.
You would think that in an 86-page book, the NAS could present ten or twenty pages of straightforward evidence for evolution, explaining how hearing and eyesight developed among animals, how insects and birds grew wings and learned to fly, how the spider learned its weaving craft, how ants and bees learned to socialize, and how a blade of grass became a redwood tree—all through a series of millions of unpredictable aberrations. The NAS book authors refer to an “immense body of evidence” proving evolution, but yet neglect to give us any details about said evidence.
EVOLUTION IS ALWAYS ASSUMED, NEVER PROVEN
The NAS book claims on page 23 that:
In the more recent fossil record, the evolutionary paths of many modern organisms, such as whales, elephants, armadillos, horses and humans have been uncovered.
We’ve seen that the human “evolutionary path” is about as unspecific as it can be. What about horses? Can the evo-atheists present any evidence for their speciation? They say they can. The typical fossil display includes four horse skeletons in line, ordered from the smallest to the largest, implying that over millions of years, that’s how they evolved. Before we get into more detail on the horses, let me share a quote from atheist NAS spokesman Neil deGrasse Tyson. It is from his speech during Session Two of the Beyond Belief Conference held in San Diego in November of 2006:
At our museum in New York, the American Museum of Natural History, they [Bible-believing Christians] come to the Big Bang exhibit and sometimes I don’t feel like having that conversation. I say, “Why don’t you go to our hall of human biology first and then come to us.” And that’s where we have sort of monkeys holding hands with people in skeleton forms and then they [the Bible-believing Christians] never make it back to the Big Bang. They’re gone forever, okay. So however egregious the Big Bang is [to them], monkeys and people is a worse transgression, apparently (laughter).
Please note first Tyson’s ridicule of Bible-believing Christians. And second, note that Tyson and his pals at the museum have set up monkeys and people holding hands. No thinking person would mistake this kind of a set-up for evidence of evolution. It does show, however, their propensity to create displays in such a way so as to make visitors think that people and monkeys share a common ancestor who sits on an imaginary branch of their whimsical evolutionary tree. The horse displays amount to essentially the same kind of set-up.
Writer Peter Hastie has debunked the idea of proof for horse evolution making, among many others, the following key points:
We ought to find the earliest horse fossils in the lowest rock strata, but we don’t. The so-called “earliest” horses have been found near the surface, sometimes right next to modern horse fossils. The fossil fragments have been gathered from several continents on the assumption of evolutionary progress, and then used to support the assumption.
“When evolutionists assume that the horse has grown progressively in size over millions of years,” Mr. Hastie writes, “what they forget is that modern horses vary enormously in size. The largest horse today is the Clydesdale; the smallest is the Fallabella, which stands at 17 inches (43 centimeters) tall. Both are members of the same species, and neither has evolved from the other.”1
Finally, Mr. Hastie quotes evolutionist Dr. Niles Eldredge, curator of the American Museum of Natural History:
I admit that an awful lot of that (imaginary stories) has gotten into the textbooks as though it were true. For instance, the most famous example still on exhibit downstairs (in the American Museum) is the exhibit on horse evolution prepared perhaps 50 years ago. That has been presented as literal truth in textbook after textbook. Now I think that that is lamentable . . . 2
When pressed, the evo-atheists admit they have no evidence for horse speciation. What about the whales, elephants, and armadillos they mention? The NAS writers present no evidence for their speciation. I searched evolution-friendly Web sites but was unable to find the identity of any of their direct ancestors. I invite you to go on the Internet yourself to find the proof we’re looking for. Good luck. I was able to retrieve the following information from some of those sites: “The direct ancestor to the modern-day elephant is unknown . . .,” “Some details (about the whale) remain fuzzy and under investigation,” and “There isn’t much information on the evolution of the nine-banded armadillo.”
The NAS book devotes two pages to a fossil uncovered in northern Canada they named Tiktaalik from the Inuit word for “big freshwater fish.” They claim it represents a 375-million-year-old missing link between water and land animals. They refuse any challenges to their dating methods. For their evolutionary speculation to be true, these fossils have to be that old. The cataclysmic upheavels of Noah’s Flood are what most likely trapped Tiktaalik. The NAS writers say that the most important thing is that “its fins contained bones that formed a limb-like appendage that the animal could use to move and prop itself up” (p. 3). Creation scientists have already shown that the Tiktaalik’s fin was not connected to the main skeleton, so could not have supported its weight on land.
It won’t be long before Tiktaalik has gone through the typical “missing link” life cycle: fragments found, imaginative interpretation, popular publication, data dismissed. Remember the distorted skull and jaw fragments of the “Chad Ape-Man?” The Washington Post editors made a huge deal over it. The July 11, 2002, issue of Nature wrote about it:
This skull’s combination of primitive and advanced features suggests remarkable past diversity in the human family tree, and should ensure that the term ‘missing link’ is consigned to history.
Only three months later, other scientists writing in the October 10, 2002, issue of Nature, who went into more detail, discredited the find as just another ape—a record time for the completion of the “fragments found” to “data dismissed” cycle. 3
Tiktaalik is really irrelevant to our effort to put evidence of speciation into the third bushel basket because the evo-atheists cannot identify the species from which, or into which, Tiktaalik allegedly evolved.
Neil Shubin, the paleontologist who found Tiktaalik in 2004, has written a book entitled, Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body. Evo-atheist professor of biological anthropology, Barbara J. King, reviewed it in the February 17-23, 2008 edition of The Washington Post Book World. King reported that “Shubin wants us to see our history not only as primates, but also as insects and worms.”
Please keep the insects and worms in your family, Shubin. Some of us were created as spiritual beings, in the image of our Creator.
The Book World editors entitled the review “The Missing Link,” without the quotes. This demonstrates just how eager papers such as The Washington Post are to present evo-atheist speculation as fact. I can see giving a doctoral candidate an extra few months to complete his or her thesis. But giving the evo-atheists 150 years to produce a genuine missing link is a bit too lenient.
The NAS writers also reference a bird fossil called Archaeopteryx they claim is 155 million-years-old, and try to make a feathered dinosaur out of it. But Dr. Alan Feduccia, a world authority on birds at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and an evolutionist himself, discounts their speculation:
Paleontologists have tried to turn Archaeopteryx into an earth-bound, feathered dinosaur. But it’s not. It is a bird, a perching bird. And no amount of ‘paleobabble’ is going to change that. 4
And as with Tiktaalik, the evo-atheists cannot identify the species from which, or into which, Archaeopteryx allegedly evolved. So, we still have no evidence of speciation to put into our third bushel basket.
On page 23, in between their mention of Tiktaalik and their mention of Archaeopteryx, the NAS writers sandwich in these two sentences:
Fossils from about 330 million years ago document the evolution of large amphibians from the early tetrapods [animals with four legs]. Well-preserved skeletons from rocks that are 230 million years old show dinosaurs evolving from a lineage of reptiles (my emphases).
Think about this: the NAS writers go into detail about two fossils for which they cannot demonstrate speciation. Yet, they give no details and present no images for fossils they claim “document” and “show” speciation. If, as they claim, these fossils did, in fact, document and show speciation, they would have put their evidence on the front cover of their book. The evo-atheists cannot name the direct ancestor species of any living species, and yet they expect us to believe they’ve got the scoop on species they say lived hundreds of millions of years ago. They do not have any evidence at all for speciation. In the above passage, they are trying to sneak by the unwary reader a false claim for it.
Again, they are not interested in uncovering the truths of nature; they want to justify their atheism. At any rate, false claims don’t cut it. We are looking for evidence for speciation, and the NAS does not have any. The third bushel basket must remain empty.
The NAS book is the product of a large committee. You know the old saying, “Too many atheists spoil the pretense.” On page 52, one of their writers basically admits they have no evidence for the origin of sex or speciation with this phrase: “Of course, there remain many interesting questions about evolution, such as the evolutionary origin of sex or different mechanisms of speciation . . .” How about demonstrating just one mechanism of speciation for just one species? A clam, a potato, a grasshopper, a slug, a tulip, an anchovy, anything!
Three empty bushel baskets sitting in a row. “Evolution evidence for sale! Evolution evidence for sale! Get your bushel-baskets-full right here at the NAS headquarters!” Are you buying it?
We are now familiar with the “empty” part of “philosophy and empty seduction.” In the next two chapters, we will examine the seductions employed by the NAS which make it seem to some that empty baskets are full. In the chapter following the next two, we will show how their Platonic philosophy aids in the systematizing of their many deceptions.