Creationist Apologetics, part 2

I started a series on creationist apologetics about three week ago in response to Scientific American’s 15 Answer’s to Creationist Nonsense. I now continue with more comments on their objections to creationist’s arguments against the theory of evolution in this second edition of Creationist Apologetics.

13. Evolutionists cannot point to any transitional fossils--creatures that are half reptile and half bird, for instance.

Actually, paleontologists know of many detailed examples of fossils intermediate in form between various taxonomic groups. One of the most famous fossils of all time is Archaeopteryx, which combines feathers and skeletal structures peculiar to birds with features of dinosaurs. A flock's worth of other feathered fossil species, some more avian and some less, has also been found. A sequence of fossils spans the evolution of modern horses from the tiny Eohippus. Whales had four-legged ancestors that walked on land, and creatures known as Ambulocetus and Rodhocetus helped to make that transition [see "The Mammals That Conquered the Seas," by Kate Wong; Scientific American, May]. Fossil seashells trace the evolution of various mollusks through millions of years. Perhaps 20 or more hominids (not all of them our ancestors) fill the gap between Lucy the australopithecine and modern humans.

Creationists, though, dismiss these fossil studies. They argue that Archaeopteryx is not a missing link between reptiles and birds--it is just an extinct bird with reptilian features. They want evolutionists to produce a weird, chimeric monster that cannot be classified as belonging to any known group. Even if a creationist does accept a fossil as transitional between two species, he or she may then insist on seeing other fossils intermediate between it and the first two. These frustrating requests can proceed ad infinitum and place an unreasonable burden on the always incomplete fossil record.

Nevertheless, evolutionists can cite further supportive evidence from molecular biology. All organisms share most of the same genes, but as evolution predicts, the structures of these genes and their products diverge among species, in keeping with their evolutionary relationships. Geneticists speak of the "molecular clock" that records the passage of time. These molecular data also show how various organisms are transitional within evolution.

The features of the Archaeopteryx are all fully formed features. It does have teeth, but the feathers, bones, jaw, and brain are characteristic of modern birds without any reptilian elements. The Sinosauroptereryx prima and the Mononykus were put forth as a feathered reptiles, but paleontologists later found this not to be the case.

The proposed evolution of the horse is utterly ridiculous. The fossil layers and radiometric dates of the alleged links are not in the same order as they are arranged when showing evolution from Eohippus to modern horses. The geographical locations in which the fossils were found are also not logical with respect to the order in which they supposedly evolved. Even if modern horses descended from Eohippus, this in no way contradicts Scripture because the Bible doesn’t mention Eohippus or any of the other supposed links as a separate Genesis kind. The bone structures of the specimens actually become simpler from Eohippus to the modern horse (three toes vs. hooves), so this (even if it were true) would not be a proven example of evolution of a higher life form with more functioning parts.

Ambulocetus was constructed from bones which didn’t necessarily all come from the same creature, and even if they did, the skeleton has quite a large section missing. Some of the bones were found 5 m above the rest. Evolutionists have dated this creature to be younger than fossils of modern whales.

Piltdown Man, Nebraska Man, Peking Man, and several other alleged missing links between apes and humans have proven to be hoaxes. More and more scientists have concluded that Lucy was just an ordinary ape and that Neanderthal Man was an “evolutionary dead end”. Missing links go through phases. First as soon as one has been found, the news media sensationalizes it. Then it is scrutinized by the “experts” in the scientific community. If they think that they can pass it off as genuine, then it becomes a “scientific fact”. Then it is taught as a fact in public schools and anyone who refuses to pay their taxes to support such nonsense is labeled a criminal and thrown in jail. Then the scientific community quietly and gradually drops the claim that it is a real missing link. After about forty years, public schools stop teaching that it is a fact that this is a real missing link. All the while more “evidence” is found to replace it on the evolutionary tree.

14. Living things have fantastically intricate features--at the anatomical, cellular and molecular levels--that could not function if they were any less complex or sophisticated. The only prudent conclusion is that they are the products of intelligent design, not evolution.

This "argument from design" is the backbone of most recent attacks on evolution, but it is also one of the oldest. In 1802 theologian William Paley wrote that if one finds a pocket watch in a field, the most reasonable conclusion is that someone dropped it, not that natural forces created it there. By analogy, Paley argued, the complex structures of living things must be the handiwork of direct, divine invention. Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species as an answer to Paley: he explained how natural forces of selection, acting on inherited features, could gradually shape the evolution of ornate organic structures.

Generations of creationists have tried to counter Darwin by citing the example of the eye as a structure that could not have evolved. The eye's ability to provide vision depends on the perfect arrangement of its parts, these critics say. Natural selection could thus never favor the transitional forms needed during the eye's evolution--what good is half an eye? Anticipating this criticism, Darwin suggested that even "incomplete" eyes might confer benefits (such as helping creatures orient toward light) and thereby survive for further evolutionary refinement. Biology has vindicated Darwin: researchers have identified primitive eyes and light-sensing organs throughout the animal kingdom and have even tracked the evolutionary history of eyes through comparative genetics. (It now appears that in various families of organisms, eyes have evolved independently.)

Today's intelligent-design advocates are more sophisticated than their predecessors, but their arguments and goals are not fundamentally different. They criticize evolution by trying to demonstrate that it could not account for life as we know it and then insist that the only tenable alternative is that life was designed by an unidentified intelligence.

Irreducible complexity is hard to prove rigorously (read Scientific American’s arguments against the irreducible complexity of the flagellum here), but the idea that these things just fell into place by chance, natural selection and mutations more than stretches the limits of believability. What the theory of evolution proposes about the origin of such complex and information containing structures is counterintuitive to what is observed in nature. In other words what we commonly see in the world doesn’t suggest that movement toward higher life forms. Irreducible complexity can be more clearly seen on the genomic level, rather than the phenomic level.

The argument that natural selection can account for the rise of higher life forms has been thoroughly disproved. Selection is ineffective against "near neutral" mutations which have the effect of degrading the genome (undoing hypothetical evolutionary progress) much faster than any evolutionary mechanism could build an improved organism. This is proven mathematically and scientifically in the book Genetic Entropy & The Mystery of the Genome by Cornell University genetics professor Dr. J. C. Sanford.

They admit that they believe that certain features (such as the eye) have evolved independently in different species, but yet claim that it is unreasonable that God would repeatedly create these same features in different organisms. This is not logical.

At the end of the article they make this statement:

"Creation science" is a contradiction in terms. A central tenet of modern science is methodological naturalism--it seeks to explain the universe purely in terms of observed or testable natural mechanisms.

I reject the philosophy of positivism. Just because something can’t be falsified using scientific means doesn’t mean that it isn’t a useful concept or that it isn’t worth believing in. When you die, if you are not sent to either Paradise or Hades, in a conscience state, then at that moment the Truth of the Scriptures would be falsified for you.

They say:

Intelligent design offers few answers. For instance, when and how did a designing intelligence intervene in life's history? By creating the first DNA? The first cell? The first human? Was every species designed, or just a few early ones? Proponents of intelligent-design theory frequently decline to be pinned down on these points.

God’s Word is more reliable than the Laws of thermodynamics. I don’t care about ID. The Bible does answer some of these questions and the others can be answered by open-minded scientific inquiry. If something is not knowable by scientific means, there is nothing wrong with admitting it. The proponents of evolution frequently decline to be pinned down on many important questions as well.

Here is a link to the next post in this series.