Lesson 3

Ape Versus Adam

One of the most religious questions anyone could ask is one regarding our origin. The Bible teaches that God created the human race through Adam and Eve. The evolutionists on the other hand claim that life emerges from lifeless matter via random forces. As a matter of historical accidents, creation is taken to be a myth and evolution a fact. The goal of this lesson is to show the opposite—i.e., the evidence for creation is good and evolution bad.

Creationism

The controversy of creation versus evolution is not something new. Ancient Greek philosophers had already advocated a form of dualism, which espoused the idea of life emanating from eternal matter. The early church fathers invested a great deal of energy to refute naturalism because they understood it to be anti-biblical.

The Hebrew words used for “create” in Genesis 1:1 is “bara” (arb) which has the semantic range of “creation out of nothing”—meaning that the universe was not created from pre-existent materials. It is known as the doctrine of creation ex nihilo. “Bara” is also used in Genesis 1:27 where God “created” Adam and Eve in His image. We take its usage in this context to mean that God did not create the human race from pre-human creatures. Interestingly a different Hebrew word “yasar” (rjy) is used in Genesis 2:7 (a parallel creation account) when it says that God “fashioned” man from the dust. Contrary to “bara,” “yasar” has the meaning of “creation from existent materials.”[1] The meanings of the two Hebrew words are not contradictory. Together, they convey a more specific picture of God’s creation in which Adam and Eve were formed from the terrestrial materials but not pre-existent animal species. Based on this interpretation, I think that Christians have theological reasons to reject evolution.

Traditionally there are four main theories of creation: (1) six-day creationism, (2) progressive creationism, (3) theistic evolution, and (4) the gap theory. As its name suggests, six-day creationism advocates that God created the world in six consecutive literal days. According to this view, the earth is only six thousand years old. The famous reference is Archbishop Ussher’s calculation that the earth was created at 9:00 a.m. on October 26, 4004 B.C.[2] Six-day creationism is also called recent or young-earth creationism. Recent creationism relies on “creation with a history” to explain the apparent age of the universe. Perhaps God created Adam and Eve with belly buttons. The problem of creation with a history is that it obscures the distinction between real existence and apparent existence. When an astronomer looks at a star 5 billion light years away, he is seeing only a mirage, not a real object, according to recent creationists. Once we allow apparent creation, we come dangerously come to anti-realism.

Progressive creationism is a compromise between evolution and creation. In this view, a creation day is taken to be an eon. Theistic evolution is evolutionary theory retained in full except at a few points where it appears to be incompatible with Christianity. This view requires only God’s setting the correct initial conditions for the universe to evolve. Neither progressive creationism nor theistic evolution subscribes to a literal interpretation of the scripture. Both try to harmonize creation with current evolutionary hypotheses. The weakness of this approach is that confession is led by fashion instead of timeless principles. Furthermore, these views add little or nothing to our creative understanding of nature.

The gap theory is a highly speculative approach to harmonize creation with the apparent age of the universe. This theory postulates a long time gap between a pre-Adamic creation and the Genesis creation. The pre-Adamic race was destroyed because of their sins. God re-created a second human lineage through Adam and Eve. The obvious problem here is that the Bible makes no mention of any pre-Adamic civilization. Hence the introduction of a pre-Adamic race may create more problems than it solves.

The shortcomings of these traditional theories tell us that there is a need for another theory of creation that is both exegetically and scientifically sound. For this reason, I invented an alternative called the “multiple gap theory.” I will postpone a detailed discussion of this theory until the lesson on cosmology. For now, it suffices to say that the Bible teaches creation ex nihilo and there exists a viable theory of creation.

Evolution

Aristotle proposed the idea of “spontaneous generation” which says that inorganic matter generates organic life spontaneously. Empedocles, a Greek physician, suggested that animals were the latest arrivals in natural history. But it was not until the 18^th century when Charles Bonnet coined the term “evolution” for the first time. Soon after, Jean Baptiste Lamarck, a French taxonomist, laid the pre-Darwinian conceptual framework of speciation, adaptation to change and inheritance of acquired characteristics. An English geologist, Charles Lyell, invented the concept of uniformitarianism which says that the laws of physics and chemistry are the same for all times and in all places. Both Lamarck and Lyell had a profound impact on the thinking of Darwin (1809-1882). In 1831, Darwin, only 22 year old then, took a leave of absence from his theological studies at Cambridge University to join an expedition on the Beagle. While he was visiting the Galapagos Archipelago islands, he noticed certain relationships in the features of bird species. Later he outlined five evolutionary principles from his observations: (1) perpetual change—species are constantly evolving, (2) common descent—all living organisms have a common ancestry, (3) speciation—the number of species continuously multiplies, (4) gradualism—evolutionary changes occur in insusceptible small steps, and (5) natural selection—the fittest survive. Darwin’s Origin of Species shook the world with its publication in 1859. Classical Darwinism was born.

Gradualism and speciation implies that the number of species multiplies continuously over a long period of time. If it were the case, the fossil records must be saturated with transitional forms. To Darwin’s dismay, quite the opposite is true—the evolutionary links are ubiquitously missing in fossil records. At the time, Darwin argued that the fossil records were incomplete. Today, even after 130 years of avid research, the missing links continue to be a real enigma.

In addition to the problem of the missing links, the fossil records post two other major puzzles to the evolutionists: (1) stasis—species appear unchanged in the fossil records, and (2) the sudden appearance of new species. It was soon clear that classical Darwinism could not explain the fossil data. In 1970, Stephen Jay Gould (a paleontologist at Harvard University) and Niles Eldridge (a genetic biologist) invented the idea “punctuated equilibrium.” They claim that evolutionary processes are suppressed under normal conditions due to various competing factors. Occasionally a subgroup of a species separates itself from the main habitat. They undergo sudden evolutionary changes and later rejoin the main group. Gould and Eldridge hope to explain the phenomena of stasis and the sudden emergence of species. In addition, Weissman replaced the Larmarckian view of inheritance in classical Darwinism with Mendelian genetics as a mechanism of inheritance. These modifications transform classical Darwinism to neo-Darwinism.

Neo-Darwinism is simply an attempt to postpone the answers. Although microevolution is documented, macroevolution (the emergence of a new species) is never observed even under the most favorable laboratory conditions. Neo-Darwinism does not offer any mechanism for saltation (the systematic macroevolution of an entire species). Synthetic theory, the newest trend in modern evolutionary theories, tries to add layers of complexity to patch up the old theory by culminating various disciplines, such as population genetics, paleontology, biogeography, embryology, systematics, animal behavior, and so on.[3] So far it is not clear the new theory has solved any old problems.

Darwinist Religion

Philip Johnson is a professor of law and an expert of logic at University of California—Berkeley. He analyzes the arguments of the evolutionists just like he would for a court case. He discovers several logical fallacies in the Darwinist arguments, such as tautology, truth by default and ad hoc classification.

Evolutionary theories are often tautological for the sole purpose of avoiding falsification. A tautology is a statement that says the same thing twice. An example is the proposition “the fittest survives.” The fittest is not necessarily the strongest and the smartest but the most adapted to survive. Therefore, “the fittest survive” simply means “those most adapted to survive survive.” In a tautology, the predicate is also the subject. A self-referential is true by default. It cannot be checked empirically. In other words, evolution is guaranteed longevity because it cannot be proven wrong.[4]

Evolutionists assume that evolution is a fact a priori. Data are used for comparing different evolutionary models only but not for disproving them. Data that fail to fit any evolutionary theory are simply considered inconclusive but not as evidence against evolution. In the some cases, anthropologists have even fabricated forgeries in their eagerness to link human ancestry to apes, as in the Piltdown Hoax.[5]

Finally, the classification schemes used by evolutionists are often ad hoc and arbitrary. Why is human classified as a primate and not something unique? Classification schemes are theory laden. Many times, a whole species is re-constructed from a single tooth or a bone fragment.[6] The oldest and most complete humanoid fossil is Lucy, which is only a small fraction of a skeleton.[7] In summary, primate fossils are indubitably real, but their links to human ancestry are not.

Once we understand the mentality of evolutionists, we see a close resemblance between Darwinism and religious fanaticism. It is the reason why Philip Johnson calls it a Darwinist religion.[8]

What about Eve?

The universe was either created or not created. If it was not created, it popped into existence via blind forces. Therefore, by disjunctive reasoning, to show creation true, we only need to show evolution false.

In the previous section, we have shown that there are good reasons to doubt evolution. So far our refutations against evolution are negative arguments. There are also positive arguments which supports creationism. One example is the genetic evidence for the existence of Eve.

In a 1987 paper published in Nature, three biochemists from University of California—Berkeley, Allan C. Wilson and his colleagues, announced a startling DNA analysis, which traces the origin of the entire human race to a single mother in Africa about 200,000 years ago.[9] These scientists constructed a family tree from the data of the mitochrondrial DNA analysis of the placenta collected from women of several continents. Mitochrondrial DNA is inherited from females only. It provides a very accurate method of tracing the maternal genealogy.

This discovery caught the public imagination. It is not surprising that this hypothetical woman is dubbed “Eve” by the media.[10] We have no reason to doubt the motivation of the scientists because (1) they are not religious and (2) Nature is an evolutionist research journal. The fact that this discovery helps creationism is merely coincidental. This analysis puts the origin of human earlier than Homo erectus and makes it much more difficult for evolutionists to attribute human ancestry to hominids.

Conclusion

The creation-versus-evolution debates are usually centered on the nitty-gritty of biochemistry, paleontology and geology. In this short lesson, I try to cover the general ideas. At the end, I hope to show that evolution is more a worldview than a science. The reason for its popularity is simply the lack of alternatives for those who refuse to believe in God. Many intelligent people believe evolution not for its evidence, but for the fear that a Creator may actually exist.