INTRODUCTION TO THE CREATION - EVOLUTION CONTROVERSY By Dr. David N. Menton (Given at the April 21, 1986 M.A.C. meeting) Definitions from the Random House dictionary: "Creation - the act of creating; act of producing or causing to exist. 2. the fact of being created. 3. the creation, the original bringing into existence of the universe by God. "Creation ism - the doctrine that matter and all things were created, substantially as they now exist, by an omnipotent Creator, and not gradually evolved or developed." (ex nihilo) "Evolution - 1. Any process of formation or growth; development : the evolution of man; the evolution of the drama; the evolution of the airplane. 2. a product of such development; something evolved: The space program is the evolution of years of research and planning in the fields of aeronautics and nuclear physics. 3. Biol. the continuous genetic adaptation of organisms or species to the environment by the integrating agencies of selection, hybridization, inbreeding, and mutation." The term "evolution" literally means "unfolding". Evolution is often intentionally obscured by equating it to mere change, and thus it is insisted that anyone who recognizes that things change is an evolutionist! At the famous Scopes trial in 1925, the lawyers defending John Scopes repeatedly confused evolution with human embryology and even aging. Lawyer Dudley Field Mallone said: "The embryo becomes a human being when it is born. Evolution never stops from the beginning of the one cell until the human being returns in death to lifeless dust. We wish to set before you evidence of this character in order to stress the importance of the theory of evolution." Even Dr. Maynard Metcalf, a zoologist from Johns Hopkins University, hopelessly confused the meaning of evolution in his expert testimony in the Scopes trial: "I have always been particularly interested in the evolution of the individual organism from the egg, and also the evolution of the organism as a whole from the beginning of life." Perhaps the most unambiguous and accurate definition of evolution as it is actually taught today is that of Julian Huxley: "Evolution -- can be defined as a directional and essentially irreversible process occurring in time, which in its course gives rise to an increase of variety and in increasingly high level of organization in its products -- The whole of reality is evolution -- a single process of self transformation." Throughout this course of study we shall use the terms CREATION ISM and evolutionism in the following way: CREATION ISM: The belief that the whole cosmos in general and living things in particular are necessarily a result of purposeful design, the work of a supernatural Creator. Evolutionism: The belief that matter, energy, time and space has in and of itself the natural tendency to transform into all of the order and complexity we see in the cosmos. These represent the only two fundamentally different explanations possible for the origin of anything. God was assumed as creator by the vast majority of all scientists until the last half of the 19th century. Almost all major fields of science were founded by Christian men of God who accepted the Biblical account of creation, these include: Newton, Bacon, Pascal, Kepler, Linneaus, Faraday, Davey, Cuvier, Morse, Babbage, Joule, Dalton, Agassiz, Virchow, Mendel, Pasteur, Lord Kelvin, Lister, Maxwell, Fleming. The "modern" concept of evolution began as a philosophy and religious view (not in laboratory as science). Began with ancient Greeks. Greeks were philosophers, not laboratory scientists. The ancient Greek philosophers specifically rejected the idea that the universe was divinely created an operated but rather taught that everything arose spontaneously from some material substance that is eternal. Thales: (640-550 B.C.) Supposed water to be the basic element from which all things evolved. (This goes back to the time of the fall of Nebuchadnezzar's invasion and the fall of Jerusalem in 586) Anaximenes: (560-502 B.C.) Supposed air to be the fundamental material from which everything evolved by a process of rarifaction and condensation. Heraclitus: (535-475 B.C.) Taught that the three cardinal principles of nature were - 1) all knowledge is based on perception by the senses, 2) everything is in a continual state of change from one condition to another, and 3) fire is the principle from which all things arise. Empedocles: (435 BC) Plants first. Nature eliminates the unfit. Aristotle: (350 BC) Gradual transition from imperfect to perfect. Epicurus: (341-270 BC) Father of crass materialism. The whole basis of his physical system was the dictum that "nothing can be created out of nothing" and thus the universe is eternal, nothing can affect it from without. Everything is made of atoms, the rest is void. The physical world is a result of fortuitous combinations of atoms. Sensation is the sole source of knowledge. Lucretius: (100 BC) A strong proponent of Epicurus. Wrote De Rerum Natura (The Nature of Things). The principal mission of Lucretius was the emancipation of mens minds from 2 fears: 1. The arbitrary interference of the gods in the affairs of men. 2. Death. No existence of the soul after death. Tells of the existence of monstrous creatures which lived early in the earths history and which eventually proved to be unsuited to their changing environment and consequently disappeared. The ancient Greek philosophy of evolutionary materialism led to two major behavioral consequences: Epicureanism: Hedonism - "eat drink and be marry, for tomorrow you will die." The only good is pleasure, interpreted as freedom from disturbance or pain. Stoicism: A philosophy founded by Zeno which taught that men should be free from passion and unmoved by joy or grief and submit to the inevitable. It was the Epicureans and the Stoics whom Paul encountered in Athens on his third missionary journey (Acts 17:18-). (Acts 17:18) And also some of the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers were conversing with him. And some were saying, "What would this idle babbler wish to say?" Others, "He seems to be a proclaimer of strange deities," -because he was preaching Jesus and the resurrection. And they took him and brought him to the Areopagus, saying, "May we know what this new teaching is which you are proclaiming? "For you are bringing some strange things to our ears; we want to know therefore what these things mean." (Now all the Athenians and the strangers visiting there used to spend their time in nothing other than telling or hearing something new.) And Paul stood in the midst of the Areopagus and said "men of Athens, I observe that you are very religious in all respects. For while I was passing through and examining the objects of your worship, I also found an altar with this inscription TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. What therefore you worship in ignorance, this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and all things in it, since He is Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made with hands; neither is He served by human hands, as though He needed anything, since He Himself gives to all life and breath and all things; and He made from one every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth having determined their appointed times, and the boundaries of their habitation, that they should seek God, if perhaps they might grope for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us; for in Him we live and move and exist. "when they heard of the resurrection of the dead some began to sneer, but others said, "We shall hear you again concerning this." The Nicolaitans: A religious sect that arose in the apostolic period of the Church which is mentioned twice in Revelations in letters to the church at Ephesus and Pergamos. "Yet this you do have, that you hate the deeds of the Nicolaitans, which I also hate." The general voice of antiquity accuses them of denying God to be the creator of the world, and attributing its existence to other powers. (Ungers Bible Dictionary) Spontaneous generation: the belief that life arises spontaneously from inanimate matter. This was widely believed up until about 1650 and was so deeply ingrained in biological thought that it took nearly 200 years of experimental evidence against it to successfully refute it. Ancient Egyptians thought mice arose spontaneously from the mud of the Nile. Aristotle believed that frogs, crabs and worms arose from soil. In 1600, J.B. Helmont reported a method for demonstrating the spontaneous generation of mice. One needed only to place wheat, cheese, and soiled linen together in a jar and mice are sure to develope. In 1650h Francesco Redi, an Italian physician proved that magots formed on rotting meat from the eggs of pre-existing flies. These experiments resulted in the law of biogenesis which states that "all life comes from pre-existing life. With the discovery of the microscope and micro-organisms, many scientists persisted in believing that at least these organisms arose spontaneously. Even with the development of food preservation by canning in France, it was believed that micro-organisms didn't arise spontaneously because of lack of air. The broth flask experiments of Louis Pasteur in 1850 laid to rest once and for all that even micro-organisms arose from previously existing organisms of their kind. At about this time Schleiden and Schwann formulated the cell theory which states that "all cells come form pre-existing cells. Still, evolutionists who believe in the spontaneous origin of life from inanimate matter must accept something very much like the long discredited spontaneous generation. In his book, "The Origins of Life", evolutionist Cyril Ponnamperuma said: "It is perhaps, ironic that we tell beginning students in biology about Pasteur's experiments as the triumph of reason over mysticism yet we are coming back to spontaneous generation -- namely to chemical evolution." Buffon: (1707-1788) French naturalist. Greatly influenced geology. Denied a universal flood. Day age theory ie. 7 days = 7 epochs. Tried to reconcile "science" with the Bible. de Maupertuis: (1750) credited with developing a theory of evolution which included a process of mutations and natural selection. Maupertuis was very outspoken atheist and used his evolution process involving blind destiny and chance to refute the necessity for God and purposefully design in nature. In his book Essaie de Cosmologie he said: "Chance one might say, turned out a vast number of individuals; a small proportion of these were organized in such a manner that the animals organs could satisfy their needs. A much greater number showed neither adaptation nor order; These last have all perished -- thus the species which we see today are but a small part of all those that a blind destiny has produced." Jean Baptiste deLamarck: (1744-1829) Formulated two "laws" which greatly influenced Darwin: 1. Life expands maximally to occupy its available niche. 2. Organs arise when needed. 3. Use and disuse = hypertrophy and atrophy. 4. Inheritance of acquired characteristics (giraffe). August Weissman: did not accept Lamarck's views of the inheritance of acquired characters and cut off the tails of 57 generations of mice finding that mice were never born without tails. Charles Lyell: (1840) wrote a profoundly influential book "Principles of Geology" in which he established the principle of "uniformitarinism" - "the present is the key to the past". Darwin read this book during his voyage on the Beagle and probably would not have written The Origin of Species with out it. Robert Chambers: (1844) Published Vestiges of Creation (unsigned). Proposed that man descended from an ape. Book was in 10th printing by Darwins time. Charles Darwin: Englishman and son of a wealthy physician. His father wanted him to study medicine but Charles failed at this. Studied for the ministry. Published Origin of Species in 1859. Summary - New species arise by the continued survival and reproduction of the individuals best fitted or adapted to a particular environment. Four postulates: 1. Variation- individuals of the same species vary. 2. Over production- more born than can survive, struggle for existence. 3. Survival of the fittest- (tautology) 4. Inheritance of favorable characteristics. Darwin's book sold out quickly to laymen! His ideas were eagerly accepted for philosophical reasons. Industrial revolution. Free market capitalism ie. survival of the fittest. Variation and natural selection was Darwin's main idea. Pigeons and dogs. Darwin saw no limit to variation. In his first edition of Origin of Species he said: "I can see no difficulty in a race of bears being rendered, by natural selection, more and more aquatic in their habitats, with larger and larger mouths, till a creature was produced as monstrous as a whale." Darwin's ideas were not based on scientific experimentation but were rather mere speculations to account for the variety he saw in living things. His primary motive for the direction of his speculation was religious and philosophical. Dr. George Grinnell, an authority on Darwin, said: "I have done a great deal of work on Darwin and can say with some assurance that Darwin also did not derive his theory from nature but rather superimposed a certain philosophical world-view on nature and then spent 20 years trying to gather the facts to make it stick." (Pensee, May 11, 1983) What were Darwins religious views when he developed his theory of evolution? In his autobiography Darwin said that while he was still a young man: "I had gradually come by this time to see that the Old Testament from its manifestly false history of the world -- was no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindus, or the beliefs of the barbarian." "--I gradually came to disbelieve in Christianity as a divine revelation." In his autobiography he told his children that his study of evolution and the laws of nature made the miracles of the Bible unbelievable. He concluded: "Thus disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but was at last complete. The rate was so slow that I felt no distress, and have never since doubted even for a single second that my conclusion was correct. I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true --." To the moment of his death, Darwin never changed his mind. Where does evolution stand today? Phil Donahue show. Guests: Carl Sagan and Steven J. Gould. Sagan: "The universe is infinitely old. Since the universe is infinitely old there is no question of where it came from or the origin of matter, It's always here." "at the very beginning is this enormous explosion which sent the precursors of the galaxies flying out from each other, happened about fifteen billion years ago." "you must imagine merely elementary particles, not yet even hydrogen atoms, although lots of hydrogen atoms happen right after that." "Cooling off, the universe gets darker, atoms combine to form molecules, little lumps form and eventually we get bunches of atoms of such large scale that stars are formed." "Condensing out of this great set of clouds of gas and dust is the Milky Way. What is remarkable is that the earth condenses out. The origin of life happens like a shot because we can see the earliest life forms there going almost all the way back to the origin of the earth." Sagan shows his animated cartoon (from Cosmos) of how man evolved: "What you'll see is life beginning as a collection of molecules, the first cell, all of this, of course, happening in the sea. The evolution of invertebrate forms you know, forms without back bones, then fishy eyes that have back bones, amphibians crawling onto the land and then the more or less familiar sequence which leads to us." Phil Donahue: Before we show that, I wanted a basic evolutionary concept. When the drought came and the water level went down, a lot of the life in that pond died? Some of it, however, over millions of years, apparently in an evolutionary way developed amphibious capabilities. Sagan: "If you live in a little pond which dries up and there's a bigger pond nearby which hasn't dried up and by accident you're able to move your fins so that you can sort of flop into the next pond, you have a good chance of surviving which your contemporaries who don't have a flopping fin capability don't have. So the guys who could move in this way survived." Donahue: "The more forms of life that flop, the more floppers we got and the longer they were able to flop?" Sagan: "That's right , we come from the floppers." Donahue: "Until pretty soon the floppers had legs to move, to move efficiently and then we stood up, huh?" Sagan: "Yeah." Donahue: "So that we could use our hands with instruments that we --" Sagan: Yeah, yeah, except that that's much later and also so that it isn't that any creature said well, it's time I stand up now, or I guess I'll flop, or I guess I'll develop lungs so that I can breath the atmosphere. It is to the best of our knowledge the sequence of random mutations of which only a tiny few turn out to be useful and a vast preponderance turn out to be of no help whatever." Donahue: "So most of lifes evolution didn't work?" Sagan: "Yes. Evolution in that sense is very inefficient, lots of deaths in order to get us to where we are now. The secrets of evolution are time and death." Sagan talked about the future evolution of man: "We might evolve into something. We may simply loose our way and be followed by some other kind of creature. It's in our hands. It's up to us because we control our own evolution right now." Sagan's religion: In his book "Cosmos", Sagan said "the world was not made by the gods, but instead was the work of material forces interacting in nature." Sagan said of himself "I am a collection of water, calcium and organic molecules called Carl Sagan". In a recent interview published in the St.Louis Globe Democrat Oct. 6, 1980, Sagan was asked if he were pessimistic or optimistic about the future of man?: "I feel in order to survive we someday must be able to give up our allegiance to our nation, our religion, our race and economic group and think of ourselves more as just a temporary form of life under the creation of a power beyond our comprehension." *************************************** Origins Talk RBBS * (314) 821-1078 Missouri Association for Creation, Inc. 405 North Sappington Road Glendale, MO 63122-4729 (314) 821-1234 Also call: Students for Origins Research CREVO BBS (719) 528-1363