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      FAITH AND FACT IN THE CREATION-EVOLUTION CONTROVERSY

            David N. Menton,  St.Louis 1986

[This document may be freely distributed on computer bulletin boards.
This document may NOT be reprinted in paper or printed forms.]

     It is said that Isaac Newton once challenged a friend with the claim
that a working model of celestial mechanics in his lab "just came together
by accident".  When his friend declared this to be nonsense, Newton
replied, "you believe the great universe itself had no Creator--why then
should this little model need one?"  This was not the beginning of the
creation-evolution controversy and it certainly was not the end; today the
issue is being hotly contested in the news media, the popular and
professional science literature and even in the courts.     It would appear
that the only place where the creation-evolution controversy is not being
actively debated is in the public school science class rooms.  Here it
seems that the scientific evidence for purposeful design in nature
recognized by such giants of science as Newton, Kepler, Pascal, Boyle,
Dalton, Virchow, Mendel, Pasteur, Kelvin, Lister, and Fleming, (to name a
few) must not be discussed for fear that any recognition of purposeful
design in nature implies a Creator and that would not be, well, scientific.

     There are really only two fundamentally different kinds of
explanations for the origin of the universe and living things; either they
were created supernaturally by intelligent design or they arose by a
materialistic evolutionary process which ultimately must depend on chance
and the intrinsic properties of matter.     Historically both explanations
grew out of a philosophical-religious milieu and it has only been in the
last hundred years that adherents of both views have sought to defend their
beliefs with scientific arguments.  The religious basis of creation is well
known but one hears less about the religious and philosophical basis of
evolution.  Many fail to recognize the religious foundation of evolution
simply because evolutionary scenarios generally preclude the concept of God
as a causative and controlling agent in origins.  A religion does not
necessarily entail a belief in God however.  Buddhism and Secular Humanism
are two examples of religions that do not include a concept of God.
Religion may be simply defined as a world view relating to ones concept of
origins, ultimate truth, values and their implication for the meaning and
purpose of existence.

     The ancient Greek philosophers were perhaps the first to formulate an
essentially evolutionary concept of origins.  In the fifth century BC,
Empedocles taught that all of the parts of living organisms were formed
independently and were brought together in random arrangements.     He
proposed that those combinations which were not well suited to live
perished, while the better suited combinations survived.  In the third
century BC, Epicurus taught that the universe is eternal and that nothing
could influence it from without.  The seeds of modern materialism can be
seen in the Epicurean assumptions that the whole of existence is made of
randomly moving elementary particles (atoms!) or is void and that sensation
is the sole source of all knowledge.  It was inevitable, given these
assumptions, that Epicurus would conclude that the physical world is a
result of fortuitous combinations of atoms.  Perhaps the most insightful
account of the role of evolutionary concepts in Epicurean philosophy is
found in Lucretius' 'De Rerum Natura' written in the first century BC.
Here Lucretius came remarkably close to Darwin's tautologous axiom of the
"survival of the fittest."  Like Darwin, Lucretius was not an
experimentalist but rather attempted to satisfy a deep philosophical need
for a self-assembling cosmos without a sovereign creator.  For Lucretius,
evolutionary materialism was an attempt to emancipate men from two great
fears - the fear of the arbitrary interference of the gods in the affairs
of men, and the fear of accountability after death (1).


WHAT DO EVOLUTIONISTS BELIEVE?:

     Any rational discussion of evolution is made difficult by the great
confusion that attends the word "evolution."  Evolution etymologically
means "unfolding," and is today typically equated with all manner of
"change," whether by chance or design.    Thus not only is the putative
origin of all living organisms from inanimate matter by random change and
natural selection considered to be evolution, but we also hear of such
examples as the "evolution" of flight from the Wright brothers to the space
shuttle.  In the famous Scopes "monkey trial" of 1925, the lawyers
representing John Scopes even attempted to defend the scientific integrity
of evolution by equating it with embryology and aging!:

     "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 (sic) in order to stress the importance of the theory of
     evolution" (2).

One can expect this sort of confusion on scientific matters from lawyers
perhaps, but even Dr. Maynard Metcalf, a zoologist from Johns Hopkins
University, stated in his expert testimony at the Scopes trial that he had
"always been particularly interested in the evolution of the individual
organism from the egg."(3)  The famous evolutionist, Julian Huxley, came
much closer to the ordinary cosmological sense of the word when he defined
evolution as:

     "a directional and essentially irreversible process occurring in time,
     which in its course gives rise to an increase of variety and an
     increasingly high level of organization in its products -- The whole
     of reality is evolution -- a single process of self
     transformation"(4).

Since to the evolutionist, "the whole of reality is evolution", it should
come as no surprise that most consider it to be a "fact", not a theory.
The evolutionist Richard Goldschmidt put it this way:

     "Evolution of the animal and plant world is considered by all those
     entitled to judgement to be a fact for which no further proof is
     needed"(5).

Interestingly, Goldschmidt's own ideas of how evolution occurs were
rejected as outrageous by most other evolutionists, but few evolutionists
ever allow themselves to ask IF evolution occurs.  Indeed, given the
confusing and eclectic definitions of evolution the question of whether
evolution occurs at all makes no sense unless we define the term to specify
that process by which the cosmos and it's living inhabitants are believed
to have arisen from atomic particles over time by chance and the intrinsic
properties of matter and energy.  Many would argue that even this more
limited definition of evolution is too broad to allow rational discussion.

     There are many different and sometimes conflicting explanations of
evolution.  There must, for example, be rather different explanations for
evolution among genetically reproducing living organisms than for the
evolution of the earth, stars and planets.  Even in biological evolution
there is controversy between "neutralists" and "selectionists" and between
"gradualists" and "saltationists."  Some evolutionists are quite certain
that life evolved on earth about 4 billion years ago while others, such as
Nobel laureate Francis Crick, are equally certain that life could not have
evolved on earth at all but rather arrived here ready made from somewhere
else in the universe (6).  Some even declare that the origin of life has
nothing whatever to do with evolution!    In the famous Arkansas creation-
evolution trial (McLean vs. Arkansas) Judge William Overton ruled, on the
basis of testimony by evolutionists, that:

     "the scientific community does not consider origins of life a part of
     evolutionary theory.  The theory of evolution assumes the existence of
     life -"

Even such long repudiated concepts as Lamark's "inheritance of acquired
characteristics", Goldschmidt's "hopeful monster" theory and occult forces
are once again being proposed by some as possible mechanisms of evolution.
There are even major differences of opinion on observations as well as
speculations!  Some evolutionists, for example, insist that those
critically important transitional organisms that ought to show us at least
some of the major stages of evolution do in fact occur in great abundance
in the fossil record while other evolutionists insist that transitional
stages are not only virtually absent in the fossil record but one shouldn't
even expect to find them!  The list could be greatly lengthened, but still
it would not mitigate the fact that there remains a common bond of faith
among all true evolutionists in the efficacy of time and chance in
producing the progressive evolution of the cosmos, they concede only the
mechanism is in doubt.    In like manner, all the differences of opinion
among true creationists regarding the time for creation, the age of the
earth, the identity of the creator and the order of creation still leave
intact their central belief that the cosmos shows overwhelming evidence of
purposeful design by a Creator, again only the actual mechanism is unknown.

     The courts have thus far wisely avoided trying to judge whether either
creation or evolution is true or not but rather have only attempted to
determine if creation is "scientific."    In the recent Arkansas case,
Federal Judge Overton decided that creation "is not scientific because it
depends upon supernatural intervention".  Evolution, on the other hand, was
judged to be "scientific" because it does not claim to depend on
supernatural intervention.  This important difference should be carefully
considered by those who prefer to believe that evolution is "God's way of
creating."  The problem with equating science with mere materialism,
however, is that it seems to confer scientific legitimacy on any
speculation or faith regarding origins, no matter how unsupported it might
be by empirical evidence, as long as this speculation is purely
materialistic in nature.  Thus when scientists speculate without evidence
that immensely complex living cells arose on earth by chance and the
intrinsic properties of matter, it is considered "science", but if
scientists speculate that living cells were designed by an intelligent
creator it is not considered to be "science".  There must obviously be more
to true science than materialistic speculations and scenarios.

     Science is a way of using our physical senses in an effort to
understand the world as it exists.  Three basic requirements of empirical
science are that the object or phenomenon under study be: 1) observable, 2)
repeatable and finally 3) any hypothesis which seeks to explain these
observations must be at least potentially refutable.  By these standards,
neither evolution nor creation can be considered a scientific explanation
of origins.  There were, after all, no human observers of the origin of
life or the origin of any living organism, nor are these origins repeatable
today.    Neither evolution nor creation qualifies as a scientific theory
because no one has been able to conceive or a critical experiment that is
capable of disproving either of them.  The evolutionists Paul Ehrlich and
L.C. Birch have pointed out that:

     "our theory of evolution has become -- one which cannot be refuted by
     any possible observations.     It is thus outside of empirical science,
     but not necessarily false.     No one can think of ways in which to test
     it." (7)

With rather remarkable candor, these authors frankly admit that
evolutionary ideas  "have become part of an evolutionary dogma accepted by
most of us as part of our training."

     The failure of both creation and evolution to meet the standards of a
scientific hypothesis or theory has led some to suggest that they be
considered as models of origin rather than theories.  As such, both models
can be compared for their compatibility with the scientific evidence.
Creationists and evolutionists must, after all, deal with the same material
evidence even if their different starting assumptions often lead them to
quite different conclusions.  Few people, unfortunately, have had the
opportunity to compare both models with the evidence because usually only
evolution is presented in our schools, books, magazines, nature films and
the news media, and then often in a dogmatic and uncritical way.  How many
of us, for example, were taught that humans and other mammals develop "gill
slits" in the course of their embryological development and that this is a
"recapitulation of our phylogeny" presumably "proving" that we evolved from
gill breathing aquatic forms?  In fact, it is universally recognized by
embryologists that neither "gills" nor "slits" are found in the so called
"branchial" (gill!) region of mammalian embryos.  The whole idea of
"recapitulation" was shown to be unsound in the early 1800's when it was
first proposed by Ernst Haeckel.  The embryologist, Jane Oppenheimer has
lamented that "the work of Haeckel was the culmination of the extremes of
exaggeration which followed Darwin" and that this mind set significantly
delayed the progress in embryology.  Why then, is this intellectually
barren concept still taught in many biology textbooks as evidence for
evolution?  Recently 8 biology text books out of 15 being considered for
adoption in biology classes by the Indiana State Board of Education were
found to mention "gill slits" as evidence for "recapitulation" and
evolution.  In discussing the recapitulation myth, the evolutionists
Ehrlich and Holm noted:

      "it's shortcomings have been almost universally pointed out by modern
     authors, but the idea still has a prominent place in biological
     mythology." (8)


WHAT THEN DO CREATIONISTS BELIEVE?:

     Creationists believe that the organisms we see on earth today, as well
as the extinct organisms in the fossil record, were created in their
original form by a mechanism of purposeful design and could not have come
into being by mere chance and the intrinsic properties of matter and
energy.     Creationists recognize limited variation among plants and animals
and assume that a species as it exists today may not be identical in all
respects to it's original ancestor.  It is quite clear, for example, that
considerable variation can occur within a species such as we see among the
150 varieties of dogs recognized by the American Kennel Club.  It is also
clear that some of these variants may become reproductively isolated from
one another as in the case of a 2 lb. Chihuahua and a 150 lb. St.Bernard.
None the less, dogs appear to have remained dogs and the immense variation
we see among them only reflects selection among the alleles of an
EXISTING gene pool of the species Canis familiaris.  Selection for any
particular trait will, therefore, have real limits as is recognized by all
plant and animal breeders.  Darwin, being unaware of the actual genetic
mechanism involved, envisioned no such limitation on variation as he
clearly stated in the first edition of his "Origin of Species":

     "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."

     Evolutionists persist in referring to the observed variation within a
species as "microevolution", suggesting that macroevolution (the formation
of discrete organisms of a higher taxonomic group) is merely microevolution
writ large.  Creationists, and indeed some evolutionists,  argue that
variations within a species are not really "micro-evolutionary" changes at
all because there is no known relationship between these kinds of changes
and putative macro-evolution.  The example of industrial melanism in the
peppered moth, which appears in nearly every biology textbook as evidence
of "observable" evolution, does indeed provide an obvious example of
natural selection for pigment variation in the moth Biston betularia but it
tells us nothing about how moths evolved, or even IF they evolved from non-
moth ancestors.     The empirical evidence simply shows that variant
"versions" of genes (alleles) exist in this species which influence how
dark or light the moth will be and that one can indeed select for
relatively darker or lighter moths (the same thing could be said of man).
Creationists would simply point out that there is virtually no empirical
evidence that dogs and moths or even dogs and cats share a common ancestor.
The important question then is not how does nature select among the
EXISTING homologous genes of a species but rather, how might an organism
develop new unprecedented genes and how likely are these nascent genes to
be helpful, rather than harmful, to the organism in its reproduction and
survival?

     Evolutionists must look to mutations as a source of genuinely new
genetic information and hence evolution.  Creationists, on the other hand,
see mutations as degenerative in effect.  The evolutionist H.J. Muller, who
won the Nobel prize for his work on mutations, said in this regard:

     "it is entirely in line with the accidental nature of mutations that
     extensive tests have agreed in showing the vast majority of them
     detrimental to the organism in its job of surviving and reproducing --
     good ones are so rare we can consider them all bad." (9)

Evolutionists assume, none the less, that all of the genes of an organism
are a collective result of countless fortuitous mutations.  Creationists,
on the other hand, point out that many such changes are known to be
responsible for cancer and other disorders and have rarely if ever proven
to be beneficial.  Moreover, it has been shown that the very survival of
all living organisms depends on the efficient operation of a complex DNA
repair mechanism in the cell which greatly minimizes the incidence of
mutations.  Even if the intrinsic stabilizing factors of a cell are
overcome, any new proteins formed may not be "recognized" by the cell and
thus are subject to automatic degradation within the cell.  Clearly the
faith of the evolutionist in the beneficial and constructive nature of
mutations greatly exceeds that of the creationist.


CHANCE VS. DESIGN:

      The most often sighted argument in support of creation is the
evidence for design in biological systems.  It should be emphasized that
the word design does not simply mean order but also implies purposeful
intent.     Most people find the evidence for design in nature intuitive and
obvious.  Up until at least this century, most of the great men and women
who laid the ground work for all branches of modern science perceived in
nature, overwhelming evidence for a designed and purposeful creation.
Beginning with the latter half of the 19th century, however, it has become
increasingly more common for scientists to deny apriori virtually any
evidence for purposeful design in nature because they believe that such a
conclusion is "religious" and not "scientific."     In 1750 Pierre Louis
Moreau de Maupertuis published his "Essaie de Cosmologie" in which he
attempted to refute the argument for the existence of God from the manifest
evidence of design in nature, by proposing an evolutionary scenario
involving chance and "blind destiny".  Maupertuis' ideas anticipated the
principles of "survival of the fittest" 100 years before Darwin!

     "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."

The denial of purposeful design in favor of "blind chance" has been a
distinguishing feature of evolutionism up to the present day.  The
outspoken evolutionary apologist Julian Huxley is emphatic in his denial of
design in nature, likening the evolutionary process to a "chaotic jazz
dance" of molecules:

     "Nowhere in all its vast extent is there any trace of purpose, or even
     of prospective significance.  It is impelled from behind by blind
     physical forces, a gigantic chaotic jazz dance of particles and
     radiations, in which the only over-all tendency we have so far been
     able to detect is that summarized by the second Law of thermodynamics
     -- the tendency to run down" (10)

There are some notable exceptions among modern scientists to this
materialistic and atheistic trend in our time.    The late Dr. Wernher Von
Braun, father and chief architect of America's spectacularly successful
space program, was both one of the most distinguished scientists of our
century and a firm believer in the evidence for intelligent design in the
cosmos.     Dr. Von Braun said:

     While the admission of design does ultimately raise the question of a
     designer, the scientific method does nor allow us to exclude data
     simply because it leads to a conclusion that life and living organisms
     are based on design.  To insist that science requires everything in
     the universe to have evolved by chance violates the very objectivity
     of science itself.     (private correspondence)

     We usually have no trouble detecting evidence for intelligent design
in a structure, even if we do not know it's builder or purpose.
Stonehenge, for example, is a prehistoric structure in England which
consists of a large circular arrangement of huge stones whose relative
positions seem to be related to the point of the midsummer sunrise.  We do
not know who built this majestic structure nor are we certain of its
function but nobody doubts that it was designed and built by intelligent
beings.     Why then do so many people today refuse to recognize purposeful
design in infinitely more complex structures such as the eye or even a bird
feather?

     Interestingly, any evidence for design in a structure of unknown
origin, be it Stonehenge or a biological organ, really must depend in large
part on essentially negative arguments.     We would argue, for example, that
complex and integrated machines simply do not arise spontaneously in
nature, moreover, if such a complex and integrated structure were somehow
to exist it would, with time, inevitably decay to a vastly more probable
and less organized state.  These kinds of arguments are embodied in the
scientific laws of probability and thermodynamics.  Thus even a simple
arrowhead or stone tool is easily distinguished from a piece of flint or
rock that only happens to look like a designed artifact because in the
latter case, the surface relief could only result from naturally existing
lines of cleavage in the grain of the rock following the most probable
path, whereas in designed and worked rock, the cleavage will often follow
improbable planes.  It is indeed ironic that a physical anthropologist can
be completely confident that a crude appearing rock is a stone tool,
designed and crafted by a sapient (wise) man and yet attribute the origin
of the unfathomably complex body of Homo sapiens himself to the natural
properties of matter and energy over time!  Even the mere stone facade of
Homo sapiens on Mount Rushmore could easily be identified as a designed
artifact solely on the basis of the improbable cleavage plains in its
granite.  We may be certain that given enough time, weathering and
geophysical events will destroy the facade on Mount Rushmore - not add
another president.


THE LAW OF PROBABILITY:

     According to the mathematician E. Borel (11), the law of probability
simply states that "events whose probabilities are extremely small never
occur."  This intuitive but mathematically precise law forms the
statistical basis on which all empirical science rests.     A simple
calculation shows we could expect to succeed in randomly arranging the
letters of the alphabet to spell the phrase "THE THEORY OF EVOLUTION"
approximately once in 8 hundred million, trillion, trillion tries; if we
make these tries at the rate of a billion a second we could expect to
succeed once in 26 thousand trillion years!  But even this highly
improbable event is a virtual "certainty" compared to the probability of
the chance formation of ONE biologically useful protein, to say nothing of
the origin of life.

     The cyberneticist Hubert Yockey has calculated on the basis of
information theory that the longest piece of DNA that might be expected to
form by chance during a billion years would code for only 49 amino acids.
It has been estimated that the simplest imaginable organism capable of
reproducing itself would require at least 125 different kinds of proteins
averaging about 400 amino acids in length.  The distinguished cosmologist
and astronomer, Sir Fred Hoyle, in a recent address at the Kellogg
Radiation Laboratory (12), commented on the probability of the chance
origin of a higher form of life.  He estimated that the information content
in such an organism would be about 10{40,000} - representing the
specificity with which 2000 genes, each chosen from about 10 to the 20th
power nucleotide sequences, might be defined.  Hoyle estimated that it
would require several Hubble times to yield this result by chance.  He
likened the probability of higher forms of life evolving in this way to the
chance that "a tornado sweeping through a junk yard might assemble a Boeing
747 from the materials therein."  Hoyle, a former atheist, has reluctantly
concluded that deliberate design is a far more rational explanation for the
origin of life than evolution by chance and says that he is at a loss to
understand biologists widespread compulsion to deny what seems to him to be
obvious.

     Evolutionists typically respond to the probability argument in three
ways.  First they insist that natural selection or "selective pressure"
makes the extreme improbabilities we have discussed more probable.  Natural
selection by differential reproduction, however, is meaningless until there
is a functional genetic mechanism in a living cell and even then it can
only "select" that which the genome provides in it's germ cells.  Another
defense of evolution by chance is that this extremely improbable event is
made probable by the great amount of available time.  The science
philosopher Karl Popper warns however;

     "if our high probabilities are merely low probabilities which have
     become high because of the immensity of the available time, then we
     must not forget that in this way it is possible to 'explain' almost
     everything." (13)

Finally, evolutionists occasionally argue that the whole question of
probability is irrelevant because evolution is utterly without purpose and
so isn't really trying to make anything.  In a recent lecture at Washington
University in St.Louis, Steven Jay Gould, said "evolution isn't a correct,
perfect set pattern, but something that just happens."  The fact of the
matter is that nature literally teems with "correct, perfect set patterns"
and it takes an immense amount of faith to believe that they "just happen."


THERMODYNAMICS:

     The second law of thermodynamics comes up quite often in debates
between creationists and evolutionists and serves to illustrate how the two
sides are at variance over the interpretation of even one of the most
fundamental laws of science.  The theoretical basis of the second law was
originally developed in relation to classical heat mechanics but, in it's
practical sense, it has had wide applicability to areas as diverse as
chemical kinetics and information theory.  The evolutionist Harold Blum has
summed up the second law quite simply;

     "all real processes tend to go toward a condition of greater
     probability -- The second law of thermodynamics predicts that a system
     left to itself will, in the course of time, go toward greater
     disorder." (14)

We will recall, however, that the evolutionist Julian Huxley has defined
evolution as a process that "gives rise to an increase of variety and an
increasingly high level of organization of it's products."

     Creationists understandably conclude that the evolution model appears
to be entirely inconsistent with the second law of thermodynamics.
Evolutionists, on the other hand, argue that evolution is consistent with
the second law because the earth is an open system receiving energy from
the sun.  Somehow, they insist, this energy from the sun allows an immense
increase in order and complexity to occur by chance on earth.  Energy
alone, however, is simply inadequate to create the order required, indeed,
it is far more likely to create disorder.  We could add all the energy we
want to a pile of building materials and still not get a building unless we
add intelligent design, a program and machines.     This is true of living
organisms as well.  An acorn grows into an oak tree not merely because of
sunshine, but rather the energy of the sun is utilized together with the
aid of extraordinarily complex genetic information, programs and "machines"
built into the seed itself.  Finally, a point often overlooked by even the
cosmologists is that the universe itself is a closed system, and thus the
evolutionist must deny the second law on a very large scale or insist,
without evidence, that the original "cosmic" egg which initiated the "big
bang" held within it a vastly higher level of order and complexity than now
exists in the cosmos!  Lord Kelvin, who contributed much to our
understanding of the second law, said;

     "the only contribution of dynamics to theoretical biology is absolute
     negation of automatic commencement or automatic maintenance of life."
     (15)


THE FOSSIL RECORD:

     Since both creation and evolution are presumed by their adherents to
have occurred mainly or entirely in the distant past, before there were any
human observers, we might expect that the best, if not the only historical
evidence in support of either model would be found in the fossil record.
Most creationists believe that nearly all fossils were formed over a
relatively short period of time during and after a world wide Flood and
thus reveals organisms that were contemporary.    Evolutionists, on the other
hand, believe that fossilized organisms were gradually deposited in
sediment over millions of years and thus give us a visual record of at
least some of the stages of evolution from the first simple organisms to
the most complex.  These beliefs are sufficiently different that it should
be quite easy to determine which is more consistent with the fossil record
as it appears today.  To be consistent with the evolution model, the fossil
record should show how organisms slowly transformed one into another
through countless intermediate or transitional stages.    Evolutionists claim
that over one hundred million years were required for the transformation of
invertebrates into vertebrates and thus it is reasonable if not imperative
to expect that there would be at least some hint of this unambiguous and
large scale transformation in the fossil record.  To be consistent with the
creation model, the fossil record should show no obvious transitional
stages between distinctly different organisms, but rather each organism
should appear all at once and fully formed.  Specifically, creationists
would argue that there should be no trace of transitional forms between
invertebrates and vertebrates because no such transformation has ever
occurred.

     It is now a generally recognized fact that the fossil record shows few
if any organisms that represent unambiguous intermediate stages in the
evolution of any organism of one taxon into an organism of a different
taxon.    The paleontologist David B. Kitts has said;

     "Despite the bright promise that paleontology provides a means of
     seeing evolution, it has presented some nasty difficulties for
     evolutionists, the most notorious of which is the presence of gaps in
     the fossil record" -- "Evolution requires intermediate forms between
     species and paleontology does not provide them." (16)

Evolutionists have been aware of these missing intermediates, often
referred to as "missing links", since the time of Darwin and have tried to
dismiss this critical problem by appealing to the "imperfection" of the
fossil record.    David Raup, a paleontologist at the Field Museum of Natural
History, holds out no such hope and insists that, if any thing, the growth
in our knowledge of the fossil record since Darwin's time provides even
LESS support for evolutionary transformations:

     "Darwin was embarrassed by the fossil record because it didn't look
     the way he predicted it would -- different species usually appear and
     disappear from the record without showing the transitions that Darwin
     postulated -- we are now about 120 years after Darwin and the
     knowledge of the fossil record has been greatly expanded.    We now have
     a quarter of a million fossil species but the situation hasn't changed
     much -- We have fewer examples of evolutionary transition than we had
     in Darwin's time.  By this I mean that some of the classic cases of
     Darwinian change in the fossil record such as the evolution of the
     horse in North America, have had to be discarded or modified as a
     result of more detailed information." (17)

Some evolutionists have tried to explain this problem away by arguing that
the absence of transitional forms is simply an "artifact" of
classification, while others argue that the gaps only occur at the higher
taxonomic levels, and still others argue that the gaps only occur at the
lower taxonomic levels.     The distinguished evolutionist George Gaylord
Simpson has conceded, however, that the gaps are a consistent feature of
the whole taxonomic spectrum:

     "-- every paleontologist knows, that most new species, genera, and
     families, and that nearly all categories above the level of families
     appear in the record suddenly and are not led up to by known, gradual,
     completely continuous transitional sequences."  "This regular absence
     of transitional forms is not confined to mammals, but is an almost
     universal phenomenon, as has long been noted by paleontologists.  It
     is true of almost all orders of all classes of animals, both
     vertebrate and invertebrate.  A fortiori, it is also true of the
     classes, and of the major animal phyla." (18)

Speaking of the highest level of animal classification, evolutionist
Phillip Handler claims that:

     "Some 25 major phyla are recognized for all the animals, and in
     virtually not a single case is there fossil evidence to demonstrate
     what the common ancestry of any two phyla looked like." (19)

At the lowest level of taxonomic classification, the problem is apparently
much the same; evolutionist Steven J. Gould has pointed out that:

     "In any local area, a species does not arise gradually by the steady
     transformation of its ancestors; it appears all at once and fully
     formed." (20)

Some evolutionist still insist that there are at least a few examples of
truly transitional forms in the fossil record while others insist that even
though the fossils may not show structural evidence of evolution, there may
be evolution occurring at the physiological level which of course leaves no
fossil evidence.  A growing number of paleontologists, however, are simply
dismissing the whole idea that the fossil record provides any evidence of
any major morphological evolution.  Evolutionist Steven M. Stanley
expressed the problem in the simplest and bluntest of terms:

     "The known fossil record fails to document a single example of
     phyletic evolution accomplishing a major morphologic transition-."
     (21)

     In commenting on the absence of transitional sequences in the fossil
record George Gaylord Simpson admitted that;

     "their absence is so nearly universal that it cannot, off hand, be
     imputed to chance, and does require some attempt at special
     explanation." (22)

There  have indeed been many attempts at "special explanation" but it all
gets rather confusing and the story seems to change with the telling and
the audience.  For example, in his testimony before Judge Overton in the
recent Arkansas trial, Steven Jay Gould is reported to have said that "the
theory of evolution is supported by a rather well formed sequence of
intermediate stages" (23) yet in his regular column in Natural History
magazine he seems to imply that just the opposite is true!

     "All paleontologists know that the fossil record contains precious
     little in the way of intermediate forms" (24); "The extreme rarity of
     transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret
     of paleontology." (25)

     It is important to point out that despite the "missing links" in the
fossil record few evolutionists have abandoned their faith in the so called
"fact" of evolution.  Oxford zoologist, Mark Ridley, defiantly declared:

     "If the creationists want to impress the Darwinian establishment, it
     will be no use prating on about what the fossils say.  No good
     Darwinians belief in evolution stands on the fossil evidence for
     gradual evolution, so nor will his belief fall by it." (26)

Still, evolutionists can not afford to entirely turn their backs on what is
virtually the only physical historical evidence for the prehistory of our
flora and fauna.  Adhoc theories and scenarios have been proposed in an
effort to come to grips with the lack of fossil evidence which would
support evolution.  Stephen J. Gould and Niles Eldridge, for example, have
resurrected a long discredited evolutionary scenario called the "hopeful
monster theory" and have renamed it "punctuated equilibrium."  This
"theory" speculates that the much sought after intermediate stages in the
evolution of organisms do not in fact appear in the fossil record because
these "transitional" organisms (hopeful monsters) were relatively unstable
and, as luck would have it, quickly evolved into stable species that
produced many offspring and thus many discrete and unchanging fossils.
Some think that this idea is "monstrously hopeful" and that it really only
attempts to account for missing evidence.  The writer G.K. Chesterton has
wisely noted that the evolutionist "seems to know everything about the
missing link except that it is missing."

     Creationists have not found it necessary to develop adhoc hypotheses
to remain consistent with the fossil record.  Many of the animals and
plants living today have been found in the fossil record in essentially
their present form and without known "primitive" ancestors.  There are of
course, a substantial number of organisms in the fossil record that have
unquestionably become extinct, a process that regrettably continues today.
This ongoing process of extinction, however, does not appear to be
counteracted by the production of new kinds of organisms.  The only
encouraging fact to have emerged thus far is that occasionally fossil forms
which were thought to have been extinct for millions of years turn up very
much alive in the contemporary biosphere.  One such "living fossil", the
coelacanth, was assumed on the basis of fossil evidence to have been
extinct for seventy million years!  Ironically, many such living fossils
have actually been used to "date" the rock strata of the geological column
in which they were found.

     Evolutionists make much of the sequence in which fossils appear in the
layers of sedimentary rock that form much of the earths crust.    There is a
tendency for simpler marine organisms such as trilobites to occur in the
lower strata while the fossils of more complex organisms tend to occur in
more superficial strata of the geological column.  This has been taken to
show that, despite the missing transitional stages, there is at least a
general sequence from simple to complex and that this in turn tells us
something about the age of the strata.    It is a well known fact of geology,
however, that the layers of the geological column do not always appear in
the order evolutionists expect.     In every mountainous region of every
continent there are examples of supposedly "old" strata containing simple
organisms resting on top of "young" strata containing more complex
organisms.  Since evolutionists use their model to interpret the fossil
record, they are obliged to dismiss virtually all of these "out of order"
sequences as being a result of the lower (older) layers sliding over the
upper (younger) layers of the earths crust.  In many of these out of order
areas, however, there is no compelling geological evidence for such
overthrusting.    In the so called Lewis overthrust in Glacier National Park,
pre- cambrian limestone, assumed on the basis of its fossils to be over a
billion years old, rests in apparent conformity upon Cretaceous shale beds,
assumed by fossil evidence to be 135 million years old.     The "thrust block"
of the Lewis overthrust has been estimated to be 350 miles wide and 6 miles
thick with a presumed displacement of 35-40 miles and estimated to weigh
about eight hundred thousand billion tons!  There is no known geophysical
mechanism that can produce such an overthrust with out destroying or at
least extensively distorting the thrust block itself and yet there is
remarkably little evidence of even breccia or rubble in the putative fault
plane.    Incredibly, one of the guide books to Glacier National Park states
that "the lack of distortion of the rocks makes this an excellent example
of an overthrust that is often used in biology textbooks."  One thing
is quite clear, if the fossils were not "out of order", no one would have
suspected an overthrust in Glacier.  The evolutionist, however, must not
allow himself to even consider the possibility that these layers are
actually in the order that they were deposited - to do so would mean to
call into question not only the whole theory of evolution but finally a
whole world view and belief system.


CONCLUSION:

     Most of us would like to believe that we bring a completely open and
unbiased mind to the issue of origins.    We prefer to think that we harbor
no unprovable starting assumptions, and that we would not hesitate to
abandon even our most fundamental beliefs about origins if the facts were
to require it.    There may be certain individuals and even certain fields of
science where this blissful neutrality prevails but it is most unlikely
when we deal with the question of our origins.    Here the facts are too few
and the philosophical stakes are too high.  Whether one believes in
creation or evolution the philosophical and religious implications are
profound.  Creation is the very foundational assumption of the Judeo-
Christian religion and evolution is the foundational assumption of
religions such as atheism, agnosticism and secular humanism.  Creation
implies that man is ultimately accountable to the Creator and evolution
implies that man is ultimately accountable to no one save himself.

     It seems almost inevitable that beliefs about origins will tend to
polarize people in two camps with each quite certain that the other is dead
wrong.    Everything seems to hinge on the existence of the Creator.  If we
assume there is a Creator, the origins of complex and highly integrated
biological systems by intelligent design is completely reasonable and
hardly incompatible with science.  If, however, we assume there is no
creator, nothing conceivable in nature could be taken as evidence for
design and origins by chance and the intrinsic properties of nature is the
only alternative open to us no matter how lacking the evidence may be.    The
British biologist D.M.S. Watson said:

     Evolution is a theory universally accepted not because it can be
     proved by logically coherent evidence to be true but because the only
     alternative, special creation, is clearly incredible." (27)

Each of us must decide for ourself which is more incredible - evolution or
special creation.


REFERENCES CITED:

1.   Bennett, Charles E., 1946,     Introduction to: 'On The Nature of Things'
     by Lucretius.  Walter J. Black, roslyn, N.Y. pp. xi-xxviii.

2.   'The World's Most Famous Court Trial' 1925, Cincinnati, Ohio.
     National Book Company.    page 116.

3.   ------------ page 136.

4.   Huxley, Julian, 1955,  In: 'What Is Man',    Edited by J. Newman,  Simon
     and Schuster, New York. p278.

5.   Goldschmidt, Richard, 1952,  American Scientist 40:84

6.   Crick, Francis, 1981,  'Life Itself', Simon and Schuster, New York.

7.   Ehrlich, P. and L.C. Birch, 1967, Nature 214:352

8.   Ehrlich, Paul E. and R. Holm, 1963,  'The Process of Evolution' p. 66.

9.   Muller, H.J., 1946, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 11:331

10.  Huxley, J., 1955, in 'What is Man?'  edited by J. Newman,    Simon and
     Schuster, New York. page 278.

11.  Borel, E., 1965, 'Elements of the Theory of Probability'  Prentice-
     Hall, New Jersey. page 57.

12.  Hoyle, F., 1981, Nature 294:105

13.  Popper, K., 1976,    'Unended Quest'     Open Court Publishers, Lasalle, IL
     page 169.

14.  Blum, H., 1968,  'Times Arrow and Evolution'  Princeton University
     Press. page 5.

15.  Kelvin, 1889,  On the age of the sun's heat.  In: 'Popular Lectures
     and Addresses'  Macmillian, London.  Page 415.

16.  Kitts, D.B., 1974, Evolution 28:467.

17.  Raup, D.M., 1979,    Field Museum of Natural History Bulletin 50:22-29

18.  Simpson, G.G., 1953,  'The Major Features of Evolution'  Columbia
     University Press.  Page 360.

19.  Handler, P., 'Biology and the Future of Man'

20.  Gould, S.J., 1977,     Natural History 86:12-16.

21.  Stanley, S.M., 1979,  'Macroevolution: Pattern and Process'  W.M.
     Freeman & Co.  Page 39.

22.  Simpson, G.G., 1944,  'Tempo and Mode in Evolution'  Columbia
     University Press.  Page 105.

23.  Geisler, N.L., 1982, 'The Creator in the Courtroom' Mott Media,
     Milford MI.  Page 90.

24.  Gould, S.J., 1977,     Natural History 86:22-30

25.  Gould, S.J., 1977,     Natural History 86:12-16

26.  Ridley, M., 1981,    New Scientist 90:830-832.

27.  Watson, D.M.S., 1929, Nature 123:233



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