The year 2007 unfolds amid the noise of battle. Not the strife in Iraq and Afghanistan (though these countries certainly need our prayers) but the intense spiritual battle raging in the UK, in which far more is at stake than political ideals.
The advocates of secular humanism and evolutionism are determined to eliminate the gospel of Jesus Christ and anything that might influence people to embrace it.
Take one particular example. Last September, Truth in Science (TiS) sent every UK secondary school head of science two DVDs, along with a short teacher’s guide. The purpose of these materials was to explain the concepts of intelligent design (ID) by the presentation of exclusively scientific facts.
Has this initiative led to a reasoned public debate? Hardly! Evolutionists and secular humanists reacted with fury (or panic?) to what was a low-key and non-polemical presentation of ID as an alternative to Darwinian evolution.
What could be more reasonable than taking a hard look at received scientific dogma? Is it not the essence of the scientific method to test prevailing hypotheses and ideas?
Intemperate reaction
The intemperate reaction is revealing. Why are evolutionists so eager to stifle scientific discussion on this subject? We could understand them not wanting to debate theology. But why will they not respond to these scientific challenges – especially as they spend so much media time loftily presenting evolution as an unassailable fact?
At the same time we have the spectacle of theologically illiterate ‘scholars’ pontificating on television and elsewhere about the non-existence of God. Ironic, isn’t it?
It is painfully obvious why secular humanists react this way. It is because they have no real answer to ID – the model is too compelling.
Evolutionary theory has left much of the scientific community chasing a will-of-the-wisp for well over a century. For example, many scientists are now prepared to admit that the fossil record – once touted as the final proof of Darwinian evolution – actually provides no support for it.
Micro and macro
So isn’t it high time we stopped brainwashing our children and students with the dodgy assertion that ‘evolution is a fact’? The only established fact is that minor adaptive variations can and do occur in living creatures (‘micro-evolution’). Thus plant and animal breeders have long been able to select for desired characteristics and all races of mankind are descended from a single pair of parents.
But by a deliberate sleight of hand, evolutionists pretend that these undeniable ‘micro-evolutionary’ observations somehow prove the truth of large-scale or macro-evolution – according to which (for example) birds evolved from dinosaurs and whales from land mammals.
The reality is that such transitions have never been observed nor are they a reasonable conclusion from the fossil record (quite the reverse, in fact).
Macro-evolution is thus a theory, not a fact, and it is high time that it was exposed as such. We need teachers and professors with a new approach. We need new textbooks and new research. We need, above all, a large injection of intellectual honesty.
Unanswered questions
As to the ID debate, we are still waiting for evolutionists to answer certain questions.
First, if Darwinian evolution is true, why do random genetic mutations under laboratory conditions never produce beneficial characteristics in the organisms tested?
Second, why do these mutations never increase the genetic information in a genome – as required by neo-Darwinian evolution?
Third, how did random mutations and selection pressures cause molecules to self-assemble into the first living cells and the many complex biological systems and ‘machines’ that they contain?
Fourth, how could random chemical processes give rise to life – and especially the elegant genetic code which forms its basis? Codes are the product of intelligence not of random processes.
Those who believe in a Creator are often accused of resorting to a ‘God of the gaps’ – thinking that if something is unexplained it must be scientifically inexplicable. We do need to avoid falling into this error.
But surely the evolutionist is the more guilty in this respect – when he fills the yawning gaps in his theory by lame appeals to unspecified future discoveries. The inference to a Designer is readily made from the natural world, as Romans 1:20 makes clear. Most of the evolutionary paradigm is wishful thinking.
