Evolution's Achilles' heels

317 Pages·2014·5.83 MB·English

by  Batten

EVOLUTION’S
Achilles’ Heels
Foreword by Dr Carl Wieland
Edited by Robert Carter, Ph.D.
Copyright © 2014 by Creation Ministries International (US) Inc of PO
Box 350, Powder Springs, Georgia, USA. All rights reserved. No part
of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever
without written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief
quotations in articles and reviews.
ISBN: 978-1-921643-82-8
Cover, design and layout: Jessica Spykerman
Powder Springs, Georgia, USA
www.creationbookpublishers.com
For further information on creation/evolution
and the Christian worldview go to
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Foreword
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Acknowledgments
While it would be impossible to individually thank the many, many people who
came together to make Evolution’s Achilles’ Heels a reality, we must mention a
select few. Carl Wieland spent hours brainstorming with me in the early stages
of the project and without his help it would never have gotten off the ground.
Gary Bates helped formulate the initial outline and was involved at all stages of
production, and without his guidance the project would never have been
finished. Scott Gillis helped with coordination, checking early drafts for
readability, and was a general motivator during the duration of the project. Lita
Cosner and She’Na Cain spent hours proofreading. Jessica Spykerman was in
charge of the layout, and never seemed to complain about the many changes we
asked her to perform. Jason Fuller donated his time and talent to design the main
Achilles graphic on the cover. I would also like to thank the chapter authors for
their willingness to participate in this joint project. My wife, always supportive,
helped get me over many bumps in the road. Lastly, but most importantly, soli
Deo gloria!
Robert Carter Powder Springs, GA May 2014
Dr Carl Wieland, M.B., B.S.
Dr Wieland serves as the Managing Director of Creation Ministries
International (Australia), a position he has held since 1987, when it was called
Creation Science Foundation. He was the founding editor of Creation magazine
(in 1978) that now has subscribers in well over 100 countries.
Carl’s formal qualifications are in medicine and surgery, and he is a past
president of the Christian Medical Fellowship of South Australia. Full time with
CMI since 1986, Carl is considered by many to be a pillar of the creationist
community and a stalwart defender of the faith.
He is the author of several books, including Beyond the Shadows: making sense
of personal tragedy and One Human Family. He has also penned many articles
for Creation magazine, the Journal of Creation, and our website, creation.com.
Dr Wieland was chosen to write the introduction to this book for one simple
reason: he has a tremendous experience in the field and a wide grasp of the
various subjects we will cover. In essence, his position and experience allow
him to write a summary and introduction to this very important work.
See creation.com/dr-carl-wieland
FOREWORD
Dr Carl Wieland, M.D.1
Nine Ph.D. scientists highlight fatal flaws in evolutionary science.
In my more than 35 years of involvement in the origins controversy, there has
never been anything quite like this book. Nine Ph.D. scientists, experts in
various disciplines, each take on a separate area of evolutionary theory and
belief. And never has it been more sorely needed. In our age, the
materialist/naturalist dogma rides high, brazenly confident in its assertion that it
has the authority of science on its side.
First, an explanation. The word evolution in this book’s title means much more
than ‘genetic change’; more even than ‘the origin of life’s diversity’. The term
will be used to encompass the whole grand-scale scenario that modern culture
takes as foundational in its rejection of the Creator God of the Bible: that stars,
planets, and galaxies supposedly came about when nothing somehow exploded;
that lifeless chemicals, by largely mysterious processes, are supposed to have
somehow formed the first living thing (a biological machine so complex as to be
able to make copies of itself and to harness usable energy from the
environment); and that from this fortuitous first life has come the entire array of
species, both past and present. Microbes have supposedly become not just
microbiologists, but mosquitoes and magnolias, mushrooms and meerkats, and
all of this over billions of years of trial and error—random changes filtered by
the unremarkable (and ultimately unguided) process of natural selection.
Rather than choosing to confront areas that might be regarded as soft targets,
Evolution’s Achilles’ Heels represents a well-argued frontal assault on what
many would see as invincible strongholds for today’s evolution-grounded,
antitheistic establishment thinkers. The eight arenas of intellectual combat, each
with their own chapter and their own scientist/author, are:
1. Natural Selection
2. Genetics and DNA
3. The Origin of Life
4. The Fossil Record
5. The Geologic Record
6. Radiometric Dating
7. Cosmology and the Big Bang
8. Ethics and Morality
Why Achilles’ heels?
Achilles was a heroic figure in Greco-Roman lore who was seemingly invincible
in battle. In one version of the myth, this invincibility was bestowed upon him as
a baby, through being dipped in the river Styx by his mother. However, the area
on the back of his heel where she had gripped the infant missed out on contact
with the protective fluid. The resultant point of vulnerability would eventually
prove fatal to Achilles by permitting the entry of a poisoned arrow. Even today,
the powerful tendon running to the back of the heel is referred to (including by
doctors if in everyday conversation) as the “Achilles tendon”.2
Achilles’ heel has, therefore, become an obvious and powerful metaphor for an
unsuspected but deadly flaw, especially where this is in the face of a seeming
invincibility. It speaks of a vulnerability which, when discovered and exposed,
proves fatal.
It is fitting, then, that these eight areas of knowledge and enquiry are more or
less those which most people think display evolution’s greatest strengths. It is
these which supposedly provide the grounds for its illusion of seeming
invincibility.
The illusion is particularly powerful, by the way, because of its inherent
circularity. It is true that the way the data are interpreted and presented
continually seems to reinforce this dominant paradigm of our culture. But this is
largely because of an unspoken rule, one that is often unsuspected by even its
staunchest adherents. This rule is that the data may only be understood and
interpreted within the presuppositions of the paradigm itself. This includes the
assumption of strict naturalism when it comes to origins. For example, a well-
known evolutionist professor (actually an immunologist) at an American
University wrote:
Even if all the data point to an intelligent designer, such an hypothesis is excluded from science because
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it is not naturalistic.
Here, he is admitting that explanations outside nature are automatically ruled
out; only natural causes are permitted. This, therefore, excludes a priori as
impermissible anything that might lead to a conclusion on origins other than a
world that made itself, with no divine assistance either needed or apparent.4
Once these intellectual shackles are broken, however, it becomes unsurprising to
find out that each of these eight areas of knowledge also encompasses some of
the greatest weaknesses in evolutionary theory. Any one of these zones of
weakness constitutes a fatal flaw—an Achilles’ heel, as it were. Together, they
constitute a formidable challenge to the evolutionary belief system.
The nature of ‘facts’
This whole controversy, incidentally, has never been about unearthing ‘facts for
creation’ vs ‘facts for evolution’. When it comes to matters of history (as
opposed to experimental or operational science, the science that concerns itself
with how the world works5), the issue has never been the facts so much as their
interpretation. We all have the same world—the same ‘facts’. Those on both
sides of the controversy observe the same stars, rocks, animals and fossils; and
we see the same natural selection and mutation. And philosophers of science
have long reminded us (the TV forensic/crime series CSI notwithstanding) that
raw, uninterpreted facts never speak for themselves. As the late Harvard
professor, Stephen Jay Gould, once wrote, “Facts do not ‘speak for themselves’;
they are read in the light of theory.”6
In any case, the argument is less about the type of science that has given us so
many benefits for humanity, the one that studies how the world works based on
repeatable experiment and observation, than about competing beliefs about
history. Objections like, “Genesis is not a science textbook!” miss the point.
Genesis presents a majestic yet compact and rather straightforward eyewitness
account of one-off, unobservable, and unrepeatable events—the history of the
origins of ‘life, the universe and everything’.
The evolutionary notion is ultimately an idea about history, too. It is a story that
tells of a very different set of one-off, unobserved and unrepeatable events. This
highlights that we are in the realm of beliefs about the past when dealing with
the issue of origins. It is the responsibility of every individual to determine
which interpretation of the facts makes more sense of the available data.
In a rare yet refreshing recognition of the limits of science when it comes to
adjudicating on past events such as these, a prominent Australian science
educator once pointed out:
The Genesis account of creation may even be the correct one but there is no way science can prove or
7
disprove that, and the creationists know it.
One sometimes sees evolution’s true believers proclaiming their scientific
‘openmindedness’ by stating that they would be willing to abandon Darwinism if
the evidence demanded it. To bolster this, they point to the many professional
disputes within evolutionism on such things as the mechanism of macro-
evolution. But that is precisely the point; there is no doubt that evolutionists
would in principle accept an alternative to the neo-Darwinian mechanism, so
long as the overall ‘fact’ of an evolved (self-made) world is not thereby
challenged. Put another way, there may be many debates and controversies
within secular scientific circles over the how of evolution (in the sense
mentioned earlier, a self-made world), but never over the whether. Such
foundational presuppositions are sacrosanct to establishment thinkers, even if
they are rarely stated outright. And it is precisely one’s presuppositions (a.k.a.
axioms—starting beliefs or assumptions that are taken for granted without proof)
about reality that largely determine one’s interpretation of it.
That’s not to suggest that there is anything inappropriate about basing scientific
constructs on presuppositions. There isn’t. In fact it’s unavoidable, and it is the
way most science works. When it comes to building scientific models of origins,
biblical creationists have their underlying presuppositional framework, too: the
straightforward truth of the Bible, in particular the Genesis record, affirmed and
taught by the Lord Jesus Christ and authenticated by His rising from the dead.
Genesis was obviously taken as real history by Jesus and all of the New
Testament writers. Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul, James, Peter, Jude, and the
author of Hebrews all referred to the early chapters of Genesis as history in their
writings.8 It was also taken as trustworthy history by the overwhelming majority
of Christians, including intellectual giants such as Sir Isaac Newton, for nearly
20 centuries—until the neo-pagan revival of long-ageism and naturalism began
during the Enlightenment period of the 17th century. This commenced well
before Darwin’s Origin of Species was published, and has gathered momentum
ever since.
A big problem is that while the axioms of biblical creationism are clearly stated
up front—on the table, as it were—the fact that the evolutionary edifice is
constructed on similarly unprovable faith/belief9 assumptions is much less
widely appreciated. And biblical creationists’ overt presuppositional basis is
often misunderstood as a negative, since it shows how ‘biased’ they are (read:
hopelessly and rigidly shackled by their commitment to the Bible).
This may help explain why many Christians instinctively shy away from this
presuppositional approach, failing to appreciate its power and usefulness in