What About Evolution?

WHAT ABOUT EVOLUTION?

There are two main views about the origin of all things. Either God created the universe or the universe developed by itself. The problems with man’s theory, which is called “evolution,” are many.

First, no scientist witnessed the beginning of all things. 

A scientist looks at the present state of things, and based on presuppositions, tries to surmise what happened in the past. For example, he finds fossils in the earth. Discounting the Biblical account of the flood, the scientist hypothesizes that these fossils record a gradual development of life over billions of years. However, he gives only his interpretation of the evidence. In fact, the fossils appear suddenly and the fossilized creatures are remarkably similar to their modern equivalents. A fossilized bat, for example, looks like a modern bat, and no scientist has found a transitional form between a bat and an “almost bat” by which he might account for the development of winged mammals (bats) from non-winged mammals (mice). The lack of transitional forms is a source of great embarrassment for the evolutionist. The “missing link” between reptiles and birds and between primates and man is still missing. 

The Christian believes the account of the Creator, who was there and reveals what he did. “By faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear” (Heb. 11:3).

Second, there is no explanation for the origin of life. 

No scientist knows the precise makeup of the atmosphere at the beginning of the earth’s history, nor what chemicals were present in a “primordial soup.” The notion that lightning struck the “soup,” so that eventually organic chemicals, such as amino acids, were formed, is without any proof. In addition, even with all the chemicals for life present, life will not form by itself. The origin of life without intelligence is impossible. Life requires a complexity of protein chains, DNA, and, crucially, an inbuilt language system to interpret the instructions embedded in the DNA. Even the simplest single-cell organism is irreducibly complex. Only infinite intelligence (the triune God of Holy Scripture) could, and did, design it.

Third, there is no mechanism for the development of life from simple to complex life forms. 

In Charles Darwin’s day the science of genetics was only beginning to be understood. Gregor Mendel, a creationist Augustinian monk, published the laws of genetics in 1886, twenty-seven years after Darwin published On the Origin of Species. Modern evolutionists suggest mutations as a possible mechanism for the development of life, but a mutation is the corruption of genetic information in a cell. When DNA replicates, sometimes a mistake occurs. This mistake, like a typo, is passed to the offspring. However, the vast majority of such mutations are harmful and even cause diseases. More significantly, mutations do not result in an increase of information in the genome, so that they enable a creature to “develop” new features. For example, it is commonly believed that birds have a common ancestor from reptiles. But a bird is a completely different organism from a reptile. Even if scales could become feathers over time—and they can’t—a bird has different kinds of bones, heart, circulatory system, and lungs from a reptile. For one thing, a bird is warm blooded, while a reptile is cold blooded. Or take the bat: how could a mouse-like animal over time evolve the characteristics of a bat? There is no mechanism for evolution to work—it requires the addition of large amounts of new genetic information, such as, for example, the information to produce wings.

The examples that evolutionists cite of “beneficial mutations” invariably involve the loss of information: a fish living in a dark cave “loses” the information to make eyes. However, there is no mechanism by which an eyeless creature develops eyes!

The Bible is clear: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” (Gen. 1:1). 

The wonder of the gospel is, that in order to save His people, the Creator became a man. The Creator, Jesus Christ, the second person of the Godhead assumed human flesh, in order to suffer and die under the wrath of God for the sins of His people. That Creator, Jesus Christ, rose from the dead with eternal life, which He gives to His people for whom He died. “Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved, and thy house.” In Jesus Christ there is salvation, forgiveness of sins, and eternal life for all who believe in Him.