Doubting Darwin
By James Bowden (08/13/05)
About 15 years ago a NASA scientist sowed the first seed of doubt about Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. That seed bore fruit over years of personal inquiry and reading. I discovered that micro-evolution, the changes within a species through natural selection and other means over time, is well proven, but macro-evolution, the changes from one species to another is unsupportable intellectually. In fact, macro-evolution requires more blind faith in invisible forces and unproven facts than believing in the bodily resurrection of a crucified, dead Jesus of Nazareth.
My NASA buddy, sharing in the bleachers for our kid’s sports, talked about the lack of physical evidence in the fossil records. There are huge gaps between explosions of life. If Darwin’s evolution were true, then all the interim creatures between one species and another should be found in fossils. They’re missing. Not only the missing link between humans and lemurs, but all other animals from the lowest single celled creature to higher mammals.
It was a bit of a shock. For almost 25 years I had taken Charles Darwin’s transmutation of species as a satisfactory explanation for the ‘how’ God created life. The Biblical account in the timeless first eleven chapters of Genesis before Abraham agreed with the order of the evolution and added the force, God’s Will, behind the creation of light, mass, the oceans and atmosphere, animals of the sea, air and land in order – ending with Man. The Bible and Darwin were not in conflict for me. Yet, doing my homework after looking at the fossil follies – the non-support of evolution – made Darwin the weaker with every scholastic step.
The Biology Professor’s book about Darwin’s black box begged the question, “What did Darwin know about molecular biology?” Answer: Nothing. Microscopes weren’t powerful enough for Darwin to see what was going on below the cellular level of life. Moreover, his theory actually broke down at the level of the single cell. Every cell has at five systems that must operate perfectly for the cell to live. An evolution in a single cell in a creature, say the wing of a dinosaur, requires the precise and perfect change of all five systems simultaneously. There is no room for error. One system not evolving forward to the new advanced system kills the cell.
Then, there was the problem of the Second Law of Thermodynamics application for living cells. Everything should devolve with entropy to disorder. But living things, cells, maintain their order until the instant of death. Then, every cell system breaks down and entropy reigns. What is it about life that defies a law of physics?
I recalled the hierarchy of hypothesis, theory, and law in science. Evolution isn’t a law like Gravity. Yet, Liberals insist on teaching it as more than a scientific law - as theology. They’re premature based on how we know what we know – epistemology. I harkened to the text, Karl Popper’s “Conjectures and Refutations”, when I taught ‘Research and Methodology for the Social Sciences’ at West Point. Namely, that for over a thousand years all learned people knew the universe was made up of water, fire, earth and air. Any other idea was madness, folly or witchcraft. Such is the arrogance the Evolutionists hold to their theory as the only truth.
Yet, for Evolution to be true, one has to believe the mathematical probability a tornado could go through a junkyard and produce an automobile. Or, if you left a bicycle, and it was alive, on your driveway for a million years that it could evolve into a Lincoln Towncar. Furthermore if evolution were true, why hasn’t a single step of macro-evolution happened in the observable past 2,000 years (.002 of a million years) with measurable .002 changes across all the life of the globe? Why would macro-evolution just stop?
Perhaps macro-evolution stopped because it never started. So, how were species created?
President Bush recently suggested Creationism, perhaps Intelligent Design, could be taught as scientific theory along with Evolution. I don’t support that idea. There is no coherent body of scientific evidence, empiricism, to support Creationism.
Why can’t scientific texts indicate there is a theory of Evolution – just a theory with many challenging holes plus a question mark? Tell students we just don’t know, like the cause of the common cold or why women don’t drink milk from the carton, etc. Science doesn’t know the origin of life. Students, why don’t you discover the scientific truth – the laws of the origin and changes of life?
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