Evidence Against Creation

Creation and Evolution — Steve Gregg

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Evidence Against Evolution

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Evidence Against Creation

Creation and EvolutionSteve Gregg

Steve Gregg presents evidence against the theory of evolution, specifically focusing on scientific and naturalistic explanations. Highlighting that supernatural forces cannot be subject to scientific inquiry, Gregg argues that the evidence from the real world does not support a naturalistic explanation for the origins of living things. He aims to demonstrate that the evidence undermines the evolutionary paradigm, rather than proving the validity of the creationist notion. Gregg questions the function of certain structures in organisms and challenges the notion of upward change in evolutionary theory, citing examples such as embryology and the study of fruit flies. He argues that experiments involving the peppered moth and observations of mutations further weaken the evolutionary theory.

Transcript

Tonight we're going to continue what we began last time, which is an examination of evidences, largely from science, almost entirely from the realm of science, that pertain to the subject of origins, of where living things came from. We're not really examining in this series the origin of the universe. We're not talking about the age of the universe, or the age of the earth, or the Big Bang Theory, or any of those things.

We could, but that just isn't in the range of things that we have time to talk about. Far more important, or what should be far more important to us, is where living things, and particularly human things, human beings, came from, because that's what we are. And if we know something about where we came from, it gives us some indicator of what our destiny might be, and whether or not there is some reason that we got here.

That is a very valuable thing to know, to know whether we are here for a purpose, or whether we're here for no purpose. Wouldn't that knowledge make a difference to your life, if you knew whether you were here for a purpose, or you were here for no purpose? Obviously, if the former is true, then there is the possibility of fulfilling your purpose, or failing to fulfill your purpose. And one who believes that there is a purpose in existence, would consider it, generally speaking, would consider it a tragedy to have lived an entire lifetime and failed to fulfill the purpose.

That's okay. We had a bit of a spill back there. That makes a lot of noise, but not much worthy of drawing our attention.

Now, last week, in our lecture, we were talking about evolution and creation as the two alternatives. We saw that even the leading evolutionists are willing to admit that either evolution or creation must have happened. These are the only two possibilities.

Either living things appeared on the earth as they are now, essentially, or they did not. And if they did not, they must have developed from previously existing forms, which is, essentially, some form of evolution. Whether we suggest Darwinian forms of evolution or some other, it is a... when we speak of present organisms developing from previously existing organisms, then we are talking about some form of evolution.

On the other hand, if the present living things that we see in their divisions, in their orders, in their phyla, in their classes, if they came into existence as they are now, essentially, then, obviously, there must have been some mind, some intelligence, some great omnipotent and omniscient source, which religious people would refer to as God, in most cases. Of course, Christians and Jews and Muslims and many other groups have some specific notion of what kind of a being this is. But it is not our purpose in these lectures to identify who the creator is.

I'm not shy about saying that I have a very strong opinion about this. In fact, I'm not ashamed at all to tell you that I know who the creator is. But that's not what I'm here to discuss.

I discuss that most of the year. In these lessons, it is not my purpose to delve into religious questions, questions of theology, but rather into questions of origins. And not to try to persuade anybody that the Christian religion is true, nor that the Genesis account of creation, the biblical account, is necessarily the true account, although I believe both those things to be true.

I do believe in a literal interpretation of Genesis chapter 1. Many good Christian people do not believe in a literal approach to it. They feel it's figurative. But that's, again, beyond the range of what we're considering in these lectures.

We simply want to look at the general question of whether the evidence from the real world, from science, from nature, supports an evolutionary notion or a creationist notion of some sort. And the basic distinctiveness of the creationist view, as opposed to the alternative, is that creation suggests that there is design and there is purpose. It's quite obvious that when you see something that gives evidence of design, you would suggest a designer must have designed it.

You might not know very much about that designer, but you must suggest and postulate that a designer exists. Furthermore, if it's a highly complex design, one which was just not thrown together haphazardly, then one would suggest that that thing was designed for a purpose. Inventors do not usually invent elaborate machinery unless they have some purpose that they wish for it to fulfill.

Therefore, if creationism is the solution we come to in the question of origins, then we have basically come to the conclusion that there is design and there is purpose in existence. Now, evolution, when we talk about evolution, we are talking about naturalistic evolution. And the reason I make that statement is because there are supernaturalists, Christians and religious people, who believe in evolution.

They are what are called theistic evolutionists. They believe in a supernatural designer, really, who created things, but he simply used evolution as the process. This is really just another form of creationism.

I don't believe it's the correct form. I don't believe it fits the facts. But there are those who hold that view.

But the mainstream scientific community would disdain the theistic evolutionists as much as they would disdain the creationists. Because science, as they understand it, must always be capable of explaining existing phenomena in terms of naturalistic processes that are observable in the natural world. And any supernatural explanations are simply not admissible as evidence.

Because they are invisible, they are non-repeatable, they simply do not subject themselves to scientific inquiry. And while we have no objection to that statement, it is true. Supernatural forces do not submit themselves to scientific inquiry.

They can't be taken into a laboratory and tested. What we do object to, as creationists, is the suggestion made by mainstream science that this naturalistic science is the only way of knowing anything about reality. It should be immediately evident to anyone who's reflective on the point that not all of our knowledge about reality comes from science.

We know many things from science, and science is a very good guide to knowing things about the natural world. There are other disciplines, however, outside of science, that yield knowledge of truth as well. History is one of those.

And likewise, if there is a spiritual realm or a supernatural being who is a creator, this too would not be one of those things that we discover through science. We could not discover them through the use of a Geiger counter or litmus paper or anything like that, which we would use to detect chemical or physical elements. Therefore, if there is a creator, we would not look to science to discover very much about that creator.

However, scientists may well come to the conclusion that the evidence of the real world does not lend itself to a naturalistic explanation at all, so that they could conclude that some form of supernatural factors must be introduced. But once that conclusion has been reached, we have to go outside of science to discover the nature of those factors, because science is limited to discourse on the subject of the natural world and naturalism. Now, because scientists do enjoy the monopoly that they presently hold on the educational system, and because they have, for the most part, convinced the average man that science is the most reliable, and in many cases people are convinced the only source of knowledge about reality, it is not in the interest of scientists to suggest that any significant kind of knowledge of reality is available from fields outside of science.

As long as people are looking to scientists to tell them what life is all about, in other words, people want to get their philosophy and their theology from the scientists, as well as their naturalistic explanations, as long as that is the case, scientists can enjoy a monopolistic priesthood in our society, so that they are the ones who are deemed as having all the answers to every question. Now, we do not wish to rob them of their legitimate authority to speak on scientific matters. Science is a good way of knowing certain things, but we do question seriously, we don't only question, we defy the scientific community to tell us how they would have superior authority to others in speaking on matters of non-physical realities or philosophical questions like whether there is meaning, whether there is purpose.

These are not questions that science is able to inquire about. Nonetheless, scientists make pronouncements on this all the time, as if it was within their realm. So we looked last week at evidence that indicated that science and evolution are not synonymous terms, although earlier in this century, quite early in this century, one of the presidents of the American Association for the Advancement of Science said, I do not need to entertain questions about the validity of evolution, because he said, evolution is just the same thing as science, and science is another word for truth.

And with that statement, basically said, don't bother me with facts, don't bother me with questions that don't seem to fit my theory, evolution is the same thing as science, science is the same thing as truth, and obviously anything else must be superstition and untruth. Now, we were fortunate enough to have some evolutionary scientists that we quoted last week, who were telling a somewhat truer statement of the facts. They said, and I quoted some of the leading authorities who were willing to be honest about it, they said basically, evolution has not been proven, nor is it provable.

It is not in the realm of empirical science, since no one can go into a laboratory and discover what happened millions of years ago. The best that could ever be hoped for, and this has not been achieved either, but the best that could ever be hoped for would be that they could reproduce some kind of evolutionary change in some species in the laboratory, or through hybridization, or through selected breeding, or through some means, through imposing artificial selection and mutation and so forth, that they could hope to produce one species from some other species. They have never come even close to this, as we shall see, by quoting other experts on it, who are all evolutionists, but even if they did, it would tell us nothing with certainty about how those species arose in nature without the scientists to make it happen.

It would not with certainty tell us that this is what happened in history. It would only show us what can be done. It would show that the evolutionary explanation of origins is a plausible explanation, but it would not tell us that it was the true explanation, only that it is plausible, and its plausibility would be increased incrementally by even one experiment in the laboratory that could show that something like evolutionary change could happen.

Since they haven't even gone that far, they have not only failed to show that it did happen in history, but they have failed to show that it is even plausible, and that is something we're going to be examining in this lecture. In this lecture, we're going to be talking about the actual evidences, and what we're going to start with, we've got three more lectures, including this one, and in this lecture, I want to talk about the evidences that are usually brought forward against creationism. In the last two lectures, I'm going to basically try to give you the evidence that's against evolution.

Now, in both cases, we're talking about negative evidence. There is no certain evidence to prove that evolution happened, nor that creation happened. These are both faith systems, and creationists make no bones about that, don't pretend otherwise.

Evolutionists do pretend otherwise, although a few of them that we quoted last week have admitted, yeah, evolutionary theory is just another faith, exactly on the same plane with special creation. No one can prove that it happened, it's just a preferred notion, a preferred cosmology. Now, that being so, we want to examine real evidences to find out which faith system is the more reasonable faith.

Not all faith systems are equally plausible or reasonable, and we can look at the real world and the evidence and make some decisions about which is the most plausible. Now, negative evidence in this realm is as good as positive evidence. That is to say, it's as good to prove creation wrong as to prove evolution right.

Or, contrary to what I said, it's as good to prove evolution wrong as to prove creation right. Because if you prove one of the systems to be wrong, by doing so, you've made the other one the only survivor. There's only two possibilities.

And when the evidence is considered, if the evidence, in fact, demolishes one of the two systems, then there's only one left standing. It's as if I was trying to discover whether a person was a boy or a girl. There's only two possibilities.

To prove that that person is not a boy would be the same thing as to prove that that is a girl. And likewise, if we want to prove the question of origins, we have to say, well, evolution in some form, or creation in some form, are the only two options. Therefore, if it can be demonstrated that evolution never happened, and it can be, in my opinion, or at least great evidences can be marshaled to show it, convincing evidences, then we have done all that is necessary to prove that creation, the only alternative, is true.

Now, evolutionists have taken the same tack. Historically, most of the evidence for evolution has not been positive evidence, but attempts to present evidence that is hard for creationists to explain. In other words, evidence which, according to the rhetoric of evolutionists, does not fit well with the creationist idea.

And if they can prove that creation does not explain the evidence, then they figure they have shown that evolution is a better argument. And that is basically the only way that evolutionists have ever tried to prove their case, is by trying to disprove creation. That's the best they can do.

And likewise, that's for the most part what creationists do. They try to disprove evolution. Because, like I said, you can't really go back in time and watch it happen.

No one was there with a video camera, and there's no way that anyone is going to see what really happened. And we can't prove what really happened. But one thing we can do is say the evidence does not support this paradigm, this model.

And it certainly agrees better with this model, and that's what we're doing. In this lecture, we want to talk about the evidences that have historically and recently been brought up by evolutionists against creationism, which is, of course, a way of saying in favor of evolution. It will be in the final two lectures that we will bring out much of the evidence, much of the best evidence available against evolution and for creationism.

And this is going to take the form of facts in this lecture, facts that were once thought not to be explainable in terms of creation. And when we come to the last two lectures, we're going to talk about facts, real facts that are out there, that are not easily explainable in terms of evolution, but fit very nicely into the creationist paradigm. Okay, now we're going to start looking at the evidences that have historically been brought against creationism.

These are the things that have intimidated many believers in creation. When evolutionary scientists present them, many times Christians and other creationists have simply not known what to say. Well, after tonight, you'll know what to say.

Because the evidences are many times misrepresented by those who present them. Let's go ahead and look at that first quote. We want to talk, first of all, about the matter of vestigial organs or vestigial structures.

If the word is unfamiliar to you, I'll basically tell you quite simply what it is. What is regarded to be a vestigial structure or organ is a part of the body that is not useful, a part of the body that has no explainable function. And therefore, it is an argument against creationism, because it is thought that if a designer had designed the organism, that designer would not have included any unnecessary parts.

That the presence of functionless parts is evidence that this is not a well-designed thing. On the other hand, it fits well with evolution if there are functionless parts, because evolution suggests, or at least would allow, that in the process of evolution, certain species have retained vestiges of their evolutionary ancestry. One of the most obvious that has been pointed to many times is in the human species, the tailbone, the cossix.

And that is a bone that resembles a tail that you have attached to your pelvis at the base of your spine. And evolutionists have long pointed to this as something that is useless to you, because you don't have or need a tail. But they say it is present in your skeleton, because we have come from ancestors that did have tails and did use them.

And it was not a useless structure to them, but in the process of evolution, the tail, as the species evolved, disappeared gradually. But the vestige that shows that there once was a tail is still present, to bear witness that we came from ancestors that once had useful tails. But since it is a useless organ to us, it is thought to be proof that there is no creator, because why would he give you a useless thing like a tailbone when you don't need a tail? Other useless parts of the body have been identified over the years.

This quotation that is before you on the screen comes from H.G. Wells, the famous novelist, but also a very much enthusiastic student of science. Most of his writing, of course, was science fiction. But back in 1934, in his book, The Science of Life, H.G. Wells made this statement.

Wiedersheim, the celebrated German anatomist, enumerated in the body of man no less than 180 organs which are vestigial, holy or almost useless to us, though useful in other species of animals, each one of them a stumbling block to the believer in special creation, but an ally to the evolutionist, unquote. So H.G. Wells believed that these 180 parts of the body that have no use, that Wiedersheim had identified back in the 19th or 18th century, that these were stumbling blocks to creation. I would have to agree.

If indeed there are 180 parts of the human body that have no function whatsoever, I would say those are a stumbling block to creation, and they are an ally to evolutionists. But the evidence that he's quoting is fairly old. With the advance of medical research and scientific knowledge, one by one, each of these 180 parts of the human body, which were believed in the 18th century actually to be useless to man, have been shown to have a use.

You see, in Wiedersheim's day and also, of course, in H.G. Wells' day, science had not discovered the use of many of the things that are now understood about our bodies and the bodies of other animals. And it can be argued that there is no useless structure, there is no functionalist part of your body. There are five organs in the human body that remain on the list.

In two centuries, out of 180 once claimed to be functionalist parts of your body, 175, now it is known the exact function and use of those organs. There are five that are still not certainly known. It's not certainly known what the cossacks is for, the tailbone.

That's one of the five. And there are a few other glands and also the muscles of the outer ear. You don't wiggle your ears, at least you don't need to for survival.

Maybe you do wiggle your ears, but that's not a necessary thing for survival, doesn't have any profitable use to you. And therefore the muscles of the outer ear seem to be of no use, the tailbone seems to be of no use, and three other glands appear to be of no use so far. However, I might say this, medical research is far from complete in what is, has yet to discover.

And there are already very plausible theories in the medical field, as yet not vindicated by research, but very plausible theories of what these things are for. I mean, for all we know, humans in some rainforest somewhere may wiggle their ears as a means of communication. That's a silly thought, it may seem, but it might seem equally silly to let you know that there are, there are tribes of human beings in some jungles that do nothing but whistle and tick to communicate.

They don't use words and sounds like we do, but that's a fact. Who knows? I'm not saying that that is what the muscles of the outer ear are for. Maybe we'll never know.

But it is uncommonly bold to suggest that man could never find out, especially given the trend. 175 out of 180 things once regarded as useless have been now found to be indisputably useful. These other five certainly may be found to have use.

There's already, you know, an argument, a very good argument for the tailbone, because can you imagine sitting as you are now sitting if you didn't have one? The presence of the tailbone gives you a comfortable tripod to sit on. Without it, and some people have had to lose it because of surgery, because of a cancer or something else, comfortable sitting is not possible. It is a good design for sitting.

Furthermore, it is an important anchor for many pelvic muscles, which would have no obvious place to anchor to if the cossacks were not present. So who is to say that the cossacks have no use? It seems to have a very good use, but it's one of the five still that they're not quite willing to say they know for sure why it's there. But I would say it's a very arrogant thing for science to talk as if they now know all that they ever will know, especially in view of what should be a very humbling history of medical research.

When bold opponents of creation were saying there were 180 evidences in the human body that evolution had occurred, and now 180 has dwindled to five. And even those may soon go by the board. One researcher doing some special work on this and publishing in a magazine called Evolutionary Theory back in 1981, S.R. Scadding was his name, back in May, the May issue of 1981 Evolutionary Theory Journal, made this statement.

Now when we read statements by scientists, if you're not accustomed to long words and long sentences, you may have to read them more than once. But we'll read it, and if it's hard to understand, I'll try to clarify what it says. S.R. Scadding made this comment in Evolutionary Theory, which is obviously not a creationist journal.

And he said, An analysis of the difficulties in unambiguously identifying functionalist structures leads to the conclusion that vestigial organs provide no evidence for evolutionary theory. Now this is an evolutionist talking who would love to point to any evidence available for evolution. But after researching and presenting the data, he says, You know, there's some serious difficulties in making positive identifications of organs that have no use.

There are difficulties in identifying with certainty indisputably useless functionalist structures. How do we identify them? How can we be sure that the structure that we have not yet discovered a use for is in fact useless? He says, Once you analyze the difficulties of unambiguously identifying structures that are in fact indisputably useless, once you understand the difficulties in that identification, you realize that vestigial organs, which is one of the main evidences for evolution, this evolution says vestigial organs provide no evidence for evolution. Because in order for them to, you must be sure that you know everything you will ever know about the organs of certain bodies.

Now, among the functionalist organs in some other species would be the sightless eyes of certain species of newt, a kind of salamander that lives underground and never sees the light of day, lives continually in darkness from its birth until its death. It has eyes in its sockets, but they are blind. These seem to be functionless.

And although no human researcher has been behind those eyes to know whether anything is getting through that optic nerve to that brain or not, we are willing to suggest that perhaps those eyes are blind and useless. Likewise, the teeth of chicken and the dangling toes of pigs that never touch the ground, these are considered to be functionless structures also. And to tell you the truth, I'm willing to acknowledge this.

Now, I don't know that to be true. I don't know that no function will ever be discovered in these creatures. The fact of the matter is these are not the creatures upon which most research is being done, medical research, and therefore we may never have enough research to discover.

There may never be any serious interest on the part of researchers to discover what use dangling toes on pigs have. But I will say this. The creationist is not thwarted by that particular information.

It is the view of the creationist, at least we should say of the Christian creationist, because other creationists of other religions may have other explanations. But the creationist of my particular viewpoint holds that all things were created perfect, but since a disaster happened in human history and in world history, which we call the fall, disorder, mutation, degeneration of species has been in progress for many thousands of years, which has led to many deformities in a variety of creatures. And these deformities, far from producing evolutionary innovations like Darwin thought they would, they have produced degeneration in the perfection that originally existed in the species.

It is not impossible to imagine that the first pig with dangling toes was a mutant pig and that its ancestors had toes that touched the ground. We do not deny that change occurs. What is denied by the creationist is that upward change occurs or that such upward change is an explanation of where things came from in the first place.

But there is no problem with the suggestion that many problems, many imperfect things exist in the living world right now due to the effects of the second law of thermodynamics, the law of entropy, things tend to get worse, not better. Therefore, if we do find flaws of design, it is not impossible to imagine that the flaw was not in the original ancestor, but that it is a product of mutation and therefore would not prove with any certainty that the original ancestor of these creatures was imperfect. We simply don't know.

We don't have that specimen, so we are left without proof of anything about that. All I'm saying is that the creationists can explain the data just as the evolutionists can. And the data does not militate against the creationist interpretation and the vestigial structures argument is not really any serious problem to the creationist.

All right, let's go to another argument that is commonly used against creation, and that is embryological recapitulation. Now, this is the view that within the womb of a specimen, a recurring of the evolutionary ancestry of that species takes place during gestation. The human species is the one upon which the embryos have been studied a great deal, and these claims have been made.

Of course, pigs' embryos and others have been studied quite extensively, but most of the claims you hear come from the realm of human embryology. It has often been thought that there are evidences in the development of the human embryo that the human embryo goes through the stages of evolution, which are suggested to be those of our ancestors. One of the most famous evidences that was brought forward back in the previous century or so was that at a certain stage in the development of the human embryo, there appeared bars and grooves in the neck region of the embryo which appeared to resemble the gills of a fish.

And these were quickly labeled gill slits and were frequently referred to in evolutionary literature as an evidence that man evolved from the fish because at a certain point in the development of the womb, a human species begins with a single cell, goes to two to four, multiplies, becomes a multicellular creature, goes through stages that are very clearly subhuman in form. I'm not saying that it's a subhuman being. It is a human being, but the form that it's in is not like that of an adult or a fully formed human being.

And that there are these gill slits apparently on the neck region is one of those things that was thought to give evidence that evolution had occurred. However, further research discovered or brought to light the fact that those so-called gill slits were not gill slits at all. They never did open at the throat, so they weren't slits.

They did not in the human species develop into gills or lungs or anything like that, so they're not gills. And since they were not gills nor slits, they quite obviously were not gill slits. And what they are known to be called today are visceral pouches.

And these visceral pouches actually exist in the embryos of many different species. We can look at that quote now on the screen. This quotation comes from Sir Gavin De Beer, one of the leading experts in the evolutionary scientific realm.

He's the former director of the British Museum of Natural History, publishing in what is probably England's premier scientific journal, Nature. And this appeared back in 1965 from Sir Gavin. April 24th, 1965, page 331 of Nature magazine.

Sir Gavin De Beer said, The visceral pouches of the embryo reptiles, birds, and mammals bear little resemblance to the gill slits of the adult fish. Anyone who can see can convince himself of the truth of this. All that can be said is that the fish preserves its visceral pouches and elaborates them into gill slits, while reptiles, birds, and mammals do not preserve them as such, but convert them into other structures such as the eustachian tubes, the tonsils, and the thymus gland.

Now, you see, if evolution were true, or I should say if this particular evidence for evolution were valid evidence, if the presence of these visceral pouches was some evidence that we evolved from fishes, which is what evolutionists used to claim for this information, then it would follow that all species that have these also descended from fishes, and yet different species develop in the process of gestation these visceral pouches into different structures, wholly unrelated to those which fishes use them for, which means that the argument for the presence of gill slits in the human embryo is weak at best and silly at worst. In fact, it is the latter designation that is usually used of it, even by modern evolutionists. Too much has been discovered to allow for this evidence from embryological recapitulation to really be held as valid.

I give you some more evidences in the following quotes. This comes from Professor E.S. Goodrich from Oxford University. He is quoted in the book Transactions of the Victoria Institute in 1947.

The age of the quote doesn't change the truthfulness of its material. He said, The respiratory surface of the lung, which is the last to appear in the embryo, must have been present from the first and throughout the phylogeny. Now what he means by that is when you look at the embryo's development, it's not until very late in the development of the human embryo that you find the final respiratory surface of the lung developing.

And yet, if the earlier stages of the embryo represented evolutionary ancestors of ours, then they would have had to be creatures that were lacking in this respiratory surface of the lung, which doesn't come until later in the embryo's development. Yet he says, Certainly all creatures with lungs prior to the human species must have had the respiratory surface of the lung. They couldn't breathe without it.

And therefore, the late development of that surface in the embryo suggests a non-support for the idea that we're seeing evolution taking place as it actually historically happened. Here's another quote. This one is from Sir Gavin De Beer again, from a different writing.

This was a reader from Oxford University Press, it was an Oxford reader, called Embryos and Ancestors, written by Sir Gavin De Beer. He said, teeth were evolved before tongues, but in mammals now tongues develop before teeth. Now what he means by that is, by the evolutionary scheme, creatures with teeth were around before creatures with tongues were around.

The tongue is a later development than teeth. Even fish have teeth, well, they have tongues too for that matter, but some very early creatures that they postulate had teeth but didn't have tongues. Yet, in the development of the embryo, obviously, you were born with a tongue but not with teeth.

The teeth come later in the embryo's development than does the tongue, which is not agreeable with the suggestions of evolution at all. Another quote comes from R. Danson. I don't know very much about this man, but he seems to be a little disillusioned with evolution.

Although he wrote in New Scientist Magazine, back in 1971, New Scientist Magazine, volume 49, page 35, In 1971, this man, R. Danson, said, The theory of evolution is no longer with us because neo-Darwinism is now acknowledged as being unable to explain anything more than trivial change. And in default of some other theory, we have none. So he declares himself not to be a creationist.

He says, evolution doesn't explain what it needs to explain. All it can do is possibly explain trivial change, and we need an explanation of major change. And yet he does not embrace creation.

He says, in default of some other theory, that is, some other theory than evolution, we don't have any, because he's not willing to give up the faith and become a creationist. So he says, further down, Despite the hostility of the witness provided by the fossil record, despite the innumerable difficulties, and despite the lack of even a credible theory, evolution survived. Can there be any other area of science, for instance, in which a concept as intellectually barren as embryonic recapitulation could be used as evidence of a theory? Now listen to this guy.

That last line. Can there be any other area of science, for instance, in which a concept as intellectually barren as embryonic recapitulation could be used as evidence for a theory? In other words, biology, which is the main field of science where evolution matters, of course, all fields of science presume or assume that evolution is true, but it's biology where the theory really matters. It is willing to admit as evidence concepts that are intellectually barren.

Other fields of science would be a little more discerning, a little more careful about what kinds of evidences are admitted, but biology is desperately seeking evidence for that which is not plausible, and therefore they're willing to accept concepts, according to this scientist, which are intellectually barren, and embryonic recapitulation is one of those. We have two quotes here now from Stephen Jay Gould. You could hardly ask for a more timely authority from the evolutionary camp than Stephen Jay Gould.

He is the poster boy of the evolutionary movement in our country. He is probably the leading American evolutionary spokesman. He is a professor of biology and geology at Harvard and describes himself as a vocational paleontologist, and he writes against creationism a great deal.

However, he has made these two statements, both of them relevant to the subject of embryological recapitulation. He said in Natural History magazine, back in 1980, in April, on page 144, he said the theory of recapitulation should be defunct today. I was myself speaking to a, I guess it was a biology class, at Worcester State College in Worcester, Massachusetts, many years ago, back in 1977.

The professor was not happy to have me there, but a student, who was, I guess, a Christian, had heard that I was in town and asked the professor, since they'd recently studied their unit on evolution, whether the professor would be open to having a creationist come in and present the evidence. The professor was not pleased, but did not want to appear to be closed-minded, and so acquiesced to the suggestion, and I was invited to come in, and I was given a period to discuss it. I gave a few evidences in the time I had and opened up for questions.

One of the students, extremely hostile to me, even more hostile than the professor, was trying to nail me to the wall with this embryological recapitulation argument. And I said to him, well, you know, that argument seemed to work for evolution, back before very many things were known about the actual stages that the embryo goes through, but now they know too much for that theory to really hold much water. And the student wouldn't let me go on that.

He was keeping depressed for it. And finally, the professor himself, who didn't love me at all, spoke to the student and said, listen, the argument of embryological recapitulation has not been held by knowledgeable scientists for over 50 years. This professor made that statement in defense of me, although he didn't like my views.

He had, on that occasion, to be honest, he made that statement in 1977. More recently, Stephen Jay Gould has said essentially the same thing. In 1982, in Discover Magazine, September 1982, page 41, Stephen Jay Gould said the theory of recapitulation died more than 50 years ago.

But the reason I bring it up now, even though you'd assume that a whole generation or two of scientists have come up who no longer use this argument, why bring it up now? Because the average person on the street doesn't know that that argument was disqualified 50 years ago. I heard it in high school. There's a good chance you did, although many of you have been in high school more recently than I have.

And, you know, the problem is that teachers and professors did their studying under people who did their studying more than 50 years ago. And they can't hope to keep up on all the new advances. Anyone in the realm of science has to specialize in some narrow field.

If the professors who taught our present-day professors lived at a time when embryological recapitulation was thought to be a valid argument and did not specialize in embryology, then no doubt they passed along to their students, who are now professors, passing along to their students, who may even represent even a later generation of professors, passing on this myth of embryological recapitulation. But those who are knowledgeable in the field for the past 50 years have ceased to use this as an argument. But I bring it up now because the average evolutionist, even the average professor of biology, who is not expert in embryology, is not aware of the demise of this argument.

Let's go on to another argument. This comes from natural and artificial selection. We won't need that quote quite yet, but we'll come to it in a moment.

Natural and artificial selection. Natural selection is what Darwin suggested was the means or the mechanism that evolution took place. People believed in evolution before Darwin, centuries before, millennia before there were evolutions.

Back in ancient history, certain ancient societies believed in evolution, but they were sort of mythical ideas that never had a way of being explained scientifically. Therefore, they were not broadly accepted in the scientific community. It was Darwin in 1859 who, with the publishing of his book The Origin of Species, gave for the first time what seemed to be a scientifically plausible explanation of how evolution could really happen.

Namely, he called it natural selection, which simply means that nature produces variation through mutation and through genetic combining in certain ways so that every two parents of a creature produce a variety of offspring. Some of the offspring are not exactly like their parents. And some of the ways in which they're not exactly like their parents might be superior to their parents.

And if that is so, they will have an advantage that their parents did not have. In survival, one of the offspring might be stronger than his parents were or have more advantageous coloration for camouflage or might have a longer neck for reaching food at a higher level than his parents could. Only slightly so.

But that slight advantage would be, nonetheless, an advantage and would therefore confer to that creature a greater probability of survival. And those creatures that did not have that particular variation would tend to die off while this improved form would live on. And over the millions of generations, the accumulation of these small advantages would actually result in whole new structures, whole new organs, and eventually whole new species just by the accumulation of millions and millions of very tiny imperceptible changes.

This is what natural selection teaches. And the reason it's called natural selection should be obvious. Nature has, by conferring advantages on some specimens, has selected them for survival.

And those specimens that have not those advantages have been selected for extinction. Therefore, nature has done some selecting here and has produced over the long haul all the species of plants and animals alive today. This is what natural selection teaches.

Artificial selection is the attempt to make that happen and prove that point artificially in the laboratory. You're no doubt aware that many experiments have been done with certain species like the fruit fly. The fruit fly is a good one to use because it has a larger chromosome than some species, so it can be observed a little bit easier.

And also it's got a very quick life cycle, reproductive cycle, so you can produce a lot of generations in a relatively short time. And generation after generation is what you need to see evolution. You need millions of generations.

They have produced over 1,500 generations of fruit flies in the laboratory, exposing them to every known mutagenic force they can. Gamma rays, X-rays, every kind of thing they can do to try to enhance or increase the normal amount of mutations that would ordinarily occur so that they can see what the effects of mutations are over a period of hundreds or even thousands of generations. And of course, there have been changes.

There have been variations of fruit flies that have occurred. You've got some fruit flies with no eyes. You've got some fruit flies with no wings.

You've got some fruit flies with no hairs on their thorax. You've got fruit flies with other deformities. In virtually every case, the mutation has made the creature less fit for survival and less fit for evolution.

And that's a very good thing. It helps the case for evolution. But worst of all for the evolutionists is that after 1,500 generations of tampering with the genetic system of the fruit fly, they have not produced even another kind of fly.

They haven't produced a house fly or a horse fly or anything like that. You still have fruit flies. They're still the same species.

They're either, in most cases, unfit for survival or sterile. Or if they can reproduce at all, they reproduce with the same species that produced them, which means they're still the same species. Therefore, artificial selection has failed to demonstrate any real evolution.

Now, the reason that evolutionists like to point to artificial selection is that they believe that they can convince you, and in many cases they can if you're not better informed, that evolution simply means change. And since they can point to a great amount of change in experiments like this, they think that that proves evolution. Because evolution just means change.

How can anyone deny that change occurs in these species? We can prove it right here. But you see, their basic premise is wrong and deceptive. Evolution does not simply mean change.

Creationists for thousands of years have known that change occurs. There are 200 breeds of dogs that most of them produced hundreds of years ago by intelligent breeders. They are all of one species, however, Canis familiaris, and they can all interbreed.

And you can see a tremendous amount of change and variety in the hairiness or the size or the body shape or the head shape or the coloration of various breeds of dogs. I mean, some of them you wouldn't know by looking at them that they were the same species at all. Now, by the way, the dog is a particularly unusually flexible kind of species.

And I bring it up because more than most species, you can see a lot of change. You can't get anywhere near that kind of variety breeding, for instance, lions or cats or horses even, although there have been some interesting variations in size in breeding horses and so forth. But really, the dog is probably the best example anyone can point to of how selective breeding, artificial selection and so forth can produce change.

But that's not evolution. Evolution doesn't just say change occurred. If it did, it's not saying anything new that creation hasn't always acknowledged.

Creationism teaches that when species were created, they were created with a sufficient gene pool so that in the process of reproduction, variation and adaptation could occur so that the species could survive changes in environment over the long haul and so forth. If the environment changed radically, certain specimens would no doubt have that variation that would give them the advantage. That is, in fact, natural selection, but it's not the same thing as evolution.

That some species are better equipped for survival than others is not any proof of evolution, nor is it anything new that Darwin thought up. What Darwin thought up was the idea that this would produce all the changes in an upward direction, increasing complexity and viability in general. That the net result of all these changes would be an increase in ability to survive and to compete in the world where there's a struggle for survival.

None of these experiments have demonstrated anything like an increase, a change for the better, such as evolution would require. Now, as a matter of fact, these experiments have actually crippled evolutionists somewhat and have removed one of the things they thought was going to be an evidence for their theory. Because what all this artificial mutation and artificial selection has shown is that there are boundaries to how much a species can change.

Some of them are extremely flexible like dogs. Others don't change very much, but eventually you reach the boundary of the species and change stops happening. You can reach a total number of variations in the dog and then you basically, all you can do is produce more of the same.

And what has been discovered through artificial selection is in fact that there are boundaries to species. There's variation within a species, but it's not an upwardly mobile kind of a change. And as a matter of fact, it's almost always the other direction.

Now, there is something that has happened in nature that is pointed to as natural selection by evolutionists. In fact, many evolutionists said this is the most remarkable evidence of evolution ever seen by man. And it's referring to the experiments with the British species of moth called the peppered moth, which existed back a couple of hundred years ago in three forms, the dark, the light, and the intermediate coloration.

These were all the same species of moth. They're called distin betularia. That's the scientific name for this species.

And there were three varieties, a dark color, a light color, and an intermediate color. Now in England during the industrial revolution, the pollution that was caused by factories and so forth tended to make the tree bark darken. Now these moths perch on tree bark.

And when the tree bark got darker, those moths that were darker in coloration had better camouflage. And the birds that ate them were less likely to catch the dark colored ones on the dark tree bark. The light colored ones were sitting ducks, and so they got eaten in large numbers.

And the majority of the population of peppered moths in England in the early days of the industrial revolution were dark because the light ones were destroyed in larger numbers. However, once environmental controls were imposed on the factories and so forth, and pollution was cleared up a certain amount, the tree bark lightened again. And as the tree bark lightened, it gave an advantage to the lighter forms that found their camouflage there.

And the population coloration has shifted now so that there are now more light colored peppered moths. Evolutionists who have studied this say, well, that is natural selection in progress. And we can say, yeah, that's true.

That is natural selection in progress, but it's not evolution. Nothing new has been produced. All three forms, the same three forms that exist now, existed before any of these changes began.

Nothing has changed. It's just a shifting in populations. It is true it demonstrates survival of the fittest, but anyone could have postulated that.

It doesn't take an evolutionist to guess that those creatures are better camouflaged, are going to survive in larger numbers. But it has been called the most striking example of evolution ever seen by man. Now, we agree with that assessment.

The peppered moth experiments are the most striking evidence of evolution ever seen by man. But of course, once you understand what happened, you realize that no evolution at all occurred. And that there has never been any real evolution observed by man.

Don't take my word for it. Here's some authorities on it. L. Harrison Matthews, writing in the foreword to the 1971 edition of Darwin's Origin of Species, made this statement back in 1971.

He said, The peppered moth experiments beautifully demonstrate natural selection or survival of the fittest in action. But they don't show evolution in progress. For however the population may alter in content of light, intermediate, or dark forms, all the moths remain from beginning to end, biston bachelaria.

We see an expert evolutionist, so expert in fact, that he was chosen to write the foreword to the 1971 edition of Darwin's book. He's saying, well, you know, it does show natural selection, but let's face it, no real evolution happened. They've all stayed the same species, and they all existed, of course, even before.

There's a quote from C.P. Martin back in 1953, the year I was born. So this is an old quote. But it was in American Scientist magazine, not a disreputable source at all.

Volume 41, page 100. C.P. Martin said, It is doubtful that of the mutations that have been seen to occur, a single one can definitely be said to have increased the viability of the affected plant or animal. Now viability is a word that just means the ability to survive.

So of all the mutations that had been seen up until 1953, and by the way, thousands of them had been seen by that time, nothing has really changed since then in terms of this information. It is doubtful whether anyone has ever been able to point to any mutation that for sure was an advantage. And yet evolution is said to have taken place as a result of literally billions, billions upon billions of advantageous mutations, because every innovation, every new structure in every species, and there are millions of species, and millions of features had to evolve.

So there must have been billions upon billions over the course of the past 4.5 billion years of advantageous mutations that account for all these changes. The problem is of the many thousands of mutations that man has seen, not one can be pointed to as for sure being advantageous. Most of them are very clearly disadvantageous.

Now we talked about the breeding of dogs and how much variety has been produced by that. One thing that has been learned by the domestication of animals and plants, because you can create hybrid plants also, you can breed certain sugar beets to get more sugar than their ancestors had, or the navel orange is a very good example that we're all familiar with of a hybrid, more than one kind of orange, the strains have been mixed to create a juicier, easier to peel, easier to pull apart seedless orange. Now these we could say represent advantages to us, but they're not an advantage to the orange.

The orange has no seeds. The navel orange is a better orange. I'd rather buy and eat a navel orange than other kinds, but it's not an advantage to the orange, to that species, for its survival.

Nor are any of the advantages that we have created through hybridization and selective breeding and artificial selection. None of them have really indisputably made an improvement on the viability of the species. Here's another quote on this very point from D.S. Falconer in a book called Introduction to Quantitative Genetics, published by the Ronald Press in 1960.

He said, our domestic animals and plants are perhaps the best demonstration of the effects of this principle. The improvements that have been made by selection in these have clearly been accompanied by a reduction of fitness for life under natural conditions. And only the fact that domestic animals and plants do not live under natural conditions has allowed these improvements to be made.

Now this is very important. Artificial selection is not just another kind of natural selection sped up in the laboratory. Artificial selection is something that is actually the opposite of natural selection.

Because natural selection suggests that innovations occurred to accommodate and adapt the creature to its environment. But artificial selection innovates, changes, to fit where there is no natural need for it, to create something that is not naturally needed by the organism. The original dog was no doubt a very hardy, wild, wolf-like creature.

But after all this refinement of selected breeding and so forth, we come up with such oddities as Mexican hairless, Pomeranians, you know, Cocker Spaniels and so forth. Now you might like those breeds and not think them oddities, but the fact of the matter is in the real world, in the natural world, they would be oddities. French poodles may be a better kind of dog to have in your mobile home.

But they would not have any advantage in the struggle for survival in the real natural world. And what D.S. Faulconer is saying is that the improvements, that is from our point of view, the improvements that are made in these domestic animals and plants, are not really any advantage at all to the species themselves and do not show any real evolution. They create innovations that do not have a niche in the real world.

Whereas natural selection is supposedly innovating changes and adaptations to a real niche and a real need in the real world. That's not what artificial selection really produces. Therefore, there is no evidence for evolution in it.

All we have found from these kinds of experiments is the boundaries of speciation. The boundaries of variation within a species. Have not seen where the species come from in the first place.

This is a quote from Pierre P. Grasse. Last week we read a quote from Theodosius Dobzhansky, a fervent evolutionist, critiquing this very book that this quote comes from. And he didn't like Pierre P. Grasse because he said his book, The Evolution of Life, is a frontal attack on all forms of evolution.

But Dobzhansky said of Grasse, he says, Now one may disagree with Grasse, but not ignore him. He is the most distinguished of French zoologists. His knowledge of the living world is encyclopedic.

That's what Theodosius Dobzhansky, diehard evolutionist, leading evolutionist today, said about this man that we're about to quote. His knowledge of the living world is encyclopedic. He's the leading French zoologist.

All right, well, what did he have to say? He had to say this. Some contemporary biologists, as soon as they observe a mutation, talk about evolution. They are implicitly supporting the following syllogism.

Mutations are the only evolutionary variations. All living beings undergo mutations, therefore all living things evolve. This logical scheme is, however, unacceptable.

First, because its major premise is neither obvious nor general. Second, because its conclusion does not agree with the facts. No matter how numerous they may be, mutations do not produce any kind of evolution.

Remember, a mutation is nothing other than a copying error. During reproduction, DNA from two parents, in the case of sexual reproduction, two parents provide their DNA, which has to replicate itself. And many times, the replication, I mean, almost all the time, it's a perfect copy.

But occasionally, there is an error, a mistake. And that's what we call a mutation. It produces something that should have been produced.

It's a result of a copying mistake of the DNA. And last week I mentioned, no matter how many times you throw a good watch against the wall, you're not going to make a better watch out of it. Somebody came up to me afterwards and said, another illustration they heard is like saying, you can improve cars by getting them into wrecks.

You know, the more wrecks they have, the more likely you are to come up with a good, a better car, an improvement on the car. Obviously, that's not true. And yet, evolution suggests that multiplied mutations are their hope of evolution.

That's all they've got to produce it, is mutation. Yet, every known mutation ever discovered by man or observed by man has been defective, has produced damage to the specimen. And none has produced any benefit.

And it's hard to know exactly how subjecting your automobile to thousands of crashes is somehow going to improve your chances of improving it and making a better car out of it. Colin Patterson, senior paleontologist at the British Museum of Natural History, was interviewed on BBC March 4th, 1982. In that interview, he said, No one has ever produced a species by mechanisms of natural selection.

No one has gotten near it. This man is an evolutionist and a leading authority. Let's go on to the next evidence.

Call the next witness. Now we want to talk about homology. Homology is perhaps the singular most important concept in evolution.

Homology is the study of similar structures in dissimilar organisms. One of the classic examples is that the hand of a man, the fin of a whale, and the wing of a bat, creatures that are very different from each other, man, whale, and bat. Yet, the fin of the whale has a similar skeletal structure to the hand of a man, which is also similar to the skeletal structure of the wing of the bat.

How is this so? How can it be that creatures so unlike each other would yet demonstrate this basic similarity of design? Well, the evolutionist answer is, this proves that all of these creatures came from a common ancestor, which had the basic characteristic. And although that common ancestor, its descendants evolved into many varied kinds of creatures, all of them retained the basic design, the basic characteristic, which would be the five-digited limb. Now, this is said to be the proof of relationship among species.

These similarities between species prove they're related to each other. Remember that the relationship of one species to another is an evolutionary guess. When they say dogs are closely related to bears, or lions are closely related to leopards, or something like that, statements that we're very familiar with.

People say those kinds of things all the time. Remember that you're hearing an evolutionary statement, because in order for two different species to be related, they have to have a common ancestor. We can say they are relatively similar, but that's a different kind of statement than saying they are related.

Just like for me to say that you resemble very much the person sitting next to you is not the same thing as to say you're related to them, at least not closely. I must say that I've been in many parts of the world where people have asked me, do you have a brother in Chicago? Do you have a brother in Miami or whatever? I say, no, no, I don't. They say, well, you look just like somebody I know there.

Well, that may be. They assume because of a similar appearance that there is a relationship. In many cases, it's a safe assumption, but not always.

Similarities are not necessarily evidences that betoken relationship. Last week, I mentioned a very good case in point. In Australia, the majority of the indigenous mammals to that continent are marsupials.

That means they carry their young in a pouch. They give birth to their young after a very short gestation period of only a few days. The young are born in literal embryonic form without eyes, without ears, without even hind legs in many cases, and having only four legs.

Maybe they're 12 days after conception, perhaps, they come out of the mother and they navigate through the hair on the mother's stomach into an abdominal pouch where they attach themselves to nipples and the rest of the gestation takes place in the pouch. Marsupials are unique in the world of animals in this respect and basically all the indigenous mammals of Australia are marsupials. In fact, the only marsupials found outside of Australia are in this country, the opossum, which many people mistakenly think is related to the rat because of its general appearance.

If evolution were true, it would not be even closely related at all to a rat but to a kangaroo or a koala or something that looks not very much like it. According to evolutionary theory, marsupials are not at all closely related to placental mammals. All other mammals, except for monotremes, the egg-laying mammals, the duck-billed planipus and the spiny anteater, the echidna.

Apart from monotremes and marsupials, all mammals are placental mammals. That's what we are. Our young are nourished through a placenta in the womb.

So we're called placental. Now the amazing thing is that if you would survey all the species of mammals in Australia and those of other parts of the world, you would find that Australia has marsupial mice that resemble almost exactly placental mice in other parts of the world. Australia has marsupial bats that look, for all appearances, like placental bats.

They have marsupial dogs and wolves, marsupial bears, marsupial other things, other creatures that are marsupials that resemble very much in shape and form the placental bears and dogs and so forth. Now, this being so, one has got to ask how much of a theory of relationship can be attributed to similarities of structure. One thing that evolutionists have a very difficult time explaining, although they realize they have to and so they give it a name, is the fact that, in their opinion, marsupials and placental mammals branched off in the family tree billions of years ago before anything looked like a bat or a mouse or a dog, that the basic change, the basic fork in the road was way earlier than any of these later developments.

And therefore, for an early marsupial to develop into something that looks like a mouse and an earlier placental mammal to evolve independently into something that looks just like the same thing, but is entirely different, is called convergent evolution. I read an evolutionist saying that he was holding in his hand the skull of a marsupial dog. I think it was actually a Tasmanian wolf.

But he said, anybody who has seen the skull of an ordinary dog would say there is no difference in the skull. He said it's an almost eerie feeling, as an evolutionist, to try to see this almost identical skull of creatures that are said to be not closely related at all and whose evolution must have convergently developed along exactly the same lines, though they were separated by continents from each other and by billions of generations from each other. Now, what I am saying about this is that because there are similarities, that is no guarantee that there is close relationship.

You may resemble very closely in appearance, have the same nose, eyes, mouth, hair color, and so forth, somebody who isn't even closely related to you in any sense. Marsupial mammals are not closely related, even by evolutionary theory, to placental mammals that look just like them. And therefore, that should give us the information that you cannot deduce close relationships or even common ancestors from similarities in appearance.

Now, the creationist, when he sees these similarities, says, well, we believe the reason that there are similar structures is because the same designer made them all. An artist often has his trademark. And besides, we believe the creator used sound engineering principles and certain structures work best.

Why shouldn't creatures that all have to eat the same grass have similar teeth and digestive systems? Why shouldn't creatures that all have to breathe air and live off oxygen and give off carbon dioxide, they have to live in the same environment, why shouldn't they have similar lungs and respiratory systems? Would you not expect it to be so? If a certain design of leg worked well for one kind of grazing antelope, would you not expect that other creatures that had to run and live similar lifestyles would have something of a similar design? If it worked well for one type of creature that had to live in that environment, why would not the designer use the same designer, a similar design, following the same principles? All the bridges in the world are different from each other, but they all have some things in common. Because in order for a bridge to work, the designer has to follow certain sound engineering principles that make it ideally suited for its purpose. And therefore, the homologous structures in various species can argue as well for a common designer as for common ancestor.

By the way, homology has recently provided some very serious problems for evolutionists because Darwin, who wrote a great deal about homology, didn't know much about genetics because no one did in his day. In fact, Gregor Mendel, who made the greatest breakthroughs in the areas of genetics, was contemporary with Darwin and published his works shortly after Darwin. Darwin never paid any attention to him, but now, of course, Gregor Mendel's genetic theories are now accepted and known.

And Darwin, not having the advantage of knowing about genetics much, believed that homologous structures, like those things that are similar structures in various animals, came from similar genes in the germ cell of that creature. It is now known that this is not true. That you would expect that the foreleg of an amphibian, because it corresponds to the arm of a man in terms of the overall body structure, that it would come from the same gene on the chromosome of the amphibian as the arm of the man comes from in his chromosomes.

It isn't that way. Things have not turned out in genetic research the way evolutionists thought they would. And since homologous structures do not develop from homologous genes, that is, from corresponding genes, it throws into entire question the validity of whether there's any evolutionary pattern here or not.

Because you would think that if a creature evolved a leg, and eventually a later creature, that leg was modified into an arm, that it would at least be the same gene that was being mutated into this. Else a totally different gene would totally independently produce a structure very similar. Now, homology has therefore provided some very serious problems for evolutionists.

This quote comes from Dr. Michael Denton, the Australian I mentioned earlier in his book Evolution, A Theory and Crisis, published in 1986. On page 145, he says, The validity of the evolutionary interpretation of homology would have been greatly strengthened if embryological and genetic research could have shown that homologous structures were specified by homologous genes and followed homologous patterns of embryological development. Such homology would indeed be strongly suggestive of true relationship of inheritance from a common ancestor.

But it has become clear that the principle cannot be extended in this way. Homologous structures are often specified by non-homologous genetic systems, and the concept of homology can seldom be extended back into embryology. Let's look at the next quote.

This comes from Sir Gavin De Beer, we quoted earlier. He's quoted by Denton in his book, the book we just quoted from. Sir Gavin De Beer said, Therefore, correspondence between homologous structures cannot be pressed back to similarity of position of the cells in the embryo or the parts of the egg out of which these structures are ultimately differentiated.

Again, Michael Denton, from the same book, on page 151, makes this statement. With the demise of any sort of straightforward explanation for homology, one of the major pillars of evolutionary theory has become so weakened that its value as evidence for evolution is greatly diminished. The breakdown of the evolutionary interpretation for homology cannot be dismissed as a triviality.

Sir Alistair Hardy, in a book called The Living Stream, published back in 1965, made this statement. The concept of homology is absolutely fundamental to what we are talking about when we speak of evolution. Yet, in truth, we cannot explain it at all in terms of present-day biological theory.

Sir Gavin De Beer, in his Oxford University reader, called homology an unsolved problem. Unsolved for the evolutionists, not a problem to the creationists. But in the Oxford University reader, Homology, an Unsolved Problem, the author, Sir Gavin De Beer, made this statement.

Quote, It is now clear that the pride with which it was assumed that the inheritance of homologous structures from a common ancestor explained homology was misplaced. There was once pride on the part of evolutionists. The pride was based on the fact that they thought that the presence of homologous structures explained evolution in terms of common ancestry.

But he says it is now known that that pride was misplaced. Because, of course, it was invalid. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle will close with this quote.

Of course, the creator of Sherlock Holmes put this statement into the mouth of his character. In the Bascom Valley Mystery, of course, this is way back in 1928, but still an interesting observation. Sherlock Holmes said, Circumstantial evidence is a very tricky thing, answered Holmes thoughtfully.

It may seem to point very straight to one thing. But if you shift your own point of view a little, you may find it pointing in an equally uncompromising manner to something entirely different. There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.

Now, what we have seen in the evidences that we've considered in this lecture is that some of the biggest guns evolutionists have ever brought against creation, and this is the only way they've ever been able to argue in favor of evolution. The presence of vestigial structures, embryological recapitulation, artificial selection, natural selection, homology. These are the most important arguments evolutionists have ever had to bolster their case and to try to embarrass creationists.

There is no embarrassment. Viewed from an evolutionary slant, they seem to confirm evolution. But if you shift your viewpoint just a little bit, you may find the evidence pointing in an equally uncompromising direction at a different conclusion, namely creation.

What I've sought to demonstrate is all of the evidence that still is valid. Of course, I'm excluding embryological recapitulation because it's not even considered to be valid anymore by evolutionists. But the vestigial organs, artificial selection, natural selection, homology, the evidence that is there actually is far more supportive of the creationist interpretation.

It is true that the creationists cannot account for all vestigial structures, nor can anybody else at the moment. But the trend of scientific discovery has been in the direction of eliminating things from the list that were once thought to be without function. And the creationist has no difficulty with such functionalist structures that are clearly defects, that are clearly degeneration from a probably more perfect ancestor.

This is the direction we would expect mutation to take, in a downward, not an upward direction. The evidence is actually more favorable toward the creationist assumption, not toward the evolutionist assumption. Likewise with artificial selection, which has done nothing more than demonstrate how much change can exist within a species.

And that was once considered to be favorable toward evolution, but actually it has produced real information that is damaging to evolution. It has found out that there are boundaries to species. There are limits to how much change can occur within a species, which is not at all what evolution would have suggested.

Furthermore, the changes that have been produced in these ways have not been in the direction that evolution would suggest. They have not been favorable. They have not produced an increase in the viability of the species.

In fact, they have gone the other direction. They have created products that are less capable of survival in the natural world, very damaging evidence to evolution, not embarrassing to creationism at all. Furthermore, homology can be explained in terms partially of evolution.

Some of the evidence can be, but all of it can be explained in terms of creation. Evolutionists can explain the similarities by suggesting that there was a common ancestor that passed along these traits to all of the variety of species that evolved from that ancestor. And that can't be proven.

That's an assumption. No one has ever discovered these common ancestors, but it is assumed they existed. If you accept evolution a priori as fact, then of course you can give that interpretation.

Creationism has an equally valid interpretation. If you're not opposed to believing that a creator could exist, then one would expect that the creator would be intelligent enough, if he created life and the planets and all the complexity around us, that he'd be intelligent enough to design things in a way that works. And that much of the various basic design structures that are found throughout the living world would be simply an evidence of good engineering on the part of the designer.

Furthermore, homology has given evolution some unsolved as of yet problems. Not the least of which is that those structures in different species that are thought to be homologous, that is to say that they share in common with other species that are not very much like them, those structures have not been shown to come from the portions of the embryo or from the genes in the chromosome that evolution would have suggested they would have come from. And this has created unsolved as of yet problems for the evolutionists, but no problem whatsoever for the creationists.

The creationists would simply say, well, the world's full of surprises. We would have guessed too that probably these things developed from homologous parts of the chromosome. But if it's not so, we just learned something new about how the creator did things.

It doesn't throw a wrench in our understanding. It's just another wonderful surprise. And the world is full of wonderful surprises.

The problem is they're more wonderful for the creationists than the evolutionists because the evolutionists in the past 130 something years has been surprised in ways that he would prefer not to be surprised. Darwin believed that all of these areas we've talked about tonight provided very strong evidence for evolution. He believed that the evidence for evolution from embryological capitulation was second to none.

And that particular evidence has been discarded by knowledgeable scientists for over 50 years now. It's simply the case that Darwin's theory took hold at a time when not much was known about the things he was saying. 130 or more years of research, however, have shown that the more we learn, the less valid any of those arguments appear.

And creation, which has stood the test of time for thousands of years, remains unassailed by actual discovery.