Evidence of Creation

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Evidence of Creation

Steve Gregg presents evidence supporting the theory of creation by highlighting the absence of transitional forms in both the present and the fossil record. He emphasizes the complexity of seemingly simple structures like feathers, asserting that they defy analysis and cannot be adequately explained through evolution. Gregg raises questions about the development of advantageous traits in organisms and contends that the intricate behaviors and organization observed in animals and plants suggest the involvement of an intelligent creator. He concludes that the evidence challenges Darwinian theories and points towards a basis in intelligence rather than chance for the origin and diversity of life.

Transcript

Tonight is our final lecture on the subject of the evidence concerning origins. We've been discussing all along the conflict between the evolutionary explanation and the creationist explanation of origins. We admit that creation is not scientifically demonstrable, nor is evolution.

That's the part that we are introducing here. And we have not introduced anything from the scripture. We've not made any religious statements in the entirety of this series, nor are we planning to do so tonight.

We talked, especially last week, about the fossil record. The fossil record being the actual record of what really happened. It is a record left in the stone, and therefore it would presumably be an infallible record of what history really was like.

We should be able to go to the fossil record and see whether it supports evolution or creation, because the predictions one would make on the basis of evolution are entirely different than the predictions one would make on the basis of creation. If creation occurred, we would expect there to be no transitional intermediate forms between species, neither alive today nor in the fossil record. That is, no extinct forms that were transitional between one type and another type of animal.

However, if evolution had occurred, there should be not only a few or several, but there should be millions of such forms, because for every major species, and there's millions of them, each of these would have to have come from another species that was not very much like it, and by a series of gradual transitions. Because evolutionists historically have always argued, Darwin argued this adamantly, even though some of his fellow evolutionists thought he was too strong on this, they believed that this has to be very gradual, that the variations that take place that lead to major evolutionary changes are very small in each generation, that they accumulate over thousands or millions of generations, so that a creature becomes fundamentally different eventually than its ancestors some hundreds of thousands of generations back. The problem here is, of course, if that is really the way things came about, then those variations would represent animals that really lived on the planet at one time or another.

Furthermore, for something like a fish to evolve into a frog, or for a lizard to evolve into a bird, there'd be a tremendous number of body parts that would have to change very gradually. There would have been millions of stages in between, let's say, a lizard and a bird, and along the line you'd have to have creatures that were 99% lizard and 1% bird. Some time later there'd be creatures that were something like 75% lizard and 25% bird.

As you go on throughout history, you'd find someday there'd be something that was about 50% bird, 50% reptile, and so forth. Eventually you'd have something that was 75% bird and only 25% reptile. Now the problem is, you don't find these.

In the living world and in the fossil world, these creatures are conspicuous by their absence. Actually, as you know, I debated a young lady from Linfield College last week, and I mentioned this fact, and she said, No, that wouldn't be necessary. These creatures, you'd never have to have something that was 50% bird and 50% reptile.

She obviously has not even read what fellow evolutionists say. Darwin himself knew that this is exactly the kind of evidence that had to be in the fossil record if evolution had occurred. But there's another problem that they're going to have to overcome, too.

The biggest problem that evolutionists have ever faced is that the fossil record did not produce the kind of evidence that Darwin predicted it would, and that evolutionists always thought it would, and that every thinking person knows it must if evolution occurred. The evidence is not there. But another problem for evolutionists, it's been a major disaster for them, is that a lot of evolutionary thinkers have been saying, Now, wait a minute.

Maybe we don't have these creatures in the fossil record, but let's just see if we can even imagine these creatures. Is there any plausible missing links that could have ever lived between a certain creature and another certain creature? In other words, if you look at the creatures that exist today, with their whole life patterns and everything, is there any imaginable way that they could have evolved from previously existing things? Now, the change from reptile to bird is a good example. Dr. E.J. Horner, I believe it is, I quoted last week, said, There is no fossil documenting the remarkable change from reptiles to birds.

Let me see if I can give you that again here. Yeah, that's E.J. Marshall in his book Biology and Comparative Physiology of Birds, made this statement, I quoted him last week, The origin of birds is largely a matter of deduction. There is no fossil of the stages through which the remarkable change from reptile to bird was achieved.

Not one fossil documenting any part of that remarkable change from reptile to bird, he says. Now, one of the most remarkable changes from reptile to bird, although there are many remarkable changes, is the development of the feather. It might not seem like such a major thing if we're not familiar with feathers, but do you have that picture of that feather? Do you want to put that feather up there? Go ahead and do that.

Thank you. When a feather is looked at under a microscope or under great magnification, it's really quite a complex thing. A feather has over 10,000 functional parts, and they're well organized.

They're organized as high tech or more as modern Velcro, which, by the way, took me a long time to figure out how to invent. But it works like that because, you see, the feather has its basic shaft, of course, there. And then there are these little offshoot shafts like the branches of a tree.

And off of these are other offshoots that are analogous to twigs on a tree. And each of these have barbules on them, which are little hooks. And they hook together, as you can see in this picture, in such a way that if a bird gets dirt in its feathers, he can rub his beak against the grain of the feather and it unlatches all these hooks and it releases all the dirt and foreign material that's in the feather.

Then he can run his beak the other direction of the feathers and it re-hooks up, just like Velcro on your tennis shoe. And this is not, you know, a matter of small, you know, concern to the evolutionists because the feather is a highly complex thing. When you just look at a feather at a distance, it just looks like, just looks like could be, you know, a very simple matter.

In fact, it was thought that feathers eventually, if you go back far enough, they evolved from a scale on a reptile. And a scale on a reptile is just a little piece of skin. But it is thought that eventually, as reptiles ran along, their scales rubbed against things and got frayed and began to have little hairy edges on them and so forth.

And eventually, some of them found this good for wind resistance, so that if they fell out of a tree, they could glide a little bit without hitting the ground and dying and so forth. And over a long, long period of time, the advantageous traits that were acquired in this way developed into the feather. However, it is now not known at all how a scale could have developed into something so complex as a feather.

And there's a quote here from Barbara Stahl in her book, Vertebrate History. I think it's her book, Vertebrate History, Problems in Evolution, published by McGraw-Hill Book Company in 1974. On page 349, Barbara Stahl said, How feathers arose initially, presumably from reptile scales, defies analysis.

Now, scientists don't like things that defy analysis. Because what scientists are supposed to do is analyzing and coming up with plausible explanations of things. But evolutionists themselves are having to admit there are certain things, many, many things that defy analysis.

Now, evolutionists would say, well, you're not really being very fair. Think of how much scientists have learned in the past 70 years. Just give them another 70, they'll probably be able to analyze it.

The problem with it is, is that people who are the best thinkers of all about this, who think more clearly than others, have tried to think through the various stages that a scale would have to go through to become a feather. It would have to cease being of any value as a scale long before it would be of any use as a feather. And, of course, another problem with that is that the lizard would have to soon lose the use of his front leg before he could ever use it as a wing.

Because you have a front leg that was developing into a wing, but far before, long before it was time for it to fly, or could fly, it would no longer be able to run on it. So it would actually be less fit for survival than its ancestors. And these are problems that evolutionists have really never explained, nor apparently can explain, how that these supposed intermediate forms between one kind of animal and another could in any way be advantageous or have advantages that were superior or more viable than their ancestors that they supposedly evolved from.

Because a lizard would be most fit for survival if it continued to be very much like a lizard. As soon as it starts to change a little bit into something else, it's less fit for survival, it's less adapted to its environment, and it's got disadvantages that it should have, it would have been better off not developing. And that's the problem with evolution.

Because they not have the fossil links in the fossil record, there isn't even an analytical link that you could imagine, how a creature could begin to give up one trait in favor of another without losing some major advantage in survival, before it gained a new advantage in survival. And that's a real serious problem. Let me show you several examples of this that have been brought out by evolutionists themselves as problems that they're not able to solve.

These examples I want to give you come from Michael Denton's book, Evolution Theory and Crisis. He's not a Christian, he's not even a believer in God, he's an agnostic. But he sees that evolution is seriously in crisis.

This has to do with the difficulties in the development of whales from land animals. It is believed that... I think it's the next one there. Whales are thought to evolve from land animals.

Some might not think that. Some might think that since whales have tails that look a little like fish tails and so forth, and fins and so forth, that they probably evolved directly from fishes. But that's not the way evolution teaches it.

According to evolution, whales came along much too late for that. There were land animals first, and some of them went back to the water. And in doing so, had to give up some of their terrestrial traits in order to live underwater, as they do.

And they went through a stage that's a little bit like a seal. Do you find that there? Go ahead and put that up. You can just read along with me from the transparency, if you can see it from where you are.

If you can't, I'll just read it to you. These are the various difficulties that exist in just trying to imagine. I mean, we don't have any fossils to show this ever happened.

But even if we just want to imagine how it could have happened, these are the problems that we have to overcome. Number one, a land animal must lose the use of its hind limbs while still on land and keep them permanently stretched out behind while dragging them. This is in anticipation of becoming a whale someday.

But of course, the animal doesn't know that billions of years from now, his descendants are going to be whales and live in the sea. But he's got to learn how to get along without his hind legs first. Two, during excursions into water, it must swim by moving its tail and hind limbs from side to side, because that's the way that the pelvis is attached on a land mammal.

So it wouldn't swivel the way a whale's hips do, but the way a land animal would, from side to side. Three, the hind limbs eventually become pinned to the tail by a membrane. Thus, the hind part of the body would become like a seal, which means, of course, it can't get very far from water anymore or else it would not be able to get around.

Number four, in anticipation of a time when the young will be born and nursed underwater, an apparatus begins to develop by means of which milk will be forced into the mouth of the young and the nipple develops a cap around it into which the snout of the young fits tightly. Now, you have to realize this. The female whale and dolphin give birth to the young underwater, yet the young don't breathe underwater like fishes do.

They have to breathe air like we do. So the young has to be born underwater and it has to come up and take a breath, but then it has to nurse underwater too, because the nipples are on the lower part, not the upper part of the body of the mother. And therefore, it has to somehow be able to fit its nose into a nipple cup that is watertight.

And of course, this nipple cup and this whole arrangement, this apparatus being able to give birth underwater and nurse underwater, has to be in place before they really have to do that. Because if they start giving birth underwater before they had that in place, that would be the last generation of them, see, because the young couldn't live on birth. They have to have the ability to do this before they need it.

So in anticipation of a time when they'll someday be born and nursed underwater, these things have to develop so that they can be utilized when the time comes. Five changes in the structure of the epiglottis and laryngeal cartilage allow the adult to breathe while taking in water and the young to breathe while nursing. These changes must be completely developed before the calf can be born underwater.

Of course, why these changes would happen to an animal that isn't born underwater and doesn't need these changes is anyone's guess. Evolution suggests that whatever changes take place do take place and are retained in the feces because they suit some purpose. They give it some advantage.

But if the creature is not being born underwater, what advantage would there be for these traits to develop? And of course, it would not just be some in one generation the whole system develops. It's through thousands of generations this is supposed to happen. And so this whole development is taking place to an animal that doesn't have any use for these changes in anticipation of the fact that someday, you know, the divine mind of evolution knows that somehow this is going to be needed someday.

Six, complete transformation of the tail region must result in a twisting of the forepart to replace the side-to-side swimming motion with the up-and-down motion of the whale's tail. So the whole pelvis has to be yanked around somehow only gradually. Of course, this wouldn't happen in a single generation.

It has to be moved 90 degrees so that it swivels not side-to-side but up and down like a whale. Now, presumably, you wouldn't have this happen in one generation. What you have is millions of generations where the tail is, or the pelvis is being just a little bit shifted each generation.

So that there'd be several, probably hundreds of thousands of generations of these creatures whose tail doesn't actually go up and down or side-by-side but diagonally. And it's very difficult to imagine why that would be an advantage to the creature. These are some of the changes that, I mean, that these things have to happen.

If a creature that lives on land is going to eventually develop into a whale, these are some of the bridges that have to be crossed getting there. How these bridges would be crossed in any creature without making it less fit for survival in its previous habitat is anyone's guess, and it's a serious problem for evolutionists. Some other problems of this kind have existed in the minds of evolutionists in trying to explain how carnivorous plants have developed their habits.

You know, the Venus flytrap, probably the best-known carnivorous plant. They eat flies. Now, this is an amazing thing.

Most plants take in their nutrients through their root system out of the soil. But here's a plant that eats animals. It eats flesh, and it takes it in through its leaf structure, and that's a nutritional thing.

Now, how it developed that system is a paradox to evolutionists. They just don't have any idea how that could have been developed. I have a couple of quotes from evolutionists on this who are perplexed by this very thing.

F.E. Lloyd, in the book The Carnivorous Plants, made this statement. He said, About the origin and evolution of the carnivorous plants, however, much as these questions may intrigue the mind, little can be said, nor have I attempted to discuss them. How the highly specialized organs of capture could have evolved seems to defy our present knowledge.

End quote. In other words, the evolution and origin of these plants involves the development of organs, which is hard to imagine. It defies analysis.

It defies our present knowledge to explain how this could have happened. C.W. Wardlaw, in the book Organization and Evolution of Plants, next one, made this statement on the same subject. He said, Special adaptive features such as those exemplified by the plants of special habitats, climbing plants, insectivorous plants, that'd be the Venus flytrap and such, the numerous cunning floral arrangements that ensure cross-pollinization and so on, seem to the rider to be difficult to account for adequately in terms of a sequence of small random variations in natural selection.

It is an inescapable fact that there are indeed very large numbers of these special cases, both in the plant and animal kingdoms, which are not satisfactorily accommodated in the omnibus of evolutionary doctrine. End quote. There's a statement here from Michael Denton himself, from his book Evolution, A Theory and Crisis, published 1986, on page 220.

Michael Denton says, In the case of certain types of insect, such as butterflies, beetles, bees and ants, which undergo what is termed a complete metamorphosis during a quiescent pupation stage, the transformation involves virtually the complete dissolution of all the organ systems of the larva, and their reconstruction de novo from small masses of undifferentiated embryonic cells, called the imagal discs. In other words, one type of fully functional organism is broken down into what amounts to a nutrient broth from which an utterly different type of organism emerges. Now, think about the problem this poses for evolution.

You've got a caterpillar, which is a fully functioning critter. It works fine. It doesn't need to change in order to get by.

It works well. But somehow, some critter decided that it needed to, of course it didn't decide, but nature decided this creature needed to develop into a flying creature. The problem is the process of getting there means the dissolving of every organ in its body into a nutrient broth, and then somehow the reorganization of the materials into a totally different kind of animal in the cocoon.

Now, just think of the evolutionary failures trying to develop this process. I mean, you would eventually have a great number of these creatures that go into their cocoon, and they turn into a nutrient broth, and they don't quite have the sophistication yet to reorganize all that stuff into a butterfly. I mean, that would be the end of their life cycle right there.

They need the whole life cycle to be in place for the creature to survive. And after all, it's the adult butterfly that lays the eggs that produces the new caterpillars. So the caterpillar can't even produce more of its own kind.

It has to turn into a butterfly. It has to go through this stage where it becomes almost nothing but soup, and then turns into another creature altogether. This is a marvelous thing for the creationists, but a terrifying thing for an evolutionist, to try to explain in terms of small changes accumulated over periods of millions of years.

How could a creature have developed such a life cycle without destroying itself in the process? I shared on the radio with the lady I was talking to over at Linfield this one. This is the life cycle of the liver fluke. This is a parasite that lives in the intestines of a sheep.

The adult lives in the intestines of a sheep. Go ahead and put that on there. The eggs are laid and passed into the feces and down to the ground in the feces of the sheep.

Then the eggs hatch in the sheep feces, giving rise to a small ciliated larva which can swim. If lucky, the larva finds a pond snail, because they must do that to survive. Part of the life cycle requires the presence of a pond snail.

A sheep and a pond snail, by the way. Then the larva finds its way into the pulmonary chamber of the snail's lung. There it loses its cilia, that's the hairs on it, and it increases in size.

Now it's called a sporocyst. While in this condition, it buds off germinal cells into the body cavity, which develop into a second type of larva known as a reteae. With the oval-shaped, possessing, excuse me, which are oval-shaped, possessing only a mouth and a stomach and two protuberances for moving about, like paddles on a boat.

The reteae eventually leave the sporocyst, enter the tissue of the snail, after which they develop into another larval form known as a cercuraeae, looking like a tadpole. These work their way out of the snail onto blades of grass, where they lose their tails and encase themselves in sheaves. Then they're eaten with the grass by sheep.

They find their way into the liver of the sheep, where they develop sexual organs and mature into the adult stage. Finally, they leave the sheep's liver and migrate to the intestines, and that's where they mate and the cycle begins again. Now, in order for this creature to evolve with its entire complex life cycle, it has to change not into one or two larval states, but there's three separate larval states, entirely different from each other in shape and so forth in the course of its life.

And it requires a host sheep. It requires a host snail, which obviously had to evolve before this creature did, or else it wouldn't have been able to go through this cycle. And there's really no... This is what we call symbionic relationships between creatures, where one kind of creature requires the presence of another kind of creature, and they need each other.

In this case, I don't suppose the sheep or the snail need the liver fluke, but the liver fluke certainly needs the environment of the sheep's intestine and liver, and also the snail's lung, in order to do its thing, in order to live out its life. It's an amazing thing. It's the kind of thing that causes creationists to say, wow, there's sure a lot of exciting and intelligent things the creator did, but the evolutionist really doesn't have any possible explanation for how this happened.

Now, in the little time we have left here, I want to talk about a few other issues that evolution simply cannot account for. We have talked about, briefly, certain organs of great complexity, like the eyeball. Many people are not quite sure how complex the eyeball is.

The important thing to know about the eyeball, though, is, like many other organs in the body, the brain, the nervous system, all the systems, your reproductive system, every major system in the body, every major organ is a highly complex thing that requires several complex factors to be present all at once, or else it won't work. The eyeball is a good example, because Darwin himself said, the eyeball makes me shudder. He said, in fact, he said this in Origin of Species on page 133.

We don't have this on Transparency, I'll just have to read to you. But this was from the Origin of Species on page 133. Darwin said, to suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.

That's why the eye made him shudder. Because to suggest that something as complex as the eyeball could have happened by slow and gradual steps. He said, it seems to him absurd in the highest degree.

He said, I admit it, but I still believe it happened. Now, realize that the eyeball has all kinds of systems that are necessary for it to function. It has to remain wet, and yet it has to be exposed to the air.

I mean, there has to be no solid opaque thing in front of it, at least. It can't have a covering that's opaque, it has to have a clear covering. And that has to remain moist.

And therefore, you have to have the eyelid to cover it and to spread. You have to have tear ducts to produce the tears to that are spread by your blinking your eyes to keep the thing moist. So it doesn't just dry up into a raisin like thing in your socket.

And then you've got to have a self adjusting lens that becomes either a concave or or or otherwise are flat. In order to adjust to focusing to distances. And your eye does this instantly and automatically, by the way.

You're looking at me at a certain distance. If you look down at something in your hands right now, your eye automatically adjusts its lens so that you can have a good focus there. Now, by the way, that video camera over there will do the same thing.

But it took men thousands of years to come up with the technology to be able to do it. And it doesn't even do it as quickly or as efficiently as your eye does. And what's more, not only your eye, but the eye of an octopus does it just as well as your eye does.

And yet an octopus is supposed to be one of the earliest things. It's in the one it's an invertebrate. It's in the class of things that supposedly evolved earliest.

Now, to have that self adjusting lens is just one thing necessary. In addition to that, you've got to have an eight layered retina that, you know, that transforms light into an image in there. And then you've got hundreds of millions of rods and cones that carry this image, not in the form of an image, but in forms of little rods and cones through an optic nerve to your brain where it is reinterpreted and recast in the shape of an image.

Now, realize you take this all for granted. It happens instantaneously. But as you look at me right now, you're the the light from my body is casting an image on your retina in the back of your eye.

But then it's all this. It's just taken apart into a billion pieces. It's not a solid image that goes through your optic nerve to your head, to your brain.

It's a billions of little tiny pieces. This image is broken up into travels through this nerve and is reorganized by the brain into an image. And it does this second by second all the time, almost flawlessly.

Now, if you didn't have the optic nerve, if you didn't have the technology that causes the image to be broken down into these rods and cones and reassembled by the brain, if you didn't have the lens, you didn't have the retina, you didn't have all those things at the same time, you wouldn't have any vision. Now, there is absolutely no way that anyone can explain how these things could have come about slow and gradually. Presumably, it would take millions and millions and millions of generations of very small changes to develop something from a light sensitive spot that some single celled organizations have organisms have into a complex eyeball.

But the thing is, it's not enough to say they got a 50 percent eye or something. They've got to have they've got to have an eye that functions. And that's something that Darwin realized couldn't be explained in terms of his theory.

Here's what Darwin wrote in a letter to his friend, Professor as a gray of Harvard, May 22nd, 1960. This tells you why Darwin believed in is in the evolution of the eye. And you'll see.

Listen carefully. You'll find it had nothing to do with scientific evidence. He said, I had no intention to write atheistically, but I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do.

And as I should wish to evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me to be too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have decidedly created the itch.

Itch pneumonia parasites with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars or that a cat should play with mice. Not believing this. I see no necessity in the belief that the eye was expressly designed.

Now, what he's saying is. The eye is a nightmare to his theory. It gives all the reasons in the world to believe in design instead of slow and gradual random evolution.

He says, I see no reason to believe the eye is designed. Why? Because I don't believe that a creator would allow there to be a world full of misery like this. That's what he's saying.

In other words, I object to the view of a creator. Because I can't believe in a creator that would allow there to be such misery and pain in the world. Obviously, his problem was theological, not scientific.

The reason he accepted evolutionary explanations for things that really required a miraculous explanation instead. Is because he had theological problems with God and he admits it. OK, well, the eyeball is just one of many, many structures that evolutionists can't explain.

Of course, every major structure in every major organism is highly complex like this with many interdependent parts. That would have to all be present at once suddenly or they wouldn't work at all. And evolution can't explain how that would happen.

Let's talk about something less physical, though. You see, in addition to the physical and biological things that would have to evolve, and those are formidable enough for evolutionists to try to explain, there's the non-physical aspects of behavior of animals that has to be explained, and plants. Like the behavior of the carnivorous plants we were talking about.

Why would a plant that was getting along perfectly well without eating flies develop an apparatus to eat flies? And a very complex one at that. Why would it bother to develop that if it's presumably surviving well enough previously without that? That's a plant behavior question. Animal behavior gets even more complex because there are in animal species what we call instincts that are very, very remarkable.

You have no doubt seen videos or watched yourself an ant in an ant farm or bees in a beehive. And you know that these creatures have very highly developed social patterns. They've got their queens and they've got their drones and their workers and everyone has his own duties and they work as a community.

This is a social instinct. And no one can say that they have developed it intelligently like we human beings have, our social structures, because the ant and the bee have such tiny little brains they couldn't think, they probably don't even know about their own existence. They may not even know they exist, much less could they have thought through how to organize themselves into these worker communities and breeding communities that they have that are a marvel.

Anyone who watches a National Geographic video or something about how ant communities or bee communities work, just thinks, good heavens, these guys are as organized as human society is almost. And yet we can explain how human society got this way. Humans think, humans reason, humans can figure out, well, we need to organize our labor here.

We need to have some of the guys appointed for this task and some appointed for that task. We've got to have some people who are the management, some who are the labor force. We've got to have some people in government.

We've got to have some people who are just benefiting from the government. We've got to have taxpayers. And we get this all figured out and therefore we have social structures and community.

Creatures that could not possibly have figured that out have much of the same systems. In their behavior. Now, in human behavior, no one would doubt that this is the result of intelligence.

Why can we not understand that when this exists among animals, this is also the result of intelligence, but not the animal's intelligence. But the designer's intelligence, the creator's intelligence. I mean, it's so obvious.

I was talking to an evolutionist on the radio. He called me in and was debating with me once. And he was saying, well, give me one good evidence of God.

And I said, well, you know, I know it sounds naive and old fashioned and primitive. But I think the oldest evidence that was ever raised against Darwin and against atheism is still one of the best. And that's the evidence of design.

He said, what design? I said, well, you name it. You know, how about your brain? And he said, well, design is in the eye of the beholder. You know, he's saying, I can look at the brain and not see design there.

This is such a cop out. If I could show him a round pebble smoothed by a river and an Indian arrowhead side by side and say, can you tell whether one of these was designed by intelligence or not? There would be no question. It wouldn't be in the eye of the beholder.

A thousand out of a thousand evolutionists would be able to spot it. Which one of these has been worked on by intelligence and which is the product of nature? Obviously, the round stone is a product of nature. The arrowhead has been carved.

It's got the marks. How about let's take something bigger. How about a boulder and a computer? Can you tell the difference which one of these was designed, shaped by nature, which was by design? You know, let's see if your intelligence extends so far as to be able to recognize which of these two things is the product of intelligent design.

I don't think we'd find one in a million who would disagree as to which of those two items was designed. It's not a matter of the eye of the beholder. Everybody admits design when it's obvious in areas where it makes no moral claims upon their life.

The human brain is far more complex than all the computers ever created. The DNA molecule in every living thing is far more complex than all the books and all the libraries in the world. No one would say that all the books and libraries of the world came about by an explosion in a print shop by accident.

But to believe that the DNA molecule in its present form came about by accident would be to make a statement that's more strong. Astronomically crazy than that. To say that the brain came about by accident without design is a hundred times crazier than to suggest that a Macintosh computer came about by accident.

Design is not in the eye of the beholder. Blindness to design is in the eye of some beholders. Any real beholder can see design and recognize it, even at the low level of an arrowhead versus a pebble.

When it gets to more complex things, it's harder to miss. But you see, this is just flat dishonesty on the part of those who don't want to believe in a creator. And that's pretty much where Darwin stood and many others who wanted to believe in nature instead.

But what about these societies of ants and bees? Since their societies are very much like complex human societies, and which we recognize that human societies are the product of intelligence, why do not we understand that the complexity of bee societies and ant societies are also the product of intelligence? Because it cannot be attributed to the animal's intelligence, and therefore one must suggest a creator's intelligence. And that's the only thing that's the stumbling block for acknowledging that intelligence is the basis of that rather than chance and development. The migration instincts of animals is just an amazing thing.

I have a few examples here that are of great interest. All of the creatures that I make reference to are not intelligent creatures at all. The feats that they perform cannot be attributed to their intelligence.

And it's impossible to imagine how they could have developed these things slowly and gradually because they'd have to have their whole migration patterns intact to survive. They'd have to make the whole trip in order to survive one generation. So this had to come up, the first creature of this type had to be able to do this or else he'd never have developed it.

Green sea turtles from Brazil, every once in a while, make a 1300 mile journey across the Atlantic to Ascension Island to lay their eggs. They cross 1300 miles of uncharted water to this one island off the coast of Brazil. A few hours later, they begin their long swim back to Brazil, leaving their eggs behind in the sand.

Two months later, the hatchling turtles also make their journey to Brazil. And when they are between 8 and 35 years old, they will return to Ascension Island to lay their eggs. Now this trip between the mainland and the island is 1300 miles.

I personally, with all the intelligence that human beings have, in a dinghy with paddles, could not find my way to that island. And you could even give me a compass, it wouldn't help an awful lot. 1300 miles across uncharted sea, and here a turtle that doesn't have a brain any bigger than a marble, makes that trip flawlessly and then leaves the unhatched eggs behind.

Two months later, these hatchling turtles with no experience whatsoever, and no parents to guide them, makes the trip across the same stretch of ocean to the same mainland, and then 35 years later maybe comes back and does the same thing its mother did. How did they develop this? Where did this intelligence come from? Well it certainly isn't intellectual ability on the part of the turtle certainly. How about the monarch butterfly? There's a small-brained creature if there ever was one.

Listen to this. In March, adult monarch butterflies migrate from a particular grove of trees in central Mexico to the eastern United States. They lay their eggs in New England, then they die.

In September, their offspring, born in New England, instinctively return to the same grove of trees in Mexico. They travel something like 3,000 miles. Their parents who were there before are now dead, so they can't guide them, but they go to the same grove of trees their parents left earlier in the year, and then they'll make the trip later and lay their eggs.

There's no explanation of this in terms of natural theories of evolution, or non-theism at all. Here's another one. American eels.

They breed in the Sargasso Sea, east of Bermuda and the Bahamas, and they drift with the currents to the coastal waters where they swim up the rivers. Five to 20 years later, they migrate as much as 1,500 miles back to the exact birthplace that they were born and spawned there. Of course, the migration of salmon is something that's well known to us as well.

The migration of eels, fish, insects, turtles, but birds are the greatest migrators of all, and some of their stories are the most sensational. Birds captured in their nests have been removed to locations hundreds of miles from their home sites, but they have unerringly returned to their nesting spots in a few days without any guidance system such as modern airliners would be dependent upon to do anything similar or analogous. The bobolink is another bird.

It nests in the fields of the U.S. and winters in Argentina. The bristle-thighed curlew nests in Alaska and then flies 2,000 miles or more across the uncharted Pacific to winter in Hawaii, and it's there. But you know what I didn't mention is it leaves its hatchlings in Alaska.

It's several weeks later that the hatchlings are old enough to fly, and then they fly to Hawaii too without their parents to guide them. Their parents are already there. Cuckoos of England migrate south to Africa in midsummer, leaving their young to follow them weeks later.

The arctic tern nests as far north as the Arctic Circle and journeys to the Antarctic seas to spend the winter, a round trip of 25,000 miles a year. Here's one. The ruby-throated hummingbird, the very smallest bird is a hummingbird, tiny little things.

You know, they don't have big brains, so you can't attribute their success in this to their intelligence. The ruby-throated hummingbird must cross 500 miles of open sea between Louisiana and Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula. This takes 25 hours for this tiny bird.

Can't rest for 25 hours because it's over open sea over the Gulf of Mexico. And the bird weighs no more than one-eighth of an ounce, and its wings beat 25 times a second. Now, this tiny bird weighing an eighth of an ounce, beating its wings 25 times a second, flies for 25 hours, nonstop across the sea, and finds the place that it's supposed to be every particular year in the Yucatan Peninsula.

The young of the gannet abandon the nest at age about 75 days and leap into the sea, swimming in the direction of migration until they're able to fly, which is at the age of 95 or 105 days. In one instance, thousands of American coots, a type of bird, were observed walking for three days in the direction of their winter quarters. Now, birds, insects, butterflies, you know, turtles in the sea, eels and fish, these creatures are not credited with great intelligence, but they can do feats of navigation and migration that human beings cannot do without sophisticated instruments.

Even if you've made the trip before, much less if you've never heard of the place you're going to, not being guided by anyone who's ever been there before, but just something inside tells you to travel this 3,000 miles from New England to this little grove of trees in Mexico, and you're just a butterfly. And your parents who did that are dead. Everyone in their generation is dead.

You got to do it on your own. Craziness. Now, see, this is a marvel to the creationists, and it's confirmation of creation.

But to the evolutionists, this is just a mystery, a mystery of very damaging import. I have to skip real quickly here over a lot of stuff. Of all these things we've said which are difficult to evolutionists, impossible for evolutionists to explain, yet the most difficult of all is the origin of life.

You see, once you have a living thing, then reproduction can take place, mutation can take place, change can take place, and conceivably evolution can take place, once you've got life. But before you have life, what is going to make random chemicals combine and do things that they don't naturally do in order to create the first living thing? In other words, pre-biological evolution is the most serious problem for evolutionists of all. It used to be thought that the living cell was a very simple thing.

Now we know it's very complex. And now evolutionists say, or I should say scientists say, that the evolution of the first cell is over 90% of the whole of evolution. The cell to man is the other less than 10%, 5%.

I have the figure here somewhere. It's a huge, it's something from a book called The Great Chain of Life, published by Hooton Miffin Company, by Joseph Wood Crutch. This is a real interesting thing.

Listen to this. The living cell held none of the fascination for previous generations that it does for us. Viewed through a microscope at only several hundred times magnification, as was possible in Darwin's day, a living cell is not particularly impressive.

It emerges as a small, shapeless blob, merely an outer skin with a kind of jelly inside, moving haphazardly in all directions under the influence of unseen forces. As a result, for the early evolutionists, the origin of life did not seem to pose any great difficulty. As they saw it, one-celled organisms were the simplest possible forms of life.

A cell seemed to contain nothing more than a... Excuse me. A cell seemed to contain nothing more complex than a small speck in the center and a few holes scattered throughout the jelly. The step from non-living chemicals to these uncomplicated blobs of jelly seemed a small and easy one.

Small is not the same, however, as simple. It soon became apparent that one-celled organisms are not mere blobs of jelly. In fact, they are perhaps even more amazing than the higher animals because they carry out the same functions without the same organs.

Without stomachs, they digest food. Without lungs, they take in oxygen. Without kidneys or bladders, they collect waste products and expel them.

Without sex organs, they have systems for combining hereditary material. And they carry out these functions every bit as effectively as the most highly developed animals do. There are at least 15 or 20,000 different kinds of one-celled organisms which differ from one another more widely than do the different kinds of higher animals.

Contrary to what the early evolutionists thought, it is no small step from non-living chemicals to one-celled organisms. Instead, it's a huge yawning chasm. It is no exaggeration to say that the greatest problem for the evolutionists is not to explain how humans allegedly evolved from ape-like ancestors.

It is not even to explain how modern organisms develop from original one-celled organisms. It is rather to explain how random chemicals cross the enormous gap to complex, highly diversified one-celled organisms." One other quote that's fairly lengthy, but I quoted it at length rather than summarizing it because it's more authoritative and better written than I could give. This is from Michael Denton in his book Evolution, A Theory, and Crisis.

He is a microbiologist, a molecular biologist. He says, To grasp the structure of the cell, we must go beyond what can be seen under a normal light microscope. We must magnify the cell a thousand million times until it is 20 kilometers in diameter and resembles a giant airship large enough to cover New York City.

What we would then see would be an object of unparalleled complexity and design. As we explore its inner workings, the idea that this magnificent piece of machinery first came into being through chance collisions of atoms becomes less and less believable. On the surface of the cell, we now see millions of openings, like the portholes of a vast spaceship.

These open and close to allow a continual stream of materials to flow in and out. If we enter one of these openings, we find ourselves in a world of supreme technological complexity. We see an endless array of highly organized corridors, tubes, and channels branching in every direction.

Some lead to the central memory bank in the nucleus, others to assembly plants, still others to processing plants. The nucleus itself is a vast spherical chamber more than a kilometer in diameter. It resembles a geodesic dome filled with neatly stacked miles of coiled chains of DNA molecules.

A huge range of products from raw materials continually shuttled along channels in a highly ordered fashion to and from the assembly plants throughout the cell. We find ourselves marveling at the level of organization exhibited here. The movements of so many different objects along so many crisscrossing conduits, all proceeding in the same perfect unison.

Then we notice in every direction a variety of robot-like machines. These are protein molecules, the simplest functional components of the cell. Yet they are astonishingly complex pieces of molecular machinery, each one consisting of about 3,000 atoms arranged in a highly organized three-dimensional spatial configuration.

Certain proteins called enzymes act as catalysts, regulating all the cell's processes like little robots with stopwatches. We would see that nearly every feature of our own advanced machinery has its analog in the cell. Artificial languages and their decoding systems, as we have in computers.

Memory banks for information storage and retrieval. Elegant control systems regulating the automated assembly of parts and components. Proofreading devices for detecting errors and for quality control.

Assembly processes that work on the principle of prefabrication and modular construction. Indeed, so pervasive is the analogy between the cell's structures and the functions of our own technology that much of the cell cannot even be described without using terms borrowed from the very recent 20th century technology. The cell in large so that we can actually observe its processes would resemble nothing more than an immense automated factory carrying out almost as many unique functions as all the manufacturing activities carried out by humans in our advanced societies.

Beyond that, it would have one capacity that has not been matched by any of our own most advanced machines, the capacity to reproduce itself, a feat it can accomplish within a matter of a few hours. Here's a quote from Carl Sagan. Now, Carl Sagan is not friendly to creation, as you know, if you know anything about him.

He's a very, very vocal and well-known evolutionist. But he wrote the article on life in the New Encyclopedia Britannica, 15th edition, 1986. In the article in the New Encyclopedia Britannica, Carl Sagan wrote in the article under life, this word, this sentence.

The information content of a simple cell has been established as around 10 to the 12th power. That is 100 billion bits, comparable to about 100 million pages of the Encyclopedia Britannica. So, hey, good to see you, brother.

Listen to this, guys. The information quotient of a simple cell is the same as about 100 billion pages of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Which means that if you wish to produce a cell by accident or by random or by coincidence, you might as well hope for 100 billion pages of the Encyclopedia Britannica, with every word spelled correctly, the spaces between words correct, grammar correct, not one typographical error, 100 billion pages of it, perfectly produced by accident.

This obviously is the biggest difficulty for evolutionists. As I said, once you've got that cell, it can replicate itself, it can mutate, it can change. It can't evolve in the sense that Darwin said, as near as anyone can tell.

At least no one's ever seen it do anything like that. But at least you can talk about that happening once you've got a cell. But until you have a cell, what is it that creates this incredible organization that we now know to be the cell? Darwin didn't know as much about cells as we do.

And it's very possible that he would have been staggered by this information. I'm sure he would have been. Michael Denton summarizes.

He says, in considering the origin of the translational system of the genetic code, evolutionary theory seems to have reached a sort of nemesis, that the problem is, to all intents and purposes, insoluble in terms of modern biochemical knowledge. That the profundity of the problem of the origin of translational systems has stretched the evolutionary framework to the breaking point is conceded by Monod, who said, the major problem is the origin of the genetic code and of its translational mechanism. Indeed, it is not so much a problem as a veritable enigma.

Nobel Prize winner Francis Crick, in his book Life Itself, said this, an honest man armed with all the knowledge available to us now could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle. So many are the conditions which would have to have been satisfied to get it going. Francis Crick, one of the discoverers of the double helix form of the DNA molecules, said it almost would have to be described as a miracle.

We have to remove the almost and be more honest. There is no other explanation of the origin of life than a miracle, nor of the production of every individual species that has come about. Every one of them depends on individual miracles.

Creationists believe in a miracle worker and therefore have no problem with miracles. Evolutionists don't believe in a miracle worker and this is their problem. This is why evolution is a theory in crisis.

Creation will outlive it.