Creation or Evolution?

THE ANNOUNCEMENT BY the Vatican last October to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences concerning the theory of evolution, which said, “Fresh knowledge leads to recognition of the theory of evolution as more than a hypothesis,” stirred up Christian communities everywhere. All tended to reexamine the prevailing evidences concerning this theory and its relationship to the Bible. The first part of this article explored the existence of a supreme intelligent Creator and the Creative days of Genesis, looking at the order in which life appeared on earth. We continue with man’s creation, as presented in the Bible.

HOW WAS MAN CREATED?

The Genesis account of man’s creation is straight forward. “The Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground [the elements of the earth], and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.” (Gen. 2:7) The combination of the breath of life with the human body made from the elements of the earth constituted the living soul. Man did not receive a separate and distinct entity such as an ‘immortal soul’. Nowhere in the Bible is such an expression found. Perhaps this is why some theologies call it a ‘spiritual soul’, but Genesis has nothing to say about a spiritual soul either.

The concept of an immortal soul came from Greek philosophy, and the utterance of the first lie when Satan, through the serpent, said to mother Eve, “Ye shall not surely die.” (Gen. 3:4) Jesus plainly spoke of the Devil as “a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth … for he is a liar, and the father of it.” (John 8:44) But many have preferred to believe Satan’s lie—that they do not die—rather than God’s statement that disobedience would bring death. It appears that the main thing retained from Genesis by some theologies is the concept of an immortal soul that does not die, as voiced by the serpent.

The far more serious consequence of accepting the Darwinian theory of evolution is the nonbelief in the existence of a supreme intelligent Creator. According to evolution, everything happened by chance, not by creative design. Science is the orderly classification of knowledge, and one such science is mathematics, which deals with laws of probability and chance. The calculated chance is so great an astronomical number that the conclusion is that “it would be impossible.” Reason and sanity lead us to admit that a Creator would be necessary to bring forth all the variety of life existing in such abundance upon earth and to establish conditions for sustaining life. None of this could happen by chance.

THE SIMPLE CELL

Since evolution is supposed to be a science, and is supposed to deal with scientific evidence, other scientists engaged in different fields will accept it as a science without much investigation or thought. This is unfortunate because those who have devoted time to exploring some of the concepts have come to other conclusions. For example, a Catholic associate professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University by the name of Michael J. Behe, and the author of “Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution,” made an assessment of this recent proclamation by the Vatican and said, “I believe that Darwin’s mechanism for evolution doesn’t explain much of what is seen under a microscope. Cells are simply too complex to have evolved randomly: intelligence was required to produce them.” He also quoted James Shapiro, a biochemist at the University of Chicago as writing, “There are no detailed Darwinian accounts for the evolution of any biochemical or cellular system, only a variety of wishful speculations.”

FIXED SPECIES

Outstanding in this respect is the fact of the fixed nature of the species as mentioned in the Book of Genesis. We read: “God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good. … God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind.”—Gen. 1:21,25

The Apostle Paul agrees with this statement of Genesis that each species of animal is constituted by nature to be separate and distinct from all other species, or orders, and that while they are all animals, consisting of flesh, yet they are not the same flesh; that is, they are unrelated. He says, “All flesh is not the same flesh: but there is one kind of flesh of men, another flesh of beasts, another of fishes, and another of birds.”—I Cor. 15:39

All nature, as we know it today, corroborates the foregoing Biblical declaration. So far as scientific observation goes, nature is unalterably opposed to the commingling of species or to the formation of new species; and it continually and successfully seeks to prevent it. It allows seemingly endless ‘varieties’ according to fixed laws, but it has established limits beyond which variations cannot occur.

Furthermore, in the crossing of varieties within a given fixed species, we see retrogression quite as often as we see improvement in the stock; and there is no evidence whatsoever that nature is attempting to move forward by “infinitesimal steps of perpetual progress,” as the Darwinists have long theorized.

By artificial cultivation and forced crossbreeding of selected varieties, stocks may seemingly be improved or enlarged up to a certain point; but when left to themselves, nature soon brings them back to an ordinary level, instead of naturally carrying them ‘onward and upward’ by an evolutionary law. Nature, when not interfered with, strives to bring all new varieties back to normal as quickly as possible, rather than inducing in them further progressive changes by evolution.

Every attempt at crossing two species results either in no descendant at all, or else in a hybrid offspring being produced that is sterile and unable to perpetuate its kind—as occurs when the horse and donkey, or the horse and the zebra, are crossed. These animals are so structurally similar that they can interbreed; but the resultant offspring is a sterile hybrid that cannot cross with anything. This supplies further proof that the species are fixed, that nature does not allow even very similar species to commingle and change into another, but calls a halt every time any attempt in that direction is made.

Darwin himself, in his “Origin of Species,” made this frank admission: “In spite of all the efforts of trained observers, not one change of species into another is on record.” It is not surprising to Bible students, who have confidence in the story of special creation as recorded in Genesis, to learn that scientists, after nearly a century of effort, can find no positive proof to support a theory that is obviously at variance with the Word of God.

The late Professor Vernon Kellogg, of Leland Stanford University, added his testimony to the host of his former colleagues. In his “Darwinism of Today,” page 18, he says: “We only tell the general truth when we declare that no indubitable cases of species-forming or transforming, that is, of descent, have been observed.”

MENDEL’S CLASSICAL EXPERIMENTS

To date, the most that has been accomplished in the effort to develop new species is the production of new varieties. However, some interesting things have been discovered in the field of genetics, such as Mendel’s Laws of Variation, and DeVries’s Mutations, which we may here briefly note.

From 1857 to 1868, Gregor Mendel, an Austrian monk, experimented with garden peas, crossing different varieties and producing new ones. His notations of the results came to the attention of Professor Carl E. Correns, famous botanist, about thirty years later, and he soon found that Mendel had discovered a hitherto unknown law of heredity. Correns duplicated Mendel’s experiments, using the garden flower four-o’clock instead of peas, and found that they too followed Mendel’s ‘law’.

Correns crossed a red and a white variety of the flower four-o’clock, and, true to Mendel’s Law of Segregation, all the first generation were pink; that is, the red and white were evenly mixed. But in the second generation only half of them came pink—the remainder being pure white or pure red, just like the original parent stocks. They were just as pure as though they had never been mixed, and continued to reproduce themselves without variation.

Mendel’s Law of Segregation is simply this: When any two simple varieties are crossed, only half of the genes, or hereditary elements, of each of the parent cells mix with each other, while the other half remain segregated and dormant; and in the second generation these segregated genes filter out and reproduce themselves in their original form, as though they had never been mixed. Mendel also discovered that if complex varieties are crossed (that is, if there is more than one difference between the parent stocks, as when yellow-round peas are crossed with green-wrinkled peas), not only will the original unmixed genes filter out in the second generation, but in addition there will be two new varieties of hybrids instead of one.

Dr. Thomas Hunt Morgan, when at Columbia University, found that animals obey Mendel’s law the same as do plants, and that finally the original stocks begin to filter out and reappear, even after having passed through successive generations of crossbreeding with other varieties. In none of these experiments, either with plants or with animals, has a new species been produced. Rather, Mendel’s laws seem to prove that the species are fixed and that the tendency of nature is to return to the original parent stocks rather than to get away from them, as Darwin erroneously imagined.

MUTANTS

In 1900, Professor G. DeVries, the late Dutch botanist, who had been experimenting extensively with the evening primrose, discovered that occasionally a new and strange variety would crop up, totally different from all other hybrids that were being produced by directly crossing the varieties. These new variants seemed to be freaks of nature, which came up in defiance of Mendel’s law, and yet were able to perpetuate their variety if unmixed with others—although generally they could be readily mixed with any other variety of primrose.

DeVries called these freaks “mutants,” and he formulated a theory which seems to explain their existence. He believed that they result from some accidental scrambling or disarranging of the genes in the fertilized cell or germ plasma, which may happen either at the time of fertilization or subsequently, and which prevents nature from taking its ordinary course. Mendel’s law thus represents nature’s normal process, while DeVries’ mutants seem to be the result of some accidental interference with nature.

Now, if a mutant should ever be discovered that is so far changed from the original stock as to be incapable of mixing with it, and at the same time would be fertile in itself and able to mix with other mutants like itself, then we would have a demonstration of a new species arising, or ‘evolving’, from an old species—the answer to every evolutionist’s prayer since Darwin’s day. But no such species has ever been discovered, notwithstanding many years of experimentation with this in view.

Even if such a mutant should finally appear, which is exceedingly unlikely (since their genes or hereditary elements are none other than those of the parent stocks), this would not prove the existence of a law of evolution; for these mutants apparently do not result from any law whatsoever, but in defiance of law, due to accident. At most, then, this would be ‘accidental evolution’, not ‘natural evolution’. Furthermore, these mutants are freaks and are often dwarfs, or otherwise inferior to the parent stock. Hence they do not obey a law of ‘progress’, such as Darwin’s theory demands.

Thus it is apparent that neither the discoveries of Mendel nor of DeVries, nor of any other experimenters in the field of genetics, have helped the case for evolution. Rather, they have proved to be a boomerang. As to the effects of Mendel’s and DeVries’ findings on Darwinism, let the late Dr. D. H. Scott, the well-known British botanist and erstwhile Darwinist, speak. In an article in “Nature” magazine, he had this to say:

“It has long been evident that all those ideas of evolution in which the older generation of naturalists grew up have been disturbed, or indeed transformed, since the rediscovery of Mendel’s work and the consequent development of the new science of genetics. Not only is the omnipotence of natural selection gravely impugned, but variation itself, the foundation upon which the Darwinian theory seemed to rest so securely, is now in question.

“The mutations of DeVries, though still accepted by many, seem to some at the present time to be nothing more than Mendelian segregates, the products of previous crossings; opinion on this subject is in a state of flux. In fact it is clear that we know astonishingly little about variation.”

DARWINISTS AT THE CROSSROADS

Thus has experimental research brought the theorizing Darwinists to the crossroads of science, and they are having difficulty in deciding which way to turn. And, perhaps without realizing it, many of them are finding themselves turning more and more in the direction of truth, as it is given in the Creation story of Genesis.

A great conflict between truth and error is now being fought by the scientists themselves, and we may be sure that the truth will ultimately prevail. In this connection we are reminded of the following paragraph from the able pen of the late Dr. William Emerson Ritter, professor of Zoology at the University of California, which was published in “Science” magazine some time ago. He therein wrote this significant sentence:

“If one scans a bit thoughtfully the landscape of human life for the last few decades he can hardly fail to see signs that the whole battleground of evolution will have to be fought over again, this time not so much between scientists and theologians, as among scientists themselves.”

It is truly remarkable that the Bible, written thousands of years ago, before the era of scientific research, should state so accurately and so definitely what now has been established as scientific truth, namely, that species are fixed. Only by divine inspiration could this have been possible. Let us then have confidence in this sacred record as we pursue our further investigation of its God-given truths.

As we view Darwin’s accomplishments in his diggings for fossils in the earth, we note that he propounded that life species come forth in a certain order. It is the same order as mentioned in the Bible. Darwin could have spared himself much labor and time by noting this same sequence in God’s Word.

Note: For complete information on the subject of Creation, send for a free copy of the booklet, “Creation”.
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