“Its ignorant opponents like to say that the process of evolution by natural selection is ‘only a theory.’ (That’s how they prove their ignorance.)”
- Steven Pinker, author of The Stuff of Thought
The Great Misunderstanding
A common accusation towards evolutionist and creationists is that they don’t understand the other side of the debate. Unfortunately this is true of far too many people on both sides. It is my goal to reduce the amount of ignorance, mainly in the Christian camp, about this highly debated topic.
Ignorance (intentional or otherwise) often leads to a device that is too common in the area of debate, the so called Straw Man Argument. A good example of this type of argument can be drawn from the time I spent debating on the Creature World forums. During this time my main antagonist was a user by the name of lincolnpark. At one point of the debate lincolnpark posted up a caricature of the Christian faith that made it look like we Christians were a bunch of raving lunatics. It went something like this:
Christianity in a Nutshell
The universe was created by an all-powerful all-knowing being who came down to us
in the form of a cosmic Jewish Zombie (who was his own father) who can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh, drink his blood, and telepathically tell him you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree.
Now I must say that Jerry Coyne does not use this type of argument to this extent. He does, however, misrepresent Creationism/Inteligent Design (ID) and proceed to talk about how ridiculous it is1. What he misrepresents is what we believe about evolution and its various components. This also plays a key part in his argument for evolution.
What is Evolution?
Since Darwin’s time his followers have basically commandeered the word evolution. In reality there are several different types of evolution, and not all of them disagree with the Bible. For now we will only discuss two types of evolution, the first is macroevolution.
Macroevolution – large scale change in organisms resulting in new species, genera, families, etc.2
This is what many people think of when they hear the word evolution. A good example of this type of evolution is the supposed change of apes into humans.
The second is microevolution.
Microevolution – small scale genetic changes in organisms through mutations resulting in slight changes in an organism.2
This is also called adaptation. It means that organisms adapt/evolve to meet the changing demands of their environments. We see this in cave dwelling animals with little or no sight, in bacteria that become resistant to medication, and countless other situations. But the fact that organisms do change is twisted by evolutionists to ‘prove’ macroevolution. They usually do not make a distinction between the two, and according to them the small changes eventually add up enough for the organism to be a different species.
This is not so. The breeding of different types of dogs created a small, stub-nosed little dog that has a tongue too long for it’s mouth. However the pug was just a dog. Through years and years of living in pools in the dark depths of caves certain populations of Mexican Tetras have lost their eyes, meanwhile their ability to detect their surroundings through other means has been enhanced. However, just as the pug was still a dog, the Blind Cave Tetra was still just a fish, and it even remained a Tetra.
Did God Mess up?
According to Jerry Coyne, if a god created the universe he should have made all creatures perfectly suited to their environments instead of having imperfect creatures be replaced by better adapted versions as time goes on. In his mind (and many others’) the fact that there are no perfect animals (humans included) proves that they evolved. What Coyne, Darwin, and many others have not taken into account is the fall.
An extremely common question is, “If there is a perfect, loving god, why is the world the way it is?” Charles Darwin asked this when he saw wasps paralyze and lay eggs in caterpillars that would eventually serve as food for the newborn wasps. Many people cannot see how a perfect, loving god could make a world with all of the death and suffering we see going on today. He didn’t.
According to the book of Genesis the God of the Bible created the whole universe, earth, animals, and man included, in six days. At the end of the six days God looked at His newly formed creation and said that it was, “very good.”3 Now how could God look at a world full of suffering and death and say that it was very good? The answer is the same as that of the last question, He didn’t. The original creation was perfect, without death, without suffering. How then, did the death and suffering we see today come about?
Romans 5:12 – Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned
So death is here because of sin, what is sin?
Sin – Anything thought, said, or done that breaks God’s laws.
In the beginning God created Man. At that point the human race consisted of two people, Adam and Eve. God’s one law for them was, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”4 However our first parents decided that they wanted to follow their own rules and so they disobeyed (this is commonly called the fall). Sin entered the world and through sin, death. The creation was no longer perfect, Man, by his own free will, marred it and has been feeling the effects ever since.
The Miracle of Adaptation (Microevolution)
Now one of the things that we know about God is that he knows all things. This means he not only know all the facts about how the universe works, but He knows what will and has happened, all of it.5 In adaptation we can see that God planned ahead when He created the universe. How is that? Well, if he had created every organism on earth in it’s perfect state without the ability to adapt, then after the fall most (if not all) of the organisms would have died off. The fact that God created life with the ability to adapt is a testament to His wisdom and foresight.
Throughout the creation we can see the miracle of adaptation at work. From woolly mammoths who adapted to colder temperatures by developing great coats of hair, to human beings who have adapted their skin to meet the climate of their region of the globe, all remind us that there is a great God who is in control.
Is Evolution Just a Theory?
One thing that seems to bug Jerry Coyne is when people say that evolution is “just a theory.”6 In their mind, he says, a theory is just a guess. As in, “My theory is that Fred is crazy about Sue.”7 And he is right, some people cite evolution as just a theory when there is nothing “just” about a theory. In the science a theory is one step removed from scientific law, it has been tested and tried thoroughly in order to become a theory (at least, it’s supposed to be).
It is my opinion that Darwinian evolution does not even deserve the title of theory, merely hypothesis. Why? Because if we are honest with ourselves and each other, we must admit that all of the “evidence” used for evolution, except that which applies to microevolution, can be interpreted either for or against evolution depending on personal bias. For example, Jerry Coyne would say that the layers of the Grand Canyon represent millions of years of sedimentary deposits. I, on the other hand, would say that it represents a world wide flood (Genesis 6-8). Now we can’t both be right, that is a logical impossibility, but I’m not going to repeat what others have already said.
So What’s The Point?
The point thus far, similarly to the first chapter of Coyne’s book, is to acquaint you with both sides of the argument. It a Christian’s duty8 to be prepared to defend their faith. That is why I am doing this, in order to prepare both myself and those reading this to better defend the Christian faith against those who would pull it down.
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