Evolution: Faith or Science?
By: Ml Huff
Tags: Evolution, Science, Creationism, Faith, Debunk

Photo by Eugene Zhyvchik on Unsplash

Evolution: the word stirs a response in almost everyone. Even after a centuries long history, this idea is shrouded in controversy. It doesn’t do for some to proclaim, smugly, that all scientists agree: they do not. Many scientists disagree fundamentally with the tenants of evolution. Evolution is not so much a scientific theory as a belief system, requiring more faith of its adherents than creationism.

So, what then is evolution? In a nutshell, it is the theory that all complex organisms have evolved, that is, undergone some physical change from one thing into something else. A fish evolves into a frog, evolves into a bird, evolves into a ape, evolves into a man. According to Steven Jay Gould, this is bedrock science and indisputable fact. The only thing to debate, says he, is the mechanism, the how of it. See “Evolution as Fact and Theory”, pp. 254–55, originally appeared in Discover Magazine, May 1981.

I wholeheartedly disagree.

Let us consider. A fossil is found — the remains of some once living creature. The only trouble is, there is no such animal these days. So then what happened? How did this creature, which obviously lived at some point in time, cease to exist? What became of it? The answer offered up by evolutionists are two: either it failed to meet the challenge of its environment and thus disappeared, or it changed into something that could. This supposition is based solely upon a fossil rock found in the ground, the only physical evidence that remains.

The theory then is this: all creatures alive today began their existence long ago in the shrouded mists of time as simple, single-cell organisms. These single-cell organisms changed into more complex organisms. Now do not be mislead. These changes are not simple just because these are simple, single-cell organisms. No, we’re talking about fundamental changes. It’s not like changing the color of your hair. It is more akin to growing another head!

Now I know that’s not the way it works. This occurs, or so they say, genetically over a very long time. But this doesn’t address the fundamental changes that must occur for one type of organism to become another type. Let’s not even talk about people! Let’s keep it simple. Let’s talk about something easy, like say, a frog.

A frog has skin, eyes, ears, a digestive system, a reproductive system, a respiratory system; it has a number of intricate body systems, each different from the others, each carrying out particular functions distinct from the others, and necessary for its survival, and the survival of its species. The eye is different than the ear, in both function and form. The lungs are different than the digestive system, in both function and form. All of these organs are complex, yes, even in a frog.

The frog though, is only one type of organism out of millions, each one different from the others: dogs, cats, people, roses, oaks, catfish, kangaroos, viruses, bacteria, protozoa, paramecium. The list simply boggles the mind.

Take any single organ, such as the liver, for example. The liver serves an absolutely vital function in the body, one which cannot be handled by any other organ: that of filtering the impurities from the blood. Without your liver, you would die. Now how did that single-cell organism come upon the idea of a liver? How many creatures, misshapen and malformed, left this world liver-less before whatever mechanism driving evolution decided that a liver was needed?

How about the heart? Or blood, for that matter? Or the kidney, or the pancreas, or the eye, or the ear, or the lungs? How did they all come to be together in one place, forming a living creature? Take any one of these things, dissect it, look at its function, its fundamental differences from other organs, and tell me that trial and error, hit and miss, in a word, chance, formed them all and brought them all together in one creature to make a living, multi-celled creature, not once, but millions of times, again and again.

Chance is a very important issue here. Darwin, in particular, in his theory of adaptation of species, relied heavily on the chance genetic meandering of change. Five toes were better than three, so every thing born, by chance, with five toes, survived to have others with five toes; while those with only three, went the way of the dinosaur. One of the interesting things discovered by geneticists is the complete lack of predictability of genetic deviations. Normal parents give birth to a giant, and the giant gives birth to a normal person. Relying on this mechanism to perpetuate improvement of species is a bad gamble at best.

Another element of evolution is that of time. Evolution, we are told, requires time, more now than when the theory began. Hand in hand with historical geologist, evolutionists have increased the estimated age of the earth, at first by millions of years, and now by billions. But even this is not enough time to account for the progress allotted to the chance happenings of evolution.

I have carefully given credit to the beginning of all of this: one simple, single-cell creature. Remember it? How did it come to be here, or anywhere, at all? Scientists tell us of the primordial soup, a chemical potluck washing over the earth some tens of billions of years ago. A chance lightening strike provided the energy to combine some of these chemicals into amino acids, the building blocks of life, as it were. This has been shown to be possible in experiments. But the amino acids in the lab were simply that, amino acids. They were not simple, single-cell organisms. They were not, in a word, ALIVE. Nor did they have an even more basic, even more complex element found in every living thing — DNA. DNA is the biological blueprint that contains all the information about a creature. It, not chance, determines what a creature will become, and what its offspring will become. Without DNA there is no reproduction; there is no life.

Faith. That’s where we started this thing, so let’s end there. It requires enormous faith to believe in creation by chance, to see order coming out of chaos, complexity following simplicity and all by chance. It would be like shredding the Collected Works of Charles Darwin in a cross-cut shredder, tossing the debris into the air, and having it land intact and readable. Well, maybe not. I think you’d stand a better chance with the later.