Part 7: Doesn’t Science Prove Evolution, and Not Divine Creation?

Pastor Gary Buchman
Emmitsburg Community Bible Church

Part 6: Who is Jesus, Really?

(2/22) The story is told about a young boy that came to his Father and asked, "Where did we come from?" The father explained how there was a big bang in the universe and how after everything cooled down, life began in water then came onto land and frogs became monkeys and from monkeys man evolved. The boy then went to his mother and asked her the same question. His mother explained how God created the world in 6 days and how man was created as the crown of all creation and was made in God’s image. The boy was baffled and said that’s not what dad said at all. Dad said we evolved from monkeys and you say we were created special by God. His mom replied, "That’s because he told you about his side of the family and I told you about mine."

While we may laugh at a story like that, it reflects a real conflict in our world. It is assumed by most secular educational institutions that the world we live in is the product of spontaneous generation otherwise known as, evolution, and that those who believe in intelligent design or special creation by God are ignorant and fools. Now, before we proceed, I want to proclaim that I am not a scientist, nor a philosopher, but I am a pastor and a preacher of the Bible as the very Word of God. In our Old Testament reading we looked Genesis 1. Look for a moment at John 1:1-3 "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was in the beginning with God. 3 All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made" and Colossians 1:16, "For by Him all things were created that are in heaven and that are on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers. All things were created through Him and for Him," just two portions of scripture that state that the world exists by a special creation of an intelligent and all powerful God. But is it? Our question today is, Doesn’t Science Support Evolution and Not Divine Creation? I hope that you are surprised by our answer. Here we go.

On December, 27th, 1831, the H.M.S. Beagle left England for a five year journey to South America and the Galapagos Islands. That journey would result in the most influential faith and philosophical system since the resurrection of Jesus Christ. On board the Beagle was a former medical and ministry student named Charles Darwin. Darwin had been influenced by some that believed that the world came into being not by divine creation but by natural processes. As a result of his study and observations on that journey, Darwin would write several books that would impact the course of the modern era more than anything else. The first was, The Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection. This book became the bible and the primary source of what we refer to as the theory of evolution. The second book was, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex. In this book Darwin, postulated that man came from ape and that within evolved humanity, there is a dominate species or race. These two books and those who would expand on them would change the world in unimaginable ways.

How important is this stuff? Evolutionist William Provine, of Cornell University, stated it well when he said that there are 5 inescapable implications if Darwin is right, there is:

• No Evidence for God (no one to whom we are responsible)
• No life after death (no heaven or hell)
• No absolute foundation for right and wrong (no absolutes, we make up our own rules and mores)
• No ultimate meaning for life (no purpose for our existence)
• People don’t really have free will

Carry this further, and there were no Adam and Eve, no original sin accounting for our inherent sin nature, no need for a Savior, and so, Jesus died cruelly on a cross in vain. If evolution is true, faith of any kind is futile and the Bible is a book of fairy tales. If the Bible is true, then evolution can not be. Although there are some who believe in Theo-Evolution, or that God created by evolution, it must be one or the other, as the logical law of non-contradiction points out. Sir Julian Huxley, one of the world’s most noted evolutionists says it this way, "Darwinism removed the whole idea of God as the creator of organisms from the sphere of rational discussion. Darwin pointed out that no supernatural designer was needed; since natural selection could account for any known form of life, there was no room for a supernatural agency in evolution….I think we can dismiss entirely all ideas of a supernatural overriding mind being responsible for the evolutionary process."

Before we answer our question let me state further, that not only has this theory, which in reality isn’t even a good hypothesis, influenced unknown multitudes to reject God in their minds and education, it has been the backbone of some of the most horrendous destruction of humanity, in the 20th century, that the world has ever seen. One of Darwin’s biggest fans was Karl Marx who wanted Darwin to write the introduction to his book, Das Kapital, which became the basis for communism. Darwin believed in survival of the fittest and that there was a superior race being the white race to which all others were inferior and that some day the superior could and perhaps should eradicate the inferior races. Friedrich Nietzsche was influenced by Darwin and proclaimed that God was dead, and we killed Him and that the Arian race was the superior race. Nietzsche was the main influence in Adolph Hitler’s life who believed that inferior people should be destroyed. Many don’t realize that Hitler did not start out killing Jews but the birth defected, and lame, and elderly and then 6 million Jews. Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, Mao Tse Tung, and others influenced by Marx exterminated nearly 200 million people in the former Soviet Union, and China

Evolutionary teachings have destroyed the lives of hundreds of millions of unborn children through out the world through the practice of abortion, because it teaches that the development of a person replicates the evolutionary process of a single cell, which became a fish, then a frog, then an ape, and then a human, therefore a fetus or embryo really isn’t human until the second or third trimester and some even believe that a child shouldn’t be declared human until several days after birth, therefore abortion is not murder but the destruction of a blob of tissue on the way to becoming human. In fact, as we stated earlier, if there is no God, man is able to determine what is right and wrong and we can establish our own laws and mores and if we want to destroy our young or encourage and promote homosexuality and discourage marriage we can do so.

Now, people of faith believe that an Intelligent Creator has revealed Himself to us in at least 2 major ways (I would argue more). One is what we call Special Revelation. He has given us the Bible and Jesus Christ, as we have discussed over the last few weeks. The Bible is the primary means by which God has revealed His character and attributes and His story which has become history and our hope for the future.

The second means is General Revelation. General Revelation is the revelation of God through nature, the world, creation, and our make-up as humans. Look at Psalm 19. Verses 1-6 declare the general revelation of God in creation, and verses 7-11 declare the value of special revelation, and the Psalm concludes with vv. 12-14 the psalmist’s desire to live for the glory of God. Look at verse one, "The Heavens declare the Glory of God and the firmament shows His handiwork."

Turn to Romans 1:18 and following. Notice a few things and then we will return to the evolution question.

• God’s wrath has been revealed from heaven against all unrighteousness and ungodliness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness (v. 18-20). God has revealed His wrath in specific revelation. He has demonstrated with the Flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, the destruction of Egypt, and then Jericho and Canaan, His wrath for ungodliness. He has also revealed in special revelation His wrath that will be displayed in the future when Jesus returns and then all will appear before His Great White Throne. It is all in the Book and part of our History and certainty for the future. Perhaps, and I say this cautiously with no specific event in mind, that some of the natural disasters of, "Biblical Proportion," may have been part of His wrath.
• God’s reason for His wrath is that men choose to ignore His revelation, and they suppress the truth and turn people away from God rather point people to Him (vv.21-23). The truth, He says, is both in them, (a God consciousness), and around them, (in creation). Many do so, not because they don’t know the truth, but because they refuse the truth. Why? Primarily so they can do what they want and not be answerable to anyone. That is the point of verses 24-32. Now, Paul was most likely referring at this time to those who made up idols or gods that suited them. He probably was not referring to Darwinists. However, Darwinian evolutionist perfectly fit this teaching, having designed a faith system that is void of a God to be answerable to.

But here is what I want to tell you. Are you listening? Say, "Amen!" It takes more faith to be an evolutionist than it does to be a Theist or a Christ Follower. As I shared with you when we started this series, our faith isn’t based on blind faith but on solid evidence. Evolution, of necessity, is based on blind faith. If a frog is kissed by a princess and that frog then turns into a prince we would say that is a fairy tale. If however, a frog becomes a man after billions of years of positive mutations, we would call this science.

To be an evolutionist you have no other choice than to believe that out of an eternal nothingness, everything came to exist. By random chance, coupled with time, nothing became something, AND, from non-life came life, AND, that billions of years of chance and positive mutations produced – Us! As I told you a few weeks ago, everyone must believe either that there is an eternal Creator, or that matter in one form or another is eternal with no creator; its either God or Gas. Evolutionists have chosen the second and that takes a lot of faith, and in fact, rather than being supported by science, science has shown that intelligent design and not spontaneous generation is how we came into being.

So, how can a preacher who is not a scientist make such a statement? I can only answer briefly that many scientists while not proclaiming to be Christ Followers are proclaiming that Intelligent Design is the reason for our existence. Consider the following:

1. Empirical Science Supports Creation and Not Evolution (science that can be demonstrated). Consider the primary laws of science called the laws of Thermodynamics. The first law of thermodynamics says that energy and matter can be converted but cannot be created or destroyed. Something can not come from nothing. Something exists so something must have had a cause. Evolution says there is no first cause or can not identify a first cause, even if you say, "What about a Big Bang," the question still remains, "Where did it come from? The Big Bang does not answer the question of origin. While no scientist would ever say let’s ignore this law, they have to in order to accept evolution. It is as William Paley described. Suppose that while you walked in the woods you looked down at something that was small round and ticking, and that had 3 hand-like extensions that were moving and 12 numbers in a circle in numeric order from 1 to 12, and gears that were moving in perfect sync, you would have found what, class? A watch. Would you ever say, "My, what the earth and water and minerals have evolved into?" No. A watch presupposes a watchmaker. Someone designed and made this watch. You would never say, if you passed Mount Rushmore, "My, how time and chance turned that mountain into what looks like the faces of 4 presidents." No. You would say, "My, what an artist." You would never assume that a hunk of marble evolved into a statue that looked like David, or that the Sistine Chapel evolved with a ceiling that looked like a painting depicting creation. These required of the genius of a Michelangelo. Yet, we look at things much more intricate and awesome and we say, "My, what chance and time and nothing has become."

The second law of Thermodynamics says that entrophy is occurring, or that our biological clock is running out of gas and dying. We are going from order to disorder, from complexity to decay. The universe is winding down. But for evolution to be true we have to be going from disorder to order and to greater complexity. Evolutionists must deny this law to believe in evolution.

Next, Consider DNA. Walter Bradley, co-author of the Mysteries of Life’s Origins and retired Professor from Texas A&M said this, "What is encoded inside every cell of every living creature is purely and simply written information. We use a 26 letter alphabet in the English; in DNA there is a four letter chemical alphabet, whose letters combine in various sequences to form words, sentences and paragraphs, These comprise all the instructions need to guide the functioning of the cell. They spell out in coded form the instructions for how a cell makes proteins. It woks just the way alphabetical letter sequences do in our language.

Now when we see written language, we can infer, based on our experience, that it has an intelligent cause. And we can legitimately use analogical reasoning to conclude that the remarkable information sequences in DNA also had an intelligent cause. Therefore, this means life on earth came from a "who," not a "what." He also said that a single cell has more information than 30 volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

2. The Fossil Record. Darwin, himself, said that if we can not find the fossil record to support his theory then his theory should be considered invalid. For evolution to be true, non life gave way to life, probably one celled creatures that became multiple celled creatures in the water that eventually came onto dry land and formed insects, birds, animals and eventually man. For this to be true there had to be transitional forms of creatures, like a tadpole becoming a frog. There would have to be thousands, maybe millions of creatures in transition, yet we can’t find any. The Missing Link is really Thousands of Missing Links. Every fossil we have ever found of any creature is exactly as we know that creature to be today. The silence of the fossils says, "Evolution didn’t occur." Just for a smile, I remember when comedian George Carlin once asked, "If man evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?

3. The Testimony of Present Relationships. Simply put, species may develop new breeds with in a species but they can never create new kinds of species. You can breed a better cow, a better dog, a better watermelon or corn. But you must use components within the kind. You can not breed a dog and a cat, nor a cow and bear, or corn with tomatoes. It is as Genesis 1 proclaims, everything is after its own kind. Yet if everything evolved from a common ancestry, would it not seem possible to produce new kinds since all life comes from the same common source? Present relationships say, "No," to evolution.

4. The Testimony of Present Processes. For evolution to be true it requires multiple thousands of positive mutations. Comic books and cartoons have popularized mutations these last 20 or more years with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the X-Men, Spider-man and more. For evolution to be true, mutations would have to be positive and beneficial. But apart from comic books, mutations in creatures usually are harmful to the species, producing defects, and sterility or inability to fight infections. Downs syndrome is an example. Yet evolutionists hold positive mutations as the basis of their explanation of our origin.

The Psalmist said, "The heavens declare the Glory of God and the firmament shows His handiwork." "They are without excuse, professing themselves to be wise they became fools, because they did not want to retain God in their knowledge" (Rom. 1:28).

If we are as the Bible says, the product of intelligent design then:

• There is a God and you can know Him personally through both general and special revelation
• There is life after death, and we can be assured of heaven by a personal faith in Jesus Christ (John 14:1-3; 1 Peter 1:3-5)
• There is a foundation for right and wrong and it is the Word of our Creator – the Bible.
• There is a purpose for life, we were made to glorify and reflect our God.
• We have a free will to treat each other rightly and to follow our God.

Brothers and Sisters let me close by reminding you of the words of Paul in Col. 2:8 "Beware lest anyone cheat you through philosophy and empty deceit, according to the tradition of men, according to the basic principles of the world, and not according to Christ. (May I add, do not be intimidated by those who call you ignorant because you believe the evidence and the testimony of nature and the Bible)

You were created by an intelligent Creator. You were as Psalm 139 says, "Fearfully and wonderfully made."

Do you know your creator personally? If not, I would love to introduce you to Him today.

Part 8: Why are there so Many Hypocrites in the Church?

Read other thoughtful writings by Pastor Gary Buchman