Origins (Part 1)

Individual Topics — Steve Gregg

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Origins (Part 2)

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Origins (Part 1)

Individual TopicsSteve Gregg

In "Origins (Part 1)", Steve Gregg discusses the origins of the universe, world, life, and human race. He argues that there is clear evidence of design and purposefulness in nature and that everything in the universe, including life, is information-based. The speaker presents a critical perspective on scientific theories related to the origins of life and the relatedness of living beings. He discusses the different assumptions that evolutionists make regarding the origins of life and points out that some of these assumptions cannot be verified in a laboratory or experimental setting. The goal is to examine and refute arguments made by both creationists and evolutionists to arrive at a more accurate understanding of the origins of life.

Transcript

This is the first of two sessions that we're going to have together talking about the subject of origins. And by origins, I'm talking about origins in the broadest sense of the term. The origin of the universe, the origin of the world, the origin of life, the origin of the human race.

And for centuries, thinking people knew that things that are as highly designed and intricately put together, so ingeniously invented, that work so harmoniously and so forth with each other, must necessarily have been the product of intelligence. When you find on the ground a stone, a pebble let us say, that's been washed by the creek and it's smooth and round, and you find next to it another stone, a piece of flint that's actually an Indian arrowhead, you can tell instantly by comparing these two objects, maybe they're about the same size, maybe made of largely the same matter, but you can tell instantly that one of them has been shaped by nature and one has been shaped by intelligence and is designed. A smooth pebble has been shaped that way, no doubt, by the motion of water and sand and erosion, and it is a product of nature, not its very existence, but its present form is a result of natural forces upon it.

Whereas an arrowhead has the very clear marks of human ingenuity, human design and purposefulness in it. And the word purposefulness is something very important for us to consider here, because we're not just talking about theories that are, you know, we could go either way on it, it wouldn't change anything, you know, well, were we designed or were we not designed? Who cares? You know, we're here and that's all that matters, right? Well, not right. If we were designed, we were designed for a purpose.

If we're simply the products of nature and there was no intelligence of design, then we might imagine that there's a purpose in living, but that's just all it is, it's imagination. There really is no purpose in that which has no design and no intelligence behind its existence. The idea of a watch and a watchmaker is a very old example that creationists who believe in God creating things used to use in arguing against evolutionists who believe that nature created everything.

And the idea that the watch functions very precisely, it has certain parts that are clearly designed to function with other parts and they work in just such a way as to do something and that something is to fulfill a purpose. A person doesn't go to the trouble of designing an intricate machine unless there's something he wants it to do. I mean, he's got a purpose for its existence.

The automobile wasn't just invented out of curiosity. It was invented for the purpose of transporting people more efficiently than the horse-drawn carriages, the space shuttle or a computer or a watch or something as simple as a power tool, a power saw. These things are the results of design, as all people know, because they are first of all too intricate and too functional to be explained in terms of natural causes producing them and because when we say functional, we mean they serve a purpose.

They actually do something that needs to be done and that the designer designed them to do. Now, what is true in those realms is true in the realm of life itself and the universe. Everything in the universe and in the living world gives evidence that there is a designer that has put it together.

Now, you might say, what about that rock you told me about that is smooth by the creek? That doesn't have evidence of design in it. Not in its gross anatomy, maybe, not in its shape. It clearly wasn't designed except by nature to be round and smooth like it was, but its existence gives evidence of design because it's made of atoms and these atoms are made up of subatomic particles that operate together in an ever so organized manner and ever so predictable and what we have to realize is that everything that exists has what scientists are more and more talking about as the information content.

It's a funny thing. Information is a new realm of science, relatively new. I mean, people always were studying animals and trees and grass and flowers and arable plants and so forth because they can be profitable to man, but nowadays you've got computers and the most important thing about a computer is not its electrical parts.

The most important part about the function of a computer is the information it contains and, of course, the information it contains is what makes it work even more importantly than the components. If you take all the components of a computer and put them together, but they're not programmed with any information, the computer is just a boat anchor. You might as well use it for one because it's not going to do what a computer is supposed to do.

It's the information that makes it work. Biologists in recent decades have discovered more than anyone knew before that life isn't just so much mechanical stuff. It's not just that your heart is a pump like any other pump and it circulates this fluid that lubricates and so forth.

It's not like a machine. Life is much more information-based. That is to say, you've got a DNA molecule that is programmed to produce a living thing a certain way and not another way.

And everything you have, whether it's your blue eyes or brown eyes or blonde hair or brown hair, your height or your width or whatever you have, you are programmed by information in the DNA molecule to be that way instead of another way. You would be taller if you've been programmed to be taller. Now, of course, this isn't true of your spiritual life.

Your spiritual life isn't pre-programmed. That's an area that God has breathed His life into us and given us freedom a lot like His own to be creative and to do things that we weren't specifically programmed to do. We've got freedom of will.

At least that's my theology. Some people have less confidence in their theology. But the point is that biologically, biological life is really more information-oriented than it is merely mechanical.

And that has thrown scientists who don't believe in God into a much bigger problem than they had before. Because people used to consider that, given millions and millions and millions of years, if you had the right amount of amino acids, the right amount of hydrogen, the right amount of the right kinds of atoms of different substances around, and these things somehow naturally got thrown together in a particular way. Typically, it was talked about by evolutionists years ago, this primordial soup, some pond on the ancient earth that had just the right chemicals in it.

And maybe it got struck by lightning or something. And the energy that came from that just caused these things to bond together. And it just so happened that they bonded in a way that really was capable of producing a protein that could self-replicate.

And eventually, there were more proteins. Eventually, these became the building blocks of early cells and so forth. And it was all thought to be mechanical.

All you need is the right stuff and the right energy to put the stuff together, sort of like a factory. You know, how do you build a car? Well, you build a car by you take this piece of metal, that piece of metal, you take a welder and weld it together, and eventually you do that with enough pieces, and you've got a car. Well, not exactly.

You also have to have, to build a car, information. You have to have a design. You have to have a sense of physics.

You have to know how many wheels will make the car balance. Do we need one wheel on this thing or three? How about six? Well, I mean, information goes into the design to make it an operational commodity. And so, even that is more information than just mechanics.

But when it comes to life, life is more information-based than mechanical-based. Because a cell is what it is and does what it does because of the information that's in the DNA molecule that's in there. And so, those who have to talk about the origin of these things have had to deal with the fact that, okay, we're talking about more than just the origin of complex material things that have combined to make more complex material things.

We're talking about things that have been combined very clearly, purposefully, with a highly complex information content without which they wouldn't work at all. Even an atom wouldn't exist without the importance of the information that guides it. Now, I have a feeling I may be talking a little bit esoterically here, and I want to come back down to things more normal here.

The question of where things originated boils down to two possibilities. And those possibilities are stated very well by an evolutionist, actually, named D.J. Fatuma. Douglas is his first name.

I read his book many years ago in the 80s, his book, Science on Trial. It was written in 1983 in order to refute creationism. Now, creationism or creation science, as we call it today, arose in the early 70s of the 1900s, 1970s.

Before that, there were people who refuted evolution, but they largely did so from a religious base and threw in a few scientific facts. But in the early 70s, there arose a movement called creation science, where actual men who were not theologians, they were scientists, professional scientists, said, Listen, the scientific evidence does not support this idea of evolution. Let's start bonding together and bringing the information together that will tell us what science really does point to.

And so you now have all over the world, and many of them in America, these associations of scientists who are creationists and believe either in the biblical view of creation or some modification of it, and they don't believe in evolution anymore. But when they appeared, the evolutionists got defensive. And the reason they did is because before the 70s, and even somewhat afterwards, if they're talking to ignorant listeners, the evolutionists could represent the tension between creation and evolution this way.

They'd say, Well, creation is religion. Because, of course, creation supposes there's a creator, and a creator would be a God, and therefore God is a religious concept. So creation is a religious idea.

Evolution is a scientific idea. And for a long time, evolutionists have said, and they still say this sometimes, although they're not being honest when they say it, they often say, We're not trying to attack religion. We're just concerned about the area of science.

We think religion is a good thing. People should keep religion in the church and let the scientists work with science. And if you want to believe in creation, that's your religious view.

You're welcome to it. But we're scientists. We have to deal with science, and therefore we're evolutionists.

And that's another way of saying, if you want to be living in a fantasy, which you call your religion, you're welcome to believe what isn't really true, namely in creation. But we who are scientists, who deal with objective reality, well, we're not going to interfere with your religion, but we just have to tell you you're believing a fantasy. Evolution is true, and you can have any religious view you want.

You can believe the moon is made of green cheese and it's populated by angels, but we're not going to interfere with your religious belief here. But between ourselves, I think you're living in a dream world. That's what evolutionists basically were communicating.

So when I was growing up, before the 70s, I graduated from high school in 71, I was always confronted with the thing as if, okay, you've got a choice between creation and evolution. Essentially, your choice is between religion and science. You want to be scientific, you'll have to be evolutionist.

You want to be religious, you can be whatever you want, even a creationist. But that's not how the issues are defined anymore. As I said, when the creation scientists emerged and began to show that creation really is more realistic in view of what science has shown than evolution is, suddenly there was this, what we'd have to say, an intramural scientific debate.

And I'll just tell you, I mean, I know I'm biased because I'm a creationist, but you can do your research for yourself, and I certainly encourage you to do so. I'll tell you what you'll find out. The evolutionists always lose the debate.

The evolutionists always lose the debate when it's posed in scientific terms. I can say this as one who's watched on video many debates between highly qualified evolutionists and highly qualified creation scientists. The evolutionists always loses.

And I myself have debated scientists on this. And if I might humbly say so, I think I won. And the reason is not because I'm a good debater.

And sometimes these creationists are not the best public speakers, they just happen to have the truth. And it's awfully hard to defend successfully an idea that isn't true. And evolution isn't true.

And the evolutionists are very much on the defensive in this. They know that if they allow there to be debate on the scientific terms alone, that evolution will lose. In fact, you may be aware, now you guys are homeschoolers, so you're not into the public school system, but there's a lot of people who are trying to get laws passed that will allow creation science to be taught in the public schools alongside evolutionary science.

In other words, they say, listen, let's don't teach creation or teach evolution, let's just present the evidence for both. Now, as far as I know, there's no one out there saying, I've never heard of anyone saying, we need to get evolution out of the public schools and bring creation in instead. I've never heard anyone even suggest it.

The most outlandish proposal that creationists have made is, why don't we just present the evidence for both side by side? And let the people decide for themselves. Well, evolutionists, they go berserk when they hear that suggestion. They can't stand the idea of this.

And isn't that strange? Isn't that strange? I have read their responses. They practically go ballistic. They say, if we teach creation and evidence in these schools, it's going to set the cause of science back 130 years.

Well, why would it do that, I wonder? Why would the presentation of evidence for two sides set science back? It seems to me that science actually makes its discoveries by comparing all evidences. Unless science has become an ideology and a religion itself, that wants to protect itself against new discovery, and wants to protect itself against adverse evidence. If so, it is no longer science.

It has become its own religion. And so, if you would ask me, well, Steve, is creation, evolution, is that science or is that religion? I would say both of them have a religious element, in that creationists usually have a religious view attached to their creationism. But so do evolutionists.

Evolutionists have their own religious viewpoint. As a matter of fact, evolution is a more necessary religious viewpoint than creation is. The reason is, because creation is a broad view that doesn't encompass any one religion.

Of course, we are Christians, and we believe in a Christian understanding of creation. We believe the Genesis story, and that's the Christian and Jewish version. But the Muslims have their own idea of creation.

And the Mormons have their own idea of creation. It's not the same as the Bible. But there are many religions out there that can say, yes, creation works.

And we don't need any one religion to establish creation. You can establish creation without even deciding which religion is true, because creation is not itself a religion. But evolution is a religion.

And it is a necessary component of atheism, which is a religion of some people. Some people choose to believe there is no God. Now, you see, if a person is not an atheist, they can believe in creation or evolution.

Do you know that? If you believe there is a God, you can believe that God created everything, as I do. Or you could choose, as some people do, to believe that God used evolution to make everything happen. There are people who believe that.

In other words, as a believer in God, I am free to either be evolutionist or creationist, as far as believing in God is concerned. But the atheist does not have a choice. The atheist can't have anything but evolution.

He can't have creation as an option. Therefore, the atheist has... it's a life and death struggle for him to prove evolution. It's necessary to his religion.

As a Christian, it's not necessary to my religion. Now, you might say, well, Steve, it is to us. Doesn't the Bible in Genesis chapter 1 teach creationism? Yes, it does.

And I believe it. I believe the Genesis 1 creation. I take it quite literally, entirely.

But I would acknowledge there are people who are true Christians, who are not so sure that that's intended to be taken literally. Some of them think it was a poetry. Some think it's a parable.

Some think it's, you know, something other than a literal story. Some say, well, the days were ages long. I mean, different Christians have different views.

And I don't think they're all right. I'm just saying they're all entitled to them. I'm a creationist.

But I could be a Christian and be, in some sense, an evolutionist, if I believe that God used processes of evolution to create things, which I don't believe He did. All I'm saying is my Christianity is not destroyed if evolution is proven to be true. If evolution was proven to be true, my religion could still be true.

I could say, oh, I see God used evolution. He didn't do it the way I thought He did. He did it this way instead.

But atheism is destroyed if creationism is proven to be true. So they are the ones on the ropes. If an evolutionist comes here and argues with me, I can really argue with him quite objectively and very interested in knowing his evidence.

If he's got evidence that evolution is true, I'm willing to hear it. Because if it is true, I want to know the truth. But the atheist is not going to be very happy to hear any evidence for creation because it's going to make it impossible for him to hold his religious view.

So there's a great deal of religion involved in this matter. And there is science involved too. Because it is a conflict of two religious viewpoints that argue their case from scientific evidences.

That's really what it comes down to. Now, after this creation science movement appeared, the evolutionists have tried to do two things. They started out trying to debate creation science, but they lost every debate they ever had.

And so they tried something else, which they are doing now, and that's to try to marginalize it. That means act like it's fringe. It's a fringe science.

It's pseudoscience. These creationists... Oh, creation science. Oh, yeah, they call it science.

But it's just religion dressed up in scientific garb, they say. And they say that's not real science. Now, it's funny that they say that, since some of the most well-trained scientists in the world are creationists.

And many who are not committed creationists are not evolutionists. They're just not sure what they are. There's many excellent scientists who say that evolution just is not true, cannot be true, it doesn't fit the facts of science.

But the mainstream scientific community doesn't want you to hear them. The mainstream community has gotten burned by debating creationists, because creationists win. And they do so not because I'm on their side, and because I think they win, because I like what they say.

They win because they have the evidence, and their opponents don't. I've got some videotapes you can watch if you're curious about this. You get a college professor who's an evolutionist debating a good creationist, and you know what you'll find every time? The creationist presents scientific evidence, evidence, evidence, evidence.

The evolutionist gets up there, and you know what he does? He blasts the Bible. He tries to find things wrong with the Bible, and blah, blah, blah, blah. And he doesn't bring evidence, because he doesn't have any.

All he can do is attack the religion that he hates. He can't defend scientifically the position. You say, well, then why does evolution command the majority of scientific views out there? You need to understand something about scientists right from the beginning.

We sometimes have the impression that a man is a scientist, because that means he wears a white frock coat. He has no germs on his hands. He's a sterile individual in all ways.

His hands are sterile. He probably can't have children. His brain is sterile, too.

He's like a computer in a biological package. His brain is totally objective. He has no religious preferences.

He has no moral preferences. He has no opinions of his own. He's a machine more than a man.

That's what scientists are thought to be in our culture. And therefore, if someone says, well, the majority of scientists say there's no God, then someone thinks, well, how could they be wrong? The majority of scientists, for Pete's sake, how could they get it wrong? People who are scientists, they have religious preferences. They have moral preferences.

Take, for example, one of the most prestigious scientists alive today. His name is Stephen Hawking. He wrote a best-selling book that no one can understand, but everyone buys, because it's fashionable to have read his book, A Brief History of Time.

And it's on the New York Times bestsellers. Everyone who's everybody has that book on their shelf. I have two copies, actually.

And I read it, but I didn't understand a word of it. And I read a review of it by a viewer who said, this is the one book that everybody feels they have to read, but no one can understand. But no one wants to admit they don't understand.

The guy is a total egghead, you know. He also has Lou Gehrig's disease, and he's confined to a wheelchair. He can't move.

And he's got these machines through which he can, in a very strange way, kind of talk. He's got all these life support systems on him. But he's like one of the most prestigious scientists alive today, if he's still alive.

And he was recently, but he might not be any moment now. But the man also is an immoral rebel against God. As a matter of fact, he stole the wife of the man who invented the life support machines that keep him alive.

He divorced his own wife, who was a Christian. Somehow she got married to him. He had a wife, maybe she got saved after he got married, but he had a Christian wife.

He divorced her and stole the wife of the guy who invented his life support system. Now, here's a guy who doesn't have much of a life. He can't move.

And his life is going to be short. But he's an immoral guy. Now, he's also one of the most prestigious egghead scientists out there.

But he's not a man without morality. And you know, he'd much rather believe there's no God, if he's going to act that way. And we have to remember that scientists are not machines.

They are people. And people are fallen. Most people are in rebellion against God.

Most people want to live immorally and don't want there to be any accountability to a divine creator. And therefore, most people don't want to believe in creation. Period.

And that's true of most scientists as well. Now, having said that, I want to read this quote I alluded to from Dr. Douglas J. Futuma in his book, Science on Trial. He wrote this book to refute the arguments of creation scientists.

I read the book and didn't read anything new from him. Everything he said in support of evolution has been answered by creationists for decades. And he must have ignored that fact.

But he made a statement I do agree with. And I always like to quote them when I agree with them as much as possible. Just so I don't seem too prejudiced against them.

Dr. Futuma, he's the editor of a prestigious magazine called Evolution Journal. So you know he's an evolutionist. And he said this, The point is this.

You don't have three possibilities or four. You have two. Either things appeared as they are, essentially as they are now, or they didn't.

Those are the only two possibilities, right? I mean, either you did, either you got, either human beings arrived here as human beings, or they arrived here earlier as something that wasn't quite human. And then they developed into human beings. Those are the only two possibilities.

Some people have tried to get away from this, because they can see that evolution is on the ropes. Evolution is a dying philosophy. It's desperately thrashing out to save itself from the evidence.

But evolutionists are defecting in huge numbers from evolution, because the evidence is so desperately against it. But many of these people don't want to become creationists because of their own religious convictions. They see that the evidence is against evolution, but they don't want to give up the faith of atheism, so they have to come up with something else.

And so they sometimes suggest a third alternative. I didn't write this down. You might be interested in knowing it.

It's called panspermia. It's actually presented as if it's a new scientific theory. In fact, Francis Crick, one of the co-discoverers of the DNA molecules, double helix formation, Francis Crick has become a defender of panspermia.

What this means is life didn't get created here, and life didn't evolve here. It was planted here by intelligences from other planets. So this is a view that some people think works okay.

You don't need evolution or creation. You just have intelligences from other planets brought us here. But it seems to me scientists should be able to think.

Sometimes they can't think as clearly as laymen can think. But I think anyone for a moment reflecting on this would say, well, if life was brought here from intelligences from other planets, don't we still have to have either creation or evolution on this other planet? I mean, we haven't really solved the problem. We've just transported the problem to another planet.

You still have to have the origin of things one way or the other. And so Dr. Futuma is actually saying something very profound and very useful. He says you've got two choices, creation or evolution.

That's all. That exhausts the possible explanations for origins. And he's right.

Now, why is that important to know? Well, one reason it's important to know is because some people say, well, you can't prove evolution or creation. And there's a sense in which that's true. You can't prove creation or evolution in the strictly scientific sense.

Do you know why? Because science is based on what's called the scientific method. If you've studied any science at high school level, you know about the scientific method. There's several steps to the scientific method.

It begins with observation. You see something happen in nature. You see it happen again and again and again.

The next step is you come up with a hypothesis about that. A hypothesis means you're going to guess something based on what you've seen. It's an educated guess that you think, okay, every year the leaves fall off the trees, and they all fall down.

Then they all fall up into the clouds. There might be something in nature that causes them to fall down. That's my hypothesis, okay? So I want to test this hypothesis.

That's the next step. The scientific method, you test your hypothesis. If you do a whole bunch of different experiments and you get the same results all the time, then you have a theory.

That's the next step. After the hypothesis has been tested adequately, you have a theory. A theory of gravitation.

I believe there's a theory. My theory is that all solid objects have a factor of gravitation that tends to pull things toward their center. Okay, that's my theory.

Then I can test that more. Eventually, if enough tests really yield all the same results with no exceptions, I can say I now have a scientific fact. And I arrived at it for scientific law.

I arrived at this through a method which started with observation. Now, many scientists have been honest enough to say, you know, creation and evolution can't really be tested by the scientific method in that sense they're not strictly speaking science at all. Because the scientific method requires that you see something happen.

You have to observe it. And no one has ever seen a species created out of nothing, as creationists believe happened. And no one has ever seen a species evolve into another species, as evolutionists say happened.

Both of these are faith statements. Neither of them has been observed. They simply belong to different religious convictions.

So, that's not strictly speaking science at all. But, one thing we can do, and this is what a responsible scientific thinking person will do, they'll say, okay, we can't go out and prove that creation occurred, we can't go out and prove that evolution occurred. But, we can say this, if creation occurred, we would reasonably expect to see x, y, z things in the universe.

And if evolution occurred, we would expect to see z, y, x other things in the universe. In other words, what we have, here's how scientists talk, they'd say creation and evolution can become either one a model. They are conflicting models or paradigms of truth.

And once you have the model, you say, okay, my model is my theory of what happened and how the universe got here. Then I can go out and look at the things that I really do observe. Things that really are visible.

Things that are really in nature. Okay, do those things conform to the evolutionary model, or do they conform to the creation model? That is, the scientific model you choose will make its predictions about what you'll find. We'll see how important that is when we get to the fossil record, eventually.

But, what I want to say is, you can approach this subject scientifically. It's not strictly speaking scientific, because no one can prove, because no one ever saw creation occur, and no one ever saw evolution occur, and no one ever will. So, we can't prove it.

But, one thing we could do, if we could prove that evolution didn't happen, then the only other alternative is creation. If someone could prove that creation didn't happen, then the only alternative is evolution. They may not have any absolute proof for evolution, but if there was absolute proof against creation, since there's only two options, that would mean evolution had to be true.

Likewise, it may be that we can't just prove beyond the shadow of reasonable doubt that creation occurred by straightforward proofs, but if it could be proven that evolution didn't occur, and couldn't have occurred, well, then you have, by default, you've proven creation. So, there are reasonable scientific ways to approach the subject. We're not just looking at two faith systems and say, well, it's all a matter of faith.

Who knows? No, we can say, here's a faith called creation, here's a faith called evolution. We can test them. We can test the predictions of each model by what we actually find in the real world, and we can decide, is this a more reasonable faith, or is this a more reasonable faith? And, by all reasonable tests, I will guarantee you, creation is the more reasonable faith.

Now, let me tell you, I want to give you some examples of what evolutionists often say. It's possible that you have not been exposed to their writings much, because your parents are wise, and have protected you from them. I wasn't protected.

My parents were wise, but not wise enough to protect me from public school. So, I was exposed to a lot of evolutionary statements. And, just so you'll know what they're saying out there, I've got some quotes here.

Some of you may have already read them, because they're in your notes. This comes from Professor Marsh, who was the president of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences back in the 1880s. And, back in the 1880s, he made this statement.

He says, quote, I need offer no argument for evolution, since to doubt evolution is to doubt science, and science is only another name for truth. Unquote. In other words, you don't have to present arguments for something that's provenly true.

Well, but you see, he's got a religious conviction there. Evolution equals science, and science equals truth. Let me ask you a question.

Does science equal truth? That's a trick question. The answer could be yes or no. Some truth, indeed, is scientific truth.

And true science, the word science is just a Latin word that means knowledge. Science means knowledge. So, in a sense, knowledge of what really is real is knowledge of what really is true.

Science can tell us the boiling temperature of water is 212 degrees Fahrenheit at sea level, if that's the right figure. And they can prove it, and it's scientific, and it's true. So, in that sense, in that particular realm, science and truth are kind of the same thing.

But what about this statement? I love you. Is that a scientific statement? Can it be tested? There's no scientific test that can be made to tell if that's true or not. But it's not science.

But is it true? Well, you don't know, but it might be. It could be. In many cases, a statement like that is true, but it's not science.

You don't go to the laboratory and make a theory and test it to see if it's true. That's a different realm than science. We need to understand that we live in an age that's trying to reduce all truth to that which the scientists can pronounce about.

In other words, all truth has to do with science. And believe me, that's on purpose. It's an agenda.

The scientific community, if they can get the mentality of the public to think science equals truth, what that means is scientists are now the priesthood of our world religion. They're the ones who know the truth, and we need to listen to them. Because they are scientists.

They know science. Well, there are several things to note about this. One is that science may be true, but not all truth is science.

There are truths that are not. History, for example, is not science. But it can be true.

If I tell you that George Washington was our first president, I'm telling you something that's true, but it's not science. It's a different discipline than science. It's history.

There are all kinds of disciplines other than science that yield knowledge of truth. So, don't let anyone tell you science is the same thing as truth. Science can be true.

But there's another thing to consider, and that is that when someone says, science has proven, or science teaches, or what, make sure that someone is saying what they really mean. It would be more accurate sometimes to say, most scientists teach, most scientists believe, such and such. That's not the same thing as science teaches, or science has proven.

Because scientists change their minds many times. Science is a good word for objective knowledge of the natural world. That's a good area to study, and a lot of truth to be had there.

But scientists are human beings, and they're not 100% right. And they often change their mind, because they find that what they believed to be true didn't fit later experience, and they had to change it. Now, one thing they never change their mind about is evolution, because that's their religion.

If they were really scientists, they would have abandoned evolution long ago, because evolution is against everything that science teaches, and often they know that, but they don't want you to know it. Sir Julian Huxley, who died in the 1960s, in his lifetime was the leading evolutionary voice in the world. His grandfather, Thomas Huxley, was sometimes called Darwin's bulldog, was contemporary of Charles Darwin, a friend of his, and Darwin was a retiring, reticent, meek sort of a man, and didn't go out and defend his theories vigorously, so Thomas Huxley did.

He was an aggressive, nasty kind of a guy, and he went out and he was the public defender of Darwin's views. His grandson, Sir Julian Huxley, died in the 1960s, and in his lifetime he was definitely the most authoritative evolutionary voice on the planet. And when he was alive, he said, in 1960, and these remarks are published in the journal Issues in Evolution, Sir Julian Huxley said, quote, The first point to make about Darwin's theory is that it's no longer a theory but a fact.

No serious scientist would deny that evolution has occurred. Just as he would not deny the fact that the earth goes around the sun. Well, let me just say, for starters, that's a lie.

Whether Sir Julian Huxley was not aware that he was lying or not, I don't know. But it is a lie. To say that no serious scientist would deny evolution is simply not true.

There are thousands now, multiplied thousands of serious scientists, they do it for a living, they're professionals, and they deny evolution, they don't believe it's true. But this is propaganda from the evolutionary side. And he says, he implies that we can prove evolution is true just as readily as we can prove that the earth goes around the sun.

Well, can they prove that the earth goes around the sun? I would say so. I'd say that's a scientific question. I would say that we, I think scientists have seen enough and tested enough and stuff, I think we can be fairly confident that the earth does indeed go around the sun.

But we don't have anything like that kind of evidence for evolution. And it is quite a misstatement, and I would say a deliberate one, on the part of Huxley, to say no serious scientist would deny that evolution occurred, just like he wouldn't deny the fact that the earth goes around the sun. That is a non-secular, one does not follow the other.

It's a lie, among other things. Another well-known scientist in his day, back in the 40s and 50s, Dr. Richard B. Goldschmidt, who was a professor at the University of California in Davis, in American Scientist magazine back in 1952, Goldschmidt made this remark, Now, is he lying? Well, it depends on what he means by those entitled to judgment. Essentially what he's saying is, if you don't agree with evolution, then you fall into the category of those that I say are not entitled to judgment.

Well, then what about all these thousands of scientists out there who are making their living at it just like he is, college professors just like him, people who are as advanced in science as he is, but they don't believe in evolution? Well, they're not entitled to judgment. Why not? Because they don't agree with him. It's his religion.

And anyone who disagrees with his religion isn't entitled to judgment. That's the way it is with evolutionists, in many cases. And certainly those who are promoting it have this opinion.

Now, I mentioned Richard Dawkins. He's England's leading zoologist today. He's alive today and writing popular books on science.

One of his books came out in 1986. It was called The Blind Watchmaker. And he said this, Now, in the next paragraph, he complains that what he likes least about creationists is that they're so intolerant.

But what is he? If you meet somebody who says he does not believe in evolution, you can count on it. That person is either stupid, ignorant, or insane, or quite possibly wicked. Well, certainly Dawkins knows there are many people out there with scientific credentials every bit as good as his who do in fact say they don't believe in evolution.

So what is he saying? He's saying notwithstanding the objective assessment of their credentials, in his judgment they're stupid or insane or wicked if they don't believe his view. Well, then he spends the rest of his book trying to explain why his view is so obviously true. And he fails to do so.

And so, anyway, this is the way that evolutionists often talk. Now, I would never say this about an evolutionist. I would never say, and I don't know any creationist who would say, if you meet someone who says they believe in evolution, well, that person is either stupid, insane, or wicked.

I would say there's a good chance they are ignorant, there's a good chance they are wicked. But I don't know. I don't know why they're saying they believe in evolution.

Maybe they've just... I'd rather hear them out and see what their reasons are rather than just broad brush them with abusive language. But you see, that's what evolutionists have had to come to. They can't win in the field of argument.

They have to win by insult. They have to win by marginalizing those who disagree with them and make them seem like they're fringe scientists, not real scientists. And that's the only way they can win.

They're desperate. Thank God they're desperate because they're not going to survive much longer. As an ideology, I'm quite convinced.

Dr. James Watson, I mentioned earlier Francis Crick. He and James Watson, the two of them, were the co-discoverers of the double helix formation of the DNA molecule. They're very well-known scientists, very famous.

James Watson wrote a book called The Molecular Biology of the Gene. And in that book he said, quote, Today the theory of evolution is an accepted fact to everyone but a fundamentalist minority... that means Christians... whose objections are based not on reasoning but on doctrinary adherence to religious principles, unquote. Now, I think you can read through that and know what he's saying.

He's saying the only people who don't believe in evolution anymore, as an established fact, are Christians. And they don't base their belief on reasoning. They base their belief on stubborn loyalty to their religious viewpoint.

That's what he said. Now, once more, I've just read you five statements from leading scientists, all of them leaders in the field. And they were all lies.

I dare say, since they were such knowledgeable scientists, they probably knew they were lying. I mean, the average science teacher at high school might say, All scientists believe in evolution. And he might think he's right, because he's not very well-educated.

He's only a high school teacher. But a man who's a leading evolutionary authority certainly has heard the arguments of people against him. How could he become a leader in the field without hearing them? He knows better.

He's lying. He's not just mistaken. They are lying, every one of them.

Which tells you what kind of people you're dealing with in many cases here. Now, there are some evolutionists who don't lie. There are some who are not committed to evolution as a religion.

And therefore, they're willing to think and to admit the truth. One of those is a professor at Wofford College in South Carolina. He's a biochemist.

His name is W. Scott Morrow. And he was quoted in the Oregonian newspaper. I used to live in Oregon, and I drew it from there, February 7th, 1987.

But he describes himself as an evolutionist and an agnostic. He's not a creationist. He's not a Christian.

And he said, quote, creation scientists offer... Now, creationists, we're not talking about evolutionists. He's an evolutionist, but he's talking about creationists. He says creationist scientists offer affirmative evidence based on paleontology.

That's the fossil record. Comparative morphology. That'd be like the field of homology.

We'll talk more about that later. Probability, genetics, and comparative unrelatedness. He says these involve scientific data and do not involve religious concepts, unquote.

So he's actually an evolutionist and agnostic who's more honest. And he's willing to say, listen, these creationists, they're just as scientific as anybody. They're not being religious when they say creation is a better view.

They're being scientific. Another guy, Dean Kenyon, professor of biology at San Francisco State University. And after he made this statement, he got in a lot of hot water.

In fact, he might have been fired. He came very close to it. There's a huge controversy at San Francisco State University over this man because he's an evolutionary biology teacher.

But he actually dared to say in class that some of the evidence is not very strongly in support of evolution. And he almost lost his job as a professor for saying that. But earlier than this huge controversy over him, he was quoted also in the Oregonian, February of 1987, making this statement.

Dean H. Kenyon, professor of biology at San Francisco State University said, It is my professional opinion that creation science is as scientific as evolution. That creation science is as non-religious as evolution. Now, of course, he's disagreeing with these big leaders in the field.

But so what? He's still an evolutionist. He's looking at the evidence. He's just more honest than the others.

There's a very committed evolutionist named G.A. Kerkut. He's a professor at the Department of Physiology and Biochemistry at the University of Southampton. He wrote a book back in 1960 called Implications of Evolution.

In that book, he's a committed evolutionist. He said evolutionists make seven assumptions. All seven assumptions must be true if evolution is true.

They have to have all seven in order for the theory of evolution to be true. And here they are. First, that spontaneous generation occurred.

You understand that term, spontaneous generation? It's a view that was held in actually pre-scientific times. People used to think that mosquitoes just came up spontaneously from the mud without any parents, without any ancestors. That they didn't come from pre-existing mosquitoes.

They just came out of the ooze. Frogs, too, and other things. They thought that rats spontaneously came out of garbage without reproducing.

They didn't believe that rats came from mama and papa rats. They believed that rats evolved from garbage. That was held by some of the leading scientists up until just a few hundred years ago when Louis Pasteur was one of the first to disprove that view.

It was called spontaneous generation. They assumed that spontaneous generation must have occurred. And it had to because they believed that the first living thing had to spring forth from whatever was around that wasn't alive.

That's spontaneous generation. Secondly, they have to assume it occurred only once. Well, why would that be necessary? Because they believe, and this is one of the best proofs they have of their theory, they believe that all living things, plants and animals, are all related to each other.

Well, why do they say that? Well, they say because we all have DNA. We're all made up of protein molecules. We're all made up of the same stuff.

It wouldn't be very reasonable to assume that spontaneous generation happened over here in this ocean once and happened over here in another ocean another time and both things developed exactly the same genetic code. That wouldn't make sense. That's too big a chance to ask for.

So they say, no, it only happened once. And it's because we all have a common ancestor. Very important affirmation of evolution is that we're all related.

When they say, well, the bear is a cousin to the dog, that's an evolutionary statement. How do two individuals become cousins? You have cousins? How did you and your cousins become cousins? By having a common ancestor, right? You have common grandparents. That's how you have cousins, by having common ancestry.

Well, to say a dog and a bear are cousins means that somewhere back there they had common ancestry. To say that the ape is our cousin means that we have common ancestry with the apes. Evolutionists assume this.

It is not true, but it is one of the fundamental assumptions of evolution. Well, they believe we all have common ancestry. It goes back to one living cell that spontaneously arose one time, not twice.

Not two different ones doing it independently. Or else we might have creatures like us over here and over here and have three-headed creatures with eight eyes on them. Actually, spiders have eight eyes.

But the fact of the matter is they believe it happened and it happened only once. The third assumption they make is that viruses, bacteria, plants and animals are all interrelated. I just made that point.

They are all related to each other. And what does relationship mean? Mind you this. Relationship does not mean that we have things in common with each other.

That we can relate. That's kind of the cycle babble idea of relationship today. Relationship today comes when we are connecting.

When we have something in common and we are kind of bonded and we are relating. That's a newfangled meaning of the word relationship. Relationship technically means you have common ancestors.

You are related to your brothers. You are related to your father and mother. You are related to your cousins.

Why? Because of common ancestry. When it says that viruses, bacteria, animals and plants are all interrelated, it means they all have common ancestry. They all came from the original one.

Four. The fourth assumption is that protozoa gave rise to metazoa. Protozoa is just a word that means one-celled creatures.

Like amoebas and such. They are single-celled. They are protozoa.

Metazoa are creatures that have many cells like us. We are made up of millions of cells. So that you had a little amoeba-like thing once.

And by the way, we know that amoebas can reproduce. So, I mean, it's not too unusual to suggest that there was an amoeba and then there were two amoebas and then four and then eight and then thousands eventually. But amoebas always give rise to amoebas.

They don't give rise to creatures that have many cells. Now, to the non-specialists, it might seem reasonable to suggest, well, if you got enough single-celled amoebas together, and maybe lightning struck and they all got melded together, that you might have a multicellular creature, right? Wrong. Amoebas are amoebas not because they are cells but because they have DNA.

They have amoeba DNA. You put a bunch of amoeba DNAs together and glue them together with super glue, you still have a big collection of amoebas that can't get away from each other. You don't have a different genetic code.

You don't have a different animal. You have the same thing. And by the way, to say, well, I mean, there's a lot of different single-celled creatures out there.

Couldn't one of them have given rise to multicellular creatures? Well, let's talk about multicellular creatures. You're one. What kind of cells do you have? You got blood cells, bone cells, hair cells, skin cells.

You know, kidney cells, all kinds of cells, right? All kinds of cells, many different kinds of cells. But amoebas only have one kind of cell, an amoeba cell. They're all, they're a package in one cell.

They don't have different kinds of cells in them. And yet to believe that a single-celled creature gave rise to many-celled creatures, you've got to come up with the idea that somehow amoebas didn't just produce more amoebas, more cells like themselves. Because they produced some cells that were not cells.

An amoeba produced a bone cell. Well, what's a bone cell going to do for a living? You know? It's not going to be, a bone cell can't live by itself. An amoeba doesn't need a bone cell.

He's not going to keep it. What does he need it for? He doesn't have any bones. Okay, and then an amoeba produced a hair cell or a blood cell.

He doesn't have any blood. What does he need a blood cell for? It's not really very reasonable, but it's an assumption evolutionists have to make. There were first single-celled creatures and these gave rise to many-celled creatures.

Okay? Sounds easy until you think about it. The fifth assumption evolutionists make is that the various invertebrate phyla are interrelated. Now, invertebrates just means animals that don't have skeletons.

There are animals that don't have skeletons. Insects are invertebrates. They don't have skeletons.

Jellyfish obviously don't have skeletons. Octopus, shellfish, they don't have internal skeletons. Many of these creatures have external skeletons instead, a shell.

But those are all invertebrates. Anything that doesn't have an internal skeleton is an invertebrate. So this assumption is that all the invertebrates are related to each other.

So the coral is related to the housefly. Would you have guessed? I wouldn't have, not by looking at them, but that's an assumption. They're both invertebrates and all invertebrates are interrelated.

Then the next assumption, number six, is that invertebrates gave rise to vertebrates, which is quite simply animals that didn't have or need skeletons because they functioned quite well without them, suddenly decided they needed skeletons. Of course, that's putting it silly. They didn't decide anything.

A skeleton just started to happen. And eventually there were these different creatures that now had skeletons, even though none of their ancestors needed one. And this is supposed to be called survival of the fittest.

Well, why is a creature that doesn't need a skeleton better served if his offspring have part of a skeleton that's eventually going to evolve into a skeleton? There's no advance in fitness here. But that's an assumption that is made. Invertebrates gave rise to vertebrates.

And the seventh assumption that is made is that fishes, which are vertebrates, it is thought they're the earliest vertebrates, gave rise to the amphibians. That's things like frogs and salamanders, which gave rise to reptiles, which is stuff like lizards and turtles and alligators and snakes. And reptiles gave rise both to birds and to mammals.

And allegedly we are mammals. We came from that line, supposedly. Now, those are the assumptions evolutionists make.

Now, look at those things. You've got them in your notes. Not one of those assumptions is dispensable to the evolutionists.

Every one of those assumptions is absolutely necessary for evolution. You can't have evolution without all seven of these. And then Dr. Kerkut, the evolutionist who brought this up, made this comment.

Quote, The first point I'd like to make is that these seven assumptions, by their nature, are not capable of experimental verification. Let's stop right there. Why are they not capable of experimental verification? Well, let's take one of them.

Spontaneous generation occurred. Why is that not capable of experimental verification? Couldn't you go into a laboratory? I think they get their information from libraries more than laboratories sometimes. But couldn't you go into a laboratory, take all the stuff, all the chemicals you know belong in a living thing, throw them together in a test tube, heat it up to the right temperature, create an artificial environment that maybe resembles something like we thought, they think the ancient earth was, shoot some electrical charges through it and make a living cell? Now, they haven't been able to do that, but they're indeed trying to do so.

But suppose they manage it. Suppose it really does happen. I'm not sure it won't.

Some Christians are sure it won't. I'm not sure that it won't. I don't know if it'll happen or not.

I don't even care if it happens or not. Because you know what? If it does, it did not prove the assumption that spontaneous generation occurred. Because what they did was not spontaneous.

In the laboratory, it was done by design. We're talking about an assumption that this happened where there was no one to design it, no one to produce the right circumstances, no one to provide all the right chemicals in the right spot. We're talking about something that allegedly happened, but no one saw it happen, and it's never going to happen again.

And anything that even resembles it will be man-made and therefore not analogous. These are things, these seven assumptions are things that if they are true, they are unrepeatable, unique, historic phenomena that cannot be observed and never were observed. Therefore, they can't be verified scientifically.

The most one could hope for, if they're an evolutionist, is that they could work with some species of fish for a while and mutate it a bunch of times, produce a bunch of generations, and eventually some of the descendants of that fish might have some little legs coming out, and eventually they got something that looks like a salamander and say, we've proven that fish gave rise to amphibia. No, you haven't. All you've done is show that you, an intelligent scientist, can manipulate the DNA in such a way as to make a fish turn into an amphibia.

It doesn't mean that that ever happened in history, or that it could have ever happened without your manipulation. Now, by the way, they haven't done that, and I'm fairly sure they won't be able to. But I mean, they're able to clone sheep, and now they're going to be cloning man pretty soon, they say.

They can do a lot of things. They can manipulate genes. I wouldn't be surprised if someday they take something like a fish and manipulate its DNA enough to get something that looks like an amphibian.

Just know that if they do, they have proven not one thing about evolution. They have not even taken a step toward proving that that happened in nature millions of years ago. They've just said that we are smart enough to make it happen.

Well, maybe God is smart enough to make it happen, but they're not thinking of Him in their evolutionary assumptions. This is all supposed to be happening in nature. And that is why Kierkegaard is quite correct in saying that these seven assumptions are by their very nature not capable of experimental verification.

He doesn't say we haven't yet proven it. He says we can't prove it. We can't even hope that it will be proved, because the nature of the statements defies any possibility of verifying it in a scientific way.

Okay? He continues. We have to depend on limited circumstantial evidence for our assumptions. That word assumption is not a very strong scientific term.

There is, he says, the theory that all forms in the world, all living forms in the world have arisen from a single source, which itself came from an inorganic form. And the evidence that supports this theory is not sufficiently strong to allow us to consider it as anything more than a working hypothesis, unquote. This from a committed leading evolutionary authority.

He says this theory exists. It's based on these seven assumptions. These assumptions cannot be verified, never will be.

By their nature, they're non-verifiable. And, therefore, we'd have to say that this theory that's out there can be considered a working hypothesis and nothing but more. The evidence that supports it is not sufficiently strong to elevate it above that point.

Now, that certainly has a different sound to it than science is a fact for which no further proof is needed and all intelligent people say so. Well, this guy's an intelligent guy and he's an evolutionist too. But he doesn't agree with a lot of them.

I have several quotes I want to give you and all of them from evolutionists here. And I realize we're going to run out of time pretty quick. But these come from, you know, recognized evolutionary authorities, not just fringe guys.

This first one, in fact, comes from L. Harrison Matthews. He is a fellow of the prestigious Royal Society in England. And in 1971, when a new edition of Darwin's Origin of Species was published, they republished it, you know, at different times.

In 1971, there was a 1971 edition came out. And they chose L. Harrison Matthews to write the foreword to the book. To what book? Darwin's book.

This quote I'm giving you came from the pages of Darwin's Origin of Species from the foreword written by an evolutionary leader who was chosen to write the foreword in the 1971 edition. His name was L. Harrison Matthews. And he said in that place, quote, In accepting evolution as a fact, which he does, by the way, how many biologists have paused to reflect that science is built upon theories that have been proved by experiment to be correct? Or remember that the theory of animal evolution has never been thus proved.

The fact of evolution, notice he still thinks it's a fact, the fact of evolution is the backbone of biology. Biology is thus in the peculiar position of being a science based on an unproved theory. Is it then a science or a faith? Belief in the theory of evolution is exactly thus parallel to belief in special creation.

Both are concepts which believers know to be true, but neither up to the present has been capable of proof. The theory of evolution is so plausible that most biologists accept it as though it were a proven fact, although their conviction rests on circumstantial evidence, that's what G. A. Kerkut said too, circumstantial evidence, it forms a satisfactory faith on which to base our interpretation of nature. Now does that sound a little more honest? And does that put a different perspective on the state of the debate? It obviously is coming from an evolutionist who's a little more willing to admit the facts, although he's still convinced that evolution is a fact.

He says it's a fact that forms his faith, it's his faith. Okay, we have a couple of recognized scientists, Dr. Paul Ehrlich from Stanford and Elsie Birch from Sydney. Ehrlich is well known for his writing on the population bomb back in the 60s or 70s, but he's also a scientist.

And he wrote in Nature magazine, I should point out that there are two journals that are more prestigious than any other in the scientific world, Nature and Science. Science is the American and Nature is the British premier scientific journals. They are like the most respected journals in those respective countries.

In Nature magazine, Paul Ehrlich and Elsie Birch wrote this, quote, Evolution is therefore outside empirical science, though not necessarily false. No one can think of ways in which to test it. Ideas, either without basis or based on a few laboratory experiments carried out in extremely simplified systems, have obtained currency far beyond their validity.

They have become part of an evolutionary dogma, accepted by most of us as part of our training. You should realize the word dogma means doctrine, religious doctrine. So Elsie Birch, Paul Ehrlich and L. Harrison Matthews all have said, although they are evolutionists, they say evolution has become a religion to us.

It's not science. It can't even be tested. Here's another guy, Errol White, in his presidential address in 1966 to the Linnaean Society.

Again, this is a prestigious scientific association in London. The Linnaean Society, named after Linnaeus, the founder of taxonomy, a major field of science. This man was the president of that fellowship in England, and in his presidential address he made this statement, quote, I have often thought how little I should like to have to prove organic evolution in a court of law.

The recent researches by workers like Dean and Henshelman already suggest the possibility of incipient cracks in the seemingly monolithic walls of the neo-Darwinian Jericho. Isn't it interesting? He compares evolution, which he isn't evolution, he compares evolution with Jericho's walls, and he sees cracks forming in them because of research. Not because of religion attacking it, but because of research.

He says, I would not like to prove or have the task of proving evolution in a court of law. Why not? Because the judge might require evidence. It's hard to prove things in a court of law if you don't have evidence.

And that's exactly what evolution lacks, is evidence. Colin Patterson is a senior paleontologist at the British Natural History Museum, author of the museum's general text on evolution, gave a lecture at the American Museum of Natural History in 1981. In this lecture he said this, quote, he's talking to paleontologists, and he says to them, can you tell me anything you know about evolution, any one thing that is true? He's an evolutionist talking to a room full of evolutionary scientists.

He says, can you tell me anything you know about evolution, any one thing that is true? He says, I tried that question on the geology staff of the Field Museum of Natural History, that's in Chicago, and the only answer I got back was silence. I tried it on the members of the evolutionary morphology seminar in the University of Chicago, a very prestigious body of evolutionists, and all I got there was silence for a long time, and eventually one person said, I do know one thing, it ought not to be taught in high school, unquote. He tries this question on these groups of prestigious scientists, does anyone here know anything about evolution that's actually true? And no one can think of anything, except one says, I think one thing, it shouldn't be taught in high school.

People should wait to college to be lied to about this. Theodosius Dobzhansky, these names are probably not familiar to you, but if you read scientific literature, there are some names that rise to the surface as the cream. These are the guys that are listened to the most.

Dobzhansky is definitely in that top 5%, I'd say, maybe even a smaller percent than that. He wrote a book review on a book by a French zoologist named Pierre Pigrasse. The book is called The Evolution of Life, translated in English.

And in the journal Evolution, which I mentioned earlier, remember, Fatuma is the editor of that journal, the first guy quoted today. In the Evolution Journal, Theodosius Dobzhansky, a Russian scientist, was critiquing or reviewing Pierre Pigrasse's book. Now Pierre Pigrasse is a French scientist, and his book was attacking evolution.

And Dobzhansky in his review said, quote, The book of Pierre Pigrasse is a frontal attack on all kinds of Darwinism. Its purpose is to destroy the myth of evolution as a simple, understood and explained phenomenon. Now, one can disagree with Grasse, but not ignore him.

He is the most distinguished of the French zoologists. His knowledge of the living world is encyclopedic. Actually, Grasse is actually the editor of a multi-volume science encyclopedia in French.

His knowledge is encyclopedic. And Dobzhansky says, the sentence with which Grasse ends his book is disturbing. Quote, quoting Grasse, It is possible that in this domain, biology, impotent, yields the floor to metaphysics.

Unquote. Now, scientists often use words that are so hard to understand that no one knows what they're really saying. I'll put that in plain English.

Biology can't answer the question of the origin of life. We might have to turn to something non-scientific, like metaphysics, he says. That which is not physical.

Like maybe something spiritual. Maybe even God. Now, Grasse is not a Christian.

And he's not a creationist. But he wrote a book demolishing evolution. There's another, an Australian scientist who's done the same thing.

We'll get to him a little later. His name was Michael Denton. And he wrote a book called Evolution, A Theory in Crisis.

A little later on in the lectures, I'll have some quotes from him. But see, these men, Grasse is, you can disagree with him, but you can't ignore him. He is the most distinguished of all French zoologists.

And his knowledge of the living world is encyclopedic. How can Sir Julian Huxley say, no serious scientist would doubt that evolution occurred? When Grasse is certainly a serious scientist. And so are many others who reject evolution.

Dr. Anthony Ostrick, Professor of Anthropology at St. Mary's College at South Bend, Indiana, was speaking to the 9th International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences in Chicago. Say that real fast, ten times. And he made this statement in his speech.

Quote, the Darwinian evolutionary theory has been promoted by only a few leaders in anthropology and human biology. But the vast body of professionals have fallen behind them for fear of not being declared serious scholars or being rejected from serious academic circles. Unquote.

Now this man is an evolutionist. But he says what you might have guessed otherwise. And that is, the big boys in the scientific world say this is true.

And all the other guys have to fall in line or else they're chastised. I mentioned Dean Kenyon at the San Francisco State University. He almost lost his job for saying that evolution doesn't have very strong support.

And he's an agnostic. He's not a Christian. He's not a creationist.

But there have been men who have lost jobs in the academy because they were not evolutionists. Most professors of science, they will say they believe in evolution. They might even try to defend it.

But in general, they haven't discovered it to be true from their own experiments. They're following the big boys. And they don't dare step out of line if they value their job and their tenure and their retirement.

And remember, scientists are people too. They can be motivated by economic pressure to say whatever they have to say. D.M.S. Watson in Nature magazine, a long time ago, back in 1929, made this statement.

Evolution is a theory universally accepted, not because it can be proved by logically coherent evidence to be true, but because the only alternative, special creation, is clearly incredible. Well, he says something correct too. That is that creation is the only alternative to evolution.

He also is quite true in saying that evolution is accepted not because it can be proven by arguments to be true, but it is accepted because those who accept it find the alternative incredible. Now, why would someone find it incredible, special creation? Many who are not very prejudiced in the matter say evolution calls for a great more credulity than creation. All that creation requires is that there be a God.

And there's really nothing intrinsically irrational about believing there could be a God. And if there's a God, then creation is entirely incredible. What's the problem? You got a God, you can have creation.

However, evolution has the more difficult problem with its credibility, because it insists, in most cases, that there is not a God. There is no intelligence. And all of the information in the creation, all the design, came without an informer and without a designer.

Now, we know of no analogy in real life where anything is designed without a designer, or information is programmed without intelligence. We don't know of any such thing. It is a faith, and it is a faith that seems, to my mind, very incredible.

Much easier to believe that design came from designer, that information came from intelligence, than to believe that it didn't. But there are some who simply reject the possibility of a God. Not for really good reasons, just because it cramps their style.

And so, they say, of course, creation is incredible. Couldn't be true. Right.

If there's no God, it couldn't be. I would dare say, if there's no God, creation is plainly incredible. But why do we have to assume there's no God? L.T. Moore at the University of Cincinnati, writing in The Dogma of Evolution, interesting title, dogma again means religious doctrine, says, quote, Now, don't get distracted by some of the things that are not essential to his point.

He said, there's the antagonistic doctrine of special creation. But, I mean, our attention as Christians may be drawn to that. But notice what he says at the beginning.

In other words, if you don't have this factor, you can't have faith in evolution. Well, what is the factor that you have to have? You have to have a reluctance to accept the doctrine of creation. That is to say that if we didn't have a reluctance to accept creation, we'd have no reason to believe evolution.

Now, that's a very strange thing to admit, although he has no choice, but it's true. He would rather say, our faith in the doctrine of evolution is based on the very best evidence that has come up. Many tests have been done.

The scientists have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is true. He didn't say that. He said, no, our faith in it depends on just how reluctant we are to be creationists.

Period. We'll be strong in our faith in evolution if we're strongly reluctant to accept creationism. That's all.

Professor Philip Johnson is probably the only author I'm going to quote in these notes who isn't an evolutionist. He is a creationist, though he's not a young-earth creationist. He's a different kind of creationist than most of us in the room, but he is a professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley, and he wrote an excellent book.

It doesn't deal with the young-earth or old-earth stuff. It just deals with the issue of evolution and creation. In Darwin on Trial, which he wrote in 1991, he said, the essential point of creation has nothing to do with the timing or mechanism the creator chose to employ, but with the element of design and purpose.

In the broadest sense, a creationist is simply a person who believes that the world, and especially mankind, was designed and exists for a purpose. With the issue defined that way, the question becomes, is mainstream science opposed to the possibility that the natural world was designed by a creator for a purpose? If so, on what basis? That is a very excellent and concise statement. He says, listen, you don't have to be a Christian to be a creationist.

You just have to believe that it's designed and it's made with a purpose. You could be a Buddhist or a Muslim or whatever. You don't have to be a Christian.

Now, to reject creationism then means what you're really rejecting is that the world was designed, and that it was designed for a purpose. But if mainstream science rejects that, why do they? What test can you run? What scientific experiment could you run to prove that this was not designed? You could run a test that say that we might be able to produce something like this quilt here without design, but if we managed to do it, we wouldn't prove that this quilt wasn't designed. You see? If you could produce, if you could throw, you know, batches of cloth into a strange contraption that randomly threw stitches and needles around, and after millions of tries, out came a quilt that appeared to be designed, and say, look, this had no design.

It was all random. This proves that you can do this without design. Fine, you could prove it in such a case, but no one's ever done so.

But it still wouldn't tell me whether this quilt was designed or not. You could never prove that this quilt was not designed. You could never prove that this species of animal was not designed.

You could never prove that that tree was not designed. Therefore, scientists' commitment to rejecting the idea of design is based not on science, but it's based on their religious commitments that there can be no designer, because they don't want there to be one. Paul Ehrlich, I mentioned earlier, wrote an article with R.W. Holm in Science Journal, in which he said this, quote, Perpetuation of today's theory as dogma, again, as religious theory, religious doctrine, will not encourage progress toward more satisfactory explanations of observed phenomena, unquote.

Well, that seems sensible to me. If we're going to take our religious dogma, one that became prominent 130 years ago when Darwin published Origin of Species, can you imagine scientists holding on to something that old? How much science has changed its views on so many things in 130 years? And yet, they're holding on to it for religious reasons. They want their religion of atheism.

Now, I'm going to have to quit there because of my time, but I'll tell you what I'm going to save for next time. We're going to talk about the alleged evidences for evolution. I've said all the way through here, what evolutionists don't have is evidence, and I mean that.

They don't have evidence. Yet, it's not as if they don't claim to have any evidence. They claim that they have evidence, and there are seven different evidences that are claimed for evolution.

They don't correspond at all with the seven assumptions that evolutionists make. It just happens to be the same number. And we'll talk about them next time.

We're going to talk about what evolutionists claim these evidences prove, and then we're going to talk about what some evolutionary scientists are willing to admit about the nature of these evidences. We're going to talk about vestigial structures. If you don't know what those are now, you will tomorrow.

We're going to talk about embryological recapitulation. Ditto. We're going to talk about natural and artificial selection.

We're going to talk about homology. Don't those things sound exciting? You probably don't know what any of those words mean. We're going to talk about molecular biology.

That one might be more familiar. We're going to talk about the geological column, and here's one everyone knows, the fossil record. And we're going to talk about those seven alleged evidences for evolution.

We're going to talk about what evolutionists claim about it, and we're going to talk about what is really true about them. And I'm going to quote not creationists. I'm going to quote evolutionists to refute these arguments.