Atheists have faith in science, not religious revelation.
1. There has been a notion in recent years that science and religion don’t mix,
that they contradict each other and that many conservative Christians are anti-science. This is fake news. Modern science, in fact, has grown out of Christianity’s belief that that there is order in the universe, and it can be observed. Many of the early great scientists—Newton, Kepler, Copernicus, and Galileo--were devout Christians, as have been some of the greatest scientists since. While it is true that there are many Christians today who are anti-evolution, they are not anti-science. In fact, what they are attacking is the flawed science of evolution.
2. Evolutionists have brought this on themselves by claiming that the theory of evolution proves that life creates itself, and a Creator, therefore, is unnecessary. Darwin’s early letters show that he was indeed an atheist, though he didn’t dare admit it publicly in Victorian times. The fact of the matter, however, is that if evolution does actually work as evolutionists describe, the only way it could succeed is if God designed it and made sure it worked. It is too iffy to accomplish the great variety of life on its own. A single cell in a primal soup couldn’t possibly evolve into all of life unless God made it do so (most likely it would quickly die). What would have to happen is the existence of many different cells, which would have to have been created by God, not chance. Many Christian denominations (including Roman Catholic) believe in what is called theistic evolution. They accept it as the way God has created life.
3. However, the Intelligent Design and Creationist movements claim that that is not the way God has operated, that evolution fails because of its many scientific flaws and the fact that there is actually no provable evidence of evolution. It is indeed only an assumed theory. Intelligent Design accepts an ancient earth of billions of years old, and though it appeals to Christians, it is made up of non-Christians also, and its Designer is not necessarily the God of the Bible. The Creationists start from what the Book of Genesis says and believe in a literal six-day creation, Noah’s global flood, and a young earth of maybe 10,000 to 14,000 years old. However, their attacks are thoroughly scientific. Ironically, the evolutionists are the ones holding on to their views religiously, while the non-evolutionists are arguing from science.
4. Intelligent Design (ID) claims the universe shows design because of the Anthropic Principle—that everything in the universe and on earth is fine-tuned to allow for the creation of life, something that could not occur by chance. Also the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics (entropy) shows the universe had a beginning (as would the Big Bang). Therefore, nature tends to disorder and not progressively higher order as evolution proclaims.
5. But ID says the process that creates life cannot be evolution for, among others, the following reasons. Every living creature is irreducibly complex. Each creature, even the smallest insect (even a cell) needs all the parts of its survival system intact. It is absurd to think it could have evolved in gradual increments over large periods of time. A bird wing, the human eye, a beehive are all extremely complex, and could not survive if they didn’t have all their parts at once. Evolutionists argue that there are more primitive wings, eyes, and insect colonies, but it does not follow that the complex evolved from the primitive. They are each separate beings.
6. There are some things in nature that cannot have evolved. Human consciousness has not been proven to be part of the brain, and there is even the idea that it may exist outside the human body. DNA is so complex that it could not have evolved incrementally from anything. Evolutionists even have trouble explaining sexuality and male and femaleness as something that could have evolved. Morality, philosophy, appreciation of beauty and music, love, altruism, and even anger, jealousy, pride, and human lust go beyond an evolutionary process. Human beings may be a factory of millions of cells working without our being able to directly observe the process as we go about our daily lives, but we are more than our cells. If we were strictly determined by the natural forces within us, as the atheists seem to claim, then why reason, debate, or argue about anything. We would be virtually automatons.
7. One of the most famous examples of supposed evolution by Darwin (but later than his Origin of the Species) is the finches of the Galapagos Islands. They are, however, only examples of microevolution perhaps and probably not examples of natural selection at all. Darwin observed the beak sizes of the finches changed according to changes in food supplies on the islands. But the changes would have to happen quite rapidly if they were to be effective, not over millions or even thousands of years. Or more likely, perhaps, they are programmed like most creatures, by the Designer, to adapt quite rapidly to an environmental change. In any case, the finches are still finches and not robins or bats or flying squirrels. In his book Icons of Evolution, Jonathan Wells exposes the myths of Darwin’s finches. “Darwin’s” finches are actually evidence against Darwin evolution because the changes don’t progress but even reverse.
8. It has been discovered that lice have developed a resistance to the soaps usually used to kill them. Is this because a mutation caused a Super Louse that then passed this mutation down to succeeding generations (over millions of years)? No, what happens is that there were already lice on many heads that were already resistant to the soap. These lice survived and reproduced with the immunity. That is, in effect, how natural selection works, not the Darwinian way. That is why everyone did not die of bubonic plague at the time of the Black Death or in the influenza epidemic of 1918.
9. ID scientists also point to the fossil record as showing no transitional forms bridging diverse species, despite the huge amount of fossils discovered since Darwin. But even if a fossil of a fish with legs or an existing fish with legs were to exist, it would only be a fish with legs, a dead end, not a transitional form. The “legs” of the coelacanth, by the way, turned out to be gills. Besides, the transformation of a fish into a reptile or a bird would require vast instantaneous changes, not incremental ones over millions of years. Also, the fossil record shows no reliable evidence of transition from primate to human despite the several false attempts to make that connection in the past. Even Neanderthals are considered to be human beings. And even though we share 86 percent or 99 percent (answers vary) of our DNA with chimpanzees, that one percent variation would make a huge difference (just as 10,000 years is only one percent of one million years, but think of all that has happened in the last 10,000 years).
10. Creationists take the ID criticisms of evolution and add a religious element and even more science. They start with a literal interpretation of Genesis, that the earth was created in six 24-hour days, Adam and Eve were the first human beings, and Noah’s flood covered the whole earth. Some theologians claim the account of creation is poetic, but creationists point out that the details are very specific and not allegorical (except perhaps in the story of Adam and Eve). There are exact measurements of the ark and the word “yom” for day always means a 24-hour period when it is used in the Bible with numbers and “morning and evening.” Moreover, the account is much more realistic than the fanciful creation accounts of other cultures, and all over the world there are ancient stories of a universal flood. Creationissts also say that if death occurred for millions of years before Adam and Eve, then the Bible is false from its very beginning. These arguments mean nothing to non-believers, but they counteract the views of theistic evolutionists.
11. There are scientific arguments for a global flood. Fossils could not form gradually over long periods of time; they would have been deposited by a cataclysmic event, hence the Cambrian Explosion. Also, there are fossils of marine life all over the globe, even on mountains and in deserts. So-called continental “drift” would be explained by the earthquakes and volcanic eruptions that occurred during the flood; this makes more sense than the tectonic plate theory and its more gradual “drifting.” The flood would also explain why all over the world rock strata are flat against each other with no signs of erosion or buildup over millions of years. Creationists say that if there was such a flood, it is possible the earth is only ten to fourteen thousands of years old, not millions. Such a flood would so drastically change conditions on earth that calculations by radiometric dating would have been thrown off, although they also point to scientific flaws in the methods of dating.. That is, they are usually based on assumptions that may not have been true about the original material or that nothing would intrude on the material to affect it. They also point to great variations and discrepancies in dating estimates, such as Coke bottles being found to be thousands of years old or rocks in higher strata being much older than rocks in lower strata. Then there is the phenomenon of upright trees standing through more than one strata, indicating the strata were laid almost simultaneously.
12. Other evidences creationists give for young earth are the amount of sediment, salt, and other chemicals in the ocean, the growth of coral, the magnetic field intensity, the observed shrinkage of the sun, earth-moon distance, coal and diamond formation, comets, helium in zircons, telektites in Australia, and many others. Also, the discovery of soft tissue in dinosaur bones indicates they could not be more than a few thousand years old. This goes along with apparent pictures of dinosaurs in cave drawings and even supposedly human fossil tracks crossing dinosaur tracks in several places. The extinction of dinosaurs could have been a result of the flood, which is at least as plausible as the current “scientific” theory that a meteorite did it.
13. I am an English teacher and not a biologist, geologist, or theologian. I can’t judge the accuracy of science on either side. The problem is that we’re talking about prehistory, of things that happened either thousands or millions of years ago when no one was there to record it, unless you believe that God revealed it to the writer of Genesis. But both sides use “science” for their arguments. The vaster the universe, the more we don’t know about it; the vaster the amount of time it existed, the more we don’t know about it. So much could have happened or changed in that time, yet scientists, basing their observations on what is true now, act as though they are dealing with only thousands of years instead of millions. Who knows how much could have changed in millions of years?
14. Gerald L. Schroeder in God According to God suggests, using Einstein’s theory of relativity of time, that at the Big Bang millions of years out in space would only be equivalent to 24 hours observed from a point on the earth (which didn’t yet exist). So maybe both views are right. As an analogy, if a baseball hit by a batter were to strike the pitcher in the head, it might kill him, but if it bounced off an outfielder’s head it would be more embarrassing than life threatening. So Day 2 of creation would be fewer millions of years than Day 1, and so on, but still take only 24 hours of earth time.
14. Two books that go into much greater scientific depth on the evolution/creation issue are The Greatest Hoax on Earth by Jonathan Safarti, which point by point counters Richard Dawkins’ arguments for evolution in his The Greatest Show on Earth, and Evolution’s Achilles Heels, edited by Richard Parks. In this book nine scientists from all over the world debunk evolution in each of their various sciences and give convincing evidence of creationism. And recently Crossway Books has published Theistic Evolution, a fat volume of essays by scientists and theologians discussing the scientific, philosophical, and theological/Biblical arguments against the theory of evolution, including theistic evolution. In Zombie Science Jonathan Wells shows how Darwinian evolution lives on in textbooks and university classes even though all the evidence against it has killed it off. The main so-called evidences of evolution—Darwin’s Tree of Life, Haeckel’s embryos, Archaeopteryx, peppered moths, Darwin’s finches, fossil horses, java man, Piltdown man, Lucy, similarity of chimpanzees to humans, the human appendix, antibiotic resistance, and Miller’s creation of life in the laboratory—have all been disproved or discredited, even by evolutionists.
15. Since there is now such an even greater attack on Darwinian evolution than there was before (there always has been), atheists would be wise to back off on using it as a claim that there is no God. They’d be better off avoiding the subject or at least admitting there might be a sort of deistic, non-Biblical designer of the universe.
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