VIII. Human Evolution?

     Perhaps the main point of the whole evolution story is to provide a platform for a materialistic, naturalistic, and non-Biblical explanation for where people came from.  Thus, it was only “natural” that Darwin would extend his story about the “Origin of Species” (1859) to explain how humans arose from an ape-like “common ancestor” and this he did in a second book, The Descent of Man (1871).  Whereas traditional “science” seeks to explain already existing evidence, evolution (like Biblical Creation) tends to begin as a philosophical story and then go looking for evidence to support it.  Now, there is nothing inherently wrong with this approach (deduction), as long as you understand what you are doing and honestly deal with the evidence that exists.  The problem comes in when philosophical materialists and naturalists start with a firmly-believed scenario, go looking for “evidence” and “card-stack” what they find so that it appears to fit their already assumed story.

     In reality, you can either do traditional inductive “science” by objectively collecting evidence and then seeking the best way to explain it all, or you can begin with some philosophical paradigm (an imagined mental picture) and do deductive investigation to see if the evidence is compatible with your story.  While labeling Creationists “unscientific” for starting with a believed story and then seeking evidence to support it, Evolutionists have demonstrated their hypocrisy by using the very same approach!  The material that follows offers the “proofs” that were presented for human evolution, along with explanation of the “rest of the story” that I think seriously discredits most of the story that evolutionists have been pushing since 1871.

A Story Looking for Evidence

     To appreciate the “human evolution” story, it helps to see how this unfolded over time.  Be prepared to sort through a lot of confusion, because “evidence” of human evolution has come and gone over the years faster than NFL free-agents join and leave teams for more money.  I have decided to present this chronologically in decade units.

1850-1870

     1856/ the first Neanderthal bones were found in Germany.  As more and more of these were found in following decades, they were interpreted as brutish “ape-men” (right) until 1955.  However, they were not viewed as “humans” or even evolutionary ancestors of humans for some time.

     As it turns out, the Neanderthals were badly misinterpreted because they were not what was expected.  The French “expert” that examined the first Neanderthal remains, Marcellin Boule, emphasized the brutish aspect, ignoring the evidence that such features were caused by vitamin deficiency and disease, and did not connect them with humans at all.  The artwork reflected this (right) and Neanderthals were portrayed as animals until the 1950’s.  Now they are classified as “fully human” and portrayed much differently (left).  Strangely, as evidence accumulated it became evident that the earliest Neanderthals were the most like modern humans, with the later ones less so (suggesting degeneration rather than evolutionary progress).

      1860/ At Castenedolo, Italy (1860) the geologist G. Ragazzoni discovered in situ (in place) two pieces of a modern human skull in early Pliocene deposits.  Twenty years later (1880), in the same area, the skeleton of a modern human woman, and the scattered bones of two children were found in a Pliocene formation (1.7 to 12 million years old).  This find was checked by Prof. Sergei and he judged them to be authentic and of great age.  In 1889, in the same area, another skeleton was found, but this one showed signs of being intrusively buried much later than the original deposit.  Evolutionists have tended to dismiss the earlier finds because of the evidence of intrusion associated with the last find.  However, Prof. Sergei took custody of the earlier skeletal remains and did little with them until 1912, when Sir Arthur Keith also found a modern human skeleton in Pliocene strata in England and the two corresponded.  Keith assumed the Castenedolo bones were intruded, because they were not fossilized, but admitted that the geological strata did not give any evidence of intrusion.  In the later 20th century, the discovery of numerous unfossilized dinosaur bones, supposedly 60 million years old, casts new light on the 1860 and 1880 Castenedolo finds.  It just may be that modern humans were buried in what are thought to be ancient rocks and they are not nearly as old as evolutionists assume.

     1871/ Charles Darwin published his second major work, The Descent of Man, speculating on the evolution of humans from an apelike ancestor, although he had no hard evidence for it.  T. H. Huxley commented later that Darwin’s scenario was generally embraced by European intellectuals within twenty years of the publication of Origin of Species, long before it could be scientifically verified.^[1]

      Darwin was not really doing “science” with this second book, but merely speculating because as it turns out he had absolutely no hard evidence that humans had evolved from an ape-like “common ancestor,”

Despite their growing faith in the evolution of man, they had so little fossil evidence to go on that their theories were of necessity largely speculative.  Darwin, in fact, wrote his epochal The Descent of Man without a single sub-human fossil as evidence to support his theory.^[2]

For the evolutionists this was a painful time.  For all the logic of [T. H.] Huxley's view, there was an embarrassing lack of fossils resembling men in Africa or anywhere else to support it.  When Darwin's book was published there was only one suspected fragment of this nature known in the entire world.^[3]

However, since Darwin’s notions found a ready European audience, having been prepared for naturalistic progress (or “evolutionary”) explanations by the French Enlightenment, the main thing that Darwin’s book on human evolution did was lay out the expected scenario and stimulate the “search” for “missing links.”  Of course, at that point, all of the assumed “links” between apes and humans were missing and what a trail of characters eventually showed up, with most of them not staying on the team very long.

      Unfortunately for inductive science, the concept of humans evolving from ape-like ancestors had already been embraced as “true” amongst European intellectuals, so all that was needed was some evidence to support the belief!  Ironically, this is the approach that the judge in the 1982-3 Arkansas “Balanced Treatment case cited as the basis for declaring Creation-science “unscientific”!

The judge said creationist methods in the realm of science differed from those of other scientists.  "The creationists' methods do not take data, weigh it against the opposing scientific data and thereafter reach ... conclusions.  Instead, they take the literal wording of the book of Genesis and attempt to find scientific support for it," he said.^[4]

My “hypocrisy meter” is red-lined - the issue of “human evolution” is an admitted case in which evolutionists began with a belief and then went looking for evidence to support it.  The only reason evolutionists can do this and call it “science” while ridiculing creationists for using the same approach is that evolutionists control the microphone, publishing houses, and public education system.  In reality, the “Church of Darwin” is every bit as capable of hypocrisy and arrogant dogmatism as were the European religious systems that evolutionary secularists love to criticize!

     Earnst Haeckel (1834-1919) was trained to be a medical doctor, but later became a zoology professor at the University of Jena.  The turning point in his life was his reading of Darwin's "Origin of Species" shortly after it appeared.  Already holding a materialistic philosophy, he completely agreed with Darwin's explanation and soon offered his own contribution to the story - the assertion that embryos all repeat their evolutionary history as they develop in the womb - embryonic recapitulation.

     We have already considered Haeckel's falsified embryo drawings used to support his contention that human embryos pass through their entire "evolutionary history" and, at one early point in their development, even pass through a fish-stage with “gill slits” on the neck.  In 1876, Haeckel published his own chart of humans evolving from lowly sea life (left).  He also applied his over-zealous artistic ability to T. H. Huxley’s drawings comparing humans with apes (right, top half).  Haeckel changed the scale, feet, and uprightness of stance in several creatures (right, lower half) to make them appear more like humans than they really are.  Haeckel is a good example of “religious zeal” that is willing to seriously fudge the evidence to support what he already firmly believed.

1890’s

     1891-5/ Homo Erectus is often represented by "Java Man" Pithecanthropus Erectus (Dubois, 1891).  Eugene Dubois is credited with the discovery of a molar in September, 1891; a skull cap of an ape-like creature in October, 1891; and a femur like that of a modern human^[5] 46 feet away the following August.  He presented this collection as being the remains of one pre-human creature in Berlin (1895).

     What is usually not heard is that when Dubois presented the bones in Berlin, he was opposed by one of the most imminent scientists of that day, Dr. Rudolf Virchow, who recognized the pathological features on the bones (left).  He actively promoted Java Man as the “missing link” until 1900, when he withdrew completely from public debate, published little on the fossils, and refused to allow anyone else to see the bones.  A rock shelter at Wadjak (on Java) had yielded the skull of a modern human in 1890,^[6] but little was said about this until the 1920’s, because it appeared that they might be the same age as his pithecanthropus fossil. The fact that he had also found orangutan teeth in the same area was kept a secret for decades.  Another generally unknown fact is that a team of specialists later went to Java (1907-8) to investigate the geological setting and fossil evidence for Dubois’ claims.  The “Selenka Expedition” sent 43 crates of material back to Germany for further study and later produced an excellent 342-page report in 1911.  Because these researchers concluded that Dubois had seriously over-estimated the age of the strata in which his pithecanthropus fossils had been found, the report suffered the fate of most scientific evidence and study that does not confirm contemporary evolutionary beliefs - it was ignored and forgotten.^[7]

1910-1960

     1912-1953/ With the notion of human evolving from an ape-like common ancestor already embraced as a logical necessity of their theory, Darwinists were increasingly anxious to find some hard evidence to support the idea.  The skull and jawbone of “Piltdown Man” (left) were found in England in 1912 and were soon embraced as evidence of human evolution.

     It took forty years to figure it out, but Piltdown Man turned out to be an intentional fraud that fooled the world’s experts as “evidence” for human evolution.  At least one of the perpetrators was probably Martin A. C. Hinton, curator of zoology at the Natural History Museum in London.  He was, apparently, playing a prank on Arthur Smith Woodward for failing to pay for some work Hinton did.  A trunk with Hinton’s initials was found hidden away in the museum after his death and it contained other bones and teeth stained with the exact same mixture used on the Piltdown bones – probably “trial runs.” ^[8]

     1913/ Hans Reck, of the University of Berlin, found an anatomically modern human in early Pleistocene strata (1 - 1.8 million years ago) and this was confirmed by Louis Leakey and others.^[9]  This find led Leakey to dismiss Java Man and Peking Man as human ancestors, since it appeared that modern homo sapiens were also around at the same time.  While a valid find, Reck’s 1913 find is rarely mentioned in recent books about human evolution because it raises grave questions about the claims of these two alleged human “ancestors.”  The evolutionary story needs evidence of transformation from an ape-like common ancestor to modern man and such finds discredit potential evidence for these needed intermediates, so there is a tendency to not want modern humans around in certain strata.  Evolutionists want to be “scientific” about all of this, but sometimes it is so difficult to get the evidence to fit the story you have been telling people they should believe!

     1921/ The first evidence of “Peking Man” was found by an Austrian paleontologist named Otto Zdansky, but for unknown reasons he kept the find a secret until 1926.  In that year, he announced the discovery of two teeth at Zhoukoudian while at a meeting in Beijing.  While Zdansky did not seem too excited about the teeth, a Canadian professor of Anatomy at the Peiping Union medical College named Davidson Black was very interested.  He arranged financing through the Rockefeller Foundation and began new excavation in 1927.  Another tooth was found, along with thousands of mammalian fossils, and then a braincase of Sinanthropus (homo erectus).  By 1934, fourteen partial skulls had been found, with braincase capacity varying from 850-1,200 ml.  Black thought his find was a more advanced form of Dubois’ “Java Man,” but Dubois disagreed and thought Sinanthropus was “perfectly human.”  By 1939, the German anatomist Franz Weidenreich added a new issue to the matter - evidence of murder and cannibalism - because the remains of almost 40 human individuals had not yielded a single complete skeleton.  The evidence consisted primarily of skulls and most had evidence of violent attacks with the skulls broken at the base in a way consistent with removing the brains (for food?).  Weidenreich concluded that, “the Sinanthropus population of Choukoutien had been slain and that subsequently their heads were severed from the trunk, the brains removed and the limbs dissected.”  Marcellin Boule believed that more advanced humans must have lived there and been responsible for ashes, tools, and accumulation of animals bones and Sinanthropus skulls in the cave.

     Except for a few teeth, all of the fossil evidence for “Peking Man” disappeared during WWII and has never been seen again.  All in all, it is probable that “Peking Man” was, in reality, a smaller monkey that was food for true men.^[10]

     1922-27/ In 1922, a tooth was found in Western Nebraska that was interpreted as being similar evidence of pre-human evolution taking place in North America (the picture right appeared in the London Illustrated News).  The tooth that all of this artwork came from turned out to have come from an extinct pig.

     In 1924, Raymond Dart found the skull of the “Taung child” and announced the “missing link” between anthropoid apes and humans – Australopithecus africanus.  While a number of “australopithicene “ remains were found in later years, they are increasingly being removed from the lineage of humans.

     1930-39/ Louis B. Leakey discovered fossilized bones in Kenya belonging to Proconsul, and it showed up on the charts as a human ancestor for awhile, but was eventually removed.

     G. E. Lewis discovered Ramapithecus in India and this has remained on quite a few charts as a human ancestor because if it goes, there is nothing else to place “way back there” as a step away from the assumed common ancestor.  However, many reject Ramapithecus because when a complete lower jaw was found, it appeared to be very similar to an orangutan.

     1959-69/ In 1959, Mary Leakey found a large skull near the surface and Louis labeled it Zinjanthropus.  Since funding for these extended “digs” comes from organizations anxious to find “human ancestors,” Louis Leakey told his new source of funds, the National Geographic Society, that the teeth were “quite obviously human.”^[11]  While it was thought to be human, the skull was given to three different artists and they did their best to come up with some kind of an “ape-like man” (right), revealing how much “imagination” rooted in paradigm expectation goes into much of the evolutionary artwork the public is given as “proof” for the story.  After the public was told that another human ancestor had been found, Louis Leakey decided that it was just a big australopithicene and of less interest than newer stuff he was finding.  L.S.B. Leakey, Philip Tobias, and John Napier announced a new species of pre-man in 1964 – homo habilis – from bones unearthed in 1959-60.

     1968/ The Time-Life Nature Library published their volume on human evolution entitled “Early Man.”  In the center of that book was a color foldout depicting “the stages of man’s long march from apelike ancestors to sapiens” with fifteen characters: Pliopithecus, Proconsul, Dryopithecus, Oreopithecus, Ramapithecus, Australopithecus, Paranthropus, Advanced Australopithecus, Homo Erectus, Early Homo Sapiens, Solo Man, Rhodesian Man, Neanderthal Man, Cro-Magnon Man, and Modern Man.  This chart became something of an icon for human evolution, adorning classroom walls and even showing up in a prominent background shot in the 1990 film “Congo.”

The Kelvin-Zallenger chart is a very deceptive piece of propaganda.  The introduction to the chart gave the impression that this was what scientists believed at that point about the stages of human evolution,

What were the stages of man's long march from apelike ancestors to sapiens?  Beginning at right and progressing across four more pages are milestones of primate and human evolution as scientists know them today.^[12]

As artwork, it powerfully conveys the impression that a small ape-like creature evolved into modern humans.  However, a different picture emerged when I examined the fine print on the chart and the book’s surrounding text.  The chart is propaganda – “a picture is worth a thousand words” – filled with non-ancestors that appear for no other reason than to give the “impression” that humans gradually evolved from some small ape-like ancestor.  For when you edit the artwork to agree with the small-print text below the characters on the chart and the surrounding text in the book itself, a far less convincing picture emerges (note the edited version below).

Gone are Pliopithecus, Proconsul, Dryopithecus, and Oreopithecus.  The last five characters are all classified “homo sapien,” so none of them are really “ancestral” to homo sapiens.  It was not long after this book/chart were published that Ramapithecus and the Australopithecines began to be removed from charts of human ancestors.  Brought up to date with current beliefs, all that would remain from this chart would be Homo erectus and modern man.

     1970-79/ Always on the lookout for something that looks like “evolution” going on, the “Tasaday” people were discovered in the Philippines, a group of humans allegedly living in stone-age simplicity and primitiveness, reported in National Geographic (August 1972).

     As it turned out, the folks at the National Geographic Society were fooled again.  Philippine government agents had made the people leave their huts and farms and move into caves, so they could make some money off of the scientists and media people who eagerly flocked in to “cover” the story.  Later, a Swiss anthropologist tried to find the Tasaday and he did – wearing T-shirts again, using metal knives, sleeping on beds, etc.  Some German reporters in the area also came and took some pictures of the now “modernized” folks.  When the Swiss anthropologist contacted the National Geographic Society to inform them of the hoax, the NGS replied that they “weren’t interested.”^[13]  Why weren’t they interested?  Well, the NGS had already published two articles and produced a television program presenting the Tasaday "discovery" as valid and, probably, just weren’t up to “eating that much crow.”

     In the June 1973 issue of National Geographic Magazine, Richard Leakey’s discovery of “1470 Man” from Kenya was announced.  Skull KNM-ER 1470 & 1590 (R. Leakey, 1972) should demonstrate that true humans existed at the same time as the Australopithecines, but this has not been the case.  Although 1470 qualifies for true human status on the basis of cranial shape, size, and wall thickness, it was placed in the category Homo habilis.  Leg bones were found in the same level which were "astonishingly similar" to modern man.^[14]  Although the volcanic tuff associated with 1470 was dated as 212-230 million years old prior to the discovery of the hominid bones, these dates were later adjusted drastically downward when the fossils were found because evolutionary philosophy dictates that radiometric dating gives true ages and that human bones should not be found in 200 million year old rock - the idea of modern humans around 2.6 million years ago was already a serious threat to the current story.^[15]  So much for radiometric dating methods as an independent confirmation of the geological time scale - it can be adjusted as necessary to fit philosophical expectations!

     The original fossil of KNM-ER 1470 was found in hundreds of pieces and when assembled the lower face was attached only at the top, so no one knows at what angle the lower portion of the face should slant.  There was no lower jaw and nose cartilage does not fossilize.  With plastic filling in the large holes and an imaginary lower jaw added, artist Jay Matternes presented 1470 in the June 1973 issue of National Geographic as not too different from a person one might meet in Africa today (left).

     1973-74/ Bones were recovered at Hadar, East Africa, in 1973-74 by Taieb & Johanson and labeled Australopithecus Afarensis.  Donald C. Johanson, a student of F. Clark Howells, nicknamed his find “Lucy” (right).  The bones are alleged to be of a 20 year old female Australopithecine in 2-3 million year old sediments.  She is short-legged, has a brain 1/3 the size of a modern human, and radio-metric ages for Lucy have varied between 2-5.3 million (pot.Ar.).  The bones are that of an ape from the neck up, human-like below.  The anatomists, Zuckerman and Oxnard, both reject Johanson's claim that this creature was bipedal, partially upright, and transitional to homo sapien.  Some of the crucial bones for determining that Lucy was partially upright (esp. the knee) were found over a mile away from the others, which causes some to suspect Lucy is a hybrid of more than one creature.  Others have noted that the bones of “Lucy” closely resemble a bonobo chimpanzee.

     1977/ Time Magazine (November 1977) ran a cover story with Richard Leakey’s picture on the cover summarizing “How Man Became Man” (right).^[16]  Also in 1977, Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin published “Origins,” which contained an interesting new version of the human evolution chart (left).  Prominent in the upper left-hand corner was the little “tree shrew” from which evolutionists believe insectivores, lorises, lemurs, New & Old World monkeys, apes, and humans evolved from, but absent were any specific “sub-human” characters – just a couple of generalized “ape-men” characters.  Notice the amount of “ink branches” connecting the tree-shrew with his alleged ancestors – representing the ever-lacking transitional fossils that should exist to document the alleged transformation and connect “common ancestors” with their descendants.

     1979/ Mary Leakey, wife of Louis and mother of Richard Leakey, found a trail of human-like footprints across volcanic ash (left) that was dated 3.6 mya and National Geographic presented her findings (April 1979).  Because of what they found in the 1970’s, both Richard and Mary Leakey began backing out of the attempt to arrange the alleged “human ancestors” in any kind of chronological development chart and made comments to that effect.

     1980-89/ In 1981, Donald Johanson and Maitland Edey published their book touting “Lucy” as the main ancestral link in human evolution.  Johanson chose to retain Ramapithecus as the distant early ancestor, then Lucy (Australopithecus afarensis) before the split, with only homo habilis, and homo erectus included as modern man’s ancestors.  What a change from the 1968 Kelvin-Zallinger chart.  In only thirteen years, the smooth line of 14 pre-human ancestors had been trimmed to four in Johanson’s chart (right).  And remember, many paleontologists reject Ramapithecus and Lucy as human ancestors, so the list of available “ancestors” for human evolution is really pretty dismal for all of the confident hype that is offered for the idea.  But what is important in selling an idea is the creation of the impression – once that is done you can do whatever you want with the “evidence” to support it as most people won’t continually monitor the situation.

     The 1980’s also saw new court cases, as the ACLU sponsored opposition to “Balanced Treatment” Laws (teach both evolution and creation) passed in Arkansas and Louisiana.  Both court cases, with high-pressure influence from major evolutionary spokesmen and the National Academy of Science, ended with evolution being defined as “scientific” and creation as “religion,” which since 1963 has been “unconstitutional” in public schools.  However, after appearing as a witness in the 1982-83 Arkanasas case to support the “evolution = science; creation = religion” position, Michael Ruse stunned a crowd a decade later by admitting that he had changed his opinion a little since then - evolution has functioned like a secular religion.^[17]  Two decades later, Ruse published a book in which he declared that evolution and creation are both religious views!  However, his original position is the one that the court system, the ACLU, and the public remembers.^[18]

     1990-99/ Time Magazine (March 14, 1994) ran a cover story of “How Man Began” (right).

     In 1996, the announcement was made that Homo Erectus (Java Man) was still around as a contemporary of modern man 27,000 years ago.^[19]

     Late in the decade, it was announced that chimpanzee and human DNA were 98% similar, thus “proving” how closely they are related.  For some time, DNA has been emphasized as the newest “major proof” for evolution, although there have been words of caution from many sources since it is obvious that humans and chimps are more than 1-2% different in how they turn out and there is still much that scientists don’t understand about DNA!  I suspicion that the shift to DNA similarity between humans and chimps as the new focus is because the fossil evidence for humans evolving from an apelike common ancestor has not worked out very well.

     2000-Present/ A number of new fossil finds have been noted in the last decade (australopithecus aethiopicus, homo rudulfensis, homo ergaster), but all have been the subject of controversy amongst researchers as to what they are.^[20]  U. S. News & World Report (June 23, 2003) contained an article about a human-like skull found in Ethiopia, dated at around 160,000 years ago.  However, the skull is difficult to categorize – it is very human-like in some ways and not so in others.  Most fascinating was the comment towards the end of the article, showing the same kind of hesitation as the Leakey’s developed about placing this skull in an evolutionary chronology leading to modern humans,

The fossil record is so empty that it is too much of a leap to put the new find into a simple evolutionary sequence leading to ourselves, says Jeffrey Schwartz of the University of Pittsburgh.  “I would not sort of jam it into this ancestor-descendant kind of thing,” he says.  “Maybe it’s the long-lost sister species of Homo Sapiens.”^[21]

 Conclusions

     Having followed the development of the modern theory of evolution from its primarily “philosophical” foundations in pre-Christian Greek skepticism (ca. 600 B.C.) and French Enlightenment “re-birth” (1689-1963), it is time to draw some conclusions.

     First of all, Darwin was probably right to some extent about biological variation, but he was not really attacking the Bible, for it only teaches the Divine origin of life, simultaneous origin of major “kinds” of lifeforms, and uniqueness of human beings (which remains quite compatible with available evidence).  Darwin’s real target was the notion of the complete fixity of species since creation (no variation) and this idea did not come from the Bible, but from Plato and Aristotle’s notion of totally fixed species (expressed in the “Great Chain of Being”) as their ideas had been blended into the Medieval European Christian worldview of Europe through the Roman Catholic Scholastics and universities.  Most Biblical creationists do not believe or advocate totally-fixed species since the beginning and no changes at all - this is a strawman created by over-zealous evolutionists.  Copernicus and Galileo were fighting the same Plato-Aristotle connection in the geo-centric cosmology that had also been blended into the Judeo-Christian worldview of Medieval Europe.  Because most European Christian people did not distinguish the Biblical teaching / Platonic-Aristotelian elements in their thinking, Darwinian “variation” was rejected by many Christians because it differed from the Platonic and Aristotelian notions in their thinking.  However, Darwinian variation was also rejected (and continues to be) because it was extrapolated into a “chemicals to chemists” grand transformation scheme by Enlightenment-based materialists and Naturalists as what could be disguised as a “scientific” justification for their atheism.  It continues to be an essential foundational element of modern atheism (Marxist-Leninist Communism, Naziism, etc.), as Richard Dawkins has admitted,

. . . . Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.^[22]

     Second, because the French Enlightenment’s philosophical (nature only, progress, reason only) agenda was so powerfully expressed in uniformitarian geology and Darwinism biology, the materialists and naturalists involved with Western Science used these as theoretical vehicles for removing God from the picture altogether and redefining “science” so that materialistic and naturalistic answers are the only ones allowed and persuading the public that some kind of naturalistic progress and development scheme just has to be the answer to every question about nature.  Realizing that evolutionists have abused and distorted the validity of traditional empirical and inductive “science” so as to promote their own philosophical agenda, a sizeable movement is growing in opposition to them.  Biblical creationists, Intelligent Design advocates, and those concerned with where materialistic and naturalistic philosophy has moved us as a culture are drawing attention to the failure of evolutionists to provide evidence for their “grand transformation” scenario.  Evidences of variation within basic kinds of life is NOT evidence of naturalistic transformation of inanimate chemicals into protozoa or bacteria and then the gradual evolutionary origin of the major kinds!

     Third, the growing awareness that uniformitarian geology and Darwinian biology are insufficient to account for some of the realities of nature, it is time to let evidence speak and re-consider that intelligent Design and abrupt appearance are very credible explanations for the apparently sudden and simultaneous origin of many phyla (Cambrian Explosion) and the inability of classical (anti-catastrophism) uniformitarian geology to account for the massive amounts of rapidly buried plant and animal lifeforms that make up the fossil record and coal and oil deposits.  In effect, Genesis has taken a continual verbal beating from post-Enlightenment rationalists, but remains a more credible explanation for what really exists than it is given credit for.  On the other hand, rather than face up to the weaknesses involved in the grand transformation evolutionary story, evolutionists have resorted to arrogance, ridicule, and legal/political repression to avoid public discussion of the issues, especially in American Public Education.  By claiming objectivity and openness to criticism, while resorting to the “separation of church and state” argument to avoid even criticism of Darwinism’s weaknesses in the educational setting, the philosophical agenda behind evolutionary theory is becoming more obvious.

     Finally, contrary to Dawkins and his group, I am an intellectually-fulfilled Biblical Theist.  I am convinced that atheistic evolutionists have often gone beyond presenting objective “scientific” explanations and are at times doing little more than spouting their own materialistic and naturalistic philosophy in “Just so” stories that are dressed in the clothes of “science” to mask its real identity.  While boldly redefining “science” in terms of naturalistic philosophy and claiming that God is not allowed into the discussion of where life came from, evolutionists have provided no observational or laboratory evidence that life can or ever did arise from inanimate chemicals by natural processes.  What scientific evidence there is, going back to the work of Redi, Pasteur, and Spallanzoni, indicates that life comes from pre-existing life and does NOT “spontaneously generate” out of inanimate matter.  We have faith in an eternal “Living God” as the pre-existing source of life to work from in our explanation, while, in reality, they have invested a huge amount of faith in eternal matter, time, and chance.  I am also convinced, from Scripture and the fossil record, that primordial single-celled life did not gradually transform into the major “kinds” of life, but that they appeared fully characteristic of their types at about the same time and, while these major body formats have varied some they also have remained very stable within those major types.  Lastly, I remain unconvinced that modern human beings gradually arose from some ape-like “common ancestor,” for I have seen this notion posed long before any evidence for it appeared and the evidence that has been put forward tends to be very scanty and highly dependent on the beliefs and presuppositions of the interpreter.  If the evidence was anywhere near as powerful as the advertising, propaganda, and maneuvering to control the discussion in scientific and educational domains has been, we would all be Darwinists by now.  Arrogance, confident assertions, and the ridicule of skeptics are ceasing to be effective tools for advancing evolutionary theory as more and more people realize that the real underlying agenda has been to abuse the good name of “science” as a tool for suppressing the knowledge of God.

Evidence for Human Evolution - Not So good!

     On one hand, we are given sweeping pronouncements by the doctrinaire “priests” of Darwinism, cheerleading us towards accepting evolution because it is “the only choice.”  One professor of psychiatry put it this way,

The human species is descended from a long line of animal forebears all the way back to one-celled animals.^[23]

      But, for those who look further, there are a number of admissions by evolutionists who actually work in areas more closely related to the “hard evidence” that indicate the evidence for evolution is not as abundant and clear as the promoters would have us think.

In 1973, Richard Leakey wrote the following comment concerning one of his finds,

either we toss out this skull or we toss out our theories of early man . . . [and that this find] leaves in ruins the notion that all early fossils can be arranged in an orderly sequence of evolutionary change.^[24]

In 1978, David Pilbeam wrote the following comment,

The fossil record has been elastic enough, the expectations sufficiently robust, to accommodate almost any story.^[25]

A year later, Pilbeam made the following comment in a review of Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin’s book Origins,

My reservations concern not so much this book but the whole subject and methodology of paleoanthropology.  But introductory books – or book reviews – are hardly the place to argue that perhaps generations of students of human evolution, including myself, have been flailing about in the dark; that our data base is too sparse, too slippery, for it to be able to mold our theories.  Rather, the theories are more statements about us and ideology than about the past.  Paleoanthropology reveals more about how humans view themselves than it does about how humans came about.^[26]

In 1984, Mary Leakey made the following two comments,

we really know very little about man's origins.^[27]

I do not believe it is (now) possible to fit the known hominid fossils into a reliable pattern.^[28]

In 1986, Michael Denton wrote the following comment about Darwinism in general,

The entire scientific ethos and philosophy of modern western man is based to a large extent upon the central claim of Darwinian theory that humanity was not born by the creative intentions of a deity but by a completely mindless trial and error selection of random molecular patterns. . . .

        The twentieth century would be incomprehensible without the Darwinian revolution.  The social and political currents which have swept the world in the past eighty years would have been impossible without its intellectual sanction.  It is ironic to recall that it was the increasingly secular outlook in the nineteenth century which initially eased the way for the acceptance of evolution, while today it is perhaps the Darwinian view of nature more than any other that is responsible for the agnostic and sceptical outlook of the twentieth century.  What was once a deduction from materialism has today become its foundation.

        The influence of evolutionary theory on fields far removed from biology is one of the most spectacular examples in history of how a highly speculative idea for which there is no really hard scientific evidence can come to fashion the thinking of a whole society and dominate the outlook of an age. . . . .

        Ultimately the Darwinian theory of evolution is no more nor less than the great cosmogenic myth of the twentieth century. . . . The truth is that despite the prestige of evolutionary theory and the tremendous intellectual effort directed towards reducing living systems to the confines of darwinian thought, nature refuses to be imprisoned.  In the final analysis we still know very little about how new forms of life arise.^[29]

Finally, in 1990, the pro-evolution cheerleader and adamant anti-creationist, Tim Berra, wrote the following statement about the continuing lack of consensus among the experts about the evidence and “path” of human evolution,

No consensus exists yet, among anthropologists, but it is the branching pattern of the hominoid tree, not its existence, that they debate.  Time and more fossils will elaborate and clarify the picture.^[30]

It does not seem to me that the evidence for evolution is nearly as clear and “overwhelming” as the promoters have confidently asserted it is to the trusting public.  Thus, I believe Paul’s advice to Timothy is still worth remembering,

O Timothy, guard what has been entrusted to you, avoiding worldly and empty chatter and the opposing arguments of what is falsely called "knowledge"-- which some have professed and thus gone astray from the faith. (1Timothy 6:20,21)

A Ministry of Severn Christian Church (Severn, Maryland)

Unless otherwise noted, all material produced by Charles E. McCoy

All Scripture citations/quotations from the New American Standard Bible

To send a question to Chuck: chuck@severnchristian.org