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09 February 2014

Science and Creationism, Part III: Human Evolution

This post is the third in a four-part series about the scientific perspective of creationism. All the information is taken from a final paper I wrote for a class at Genesee Community College.

The first post is about the Big Bang Theory, galactic placement, and the planets; the second is about Molecular Biology and the final one will contain concluding thoughts.


As for evolution itself, there are currently even scientists and paleontologists that are starting to believe that it is an impossible thing to have occurred.  In reference to that statement, it was written “An increasing number of scientists, most particularly a growing number of evolutionists (particularly academic philosophers) agree that Darwinian evolutionary theory is no genuine scientific theory at all.  Many of the critics have the highest credentials.” (Darwin’s Theory: An Exercise in Science. Michael Ruse. New Scientist. Pg. 828-830. June 25, 1981).  
According to the Grant R. Jeffery, writer of The Signature of God, he explained that Charles Darwin admitted that millions of ‘missing links’ would need to be revealed in the fossil record for an attempt to accurately confirm his speculation that all species had progressively evolved by chance mutation into new species.  Although for his theory, despite the millions that have been spent on probing for fossils globally for more than a century, the scientists have failed to locate one missing link out of the millions that must exist if evolution is to be proven truthful and more than just a theory.  Even the writer David Berlinsky was quoted to say, “There are gaps in the fossil graveyard, places where there should be intermediate forms, but where there is nothing whatsoever instead.  No paleontologist…denies that this is so.  It is simply a fact.  Darwin’s theory and the fossil record are in conflict”, and also an article from Time Magazine on Nov. 7, 1977 reported that, “Scientists concede that their most valued theories are based on embarrassingly new fossil fragments and that huge gaps exist in the fossil record.”

     According to Dr. Colin Patterson, senior Paleontologist of the British Museum of Natural History, in 1981 in New York City said,

One morning I woke up and…it struck me that I had been working on this stuff for 20 years and there wasn’t a thing I knew about it.  That’s quite a shock to learn that one can be mislead for so long…I’ve tried putting a simple question to various people: ‘Can you tell me anything you know about evolution, any one thing that is true? (p. 1430) 

And after posing this question to the geology staff of the Field Museum of Natural History, all he got was silence as a response, and yet again when he posed the question, this time in front of the members of the prestigious Evolutionary Morphology seminar in the University of Chicago, he received silence again until one of the members spoke up and said, “I do know one thing – it ought not be taught in high school.” 

     When it comes to speaking, how did language come to be in humans and how does it differ from that of how animals communicate?  Charles Darwin, Noam Chomsky, and Einstein have different points of view on the subject, each with an interesting take.  According to Einstein and his academic acquaintance, Charles Peirce, both agreed that man’s distinct capability to commune originated from within, unlike Charles Darwin, who in his book The Descent of Man, wrote “I cannot doubt that language owes its origin to the imitation of animals and man’s own instinctive cries,” meaning that he believed gradualism fashioned the species and the sounds they made that in time followed the evolutionary pathway and turned into language.  Noam Chomsky, an MIT professor and evolutionist, disagreed and said, “The ability to speak with symbolic words is an all or nothing affair and humans are equipped with a unique deep structure that allows them to produce the discourses that we routinely do.”   

     Kenneth Poppe also had a take on the subject of how language came to be.  He went on to write how humans differ from animals in how we are born with a inherent gift to make a singular set of gestures and sounds that are understood by any other of our own species in one way or another.  In addition, he stated that we all have the genetic talent to also process and assess information, despite how we communicate the point and are trained in multiple different ways to send a response, while in contrast, all other animal species on Earth have one way for communication that is dependent upon that one way of communication.  And since animals only have one way to communicate with their own species and humans are able to do it in a variety of ways with their own species, we can use that knowledge to conclude that we have a unique form of the deep structure that Chomsky talked about.  Therefore it has to be registered in a different way in the DNA of humans and animals respectively.  Or in other words, we can see that our genetics have an amplified ability that is exceedingly intricate.  This shows us that there is a critical distinction between the progression of humans and animals that does in fact separate us from the ancestors of chimpanzees and apes that Darwinists continue to say we evolved from.  As Poppe said,  Einstein realized that this capability, communication through sounds as well as printed letters and numbers, could never be a product of natural evolution, which in his mind left only one alternative – the God that he often referred to” and also that, “Either Darwin was correct in that the human language developed slowly over time from animal sounds or Einstein, Peirce, and Chomsky were correct through saying that there are no parallels to the natural world in how we communicate. (p. 168) 

     If we evolved like it is taught we did, why is it that animals do not seem to have the conscience choice of doing or not doing something?  Animals are only able to go by instinct when they, like in the case of birds, sing because that’s what they are inwardly programmed to do, but with humans, we have the ability to choose to sing or not sing.  Is it by chance that animals go by instinct alone and humans are able to make a conscious choice?  What about values and morals?  Jacques Monod, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1965, was quoted to say, “Science is ignorant of values,” but Kenneth Poppe believes that I say a variety of good and evil acts exist, and had their origin from the concept of choice given to the world’s first couple made in the image of God.  This option to decide is what we all would have requested, and choice is the dividing factor that puts humans on a spiritual plane totally separating us from either bacterium or chimps, which remain on the biological plane only. (p. 188-189)

     Also, if you compare the Nobel Eightfold Path of Buddhism, the 42 Declarations of Purity of the Egyptian Ma’ at Law, the Chivalric Order of the medieval knights, and the 10 Commandments, amongst many other writings in the cultures of the world, there is a remarkable point of occurrence in the values, morals, and rules that are the basis of how we should live or treat others.  In which these lead to the reality of a force in the world that causes people to need to have certain rules to govern how they live, and this also shows the existence of good and evil extends to a further power that is greater than the ideals that evolution has a difficult time clearing up.  Societies in general, along with common sense, also can show us that there is truth to saying that values exist and their existence proves that there is a Giver of those values; they aren’t something that came along by chance.
 
References
1) Poppe, Kenneth. 2008.  Exposing Darwinism’s Weakest Link: Why Evolution Cannot Explain   Human existence. Eugene, Oregon. Harvest House Publishers.
2) Comfort, Ray. Feb. 2003. The Evidence Bible. Bridge Logos Pub. New and Revised Edition.
3) Battersby, Stephen. Mysterious Radio Waves Emitted from Nearby Galaxy. Retrieved from: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18775-mysterious-radio-waves-emitted-from-nearby-galaxy.html
4) OceanMotion and surface currents. Retrived from: http://oceanmotion.org/html/background/timeline1800.htm
5) Michael Ruse.  Darwin’s Theory: An Exercise in Science. Retrived from: http://bit.ly/1bQe7i6
6) Feb. 15, 2004. A Question of Origins dvd. USA: Eternal Productions Studios. Jim Tetlow.

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