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2009: will creationism lose the struggle for survival?
By now, everybody has heard the news - 2009 is the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth and, coincidentally, the 150th anniversary of publication of "On the Origin of Species". Evolutionism's minders, particularly those of skeptical bent, are stoking the propaganda machine to full steam ahead. Their prayer is that the sheer weight of pro-evolution books, articles, and TV programs will be sufficient to silence creationists who stubbornly and foolishly remain skeptical of skepticism. Creationism will, in 2009, be badgered and bullied, harassed and hectored. The Richard Dawkinses of the world are hoping that when the dust settles at the end of this year, evolution will emerge as sole survivor, vigorous, healthy and happy. We'll see.
Of course, creationists aren't just going to sit still and let the invading army walk right over them. They, too, are cracking their knuckles over the keyboard and buying up all the ink cartridges and paper they can afford. However, the reality of life is that evolution theory, at least in the Western world, is far more palatable than is creation theory to human beings who don't want to be accountable to a supreme being. Thus, evolutionists win hands down in access to almost all popular and respected media outlets. The propaganda barrage has begun. The February editions of both National Geographic and The Smithsonian have published articles titled, "What Darwin Didn't Know". Always religiously trotted out - as if now beyond all dispute - is Theodosius Dobzhansky's famous dictum, "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution". Tommyrot! If God created all things, as the evidence powerfully argues, nothing makes sense in biology except in the light of creationism. Name one fact of nature that contradicts creation as its origin. Please. Contrarily, lots of facts of nature undermine evolution theory.
The evidence that is ceaselessly called upon to bolster evolution's cause could, in probably every instance, be used in support of intelligent design. Let us go right to the heart of Darwin's great theory - variation. Everywhere he went, Darwin observed natural variations occurring within a species. He observed that the species of tortoise found in the Galapagos Islands varied in the shape of its shell from island to island. To Darwin, here was evidence of evolution. (In today's evolutionary thinking, here was proof of evolution.) In geographically isolated populations, natural selection wrought its magic by enhancing the reproductive capacity of those turtles whose shell shape somehow gave them an advantage in that particular environment over friends and relatives with different shell shapes. Voilá. This theory of evolution is summarized by Richard Dawkins as "nonrandom survival of randomly varying hereditary instructions for
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building embryos".1 "Nonrandom survival" refers to the process known as natural selection which gives a competitive edge to certain variations compared with others. "Randomly varying hereditary instructions", aka mutations - which in the case of the tortoise produce varying shell shapes - allegedly arise spontaneously in the genetic makeup by some unexplained mechanism. Stir in sufficient time to allow untold billions of mutations to pop up (since mutations are random in their anatomical effects, it might take many millions to produce one beneficial variation), and there you have it. Birds turn into dinosaurs and slime into celery. In On the Origin of Species, Darwin describes it this way:
It may metaphorically be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing, throughout the world, the slightest variations; rejecting those that are bad, preserving and adding up all that are good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers.. We see nothing of these slow changes in progress, until the hand of time has marked the lapse of ages.
What evolutionists won't tell you (among many other things) is that nobody has ever seen a mutation occur spontaneously. Nobody has ever had a "molecular microscope" trained on a gene in a germ cell (to have any effect on progeny any change must occur in the sex cells) when one of its vital bases suddenly went "blip" and miraculously changed from, say, guanine to thymine. Indeed, variations occur naturally in hereditary material. Tallness and shortness, blue-eyedness and brown-eyedness are governed by genetic variation. But the notion that changes spontaneously occur every so often (gotta be in a sex cell, remember) is a pure figment of overactive imagination. (This is not to deny the possibility of rare spontaneous errors or "copying mistakes" in DNA replication in the production of sex cells. Things can go wrong, but such glitches do not produce viable offspring. "Hopeful monsters" are not the stuff of new species.)
"Mutants" and the variations they produce have existed from the beginning. Bacteria develop immunity to various drugs such as streptomycin "due to the presence in every large culture. of a few mutants which have already mutated. in such a way as to be able to resist the action of streptomycin".2 In other words, large populations of most creatures harbor a rich genetic reservoir of variations. This phenomenon speaks eloquently of the wisdom of the Creator who built genetic variability in for the purpose of enabling species to survive, in many cases, in a broad range of environments. When will evolutionists recognize the truth that has been staring them in the face for so long?
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