En route to a friend's housewarming last night, I had an interesting conversation with a fellow teacher about evolution. I'm a Christian who believes that God created everything. While I'm familiar with the concepts of evolution, much of the argument for it seems illogical to me.
It began in a local coffee shop where our hostess said to meet. My colleague, Ryan, was looking at a book about dinosaurs, apparently trying to convince another colleague (who is also a Christian) that man and dinosaurs didn't exist at the same time. His first comment--which was a joke--was, "Look at the pictures! Where are the humans?"
Um, the artist chose not to draw them? :-)
As we walked to the apartment, the conversation was more serious. He said there was no evidence that dinosaurs and humans lived at the same time. I pointed out the fossilized footprints in Texas where a barefoot man (a homo sapiens footprint) was most definitely following the tracks of a dinosaur. My friend pointed out that the footprints weren't necessarily formed at the same time. I said that they're in the same rock and were very close to one another.
A side point here that we did not discuss last night: we have an assumption that earlier people were not nearly as intelligent as we are. This assumption cannot be easily proved or disproved. No matter their level of intelligence, I do find it hard to believe that someone who probably subsisted on hunting would mistake unfamiliar footprints in rocks for fresh tracks and take the trouble of following them to a river or waterhole. I also find it difficult to believe that fresh mud around a man's foot would fossilize in unity with stone layer formed millions of years earlier.
My Christian friend brought up the topic of missing links. Where are they? Ryan said that the links would be quite rare, so it's natural that we haven't found any yet since we only discovered dinosaur bones in the mid-1800s. Beyond what he said, I will offer the idea that fossils normally form under cataclysmic circumstances, so if missing links are as rare as they would appear to be, even under committed evolutionist thought, the likelihood of their being discovered is even less, for the animal would probably have had to be living at a time of great destruction, and destruction is not the normal condition for life on earth. What I did point out was that seeing there was no solid evidence, only conjecture, the existence of missing links is a matter of faith. Either you choose to believe something unseen or you choose not to believe.
Ryan brought up dating methods. From what I've heard, most of them are not nearly as accurate as we would like to believe. For one thing, they assume a constant rate of change and decay, which no one can guarantee has happened. For another, they have a limited length of usefulness. Techniques may have changed significantly since I last considered the matter, but if I recall correctly, in the early 1990s, carbon dating was only consistently accurate over a period of roughly 2000 years, and even then it could make mistakes. I heard that someone tested a living clam, and the test said that the shell was thousands of years old. Seeing that I don't have access to any sources over here, I admit that such things can only be admitted as anecdotal evidence.
As we discussed mutations and natural selection an idea struck me for the first time (before last night, I've never really had a serious talk about evolution with someone who honestly and committedly believes in it). I cannot and will not deny that natural selection occurs. It's a part of life: things suited for a certain environment thrive while others die out. However, it is a logical fallacy to conclude that evolution occurs simply because natural selection does. Evolution, as I understand it, is the gradual changing of one life form into another different life form: microbes become something bigger, over millions of years turning into mammals, people, etc. It is the changing of one thing into a completely different thing. For evolution to occur, natural selection is necessary. However, the occurrence of natural selection does not demand a result of evolution, the changing of one thing into another that is completely different (or even necessarily imply it apart from certain presuppositions). It is a simple logical fallacy: A occurs because of B. B occurs; therefore, A must follow. To make a cake, I must have flour. I have flour; therefore, I must make a cake.
Much of my disagreement with the idea of evolution is that too many changes would have to occur simultaneously for a new trait to be useful. How many different things are essential for an eye to work well? An optic cord leading to the brain, the cones and rods of the retina, the eyeball itself, the iris, a pupil, the lens, muscles to move the eye (maybe not), a relatively clear section of cornea, some sort of membrane to protect the eye. If evolution occurs slowly, there would be no gain, no positive advantage of developing one or two of these things without developing all of them simultaneously. There's little chance that an eye would be passed on. What about as significant a change as bones? And how would internal skeletons form as opposed to shells or exoskeletons? Other examples of unlikely combinations of traits could (and often are) made: bombardier beetles, who maintain chemicals that react explosively with one another within two chambers in their bodies, combining them only in measured outputs for self-defense; a male wasp that is the only pollinator of a flower having a glob of tissue that looks and smells like the female wasp of the same variety (I saw that in National Geographic a few years ago)--which would have evolved first: the wasp or the flower?, etc.
Natural selection, as it has actually been observed and not merely conjectured, has not changed one type of animal into another different type of animal. A classic example of natural selection used by evolutionists is the white moth around London that turned into a gray variety after industrialization. While that was indeed natural selection--the white ones could not hide as easily with soot as the gray ones--I fail to see how that was truly evolution. The moth is still a moth and is still identifiable as the same kind of moth. Everything is the same about it except for one characteristic: it changed colors. It did not and has not become a completely different creature. The comparison is no different than a person who has blond hair and a person who has brown hair or the differences between races of humans (who has evolved more: Caucasians? Asians? Africans? This abusive extension of natural selection could very easily lead to negative results and be used to defend oppression and racism).
Another example is Darwin's finches. Some have different-looking beaks for eating different kinds of seeds. But they're still all very recognizable as finches. They are not completely different kinds of birds. In fact, the great unity of different kinds of animals around the globe would seem to argue against evolution. Finches can be recognized on many continents, though they may differ in aspects of appearance. Doves are different in different regions, but they are still doves and recognizable as doves. Deer, antelope, bears, dogs squirrels ants, bees, trees--the list could go on ad infinitum. Each kind of animal (or plant) consists of a variation on a theme, each fitted to its environment but still definitely identifiable as that kind of animal.
Ryan based much of his argument on dominant and recessive genes. A trait would not necessarily have to be useful to be passed on, nor would it have to express itself in every generation. Under that concept, two individuals would not even necessarily have to live at the first appearance of the trait for the gene to exist and continue. After thousands or millions of years, the gene could become common enough among a population for it to regularly appear and be expressed, even if recessive. I did find that an interesting thought but do have some problems with it. First of all, how does a recessive gene become dominant? For example, it is a dominant characteristic for "higher" life forms to have eyes, but at one point, eyes would not have been a dominant characteristic. They would have been an exception to the norm and would likely have been a recessive gene. Secondly, the genetic material would have to be present anyway for the trait (or a form of it) to appear in the first place and be passed on. From the way we've seen genetics function, if evolution were to occur, all the DNA necessary for the expression of each trait of every creature would have to have been present within the first life-form, whatever that may have been.
In the end the conversation very plainly came down to a matter of faith, and I told Ryan that. There is no conclusive proof for evolution just as there is no conclusive proof for creation. Each of us must look at the evidence as honestly as possible and form our own conclusions. Personally, I find too much illogic and what-if's in evolutionary concepts for me to consider it a viable theory, much less an obvious natural law. I am, however, willing to honestly and openly consider a different viewpoint. If anyone can express the evolutionist's idea more clearly and fairly than I have here, I would appreciate knowing it so that I may understand it accurately. However, according to my current knowledge, it is far less of a stretch of the imagination to believe in a personal God who created everything according to his own purposes and designs and who created it well. With God as the basic presupposition, the evidence I have observed appears to make much more logical sense.
Posted by at February 28, 2004 11:33 AM