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The Darwinian Delusion The Darwinian Delusion The Darwinian Delusion The Scientific Myth of Evolutionism Michael Ebifegha AuthorHouse™ 1663 Liberty Drive Bloomington, IN 47403 www.authorhouse.com Phone: 1-800-839-8640 © 2009 by Michael Ebifegha. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author. First published by AuthorHouse 09/30/2011 ISBN: 978-1-4634-0385-0 (sc) ISBN: 978-1-4634-0384-3 (hc) ISBN: 978-1-4634-0383-6 (ebk) Library of Congress Control Number: 2011907896 Printed in the United States of America Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only. Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock. This book is printed on acid-free paper. Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them. Scripture quotations marked NIV are taken from THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49530. All rights reserved. Scripture quotations marked NLT are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, Copyright © 1996. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois 60189. All rights reserved. Contents PREFACE ..................................................................................... 5 INTRODUCTION ...................................................................... 13 CHAPTER 1. EVOLUTIONISM: PURPOSE AND CONCERNS ....31 CHAPTER 2. DEBUNKING FALSEHOOD: THE EARTH’S AGE NOT IMPLIED IN THE BIBLE ....................................67 CHAPTER 3. RESOLVING THE MICRO-MACRO EVOLUTION DILEMMA .............................................78 CHAPTER 4. CREATION VS. EVOLUTION COSMOLOGY .......104 CHAPTER 5. EXALTING THE CREATIONIST WORLDVIEW ....128 CHAPTER 6. THE NATURAL SELECTION DELUSION ..............150 CHAPTER 7. THE FOSSIL RECORD DELUSION .........................187 CHAPTER 8. THE “ORIGIN OF LIFE” DELUSION ......................203 CHAPTER 9. GOD IS NO DELUSION BUT SCIENTISM IS ........229 CHAPTER 10. THE MEDIA AND THE CREATIONISM-EVOLUTIONISM CONTROVERSY ..........................................................266 CONCLUSION ......................................................................... 281 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ........................................................ 295 APPENDIX A. TEACHING OF ORIGINS .................................... 297 APPENDIX B. THE GOD OF CREATION & THE TEN COMMANDMENTS ............................................. 302 INDEX ..................................................................................... 307 Books by Michael Ebifegha The Death of Evolution: God’s Creation Patent & Seal The Darwinian Delusion Creation or Evolution?: Origin of Species in Light of Science’s Limitations and Historical Records Dedicated to the Almighty God, WHO, as ex-atheist Antony Flew stipulates in his last will and testament, IS a self-existent, immutable, immaterial, omnipotent, and omniscient Being. Ultimately it comes down to the alternative: What came first? Creative Reason, the Creator Spirit who makes all things and gives them growth, or Unreason, which, lacking any meaning, strangely enough brings forth a mathematically ordered cosmos, as well as man and his reason. The latter, however, would then be nothing more than a chance result of evolution and thus, in the end, equally meaningless. —Pope Benedict XVI, Creation and Evolution (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2007). PREFACE Life, like love, is immaterial but dwells in and operates through a material body. If the origin of life is unsolvable as a scientific problem, so also is the origin of species. For biological evolution by natural selection in the form of bacteria-to-bacteria or finches-to-finches, the problem of origin is unimportant in that the progeny are variants of their progenitors. Evolution under these circumstances falls within the scientific domain and is the cornerstone of medical applications for the prevention and treatment of human diseases such as SARS, the development of new agricultural products, and the production of industrial innovations. No dogmatic assumptions are required, and scientists understand the mechanisms involved. This mode of evolution governed by artificial selection existed before the Darwinian paradigm of evolution by natural selection modified it. However, in biological evolution by natural selection of the bacteria-to-human type, the question of origin falls outside the domain of scientific investigation. Here the mechanisms are unknown; doctrinaire assumptions are required; and conclusions are distorted by philosophical preferences. Biological evolution by natural selection is a belief described in this book as evolutionism. The controversy within the scientific community is not between creation (inventing or producing new things from other things) and evolution (things changing with time), both of which are facts of life and processes in science. According to the National Academy of Sciences, “Biological evolution concerns changes | 5 { Michael Ebifegha in living things during the history of life on earth.”1 There is, therefore, no actual creation-evolution controversy in science. Instead, the controversy concerns creationism versus evolutionism, which are different beliefs about the origin and diversity of life on earth. The creationist within the scientific community believes in an intelligent, conscious, omniscient Creator, the God who in recorded speech claims credit for having created the world. Creationists accept the limited influence of natural selection as a sorter in the diversity of species. Evolutionists, on the other hand, believe in natural selection as the mindless, unconscious, and sole mechanism behind the emergence of all organisms. Creationism is the religious belief in creation, and evolutionism is the religious belief in evolution. Creationism and evolutionism are two mutually exclusive beliefs. Both are not scientific because they are not capable of proof. However, one of these worldviews must be a delusion since both cannot be true. My objective is to explain why evolutionism is the delusion. Advocates of evolutionism present its tenets to the public as scientific facts. According to Peter Grace, “Origins are a matter of history or prehistory; hence no scientific statement, qua science, can be made, since there is no possibility of verification by repetition.”2 Many modern scientists ignore this fact in their presentation of data. For instance, the National Academy of Sciences and Institute of Medicine (NASIM) asserts in Science, Evolution, and Creationism: [T]he common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees was a species estimated to have lived 6 to 7 million years ago, whereas the common ancestor of humans and the puffer fish was an ancient fish that lived in the Earth’s oceans more than 400 million years ago. Thus, humans are not descended from chimpanzees or from any other ape living today but from a species that no longer exists. Nor are humans descended from the species of fish that live today but, rather, from the species of fish that gave rise to the early tetrapods.3 (Emphasis theirs.) | 6 { The Darwinian Delusion These clearly are not scientific facts based on Grace’s criterion of “verification by repetition.” NASIM, surprisingly, concurs: “[A]ny belief/event that cannot be tested, modified, or rejected by scientific means does not constitute a part of the processes of science.”4 Accordingly, the premise of fish-to-human or chimpanzee-to-human evolution can be accepted only by faith, since it does not meet the scientific requirement of “testing, retesting, and experimentation.”5 The same rules that disqualify creationism as science invalidate evolutionism as science. Nonetheless, ideological disciples of Charles Darwin continue to propound their preconceptions as reliable science. Such double standards and stonewalling are symptoms of academic delusion. The Darwinian Delusion continues the anti-pseudoscience dialogue that other authors initiated after the publication of Darwin’s The Origin of Species. John A. Davison’s “The Darwinism Delusion” is the latest contribution. Excerpts from Davison’s essay appear below because they provide a concise overview of this dialogue. It is now 147 years since the publication of Darwin’s celebrated “On the Origin of Species,” yet not a single species has been observed to be formed through the mechanism he proposed. That mechanism, the natural selection of randomly produced variations, is apparently incompetent to transform contemporary species even into a new member of the same genus. The most intensive artificial selection has also proven to be unable to transcend the species barrier . How then is it possible for an hypothesis to survive without verification? Both the Phlogiston of chemistry and the Ether of physics collapsed when controlled experiment demonstrated them to be without foundation. Darwinism also has failed to survive the acid (decisive) test of experimental verification. Why then has it persisted? The reason for this paradox is the subject of this brief essay. It is, as my title indicates, because Darwinism
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