My Help Comes from the Lord, Maker of Heaven and Earth Dr. Doyle Holbird 2019 Synod Convention Essay 2 The Maker of Heaven and Earth, His Attributes are Clearly Seen About 150 years ago Charles Darwin published his seminal work “On the Origin of Species”. At the time few people realized that the hypothesis that Darwin proposed in this book would sweep across every continent and change the way that even most church bodies think about God’s role in creation. While most church bodies long ago dismissed any Biblical or scientific challenge to the theory of evolution, for confessional Bible believing churches it remains an active and important issue. God says in Romans that even His creation is a witness to Himself. This essay discusses that witness. For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made so that they are without excuse. Rom.1:20. University of Chicago biologist Jerry Coyne states, “Evolution is the greatest killer of belief that has ever happened on this planet”1. Most of us would probably agree that the theory of evolution is one of the great tools in the arsenal of satan to prevent people from seriously considering the claims of Scripture. But it is also one of his tools to seduce students who come from conservative Christian families away from the faith. Below is a quote from another professor Dr. David Barash from the University of Washington. This is a part of “The Talk” that he gives his students every year to convince them that “science” has undermined Christianity as a viable way for “intellectually stable” individuals to think about creation. The twofold demolition begins by defeating what modern creationists call the argument from complexity. … A few of my students shift uncomfortably in their seats. I go on. Next to go is the illusion of centrality. Before Darwin, one could believe that human beings were distinct from other life-forms, chips off the old divine block. No more. The most potent take-home message of evolution is the not-so-simple fact that, even though species are identifiable (just as individuals generally are), there is an underlying linkage among them literally and phylogenetically, via traceable historical connectedness.2 Professors like Barash are apologists for evolution and they are at work in universities all over the U.S. to try and undermine the faith of the Christian students that attend their classes. These gentlemen and others like them are fond of saying that virtually all of the scientific evidence supports a godless creation of life, earth and the universe. These militant atheists are certainly the most egregious examples of scientists who attempt to undermine the Christian faith. There are plenty of other scientists however, who would promote the idea that while a god may indeed exist he really doesn’t have much to do with creation, except that perhaps he was responsible for starting the process of creation in some primordial way and that if he exists we couldn’t know it. Some folks espouse the idea that God created through the process of evolution. These people are theistic evolutionists. Theistic evolutionists are sometimes Christians and those our brothers and sisters in Christ. But please don’t think that theistic evolution is a completely harmless idea. It can take several forms but most often it relegates God to a hapless bystander who can do nothing but watch as the creation unfolds much like the god of deists. Scientists who claim to be Christian hold one of three positions. Those for whom Scripture isn’t authoritative are actually some of the most vociferous when it comes to defending evolution (Kenneth Miller is one example). Others are keen to harmonize Scripture with evolutionary theory and downplay 3 the discrepancies between them. The third group consists of people like myself for whom Scripture is authoritative, and who do not believe that Darwin’s theory is true. We are the smallest in number and yet if evolution is arguably the greatest killer of belief on the face of this planet, then harmonizing the two cannot be allowed and it behooves us to know what it is and how to knowledgably address it. This essay is divided into 4 main parts. The first will detail several ways in which evolutionary theory differs from Biblical creation. The second will show show that in spite of the fact that evolution has become the de facto explanation in science for how all living things came into existence, a great deal of the evidence cited to support evolutionary theory need not be interpreted that way. The third will show that in spite of what you read in popular literature there is actually scientific evidence that militates against evolutionary theory. The fourth part will show scientific evidence that most Christians haven’t heard that actually supports Genesis. My goal is that it will provide an explanation for why our belief in Genesis chapters 1-10 is not unreasonable. I hope that you will find it helpful or at least interesting. PART I In this part of the essay I’d like to contrast what evolution teaches with what the Bible says so that we can see in general how much these 2 philosophies have in common. The second part of the talk which will begin today and continue tomorrow, will consist of scientific evidence, and most of it from within the last 10 or 12 years. I should mention that I am a biologist and so most of the scientific evidence that I will be reporting will be biological in nature. To begin let’s define what we mean by evolution. Evolution itself simply means “change that occurs over a period of time”. According to this definition you and I evolve as we grow older. So do our loved ones and the world around us. But this is not the definition of the term “evolution” as it is used in science classes in high schools and universities all over the US. For the purposes of this talk, when I refer to evolution what I mean is something much more specific. What I mean today when I use the word evolution is a concept that is sometimes called “neo-darwinism” or “neo-darwinian evolution”. It is more properly called the “Synthetic Theory of Evolution” 3 or “the modern synthesis”. What the term evolution means most often in contemporary scientific usage is (the words in bold are considered to be the core of the theory): The concept that populations of organisms are changing over time. And that all organisms on earth have arisen from a single common ancestor by a process of random mutation of genes and natural selection. This single ancestor has given rise to all the diverse living things that are alive today via descent with modification. The last common ancestor of all living organisms lived about 3.5- 3.8 billlion years ago.4 What is meant by natural selection? Sometimes it is called the survival of the fittest. But what it really means in common usage is that the organisms that are most fit will leave their genes in the most offspring. In short the most fit plants and animals are the ones that leave the most offspring. Those that leave more surviving offspring are more fit. This theory of evolution says for example, that if a random mutation occurs in a gene that happens to increase the fitness of one member of a population. Because it is more fit, then it will be more likely survive and leave its offspring behind. So, mutations in the genes of living things are the raw material of evolution. When a mutation occurs that helps an animal survive in its ecosystem better than others 4 then natural selection will sort of lock that gene into the population. If the gene is beneficial enough then it will, over a period of years, end up being present in every member of that population as the individuals that have the beneficial gene outcompete the ones that don’t. Now, because living things can’t tolerate massive changes in their genes all at once, evolution is necessarily very gradual and slow. It is beyond dispute that organisms have changed over time. The real question is how much have they changed over time? And in what direction are they changing over time? There are two ways to understand evolution. They are Microevolution and Macroevolution: Microevolution, refers to smaller evolutionary changes within a species or population. This kind of change happens. This ought not surprise Christians that God created tremendous potential for variability in the genes of animals. We can observe these changes sometimes in the wild or in laboratory experiments. An example of this genetic potential would have been found in the ancestor of dogs and wolves. Sometime after the time that ancient wolves left Noah’s ark people began to tame them. Then they began to breed out characteristics that made them lousy companions, and the result is the many breeds of dog that now exist. All of the characteristics (and maybe more) of all the breeds of contemporary dogs, from St. Bernards to English Bulldogs, were pre-existent in the ancestors that Noah took on the ark (with the exception of those characteristics that been degraded because of mutations). Those canines that Noah had on the ark were very similar to wolves. But all of these changes are to genes that were already present. No new genes have come into existence that we know of in any dog breed.