Neanderthals: Support for Evolution?

Dear hijas,

Are Neanderthals support for evolution? For many years they were proclaimed as such. The truth of the matter however, bears some interesting details. The bones of what would be labeled ‘Neanderthal’ were first discovered in 1856 from the quarrying of limestone in a valley about 10 miles east of Düsseldorf, Germany.

The valley was named after Joachem Neander, an evangelical (Lutheran) theologian and school rector who lived in the late 1600’s. He loved to take walks in this valley, and as he strolled along he would compose hymns and sing them in praise to God. He was there so often, the valley became known as the Neanderthal–the Neander Valley (tal or thal in Old German means “valley”, the h being silent).

It was a couple hundred years later that the valley was owned by a Herr von Beckersdorf, and as owner of the valley his workmen quarrying the limestone found a cave. The cave was known as Feldhofer Grotto, and it was there that a skullcap, some ribs, part of the pelvis, and some limb bones were discovered. These bones were taken and analyzed by several different individuals in the ensuing years , and it was William King, professor of anatomy at Queen’s College, Galway, Ireland, who reading an evolutionary history into the bones, gave them their first scientific name, Homo neanderthalensis. This is significant, because King believed the bones represented a person so primitive that he didn’t even belong to the same species as modern humans.

More fossils were found in later years in different places, and today, because of the richness of the Neanderthal fossil record we have a general idea of what they looked like. In fact, there is a distinct Neanderthal morphology: large cranial capacity; skull shape low, broad, and elongated; rear of the skull pointed with a bun; large heavy browridges; low forehead, etc. They do differ somewhat from a typical modern human, but they also overlap. What we come to find out is that they should have never been placed in a separate taxonomic status. They are completely human, descended from Adam and Eve as our first parents, just like we are. The same can be said about Cro-Magnon man.

Neanderthals were ‘otherized’, but they shouldn’t have been. They buried their dead with distinct mortuary practice, butchered and quartered their prey animals in the hunt for food, used stone and bone tools (purposeful chipping at stone like a sculptor would), created rock art and musical instruments from bone, and have a record of tender care for debilitated individuals. In life and death they were so very human.

What must be remembered, mis hijas, is that ever since Darwin, evolutionists have sought to discover the path by which humans arose from their alleged primate ancestors. Coupled with this is the attempt at an explanation of the path that our own species, Homo sapiens, arose. Neanderthals were supposed to be on that path. Today, there are a couple of views in evolutionary circles about the Neanderthals. Evolutionists have changed their story and now mostly believe that they were an isolated side branch of the family tree.

But what about the “dating”, you might ask? “Neanderthals are supposed to be several hundred thousand years old, becoming extinct some 30,000-35,000 years ago”, you might say. “What about that, nuestros padre?”

Ah, yes, the “dating” game. Stay tuned mis hijas.

Vaya con Dios mis hijas,

Dear ol’ Dad

Frauds in the Rise of the Apemen

Dear hijas,

Have you ever heard of Piltdown Man?

Perhaps you studied him at university in your anthropology classes or in your high school biology textbooks in the sections on evolution. Turns out he was a hoax, a fraud. Perpetuated for over 40 years as a ‘missing link’ in the human evolutionary chain it was a very successful hoax indeed; a combination of ape and human bones labeled Eoanthropus dawsoni after Charles Dawson the medical doctor and amateur paleontologist who in 1912 discovered a mandible (lower jaw) and part of a skull in a gravel pit in Piltdown, England.

Here’s the story. The jawbone was apelike but had teeth that showed similar wear to that of humans. The skull, on the other hand, was very humanlike. The two specimens were combined, together with other pieces of skull, and later a canine tooth in the Piltdown gravel pit and surrounding area, and this combination was called ‘Dawn Man’. He was calculated to be 500, 000 years old.

Turns out the whole thing was an elaborate hoax. The skull was indeed human (but only about 500 years old), the jawbone was that of an orangutan whose teeth had been obviously filed down to crudely resemble the human wear pattern, and the canine tooth discovered 3 months later had been filed down so far it had exposed the pulp chamber, which was then filled in to hide the mischief.

The fraud was likely committed by only one or two persons, (a dozen different individuals have been named as the likely culprit or culprits) whether Dawson or someone else, nobody knows, but the fascinating thing is that the hoax lasted for over 40 years! It was only in 1982 that the mandible and canine tooth were determined conclusively, by collagen reactions, to be those of an orangutan.

The literature produced on Piltdown Man was huge. Perhaps as many as 500 doctoral dissertations were written on Piltdown. Thinking they were writing and perhaps seeing actual fossils of their evolutionary ancestors ‘proving’ the human evolutionary chain, they were really writing and looking at a hoax. Sir Arthur Keith, perhaps one of the greatest anatomists of the twentieth century, and writing about Piltdown more than anyone (see his The Antiquity of Man), was completely conned. Keith had put his faith in Piltdown. At 86 years old he was at home when he was told that the fossil he had trusted in for more than 40 years was a fraud. His Autobiography tells of  his attending evangelistic meetings and seeing students make a public profession of faith in Jesus Christ, and often feeling ‘on the verge of conversion.’ Sadly, he had rejected the gospel in large part to faith in a phony fossil and the human evolutionary chain it supposedly was part of.

The widespread myth, mis hijas, is that science is a superior worldview because of its self-correcting nature. In reality, it’s not all that self-correcting in any meaningful way as the Piltdown Hoax has demonstrated. Science as a tool, practiced in light of God’s revelation in Scripture, is very powerful to explain the means that our Creator upholds and sustains His Creation; science as practiced by unregenerate men and women looking to explain their origins apart from God, is fraught with hoaxes, frauds, and errors.

As always, I remain,

Dear ol’ Dad

Vaya con Dios mis hijas

Rise of the Apemen: The Australopithecines

Dear hijas,

The supposed human evolutionary chain starts with the fossil apes. Evolutionary paleoanthropologists in accordance with their evolutionary assumptions begin with the presupposition that man has, in fact, evolved from apes. The only question paramount in their thinking is “From which apes did man evolve?” They are looking for any anatomical feature that looks ‘intermediate’ between that of apes and that of man in the fossil record. Fossil apes having such features are declared to be ancestral to man and are called hominids. Any similarity between what is found in the ground as a fossilized extinct ape and the bones of living men, are then proclaimed as “proof” of our ape ancestry.

But what is the evidence? Is there an unbroken and identifiable progression of development in the fossil record from the australopithecines like “Lucy” through Homo habilis through Homo erectus through early Homo sapiens (and/or Neanderthals) to anatomically modern Homo sapiens? Evolutionists like to think so, but what are we really looking at?

In the case of “Lucy”, we’re looking at an extinct ape, most likely an extinct chimpanzee. There is nothing in Lucy’s bones that indicate she is a transition between apes and humans. She has an obvious ape skull, obvious ape pelvis, and obvious ape hands and feet. Her long arms are common to knuckle-walkers with locking wrists. Her feet, like her hands, are long, curved, and heavily muscled, much like those of living tree-dwelling primates.

If humans evolved from a chimp-like animal such as “Lucy”, it is obvious that we had to pass through a number of stages on this long evolutionary journey. We are classified as Homo sapiens. Lucy is classified as Australopithecus afarensis. Not only are we said to come from some form that was not our species, but we are said to come from some form that was not even our genus. Theoretically, the progression (from Australopithecus afarensis or Australopithecus africanus through to modern Homo sapiens) looks tidy, but it is anything but.

Lucy is dated by evolutionists at 3 million years. Homo habilis at 2 to 1.5 million years. Homo erectus at 1.6 to 0.4 million years, with early Homo sapiens and anatomically modern Homo sapiens in the last hundred thousand years or so. This sequencing implies genus to species and species to species development that could take up to 1 million years between the classifications. Since the evolution of one genus to species, or one species to another would require many favorable genetic mutations (the existence of a ‘favorable’ mutation has yet to be conclusively demonstrated), it becomes obvious that evolution requires vast periods of time even on the species level and even “if” several advantageous genes were being dispersed throughout the population at the same time.

If evolution were true, we have the right to expect that the hominid fossil record would faithfully follow the time and morphology sequence set forth by evolutionists, don’t we? We are supposed to have evolved from something very similar to Lucy, something very dissimilar to what we are today, so we have the right to expect that very modern-looking fossils would not embarrass the evolutionist by showing up in ancient times and that primitive or archaic fossils would not embarrass the evolutionist by showing up in modern times. We also have the right to expect that if a significant number of fossils are so rude to show up at the wrong time, the evolutionist would be honest enough to admit that his theory of human evolution has been falsified, correct? In actuality, many fossils have been that rude, and evolutionists have been less than intellectually honest.

Vaya con Dios mis hijas,

Dear ol’ Dad

The Rise of the Apemen: Support for Evolution?

Dear hijas,

People are fascinated by the story of their origins. We want to know where we came from, how we got to be who we are. On the one hand is the evolution myth, that humans find their origin in an unidentified apelike creature that lived millions of years ago and this from tracing a lineage back to a single-celled organism that allegedly lived billions of years ago. On the other hand is the Creator God Himself, who has revealed to us in propositional form (the Scriptures) that He created everything that exists, out of nothing (ex nihilo), including man, and that man was made in the very image of God. This propositional revelation tells us that we are not apes who have evolved over time, but a special creation of the Creator, the altogether grand other, the infinite, omnipotent, and sovereign Elohim. A man’s own nature tells him that this God exists, and he is held accountable for accepting or rejecting this knowledge within and about him.

Does what you believe about who you are (your origins) influence the way you live and view those around you? Do you think that if you view yourself as nothing more than an intelligent ape, kicked up slowly over millions of years from the primordial pond scum, that you might act like an ape (animal) in daily living? That this belief (that we are no more than an intelligent animal), might express itself in lawless animal behavior? (An interesting side-note is what the Nazi’s did based on this belief, but we’ll save that for later).

For years we’ve been taught that human evolution is fact and that the human evolutionary chain contains “links” of fossil skulls and fragments of bone that “prove” our progression from a supposed apelike creature several million years ago. We’ve heard accounts that “Lucy” and “Ida”, and others, are the missing links, now found, that show how this is true. We’ve watched TV documentaries like the BBC Walking with Cavemen (2003), or National Geographic’s The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey (2003), or The Mystery of Us (2005).

But what is the real evidence for human evolution? What evidence are we not hearing? Are these purported claims of presumed ape ancestry “proof” of evolution? Far from it, and what we will see as we examine the details is that anthropologists are either making man out of a monkey, or making monkeys out of men. The evidence will point to the conclusion that man is a unique creation of God, and made in His image.

Vaya con Dios mis hijas,

Dear ol’ Dad

Short and Long-Period Comets: Support for Evolution?

Dear hijas,

What do you know about comets? Dirty snowballs or hairy stars, perhaps? They have been observed for millennia and are often considered quite mysterious. Wikipedia describes them as:

an icy small Solar System body (SSSB) that, when close enough to the Sun, displays a visible coma (a thin, fuzzy, temporary atmosphere) and sometimes also a tail. These phenomena are both due to the effects of solar radiation and the solar wind upon the nucleus of the comet. Comet nuclei range from a few hundred meters to tens of kilometers across and are composed of loose collections of ice, dust, and small rocky particles. Comets have been observed since ancient times.

What do you know about their orbital period; the time it takes them to make one revolution around the sun? Astronomers put this orbital period into two categories: short-period comets (less than 200 years), and long-period comets (longer than 200 years). Halley’s Comet, for example, has an orbital period of 75-76 years. It was last seen in 1986 and won’t return again until 2061 or 2062.

Each time a comet passes the Sun, they lose some of their mass. We can observe that this is happening in the ‘coma’ and ‘tail’ of the comets. Since comets consist of dust and ‘ice’, and this ice is not just frozen water, but frozen ammonia, methane and CO2, some of the ‘ice’ evaporates at it makes this close pass. This observed loss rate combined with a comet’s maximum orbital period means comets could not have been orbiting the sun for the supposed billions of years that evolution requires. Remember, evolution is a three-stranded cord: cosmological, geological, and biological. Or think of a three-legged stool. You knock one of the legs out, the stool falls over. Biological evolution is seriously eroded , and indeed, a non-starter, if cosmological or geological evidences within the universe indicate that it can’t possibly be billions and millions of years old.

“But wait, we’re missing something here,” you might say. “You haven’t given us all the information.” “What if both short and long-period comets have a natural source that is consistent with billions of years?”

Ah, yes, that’s a good question. Comets are assumed to be primordial. They are assumed to be leftovers from the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago, and specifically to the formation of our solar system 4.6 billion years ago. Astronomers have long seen the continued existence of comets today as a problem. They should have all burned out by now. So, what is an evolutionist to do? She doesn’t want any of the legs of her stool to fall over, so she postulates an ad-hoc, unobserved, and theoretical source of those comets we see today from the Oort Cloud.

Jan Oort, a Dutch astronomer, proposed a large spherical cloud of comet nuclei that formed early in the history of the Solar System. This Oort cloud is supposed to be at a large distance from the Sun, putting the comet nuclei too far away to be observed. Theoretically, the Solar System is 4.6 billion years old, thus comets formed at that time and currently residing in this Oort Cloud are supposedly and occasionally knocked and bumped by gravitational effects of other stars into an orbit that takes them around the Sun. But here’s the problem; this Oort Cloud is only theoretical. It’s never been observed. It has no empirical observational proof of its very existence and is completely ad-hoc (for a specific purpose only; lacking justification).

“But what about the Kuiper Belt”, you say. “Astronomers have discovered objects, called Kuiper Belt Objects (KBO’s) beyond the orbits of Neptune and Pluto, and this could be the source of comets consistent with a billions of years old universe.”

Well, yes, evolutionary astronomers, who assume the solar system is billions of years old, must propose a ‘source’ that will supply new comets as old ones are destroyed. The Kuiper Belt is one such proposed source for short-period comets. But there are a couple of things to keep in mind. One, an estimated billion icy cores in the Kuiper Belt would be needed to replenish the solar system’s supply, whereas only ‘several hundred’ KBO’s have actually been observed, and two, the KBO’s that have been observed have nuclei that are far larger than comet nuclei. This calls into question whether these KBO’s are actual precursors of short-period comets at all.

Bottom line, mis hijas, comets are powerful testimony to a universe that is not billions and millions of years old. They can’t possibly be losing material for the supposed billions and millions of years that the evolutionary timeframe requires, and the supposed sources are either ad-hoc, or seriously in question. Be sure to tell your Momma and I’s grandkids and great- grandkids in 2061 when you see Halley’s comet again what a wondrous Creator we serve, and what amazing testimony a comet truly is!

For further study, please see here: http://creation.com/comets-and-the-age-of-the-solar-system, and http://creation.com/kuiper-belt-objects-solution-to-short-period-comets.

As always, I remain,

Dear ol’ Dad

Vaya con Dios mis hijas!

Bioluminescence: Support for Evolution?

Dear hijas,

Though research on bioluminescence recently garnered a Nobel Prize, the phenomenon is still poorly understood, according to a new paper reviewing recent discoveries about bioluminescence’s benefits, its evolution, and the surprising diversity of ways plants and animals generate glowing substances.

The above quote is from a National Geographic article on bioluminescence. Notice the phrase “the phenomenon is still poorly understood”. What? I thought evolution was supposed to be able to explain it all. How did an organism ‘evolve’ the ability to produce its own light? Answer: scientists poorly understand it. What an understatement.

The reason they ‘poorly understand it’, and what they don’t tell you, is that they can’t make their supposed ‘tree of life’ work very well from a supposed common ancestor who first evolved bioluminescence and then supposedly should have passed it along. They assume a tree of life and assume there should be a natural pattern that can be detected, but what they find is that bioluminescence is scattered haphazardly among dozens of totally different life forms.

The list of bioluminescent creatures includes bacteria, fungi, jellyfish, sea worms, sea slugs, clams, squid, roundworms, beetles, isopods (an order of crustacean that includes woodlice and pillbugs), ostracods (a class of crustacean sometimes known as seed shrimp), copepods (small crustaceans found in the sea and nearly every freshwater habitat), shrimp, centipedes, millipedes, sea stars, crinoids (sometimes called ‘sea lilies’), fish, sharks, tunicates (marine filter feeders), and many other less familiar living things.

Evolutionists organize all of these basic forms into the preconceived tree of life, yet admit that:

The distribution of bioluminescence across the major taxonomic groups does not appear to follow any obvious phylogenetic or oceanographic constraint. (Haddock, S.H.D., M.A. Moline, and J.F. Case. 2010. Bioluminescence in the Sea. Annual Review of Marine Science. 2 (2010): 443-493)

There is a huge mismatch between theory and reality here. They must cling to the unlikely conclusion that bioluminescence has evolved 40-50 times among extant organisms. A question that immediately comes to mind is “If bioluminescence evolved so often in the past, then why is it not evolving today?”

What better explanation, in remembering the Creator-creature distinction, that it was the Creator who built bioluminescence into just those creatures He wished. It is Christ Himself in His work of creation (John 1:3, Colossians 1:16) who should get the credit, and not the non-directed blind chance of evolution.

For further study please see here: http://creation.com/octopus-suckers-glowing-in-the-dark.

Vaya con Dios mis hijas,

Dear ol’ Dad

C-14 Decay: Support for Evolution?

Dear hijas,

Take C-14 for example. C-14 or radiocarbon is a perfect example of a physical aspect of our universe that is scientifically determined and analyzed. From your chemistry classes you remember that the element carbon comes in three isotopes: C-12, C-13, and C-14. The carbon atom has 6 protons, but it is the number of neutrons that determine the isotope. C-12 then has 6 protons and 6 neutrons, C-13 has 6 protons and 7 neutrons, C-14 has 6 protons and 8 neutrons.  During life both plants and animals, including you and I, are gaining and losing C-14; plants chiefly through CO2 in the air, animals chiefly through eating the plants. When an organism dies, it no longer gains C-14, but only loses it.

The production of C-14 in the universe follows an ordered principle or law whereby cosmic rays trigger a process in the atmosphere that changes atmospheric nitrogen into C-14. This carbon in the atmosphere mostly becomes attached to oxygen formed carbon dioxide (CO2) . The CO2 includes the stable, common isotope C-12 and a very tiny amount of the unstable C-14; only about 1 in a trillion carbon atoms is a C-14 atom. Carbon dioxide is then ingested by plants and animals and is incorporated into their biological structures, and it stops at the time of death of the organism. It can be seen in the chart below:

Unlike C-12 and C-13, C-14 is unstable and eventually decays back into nitrogen. Once a plant or organism dies it no longer takes in new carbon, and the amount of C-14 in the tissue of the plant or animal begins to decrease. This decay rate can be measured as the ratio of the isotopes C14/C12. It is expressed in terms of a half-life, which is the amount of time for half of any given sample of C-14 to decay back into nitrogen. Thus, after one half-life, 50% of the original C-14 atoms will remain in the sample. After two half-lives, 25% of the original C-14 atoms will remain, three half-lives 12.5%, 4 half-lives 6.25%, and so on. The scientifically measured half-life today of C-14 is 5730 years.

So how does this support evolution and its millions and millions of years? It doesn’t; C-14 decay actually supports just the opposite. It supports a relatively young (thousands, not billions and millions) age for the dead organisms found in the rock layers of the earth, thus eliminating the vast long ages required for evolution to even happen. We can see this in a number of examples.

We must remember the half-life, right? C-14 half-life = 5730 years. After 18 half-lives, or a little more than 100,000 years, the percentage of C14/C12 in any given sample is undetectable by our most sensitive scientific instruments. The implications here are huge! Since each half-life is 5730 years, this means that no C-14 at all would be detectable in a specimen that is older than 18 X 5730 = 103,140 years. But what if we did find C-14 in, let’s say, a dinosaur bone, or coal, or seashells? These are formerly living organisms. Dinosaurs supposedly went extinct 65 millions years ago. Coal is thought to be hundreds of millions of years old. Some seashells supposedly date back even further. Wouldn’t detectable C-14 in these specimens tell us these things couldn’t possibly be older than 100,000 years? It certainly suggests it, doesn’t it?

But, not only that, what if we found detectable C-14 in something supposedly billions of years old? How could something supposedly billions of years old have any C-14 left? It shouldn’t, except that we do find detectable C-14 even in diamonds supposedly billions of years old. These examples throw the whole dating system upon which evolution is based into a futile exercise of whack-a-mole. The actual, detectable C-14 in specimens supposedly millions and billions of years old keeps popping up to disprove the old dates they’ve been given by the evolutionists. C-14 decay is a valuable tool in our arsenal, mis hijas, and is just one of many proofs to disembowel long evolutionary ages.

For further study I encourage you to visit: http://www.icr.org/article/117/, http://creation.com/carbon-14-dating-explained-in-everyday-terms, http://creation.com/diamonds-a-creationists-best-friend, http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/nab/does-c14-disprove-the-bible.

Vaya con Dios mis hijas,

Dear ol’ Dad

Evolution and Millions and Billions of Years: A three-stranded braid

Dear hijas,

We must remember in our discussions here, that Darwinian evolution and millions of years go together. Evolution, as it is defined today, would not be possible without the vast ages of time for slow and gradual step-by-step modification from one species to the next through many, many transitions; all happening by non-directed blind chance through death and struggle.

Evolution and an old earth, or the necessity for an old earth, are two sides of the same coin. The biological side of the coin representing the millions and millions of year of biodiversity of life, and the geological side of the coin representing millions and millions, in fact ‘billions’, of years of earth development in the rocks.

But we cannot forget the cosmological side of things, can we?. Think of a braid. When hair or rope is braided, it is common to take three sections and weave them together into one, isn’t it? This is exactly the picture we must think of when talking about evolution; a three-stranded braid or cord. One section of the braid is the cosmological side with it’s billions of years of star and planet formation, another section is the geological side with its billions of years of strata development in the rocks of the earth, the last section is the biological side with its millions of years of plant and animal development from lower to higher forms through mutation and natural selection, death and struggle.

So it is with an old universe (billions of years), an old earth (billions of years), and evolution (millions of years). Evolution needs an old earth. An old earth needs an old universe. They are inseparably linked. We must not forget this. If it turns out that the universe and earth are relatively young (thousands not billions of years), evolution as it is currently defined, would not be possible, and would fall dead on arrival; it would not have even been proferred let alone gained any traction in the minds of men.

Whether speaking with a non-Christian, (or Christian who has accepted the claims of evolution; theistic evolutionist), we must remember the implicit acceptance of the millions and billions of years associated with an old universe and old earth behind the actual claims of the biological development of life on earth. It is critical that we not forget this. The evolutionary system of thought should always be thought of as a three-stranded braid or cord; cosmological, geological, and biological.

Thus, in what is to follow in future posts, we will be dealing with not only the biological side of evolution, but its cosmological and geological sides as well.

Vaya con Dios mis hijas,

Dear ol’ Dad

Did God Create or Evolutiate?

Dear hijas,

Your sister has suggested I start a series on creation vs. evolution; specifically the evidences from the natural world that show scientifically how evolution is a non-starter and can’t possibly be true.

You’ll notice I coined an imaginary word in the title: evolutiate. For purposes of our discussion, I mean by this term, in contrast to create, that God used the process of evolution to bring about the universe and all of the biodiversity of life on this planet. Thus specifically, did God create ex nihilo (out of nothing) and de novo (afresh, from the beginning), or did He evolutiate stars and planets from a singularity and life from non-life over billions and millions of years? This last view is called theistic evolution.

Evolutionist D.J. Futuyma has clearly stated the issue here:

Creation and evolution, between them, exhaust the possible explanations for the origin of living things. Organisms either appeared on the earth fully developed or they did not. If they did not, they must have developed from pre-existing species by some process of modification. If they did appear in a fully developed state, they must have been created by some omnipotent intelligence. (D. J. Futuyma, ‘Science on Trial’, Pantheon Books, New York, 1983).

To move our discussion along, we must have a proper definition of evolution. Evolution as we will use it is the “descent with modification”, or “descent from a common ancestor” model. Starting with single-celled organisms, life supposedly followed a chain of development from marine invertebrates, to chordates, to fish, to early reptiles and amphibians, to various stages of mammals, and finally through various hominids to modern Homo sapiens. This enormous chain of development was brought about by time, chance, struggle, and death, without any help from a supernatural ‘god’ or an ‘intelligent designer’. Mutation and natural selection accomplished everything.

We must remember that the evolutionary system arose and was elaborated on by those wishing to replace the Christian concept of special creation. Evolution is a replacement paradigm. It sought, in its original objective, to do away with Christianity once and for all. In this it is more of a philosophical system than a scientific one; a faith-based belief system with religious dogma like any other system of thought. Dr. Michael Ruse, one of evolution’s chief spokesmen has candidly admitted the following:

Evolution is promoted by its practitioners as more than mere science. Evolution is promulgated as an ideology, a secular religion–a full-fledged alternative to Christianity, with meaning and morality. I am an ardent evolutionist and an ex-Christian, but I must admit that in this one complaint…the literalists are absolutely right. Evolution is a religion. This was true of evolution in the beginning, and it is true of evolution still today. (Michael Ruse, ‘Saving Darwin from the Darwinians’, National Post, May 13, 2000, as quoted in John Morris and Frank Sherwin, ‘The Fossil Record: Unearthing Nature’s History of Life’, Institute for Creation Research, Dallas, TX 2010)

With that as backdrop to our discussion, we will compare and contrast the claims of evolution with that of a special creation ex nihilo by God. We will run the gamut of cosmological, geological, and biological claims by evolution that God has nothing to do with our existence, doesn’t even exist in and of Himself, and has no claims on how we live our lives here on earth. We will touch on the compromising and accommodationist positions of those within the Church whose views distort and twist the clear meaning of Scripture on its foundational doctrine of creation. We will see how God’s revelation to man on how He did it is paramount to the gospel we preach to fallen sinners.

As always, I remain,

Dear ol’ Dad

Vaya con Dios mis hijas