Evolution Believed

Comment by Dave Haigler

Section V(C) of the 1982 Arkansas case of creation science vs. evolution science (McLean v. Arkansas Board of Education) said that if evolution were as religious as creationism was, the remedy would be to remove them both from the public schools rather than give equal time to them as the creationists were asking.  The fact that this dictum has been ignored points to one of the great sleepers of the past century - and that is that evolution, or at least macro-evolution, is an article of faith.  The creationists were so busy trying to prove that creationism was scientific that they forgot to prove that evolution is religious, and that is the reason they lost the Arkansas case as well as the later Louisiana case.  That is why, as well, they will lose the current Pennsylvania case where they are trying to prove that "intelligent design" is scientific. 

I say "at least macro."  What does that mean?  It means that micro-evolution has been scientifically proven, whereas macro-evolution remains a theory, 140 years after Darwin's Origin of Species.  Micro-evolution is a study of how, within species, small changes can occur over generations in adapting to the environment.  Studies of fruit flies show this, because fruit flies reproduce very quickly, and the changes can be seen very promptly, in time for a scholarly paper to be written in a university.  However, no one has lived long enough to observe whether an ape evolves into a man.  All science can do, for example, is present a sequence of pictures starting with less-developed monkeys, progressing to more-developed monkeys, followed by another sequence of pictures, speculating what a less-developed human may have looked like, and progressing to whatever we think the highest form of humanity might be.  But all this sequence of pictures can do is present a theory that one end of the series of pictures led to the other end.

All the so-called proof for evolution is nothing more than intelligent speculation about hypotheses.  Fossils in sedimentary layers of rock are an example.  The hypothesis here is that it took millions of years for these successive layers to deposit themselves, and therefore millions of years separate life frozen into a lower layer from life preserved in a higher layer.  However, cataclysmic events have created similar successive layers and have caught living beings that become fossils straddled between these multiple layers of strata. 

Another example of intelligent speculation is carbon dating, sometimes called radiometric dating - the process of determining the half-life of atomic matter and measuring how deteriorated a particle is, and thus extrapolating back to however long it was before it was half gone - resulting in millions of years.  However, this system of time measurement overlooks the assumption in the book of Genesis in the Bible that Adam & Eve were created as adults.  This assumption is called "apparent age" in scientific literature, and dates back at least to 1863.  The logic of carbon dating, as applied by scientific method to Adam and Eve, would be to determine how old they were when someone first observed them, and then extrapolate their origin back that same number of years.  All the scientific method could have done with Adam & Eve, assuming it had been around at the time Cain & Abel were born without knowing about creation, is to:

   1. observe, first, that Adam & Eve appear to be, say, 25 years old,
   2. observe, second, that no person has ever lived without being born, and therefore
   3. hypothesize that, third, Adam & Eve must have had parents who bore them around 25 years previously.  But that wouldn't prove anything; it would only be a hypothesis. 

So what do we say to people who stoutly proclaim they "believe in evolution?"  We simply say, "exactly!  I agree - you believe!" 

The answer is not to pass more laws requiring people to believe something different, because our constitution's first amendment prevents the government from requiring any form of belief over another.  Rather, the answer is to encourage the development of knowledge unshackled by the hypotheses of the past.  And part of that answer is to recognize that scholars who reject God need some kind of explanation for where they came from that excludes God.  That is why they will seize upon something like the theory of evolution to believe in.  It eliminates God, in their thinking, or at least projects Him back so many millions or billions of years ago that they don't have to think about Him very much.