Refutation of “Evolution: A Fairy Tale for Grownups” – Questions 71 – 80
Fill in the blank question: Malcom Muggeridge, British philosopher, wrote, “I myself am convinced that the theory of evolution, especially the extent to which it has been applied, will be one of the _________.” Comfort answers “the great jokes in the history books of the future.”(Source: Pascal Lectures, University of Waterloo Research, The Advocate, March 8, 1984, p. 17)
“evolutionary experts” and right here, Comfort provides a quote from a non-biologist. Muggeridge was a philosopher, not a scientist.
“When it comes to the Origin of Life there are only two possibilities: creation or spontaneous generation. There is no third way. Spontaneous generation was disproved one hundred years ago, but that leads us to only one other conclusion, that of supernatural creation. We cannot accept that on philosophical grounds; therefore, we choose to believe the impossible: that life arose spontaneously by chance!”(Source: Prominent evolutionist George Wald (Harvard University biochemist and Nobel Laureate), “The Origin of Life,” Scientific American, May 1954)
There IS a third option: abiogenesis. George Wald did not know the depth of research we have uncovered regarding this field. Wald has a very good excuse, Ray Comfort on the other hand (who has access to this proof and data) has no excuse. Rather, Comfort pretends that all the evidence for abiogenesis is nonexistent and refuses to learn about any of it.
True or False question: the Second law of Thermodynamics says that the amount of usable energy in the universe is becoming less and less. Comfort answers “True” and goes on to say “essentially this means that things will eventually ‘wear out.’ The universe is not eternal; it had a beginning, and will wear out. Twenty-five hundred years before the birth of modern
science, when the brightest thinkers were confident that the universe was eternal, the Bible said that the universe would ‘wear out’: “…the heavens are the work of Your hands. They will perish, but You remain; they will all wear out like an old garment” (Psalm 102:25,26, NIV)
eternal. Whether it is or is not is irrelevant to the science of hos
life diversified (i.e. evolution).
“The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that ‘in all energy exchanges, if no energy enters or leaves the system, the potential energy of the state will always be less than that of the initial state.’ This is also commonly referred to as entropy. A watchspring-driven watch will run until the potential energy in the spring is converted, and not again until energy is reapplied to the spring to rewind it. A car that has run out of gas will not run again until you walk 10 miles to a gas station and refuel the car. Once the potential energy locked in carbohydrates is converted into kinetic energy (energy in use or motion), the organism will get no more until energy is input again. In the process of energy transfer, some energy will dissipate as heat. Entropy is a measure of disorder: cells are not disordered and so have low entropy. The flow of energy maintains order and life. Entropy wins when organisms cease to take in energy and die.” (Source: Michael J. Farabee, Ph.D., Online Biology Book, 2007 www.emc.maricopa.edu/faculty/farabee/BIOBK/BioBookEner1.html)
True or False question: the biblical description of creation and the Darwinian theory of evolution are compatible. Comfort answers “False” and goes on to say the
following: “the Bible says that man was made in the image of God, that every animal brought forth “according to their kinds” (Genesis 1:21) and that “men have one kind of flesh, animals have another, birds another and fish another”(1 Corinthians 15:39)
“A variation of the theme of evolution is theistic evolution. It states that God initiated life on earth and allowed evolutionary principles to bring man to where he is–maybe with a little help from God here and there. At least this theory includes God. But this theory was developed in part by Bible believing people who thought that evolution had some merit. In addition, it is an attempt to answer the many problems existing not only in the fossil record but also with how life could somehow randomly form out of nothing. Because of problems like this, some believe they can be explained by simply adding God to the picture: God directed evolution.
For those who hold to the Bible as the word of God, theistic evolution should not be a viable option. The Bible says, “Know that the LORD is God. It is he who made us…” (Psalm 100:3). The Scriptures state that God created. God said, “Let there be…” and there was. The Scriptures speak of the creative word of God. When God speaks, it occurs. He said “Let there be” and it was so. It does not say, “Let there be a slow development through an evolutionary process.”
God said in Genesis 1:26, “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” The Hebrew word for “make” in this verse, and in verse 25 where God makes the beasts, is “asah.” It means to do, work, make, produce. This is not simply the limited Hebrew understanding of evolutionary principles.
The land animals were made differently than man. The animals were made from the ground, but man was made directly by God: “the LORD God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being” (Gen. 2:7). Evolution states that man evolved from life forms that developed in the ocean. Here, God made man from the dust of the ground–not the water of the ocean.
If evolution is true and the Bible is true, then how is the formation of Eve explained? She was created out of one of Adam’s ribs (Gen. 2:22). There is no way to explain this if theistic evolution is true; that is, unless you want to say that Eve wasn’t made from Adam’s side. Then, if you do that, you are doubting the very word of God.
Also, Jesus said in Mark 10:6 “But at the beginning of creation God ‘made them male and female.'” The beginning was not evolutionary slime; in the beginning of creation there was Adam and Eve.
Though this information is brief and far from complete, it should be obvious that theistic evolution and the Scriptures cannot be harmonized.”
(Source: Matthew Slick, “Theistic Evolution” www.carm.org/evolution/evtheistic.htm)
“The creation account in Genesis and the theory of evolution could not be reconciled. One must be right
and the other wrong. The story of the fossils agreed with the account of Genesis. In the oldest rocks we did not find a series of fossils covering the gradual changes from the most primitive creatures to developed forms; but rather, in the oldest rocks, developed species suddenly appeared. Between every species there was a complete absence of intermediate fossils.”(Source: D. B. Gower (biochemist), “Scientists Rejects Evolution,” Kentish Times, England, December 11, 1975, p. 4)
Gower is a British chemist, whose belief in god is centered around
“I don’t understand how life formed naturally on Earth, so it must
Here Gower is speaking about the fossil record, a field (geology
and paleontology) he is not trained in.
True or False question: If people and dinosaurs were created at the same time, the word “dinosaur” would appear in the Bible. Comfort answers “false” and adds the following, “The King James bible was translated in 1611, and it wasn’t until 1841 what the word “dinosaur” (from Greek words meaning “terrible lizard”) was invented. Is there another word for “dinosaur”? The Hebrew word translated “dragon” in the KJV Bible appears in the Old Testament some 30 times (e.g. Jer.
51:34; Mal. 1:3). In many contexts these could refer to what we now call dinosaurs. Even Strong’s Concordance lists “dinosaur” as one the meanings of that Hebrew word.(Don Batten, ed., The Answers Book [Green Forrest, AR: Master Books, 2000], p. 243))
“There is a growing body of evidence that dinosaurs and humans were contemporary. In 1970 newspapers reported the discovery of cave paintings in Zimbabwe. The paintings were made by bushmen who ruled that area from about 1500 B.C., until a couple of hundred years ago. Along with accurate representations of the elephant and the giraffe, is a painting of an Apatosaurus (brontosaurus). These art works have greatly puzzled scientists since bushmen are known to have pained from real life. (Source: Bible-Science Newsletter 1970, 2).
About seventy years ago, Dr. Samuel Hubbard, curator of archaeology in the Oakland (California) Museum, discovered dinosaur carvings on the cliff walls of the Hava Supai Canyon in Arizona. One remarkable carving resembles a Tyrannosaurus. Nearby, dinosaur tracks were preserved in the rock surface. (For a picture of this carving, see our book, The Mythology of Modern Geology 1990, 31.)
When the discovery of what appeared to be human footprints, along with dinosaur tracks (in the Paluxy River bed near Glen Rose, Texas), was reported in the May 1939 issue of Natural History, it created a furor that has not subsided to this very day. For decades it seemed obvious to careful observers that this was clear evidence of human/dinosaur co-habitation.” (Source: Wayne Jackson, “Dinosaurs and the Bible,” August 5, 1999 www.christiancourier.com/articles/read/dinosaurs_and_the_bible)
- Most supposed “man tracks” in the riverbed are forms of elongate, metatarsal dinosaur tracks– made by dinosaurs that at times impressed their metatarsi (soles and heels) as they walked. When the digit impressions of such tracks are subdued by mud-collapse, erosion, infilling, or a combination of factors, the remaining metatarsal portions often superficially
resemble human footprints. However, when well cleaned such tracks show definite indications of tridactyl, dinosaurian digit patterns (Kuban, 1986a, 1986b; Hastings, 1987).
- Some of the reputed human prints are erosional features or other natural irregularities. They do not show clear human features without selective highlighting, nor occur in natural striding sequences (Cole et al, 1985).
- A smaller number of alleged “giant man tracks” are carvings on loose blocks of rock (Godfrey, 1985; Kuban and Wilkerson, 1989).
True or False question: Ramapithecus, once widely regarded as an ancestor of humans, has now been
recognized as merely an extinct type of orangutan. Comfort answers “True”Comfort then adds a bit from the Columbia Encyclopedia: “Ramapithecus: an extinct group of primates that lived from about 12 to 14 million years ago, for a time regarded as a possible ancestor of Australopithecus and, therefore, of modern humans.”(Source: The Columbia Encyclopedia).
One fossil does not out rule the dozens of other intermediate fossils discovered in the human lineage, nor does this one fossil falsify genetics (which proves common descent with other primates).
“Although it was generally an apelike creature, Ramapithecus was considered a possible human
ancestor on the basis of the reconstructed jaw and dental characteristics of fragmentary fossils. A complete jaw discovered in 1976 was clearly nonhominid, however, and Ramapithecus is now regarded by many as a member of Sivapthecus, a genus considered to be an ancestor of the orangutan.”(Source: The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition, 2007 www.bartleby.com/65/e-/E-Ramapith.html)
Who said it question: “To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of
light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree possible.”Comfort answers “Charles Darwin”(Source: The Origin of Species).Comfort then says “Darwin later on in his book, explained how he believed it evolved anyway and that the
“absurdity” was just an illusion.”
This is a favorite quote mine of creationists. Here is the very next line,
“Yet reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist; if further, the eye does vary ever so slightly, and the variations be inherited, which is certainly the case; and if any variation or modification in the organ be ever useful to an animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, can hardly be considered real. How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light, hardly concerns us more than how life itself first originated; but I may remark that several facts make me suspect that any sensitive nerve may be rendered sensitive to light, and likewise to those coarser vibrations of the air which produce sound.” (Darwin 1872, 143-144)
Darwin continues with three more pages describing a sequence of plausible intermediate stages between eyelessness and human eyes, giving examples from existing organisms to show that the intermediates are viable.
“The human eye is enormously complicated—a perfect and interrelated system of about 40 individual subsystems, including the retina, pupil, iris, cornea, lens and optic nerve. For instance, he retina has approximately 137 million special cell that respond to light and send messages to the brain. About 130 million of these cell look like rods and handle he black and white vision. The other seven million are cone shaped and allow us to see in color. The retina cells receive light impressions, which are translated to electric pulses and sen to the brain via the optic nerve.
A special section of the brain called the visual cortex interprets the pulses of color, contrast, depth, etc., which allows us to see ‘pictures’ of our world. Incredibly, the eye, optic nerve and visual cortex are totally separated and interpret up to 1.5 million pulse messages a millisecond! It would take dozens of Cray supercomputers programmed perfectly and operating together flawlessly to even get close to performing this task.”
(Source: Lawrence O. Richards, It Couldn’t Just Happen (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, Inc., 1989), pp. 139-140)
“The exquisite order displayed by our scientific understanding of the physical world calls for the divine.”(Source: Vera Kistiakowsky, MIT physicist, quoted in Henry Magenau and Roy Verghese, eds., Cosmos, Bios, Theos (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1992), p. 52)
Divine of what? Krishna? The Great Unga Bunga?
This has no bearing on the theory of evolution. Whether or not there is a god or not, the fact of evolution remains. Just as whether a deity exists or not, gravity remains.
Who said it question: “This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being. Comfort answers “Sir Isaac Newton” (and adds “the father of Science”).(Source: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, Book III, Andrew Motte, trans. (London: H. D. Symonds, 1803), pp. 310-314 www.thenagain.info/Classes/Sources/Newton.html.)
“Professor H.E. Huntley in The Divine Proportion – A Study In Mathematical Beauty, poses the evolutionary puzzle of our aesthetic sense thus: ‘we might begin by asking whether the universal human thirst for beauty serves a useful purpose. Physical hunger and thirst ensure our bodily survival. The sex drive takes care of the survival of the race. Fear has survival value. But – to put the question crudely – what is beauty for? What personal or evolutionary end is met by the appreciation of a rainbow, a flower or a symphony? At first sight, none.’ Huntley suggests that: ‘a part of the answer is that [beauty] serves as a lure to induce the mind to embark on creative activity. Beauty is a bait. [However] This view seems to require the existence of ‘absolute’ beauty, to demand that specimens of beauty antedate the human
perception of them, although beauty in its subjective sense is called into existence only at the moment of its appreciation.’ And this conclusion is fodder for the objective ontological aesthetic design argument. Of course, if our appreciation of beauty does have an evolutionary (efficient) explanation, this does not exclude the possibility that our appreciation is also the result of
(teleological) intelligent design.”(Source: Peter S. Williams, “Intelligent Design, Aesthetics and Design Arguments” http://www.arn.org/docs/williams/pw_idaestheticsanddesignarguments.htm)
“Big bang cosmology as widely believed as has been any theory of the universe in history of Western civilization. It rests, however, on many untested, and in some cases untestable, assumptions. Indeed, the big bang cosmology has become a bandwagon of thought that reflects faith as much as objective truth.”(Source: Geoffrey Burbidge, “Why Only One Big Bang?” Scientific American, Vol. 266, February 1992, p. 120)
We are discussing the theory of evolution. The Big Bang Theory is a subject for cosmology, not biology.
True or False question: Darwin stated the following, “Why, if species have descended from other species
by insensibly fine gradation, do we not everywhere see innumerable transitional forms? Why is not all nature in confusion instead of the species being, as we see them, well defined?”Comfort answers “True”(Source: The Origin of Species (London: John Murray, 1872), pp. 133-134)
“We do not have any available fossil group which can categorically be claimed to be the ancestor of any other group. We do not have in the fossil record any specific point of divergence of one form for another, and generally each of the major life groups has restrained its fundamental structural and physiological characteristics throughout its life history and has been conservative in habitat.”(Source: G. S. Carter (Professor, Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, England), Structure and Habit in Vertebrate Evolution (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1967)
“Paleontologists had long been aware of a seeming contradiction between Darwin’s postulate of gradualism…and the actual findings of paleontology. Following phyletic lines through time seemed to reveal only minimal gradual changes but no clear evidence for any change of a species into a different genus or for the gradual origin oh an evolutionary novelty. Anything truly novel always seemed to appear quite abruptly in the fossil record.”(Source: E. Mayr, One Long Argument: Charles Darwin and the Genesis of Modern Evolutionary Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 138)
Which famous newspaper reported the following: “Piltdown Man Hoax Exposed.” Comfort answers “The
New York Times” (November 21, 1953).Comfort goes on to say the article stated, “Part of the skull of the Piltdown man, one of the most famous fossil skulls in the world, has been declared a hoax by authorities at the British Natural History Museum” www.pbs.org/wgbh/aso/databank/entries/do53pi.html
“Piltdown Man (Eoanthropus Dawsoni) was once thought to be a ‘missing link’ between man and ape. The first Piltdown fragments were discovered in 1912. Thereafter, over 500 scientific essays were written on the Piltdown Man in a 40-year period. The discovery was proven to be a deliberate hoax in 1953.Piltdown Mann consisted of two human skulls, an orangutan jaw, an elephant molar, hippopotamus tooth, and a canine tooth from a chimpanzee. Sir Kenneth Oakley has determined the human skulls to be approximately 620 years old. They may have belonged to Ona Indians from Patagonia, as the skulls were unusually thick. Thick skulls are a common trait among Ona Indians. The orangutan jaw is around 500 years old, perhaps from Sarawek. The elephant molar is thought to have come from Malta or perhaps Sicily. The canine tooth belonged to a Pleistoncene Chimpanzee.The Piltdown remains were purposefully scattered around a quarry in Piltdown, England, so that they could be ‘discovered’ later as evidence for evolution and the development of man from ape. The skulls had been treated with acid. All of the fossil remains were stained with an iron sulfate solution. The canine tooth was painted brown and patched with bubble gum. The molars were filed down. The portion of the orangutan jaw that connected the jaw to its skull was carefully broken so as not to show evidence that this jaw did not belong to a human skull.”(Source: “Piltdown Man: Test All Data,” All About Creation www.allaboutcreation.org/piltdown-man.htm)
Before Piltdown man was discovered to be a hoax, how old was it estimated too be? Comfort answers “500,000
to one million years old.”Comfort goes to to say according to PBS, “At the time, the skullcap was still believed to be about 500,000 years old. In 1959, however, the recently discovered carbon-14 dating technique was used to show that it was between 520 to 720 years old, the jawbone slightly younger!”(Source: “Piltdown man is revealed as a fake” www.pbs.org/wgbh/aso/databank/entries/do53pi.hyml)
One hoax cannot indicate the inferiority of conventional archeology,
because creationists have several of their own, including Paluxy
footprints, the Calaveras skull, Moab and Malachite Man, and others. More telling is how people deal with these hoaxes. When Piltdown was exposed, it stopped being used as evidence. The creationist hoaxes, however, can still be found cited as if they were real. Piltdown has been over and done with for decades, but the dishonesty of creationist hoaxes continues.
“When the blood of a seal, freshly killed at McMurdo Sound in the Antarctic was tested by carbon-14, it showed the seal died 1,300 years ago.”(Source: W. Dort Jr. Ph.D. (Geology Professor, University of Kansas), Antarctic Journal of the United States, 1971)
TOTALS FOR THIS SEGMENT (Q 71 – 80) 24 Total Quotes
|Fallacy||Number of Fallacies|
|Appeal to Authority||2|
|Not a qualified biologist or scientist||4|
|Not Relevant to Evolutionary theory or Biology||8|
|Not Damaging to Evolutionary theory||8|
|Distortion of Science||7|