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When evolutionists present their latest fossil finds as “evidence” of evolution, keep in mind that they could never find any bit of evidence that would disprove evolution. Their minds are made up before they ever dig up a single fossilized fragment. To be blunt about it, they are looking for evidence to prove what they already believe but can never prove. The facts are interpreted in terms of their necessary materialistic paradigm. This isn’t my opinion; it’s what evolutionists claim for themselves. Richard Lewontin is honest enough to admit that for an evolutionist, “materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.”[1]
The discovery of facts has little to do with the building of the paradigm since creationists and evolutionists study the same evidence. Evolutionists evaluate the evidence in terms of a pre-conceived worldview based on (the impossibility) of naturalism. There’s nothing new in this. R. J. Rushdoony describes the faith-based character of evolution as it was operating 50 years ago in the work of Louis Leakey:
Louis Leakey, director of Kenya’s Centre for Prehistory and Paleontology in Nairobi, described his discovery, together with his wife Mary, of a bit of skull and two teeth, in these words: “We knelt together to examine the treasure . . . and almost cried with sheer joy. For years people had been telling us that we’d better stop looking, but I felt deep down that it had to be there. You must be patient about these things.” The time was July 17, 1959. This scene is a curious one on two counts. First, the scientist Leakey knew what he had found before he had examined it: he worked by faith, and viewed his findings by faith. He was finding “proof” for a theory already accepted, and he accepted his finding as “proof” on sight. Second, the intense emotionalism and joy sound more like a revival experience than a scientific analysis.[2]
In 1999, an article appeared that unquestioningly assured us that “A Baboon-sized ape that lived in East Africa 15 million years ago might have been among the first primates to leave the treetops and live on the ground, a key step in the evolutionary path that scientists say eventually led to humans.”[3] Fifteen million years ago!? Give me a break. Now we learn that a 4.4 million-year-old fossilized ape is one of our ancestors. An ABC News article was honest enough to write the following:
In the case of “Ardi,” the ape-like fossil recently discovered in Ethiopia and already being celebrated as the oldest found relative of modern human beings, the final determination depends on who is doing the talking.
Exactly! We have film of the JFK assassination, and people still aren’t sure if Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone shooter and that one bullet did all that damage, but these evolutionists are sure that a few fossilized fragments are nearly 5 million years old and are in some way related to humans. They have to be. There is no other option because evolution must be, has to be, true. Non-evolutionists looking at the same bits of fossilized bone and teeth come to a different conclusion because there’s no way that life can spring from non-life. In order to be taken seriously, evolutionists must explain how life started in the first place. They can’t, so like a stage magician (also here) they trot out a few bits of bone and teeth to divert our attention from the evolutionist’s real problem of how to explain something out of nothing. The evolutionist will convince an ignorant public by presenting their fragments as an artist-rendered specimen when in reality “that all of these conclusions are inferred from digital reconstructions and fallible reconstructions of bones that were in very bad shape.” In fact, “Ardi is a partial skeleton put together based on the bone fragments of at least 35 sets of skeletons—many of which were in such bad shape that it took 15 years before the research team could fully analyze and publish its findings on the combined skeleton.”
For David Menton, who served as an anatomy professor for 20 years at Washington University School of Medicine , “all the fragments indicate is that Ardi is an ape, plain and simple—and not anywhere nearly as old as scientists would have you believe.”
In reality, evolution is a substitute religion. Time, chance, and necessity make up the evolutionary trinity. Evolutionists tell us that nothing can be understood unless interpreted through the corrective lens of the Darwinian worldview. Darwinism is comprehensive, acting as “a universal solvent” that cuts “right to the heart of everything in sight.”[4] The evolutionists have their popes (Stephen Jay Gould), priests (professors), seminaries (universities), and dogma. For example, Arthur C. Clarke expresses the evolutionary dogma in emphatic terms: “Though I am the last person to advocate laws against blasphemy, surely nothing could be more antireligious than to deny the evidence so clearly written in the rocks for all who have eyes to see!”[5] Daniel C. Dennett, author of Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, proposes that anyone who holds a theistic view of origins should be allowed to live in America but only in “cultural zoos,” otherwise they would be a danger to society:
If you insist on teaching your children falsehoods—that the Earth is flat,[6] that “Man” is not a product of evolution by natural selection—then you must expect, at the very least, that those of us who have freedom of speech will feel free to describe your teachings as the spreading of falsehoods, and will attempt to demonstrate this to your children at our earliest opportunity. Our future well-being—the well-being of all of us on the planet—depends on the education of our descendants.[7]
When evolutionists cannot make their case using science, the next step is compulsion. You will believe this or else. Notice how Dennett appeals to “free speech” to cut off “free speech.” Also, if you insist on questioning the evolutionary paradigm, you might be charged with educational child abuse.
Endnotes:
[1] Richard Lewontin, “Billions and billions of demons,” The New York Review (January 9, 1997), 31. Here’s the full quotation: “We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.”**
[2]** Rousas J. Rushdoony, The Mythology of Science (Nutley, NJ: The Craig Press, 1967), 85.
[3] Paul Recer, “Newly discovered ape fossil boosts evolution knowledge,” USA Today (August 27, 1999), 4A.**
[4]** Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meaning of Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 521.**
[5]** Arthur C. Clarke, Foreword, in James Randi, An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), xii–xiii.**
[6]** On the “flat-earth myth,” see Gary DeMar, America’s Christian History: The Untold Story (Atlanta, GA: American Vision, 1995), 221–34; Gary DeMar and Fred Douglas Young, To Pledge Allegiance: A New World in View (Atlanta, GA: American Vision, 1996), 75–82; Jeffrey Burton Russell, Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians (New York: Praeger, 1991).
[7] Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, 519. Quoted in Phillip E. Johnson, “Daniel Dennett’s Dangerous Idea,” The New Criterion (October 1995), 13.