THE FADING, VANISHING CASE FOR EVOLUTION

Dr.  W.  A.  Criswell

Genesis 1:26

1-13-88    7:30 p.m.

God love you and God bless you forever.  And once again welcome the throngs of you who share this hour on radio and on television.  You are now part of our dear First Baptist Church in Dallas, and this is the pastor bringing the message entitled, The Fading, Vanishing Case for Evolution.  These Wednesday evenings we are dedicating to a series of studies around the theme; “The Phantom of Evolution versus the Creation of God, The Phantom of Evolution versus the Creation of God.”

And the reason for the series lies in a very apparent development here in the United States of America.  The Supreme Court struck down the law in Louisiana that in the public school system, supported by the taxes of the people, when they teach evolution they must also teach creation science.  And the Supreme Court cut that law down saying by mandate, by law, we must teach our children evolution, but you cannot teach them God-created science.

So in behalf of the truth of God, which I think the Spirit will affirm as we deliver these messages each Wednesday evening in the truth of God, we will see the affirmation of what God has done.  Whatever law man may make to the contrary, God still lives, God still moves, and His truth is verifiable.  And that is the purpose of these Wednesday evening messages.

This is what God’s Book says in the first chapter of Genesis, verse 26:

And God said, Let Us make man in Our image and in Our likeness: and let them have dominion. . .

So God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him; male and female created He them.

And God blessed them.

[Genesis 1:26-28]

Then in the second chapter, verse 7, “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul” [Genesis 2:7].

The fading, vanishing case for evolution; we first shall speak of the hoaxes of anthropology.  In two of the great cities of America, I walked through the museums of natural history.  And in one of them particularly and especially, there was a large, large display of a prehistoric village filled with ape-men.  It was an astonishing thing to me!  There they were, fleshed, fully aware and viable in life in all of the things of their homes—subhuman creatures.  And children and young people with their mouths wide open in astonishment and their eyes agog, looking at those hairy half-men with clubs in hand, and listening to the group leader as he says, “Millions of years ago a few ape-like animals began to walk upright taking the first faltering steps toward becoming human beings.  Time, chance, and the struggle for survival, continued shaping us.  Along the way, social groups became the key to survival and the human family evolved as the pleasure of sex was offered in return for food and protection.  Truly evolution is the science of human survival.”

So goes the lecture, often replete with compounded speculation and sexually explicit details.  Our children are told this sad story over and over again in children’s science magazines, in high school textbooks, in Saturday morning TV cartoons, in talk shows, in news specials and documentaries, and, of course, in museum after museum.

Sometimes they hear the words “perhaps” or “theory” or “may have been,” but the whole thrust of constant repetition by so-called experts in the field could not have been designed any better to overwhelm our young people into believing that evolution is a fact, like apples falling out of a tree.  But what are the facts?  Tragically, the facts are virtually inaccessible to most students.  Museums rarely point out which parts of their displays are real and which are reconstructions and imaginations.

Textbooks, encyclopedias, and scientific journals are the normal sources of student information, but they rarely report the facts admitted by an international conference of leading evolutionists, namely, that the missing links between man and ape, like the supposed links between plant and animal groups are still missing.  In fact, it is really only in creationist works that students can get a scientifically, critical look at the so-called facts behind evolutionist museum displays and textbooks, pictures of our supposed family tree.

We have in our church a marvelously gifted cartoonist.  His pictures are shown throughout the world.  This is one called “The Divine Affirmation.”  “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” [Genesis 1:1].  Then he quotes from Robert L.  Whitlaw, professor of nuclear engineering in the Virginia Polytechnic Institute, quote: “With solid facts gathered from many quarters, the theory of evolution is weighed in the balance and found wanting, both in science and in logic.”

And I came across this paragraph.  “Our cosmos has the marks of intelligent design, a phenomenon that makes most people uncomfortable with the hypothesis of evolutionary giants.  I agree with Voltaire”—who was an atheist; it’s amazing that he’d say it—“I agree with Voltaire, that quote, if a watch proves the existence of a watchmaker, but the universe does not prove the existence of a great architect, then I consent to be called a fool.”

What are the true facts?  We are going to look first at the hoaxes of anthropology.  First of all, the Neanderthal man; Neanderthal is a valley right in front of Dusseldorf in West Germany, and once the Neanderthal man was depicted by evolutionists as a beetle-browed, barrel-chested, bow-legged brute.  And he was called the link between the ape and the man.  I can remember that.  But now we know the Neanderthal people were people just like us today—no difference at all.

Second: the Piltdown man; Piltdown is a name in southern England.  The Piltdown man was a deliberate hoax.  But for more than 40 years between 1912 and the 1950s—and I can remember reading about the Piltdown man as being the link between the ape and the human being—he was called the missing link.  It turned out that the Piltdown man was an ape’s jaw with teeth filed and a human skull stained to make it look ancient.  Over five hundred doctoral dissertations were done on the Piltdown man, so intense was the scientific study.   They got Ph.D.  degrees in anthropology writing doctoral dissertations on the Piltdown man—which was an overt and studied hoax.

Third, the Hesperopithecus; Harold Cookie, hespero is the word for western, and pithekos is the Greek word for ape.  And Harold Cook is that man that discovered it, also called the Nebraska man, from a discovery made by Harold Cook in the state of Nebraska.  From a single tooth he reconstructed flesh, hair, and whole family; the Hesperopithecus.

At the Scopes trial in Dayton, Tennessee, William Jennings Bryan, in that evolutionary trial William Jennings Bryan was confronted with this fact of the Hesperopithecus.  What it turned out to be: the tooth of an extinct pig, a peccary that once roamed this part of America.  And out of that tooth, they reconstructed the whole life of an ape-man, the missing link between us and the animal.

All right, number four: the Pithecanthropus erectus; that is the Java ape-man.  He was the missing link between the ape and the Homo sapiens.  And what turned out was the bones of a gibbon and a part of a knee of an extinct elephant.  And out of those bones of a gibbon and the bone knee of an extinct elephant, they built a whole tribe of ape-people.

A great anthropologist said, “The further back we look, the more like ourselves the ancient man appears to be.”  What are the actual facts?  We turn now from the hoaxes of anthropology, and I’ve mentioned just a few.  What are the facts?

Dr.  Colin Patterson, senior paleontologist at the British Museum, at a meeting of the American Museum of Natural History in New York in 1981; he woke up one morning, he says, after 20 years of research on evolution, shocked to realize that he had discovered not one fact to affirm the truth of evolution.  He then asked other evolutionists if they knew a fact that confirmed the theory of evolution, and he was met only with stony silence.  The most fundamental facet of the evolutionary theory, namely descent from a common ancestry, is a false interpretation of the data we know.  In fact, the data we know contradicts such a conclusion.

All right, let’s look at these facts.  At the very beginning of fossil remains in the Cambrian strata, there is an explosion of complete animal types.  Evolution cannot explain that fact.  Of the billions of known fossils, not a single transitional form has ever been discovered.  Animal types are stable.  They don’t change from one species to another.  Cows are cows.  Horses are horses.  Dogs are dogs.  Cats are cats.  There is no such thing as evolution to be seen.  There are varieties of dogs and varieties of cats and varieties of cows, but one has never been seen to evolve into the other.  They are stable, created by the hand of God.

Evolution contradicts the law of entropy, and there is no known exception to this law.  The law of entropy is the second law of thermodynamics, propounded by the great French physicist Carnot, who lived in [1796] to1832.

There are two great laws of thermodynamics.  The first law concerns the transference of energy by heat, such as coal burning to turn a turbine engine.  Now that law says there is always a loss in that transference of energy.  There is never a complete transference.  When you burn coal or gas in order to turn a turbine, you get energy out of the turbine, but you lose some of energy when it is transferred from coal or gas into the turbine.  That’s the first law of thermodynamics, and there’s never been an exception to it.

Now the second law of thermodynamics has never been known to be contradicted by any known fact.  The second law of thermodynamics is the law of entropy; that is the law of disorganization or disintegration—our whole universe is running down.  All of the universes that have ever been discovered are running down.  That is where you get dead stars and black holes and barren planets.  Things run down.

And the law of entropy is this.  Unless a thing is changed from an outside source of energy, if it worsens, it tends to get worse, not better.  For example, if you have a typeset of, say, “Crossing the Bar,” and you throw it up in the air, it will come down in disarray.  Throw it up again, and it will come down in greater disarray.  Throw it up again, and it will come down in still greater disarray.  And the more you throw it up, the more disarrayed the poem will be.

The law of entropy says all things are like that.  Where there is a tendency to worsen, it continues to be worse and worse and worse unless it is changed from some outside source.  So you see it in all human life, in all animal life, in all created life.  You see the law of entropy at work.  Take a breed of horses.  Leave them alone and they tend not to evolve, but to devolve.  They’ll finally turn into broomtails and nags.

Whatever it is, leave it alone, let it be inbred of itself and it will go down and down and down.  The only way that a thing can be bred up is from some outside source like the energy of a man.  He’ll breed up a breed of cattle or he’ll breed up a breed of horses or he’ll breed up a breed of dogs or cats.  But without that outside source, it will devolve.  And there is no exception to that in scientific fact.

All of this is the very opposite of evolution.  You don’t evolve upward.  You evolve downward.  And unless there is an intervention, I say, the second law of thermodynamics, the law of entropy, is universal.  There’s never been an exception to it.

There is no such thing as a new species—never under the sun.  In his book on The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin never approached it, never discussed it.  He could not cite even one example of a new species beginning.  Neither can you.  Neither can I.  Neither can anyone in this earth.  There is no such thing as a new species appearing in human life on this globe.

There is no known procedure or mechanism of evolution.  How does it work?  What are the mechanics of evolution?  How would it do?  One would think that, in the 125 years following Darwin with thousands of trained biologists studying the problem and using billions of dollars of complex laboratory equipment, an answer would be found.

How is it that evolution could work?  What would it be like?   But how a new species would, could, has originated is still as great a mystery as when man’s mind first confronted it.  The answer is, only God could do it.

Now let me give an illustration of that then I am through.  Let’s take—now remember, the evolutionary theory is that all of us came from a speck.  That speck, they theorized, was created—the amino acids—by a bolt of lightning that comes down through the clouds and created that speck of amino acids that fell into the ocean.  And that’s where life began.

Where the bolt of lightning came from, where the clouds came from, where the oceans came from, those things are never addressed; things that I want to know, they are never accosted.  They are never confronted.  They are never addressed.  Well, let’s start with them.

What they say is that that bolt of lightning created that speck of amino acids, which is the basis of all living tissue, and it fell into the ocean and then out of that speck, out of that one speck developed all that you see today, including you; you.  So let’s just take one little simple question in that development.  I’ve got an eye.  I’ve got an eye.  I can see.  Where did that eye come from?  The best scientific evolutionary hypothesis that I can come across for that eye is that way back yonder, back yonder, back yonder, way back yonder, there was a little sensitive spot that developed in one of those little animalcules—a little sensitive spot.

And that little sensitive spot was inherited by the descendants and the descendants and the descendants and the descendants.  And that little sensitive spot remained through all of those generations following.  And finally, that little sensitive spot developed into my eye.  Now that’s the best scientific explanation for where my eyes came from.

All right, what I want to know is the basic theory of evolutionary inheritance is that if anything is not useful, it is sloughed off.  It just becomes useless.  And the only thing that is kept in the evolutionary ladder is something that is useful.  Like my hand is useful, so it developed.  My feet are useful and they developed.  And all these things are useful and they developed.  Now of what use would be a sensitive spot on some animalcule?  And it had to develop and develop and develop through all those uncounted thousands of years, and still there to develop when it was useless.  It had no purpose at all.

When the evolutionist says, “If anything has not a purpose, it is sloughed off,” well, why didn’t that slough off?  But it stayed there through all of those millennia of inheritances and finally became my eye.  And everything about me is like that.  Where did my hearing come from?

All of these things from the most unbelievable, fantastic, far-out, speculative theorizing, and yet that is supposed to be true science.  It is unthinkable.  It is unimaginable.  But the encyclopedias, the textbooks, all of the articles of modern knowledge and science treat that, exhibit that, present that as being the truth of life and of creation.

How much and infinitely better is it to learn from God Himself?  He made us.  He created us.  And He says, God says, that He formed us out of the dust of the ground, and He breathed into our nostrils the breath of life; and we became a living soul [Genesis 2:7].

How noble that is.  How wonderful that is.  How God honoring and human exalting that is; in the image of God [Genesis 1:27], thinking God’s thoughts, loving the Lord, praising His name, sitting at His feet [Matthew 11:28-30], and all of the marvelous revelation that follows after in the redemptive story—finally our Savior coming into the likeness of our flesh [John 1:14], and raised from the dead [Matthew 28:1-7], and ascending into heaven [Acts 1:9-10], and coming back someday for us [1 Thessalonians 4:16-17]. 

There is nothing comparable to the glory and exaltation of the biblical presentation of where we came from [Genesis 2:7], how it is we fell [Genesis 3:1-6], how we are redeemed in the loving grace of the Lord God our Savior [Ephesians 2:7-8], and how someday we will be in His sinless image [Romans 6:5], living with Him and one another in a new and a heavenly kingdom, world without end, forever and ever [Revelation 21:1-5].

I am so glad I’m a preacher.  I’m so glad I have this Book in my hands.  And I’m so glad I can proclaim it as the truth of Almighty God, no speculation, no theory, no supposition, but the revelation of the Great Creator God Himself.  O Lord, what a privilege is mine and ours!

Now Doug, we are going to sing us a song.  And while we sing the song, I will be standing right there.  Somebody you, give his heart to Jesus [Romans 10:9-13]; a family you, to come into the fellowship of our dear church, or answering a call in your heart; as the Lord shall make appeal, as the Spirit shall woo, answer with your life, on the first note of the first stanza, come, and a thousand times welcome; while we stand and while we sing.