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That, says evolution critic Dr. Meyer, is how evolution suggests bacteria
can become people. Darwin proposed a theory with broad implications.
Other critics like law professor Phillip Johnson at the University of
California, Berkeley, have analyzed the evidence for evolution as well
as its philosophy.
Dr. Johnson says those implications lead to one conclusion. "Nature's
all there is: no God in the picture. He's either non-existent or He's
so far away it doesn't matter. He might as well not exist -- nature did
its own creating by natural mechanisms."
However, Dr. Audrey Chapman of the American Association for the Advancement
of Science says evolutionary thought has lots to offer religion.
"A big enough God, a God that is not constrained by the findings of science
-- and the vision of the universe 2,000 to 3,000 years ago."
Was Darwin himself a materialist into naturalism?
Dr. Johnson says Darwin left the impression that God could have created
through evolution. "Whenever these issues came up more specifically, he
was very firm in saying that the whole process is undirected and very
cruel and wasteful. And it's just not something that makes any sense to
attribute to God."
Dr. Chapman disagrees. "Darwin was not a materialist; I think that's
a major misunderstanding."
Dr. Meyer says family dynamics played a role in restraining Darwin, who
"was married to a devout Christian. He knew that his work caused her a
lot of pain. So, he was very reluctant to state everything that followed
from his theory."
Trained in both science and theology, Dr. Chapman finds no conflict between
belief in God and evolution. Dr. Meyer says naturalism pervades science
to the point God is often excluded. Philosophy aside, Darwin believed
that eventually fossils would be discovered to show the gradual transitions
he predicted.
Today, the gaps still exist, Johnson says. "When the < P of
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In addition, there's the Cambrian Explosion, a sudden burst of creatures
in the lowest geological levels of life, which left lots of fossils. Johnson
comments, "If you look at the areas where the fossil record is most complete,
it's also the most anti-Darwinian. It shows variation, but no step-by-step
progressive change from one kind of thing into another."
But hasn't science demonstrated, as Time magazine recently reaffirmed,
that man is simply a smart ape? Still, human and ape fossils are rare.
Again, Dr. Johnson responds, "They go to the area where the fossil record
is most incomplete -- and where subjective interpretation can have the
greatest sway. They say, 'Well, we found this, we found that, that proves
that we're right, ignore everything else.'"
Jack Cuozzo, an orthodontist and anthropologist, has analyzed and X-rayed
several Neanderthal ancestors of man. His conclusion is that man devolved,
not evolved, from the ancient Neanderthals. "These people had better teeth
from what I saw, they had better eyes, they had much stronger bones and
much stronger muscles, they had bigger brains."
Evolutionary anthropologist Colin Groves reviewed Cuozzo's book, Buried
Alive, and disagreed with Cuozzo's interpretation.
Mathematician William Dembski, author of The Design Inference,
criticizes what's called chemical evolution -- the development of the
first biological chemicals on the early earth. His figures find the chances
of getting these crucial substances at 1 in 10 to the 60th power -- essentially
zero.
And how do the engineering lines of the Chevy Corvette serve as evidence
of evolution? One evolutionary zoologist compares biological evolution
to the development of the Corvette.
Dr. Dembski finds this odd. "So it's nothing like what's supposed to
be going on in Darwinian evolution where you have random processes with
no forethought about where it's going."
Biochemist Michael Behe says evolution simply doesn't explain the complex
biology of living things -- once we look into Darwin's Black Box
-- the complexities of the cell Darwin never imagined.
Comments Dr. Behe, "The cell contains machines, real molecular machine.
Much like a mousetrap, they have different parts that work together to
allow the function. If you take one of those parts away, the machine doesn't
work half as well as it used to. It's completely broken."
So how does that impact evolution?
"It's very difficult to see how things like that could accumulate their
function gradually in a Darwinian way as most scientists have thought,"
says Behe.
So far, Behe's design idea has not caught on with members of the science
establishment like Dr. Chapman. "Their evidence is not compelling," she
says.
Phillip Johnson takes a different approach. "I always say we ought to
teach the young people much more about evolution than the science educators
want them to know -- because the science educators don't want them to
know about the problems, they want them to think that all you need to
have is variation and everything is perfect."
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