What are the most important statements of the theory of evolution?
Charles Darwin (1809 – 1882) took part in a research trip in the years 1831 – 1836. From his findings there, he developed the theory of evolution and published it in 1859 in the book “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races by the Struggle for Life”. In this book, Darwin stated the following:
- In nature, more offspring are produced than are required to maintain an animal or plant species.
- All these offspring exhibit a natural diversity of heritable traits.
- If certain of these traits are preferred by mating partners or are better adapted to the current environment, this leads to the proportion of animals or plants with the preferred trait increasing more and more.
- It is therefore possible to achieve major changes in traits over many generations by taking many small steps. Humans can accelerate this phenomenon by actively selecting mating partners. This makes it possible to breed very different dog breeds, from the very small Chihuaha to the large St. Bernard. This evolution within a species was later referred to as microevolution.
- Darwin went one step further: he assumed that new species can emerge in many, many small steps and that all animal and plant species have emerged from a single living cell in very many steps through a process that requires only random variations of heritable traits and the natural selection of the most suitable traits, but no intelligence or planning. This evolution across species boundaries and the emergence of new traits was later referred to as macroevolution.
After Darwin, this idea was extended to the evolution of all chemical compounds and to the evolution of living cells, to the evolution of stars and planets and to the evolution of the entire universe.
After Darwin, both the living cell and the mechanisms for storing and transmitting information for the inherited characteristics of the cell and the organism became much better known.
The theory of evolution as a bulwark of atheism
Atheists immediately welcomed this theory of evolution because it seemed to free us from the need to assume the existence of an omnipotent God who created the heavens and the earth, as well as all the animals and plants that are so well adapted to their environment. Instead, they believe that no intelligent planning is required, but that chance and the laws of nature are sufficient to accomplish the task.
In the first half of the 19th century, England was under a very strong evangelical influence in society and politics, which enabled a successful fight against the slave trade and slavery, against all odds. Atheists now tried to overcome this Christian influence by contrasting science with faith: They claimed that science no longer needed God as an explanation and that God had no place in science. They claimed that science was a well-founded truth, while Christian faith was a blind belief in an old book without any evidence, a superstition that was increasingly overcome by the development of science during the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the 19th century. As a result, scientific experts had to become the highest authority in society, and the theory of evolution is now a compulsory part of the secondary school curriculum in many countries. As the theory of evolution is now the basis of many people’s worldview, especially those who are most vocal about it, it is very strongly defended. Many claim that it is scientific fact and that those who criticize it are just “creationists” who bring superstition but no good arguments and are therefore not worth talking to. The worldview associated with this theory of evolution is called Darwinism, and its adherents Darwinists.
Darwinists have a false view of the Christian faith.
Faith in God means trusting in God, whom we know well enough to do so. Faith in God rests on solid historical foundations. Jesus said: “He who comes from the truth hears my voice.” (John 18:37) If we really seek the truth, we can be convinced by the truth that we encounter in the Bible and in nature. Faith is not a blind leap into the dark, but a life of trust in a person we believe to be trustworthy. However, if we have decided that we do not want to hear the truth and that our desires are the ultimate reality and the only criterion for the things we believe, then we are trusting a lie that will eventually lead us to disaster.
Darwinists have a false view of the history of science.
Modern science originated in only one culture in the world, the Christian Western Europe of the Middle Ages, and not during the renaissance. The founders of this branch of science believed in a personal, rational and intelligent God who created the entire universe. Therefore, they believed that nature follows rational laws that can be found through reason and hard work by humans, who are rational beings created in the image of God, a God committed to truth. They set out to find the truth about God in the Bible and the truth about God’s creation in nature in order to praise and glorify God. This commitment to truth is what made science so successful and effective. It has enabled the gigantic progress of modern technology. Some of the greatest scientists of all time such as Nicolaus Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, Isaac Newton. Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell were devout Christians and made their contributions to science as Christians. The writer of these lines studied physics himself and never had a problem with understanding and researching physics and believing in God at the same time. Since I believe that God is at work in the things we don’t understand as well as the things we do understand, I have never had a problem accepting a natural solution if that solution provides a reasonable explanation. We should not fall for the lie that science and faith are mutually exclusive.
Darwinists have a wrong view of certain aspects of science.
Science describes physical properties of things and relationships between things. There are physical laws, and it can be tested through repeated and varied experiments whether a particular law is valid in this situation. The situation is different when we try to understand things and events in the distant past. Here we cannot carry out repeated measurements. We can only see if we can reach reasonable descriptions of things that happened in the past. We can never rule out the possibility that God acted in a particular situation, even if the explanation of that situation from natural causes seems very probable. However, if the probability of an explanation is extremely low, an explanation that relies on nothing other than pure chance seems to be wrong. Then the planning and acting of an intelligent entity seems to be a logical explanation.
Modern science has shown that our entire universe, together with space and time, began less than 14,000,000,000 years ago. Let’s see how good the explanation is that our entire universe came into being by pure chance within this period of time.
Darwinian macroevolution does not provide a sufficient explanation.
Now nobody doubts microevolution; you can see it in action. Macroevolution, on the other hand, does not work.
The following reasons for this statement do not come from the Bible, but from science and experience:
a) Breeding dogs always leads to dogs, breeding cows always leads to cows. Fruit flies are the subject of intensive research. They are easy to feed and keep, they have a generation time of less than 10 days and female flies produce up to 100 eggs per day and perhaps 2000 in their lifetime. Since 1967, attempts have been made to alter the genetic makeup of the fruit fly. (I found this information about fruit flies in the English Wikipedia under the heading “Drosophila Melanogaster”) The results were: Functioning fruit flies, damaged fruit flies or dead fruit flies. A new species was never observed.
b) The genetics of a cell are stored in the DNA sequence. It is a code written in a special alphabet that tells the cell what to do, like a computer code for a computer. There is no known case in which a functioning computer code could be generated purely by chance.
c) Among other things, the DNA sequence determines how a certain protein is built by connecting the right amino acids to form a long chain. There are 20 amino acids in the cell. If we want to achieve a certain sequence of 200 amino acids by chance, we have a probability of less than 1/20 for each amino acid. These probabilities must be multiplied by each other. The probability P is then
P = (1/20) * (1/20) *(1/20) * …………* (1/20) (with 200 factors) = (1/20)200 = 1 / 20200. This number is so small that even if we assume that the universe is around 14 billion years old, it is absolutely impossible for this gene to have arisen by chance.
d) A simple human cell has proven to be more complicated than any human factory. It contains as much information as 1000 sets of the famous Encyclopedia Britannica with about 30 volumes each. To generate this gigantic amount of information by chance seems completely absurd, even if we have a few billion years to do so. The better we know the living cell, the more complicated it turns out to be.
e) In the last 70 years, the theory of how a living cell can arise by chance from non-living matter has not progressed a single step and it seems absolutely impossible to do so.
f) In the past, it seemed that only very few conditions had to be met to create a life-sustaining planet. In recent decades, many additional conditions have been found. The probability that a planet is capable of sustaining a global high-technology civilization is 10-1032, which is absolutely impossible even if we consider all planets of all stars in all galaxies of our universe. That is, the existence of a habitable planet without the design and creation of God is absolutely impossible, and we can be sure that there is no other habitable planet in the entire universe unless God decided to create it. (Ross, Hugh N.:The Creator and the Cosmos: how the latest scientific discoveries reveal God. Covina CA, RTB Press, 20184. p. 219)
g) In recent decades, it has become apparent that the properties of certain central constants in the equations of physics must have extremely few of their many possible values and therefore an extremely low probability in order for atoms and molecules to exist at all. This means that an evolution of the entire universe by pure chance seems to be absolutely impossible.
Darwinism requires a lot of blind faith.
Atheists claim that their belief system is “scientific”. However, if they do not adhere to the truth, they are the enemies of true science. This happens, for example, when results that contradict the theory of evolution are not recognized, and when biologists who doubt this theory have no chance of making a professional career in biology. Thus, “Darwinism” is a religion in its own right, which excludes the possibility of the existence of a Creator God from the outset.
Despite many efforts, not a single valid reason could be found as to why and how mind, consciousness, moral values and a sense of beauty emerged from the meaningless movements of atoms and molecules. Why should a human being, a product of meaningless random processes, have any value and dignity? Why should we care about the poor and the oppressed?
Today, science forces us to recognize that our universe had a beginning at some point in the past and that even space and time came into being at that point. Either an omnipotent, extremely intelligent God who is good is the cause of everything that exists, or mindless matter and energy are at the beginning of the universe. If God is the cause, it is easy to explain why there are humans with a mind and a conscience who are able to know things and eventually do science, why there is good and evil, and why we feel beauty and harmony. If the universe came into being as mindless matter and energy, there is no proven way these things came into being, only the hope that science will one day find an explanation. Atheists need a very big faith for which there is no evidence. I don’t have enough faith to be an atheist.
Darwinism is a worldview that deceives us.
Without God, there is no final authority. At first glance, this looks very nice for people who don’t want God to interfere with their wishes and plans. But it means that tyrants, thieves, robbers and murderers can go about their business with impunity as long as they are stronger than their victims and are never brought to justice – the ideal worldview for criminals. This is why Darwinism was loved by the great mass murderers of the 20th century such as Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, known as Lenin, Yossif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, known as Stalin, and Adolf Hitler and their henchmen. With this worldview, you are free to exterminate all those people who prevent you or your nation from becoming victorious, namely the disabled, all those whom you regard as your enemies, and soon probably also the old generation, which no longer produces anything but devours many resources. With this ideology, you can focus on “man” as an abstract being, but the actual individual is only valuable as long as he is useful, but can easily be disposed of afterwards. You see no need to tell the truth and feel justified in lying whenever it suits your purposes.
But it is a hopeless worldview, because in this world everyone and everything eventually goes to death and destruction. If you’re lucky, you can be at the top for a few years or even decades, but in the end you lose everything and in the end you lose your life. And in a completely meaningless universe like the Darwinian universe, your life ultimately has no meaning.
In whom will you trust?
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