What are the main statements of the theory of evolution?
Charles Darwin (1809 – 1882) took part in a research voyage in 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 Favoured 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.
- In all these offspring, there is 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.
- Thus, over many generations, it is possible to achieve large changes in traits through many small steps. Humans can accelerate this phenomenon by actively selecting mating partners. Thus it is possible to breed very different breeds of dogs, from the very small Chihuaha to the large St. Bernard. This evolution within a species was later called microevolution.
- Darwin went one step further: He assumed that new species can arise over many, many small steps, and that from a single living cell, over very many steps, all animal and plant species arose by a process requiring only random variations of heritable traits and the natural selection of those best suited to the situation, but no intelligence or planning. This evolution beyond species boundaries and the emergence of new traits was later called macroevolution.
- After Darwin, this idea was extended to the evolution of all chemical compounds and to the evolution of the living cell, to the evolution of the stars and planets, and to the evolution of the entire universe.
- After Darwin, both the living cell and the mechanisms for storing and transmitting the information for the inherited properties of the cell and 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 and all the animals and plants that are so well adapted to their environment. Instead, they believe that there is no need for intelligent planning, but that chance and the laws of nature are sufficient to accomplish this 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 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 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. Thus, the experts of science had to become the highest authority in society, and the theory of evolution is now a compulsory part of the curriculum in secondary schools in many countries. Since the theory of evolution is the basis of the worldview of many people today, and especially of those who are most vocal about it, it is very strongly defended. Many claim that it is a 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 wrong view of Christian Faith.
Faith in God means to trust in God whom we know enough for it. Faith in God rests on solid historical foundations. Jesus said ”Whosoever comes from truth hears my voice.” (Joh. 18,37) If we really seek the truth, we can become convinced by the truth that encounters us in the Bible and in nature. Faith is not a blind leap into darkness, but a life of trust into a person that we found to be trustworthy. If we, however, have decided, that we don’t want to hear the truth, and that our wishes are the ultimate reality and the sole criterion for the things we believe, we trust a lie, that will finally lead us into a catastrophe.
Darwinists have a wrong view of the History of Science.
Modern science was born worldwide in one culture only, the Christian Western Europe in the Middle Ages. The founders of this branch of science believed in a personal, rational and intelligent God, who created the whole universe. Therefore they believed, that nature followed rational laws, which could be found through reason and hard work by human beings who were created as rational beings in the image of God, a God who is 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 made science so successful and effective. It made the gigantic progress of modern technology possible. Some of the greatest scientists of all time like Nicolaus Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, Isaac Newton. Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell were believing Christians and did as Christians bring their contributions to science. The writer of these lines studied physics himself and had never any problem to understand physics and to do research in physics and at the same time to believe in God. As I believe that God is at work both in the things we don’t understand as well as in the things we do understand, I never had a problem to accept a natural solution, if this solution gives a reasonable explanation. We should not fall for the lie that science and faith exclude each other.
Darwinists have a wrong view of certain Aspects of Science.
Science describes physical properties of things and relations between things. There are laws of physics, and it can be tested by repeated and diverse experiments, whether a certain law is valid in this situation. The situation is different, when we try to understand things and events in a distant past. Here we can’t make repeated measurements. We can only see, whether we can achieve reasonable descriptions of the things that happened in the past. We can never exclude the possibility, that God acted in any certain situation, even if the explanation of that situation seems to be highly probable. If, however, the probability of an explanation is extremely low, an explanation invoking nothing else than pure luck seems to be wrong. Then some planning and acting of an intelligent agency seems to be a logical explanation.
Modern science has shown, that our whole universe had a beginning together with space and time less than 14 000 000 000 years ago. Let us see, how good is the explanation, that within this time span our whole universe now has come into being by pure chance.
Darwinian Macroevolution doesn’t give a sufficient explanation.
Now no one doubts microevolution; it can be seen in action. Macroevolution, however, doesn’t work.
The following reasons given for this statement don’t come from the Bible, but from science and experience:
a) Breeding dogs leads always to dogs, breeding cows leads always to cows. Fruit flies have been an object of intensive research. They are easy to feed and care, they have a generation time of about under 10 days and female flies produce up to 100 eggs per day and perhaps 2000 in a lifetime. Since 1967 attempts were made to change the hereditary traits 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 is stored in the DNA sequence. It is a code written with a special type of alphabet and tells the cell what to do, like a computer code for a computer. There is no case known, how to produce a working computer code by mere chance.
c) The DNA sequence determines, among other things, how a certain protein is built by coupling the correct amino acids to a long chain. In the cell there are 20 amino acids. If we want to achieve a certain sequence of 200 amino acids by chance, we have a probability of 1/20 for each amino acid. These probabilities must be multiplied with 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 an age of the universe of roughly 14 billion years, it is absolutely impossible to create this gene by chance.
d) A simple human cell has turned out 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 produce this gigantic amount of information by chance seems to be absolutely absurd, even if we have some billion years for it. The better we know the living cell, the more complicated it turns out to be.
e) During the last 70 years the theory, how to produce a living cell out of non living matter by chance has not advanced a single step and it seems to be absolutely impossible to do it.
f) In former times it seemed that only very few conditions must be fulfilled to create a life-sustaining planet. During the last decades a lot of additional conditions were found. The probability for a planet to being able to maintain a global high-technology civilization is 10-1032. This is absolutely impossible, even if we consider all the planets of all the stars in all the galaxies of our universe. That means, the existence of a habitable planet without the planning and creation of God is absolutely impossible, and we can be certain, that there is no other habitable planet in the whole universe, if God didn’t decide 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) During the last decades it turned out, 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, so that atoms and molecules can exist at all. That means that an evolution of the whole universe by pure chance seems to be absolutely impossible.
Darwinism Requires a lot of Blind Faith.
Atheists claimed, that their system of beliefs is “scientific”. However, if they don’t follow the truth, they are the enemies of true science. This happens for example, if results, that contradict the theory of evolution are not acknowledged, and if biologists, who doubt this theory, have no chance to make a professional career in biology. Thus “Darwinism” is a religion of its own, that excludes the possibility of the existence of God the creator from the outset.
In spite of a lot of efforts not a single valid reason could be found, why and how out of the mindless movements of atoms and molecules mind, consciousness, moral values and a sense of beauty came into existence. Why should any human being, a product of mindless random processes, have any value and dignity? Why should we take care of the poor and oppressed?
Today science forced us to acknowledge that our universe had a beginning at a certain moment in the past, and that even space and time came into existence at that moment. Either an almighty, extremely intelligent God, who is good, is the cause of everything, that exists, or mindless matter and energy stand at the beginning of the universe. If God is the cause, it is easy to explain, why there are persons with a mind and a conscience, able to know things and finally make science, why there is good and evil, and why we feel beauty and harmony. If the universe comes into being as mindless matter and energy, there is no proven way, that these things come into being, but only a hope, that science will some day find an explanation. Atheists need a very big faith with no evidence for it. I don’t have enough faith to be an atheist.
Darwinism is a world view that cheats us.
Without God there is no final authority. At first, this looks very nice for people that don’t want a God to interfere with their wishes and plans. But this means, that bullies, thieves, robbers and murderers can do their work with impunity, as long as they are stronger as their victims, and will never be held accountable – the ideal world view for the criminal. Therefore Darwinism was loved by the great mass murderers of the 20th century as Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, called Lenin, Yosif Wissarionovich Dshugashvili, called Stalin, and Adolf Hitler, and their minions. With this worldview you are free to to exterminate all those people who hinder you or your nation to become victorious, namely the handicapped, all those you see as your enemies, and soon probably the old generation, that no longer produces anything, but eats up a lot of resources. With this ideology you can put “the human being” as an abstract entity in the center, but the actual single person is valuable only as long, as it is useful, but can be dumped easily afterwards. You don’t see any need to speak the truth, and you feel entitled to lie, whenever it suits your purposes.
But it is a hopeless worldview, because in this world everyone and everything goes finally to death and destruction. If you are lucky, you can be at the top for some years or even decades, but finally you will lose everything and in the end also your life. And in a totally meaningless universe like the Darwinist universe your life has ultimately no meaning.
Whom will you trust?
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