The Natural Sciences: The Collapse of Darwinism
and
the Victory of "Intelligent Design"
As stated earlier, one of the main supports for atheism's
rise to its zenith in the nineteenth century was Darwin's theory
of evolution. By asserting that the origin of human beings and all
other living things lay in unconscious natural mechanisms, Darwinism
gave atheists the scientific guise they had been seeking for centuries.
That time's most passionate atheists adopted his theory, and such
atheist thinkers as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels made its elucidation
the basis of their philosophy. The relationship between Darwinism
and atheism born at that point in time has continued until our own
time.
But, at the same time, this core belief of atheism
is the very one that has received the greatest blow from twentieth-century
science. Discoveries in paleontology, biochemistry, anatomy, genetics,
and other scientific fields have shattered the theory of evolution
(See Harun Yahya's Darwinism
Refuted). We have dealt with this fact in far more detail
elsewhere. However, in short, we can say the following:
- Paleontology: Darwin's theory rests on the
assumptions that all species come from a single common ancestor
and that they diverged from one another over a long period of
time by means of small gradual changes. Supposedly, the required
proofs will be discovered in the fossil record or the petrified
remains of living things. But fossil research conducted during
the twentieth century presents a totally different picture, for
no fossil of a single undoubted intermediate species, one that
would substantiate this theory of gradual evolution among species,
has been found. Moreover, every taxon [an animal or plant group
having natural relations] appears suddenly in the fossil record,
and no trace has ever been found of any previous ancestors. The
phenomenon known as the Cambrian Explosion, which scientists classify
as a period of time that occurred 540 to 490 million years ago,
is especially interesting. In that early geological period, nearly
all of the animal kingdom's phyla (major groups with significantly
different body structures) appeared suddenly. The sudden emergence
of many different categories of living things with totally different
body structures and extremely complex organs and systems (e.g.,
mollusks, arthropods, echinoderms, and, as recently discovered,
even vertebrates) rendered the theory of evolution invalid and
proved creation, for as evolutionists also agree, a taxon's sudden
emergence implies purposeful design, and this means creation.
All of the fossil research conducted
during the twentieth century proves that there is no gradual
evolution between species. The fact that many different
groups of living things appeared suddenly in the Cambrian
Explosion is convincing proof that they were created.
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Advances made in twentieth-century
biology reveal the unscientific nature of the theory of
evolution. The discovery of the structure of DNA alone
gave one of the greatest blows to this theory. |
Biological Observations: Darwin
elaborated on his theory by relying upon examples of how animal
breeders produced different dog or horse varieties. He extrapolated
the limited changes he observed to the whole natural world, and
proposed that every living thing could have come from a common
ancestor. But Darwin made this claim in the nineteenth century,
when the level of scientific sophistication was low. In the twentieth
century, things changed greatly. Decades of observation and experimentation
on various animal species have shown that variation in living
things has never gone beyond a certain genetic boundary. Darwin's
assertions, like: "I can see no difficulty in a race of bears
being rendered, by natural selection, more and more aquatic in
their habits, with larger and larger mouths, till a creature was
produced as monstrous as a whale"22 actually
demonstrates his great ignorance. On the other hand, observations
and experiments show that mutations defined by Neo-Darwinism as
an evolutionary mechanism add no new genetic information to living
creatures.
- The Origin of Life:
Darwin spoke about a common ancestor, but never mentioned how
this person came to be. His only conjecture was that the first
cell could have formed as a result of random chemical reactions
"in some small warm little pond."23 But those
evolutionary biochemists who sought to close this hole in Darwinism
were frustrated by the fact that all of their observations and
experiments showed that no living cell could arise within inanimate
matter by means of random chemical reactions. Even the English
atheist astronomer Fred Hoyle expressed that such a scenario "is
comparable with the chance that a tornado sweeping through a junk-yard
might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein."24
- Intelligent Design: Scientists who study cells
and their molecules, along with the cells' remarkable organization
within the body, and the bodily organs' delicate order and plan
are faced with proof that evolutionists strongly wish to reject:
The world of living things is permeated by designs too complex
to be found in any technological equipment. Intricate examples
of design, including our eyes that are far superior to any camera,
the wings of birds that have inspired flight technology, the complexly
integrated system of the cells of living things, and the remarkable
information stored in DNA have vitiated the theory of evolution,
which regards living things as the product of blind chance.
By the end of the twentieth century, all of these facts
had squeezed Darwinism into a corner. Today, in the United States
and other Western countries, the theory of intelligent design is
gaining ever-increasing acceptance among scientists. Those who defend
it say that Darwinism has been a great error in the history of science,
and that it came to be so by imposing materialist philosophy on
the scientific paradigm. Scientific discoveries show that there
is a design in living things, which proves creation. In short, science
proves once more that God created all living things.
22. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species: A Facsimile
of the First Edition (Harvard University Press, 1964), 184.
23. Charles Darwin, Life and Letter of Charles
Darwin, vol. 2: From Charles Darwin to J. Do Hooker, March 29, 1863
24. "Hoyle on Evolution," Nature, vol. 294 (12
November 1981): 105.
    
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