As I See It

by Hugh Ross

I applaud producers who bring spiritually significant issues to the little screen. Such an occasion presented itself in December, 1997, when William F. Buckley, Jr., featured seven panelists, four naturalistic evolutionists and three skeptics of the naturalistic view, on "Firing Line." The announced topic for this Public Broadcasting Service television program was the following question: Is there room within academia to consider creation as a possible explanation for the advance of Earth life?⁽¹⁾

A traditional debate format might have been more satisfactory to those deeply interested in the subject, but airtime limits did not permit. Each participant had just 90 seconds to state his or her position and then a few minutes to field questions from the other participants,--too little time for substantial content. Nevertheless, some important points came forth.

First, I noticed that none of the participants directly answered the program's stated question, but they all answered it indirectly. They immediately skipped past arguing the appropriateness of academic discussion of creation and jumped right into arguing various points of creation vs. evolution. In other words, such discussion is appropriate--and apparently welcome.

Second, I observed what I hope millions of other viewers also noticed, that Michael Behe, David Berlinski, and Phillip Johnson raised potent and pivotal challenges that the three naturalists simply ignored. Both Behe and Buckley raised this excellent question: Since most astronomers and physicists concede that the universe and the solar system are exquisitely fine-tuned for life (thus, there must be a Tuner) and since we know that life is far more complex and information-rich than galaxies, stars, or planets, why should anyone dogmatically insist that no divine design is evident in life? The naturalists never responded.

Third, the naturalists chose to support their position with evidences that can easily be shown to support the creation position. Kenneth Miller, Eugenie Scott, Michael Ruse, and Wally Lynn focused almost exclusively on transitional forms in the fossil record, identifying these as the crux of the creation-evolution debate. Unwittingly they stepped into a trap, but for some reason (perhaps the tight time limits) that trap was never sprung by the skeptics of naturalism.

This focus on transitional forms probably arose from creationists' exploitation of this topic in their attempts to prove that Darwinism is wrong. The four naturalistic scholars seemed to relish the opportunity to disprove that "proof" publicly. Dr. Kenneth Miller showed beautifully illustrated charts of Pakicetus, Ambulocetus, and Inodcetus, three ancient species supposedly representing transitions between large land mammals and modern whales. The other evolutionists mentioned, for example, the dozen plus "transitions" between the four-hooved eohippus and the modern horse, or equus. All four spoke confidently, even triumphantly, about these "verifications" of natural process evolution.

Unfortunately, none of the skeptics challenged this evidence. Again, time constraints may have hindered. Unfettered by such constraints, I offer my response:
The presenters could not have picked any more vulnerable "evidences" than the whale species. The whale's capacity for natural process change is severely limited by six factors: 1) relatively small population; 2) long generation spans (the time between birth and the ability to give birth); 3) low number of progeny produced per adult; 4) high complexity of biochemistry and morphology; 5) enormous size; and 6) specialized food supply. As The Creator and the Cosmos explains, these factors severely limit a species' capacity to change, or even to adapt to change, through mutations and natural selection.⁽²⁾ Rather, small environmental changes would tend to drive whales rapidly to extinction. The same can be said for the so-called "descent" of horses. Many of these same factors affecting whales also severely restrict the horses' capacity to survive internal and external changes. Indeed, biologists have observed several extinctions of horse and whale species during human history, never a measurable change within a species, much less the appearance of a new one.

Pakicetus, Ambulocetus, and Indocetus can more realistically be cited as evidence for special creation.⁽³⁾ The fossils of these species show that whales transitioned from drinking fresh water to drinking salt water in only two to four million years--and at a time of environmental stability. Neither Darwinism nor Stephen Gould's punctuated equilibria hypothesis can explain such dramatic and rapid change, especially in creatures so resistant to change and vulnerable to extinction.

The Bible offers this explanation: God created the first sea mammals on the fifth day. As the fossil record documents, sea mammals have persisted on Earth from that epoch till now, though not without interruption. Sea mammals' multiple extinctions imply that God repeatedly replaced extinct species with new ones. In most cases, the new species were different from the previous ones because God was changing Earth's biology, step by step, in preparation for His ultimate creation on Earth--the human race.

The many "transitional" forms of whales and horses suggest that God performed more than just a few creative acts here and there, letting evolution fill in the rest. Rather, God was involved and active in creation of new species.

The proponents of naturalism made one point with which I wholeheartedly agree. They said theists who believe in divine creation must do more than find flaws in naturalistic models. Such flaws may merely reflect weaknesses in researchers' model-making skills rather than defects in the models themselves. I agree that for Christians to make a significant impact on modern secular society, we must propose a creation model that is scientifically sound and, thus, useful in predicting the course of future scientific research.

Our model must address two (or more) of the biggest stumbling blocks to faith in the biblical Creator: The existence of evil and suffering and what may seem a "trial-and-error" approach to creation. I like to start with the most sensitive and controversial point and unfold my model from there (see Beyond the Cosmos for a fuller discussion of the topic⁽⁴⁾). The evil we see in this world exceeds what we can reasonably expect from the randomness of the natural realm or from the tendency toward increasing decay that flows from the operation of the second law of thermodynamics. We see intentional evil, not just happenstance suffering. The evil we see emanates from a source beyond nature. The Bible reveals that Satan and his followers, or demons, introduced evil before Adam, and Eve rebelled in Eden. We can infer from Romans 8 and Revelation 20-22 that God created the universe for the purpose of conquering evil. These same chapters help us understand that gravity, electromagnetism, thermodynamics, and a universe characterized by the three expanded (and expanding) space dimensions and an additional (finite) time dimension all play a part in evil's conquest. These necessary factors require that the physical conditions of the universe and Earth change dramatically over time. (For example, the sun even during its most stable burning phase brightens by about eight percent per billion years.) They also imply that Earth, the solar system, and the universe must fit within a narrowly constrained set of characteristics for physical life to survive.

These conditions lead to some deductions. For humanity to be provided with an abundance of limestone, marble, ozone, oxygen, water, top soil, coal, oil, gas, salt, phosphate, gypsum, etc., millions of generations of life would have to predate us. Because the physical realm changes with respect to time, God apparently created different species at different times to suit the changing environment. For instance, only the most primitive and tiny forms of life could survive the 8-hour rotation period of early Earth. Because highly advanced life requires a more delicately balanced set of characteristics for survival than primitive life, such life forms are more vulnerable to extinction, but when such species went extinct, God created new ones, sometimes the same and sometimes different (according to environmental conditions and divine timing) to replace them.

The step-by-step approach to creation we see in the fossil record may reasonably reflect God's understanding of the difficulty other life forms would encounter in adapting to sinful humans. The ecocrises we see in so many places of the world provide abundant testimony to that difficulty. Given this context, we can see that the bipedal primates predating Adam and Eve reflect care rather than waste. Their presence and activities helped prepare the other animals for future shock, the human beings' arrival.

We can reflect on many more reasons than these for God's step-by-step creation. Some are discussed in Beyond the Cosmos⁵ and others in The Creator and the Cosmos⁶. Many more, no doubt, will be discovered as research proceeds and knowledge increases.

References:

If you would like to read or hear more from Behe or Johnson on evidences for divine design, we carry materials by them in our catalog. We also carry a packet of papers featuring an article by Berlinski.