Argument number 11: the score to date, Creation 10, Evolution 0.  

11. Natural selection might explain microevolution, but it cannot explain the origin of new species and higher orders of life.

Evolutionary biologists have written extensively about how natural selection could produce new species. For instance, in the model called allopatry, developed by Ernst Mayr of Harvard University, if a population of organisms were isolated from the rest of its species by geographical boundaries, it might be subjected to different selective pressures. Changes would accumulate in the isolated population. If those changes became so significant that the splinter group could not or routinely would not breed with the original stock, then the splinter group would be reproductively isolated and on its way toward becoming a new species.

Natural selection is the best studied of the evolutionary mechanisms, but biologists are open to other possibilities as well. Biologists are constantly assessing the potential of unusual genetic mechanisms for causing speciation or for producing complex features in organisms. Lynn Margulis of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and others have persuasively argued that some cellular organelles, such as the energy-generating mitochondria, evolved through the symbiotic merger of ancient organisms. Thus, science welcomes the possibility of evolution resulting from forces beyond natural selection. Yet those forces must be natural; they cannot be attributed to the actions of mysterious creative intelligences whose existence, in scientific terms, is unproved.

Once again, there is an abundance of straw in this argument, but no meat. The creationist side of the argument as initially stated above is correct, but Mr. Rennie’s attempted refutation has enough straw in it to feed the entire beef population of Argentina, and then some! Thus, the creationist argument remains unrefuted by this attempt.

Moving to specifics, simply put in his terms, new species arising within a “kind” (microevolution) from reproductive isolation is accepted by creationists (rendering it a “straw man” argument). However, because he wants you to believe that creationists are moronic knuckle dragging Neaderthals, you are not to know that fact. You, dear reader, might actually listen to a creationist instead of feeling, oh, so sophisticated over those parochial morons with your scientific evolutionary wisdom!

But it truly gets better, because creationists also actually agree that allopatry could explain the origin of different people groups (“races”) when the confusion of languages at Babel created a separation of small population groups which spread out all over the Earth (although we are still a species isolated reproductively only by geography, and not biology).

This brings us back to a topic of critical importance that is usually ignored by the evolutionist and most certainly ignored repeatedly by Mr. Rennie: information content. Reproductive isolation works by stopping the interchange of genetic information between populations, not by generating new information. This point extends to natural selection, which, despite being studied so much, is observed only to delete information, not add it.

Lastly, the hypothesis of endosymbiosis remains an unproven theory lacking in significant factual evidence despite “persuasive argumentation.” There is no data that suggests that any prokaryote (past or present) is capable of ingesting another cell and maintaining its viability without digesting it. In addition, the theory totally ignores the large genetic differences between mitochondria and prokaryotes. Some similarities are to be expected, but the homologies are insufficient to carry the weight of this hypothesis in the absence of anything else substantial.

Now, listen carefully again to the last sentences of this alleged argument, for it truly lets the cat out of the bag regarding the evolutionist position (emphasis added):

Thus, science welcomes the possibility of evolution resulting from forces beyond natural selection. Yet those forces must be natural; they cannot be attributed to the actions of mysterious creative intelligences whose existence, in scientific terms, is unproved.

They MUST; they CANNOT. So, it doesn’t matter if the evidence does point in that direction even in scientific terms, as though their definition of science were the only and ultimate epistemological method. (For those interested in evidence for the existence of God, I invite you to the other ongoing series I have starting here.) This one direction is forever sealed off as unviable to the evolutionist’s mind. Why? Mainly because evolutionists reject the possibility of proof of the supernatural a priori, even before any evidence has been considered. And this is not an isolated statement by our protagonist but a consensus among evolutionists. For example (emphases added):

"It is as though they [fossils] were just planted there, without any evolutionary history. Needless to say this appearance of sudden planting has delighted creationists. ...Both schools of thought (Punctuationists and Gradualists) despise so-called scientific creationists equally, and both agree that the major gaps are real, that they are true imperfections in the fossil record. The only alternative explanation of the sudden appearance of so many complex animal types in the Cambrian era is divine creation and (we) both reject this alternative."

(Dawkins, Richard, The Blind Watchmaker, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 1996, p. 229-230)

"All of us who study the origin of life find that the more we look into it, the more we feel that it is too complex to have evolved anywhere. We believe as an article of faith that life evolved from dead matter on this planet. It is just that its complexity is so great, it is hard for us to imagine that it did."

(Urey, Harold C., quoted in Christian Science Monitor, January 4, 1962, p. 4)

"An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that, in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle. So many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going. But this should not be taken to imply that there are good reasons to believe that it could not have started on the earth by a perfectly reasonable sequence of fairly ordinary chemical reactions. The plain fact is that the time available was too long, the many microenvironments on the earth's surface too diverse, the various chemical possibilities too numerous and our own knowledge and imagination too feeble to allow us to be able to unravel exactly how it might or might not have happened such a long time ago, especially as we have no experimental evidence from that era to check our ideas against."

(Francis Crick, Life Itself, Its Origin and Nature, 1981, p. 88)

So much for open minds willing to follow the facts where they lead! So just who is being irrational? Who is invoking faith? The above statements are just that: statements of the faith that all must be explained in terms of the material, that there is no other option possible, and that to doubt it is logically impossible.

And that is the crux of the matter. The evolutionist doesn’t want to consider the possibility of a transcendent God to whom he might be accountable, therefore, no such God must be allowed to exist. Alas for him, there will be a rude awakening moments after his death as he stands before this God whom he has been denying all his life!

[Note for Piker, who frequently challenges my generalizations: the last paragraph is a generalization. While it accurately describes the current crop of militant evolutionists, I realize that some evolutionists are such because they have uncritically accepted the alleged evidence for evolution without even bothering to consider alternatives and that they harbor no such hostility to Creationists or their God. Alas, the end result when they enter eternity will be the same.]

The score after this round: Creation 11, Evolution 0. Only four more chances.

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