THE STORY OF EVOLUTION

In the Bible we read that on the sixth day of creation, "God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness… So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him, male and female created he them" (Genesis 1:26, 27).

Christians believe that all human life began 6,000 years ago when God created the first man and woman - Adam and Eve. However, modern science teaches that man evolved on earth from a single cell animal that existed three billions years ago. Rather than believing in the story of creation, they believe in the story of evolution.

According to this story, 4.5 billion years ago the earth began to form from stellar dust and gas but it wasn't until another 700 million years later that the earth cooled enough to become a rocky planet. At this same time the gaseous atmosphere surrounding the planet cooled and condensed creating oceans but not like those we have today. These oceans were filled with carbon dioxide.

Somewhere around 3 billion years ago the first living organisms developed in this ocean. They were simple, one cell creatures such as microbes and bacteria that fed on the carbon dioxide in the water and gave off oxygen as a by-product. For the next one billion years this oxygen was released into the water and then into the atmosphere.

Once the earth became rich in oxygen this enabled the formation of a more complex single cell organism that had a nucleus with DNA and other working systems. A billion years later the first multi-cell organism appeared on earth and then, over millions of years, these organism grew in size and shape, developing first into jelly-fish type creatures that had very little form, then into worm-like creatures with a more structured and a distinctive shape, which eventually developed into fish with vertebrae and complex organs such as heart, eyes, lungs, etc.

It is estimated that around 500 million years ago the first sea creatures began to venture out of the water onto land. By this time there were hundreds of thousands of different species of sea animals, along with an equal number of different kinds of plant life. But for a fish to venture out of the water there had to be a change in its breathing system. Water is made up of molecules that contains one atom of hydrogen and two atoms of oxygen, and, since fish need oxygen to live, they are equipped with lungs that have the ability to extract oxygen out of the water. However, their lungs are not able to take in oxygen directly. Therefore, in order for a fish to live both in the water as well as on land, their breathing system had to be different from that of a normal fish.

According to the story of evolution, changes take place in animals that allow them to adapt to their environment and the way this happens is that mutations occur in the DNA of offspring which is different from their parents. In this sense we can consider these mutated creatures as freaks of nature. However, evolutionists teach that these mutations occur randomly and happen by chance. Most of the time, these mutations are not beneficial and therefore do nothing to improve the animal's ability to survive. When this happens, these mutated offspring and their kind eventually die off. But some of these mutations actually improve the animal's ability to adapt to a new environment, which not only increases their ability to survive but to flourish. Thus, only those animals whose mutations allow them to adapt to changes in their environment, are able to prosper and increase. This is what evolutionists refer to as survival of the fittest. But the premise of evolution is that these changes occur, not because some external superior intelligence has deliberately caused them to happen but rather they are the result of random and arbitrary mutations in the animal's DNA.

Since this is the accepted theory of how animals evolve, let's apply that knowledge to understand how fish became land animals. At some point in time there was a male and a female fish who mated and produced an offspring. However, in this case, the parent fish had lungs that could only extract oxygen from water, but their offspring was born a freak because he had a very different breathing system that could not only extract oxygen from water but could also breath air directly. This mutation didn't involve just a change in the color of the new animal's skin or the shape of its fins, or the shape of its mouth. This new fish had a completely different breathing mechanism. But exactly how randomly mutated DNA was able to accomplish this feat, no evolutionist is able to explain except to say it just happened by pure chance.

Since this new fish now had the ability to breathe air, it seems only natural that its instincts would compel it to poke its head above water and breathe. This would then eventually lead him to venture near land and desire to explore this new, non-watery environment. However, here the air-breathing fish would encounter a problem because its only means of propulsion was with its fins and tail which were not capable of getting him to move on land. For that to happen, there would have to be another random mutation occur in one of its offspring but this mutation would have to be very specific in nature. It would not only have to develop feet but they would have to be just the right kind of feet.

As we follow the timeline that evolutionists give us, as these air-breathing fish mated over thousands of years, they would have produced millions of similar kinds of fish. However, there is no advantage to breathing air if you're a fish. In fact, it's a liability because these animals would need to constantly rise to the surface to breathe. Therefore, according to the theory of survival of the fittest, air-breathing fish should have become extinct but, obviously, that didn't happen. Furthermore, according to the theory of evolution, if air-breathing fish did easily survive in the water we should have then expected to see an explosion of a wide variety of different kinds of air-breathing fish, as occurred with water-breathing fish, but that didn't happen either.

As we continue to follow the story of evolution, we are led to believe that air-breathing fish struggled to find ways to get up on land in an effort to adapt to their ability to breathe. Perhaps some fish developed claws on their fins as a means of pulling themselves along the ground. Perhaps there were fish who developed longer snouts with hooks on the end whereby they could pull themselves up on land. We can imagine all sorts of adaptations taking place over thousands of years until finally, one day, one fish produced an offspring that had four legs, properly proportioned and exactly positioned that allowed it to walk out of the water. This is the picture that evolutionists paint for us of how fish evolved into land animals.

However, this explanation of animal adaptation sounds more like intelligent design than random happenstance. In other words, this explanation clearly implies that the fish were making a conscious effort to figure out how to achieve a specific goal. That suggests an intelligent effort to design something that could overcome a particular problem the animal faced. But is wasn't the animal itself who was was trying to make the needed changes. Rather, the changes took place place in the DNA of their offspring which is something no one has the ability to do simply by concsious thought. On the other hand, evolutionists state as fact that these mutation take place randomly which, by definition, means there is no intelligent thought process involved. If that is true, then it is impossible for nature to know that air-breathing fish need feet. Therefore, to maintain their theory, evolutionists either have to contradict their own beliefs about intelligent design or just ignore the obvious.

As millions of years continued to go by, the story of evolution tells us that the earth began to teems with hundreds of thousands of different kinds of animals, both in the sea and on the land. But then, about 230 million years ago, there was a cataclysmic event that destroyed nearly 95% of all life on the planet. According to some, there were gigantic volcanic eruptions all over the earth which spewed forth ash and gases into the atmosphere that blanketed the globe and caused the oxygen level to drop dramatically. Since all life depends on oxygen, this caused both plant and animal life to die and nearly the entire earth came to resemble a desert.

Even so, evolutionists say that some life did survive, mostly as microbes, and the process of evolution began once more. This time, however, what nature produced was the dinosaurs. The reason they thrived in the oxygen poor environment was because they had a unique breathing system that allowed them to extract enough oxygen from the air to give them all the energy their bodies needed. As a result, this allowed them to grow to gigantic sizes and live long lives. And, as the oxygen level in the earth's atmosphere gradually increased, their breathing system still served them well. Because they were so well adapted to their environment they were the fittest and therefore survived the best.

While this is the accepted theory, there is one question that evolutions can't answer and that is: Where did the dinosaurs come from? In other words, if all evolution can be accounted for by random mutations in the DNA of existing animals, which animal or animals were the parents of dinosaurs, especially since 95% of all life had been extinguished? And what caused the offspring of one set of parents to be born with a completely different breathing system that could operate so much more efficiently than their parents? Furthermore, this evolutionary process took place much quicker than had originally happened at the beginning of the earth's history. That then raises another question of: why? The only answer evolutionists offer to these questions are theories that often contradict one another. In other words, they can only give educated guesses because there is no clear scientific evidence available for them to give a difinitive answer.

There are three different kinds of animals - herbivores, carnivores. and omnivores. Herbivores are plant or fruit eating animals while carnivores survive on eating meat and omivores can eat both plants and meat. But, there's much more to what we eat than meets the eye. First of all, there is a distinctive difference in the digestive system of these animals. It takes much more effort to digest meat than it does plants which means that the digestive system of fleshing eating animals has to be different in some way from those who survive on eating plants. Furthermore, a carnivore's body has to have meat in order to grow and survive, which indicates that its cells require different nutrients than those of a herbivore. If a carnivore had only grass or leaves to eat it would starve to death while a herbivore would starve to death if all it had to eat was meat.

Secondly, there is a difference in the kind of teeth each animal has. Plant eating animals have flat teeth that are designed to grind and pulverize their food while carnivores have sharp teeth that are designed to rip and tear flesh apart. More than that, meat eating animals need stronger jaw muscles than those who eat plants. What all of this points out is that instead of there being small, minor differences between herbivores and carnivores, there are major structural difference between these two classes of animals.

When we look at birds we find even more significant differences. Leaving aside the obvious difference of having wings, their bones are lighter, their heart-rate is much faster, and their sense of direction is much more acute than land animals. Yet, according to evolutionists, these three very different classes of animals all came from the same parents. That would be like saying that two rabbits mating produced a creature that eventually became a lion while two other rabbits had offspring that eventually became an eagle.

Evolutionists claim that these changes took place very slowly and that each species of animals gradually morphed into something very different from their parents over thousands of years but, if that were true then we should find extensive archeological evidence showing these many minor but significant changes gradually occurring over a large number of years. For example, we should find abundant evidence showing how animal's teeth gradually changed from being short and flat to being long and sharp or mutated animals with small, useless wings that got bigger and more functional for flying over the years. Instead, what the archeological record shows is that each animal discovered already had highly formed and fully developed systems that were well integrated with one another that not only made each of them distinctly unique but which also allowed them to successfully survive.

But dinosaurs weren't the only animals living during this period of time. Dinosaurs belong to a family of animals known as reptiles but there was another group of animals who belong to a family known as mammals. However, their breathing system was not as well adapted to surviving in a low oxygen atmosphere which therefore put them at a distinct disadvantage to the dinosaurs.

The first disadvantage was that they were small, ranging in size from about six inches to no more than twelve inches long. In many ways they resembled a mouse or a squirrel but they couldn't run very fast and had a relatively short life-span. This was because of their reduced capacity for extracting oxygen from the atmosphere. Why their lung system never adapted to this change in their environment as had happened with the dinosaurs, evolutionists are unable to explain. However, as the oxygen level began to rise over millions of years, instead of growing larger they still remained small. According to evolutionists, the reason for this was because they were easy prey for the larger animals. To protect themselves, they lived in underground burrows or in trees and came out to forage for food mostly at night when it was safer. According to the theory of survival of the fittest, if a mammal did begin to grow larger and couldn't live underground, they were easily eaten and soon became extinct. Therefore, as long as the dinosaurs were around, mammals remained small creatures.

Because it was safer to move about at night, most mammals at this time were nocturnal creatures and nature did help them evolve in adapting to this kind of existence, with their eyes changing to see better in the dark and the growth of claws enabling them to dig in dirt. But this explanation again infers there was some sort of an intelligent force at work to produce these necessary mutations. The evidence also suggests that nearly all mammals at this period of time were herbivores, eating mostly berries and small plants.

But mammals had a unique feature that dinosaurs lacked - they produced live offspring while reptiles and most fish reproduce by laying eggs. In the egg is the embryo which grows by feeding on the material surroundiing it and, by the time the embryo has used up all the material, it has grown sufficiently strong enough to break out of the egg. In addition to this, most animals who lay eggs bury them and then go away, letting the egg hatch by itself and leaving their newly born offspring to live on their own.

On the other hand, a mammal requires a completely different kind of reproductive system because the embryo of their offspring remains inside the mother while it grows. When a female mammal becomes pregnant, her body manufactures something called the placenta which is designed to take nutrients from the mother's body, store it and then deliver it to the growing embryo through an umbilical cord. When the embryo has grown to a certain size, rather than the offspring deciding on its own to come out into the world, it is the mother's body, independent of her own conscious control, that determines when it is time to expel the offspring out of the womb. Then, once the new mammal is born, the placenta is no longer needed and automatically ceases to function. When this happens, it shrivels up and is expelled from the mother's body.

Unlike animals that are hatched through eggs and who can immediately live on their own at the time of birth, mammal offspring cannot survive on their own without the aid of their parents. Therefore, a female mammal also has to have a system for producing food to nourish their young after birth until they are old enough to take care of themselves.

According to the theory of evolution, each of these different systems came about through a random mutation in genes as they were passed from one generation to another and that these systems developed slowly over thousands of years. However, this isn't a simple matter of a fish's fins mutating into legs, or paws that morph into fingers, or a fish tail that slowly changed into the tail of a monkey that shortened over time and then disappeared all together in humans. The procedure needed for breathing, digestion, and reproduction are highly complex and very sophisticated operating systems that require many different parts, all of which are extremely essential and connected in just the right sequence in order for the entire process to function properly. Such systems cannot gradually develop over thousands of years. They have to appear complete and fully assembled all at once or they don't work. And that is precisely what the archeological evidence shows. Furthermore, according to the theory of evolution, animals who had systems that didn't work properly would have become extinct rather than continuing to produce mutated offspring with useless parts that eventually became highly functional thousands of years later.Again, what we see is that the evidence doesn't support the theory.

Then, 65 million years ago, there was another cataclysmic event that changed everything. Scientists believe that a giant meteor, measuring about six miles wide, crashed into what today we call the Yucatan peninsula. This impact had a devastating effect upon the earth, destroying more than 50% of all life. It was this event that scientists believe completely annihilated the entire dinosaur population. On the other hand, nearly all the land animals that survived this catastrophe were mammals.

As thousands of years went by after this disastrous event had occurred and without the threat of large predators to worry about, evolutionists claim that mammals began to evolve from being small, chipmunk size creatures into larger and large animals. For example, evolutionists point to evidence showing how the horse evolved from being the size of a dog to their current size today. But what they haven't been able to show is how a horse evolved into an elephant or a giraffe or even a zebra. Neither have they been able to find evidence of a Siamese cat evolving into a Bengal tiger or a squirrel eventually becoming a monkey.

Since all mammals were herbivores during the time of the dinosaurs, it is obvious that a major transformation had to take place for them to evolve into carnivores. If there were just a few species that made this transformation, it might be understandable why there isn't any evidence of this evolutionary process in the fossil record but with tens of thousands of different mammals having been cataloged by scientists, it would seem there should be an over abundance of proof to document this slow and gradual change over thousands of years. However, scientists have not been able to find conclusive evidence to document these changes.

What the evidence does show is that, while this account of the history of the earth is a dramatic and exciting story, it is nonetheless only a theory. However, many scientists say it is more than a theory because there is still an abundant amount of evidence to support their conclusions. They argue that the fact they haven't been able to discover a complete evolutionary change from one animal into another shouldn't be surprising given the fact that what evidence they have found so far is only a tiny fraction of all the animals that have lived and died over the past 230 million years. But if that is true then it undermines their claim that evolution is more than a theory because if what fossils they've collected so far is just a very small fraction of the entire history of life on this planet then they are admitting their conclusions are based on fragmentary and incomplete evidence.

But there is another way to test their theory rather than relying on the fossil record. According to evolutionists, each time animal life has nearly been extinguished on earth, it has come back by adapting to meet the changing conditions of their environment. More than that, this process of adaptation has resulted in a relatively small number of animals evolving into tens of thousands of different species. That highly suggests that evolution is a constant and ongoing process.

To believe the theory of evolution one must also believe that the process by which one kind of animal evolves into another completely new and different kind of creature must still be going on today. Therefore, with such a wide variety of animals to study we should expect to easily observe this process taking place among living creatures.

In the beginning of modern man's development he was primarily a farmer and a keeper of animals and, as such, was very familiar with the process of birth. That means he was well aware of what kind of animal a normal birth produced and would have certainly recognized when an animal was born that was different from its parents.

Over the last 6,000 years of recorded history man has always been curious and observant of his environment and has made careful notes of what he has discovered, yet there has not been one recorded instance of an animal being born that was materially different in some way to its natural parents. And that includes observations made during the entire 20th century with all of it technological advances in science and increased knowledge of nature.

And this process of evolution among mammals applies equally as well to humans. According to evolutionists, two million years ago the first humanoid appeared which scientists have named Homo Habilis. This mammal later evolved into Homo Erectus who eventually evolved into Homo Sapiens, or the modern man, about 50,000 years ago.

If evolution is an ongoing process then we should expect to see new lines of humanoid creatures splitting off from Homo Sapiens and these would be mammals who have significant anatomical differences from its parents, thereby showing the beginning stages of a new species of humans in the making. At the least, we should expect to see man himself evolving into a more advanced stage, perhaps calling him Homo Superious, but there is no evidence that such evolution in man is occuring.

In answer to this lack of evidence, evolutionists argue that there have been many mutations among humanoids over the last two million years but that most of these changes have not been beneficial. Because of this, these mutated humans were not well adapted to their environment and therefore died off after a few hundred years. But if this is true, then we should still expect to see some evidences of evolution occurring in the past 50,000 thousand years. Certainly, that is more than enough time for at least some changes to take place in humans but there are none.

While there is some evidence that does support the claims of evolutionists, there are also many other questions that science has not be able to provide convincing answers to and until they can their theory will continue to be just a story of evolution.


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