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Dinosaurs for Dummies                                  Richard Dawkins                                                   More To Life

Built on Rock ! Exploring Answers to Questions about Life, The Universe & Everything

This is not an easy question to answer. The reason being that the way in which the word evolution is most commonly used is not controversial. It is used about almost anything that develops. We speak about the evolution of the motor vehicle and have no problem. It is just another example of the use of the word evolution and we know what is meant by it.  A development from the first simple basic model through many stages up to what we experience driving a modern car. That is how all man made technology develops. Darwin theorised that nature developed similarly, from simple to complex, but without recourse to any intelligent design or purposeful input.

The difficulty is that Darwin’s method cannot be applied to the evolution of a car which involved both an idea and engineering knowledge: placing an engine into some construct that had three or four wheels is normally understood to be a design process. Darwin, being endowed with intelligence can have an idea, but nature cannot; there is no intelligence in evolution: things just happened spontaneously. In contrast cars came from an idea, and from the growth of that idea came more and better cars. Darwin applies this principle to all living systems but ignores a major difficulty. The problem is that life has only ever been observed coming from life. Life has never been shown to have arisen from non life, despite many of years of hoping and trying to achieve this miracle in laboratories. Those supporting the theory of Evolution have never demonstrated this first vital step.

Evolution is therefore stalled on the starting line.

It cannot have an idea concerning life because intelligence is ruled out.

It cannot gather the component parts together because there can be no plan.

It cannot put the necessary parts together for the same reason.

There is nothing more obvious than the fact that every aspect of molecular life is defined by a plan.

It is also obvious that procreation has to occur before life as we and everything else, apart from asexually  reproducing life experience it, can be more than a spark that flares and goes out. Procreation requires some kind of partnership between two mutually compatible but very differently set up units: something like male and female. And then the couple have to meet. Imagine the chances of that happening. An original couple wandering around a planet the size of earth who just happen to bump into one another; dream on!

Evolution covers a broad spectrum.You can break it down into roughly three separate areas. The first of which is agreed and acceptable to almost everyone, certainly to me.

Firstly: The process of change of living things over time. When evolutionists say that evolution is a fact in this sense then no-one in their right minds objects. Change over time and diversity is not a problem, it happens all the time, both in car design and in nature. Darwin noted how the beaks of finches differed on the Galapagos Islands. This demonstrates the reality of natural selection. It works in this case as in every case, but only within very tightly defined limits: in this case at the level of finches. It cannot however and has never been shown to evolve into anything other than a finch.  Creationists do not have a problem acknowledging that natural selection works within these well  documented boundaries.

Secondly: Reconstructing an evolutionary history that shows how various lineages branched off from a single stem to create a tree of life. This has never been demonstrated. If it has ever happened, it did so during the eons of pre-history and out of sight of any observer. So this belief is nothing more than an idea that could be true. My belief in a living God who created everything fully mature: universe, plants, animals and humans in six days could also be true. Both are belief systems based primarily on faith, neither are science, not unless scientists can come up with proof. And this they have failed to do.

Thirdly: The current mechanisms which are said to account for evolutionary change have never been shown to work. Darwin appealed to natural selection operating on random variations in living things in order to explain how organisms adapt to their environment. This as was stated above is known to work, Darwin’s finches prove it well enough. The trouble is that it was soon established that natural selection only worked within narrow limits. With the development of Mendel’s ideas genetic mutations were introduced to supplement Darwin’s mechanism of natural selection. Mutations supplying an explanation for the variations on which natural selection works. This marked the birth of the updated version of evolution called neo-Darwinism. And no aspect of neo-Darwinism has ever been proved. It was a sign of the desperation of evolutionists that they ever contemplated introducing such a dangerous and destructive element into their thinking. Since mutations are known primarily for their ability to foul up genetic information. They are the major contributors to the reason why we fall apart with age and disease and end up in a coffin. They are a continuing and constant drag on our genome.

Darwin’s great idea, the one that set him apart from the others was that one kind of creature could evolve into another kind: such as a type of small land mammal  evolving into a whale, and most famously ape kind into humankind. The problem is with definitions. The word “evolution” can be used to refer to any of these very different ideas. Some are OK and not contentious whereas others are just speculations and assumptions.

To call evolution a “fact” is a deceit, since the word is defined in a number of different ways by evolutionists themselves. You may now begin to understand how misleading it is when evolution is asserted to be an established and universally recognized fact.



Darwin’s Theory of Evolution: What is it?