Discerning Truth: Refuting False Claims Regarding Natural Selection - Part 1

Hi folks, Jason Lyle here with the Biblical Science Institute and our webcast Discerning.

Truth. Today we've got a really important topic. It concerns honesty and truthfulness in the way in which we defend the faith. Obviously it's very important that we who are Christians when we're trying to urge people to trust in Christ and we present them information for the reliability of the scriptures, evidence that confirms biblical creation and challenges evolution, it's really important that we get our facts right.

It's really important that the information that we present is true. There is a tendency in some people to get so excited about wanting to win people for Jesus that they're not so concerned that their arguments are good or that their claims are truthful and that's a problem because the ends don't justify the means.

What you lead people by is what you lead people to. So we don't want to lead people by error, we want to lead them by the truth to the truth. It's very important. To that end, certain organizations like Answers in Genesis and Creation Ministries International have a list of arguments that are bad, bad arguments, arguments creationists should not use when attempting to defend creation or the Bible in general.

And there are good reasons for why we shouldn't use these arguments. They're fallacious, they're based on false claims and so on. But most creation scientists really respect that and they say yeah, I can see there are good reasons why we shouldn't use this argument.

And besides we've got plenty of good arguments to use. We don't need bad ones, folks. We don't need to use false information. There's plenty of true information that confirms the gospel, that confirms biblical creation and it's important to do that.

But every now and then there's a creation speaker who just is so enamored with these bad arguments that he wants to use them anyway. And those of us who are Christians, we need to speak out against that.

We really do. We need to say no, sir, I appreciate your heart, but the way you're going about this is not truthful and that's a problem. And one of the arguments in particular that is on these don't use lists that are promoted by Answers in Genesis, Creation Ministries International, is the idea that natural selection either doesn't exist or it's not a useful concept or whatever.

And a lot of Christians are enamored with that kind of argument because they know that Darwin attempted to use natural selection to convince people of evolution. And so the way they think you convince people evolution's not true is you convince them natural selection isn't true.

But those are actually two very different things. Natural selection could never lead to evolution when you understand it. Natural selection refers to the fact that organisms have different traits that are more or less suitable to their environment.

And those organisms that have traits that better enable them to survive and reproduce in that environment tend to survive and reproduce in greater numbers than those organisms that have traits less suitable to survival in that environment.

Maybe the less suitable don't go extinct, but they have to spend more time being sheltered from their environment because they're not well suited to it and so that leaves less time for reproduction and so they reproduce in smaller numbers.

Now this is something that is readily observed. We observe it every day as I look out here in Colorado. We don't have palm trees here in Colorado, not in any abundance because they're not well suited to the kind of climate that exists here.

And so we do see examples of this all over the world. And yet occasionally you'll get a creationist who wants to deny that. And so today we're going to look at the teachings of Randy Galusa. He's a very nice guy.

He's a creation teacher. He's over at ICR. And a lot of people like him because he's very winsome and charming and he is. I liked him right away when I met him. He's got a delightful sense of humor. But unfortunately he continues to promote false information regarding natural selection.

And he's got some other claims that he makes that are really just kind of assertive. There's really no evidence backing them. We'll probably talk about that in a different webcast. So in any case, those of us who've known Randy, we've approached him.

We've said, you know, you really can't say this, but he just continues to do it anyway. And so we've actually published some articles. Answers in Genesis has published some articles refuting Randy Galusa's claims.

The Creation Ministries International has published articles refuting Randy's claims. And the Biblical Science Institute. I've written a fairly detailed technical article refuting Randy's claims and showing that they don't stand up to scrutiny.

And so we were hoping that he would kind of get the point and not use these arguments, but he continues to do so. And so what I want to do today is take a look at a recent webcast that Randy did. And we're going to take a look at some of the claims that he makes and examine them for logical consistency, correct usage of terms, scientific integrity, theological integrity.

And we're going to find they don't really stand up to scrutiny. They've really been the same claims that have already been refuted by Answers in Genesis, Biblical Science Institute, Creation Ministries International and so on.

If you're wondering how we do this, this falls under a legal principle called fair use. We're allowed to take content from other groups in small sections and comment on that. As long as we're commenting on that.

Our ability to comment on these articles is protected by law. So we can do this. And it's a very useful principle for education. So let's take a look at this latest webcast and see what we can see.

Defining Natural Selection and What Randy Guliuzza Claims

So I wanted to talk a little bit today about natural selection. I know that's a topic you're very passionate about. And we hear about that all the time in popular science. What was the original purpose of natural selection?

And where did that idea originally come from?

The way you phrase that is perfect. Because normally we begin with the question of what is natural selection and you begin with some kind of definition of natural selection. What are we talking about and all these kinds of things?

Yes, normally we would begin with the definition of the thing we're going to talk about. That's important because if we don't do that, if we don't define our terms, then how do we know what it is we're talking about?

Very important. Definitions are very important. We'll see that as we go on.

But really nobody actually has a definition of natural selection.

Well, we're only a few seconds into Randy's response and he's already said something that's just not true. He's claimed that no one has a definition of natural selection. Well, is that true? Let's take a look.

Here is a dictionary. This is the Merriam-Webster Dictionary. This is the 1993 edition. This is the one I used in college. You can check out other editions if you like. Is there a definition for natural selection?

Well, let me read it to you. Natural selection, 1857, a natural process that results in the survival and reproductive success of individuals or groups best adjusted to their environment and that leads to perpetuation of genetic qualities best suited to that particular environment.

Well, what about other dictionaries? Well, the American Heritage Science Dictionary defines natural selection as the process by which organisms that are better suited to their environment than others produce more offspring.

As a result of natural selection, the proportion of organisms in a species with characteristics that are adaptive to a given environment increases with each generation. Dictionary .com. It's got a definition for natural selection.

It says the process by which forms of life having traits that better enable them to adapt to specific environmental pressures as predators, changes in climate, or competition for food or mates will tend to survive and reproduce in greater numbers than others of their kind, thus ensuring the perpetuation of those favorable traits in succeeding generations.

The Oxford Dictionary defines natural selection as the process whereby organisms better adapted to their environment tend to survive and produce more offspring. That's pretty easy. So is there a definition of natural selection?

Yes, there is. It's in the dictionary. And you can read other dictionaries. You'll get similar definitions because there really isn't any doubt about what the definition of natural selection is. It really is simply differential reproduction.

Organisms with traits best suited to survival and reproduction in an environment tend to reproduce in greater numbers than those that lack traits that are suitable to survival and reproduction. It's something that is intuitively obvious, but the definition does exist.

We do have a definition of it. And dictionaries really are just recording the way terms are used by people. So when people refer to natural selection, that's.

What they mean. And we'll get to that, I'm sure, later on. In your questions when we talk about why isn't there a really, really good definition of natural selection.

He's equivocating a little bit. Now there's not a really good definition of natural selection. Well, how do you define a good definition? A good definition is one that describes the term in ways that allow you to distinguish whether something does or does not belong to the term.

And the standard dictionary definition does that. I would give him credit if dictionaries all had very different definitions, but if you look at other dictionaries, they have the same, I mean they're going to use different words, but they have the same basic definition.

Organisms, different traits, different environments reproduce in greater numbers. That's all there is to it. So it's a perfectly good definition. Randy might not want to accept it, but it turns out it's an important principle of logic to use words in established ways.

Because if you don't, communication cannot occur. And that's actually a biblical principle. According to the Bible, we're not to get engaged in disputes over words. We're not to be word wranglers. So this is an important principle.

So the way you phrased it was right on. What.

Was the original purpose of natural selection in terms of what Darwin developed?

Did Darwin come up with natural selection? Now as far as I can tell, he did invent the term, but the process of organisms that have traits more or less suitable to their environment reproducing in different numbers, Darwin did not come up with that.

It's a creationist concept. Edward Blythe wrote about natural selection, again 20 years before Darwin. Why is it that Randy is crediting Darwin with creating natural selection? Evolutionists do that because they want to tie it into the mechanism of evolution, which it cannot be.

But why is it that a creationist would repeat that false claim that Darwin came up with this idea of differential reproduction? He didn't. But if you point out it was actually a creationist who came up with that idea, or at least wrote about it before Darwin, it makes it harder to vilify it, doesn't it?

It's actually a creationist concept. Who invented the idea of natural selection? God did. God in his providence created organisms with different traits, and organisms that have traits that are very conducive to survival and reproduction in a particular environment tend to survive and reproduce in that environment in greater numbers than those that lack such traits.

And we tend to think of that in terms of organisms that have living life in them, animals and things like that. But it applies to plants. Plants are not alive in a biblical sense. But again, the kinds of plants that you find growing in different parts of the world have traits that allow them to be there.

And we don't find plants that are not well suited to that particular environment in nature anyway. And so it was actually God that came up with this concept. And so let's give credit where credit is due.

It's a biblical concept. There are actually examples of it in scripture. Perhaps we'll look at those a little bit later. But it's a biblical concept. Darwin simply hijacked it and tried to attach it to his idea of evolution, which it turns out is fallacious anyway.

And that was because he needed to answer a really, really important question which everybody had been trying to answer for a long time. That is, why do creatures look so incredibly designed? Why do they look like they fit their environments so well without explaining it by a designer or God in any words?

When Edward Blythe wrote about differential reproduction, was he trying to explain how life could come about apart from a designer? Not at all. In fact, he was very clear that the differential reproduction occurs because God has designed organisms with the capacity to produce offspring that are a little bit different from themselves, that have slightly different traits.

And he saw that as a mechanism by which the Lord preserves life on earth. Darwin invented evolution. And indeed, one of the purposes of evolution, probably the main purpose, was to try and explain how life could come about and diversify apart from God.

But that has nothing to do with natural selection. That's evolution. Darwin tried to confuse these terms. He tried to link them so that if you could demonstrate natural selection, which is easy, you would somehow prove evolution, which is false.

And they're very different phenomenon because natural selection is simply referring to differential reproduction. It doesn't create any new traits. The traits have to already be there in order for the organism to survive or not survive in a given environment.

And because creatures do look so incredibly designed, that was the natural explanation for centuries that God created them or they were made by some intelligent designer. But if you want to get around that, you have to come up with another way of explaining it.

And what you really want to explain is agency. Because when we look at creatures and we see how they fit together with their environment, we see how the parts fit together, and now even recently with molecular biology, we can look at the systems in those areas.

We see evidence of an agent, that there was an agent at work. And so what Darwin, as you phrased the question, what was its original purpose? His original purpose was to come up with a substitute agent, a substitute agent in lieu of God, to explain why creatures look so incredibly designed.

Well, again, Darwin did not come up with natural selection. He hijacked it from Blythe and others and tried to use that to come up with a way of explaining life apart from God. Darwin was trying to explain how you could get all this diversity of life without a conscious agency.

He was trying to say that this could happen naturally without any kind of mind behind it, and that was the point of evolution, not natural selection.

And that's how he came up with the concept, and it was Darwin. We have to give credit where credit was due. It was Darwin who came up with the entire concept of natural selection.

Okay, here we have a demonstrably false claim. Darwin did not come up with the concept of natural selection, and I can prove that by reading quotes from Blythe, for example, that detail this differential reproduction before Darwin had given it a moment's thought.

Twenty years before Darwin wrote anything about natural selection, we see all the elements of the concept in Blythe's writings. He says, there would almost seem in some species to be a tendency in every separate family to some particular kind of deviation.

It would be the differences in the traits, which is only counteracted by the various crossings, which in a state of nature must take place, and by the above-mentioned law, which causes each race to be chiefly propagated, that is reproducing greater numbers, by the most typical and perfect individuals, those that have traits most suitable to that environment.

So you can see all of the elements for natural selection are there in Blythe's writing twenty years before Darwin. Blythe is clear that this provides an advantage to survival. He says, the original form of a species is unquestionably better adapted to its natural habits than any modification of that form, and the stronger must always prevail over the weaker.

The latter in a state of nature is allowed but few opportunities of continuing its race. Very clear example of differential reproduction or natural selection. Blythe then goes on to give a specific example, just in case there's any confusion.

He says, in a large herd of cattle, the strongest bull drives from him all the younger and weaker individuals of his own sex, and remains sole master of the herd, so that all the young which are produced must have had their origin from one which possessed the maximum of power and physical strength, in which consequently in the struggle for existence was the best able to maintain his ground and defend himself from every enemy.

And people say, but surely Darwin was the first to connect natural selection with artificial selection, right? Wrong. Blythe did that too. He went the other direction. He started with the way things happen in nature, the natural selection, and then pointed out that this could be used by human beings to promote the traits that we like.

He writes, in like manner among animals which procure their food by means of their agility, strength, or delicacy of sense, the one best organized must always obtain the greatest quantity, and must therefore become physically the strongest, and be thus enabled by routing its opponents to transmit its superior qualities to a greater number of offspring.

The same law which was intended by providence to keep up the typical qualities of a species can be easily converted by man into a means of raising different varieties. That's artificial selection. And people say, well then Blythe must have been an evolutionist, right?

Because isn't natural selection the same thing as evolution? Blythe didn't believe so. He says, but still retaining to the very ultimate limits certain fixed and constant distinctive characters by which the true affinities of the species may be always known.

Basically he's saying dogs will always be dogs, even though you can get a lot of different variations. He says the modifications of each successive type being always in direct relation to particular localities or to particular modes of procuring sustenance.

In short, to the particular circumstances under which a species was appointed to exist in the locality which it indigenously inhabits. And Blythe was very clear that he was creationist. He attributes these things to the great being who first awakened man into existence in common with the meanest Adam, who appointed his destiny upon earth to be so diverse from that of his other creatures, who endowed him alone with a capacity to reflect upon his maker's goodness and power.

So there's no doubt that Blythe had all the concepts of natural selection. This is 20 years before Darwin wrote anything about the topic. So anyone who claims that the concept of natural selection was Darwin's just doesn't know what he's talking about.

He has not bothered to study this topic at all. For that matter, the Bible contains examples of natural selection. Natural selection is about organisms reproducing at different rates depending on the environment in which they're in and the traits that they have.

And we do see examples of that. In fact, Jesus used an example of natural selection to explain a kingdom principle. In Luke chapter 8, beginning in verse 5, he tells a parable. The sower went out to sow his seed and he sowed.

Some fell beside the road and it was trampled under foot and the birds of the air ate it up. Other seed fell on rocky soil. As soon as it grew up, it withered away because it had no moisture. Other seed fell among the thorns and the thorns grew up with it and choked it out.

Other seed fell into good soil and grew up and produced a crop a hundred times as great. Jesus is not trying to defend the idea of differential reproduction. He's using it to explain the kingdom principle.

He's using it to point out that, look, this seed, some of it is not able to survive and reproduce because of the environment in which it's in. And we get one example where the seed falls among thorns and the thorns are better suited for that environment than the seed that's been planted is.

And so the thorns choke it out. The thorns reproduce in greater numbers than the seed. Now that fits the very definition of natural selection. We see it in scripture. So no, let's not give glory to Darwin for something that God thought of and that creationists wrote about 20 years before Darwin.

Why repeat this false claim? I mean, it does make it more difficult to vilify natural selection if you realize it's a creationist concept. God came up with it and creationists wrote about it before Darwin.

Darwin simply hijacked it and tried to link it to evolution. A lot of people would say, well, there's a lot of.

People who thought about natural selection before Darwin did. Yep. Like Edward Blythe,.

The creationist.

In other words, they saw creatures that they, they faced an environmental challenge and some of those creatures lived and some of them died. And therefore the ones that seem to live seem to have traits that fit their environment better.

Everybody observed that on there.

That's the definition of natural selection. We just read the dictionary definition. That's what it is. The organisms that had traits that were, that better enabled survival were better able to survive and reproduce in that environment than those that lacked such traits.

So now at this point, if this were a debate, it would be over because Randy has now contradicted himself. He has affirmed natural selection. So for people who are using the term correctly, natural selection being differential reproduction, you would say, well, Randy has just confirmed that, yes, we do observe natural selection.

We do observe that organisms that have traits better suited to their environment tend to survive and reproduce in greater numbers. That is the definition of natural selection. Now he can, Randy's free to reject that definition, but that's not what we're supposed to do biblically.

Biblically, we are not supposed to have disputes over words. We're supposed, we're supposed to use words in the same way that other people do so that we can communicate. If you fail to do that, then conversation cannot occur.

Rational communication cannot occur.

But it was really Darwin, Darwin, right at the very beginning, who coined the term natural selection. And there was a good reason why he did that.

Ah, here we go. Now here we have some truth. It was Darwin that coined the term, the phrase natural selection. And as far as I can tell, that is true. But earlier, Randy had said that he invented the concept.

We know that's false. I've noticed, in fact, in my writings where I some of Randy's claims, Randy seems to confuse concepts with their description or concepts with the verbal token that describes them.

They're two different things, right? I mean, you can have a word that describes something that where the something doesn't even exist, or you can have something that exists that doesn't have a word yet that's been invented for it.

The word is what's called a verbal token. Okay. And so if I had the word lion, lion, the word, the four letters would be the verbal token. The referent would be the animal, the actual physical lion. Okay.

And there is no, there is no necessary connection between a verbal token and its referent. There's no reason why we have to call a lion a lion. And in fact, in different languages, they give it different names.

Okay. Language is conventional. And so Darwin is free to invent whatever term he wants to invent to describe this process. But the process was already known and had already been written about, but again, it makes it harder to vilify natural selection.

If you realize it's a creationist concept.

Why Darwin's Analogy With Breeding Is Misleading

Okay. So with that groundwork laid, and that was really helpful to have just that background. Now that we have that background laid, what is natural selection. Or at least what is it supposed.

To be? Natural selection was a concept that was originally conceived by Darwin.

No, the concept was invented by God. It was written about by creationists Edward Blythe 20 years before Darwin. Darwin hijacked the concept, gave it a name. He coined the term natural selection, but he did not invent the process.

What Darwin tried to do was link natural selection to evolution to as the cause of evolution, which we now know from genetics, that's not going to work. That can't work.

By comparing nature to what a human breeder would do. You know, there's breeders that people that breed roses and people that breed cattle, and they can get a huge diversity of traits within a very, very short period of time.

In fact, Darwin was looking at pigeon breeders at the time. He could see all these different kinds of pigeons. And just within a short period of time, these pigeon breeders, by picking for one trait or another trait, they could get a big variety of pigeons in a relatively short time.

So he thought, well, what if that could happen naturally? What if.

Nature could act like a pigeon breeder? Edward Blythe had already done that. He had pointed out that artificial selection, which was very common, we can eventually get traits that we like to a certain extent, but he pointed out that in the natural world, it would depend on whether or not the traits are suitable to survival in that given environment.

The only thing Blythe didn't do was coin the term natural selection, but he did make that comparison as well. Remember, Blythe said, the same law, which was intended by providence to keep up the typical qualities of a species, can be easily converted by man into a means of raising different varieties.

So it was not Darwin, but Blythe who first made the connection between artificial selection and natural selection, and he did that in 1835. This was more than 20 years before Darwin's.

Origin of species. And if you can get this big variety of pigeons in such a short time, what could nature do over a really, really long period of time? So he compared nature to a pigeon breeder, and that's where his analogy goes off the rails right from the very beginning.

Initially, people observed that, but nobody is catching it these days, that there is no good, legitimate reason to compare nature, which is as full of living things, but isn't alive, to something that does have a brain, which has real intelligence and real volition,.

And therefore can make real selections. The Bible does. The Bible occasionally will make a comparison between something that we would normally think of as requiring a mind and something that would be natural, something that's inanimate, doesn't have a mind.

For example, Proverbs 16 .33, the lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the Lord. Hmm. So the lot is making a decision. Is the lot making a conscious decision to land one way or the other?

No, of course not. It doesn't have a mind. But nonetheless, the Bible uses that kind of metaphorical language, and scientists do too. And by the way, evolutionists, it was the evolutionists who criticized Darwin for using that term natural selection, because in their view, nature has no mind, and so you can't do any selection.

So the evolutionists would agree with what Randy's saying. But two things to remember here. First of all, how is that in any way relevant to the reality of differential reproduction? Let's suppose that the name, the term natural selection, just isn't a very good term.

So what? I mean, there are things in my field of astronomy that are poorly named, like a black hole. It's not a hole at all. Why do they call it that? Well, okay, it's poorly named, but nonetheless, that's the term that we use for it.

I wouldn't argue therefore black holes don't exist, just because they have a name that doesn't seem to be appropriate. Secondly, I would agree that from an evolutionary perspective, it makes no sense to talk about anything in nature having a mind.

But see, in the Christian worldview, there is a mind behind nature. In the Christian worldview, natural refers to what God normally does, as opposed to supernatural, where he does something in an extraordinary way.

You see, a consistent Christian recognizes that God upholds all things by the word of his power, and therefore everything that happens in nature, every electron that circles its atom, is controlled by the mind of God.

And so when certain organisms have traits that enable them to survive in environments, say, you know, a palm tree that thrives in the tropics, but that same palm tree doesn't, isn't able to grow and reproduce in a very cold climate in Alaska, maybe, is there a mind behind that?

Yeah, the mind of God. God's the one that gave organisms traits that allow them to survive in various environments. And granted, no organisms, no living organisms, like animals, would have died before sin, but they still would have been able to reproduce in greater numbers in environments to which they're more suited.

So this is utterly irrelevant to the process of natural selection. It's simply arguing over words, something that we're not supposed to do according to scripture. Refusing to use words the way other people do just generates confusion.

And the Bible says of such a person in 1 Timothy 6, 4, he is conceited and understands nothing, but he has a morbid interest in controversial questions and disputes about words, out of which arise envy, strife, abusive language, evil suspicions.

Folks, we're not supposed to be that way. Let's use words in the standard way, consulting a dictionary if we need to, to understand how people use terms and not just fight over whether or not terms are fitting or not.

That doesn't lead to anything good.

According to scripture. And that's how we coin the term natural selection. Nature is selecting similar to how a human breeder would be selecting. Backing up to your earlier question, that's really.

Pretty good. How did natural selection replace God? Did natural selection replace God? I mean, organisms have been reproducing differentially since creation even. Did that replace God? Not at all. God is the one that gave organisms the capacity to produce traits that are slightly different in the offspring than in the parents.

And that's due to the genetic information that is available in the parents. And that leads to differential reproduction. It just does. It's not a replacement for God. Now, I do believe Darwin wanted to replace God, but not with natural selection per se, with evolution.

He was trying to explain the diversity of life apart from God. And you can't do that because, remember, natural selection simply refers to differential reproduction. In the most extreme cases, the differential reproduction is one organism surviving and the other one not surviving at all and being able to reproduce.

In which case, its genome, the genes that it has that produce those traits are eliminated. So you can see, you can't get anything, you can't get new traits by natural selection. So what do modern evolutionists believe is the cause of new traits?

Mutations. Mutations are what they believe is actually responsible for diversity. And then natural selection is simply supposed to refer to the sort of the culling of those that didn't have traits that were suitable.

That environment. And you have to look at what Darwin was trying to do. If you're going to explain agency, God's agency with nature, you have to be able to get nature as an agent in some way.

That's a bifurcation fallacy because it's not either God's agency or nature. Nature is God's agency. It is the way he normally accomplishes his will. It's again, it's so important to define our terms so that there's no confusion.

What does Randy mean exactly by agent or agency? Because there are multiple definitions for those words. Some imply intelligence, others imply no intelligence whatsoever. If we just, again, we just look to the dictionary.

Let's take a look here. Agent, one that acts or exerts power, something that produces or is capable of producing an effect, an active or efficient cause, a chemically, physically, or biological active principle.

Now, none of those definitions would require any intelligence at all. But the third definition does a means or instrument by which a guiding intelligence achieves a result. Now, by that definition, nature is God's agent because it is the means or instrument by which the guiding intelligence of God achieves a particular result.

So nature as an agency of God is not a replacement for God's power. Rather, it's an example of God's power. Maybe that's what Randy means. I don't know. He doesn't define his terms. But in any case, Darwin was not trying to argue that nature is intelligent.

He was trying to argue that evolution, that life could come about without any kind of intelligent agent at all. And he did that by trying to convince people that if natural selection was true, then that would lead to evolution.

And he can be partly forgiven for that because he didn't know anything about genetics. We now know that from genetics, that can't happen. The differential reproduction we see, natural selection that we see, cannot possibly lead to different kinds of organisms.

There are limits within that variation. And the way he was able to ascribe agency to nature was he found a way to ascribe intelligence to nature and volition to nature.

Was Darwin actually trying to say that nature has intelligence and volition? No. And again, I think Darwin was wrong for a lot of reasons. But we folks, we need to represent him correctly. This is a straw man fallacy, that Darwin's trying to say nature has some kind of intelligence.