Genesis Apologetics K8 Student Zone-Refuting Evolution Part 1 (6-8 Grade)

Well, hello and welcome to The Zone. I'm your host, Big Wave Dave. Today we're going to kick off our three -part series on refuting evolution.

Today's episode, Understanding the Basics. When someone asks you, do you believe in evolution, please don't say no.

Instead, you should ask them, what do you mean by that? Are we talking about adaptation or genetic variation or maybe natural selection or Darwinian evolution?

You see, the word evolution has a lot of different meanings. Let's start by taking a closer look at these two.

Most scientists agree that all the different breeds of dogs came from wolf -like ancestors. But how did we get so many breeds?

There are hundreds of them. The answer is adaptation and genetic variation.

Now, in the first nine chapters of Genesis, God commanded his creatures five times to be fruitful and multiply.

And to help them do that, God gave living creatures the ability to adapt. Here's how it works.

Living creatures have the ability to detect certain changes in the environment, and then they switch on and off programmed responses.

The important thing to remember is this. The mechanisms for implementing these changes are already within the creature.

For example, in the winter, the coat of the arctic fox turns white, and in the summer it turns gray.

This helps them hunt and stay safe from predators. Depending on where these dogs live, certain features get turned on and off, and then over time, when they reproduce, you end up with a wide variety of different types of dogs.

Is this the result of random mutations? Actually, it's not. What we're looking at here is the result of programmed responses to environmental changes and genetic variations.

Dogs are a little different. We've got to take into account something called selective breeding. Here's the way it works.

Sometimes people want a dog that looks a certain way, like this adorable little schnauzer puppy. So if you want a puppy that looks like that, well, what do you do?

Well, you find parents that look like that, and then they have puppies. Lots and lots of puppies.

Now this is what people call a purebred. Now sometimes people want to combine breeds and then make some new varieties.

Let's play a game. The dogs along the top are the parents. These cute little guys are the puppies.

Let's see if you can guess who the parents are. Let's start with this first one. Okay, who do you think the parents are?

Make your guess. That is a golden doodle. And what about this cute little guy?

That's a labradoodle. Okay, what about this adorable little girl? What do you think?

That is a cockapoo. The result of all this, we now have hundreds and hundreds of different breeds of dogs.

We have tall dogs, skinny dogs, fat dogs, hot dogs, all kinds of dogs. But here's what you need to remember.

They are all still just dogs. They're not evolving or turning into some other type of creature.

They're still dogs. We're going to talk more about that during session two. Let's talk about natural selection.

These two dogs are madly in love, so they decide to get married and have puppies. Now I want you to notice something.

These dogs both have medium hair. They have the genetic information for short hair or long hair, which means when they have puppies, there are three possible outcomes.

They can have puppies with short hair, with medium hair, or with long hair. Now let's say, okay, these puppies grow up and they decide to move.

Let's say they go to the desert. What's going to happen? Well, dog number one, he's going to be just fine because he has short hair.

Now the second one, he's going to struggle because it's hot and his hair is kind of long. But he's got some options because of his genetic makeup.

He can either leave, quickly adapt, and if he can't do those, then he's going to perish.

Now the third dog, he's in a lot of trouble because he can't adapt. So he has two options.

He can either leave or perish. Now animals that can't adapt or relocate, this is the outcome.

So what we see quite often is animals that are well suited for the environment tend to dominate that area.

In this case, dogs with short hair would be the ones that lived in deserts. And just the opposite would be true in cold climates.

So there's some important things that we need to know about natural selection. First, nature doesn't have a brain.

It's not a person. So it's not capable of selecting anything. The second thing is natural selection doesn't actually create or form new creatures.

And finally, it is the ability or inability of a creature to adapt or relocate that often determines whether or not it lives.

You see, natural selection is actually a process. It is the extinction of creatures that are unable to adapt or relocate.

You get it? Great. Let's review. Adaptation are program responses to changes in the environment.

Genetic variation is recombination of existing genetic information. And natural selection is a process.

It is the extinction of living things that cannot relocate or adapt. What's really important to understand is these processes have all been confirmed by observable science.

Okay, you ready for the last one? Darwinian evolution. So let's start with the definition.

What is it? Well, here's the definition from the Biology Teachers Association. The diversity of life on earth is the outcome of evolution, an unsupervised, impersonal, unpredictable, natural...

Wow. Okay, let's make this a lot simpler, shall we? This is really what they're saying.

That time plus chance equals life. You see, evolutionists believe that millions and millions of years ago that somehow non -living chemicals suddenly became alive, like this.

It's alive! Okay, time out. Reality check. When you look at living creatures and you look at things like human cells, you discover they are really complicated.

Now Darwin, when he was around, when he looked into a microscope, all he could see was just like a little blob.

Today we know that inside these cells are little factories and transportation systems, all kinds of different things going on in there.

There is no way that this could have created itself. And yet evolutionists insist that, oh no, if we have billions of years, it can happen through mutations.

So what is a mutation? A mutation is when an animal or living creature reproduces.

Sometimes there are mistakes in the genetic information that is passed on to the offspring. So theoretically, there are three different types of mutations.

The first one is detrimental. Now what does that mean? It means bad things. We know of thousands of mutations that cause disease or death.

Well, that's not going to help Darwinian evolution. What about the next one? Neutral. Now these are just like the name sounds.

They don't really do much. Some examples might be an unusual eye color or hair color or things like that.

Again, that's not going to help promote Darwinian evolution. What Darwinian evolution needs are mutations that can add tons and tons of complex information and then pass that on to offspring.

So can random mutations do that? Can they provide this type of complex information? This is what

Lee Spetner, Ph .D. of physics said. He says he's never been able to find that kind of mutation.

Here's another one. Royal Truman, Ph .D. in chemistry. He can't find even one example of this happening.

You see what Darwinian evolution needs is a mechanism to add all kinds of complex, complicated information.

If you want to go from goo to zoo to you, well we need information on how to make arms and legs and nose and eyes and tongues and all kinds of things, right?

Here's the problem. There is no mechanism, no known process in nature that can do that.

This type of information always comes from an intelligent source. And yet sadly, in a lot of the textbooks we'll see that evolutionists confidently insist that it happened.

You know, they use words like appeared, emerged, arose. Words like that.

We call them magic words. Here's a couple of my favorites. Became a miracle of evolution and was lucky.

Now these would almost be funny except for this. These are used in textbooks that are trying to convince people that we evolved from slime.

By the way, there was an evolutionist named Sir Fred Hoyle and he was also a mathematician.

He sat down one day and decided to calculate the odds of going from goo to zoo to you.

Here's what they are. They're the same odds as rolling a six on a dice five million times in a row.

Wow! That would be pretty lucky, right? It's the same odds as a tornado ripping through a junkyard and making an airplane.

Sounds impossible? That's because it is. Alright, so I really want you to remember this.

Adaptation, genetic variation, and natural selection are not the same thing as Darwinian evolution.

These are scientifically proven. We can observe these today. Darwinian evolution is actually a belief that when you apply the tests that we use for science, fails.

That's why it's so important for when somebody asks us, do we believe in evolution, that we understand what they're saying and so that we can have a conversation and hopefully share our belief and our faith in Jesus Christ.

Wouldn't that be cool? Now God says, when we look at the things that have been created, we know that somebody really smart made them.

And who is that really smart one? That's God. Well, I'm Big Wave Dave and that's all the time we have together.