Tape 1 - Evolution vs. Creation Seminar

Our Father, we thank you that there are times when we can come aside and study the biblical revelation of man's origin and destiny, and be known as the truth that there is a person who lives in us who can give us a controllability between that point of origin and that destiny.

We thank you that that person we have come to know is God in Jesus Christ, and that he lives in our life, giving meaning and purpose and direction. We thank you for these men who have dedicated themselves to this cause, and for a church who is willing to extend itself financially and physically and spiritually to make possible this conference.

We pray, Heavenly Father, that it will be under the absolute control of the Holy Spirit, and that God would use it to accomplish the purpose that would glorify him. May it be nothing else. May it not in the minds of the people simply be something that is incidental, or outside the area of the gospel revelation, but may it all work out for the furtherance of the gospel, for the edification of the believer, and for a challenge to the intellectual mind to consider Jesus Christ, because we ask it in his name and for his sake.

Amen. Now, Brother Barry Wood will come and take charge of the meeting.

The Relevance of Creationism and the Seminar Format

Thank you, Pastor. I just want to take the opportunity to explain something of the format of what we're going to be doing this morning, and something of the relevance of what we're doing. Everywhere I've been around our city on television interviews and just on the campus, I've had people say, well, is this relevant, is this important?

We even had some professors who just didn't feel like that it really was relevant to the Christian cause. I've had some people say, well, what we ought to do is go out and preach the gospel, and as though this were just an old, dead issue.

And yet I think what these men will share with us today is that I think you'll find out that doctrine is important, because without doctrine we do not even have the relevancy of God, and the person of God, and the person of Christ.

And we feel like that the evolutionary position is anti-God, it's anti-Bible, it's anti-Christ, and I don't apologize for saying so. And what we want to do is to ask Christians to understand something of the biblical position and what the Bible does teach, and that certainly it does not teach evolution, and that creationism is sound scientific fact, and that you can be an intelligent Christian and believe it, and be a relevant Christian.

So what we want to do is to let these two men come today who are doing this all across America. Dr. Gish flew in from Manitoba, Canada, where he had been in a debate there, Dr. Morris and Gish together have been in New Orleans, where they have been in a debate there just recently.

They were in Knoxville, Tennessee, in a debate there, and so they've been doing this. And God's given them a very prolific ministry. Dr. Henry Morris, Dr. Duane Gish, are directors of the Institute for Creation Research in San Diego, California, and these men teach at Christian Heritage College and also lecture around the country.

There are many, many books available. We have a number of books that they sent us that are available on the book table at the back or in the bookstores downstairs as we go to eat. You may go down there and browse through the bookstore to see these books or to purchase them.

Some of you are going to ask me about tapes. We are taping everything that's done in this conference and in the debate. They will be reproduced through our tape library, either for lending purposes, for you to check out, listen to in return, or to purchase.

And all of our tapes sell for $2 .50 to the local church members, they're $3 .00 to the public at large, and either way it's a steal. So if you want to purchase these tapes, you just turn in a request and we will take care of that.

Either give the request to myself, to Skinny Boy down here, Kent Turner, this tall blonde haired boy, runs our tape ministry, to Ray Woodard or myself, and if you'll just request the tapes that you want on these conferences, we'll produce them for you and see that you get them.

It'll take us a week or so to get these done. Probably by the end of next week, we're going to have both the tape and the debate ready to go. That's not what I wanted to say, the conference and the debate ready to go, so those tapes will be available.

If you want to tape them here like some of you are doing, that's fine, or if you want to get them from us, that'll be just as acceptable. Now what we're going to do this morning, Dr. Henry Morris is going to come first and he's going to take evolution and creation as the two different alternatives as explanations of origin.

He'll deal with that in the first hour's lecture. We will take a five minute break when Dr. Morris is through, sort of a drink break or do whatever you do during those five minutes. And then we'll come back immediately and Dr. Gish will take another 55 minutes and share with us on the second subject.

He's going to deal with the fossil record at 11 o 'clock, on the fossil record at 11 o 'clock. And then we'll take a break for lunch, and if you've made reservations with us, about a hundred of you have, we'll eat downstairs for 75 cents if you've made a reservation.

If not, I suggest you go to the Coliseum and eat pancakes for a dollar. But at any rate, you'll be back and we'll start again about 1 o 'clock or shortly thereafter. I think we can probably start at 1 instead of 1 .15.

And at 1 o 'clock we'll continue, and I just don't think you're going to want to miss this afternoon's conferences, because that's where all the big goodies are. Because coming back this afternoon at 1, Dr. Gish is going to begin and he's going to lecture on human origins, and that will take care of the caveman and all that, how that all fits in.

I know we're all interested in that. And he'll deal with human origins at 1 o 'clock, and then at 2 o 'clock, Dr. Morris is going to deal with Earth age and the arguments for a young Earth, as opposed to 3 billion years, something like anywhere from 4 to 6, 6 to 10 thousand years, and that's quite a difference.

So we're going to hear from Dr. Morris at 2 o 'clock on that subject. Then, it'll be open to questions, as long as we want to ask them, I think these men will stay here and answer them until they drop.

But I'm going to ask that throughout the lectures you take your notes, if something is said that you did not understand, something that you want clarification on, make a note of that then. And so these men can move on uninterrupted, and then as we come back at 2 o 'clock, 3 o 'clock, excuse me, we will then have the time for questions.

And I think that probably is the best way to handle that. All right, I'm going to ask first of all that Dr. Henry Morris will come and begin to deal with evolution and creation.

Creationism as a Scientific Alternative to Evolution

Thank you very much, Barry. Dr. Weber, we certainly thank you for the gracious hospitality, the invitation to be here this weekend, this fine church. We're also grateful for each one of you who has come and are going to participate in this seminar this afternoon.

We hope it will be profitable and interesting for you. We're looking forward to a good day together. Now for this first session, let me just first give a few words of introductory explanation. Is that better?

On the book table, we do have some free literature. We'd invite you to pick up some sample copies of our newsletter if you're interested in keeping up with the news on creationism. Also a complete book list.

We have some of our books here on the book table. We have many others, and if you'd like the complete list in the ICR brochure, you'll have those. I might mention just one of the books in particular. That is this book, Scientific Creationism, which is intended to be kind of a textbook for such meetings as this.

This is available both in a general edition and a public school edition. The general edition has both scientific and biblical material. The public school edition is limited strictly to scientific material.

We're trying to get that adopted in public schools for use by teachers in balancing the treatment of origins in their classes. Now when we're dealing with the subject of origins, as Barry said, many people feel that this is kind of irrelevant.

It's much more important what we're doing now and where we're going than where we came from. And many Christian people suggest that this is not central to the proclamation of the gospel. It's controversial and sort of peripheral.

And they wonder why it's really important to decide how we arrived here. And of course the dominant viewpoint in the intellectual world, the scientific world, the educational world, is evolution. And many Christian people feel because of that we have to some way reinterpret the Bible to fit that.

We're not going to be dealing primarily with the biblical aspects of the subject this weekend. And one reason for that is because so many people, particularly in the schools and in the science areas, tend to say, well, creation is a religious issue.

Scientifically, evolution is a fact. And therefore you can't teach creation in the schools, for example, because that's religion. Evolution is science and we have to limit our teaching to science in the public schools.

Well, we believe that's a false view of the matter. We're going to try to show that evolution is not scientific, it's just as religious as creation. As a matter of fact, creation fits the facts of science better than evolution.

So that if one is to be taught, then the other should be. We're not interested in anti-evolution laws or anything of that sort at all, but rather that all of us, young people especially, have access to both concepts and the evidence is foreign against each and then they can make their own minds.

As it is now, evolution is dominant and creation is sort of excluded. So we're going to be dealing primarily with the scientific aspects of this subject today. That doesn't mean, of course, that we don't believe that the biblical aspects are important.

Dr. Gish and I, and all associated with our creationist movement, do believe the Bible to be the Word of God. And we believe it's true. As a matter of fact, one reason we're so confident we can approach this subject strictly scientifically rather than biblically is because we know, we have faith or confidence that when all the scientific facts are in and rightly sorted out, that they will be found to teach exactly what the Bible has been teaching all along.

So we have confidence that the biblical record is true and therefore we can approach the study of science, apart from the biblical record, in confidence that it finally will be in full harmony. And of course the Bible does teach creation, no question about it.

If you look closely and if you follow a consistent pattern of exegesis, the Bible will not support evolution. It says, for example, ten times in the first chapter of the book of Genesis after its kind.

So whatever the kind was or is, may not be exactly our species, but whatever it is, organisms were to reproduce after their kinds and not after some other kind. So there are limits to variation within the kind.

That's what the Bible teaches. Also teaches, and I might just mention this one passage of scripture which seems to me to settle the question as far as the biblical teaching is concerned. In the Ten Commandments, God gave these commandments to his people and it says that he, as a matter of fact, wrote these words with his own finger on a table of stone, so that this is uniquely divinely inscripturated as well as inspired, according to the record.

And there in the Ten Commandments, in the fourth one of the commandments, he said, Remember this Sabbath day to keep it holy. Six days you do all your work and so on. The seventh day you don't do any work.

And then the reason for that, he says, in verse 11 of Exodus 24, In six days the Lord made heaven and earth and the sea and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day. Now these days of God's week are the same as the days of man's week because they're in the same words, the same structure, the same sentence arrangement and so on.

And he's telling us that the reason for man's week is God's week. And they're the same thing. In six days he made everything, heaven and earth and the sea and all that in them is. Now we can reject that statement if we wish, but we can't believe the Bible and reject that statement, it seems to me, because that's very plainly what the teaching of the Bible is.

Well, but we're not going to discuss that part of it today. We just mentioned that in passing to point out that this is the biblical teaching, creation. We believe recent, special creation. Now, as far as the scientific aspects are concerned, many people have tried to find some means of accommodating the Bible to the evolutionary point of view.

But really that won't work. Now we don't have time really to discuss that. This is dealt with in some of our books. But for example, to use the day-age approach, that the days of creation were long ages, corresponding to the ages of geology, will not work because even though we might legitimately be able to translate the word day by age or something equivalent, it wouldn't help because there are still many contradictions between the order of events in creation and the order of evolution in geology.

We have a list of at least 25 such contradictions. There's no correlation at all. Just in a general superficial way there may appear to be kind of a correlation, but when one goes to the details, they don't agree at all.

And so stretching the days of creation into ages won't help in harmonizing with the evolutionary system at all. And some suggest that maybe you can work this out by putting the geological ages in a gap between the first two verses of Genesis, but that won't work scientifically either because that postulates a great worldwide cataclysm at the end of the geological ages which let the earth without form and void as described in Genesis 1 -2.

But any cataclysm that would do that, in other words, blow all the mountains into the ocean leaving the earth covered with water and blow billions of tons of debris up into the sky blotting out the light of the sun, any cataclysm that would do that would be such a devastating atomic explosion or volcanic eruption worldwide as to just literally disintegrate the crust of the earth and that's where the sedimentary rocks are which contain the fossils which identify the geological ages, as we'll discuss a bit this afternoon.

So we can't retain the geological age system and the evolutionary system, which is essentially synonymous with it, by postulating a worldwide cataclysm which would destroy the evidence for the geological ages.

So that won't work scientifically any more than biblically and we are kind of limited, if we're going to be consistent in our biblical interpretation and application, to the concept of special creation in recent times.

Now many people say, well that's utterly impossible scientifically. We believe that people have discarded the Bible too quickly on this, but as a matter of fact the real facts of science will support this concept better than they will the evolutionary concept.

We're going to try to show that today in an introductory way at least and not suggesting that we have all the answers because obviously any theory of origins deals with all types of data and it's really a cosmogony and cosmology and deals with everything and so there are many questions that need to be settled but we do believe that the creation concept explains more facts of science with fewer problems than does the evolutionary approach and therefore at least it ought to be taught on a competitive, equal basis.

Now having discussed the biblical aspect very briefly, I want to go on to the scientific aspects and most of the rest of the day will be devoted to this. Now many people have the idea that evolution has been proved scientifically.

In fact, in my statement from Julian Huxley, probably the world's leading evolutionist or certainly one of them, who in his keynote address at the Darwinian Centennial Convocation in 1959 at the University of Chicago said, among other things, the first point to make about Darwin's theory is it's no longer a theory but a fact.

No serious scientist would deny the fact that evolution has occurred, just as he wouldn't deny the fact that the earth goes around the sun. So it's a proved fact of science in the viewpoint of men like Huxley and many others.

This is essentially the way it's taught in the schools today. And as mentioned, because of that, many religious people have felt that we have to accept it and adapt our theology to it. And so many people think we can go the route of theistic evolution.

As a matter of fact, I thought that while I was a theistic evolutionist all through college. And many people believe that way so I can understand some of that. But there are others who believe that. But I wish I could talk to you about that.

Because I think it would be wonderful if you could talk to me about it. Because I think it would be interesting to me. And because it was interesting to me. From the sphere of rational discussion, Darwin pointed out that no supernatural designer was needed since natural selection can account for any known form of life.

There's no room for a supernatural agency in its evolution. We can dismiss entirely all idea of a supernatural overriding mind being responsible for the evolutionary process. What he said. Now, not every evolutionist would agree with him, but most of the leaders of evolutionary thought and philosophy do.

And of course, that's the idea. If evolution can account for everything, it's a cosmogony, a cosmology which accounts for all things. He says in another place, the whole of reality is evolution, one single process of self-transformation.

Then why bring an unnecessary hypothesis like God into the picture? That's the attitude. It's irrational to do that when you can explain everything without God. So he says, this is not even rational discussion to talk about God.

Now, if that's a legitimate approach, and this is the approach which is dominant in Then, of course, I think we ought to realize that we're dealing not simply with science, because science cannot really answer the question of origins.

You see, science, the word science means knowledge, what we know. And the essence of the scientific method is observation, things that we can see taking place. We can set up an experiment and see how it works.

That's the essence of science. We formulate a hypothesis, we set up an experiment, we test the hypothesis, and so on. That's the scientific method. Well, you cannot do this with origins. There's no way we can study, for example, the origin of the solar system experimentally or the origin of man.

You can't repeat these things in the laboratory to see how they work, and the essence of the scientific method involves experimental repetition and confirmation, and we can't do that with origins. That's true with creation as well as with evolution, of course.

In fact, many times evolutionists reject our proposal to teach creation on that very basis. They say, well, creation is not scientific. You can't study it. You can't put it in the laboratory. You can't see it operating, so it's not science.

That's quite true if creation really did take place, and that's at least a possibility certainly. If you don't reject God altogether, at least it's possible that God might create, so it's at least a possibility, but we can't study it in the laboratory because if it did take place, it took place in the past and isn't taking place now, and therefore we can't see it taking place now.

But the same problem applies to evolution, exactly the same way. If evolution is true, it operates so very slowly that it takes a million years to produce real significant evolutionary changes from one kind into a higher kind, and nobody can study an experiment for a million years, and so you can't study that either.

Now, of course, in the laboratory we can study the small variations, mutations, shifting of colorations in insect species and things of this kind, but these small changes fit either concept equally well.

In fact, we, as we'll show, think they fit the creation model better than the evolution model, but what we cannot study in the laboratory is the vertical change of one degree of order into a higher degree of order, one kind into a higher kind over the geological ages.

We can't study that experimentally because it takes too long, and therefore it's outside the scope of science, and that's the essence of evolution. Now, these small changes, nobody argues about those.

If that's what evolution is, shifting of color in the peppered moth, for example, or mutations on a fruit fly, for example, or something like that, if that's what evolution is, then all of us are evolutionists, because these are things we see taking place, but they can be explained, we think, better in the concept of creation than evolution.

Now, let me give a statement or quotation from two of our modern-day leading evolutionists, Dr. Paul Ehrlich, Stanford, and Dr. Elsie Birch at Sydney. Ehrlich is a very well-known ecologist and evolutionary biologist, one of the leaders, and he's certainly an evolutionist, but on the other hand, he sees this problem from the magazine Nature.

Let me quote him. He says, "...our theory of evolution has become one which cannot be refuted by any possible observations. Every conceivable observation can be fitted into it.". Now, at first you might think, well, that makes it a pretty good theory, doesn't it, if everything fits it?

No, that's exactly what makes it a bad theory, because it cannot be tested. If everything can be made to fit it, then there's no way of determining whether it's true or not, no way of testing it. You see, the creationists can say the same thing.

Every conceivable observation can be explained by creation. So there's no way of testing that either, scientifically. Now, he goes on to say, "...it is therefore outside of empirical science, though not necessarily false.

No one can think of ways in which to test it. Ideas either without basis or based on a few laboratory experiments carried out in extremely simplified systems have attained currency far beyond their validity.

They have become part of an evolutionary dogma accepted by most of us as part of our training.". Now, he's an evolutionist, but he does recognize that evolution is a dogma. Now, that's a religious term.

You have to believe it. By faith, you cannot test it. Now, that's okay. One can believe what he wants to believe, but he ought to recognize that he is believing, he is not proving. And the same thing applies to creation.

Let me also quote from the latest edition of Darwin's Origin of Species. This was published in 1971, and you understand, of course, that Darwin does not revise his book anymore. But a new edition does come out every once in a while with a new foreword written by a current leader in the field to sort of put Darwin's book in the current perspective.

And that's what this is, published 1971 in London, foreword written by L. Harrison Matthews, an evolutionist, fellow of the Royal Society. And he also sees this problem. He says this, in accepting evolution as a fact, how many biologists have paused to reflect that science is built upon theories that have been proved by experiment to be correct?

Or how many remember that the theory of animal evolution has never been thus proved? The fact of evolution is the backbone of biology, and biology is thus in the peculiar position of being a science founded on an unproved theory.

Is it then a science or a faith? And then note this. He says, belief in the theory of evolution is thus exactly parallel to belief in special creation. Both are concepts which believers know to be true, but neither up to the present has been capable of proof.

So you believe in one or the other, and special creation is on the same level as evolution. You cannot prove or disprove. You decide which you want to believe. Well then, if that's the case, you see, we cannot repeat history, so we can't go back and see what happened.

It would be real nice if we could set up an experiment, some kind of an experiment which we could run and make the measurements, and then on the basis of that experiment decide whether evolution or creation were true, but there's no way you can do that.

You can't repeat history. And these are historical questions. Well, that being the case, is there any way that we can really discuss it scientifically? Is it simply a matter of blind faith? Either way, no.

We can discuss them scientifically, because they do deal with scientific data and with the world in which we live, and I think the way to do it is to define them in two models. Evolution model, creation model.

Now, a model is simply a framework within which we try to explain things, so you could call it a framework if you wish, or a system. But at any rate, two models, creation model, evolution model, define them in their simplest terms, use these models as means for predicting data that we would expect to find out there in the real world, and for correlating those data that we do find, and see which one fits the data, predicts the data, correlates the data more effectively than the other.

Now, we can always make any conceivable observation fit either model. Understand that. But we define the models in the simplest terms, and then we predict data, then we go see what's there, and if it doesn't fit the prediction, it's always possible to bring in a secondary modification of the model to make it fit.

You can do that with either one, so you can make it fit anything, but the model which would fit the facts more directly with a smaller number of additions and secondary assumptions and modifications would be, at least probably, the more likely model to be correct.

And we believe that when you do that, the creation model will always fit the facts more directly with a smaller number of secondary modifications to make it fit than will the evolution model. And therefore, we think it's a better scientific model, even though we acknowledge that we can't ultimately prove it any more than the evolutionist can ultimately prove his model.

But the creation model does fit the facts that we do have available, up to date in any way that it does. Now, with that in mind, I want to define the models, and I think to do that, I'll, so that you'll get the picture, put it on the screen, so maybe you'll have the lights out a little bit in the first slide.

Now, here's the evolution model defined, and I'm going to define it based on Julian Huxley's definition. Huxley is certainly qualified to define evolution, and he defines it this way. He says evolution, in the extended sense, can be defined as a directional and essentially irreversible process occurring in time, which in its course gives rise to an increase of variety and an increasingly high level of organization in its products.

Let's see, was anybody turning the lights out, or down, anyway? Our present knowledge, he says, indeed forces us to the view that the whole of reality is evolution, a single process of self-transformation.

Now, if you note there, he's talking about not just change, but a directional change in the direction of higher organization, greater variety, higher organization, irreversible change. And furthermore, he's talking about a self-contained universe, there's no supernatural agent outside controlling the process, it's all natural.

He says it's a process of self-transformation, the universe is transforming itself into higher levels, and the total picture, of course, is billions of years of evolutionary change going all the way from random particles some way back here billions of years ago, through the various evolutionary changes, molecules formed, stars formed, and so on, then living chemicals formed from non-living chemicals, life beginning and simple forms of life evolving into complex forms of life, and finally man, several million years ago.

And here we have this tremendous increase in complexity brought about by these natural processes, which are still operating because it's all within a self-contained universe, which is continuous, going all the way from particles up to people.

Now so we can define the evolutionary model in very simple terms this way, it specifies that we can explain the origin and history of the world in terms of a continuing naturalistic origin, no external supernatural intervention.

And furthermore, the net effect has to be increase in complexity, although it can go up and down maybe, yet the net effect has to be an increase in organization because that's what has happened if evolution is true, all the way from particles up to people.

And at least most people would recognize that people are more complex than particles. Now furthermore, since the history of life and of the universe, of man and so on, is to be explained in terms of the same natural processes which operate now, this is the concept of uniformitarianism, uniform operation of natural laws and processes.

So earth history would be dominated by uniformitarianism, and if we're going to explain the origin and history of the earth in terms of present natural processes, say the structure of the earth in terms of processes of sedimentation, erosion, radioactive decay, earth movements and so on, obviously these will take millions of years to explain the sedimentary crust as we have it, so uniformitarianism, as Dr. Dunbar says, of Yale, demands an immensity of time.

So the evolutionary model does necessarily presuppose a large amount of time. In contrast to that, the creation model says that there must have been a period of special creation in the past in which processes were operating, creative processes which are no longer continuing in the present, completed in the past, supernatural in essence because they're not the present natural processes.

This presupposes the existence of a creator who created things. Now that doesn't mean that there can't be changes in the present world, but it does mean that the basic categories of nature must have been brought into existence by special creation, the basic laws of nature, the basic structure of the universe, and the basic types of plants and animals, basic kinds, and especially man brought into existence by special creation so that man was created as man directly, not through a long chain of evolutionary ancestors of the hominid or hominoid type.

Now that's the creation model, and furthermore, the creation model says that if there are any significant changes in complexity, they will not be towards higher complexity but towards lower complexity.

Now I would recognize that there would be horizontal changes, no two individuals are alike, we have a lot of variety in the world, and furthermore, you can have different species, different varieties, subspecies, and so on, within the kind, you can have all the different varieties of dogs, for example, from the same ancestral dog, and all the different tribes and nations of people from the same ancestral people, or man and woman, and so on, you can have variations of a horizontal nature within the kind, but we will not have variations of a vertical nature from one degree of complexity to a higher degree of complexity, as evolution supposes.

If vertical changes take place, they will be towards lower degrees of complexity, and the reason for saying that is that the creation concept involves created entities in the beginning which were perfect for their purpose in the mind of the creator who made them, and he created everything with its own structure for its own purpose, it was perfect, and since you cannot improve perfection, if any external change comes in as it were to force a vertical change, it will be towards imperfection, and that means downhill instead of uphill, so there would be a net decrease in complexity in the creation model, and furthermore, the creation model would suggest that earth history has been dominated not by naturalistic uniformitarian processes, but by catastrophism, or cataclysm, not only a period of special constructive process, creative process, but one or more periods of special destructive process, in which processes were operating at intensities far beyond what they normally operate in the present world.

Now, that doesn't mean, of course, that the creation model does not allow for uniformitarian processes within normal framework of history, or that the evolution model does not allow for occasional catastrophes in the overall uniformitarian framework of history.

Both have a certain measure of both in them, but we're just saying that the evolutionary model must be dominated by uniformitarianism, the creation model, in terms of earth history, dominated by catastrophism.

That's not maybe as important a part of the definition as the other two, but we will see this afternoon that it does have an important role in the interpretation of earth history. Now, on the next slide, we'll compare the two again so that you see the contrast.

Each is quite different from the other, and therefore they ought to lend themselves to comparative evaluation so that we can decide which one fits the facts more directly, make predictions from these two models, and go out and see what's there in the real world.

And when you do that, we believe that the creation model will fit. Let's just take as an example of the sort of thing that we mean when we say we can compare the two models in terms of their ability to fit the data that are there in the real world.

Let's take the array of organisms as a test case, the classification system, plants and animals, species, genera, families, and so on. Now, if we can put ourselves in the position of two people, an evolutionist and a creationist, who approach the world for the first time and they don't know what they're going to find, they just make predictions on the basis of their two models.

It would seem that the basic prediction of the evolution model would be that since all organisms have come by this natural process increasing in complexity from a common ancestor, say a one-celled organism way back there somewhere, and that in turn from non-living chemicals somewhere even further back, they've all come by this evolutionary natural process from a common ancestor to give the present great complexity and variety of the organic world.

Therefore, come from a common ancestor by the same process in the same world, there ought to be therefore a continuum of organisms, an evolutionary flux of all sorts. In other words, instead of having cats and dogs, for example, we ought to have cats, 90 cats, 10 dogs, 80%, 20%, and so on.

There ought to be a continuum of organisms instead of distinct kinds with gaps between the kinds. Now, that isn't what we find, of course, and the evolutionists say, well, we can explain that. That's true, we can, but that isn't the basic prediction of the model because if we did find that, you see, if we did find in the world a continuum of organisms, you couldn't tell where one stopped and another began.

Obviously, they'd all be related and this would be a very obvious evidence supporting the evolution model. That would be the best evidence you could get to show that all organisms are interrelated by evolutionary descent if there was a continuum of organisms.

So that would be the basic prediction of the model as defined in simplest terms. Now, the evolutionists can come in and say, yes, but we can explain because, you see, in the original population, a certain group got isolated, small population, inbreeding, developed rapidly, developed distinct characteristics in a different environment than the other population, so one went one way, one another, and there was a gap then finally between them.

Yeah, that's true. Maybe that's exactly what happened. You can explain it that way, but you do have to explain it, you see. You don't predict it, whereas the creation model, on the other hand, does predict that there would be gaps between the kinds.

The creationists would say the Creator made basic kinds with structures corresponding to the functions that He intended for them. Each has its own purpose with its own functions, therefore its own structure.