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Source: https://www.sermonindex.net/speakers/michael-penfold/apologetics-101-the-lie-of-evolution/
On Monday night, we introduced the subject of the Enlightenment, which was a period of history from 1685 to 1815. It was a watershed in Western civilization when a great shift took place. Men like David Hume and Immanuel Kant, philosophers, came out with a bunch of new ideas.
And on Monday, we found that the Enlightenment undermined truth. So the Enlightenment came along and said, we don't need to subject ourselves to a book from God. We can think our way to truth. We can experiment our way to truth.
We just need to trust in ourselves. That's why the Enlightenment was called the Age of Reason. So they said, we don't need God for truth. And they also shattered the unity of truth. Now the only thing we can call truth is maths and science.
Anything else is just your opinion, your preference. This all happened in the Enlightenment. Then Tuesday, we were looking at not so much how the Enlightenment undermined truth, but how the Enlightenment undermined belief in God as a creator.
They did away with what we learned last night, the cosmological argument. That argument goes like this. Everything that begins to exist has a cause. The universe began to exist, therefore the universe has a cause.
Oh no, said the Enlightenment philosophers. The universe didn't have a beginning. It's always been here. And sadly, even though they now in modern science no longer believe that, they've accepted that there was a beginning.
They keep fudging and moving and asking who made God and so on. Well, we dealt with all that last night. Now tonight, we want to look at how the Enlightenment undermined belief in God as a designer. Not just the existence of God, but God as a designer.
The Bible points to design in nature. Now we read about that last night in Romans chapter 1, that you can actually see the power and the nature of God in the world around you. You can actually look at your hand and you can understand something about God from your hand, which brings God very close.
Because this hand was designed by the immortal, invisible God. It could not have come by accident, by chance, by natural selection, by any other means. It was designed by God. And it is attached to you, something made by a divine being.
And if you look back through history, even pagan people who didn't know about the Bible, always accepted that. If you read Socrates, you'll find he accepted the design argument. Read, that's a Greek person, read Cicero, a Roman.
He accepted the design argument. Everybody back then accepted that. When you look at the human body, when you look at animals, when you look at plants, when you look at the whole systems, photosynthesis, when you look at the whole thing, you think this could not have happened by chance.
Now the fancy name for the design argument is the teleological argument. So we have the cosmological argument about the existence of God. The teleological argument, don't be put off by the name. Telos in Greek means the goal or the end or the purpose.
And logical comes from logos which means word. So the teleological argument is simply saying we're studying design and purpose and goal. You see, if you're an atheist, there's no goal. We're not going anywhere, it's all by accident, it doesn't matter, there's no purpose.
Which is a joke, because if you say there's no purpose, then what you just said doesn't have any purpose and you're in big trouble. But anyway, they say there's no purpose. But the teleological argument says, oh yes, there is purpose, there is design.
So for example, you could use the teleological argument in relation to biology. So the human body, or plants, or animals, or fungi, or bacteria. You could apply the teleological argument like this. So you can put it as a three-point syllogism.
Point number one. The more complex something is, the more likely it is that it is the product of design, not chance. I mean, as complexity increases, it gets more and more difficult to say it's an accident.
Point number two. Biological complexity, i .e. the cell, the eye, the knee joint, and all of those things. Biological complexity is actually more complex. So your brain is far, far, far, far, far more complex than this iPhone.
One cell of your body is more complex than New York City. If you learn nothing else tonight, take that away and sleep on it. So biological complexity is more complex than all man-made design. So if that's the case, point number three.
Biological complexity, plants, people, animals, must be the product of design. That's the teleological argument. It's an incredibly powerful argument for the existence of God and for design. And I believe the youngest child here, we have some children here tonight, which is great.
Do you know the difference between a sand dune and a sand castle? What's the difference? The youngest child here knows. The sand dune just happened to be there by wind and erosion and so on. Somebody must have made the sand castle.
Now you may not be able to explain why you know that. But you can spot design a mile off. That sand castle just didn't come by chance. Couldn't you tell the difference, children, between a pebble and an arrowhead made of stone?
The very reason people say we know that we found human civilization in a cave somewhere in the back of nowhere, because we found an arrowhead. Oh. You see, an arrowhead means somebody's been there with a brain who made it.
I want to ask the children here, don't shout out, but which one of those rocks was designed? That's real rock faces. One is just one I randomly picked off Google. The other one is a rock face called Mount Rushmore.
Maybe some of you have been to it. It's in America in a place called South Dakota. Some clever genius climbed up there with a hammer and a chisel and chiseled the faces of several presidents out of the granite.
Which one of those was designed? You say, well, don't insult my intelligence. Well, why do you know that? Because as you look at those faces, you think that just couldn't have happened. Rain doesn't do that.
Lightning doesn't do that. Acid rain doesn't do that. There's something about it. It's sort of complicated. It's specified. It means something. I can understand it, which means there must have been a mind behind it.
There must have been intelligence behind it. And so that's how the world works. That's how people thought. In fact, that's the whole basis behind the SETI program. I don't know whether you've ever heard of the SETI program.
S-E-T-I, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. They're spending billions trying to look for little green men somewhere out there. And they have these radio telescopes much bigger than this room facing outer space trying to pick up signals.
They're waiting for one intelligent signal from outer space. All they're getting at the moment is noise. But as soon as they get one intelligent signal, something that they can decipher, they'll know there's intelligence out there.
Because a language means someone must have a mind. So we know this link. And it was an incredibly powerful link for thousands of years until the Enlightenment. This man called David Hume came along. David Hume wrote a book called Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.
So he had four people in this book and they talked to one another and they discussed the design or otherwise of the universe. And he came up with some arguments to sort of say you can't prove there's a link between the way things are in nature and God.
You can't actually prove it's designed. I mean I don't know what you think of some of his arguments. He said, well let me just explain. Yes, the phone will do as an example. When you look at the phone, you're dealing with a machine.
It's got parts in it. They're all linked together with wires. It performs functions. It's a form of a machine like a car or a back in the Industrial Revolution it would have been mills and things like that.
And Christians and others would say, well when you see a machine in everyday life you know that somebody must have made it. Therefore, when you see a human body it's very much like a machine. It has moving parts and you put petrol in one end and you get waste out the other and so on.
It's very much like a machine and it processes energy and therefore if it needed someone to design the human machines then it must have needed someone to design the machines in nature. That was the argument.
And Hume said, well I can see who made that but I can't see who made this. So how can you be sure? Another argument he used was bad design. So he would say, look at a cat playing with a mouse and torturing the poor thing.
Would God have designed something like that? So he was throwing a few spanners in the works. Another thing he said was in nature we can reproduce ourselves. Animals reproduce themselves. Plants reproduce themselves.
But machines can't so it's not a perfect analogy. I think his arguments were absolutely pathetic. But anyway, this was very convincing to certain people who wanted to believe it. And so he really dented the design argument.
Now there were some people there back then who fought back very strongly. There was a man called William Paley who really fought back very strongly. He read Mr. Hume and thought, what rubbish is that?
And he wrote a book called Natural Theology. If you can see the subheading. Evidence of the existence and attributes of the deity collected from the appearances of nature. So William Paley comes out with this book and he starts the book by imagining walking through a field.
And as he walks through the field he comes across a stone. And he thinks to himself, I wonder where that stone came from? And he says, well as far as I know it could have been there forever. And then he walks on a little bit further and he comes across a pocket watch.
And he says to himself, I wonder where that came from? And he refuses to believe that it could have happened by chance because look at that watch. Look at the workings of it. Look at the make of it. Look at the quality of it.
Look at the engravings on it. Look at the springs and the cogs and everything. Somebody must have made that watch. Somebody must have put that watch there. And so he shot across at David Hume. And as for the argument about machines don't reproduce themselves but we do.
He said that's actually a proof even greater for God that God has not only made complex machines but he's made them able to reproduce themselves. I mean, wouldn't that be wonderful if your lawnmower could reproduce itself?
You didn't have to go and buy a new one. Your car could reproduce itself. He said that's even greater proof that there's a God. So anyway, this battle kept on going for another sort of 100 years. Hume had put a dent in the design argument but most people still, the average person in Northern Ireland at the beginning of the 19th century believed that there was a God.
Probably 95%. But then along came another man. Another man called Charles Darwin, Englishman. Sad to say he's an Englishman. Now he didn't believe in the inspiration. He was a Unitarian. He went to a church in Shrewsbury.
A Unitarian denied the Trinity. He didn't believe in the inspiration of Scripture. He didn't believe in Genesis. And he didn't believe in hell. And he was actually looking to get a theory that would sort of do away with all of that and give an alternative.
He came up with what we now call the theory of evolution. He wrote a book called On the Origin of Species. It was printed and published in 1859. What a year that was. In this country in 1859 there was a religious revival.
Around about 100 ,000 people were converted to Christ in a two-year period. That's 2 ,000 people a week. At the same time as that was happening this bombshell of a book was printed and published in England.
Now what was it all about? Well, it was a completely devastating way of getting rid of the design argument once and for all. And it's been so successful that now if you go to university you will be taught this theory.
If you go to school you will be taught this theory. If you pick up your newspaper it will be there on the pages of the... Well, it's infused everything. It's unavoidable. And it lies at the basis of most young people's atheism.
They think that this book and this argument... In fact, Richard Dawkins, the world's most famous atheist who lives in Oxford, said this. Darwin's book made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.
In other words, prior to this book it was like if you didn't believe in God what was your explanation? But now you have an explanation. So what was the theory? Well, the theory was that over millions of years plants and animals have changed.
They have adapted. They have adjusted. And as a change takes place in the generations if one of those adaptations... Let's just make this concrete. Let's just imagine if you're a bear. A baby bear comes into the world with slightly thicker hair than daddy bear.
And that confers an advantage on baby bear. And baby bear is now able to survive in the cold. And if a really, really cold winter comes along all the other bears will die but baby bear will be alright.
And then when he has the next generation they will carry on that same feature. And so Darwin proposed that as adaptations happen, as changes happen, which they do, nature comes along and says, I'll have some of that and I'll have some of that.
Oh, you're faster. That's good. You'll be able to run away and you won't die. And in the survival race in planet Earth those who had beneficial adaptations passed on more and more children and this tremendous engine of natural selection and adaptation has driven us from being a little cell in a warm pond millions of years ago to being what we are today.
We've gone from bacteria to Beethoven by small advantageous changes that were selected by nature over millions of years. So his great theory was that life is a tree. He taught something called common descent.
In other words, you and your banana that you ate this morning and your pet dog and the buttercups and everything that is alive on planet Earth today all is one big tree that goes right back to one common ancestor and we all share common descent.
We're all descended from this one original life form. Now that is where the design argument fell apart. It was the most convincing argument that anybody had ever thought of. In fact, Darwin himself said this.
The old argument of design in nature as given by Paley, the watchman which formerly seemed to me so conclusive, fails now that natural selection has been discovered. So this guy that's living in Oxford now, he's in his 70s I think, maybe 60s Richard Dawkins, the world's most famous atheist he wrote a book, a very clever book and he called the book The Blind Watchmaker.
Why do you think he did that? Because Paley in 18 whatever it was had written a book about finding this watch and somebody had to make it. But now Dawkins says we've got a blind watchmaker and the blind watchmaker is natural selection.
It's blind, it doesn't know that it's selecting fur or it's selecting speed or it's selecting this, that or the other. It just happens to be that way. It selects what will be good and it's blind but it's just this tremendous and he actually said, Mr. Dawkins said that the idea of natural selection which Darwin had way back when was the greatest thought ever to pass through a human mind.
And in the beginning of that book, The Blind Watchmaker Mr. Dawkins who lives in Oxford said biology is a study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose. Do you see what he's saying?
So you've been looking at your hand and thinking isn't that amazing that God made me with an opposable thumb and all the nerves and all the blood vessels and everything and it looks designed. Yes, yes, we'll give you that, it's fine.
Definitely, definitely looks designed. But the looks are deceiving because all that's happened is it's followed this path of what suits it and it's adjusted and it looks like it's designed but it really isn't.
And that theory rules our culture. Totally dominates all conversations about origins and so on. I was actually on holiday three or four weeks ago in Cheddar Gorge. I don't know if you've ever been to Cheddar Gorge, it's down in sort of the Bristol, Somerset area.
It's just a big ravine gorge through the rock close by where Rock of Ages was written and there are all various shops there selling candles and fudge and ice cream and so on. And I went into one of them and I saw a little book on fossils.
So I thought I'll just have a little look at this book and had a little look through the book and I'll just read out, this is just typical right up to date of what you'll see when you're on holiday in Cheddar Gorge.
Some mammals returned to the sea and became whales. Others took to the air and became bats. In Africa, a chimp-like ape stood up on its back legs, made some stools and became us. No explanation, no science, just like that's how it happened, by magic.
Well, what are we going to do about this? We can't just say we don't agree with it. You have to have answers. Now I want to give you tonight four reasons why I cannot accept Darwin's theory of evolution and therefore why I believe that the design argument is still strong.
Number one, the Bible is against it. Number two, genetics is against it. Number three, the fossil record is against it and number four, nature's complexity is against it. Now I find this particular message difficult because there's like so much that you want to say and there are so many things that they say and you want to refute them but you can't do that.
You need a week, you need more than that. So I'm just going to pick up on four things. If I don't mention your favourite topic and you want to discuss it or you want to ask questions, please feel free to ask.
So number one, the Bible won't allow it. Now if you're not sure about whether the Bible's a word of God or not, you need to come tomorrow night but here we go. The Bible won't allow it. The Bible teaches the design argument.
Psalm 94 verse 9, He that planted the ear, shall he not hear? He that formed the eye, shall he not see? God formed the eye, God planted the ear. He designed those two organs. 1 Corinthians chapter 12 verse 18, God has set the bodily members, every one as it has pleased him.
That is to say God set the arm where it is and the leg where it is and the heart where it is and the lungs where they are and the brain where it is. He set the members. He designed the human body. By the way, on the way through, that gets rid of one of the main planks of Darwin's theory.
Darwin not only wrote On the Origin of Species, he wrote another book called The Descent of Man, a big thick book. And in there he gives his major three reasons why he believes in human evolution. One of them is something called vestigial organs.
Have you ever heard of that? Vestigial organs, that is the idea that over millions of years we have been evolving from this, from that, from the other and there's quite a lot of parts of our body, Mr. Darwin thought there were more than a hundred, which are left over from our evolutionary history.
So we had an appendix when we were a sheep. Well, we weren't exactly sheep, you understand the point. And we have tonsils and we have wisdom teeth and we have coccyx and we have chest hair and we have all sorts of things and these are all leftovers from when we were former animals.
Well, that's contrary to what 1 Corinthians says. God set all the members in the body for a reason. Now I cannot go through all those things tonight but just let me assure you that all of those things that Mr. Darwin thought we didn't need and were left over, you do need them.
Oh yes, the body is wonderfully adaptive. You can survive without a lot of things. You can cut off both of your legs and both of your arms, you'll still be here, but that doesn't mean to say they're useless.
Secondly, not only does the Bible teach the design argument, the Bible's account of creation is radically different to evolution's account. Now there are some people that try to believe both. They believe God used evolution.
Maybe they're too embarrassed just to say, I believe Genesis, so I don't want to let go of God but I don't want to look bad in front of the culture so they sort of put them together. I believe God used evolution.
Well, let me just challenge you on that. We read Genesis chapter 1. If you know the theory of evolution, you'll know that the theory of evolution puts the reptiles before the birds. The reptiles turned into birds, according to evolution.
But in Genesis, the birds came first, created on day five, and the reptiles on day six. Totally different order. Again, evolution says land mammals. This shocks a lot of people. Land mammals, having come out of the sea, went back into the sea and turned into whales and dolphins.
Evolution says land mammals came first, whales and dolphins came second. But we read in Genesis 1, whales were created on day five, land mammals were created on day six. Now it doesn't really make any difference at this point of the argument whether you think those are days or millions of years.
It's the wrong order. And unless you want to just play fast and loose for Genesis, you're going to have to take your pick. Creation or evolution, not creation and evolution. So the Bible teaches design.
The Bible's order is completely different to Darwin. The Bible wouldn't allow Darwin. Number three, and finally on this point, Genesis 1 says that plants and animals and fungi and molds and all the rest of them, they were designed to reproduce after their kind.
That simply means that humans will always produce humans and elephants will always produce elephants and sharks will always produce sharks. Because of genetics and because of the way God designed us to reproduce, we will always produce a replica of ourselves.
Give or take a little bit of variation, we will produce... Aren't you glad about that? I mean it would be quite a shock if you produced something completely different. We produce after our kind. You say, is kind a species?
Or is it a family? Or is it a genus? Well, I'm not really going to get into that. I think everybody knows what a kind is. I think even the boys and girls here know that a cat is one kind and a dog is another kind.
A cat will never produce a dog and a dog will never produce a cat. You cannot get those kinds to change from one into another. Now you can have massive variation within a kind. Some of it's natural variation.
Some of it is artificial. So they've done a massive load of artificial variation with dogs for example. You'd hardly believe that a Chihuahua and a Great Dane were the same kind. But they are. They're variations of the dog kind.
They are different in shape and size and speed and strength and colour but they are both 100 dog and they never will be anything else. So when the Bible says after their kind it simply means this. You cannot turn one kind of animal into another which is the end of the theory of evolution according to Genesis chapter 1.
So the Bible is against the theory. Number two. Genetics is against the theory. Now when I say to you when I start talking about cells I wonder if you know what I'm talking about. I have brought along a blown up copy of a cell.
You can't see a cell with your human eye. But if I do that thousands and thousands of skin cells have just rubbed off. You are made of cells. In fact you started life as one cell. When your mum and dad got together your mum supplied 23 chromosomes in her egg.
Your dad supplied 23 chromosomes in his sperm. And those two sets came together and formed 23 pairs of chromosomes. The last pair is either XX or XY. One will give you a male the other will give you a female.
Which is quite relevant to what we discussed the other night. If you are a man here tonight every cell in your body has a different genetic makeup to the cell and every cell in the body of every other woman in this audience.
You may be able to change the outside you may take hormones you may change your name you may do all sorts of things. You cannot change the fact that you are either XX or XY. Now I know there are a very very small category of mistakes that come in there but that is exceptions that prove the rule and do not break the rule.
Inside your cell every cell in your body there is a nucleus. And inside that nucleus that's where these chromosomes are. And inside see that X there in the middle that's your chromosomes and there's a little ring around the chromosome and it blows it up to that thing on the right which is a coil of DNA.
DNA is the blueprint for you. It gives the instructions for life. And when the Bible says after their kind it's referring to that structure which is like a library. It's like a code. There are little bases those little rungs are nucleotide bases there are four of them.
They go under the letters A, C, G and T. I'm sure you've heard about people talking about genes. Not the kind that you wear. G-E-N-E-S. Now a gene is a section of DNA. And each section of DNA that's called a gene is a code that produces proteins.
Now sometimes there's a mistake. There's a mistake in the copying process when the sperm and the egg come together there can be errors there can be duplications and so on. And the evolutionists say that's where evolution comes from.
See Darwin didn't know this. Not because he was ignorant but because nobody knew it. This hadn't been noticed at that time nobody had powerful enough instruments to see this. But after Darwin came along with his theory this genetic basis for life was discovered so they bolted it on to Darwin and said this is how it happens.
When a mutation happens we get new forms. And as upward evolution takes place more and more mutations drive us from the single cell in the slime millions of years ago to human beings today. Now here's the question.
Can you really build the tree of life by mistakes? That's what a genetic mutation is. It is a mistake. The whole point of this code is A, G, T, C, T, A, G it's all lined up and it's supposed to match perfectly so that you then get a copy in the next generation.
And as they look at the kinds of mutations that take place I'm just going to give you the figures here because now what they've been able to do they're getting very clever at this they can sequence the human genome.
What that means is they take one cell they extract the DNA out of it out of the chromosomes and they literally sequence it. They get all the letters and they line them all up. They can do it in an afternoon now.
It used to take years. They can do it in an afternoon. They can sequence the genome of a frog or a jellyfish or a pear or a human being. You can actually go and get your DNA checked and see what you're going to get when you're older and all that sort of thing.
It's going a bit crazy nowadays. But when they look at the mistakes that can happen they find this. Around about 29 of mutations are completely neutral. They just happen and nothing goes wrong because the other pair comes along and it's matched out.
It doesn't cause you a problem. But then there's around about 30 -40 which actually damage you and then there's another 36 which if you get them they're either very, very damaging or they're lethal.
Have you ever heard of hemophilia? Muscular dystrophy? Cystic fibrosis? Down's syndrome? I've heard of all of those things. Do you know what they are? They're genetic mutations. There are around about 4 ,000 of those conditions and diseases which come about through copying errors in the process of reproduction.
So mutations far from being beneficial far from being something that let's have lots of those and we'll get improvement to the body plan and all the rest of it they're actually seen to be very dangerous things.
Now number two. People have studied these things in tremendous detail in recent years. In the last 20 years there's been a huge amount of progress made. And what they've found is this. That even when a mutation sometimes is beneficial it involves a loss of information not a gain of information.
Let me say that again. Scientists in very recent years in the last 20 years have discovered that even when a mutation is beneficial to an animal or to a plant or to an organism or to a bacteria it is because of a loss of genetic information not a gain of genetic information.
You say, well why are you saying this? This is a bit complicated for a Wednesday evening when I had a hard day at work. If evolution is true we desperately need lots and lots and lots of new, complex, specified genetic information to go from a single-celled amoeba in a warm pond billions of years ago which is what they believe to all life today with millions of species and highly complex brains and arms and eyes and hands and systems you're going to need that to be coded for.
You're going to need to have code. You're going to need lots of information. So we need to gain and gain and gain. But when they actually examine what's happening in creatures today and in little bacteria and so on they say, we're losing information.
It's much easier to break a gene than it is to build a gene. Here's an example. Maybe you've been listening to the radio or something and you hear about there's a super bug. Problem MRSA and all these kind of things there's a super bug.
It has evolved resistance to antibiotics. And you think, oh dear, perhaps evolution is true. Here's a bug, a bacterium and we used to be able to take a bit of streptomycin and zap. That was the end of our problems.
But now we've got a problem. The bug has evolved to be resistant to antibiotics. Does that prove evolution? No, it doesn't. Because when they cut one of these little bacteriums open and tried to work out so why can't we kill this anymore with streptomycin they discovered that what happened was this.
It had had a little mutation in it which changed the shape of something inside the bacterium called the ribosome. Now the way streptomycin kills the bug is it goes in it binds to the ribosome and makes it unable to produce proteins and it dies.
But by chance the genetic code in the bacterium broke the ribosome changed shape and you've now got the bug. You take streptomycin it goes into your system it seeks out the bacteria and it goes inside and says, oh it's changed shape.
Can't kill it anymore. But it changed shape by breaking a gene not by building a gene. So when a bacterium evolves resistance what is it he says here? Resistance is gained not by adding something but by losing it.
Rather than say that the bacterium gained resistance to the antibiotic we'd be more correct to say that it lost sensitivity to it. Imagine the police came here tonight and they wanted to arrest everybody and they're going to arrest everybody with handcuffs and I just happened to have had an accident a few years ago and I have no hands.
I have an advantage over you guys. He can arrest you with his handcuffs but he can't arrest me because I have no hands. Now that's the kind of argument that you're going to be facing if you're going to try and say this proves evolution.
It has lost information. Yes, it gave it advantage against antibiotics but that's not going to build it into a completely new animal. Now somebody was telling me today that they went to the Galapagos Islands.
Have you ever heard of these creatures? Darwin's finches. This is probably the most well-known proof of evolution. It's in all the textbooks. You will learn it at school. It's on the television. If you go to the Galapagos Islands they will be telling you all about it.
You see this young fellow, Darwin, he went to the Galapagos Islands. So they're off the coast of Ecuador, South America. They're an archipelago. Quite a few spread out islands and that's a picture of them there on the bottom left.
And there's all sorts of wonderful and weird creatures there. There's a species of finch. And Mr. Darwin looked at these species and he collected them because he was that kind of a person. And as he looked at them he thought there's a whole lot of different ones here.
In fact, I think there's about 13 different species of these finches and they've got slightly different this and slightly different that. And the thing that everybody knows about them is their beak size was different.
Some had little sharp pointy beaks. Some had short blunted beaks. And he thought to himself, isn't that interesting? They've only been on this island for X number of years and already these changes have taken place.
Imagine what could happen if we had thousands of years and millions of years. Why those birds could change into something completely different. Well, what are we going to do with that? Well, what were they before these changes took place?
Finches. What were they after these changes took place? Finches. Every one of those creatures is just as much a finch as the other one is. But you know what? They've now sequenced the genome of the finch and they can actually work out why the beaks are different shapes.
And it turns out that the finch with the blunt thick beak has a break in one of its genes. And two minor spelling mistakes in a protein impaired the growth of its beak and it got a short stubby beak. But you know the amazing thing was that actually helped it.
Because in 1978 there was a drought in the Galapagos Islands and it made it very difficult to get that food. But if you had a short stubby beak you could get it through better than if you had a flimsy little pointy beak.
So it conferred an advantage on it. And in the drought some of the pointy beak people died out and it was a perfect picture of the natural selection that within one kind of animal produces all kinds of different variations and fluctuations.
But when the drought was over the population spread went back to normal and what we've seen is not what Darwin needs. We haven't seen upward growth. We haven't seen changes. We have simply seen that sometimes genes break and you get a short nose.
Anybody got a bulldog here? A most unnatural creature. Dogs are supposed to have long noses. But every so often a gene breaks and if you just select and select and select and select you can get the most weird and wonderful looking creatures.
That's what genetics is all about. But you will never turn that dog into a cat or any other kind of animal. We're going to go to point number three. So the Bible is against evolution. Genetics is against evolution.
Number three, the fossil record is against evolution. Now you might be surprised at that. You might be sitting there thinking well that was the bit I was afraid of. Sometimes I see on the internet they found this creature and it's half this and it's half that.
What do we do with these people? Well I can assure you tonight absolutely categorically that the fossil record is not in favour of evolution. I'm going to give you two reasons for that. Number one, you need to put this in the back of your head.
Something that is known in science as the Cambrian explosion. It is acknowledged even by evolutionists that when you dig down in the rocks you get to a certain layer where there are an awful lot of creatures that have an awful lot of different body plans.
25 to 35 completely novel body plans. There they are. Complex eyes, spinal cords, pumping hearts layers of teeth, jointed limbs, brains, muscles. But it seems like it's the bottom layer. And when you go below that there's nothing.
Literally nothing. Maybe one or two little microbes or something but it's like this is the bottom. Now I don't accept the millions of years thing I believe all that was laid down in Noah's flood. But either way if you were an evolutionist that would be a massive problem to you.
And it is the big problem in paleontology. Let me quote you what they say. Richard Dawkins. It is as though the animals were planted there without any evolutionary history. Charles Darwin. If my theory is true the world swarmed prior to the Cambrian but I can give no satisfactory answer.
Another one. Final quote. Peter Ward. If there ever was evidence suggesting divine creation surely the pre-Cambrian and the Cambrian transition known from numerous localities across the face of the earth is it.
Now I often say to people when we're preaching the gospel in Oxford and London we meet an evolutionist one of the creatures which is no longer with us but is found in these Cambrian rocks is a trilobite.
It's one of my favourite little creatures. It has very complex eyes. Lovely little creature. And when they start talking about evolution I just say what's the ancestor of the trilobite? And I have yet to find a few people don't know what a trilobite is but the average person who's on that side of the fence does.
And they're stuck. Because these complex animals just suddenly show up. Because that's exactly what happened. So do not be bamboozled by the theory of evolution from the fossil record. But secondly, not only the Cambrian explosion but the fossil record lacks what it should have.
Imagine. Imagine. Imagine if it was really true that we started as a single cell blob in a pond millions of years ago and slowly but slowly but slowly we came to where we are today. That must mean that were we to dig down in the earth we would find the history of that slow change in the fossil record.
Let me quote you what Mr Darwin said. Why is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain.
And this, perhaps, is the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory. So there you have it from the horse's mouth. The man who wrote The Origin of Species. The man who invented the theory of evolution says I can't prove it from the rocks.
I can't prove it from the fossil record. There should be billions and billions and billions of intermediate links. I mean the monkey to man thing is a typical example. Every so often you hear about this missing link has been found and you look at it and it's a skull or something and they're trying to fit it in here and is it here and everything has to be revised and has to be moved over here and they're scratching around to try and get some sort of well we've got a creature here and we can put it in here and it's a whale and it's this and if you've ever looked at it you'll see.
It is the most amazing concoction of just so stories that you have ever heard. It shouldn't be like that. If evolution was true, if the theory was true it should be it should be right under our feet plain as day.
You know there was a few years ago there was a leading evolutionist in America who disagreed with Mr. Dawkins. Now there's a thing. So Mr. Dawkins is the leading atheistic evolutionist in Britain and here's this guy in America called Stephen J. Gould.
He's now dead but he and Mr. Dawkins disagreed. Now Stephen J. Gould was a paleontologist which means he likes fossils and he digs up fossils and Mr. Dawkins says oh it all happened gradually gradually and Mr. Gould says I can tell you sir it didn't.
Now he believed in evolution but he said it didn't happen gradually because I don't see any gradualism and I'm going to quote you what he said because this is one of the best quotes you'll ever read. This is the American paleontologist one of the leading paleontologist fossil men in the world history.
The extreme rarity of transitional forms that is links between different animals over the centuries. The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology.
Trade secret. The evolutionary trees that adorn the textbooks have data at the tips and at the nodes of their branches the rest is inference. You see you and I kind of think oh well perhaps they've got ideas perhaps it's really true.
Listen that's the top man absolutely top of the tree and he's just let the cat right out the bag. We haven't got anything. We haven't got anything. It's the trade secret. We have this whole theory and it's resting on nothing.
We know that but I hope you don't find out because it's a trade secret. So the bible is against it genetics is against it and the fossil record is against it. Now finally nature's complexity is against it.
I said to you earlier on that one cell so small you can't see it your whole body made of 200 different types of cells, hair cells if you've got any skin cells, bone cells blood cells, nerve cells 200 different types of cells all of them looking roughly like this.
Each one there are about 100 trillion of them in your body. Try and work that one out. 100 trillion of these in your body. Each one of them more complicated than New York City. There's a verse in Ecclesiastes which says this Thou knowest not how the bones do grow in the womb of her which is with child.
At this moment in time they don't know exactly how the baby takes shape. It's actually not through the DNA. DNA can't assemble proteins into cell types and tissue organs and body plans. Nobody actually knows how it is that it all starts lining up and taking shape.
It's the most unbelievable process. Because what's happening is every few minutes or hours or however long it is, New York City splits in two. So you start as one and then it splits and you get two copies.
You've heard about meiosis and mitosis at school, right? You've now got two New York Cities. Then they split. Four New York Cities. And you keep going and going and going and going till you get 100 trillion New York Cities.
And then mummy gives birth. And out you come. How do you explain that? Now let me just finish off by giving you this will be a whiz finish. Five minutes. The human eye it sends two billion messages to the brain every second.
It has all these coordinating parts, iris, cornea, a lens. Your lens has got 2000 fine layers. Optic nerve, retina, vitreous humor, 125 million photocells in the retina. Don't forget the eyelashes and the eyelids and the tear ducts and the sockets.
Don't forget you've got to have two on the same side of your head, just the right distance from each other. The eye brain system from the molecular level up to the full level is utterly and absolutely beyond the reach of mutational errors.
It cannot happen. What about the knee joint? The largest joint in the human body. Yeah, there it goes. Amazing. I've never done this before. We've got some animation. You say, why is that amazing? Well, it's four parts.
You've got your tibia and your femur and then you've got what they call cruciate ligaments. Cruciate means the cross crux. Calvary's cross. Cruciate ligaments means that they are in a four bar hinge and it's working in such a way that you can either have all of it or none of it.
You can't have part of that system. You must have all four parts or you can have no knee joint. We don't even think about it. It just works, but it is an incredible marvel of design. Here's another one.
I think I've got five, so that's number three coming up. Here's a little bug called an isus bug. It's a tiny, tiny little bug half the size of an ant and in its back end it has got gears. G-E-A-R-S.
Mechanical gears. That is an electron microscope picture of its gears. Those grey things are hugely blown up. They are in the back of this little bug called the isus bug and they're on a spring and when it wants to jump you can look at this when you get home on Google.
Just type in the isus bug. When it wants to jump, the gears spring into action and it takes off at eight miles an hour. Twenty times faster than our body could even stand. It has mechanical gears. Now if you find a set of mechanical gears, do you say, oh how did they get here?
Mechanical gears? By accident? I don't think so. The human eye, the human knee joint, the isus leg gears. What do you think that is? You've got millions of those in your body. You won't sleep tonight now you know that, will you?
One of the things that goes on in your cell when it divides is it needs proteins. And that little red thing with the feet is a protein. It's just a string of amino acids. It's called kinesin. And as your cells divide, there are millions of these little proteins.
He's running along a thing called a microtubule. And on his back he's carrying a great big thing called a vesicle. Just give me that animation one more time. That's going on in your body right now. A protein machine.
In fact, if you cut off your finger, you don't need to cut it off, but if you were just to examine your finger, there are more machines, I'm talking about protein driven molecular machines, there are more machines in your finger right now than all the petrol engines and all the diesel engines and all the electric motors and all the outboard motors in the entire world.
Just in your finger. Because every cell has millions of these machines working all the time to keep you going. I think I've got one more. Yes, I've got one more. Let's see if we can make that go. Well, I'll tell you what it is once you've had a look at it.
You can see a sort of an outboard motor with a tail coming out of it. You may have heard in the news about E. coli. People are getting E. coli infections. So E. coli is a bacterium. Tiny little thing that you can't see.
And it has a tail. Now, a dog has a tail. When a dog moves its tail, it just wags it. So it's just a muscular attachment and it wags. The tail of this tiny little bacterium, so you're imagining a cell, a single-celled creature without a nucleus, and out the back it's got this tail that drives it.
It moves around with this tail and gets inside you and causes you all kinds of problems. E. coli. But what they've discovered as they look at this tail is that it's attached to the bacteria at that point.
So this is the membrane of the bacterium and this is the part where the tail attaches. At the part where the tail attaches to the bacterium, there is an outboard motor. You saw it moving. It's an electric it's a, well it's not electric.
It's made of proteins. It's got a rotor, a stator, a switch, a universal joint, and a propeller. And it runs on protons. Do you know how small it is? It's 20 nanometers thick. Now a millimeter, you know how small a millimeter is, a thousandth of a millimeter is a micron, and a thousandth of a micron is a nanometer.
That thing there is 20 nanometers. And it's a fully operational outboard motor. Now Mr. Darwin said, Mr. Darwin said in his book, if it could be demonstrated that any complex organ exists, which couldn't have been formed by numerous successive slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.
See the point he's making? For Darwinism to be true, for the design argument to be finished, we have to be able to build everything slowly and slightly. How do you build that slowly and slightly? You see, if you have a rotor and a stator and a switch but you don't have a universal joint, if you have a propeller and a switch and a stator but not a rotor, if you have protons but not proteins, it doesn't work.
It's what's called an irreducibly complex system. A bit like this mousetrap. This mousetrap has about five parts. It has a base, it has a catch, it has a hook, it has a hammer, and it has a spring. Take away one of those points and you will not catch any mice.
You say, well you could nail it to the floor but that would be just changing one base for another. This is an irreducibly complex and you could change that plastic to something different but you still have to have a catch.
A simple illustration of something that could not have evolved. Because you can't evolve it all at once, you have to evolve it slowly. If I evolve this, will I catch a mouse? If I evolve this, will I catch a mouse?
If I evolve this, no, I have to have it all or nothing. And evolution isn't all or nothing. Evolution is I have to have a use for this once I've evolved it. Then I have to have a use for this once I've evolved it.
Then I have to have a use for this because if I don't it will be weeded out. That system there, as with many, many systems in the human body, blood clotting and a whole bunch of things, is irreducibly complex.
You either have it or you don't. And the man who has written about that, Michael Behe, hasn't got a reply in 20 years to his claim. But what about the ear and the hand and the liver and the kidney and the heart and the brain?
What about photosynthesis and pollination and metamorphosis and migration? What about the nervous system and the lymphatic system and blood circulation and blood clotting? What about breathing and balance and speech and consciousness?
What about reproduction? Where a fertilized egg makes a journey as complex as the path of a golf ball that rolls 30 miles and lands precisely in the 18th hole of a course that it's never seen. I'll finish with a quote.
A man called E. C. Comfield. He was a Nobel laureate molecular biologist and in 1962 he said these words. While laboring among the intricacies and definitely minute particles in a laboratory, I have frequently been overwhelmed by a sense of the infinite wisdom of God.
The simplest man-made mechanism requires a planner and a maker. How a mechanism ten times more involved and intricate can be conceived as self-constructed and self-developed is completely beyond me.
In the words of Psalm 139 I praise you for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.