Published: February 26, 2006 01:59 pm            

Guest columnist: Barney Maddox, M.D.: Questioning whether evolution is true?

This is a reply to Dr. Elam’s letter “Darwin and the Idea of Progress” (Times-Review, Feb. 5). Elam passes along the popular myths that Darwin’s theory of evolution is science, and that modern science conflicts with the Bible. Actually Darwinism sharply conflicts with science.

Is Darwin’s pre-civil war theory, taught as fact to this day, true? Since 1859 a massive amount of scientific data conflicting with evolution has accumulated, and is censored from school textbooks. But Darwin had two theories: microevolution and macroevolution. Microevolution refers to the study of the variants within a species, and is defined as gene shuffling of existing genes or changes of the frequencies of existing genes for variants in a species. New successful variant genes within a species have never arisen at the end of a study that didn’t exist at the start.

Darwin knew he had no evidence for macroevolution so he hitched his observations of microevolution to his fairy tale of macroevolution, giving his theory false credibility. This extrapolation of gene shuffling to macroevolution was indeed a “leap of the imagination.” If I find a penny I can likewise imagine winning the lottery, but that doesn’t make it true, or mean we should teach it in high school.

Science is simply repeatable, testable observation. Speculations about origins is religion, not science, since no human observed origins.

Macroevolution is the atheist’s origin myth, a fairy tale that life arose from non-life naturally and that the first cell evolved into all the various life forms today. No one has ever observed life originating from non-life (spontaneous generation), nor macroevolution in fossils or the living world.

Did Darwin find evidence for evolution (transitional forms) in the fossils? Here is a quote from Darwin: “But as by this theory innumerable transitional forms must have existed why do we not find them embedded in countless numbers in the crust of the earth?” After extensive fossil-hunting for transitional forms linking the major types of animals, an evolutionary paleontologist sums up the evidence. “Even though we have no direct evidence for smooth transitions, can we invent a reasonable sequence of intermediate forms, that is, viable, functioning organisms, between ancestors and descendants? “What good is half a jaw or half a wing?” asks Stephen Jay Gould, late Harvard paleontologist. So much for Darwin’s mythical “mountain of evidence” for macroevolution that Gould and others disingenuously write about in textbooks.

Darwin published in 1859, when scientists thought the “simple” cell was just mysterious cytoplasm. Science has since determined that the “simplest” cell is a world of staggering complexity, with assembly lines, libraries, ion pumps, and even electric motors. Michael Behe, Ph.D., in “Darwin’s Black Box” talks about the electric motor, the bacterial flagellum. The flagellum is perfectly analogous to our own electric motors, yet is 10,000 times smaller than our smallest motor. Cramming more useful function into a smaller volume requires extraordinary creative intelligence, doesn’t it? There’s no way over vast time that random chance could assemble the flagellum piecemeal, since it requires 30 different proteins, all precisely in place, to function. If even one protein is missing, the flagellum won’t function. The first flagellum and the DNA coding for it had to be assembled all at once, by a technology infinitely superior to ours. Doesn’t that sound a lot more like Genesis I than evolution?

There is only one way a lizard could change naturally into a chicken or monkey over time, and that is through random mutations in the DNA. If the DNA doesn’t change the species cannot change. What happens when mutations in DNA occur? In human medicine mutations cause over 3,000 of the worst diseases doctors treat. The biology textbooks refer to “positive” mutations, another evolutionary fairy tale, since unequivocally positive mutations are unknown in nature. Thus macroevolution is not only never observed, it is theoretically impossible.

Science conflicts with the Bible? Creationist Christians like Newton, Pasteur, Kelvin, and Faraday founded modern science! Isaac Newton, the greatest scientist ever, was a young-earth creationist who believed the entire Bible. How could these giants found modern science unless they had the right assumptions about reality? Read “Men of Science, Men of God” by Henry Morris.

Agnostic biochemist Michael Denton, M.D., Ph.D., author of “Evolution: Theory In Crisis‚” like all of us was indoctrinated in evolution. He tried to prove evolution by doing sophisticated enzyme sequencing research to demonstrate “phylogenetic” relationships between different organisms. The data directly conflicted with evolution.

Denton faced a decision. Practice bad science by rejecting the observed data and desperately cling to the crumbling theory, or practice good science by believing the data and questioning and rejecting the false theory. He did the latter. He reviewed all the evidence put forward by evolutionists in support of Darwin’s theory. Here is his conclusion: “Neither of the two fundamental axioms of Darwin’s macroevolutionary theory — the concept of the continuity of nature, and the belief that all the adaptive design of life has resulted from a blind random process — has been validated by one single empirical discovery or scientific advance since 1859.”

Fred Hoyle, atheist and renowned physicist, carefully researched the mathematical probabilities of spontaneous generation and concluded, “There must be a God.” Leading English atheist Anthony Flew recently converted to theism because the analysis of DNA, the information system inside cells that is so much more powerful than the most advanced man-made computers, is forensic proof of an Intelligence infinitely superior to ours.



Barney Maddox, M.D., is a

guest columnist.

        

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