National Geographic News: “Evolution vs. Intelligent Design: 6 Bones of Contention”

It’s the sort of headline that both excites us and worries us: will National Geographic News’s portrayal of “evolution vs. intelligent design” be fair and balanced?

“[T]he theory that new species can arise from old ones through natural selection is still met with some resistance,” the story begins (in understatement). The article then lists six major empirical disagreements between “evolution” and “intelligent design.” (That dichotomy is imperfect, however; many intelligent design advocates [IDers] still accept billions of years of evolution between the hypothesized instances of intelligent design.)

We were pleasantly surprised to see that National Geographic let each side (or, at least, one representative from each) speak for itself, although the evolutionary perspective was given the last word on each debate. On the whole, the six-page article gives not a bad overview of evolution versus bare-bones intelligent design—i.e., a view much more open-ended than young-earth creation.

Here is a summary of the six debates, along with intelligent design and evolutionary perspectives offered by the Discovery Institute’s Casey Luskin and Occidental College’s Don Prothero, respectively:

• On the vertebrate eye, IDers note the multiple interacting parts and argue the parts would have to evolve simultaneously to produce a functioning eye. Evolutionists counter that eye could have begun as a simple “spot” that transformed in stepwise fashion into the modern eye.
• For Luskin, the Cambrian explosion is about “abrupt explosions of mass biological diversity that required huge amounts of information be injected into the biosphere rapidly,” the opposite of Darwinian predictions. Prothero claims soft-bodied organisms from before the Cambrian reduce how “explosive” the event was.
• IDers claim genes pack “complex specified information,” which can only come from an intelligence. For evolutionists, it’s natural selection to the rescue—starting with the most basic DNA fragment and ratcheting up the complexity over time.
• Bacteria flagella, like eyes, are complex parts that IDers say reflect design, while evolutionists say they’re due to natural selection hard at work over millions of years.
• Were whales once land mammals that adapted to an aquatic lifestyle? While Luskin points out problems for evolutionists such as whales’ long generation times, National Geographic News shows its colors and refers to “fossils of ‘archaic’ whales” (which are, of course, contested).
• The anthropic principle, which posits that various universal constants and astronomical facts are “set” perfectly to enable human life, leaves Prothero with his least scientific response yet. “There’re lots of ways you can imagine a universe that is not finely tuned for us, but might be tuned for something else,” he says. National Geographic News fills in the idea of multiple universes, which physicists have resorted to in the face of arguments about astrophysical design. Of course, all of this is, as Prothero puts it, part of evolutionists’ imagination—taken on faith to protect the naturalistic enterprise.

For those familiar with the creation/evolution debate (including intelligent design perspectives), the back-and-forth is nothing new. We take the intelligent design side in each of the debates above, of course (minus some disagreement on the nature of the Cambrian explosion in the fossil record; we do not consider the fossil layers a continuous record of billions of years of earth history).

What is as important to us is what evolutionists cannot do (at least, not with scientific—as opposed to philosophical—arguments): they cannot show why intelligent design is inferior, as a belief, to evolution. That is, even if we agreed that natural selection was a plausible way to generate the complexity observed in life (and we don’t), such agreement does not reduce the plausibility of an intelligent creator. And evidence from the fossil record merely begs the question, since no fossil can prove either evolution or the lack thereof.

How is it that such an auto accident can go into the round file without even an interview with the driver? Is this a case of the rich and famous getting away with anything? I guess the next time one of us ORDINARY people has an accident we can just refuse to answer any questions from the Highway Patrol. I wonder how much of a donation the Florida Highway Patrol will receive from Mr. Woods this year. Well, there you have it folks! I guess it will be up to the media to ferret out the many mistresses this squeaky clean Buick agent had. I wonder if Buick will continue to let him advertise for them, seeing that he was driving a Cadillac in the accident.

DID YOU KNOW that Mr. Woods pulled in a smooth 100 million dollars this year from his commercials etc.? Wow! I guess he can afford the $164.00 ticket, don't you?

“In each of these pivotal nexuses in life's history, the principal “types" seem to appear rapidly and fully equipped with the signature features of the respective new level of biological organization. No intermediate “grades" or intermediate forms between different types are detectable.”
—Eugene V Koonin,

“The Biological Big Bang model for the major transitions in evolution,” National Center for Biotechnology Information, National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, in Biology Direct 2007, 2:21.

"To take a line of fossils and claim that they represent a lineage
is not a scientific hypothesis that can be tested, but an assertion that
carries the same validity as a bedtime story - amusing, perhaps
even instructive, but not scientific."
—Henry Gee

Evolutionist, Dr. Henry Gee, Senior Editor, Biological Sciences for the journal Nature as written in his book, In Search of Deep Time: Beyond the Fossil Record to a New History of Life, New York, The Free Press, 1999, page 126-127.

"We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some
of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant
promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific
community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism … Moreover, that materialism
is an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door."
—Richard Lewontin

Evolutionary geneticist, Alexander Agassiz Research Professor, Harvard University, “Billions and billions of Demons,” The New York Review, p. 31, January 9, 1997

Source: whoisyourcreator.com

The challenge to evolutionists is to PROVE that evolution is real. To try and force feed it to us as FACT is absurd. Where are the facts to back it up? It is a fraud hatched up by atheists to try and disprove God's existence. God will never be disproven but evolution is on its last legs even as a theory.

PS: Stay tuned for the next theory, that space aliens did it. Well, if they did, where did the space aliens come from? This question will never be any more answered than the question of how the first life came into existence. Let me suggest that you look at Genesis chapters one and two and you will find a rational and logical answer. Most people who hold to evolution have been unwilling to examine the scientific evidence for creation. As Mr. Koonin stated, everything came into being suddenly and in their complete form. This is referred to as the Cambrian Explosion. This has dealt a death blow to the theory since it agrees with the missing fossil record of transitional forms. Isn't it time to shed your bias against creation and look for yourself at the evidence? There are many excellent sources available.

Intelligent Design, Answers In Genesis and Institute For Creation Research are just three good sources to help you. Also, if you have questions about the Bible's reliability, I recommend that you read Josh McDowell's research book, New Answers That Demand A Verdict. Happy hunting! Prepare to be blown away!

The Senate version of health care reform, H.R. 3590, grants an unprecedented amount of power to the HHS chief, who, prior to taking her place in the President's Cabinet, served as the most pro-abortion governor in U.S history. According to the National Center for Policy Analysis, there are 1,697 instances in the bill "where the Secretary of Health and Human Services [has] the authority to create, determine, or define things in the bill." Sebelius would be the sole authority on everything from setting monthly costs per person to establishing an agency that would determine cuts without congressional approval. She would even make the final decisions about including abortion in the government-run plan.

That's an awful lot of responsibility for a leader who has proven to be largely ineffective during the health care debate and maintained close ties to an abortion industry that helped finance most of her political career. If Sebelius is behind the wheel of a $2.5 trillion health care overhaul, you can bet she'll be receiving a lot more notes like this one. Earlier this month, the HHS boss got a letter from Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards, thanking her for speaking to a gathering of leaders in the abortion industry. "Planned Parenthood is honored to have you as an ally," it reads. At the bottom, Ms. Richards adds a personal P.S., gushing her gratitude "for [Sebelius's] friendship and support." I shudder to think about the kind of "support" Sebelius could offer to Richards if HHS is entrusted with reinventing the entire health care system in the image of the abortion industry.

The Miller-Urey experiment conducted in early 1950 claimed to have created life in a test tube. Miller tried to reproduce what he believed to be the conditions of early earth and how life evolved into existence. His choice of gasses was determined by preconceived notions of what might produce life rather than what we know existed. Our atmosphere has most likely remained the same from the beginning. Miller assumed that the gasses present DID NOT include oxygen since oxygen would have destroyed any expected outcome. He assumed that our atmosphere consisted of water, methane, ammonia and hydrogen. He then added the electrical spark to simulate lightning. (How we had lightning he did not explain.) The result produced amino acids, which science textbooks tell our naive students that this could have been how life first originated. The problem is that he did not give us all the negatives about his experiment.

Three critical questions were not answered.

1. How much of the experiment was left to chance processes or how much involved intelligent design?

2. How did Miller know what earth's early atmosphere was like?

3. Did Miller produce the right type of amino acids used in life?

Miller started with years of intelligent research in chemistry to set up his experiment. He sort of 'helped out' the experiment by his knowledge of how amino acids are formed and then set up his experiment to produce the best possible results based on his distorted ideas of early earth's atmosphere. Why would oxygen NOT be in the original atmosphere? Because oxygen would have destroyed the amino acids that were produced.

"Oxygen is a poisonous gas that oxidizes organic and inorganic materials on a planetary surface; it is quite lethal to organisms that have not evolved protection against it."  P. Ward and D. Brownlee, Rare Earth: p. 245

So, you see why he had to leave out oxygen, don't you? There is NO evidence that earth ever was absent oxygen as part of our atmosphere.

"The only trend in the recent literature is the suggestion of far more oxygen in the early atmosphere than anyone imagined."  Thaxton, Bradley and Olsen: The Mystery of Life, p. 80

He also isolated the amino acids from the other elements he used as they too would have destroyed the outcome. All you have to do is to see the apparatus he used to bleed off the amino acids to isolate them from all the other elements used in the experiment.

If we grant the evolutionists that there was no oxygen, then ozone, which is made by oxygen, would not have existed and the sun's ultraviolet rays would have also destroyed the outcome.

But what if life started in the oceans? Water has the ability to split apart the molecules and this would have destroyed them. Water also breaks apart chains of amino acids thus destroying the possibility of this process expanding into more complex forms. This is why evolution is IMPOSSIBLE!

Out of the 2000 types of amino acids, only 20 are used in life. The atoms that make up the amino acids are two basic shapes; these are left and right handed. The amino acids that make up life are ALL left handed. We do not find right handed amino acids in proteins. Miller's experiments produced both left and right handed amino acids.

"So we remain profoundly ignorant of how life originated. Yet, the Miller-Urey experiment continues to be used as an icon of evolution, because nothing better has turned up. Instead of being told the truth, we re given to the misleading impression that scientists have empirically demonstrated the first step in the origin of life."  J. Wells: Icons Of Evolution, p. 24

Well, because of limited space we see that this experiment was 'set up' in a way that modern science knew in advance would produce some amino acids but did not represent the remote possibility of being real in early earth's makeup.

Now for a quote from your student's textbook:

"By re-creating the early atmosphere (ammonia, water, hydrogen and methane) and by passing an electric spark (lightning) through the mixture, Miller and Urey PROVED that organic matter such as amino acids could have formed spontaneously."  Kenneth Miller and Joseph Levine, Biology, 5th ed.

You see how our students are manipulated by telling them only a little bit of the evidence without telling them all the side effects and man made manipulation of the conditions.

Folks, it is time to clear out all the outright lies in our student's textbooks and force them to put in the truth. This is why evolutionists try to force school boards to forbid the teaching of the evidence against evolution. Get involved in your kid's education and let them know the facts without the lies and distortions.

(Excerpts taken from The New Answers Book 2, Ken Ham editor)