Evolution falsified – Again

• God exists
• God is good
• God is love
• Jesus is the image of the invisible God

I have good reasons to believe all these things¹, which makes my belief a rational one. (More on that here.) But the fact that regardless of what you show me, I will still believe them indicates that they are un-falsifiable statements, which make them statements of faith, not of science.

That is precisely how faith is supposed to work. Care must be taken that you place your faith in an object worthy of faith. Such as Jesus and the Bible.  Once that requirement is met, you continue to have faith in revealed truth because your object of faith (God) has presented evidence of the truthfulness of what you believe.  More importantly he knows more than you do about things you now question, like why or how did __x___ (fill in the blank) happen.  God will at some future date resolve your questions and make sense of apparent contradictions, but that which he has made clear – like the fact of his existence²
– he expects us to continue to believe regardless of the nonsense and lies unbelievers present.

On the other hand, science is not supposed to work that way. Karl Popper championed the idea of science as falsification, realizing that “… no amount of data can really prove a theory, but that even a single key data point can potentially disprove it.”³ There are limits to falsification⁴, but where falsification is possible, it is a valuable tool – a tool that helps identify and separate true science from faith statements. Because of that materialists scientists are increasingly turning away from the practice of falsification because when employed properly, it invalidates  incorrect theories – including pet ones.  This invalidation is a problem for scientists when theories, instead of being scientific, become philosophical outlooks (as in the case of evolution⁵) or when they lean toward the metaphysical (as in the case of multiverses⁶).  This desire to protect scientific theories – even when it can be demonstrated they are wrong shows that science without falsification tends toward religion.

Science without Falsification tends toward Religion

In science disciplines where falsification is possible, it is easily demonstrable that scientists increasingly reject the notion of falsification because they prefer not to have their favored theories (like evolution) shown to be without merit by stubborn inconveniences like facts and evidences. In the case of metaphysical concepts like the multiverse – they prefer not to have their theories ruled as un-testable metaphysics or religion instead of science.

Someone will say since it is “easily demonstrable” then do so. Very well, but let me clarify: that statement was directed at evolution because it is a testable concept, unlike the concept of the multiverse which is not testable.  As Jay Richards, senior fellow at the Discovery Institute puts it regarding a supposed
multiverse, “It’s an interesting idea. There’s really only one problem with it. There’s no independent evidence that it’s true.”⁷  There’s no evidence because it can’t be tested, which means no evidence can be generated. Furthermore, the multiverse is a metaphysical concept similar to ideas John Lennox chides Stephen Hawking for with regards to statements Hawking made in his book The Grand Design.⁸

Science, faith and evidences that falsify evolution

Evolution has been falsified before, and with this latest bacterial discovery, it has been falsified again. Why has a falsified theory retained such popularity? Evolution is a manifestation of a rejection of God and the morality that comes with believing in God. (This, by the way, is another reason why Christians who believe in evolution are misguided. See  Can you be a Christian and believe in Evolution?) Those who deny God feel free to make up their own worldview and morality, and with it attempt to make up science that fits their worldview. But science facts are just that: facts meaning established truths. One can not change the facts because they do not fit your worldview. By refusing to acknowledge evolution’s obvious problems, deniers of the powerful evidence against evolution demonstrate they hold the tenets of evolution as statements of faith which they consider to be above the facts. In science -established facts can disprove theories if the theories don’t fit the facts; but theories cannot change established facts – however much you might wish they could. Those who refuse to accept the facts regarding evolution show they hold evolution not as a series of testable, disprovable scientific theory, but as inviolate faith. In addition to reasoned evidences like Behe’s argument for irreducible complexity based on bacterial flagellum (above) that militate against evolution⁹, there are many hard facts that falsify evolution.  Let’s rehearse a few starting with the recent bacteria discovery:

1. Unchanged (Un-evolved) 2 Billion year old Bacteria

Following is an excerpt from an announcement made 2/2/2015 by the UCLA Newsroom of the discovery of bacteria that have not evolved for 2 billion years:

“It seems astounding that life has not evolved for more than 2 billion years — nearly half the history of the Earth,” said J. William Schopf, a UCLA professor of earth, planetary and space sciences in the UCLA College who was the study’s lead author. “Given that evolution is a fact, this lack of evolution needs to be explained.”¹⁰

Even this supporter of evolution can’t hide the fact that things don’t add up in the evolutionary worldview with this latest find. Their attempts to salvage the theory fall far short of believable. That attempt is this: evolutionists are saying this find  actually proves evolution – because the environment didn’t change for the microorganism, and evolution predicts there should only be change when the environment changes – creating new pressures on the organism.

The problem with that is, that’s only true for classical evolution as Darwin first proposed it, where only natural selection operates as a change agent. But no scientist alive adheres to merely classical Darwinism. They’ve all adopted and injected the concepts of genetics and mutations into evolution, transforming it into what is typically referred to as “Neo-Darwinism.” And Neo-Darwinism uses genetic mutations as a key mechanism for change and states that change is always occurring. In fact they say the change is so regular, they can use it as
a genetic dating technique which they call a “Molecular Clock.” Geneticist Mark Stoneking from the Max Planck Institute explains that, “It’s based on the fact that the sequence of chemical bases which make up DNA mutate at a regular rate.”¹¹

Since mutations happen regardless of environmental factors – and they happen at “a regular rate” – so much so, that they can use mutations as a clock, how can it be that a micro-organism has not changed at all in 2 Billion years? Thus the incredulity of even the evolution supporting Schopf.  When you consider it was only 5-7 million years ago that (evolutionists claim) chimps and humans had a common ancestor, it boggles the mind that this bacterium has not changed at all in 2 billion years. How many thousands of mutations were needed for the chimp-human divergence? And it happened (in theory) only 5-7 million years ago. And here we have a simple microorganism that has not changed in 2 billion (that’s billion with a “b”) years. Evolution is clearly not happening. Contrary to what Schopf states, this doesn’t need to be  “explained,” rather it needs to be recognized that evolution simply did not, and does not occur, and thus you find microorganisms unchanged for billions¹² of years.

2. Wheels (and motors) in living Creatures

Consider the following:

The famous evolutionist J.B.S. Haldane predicted that we would find no wheels or magnets in living creatures. This is because these would not work unless fully formed. Thus natural selection could not have produced them step by small step, each an improvement over the previous one. [Note – Because random changes don’t move in a planned fashion; such directed improvements require a designer! – DC] Such motors thus falsify evolution by Haldane’s own words.¹³

That’s from an article on the microorganism MO-1, Germ with 7 motors in one!. In addition to that, they’ve found two others. See “A Third Rotary Motor Has Now Been Found in Bacteria“

By their own standards evolution has been falsified, but few (if any) materialist scientists have the courage to step forward and admit it.

3.  The Cambrian Explosion

The Cambrian explosion is a well documented problem for the theory of evolution. If evolution is true, the model predicts we’d find the simplest fossils at the lowest strata, starting with a singled celled creature. From this single celled creature, all other creatures should evolve, creating the familiar evolutionary tree, and leaving ever increasing complex fossils of the various creatures as you go up through the strata. This means by the time you get to very complex creatures, there should be a well established fossil trail of their evolutionary origins.

On the other hand if creation were true you would expect to find complex creatures appearing all at once, without a fossil trail behind them. What does the fossil record show? As the diagrams below depict, the fossil record shows complex creatures suddenly appearing in the Cambrian layer, with no fossil record of simpler creatures before (below) them.

Above: Simplified depiction of the fossil record as it should appear if evolution were true. As you go down deeper in the levels, fossil remains should become simpler and simpler, going back to an original single celled creature called LUCA (Last Universal Common Ancestor). In the diagram, simpler, less evolved creatures are depicted by smaller creature icons.

That is not what was actually found. (See below)

Above: Simplified depiction of the fossil record as it is actually found. Complex creatures suddenly appear in the Cambrian layer. No simpler creatures found below them (before them in time) in the Precambrian layer.

This is devastating evidence to the theory of evolution as Darwin himself recognized:

“If my theory be true, it is indisputable that before the lowest Cambrian stratum was deposited, long periods elapsed, and during these periods of time, the world swarmed with living creatures. To the question why we do not find rich fossiliferous deposits belonging to these assumed earlier periods prior to the Cambrian, I can give no satisfactory answer.”¹⁴

Neither Darwin nor any other evolutionist has a feasible answer as to why the fossil record does not contain what Darwin expected. Darwin attempted an answer by claiming the fossil record was incomplete – we hadn’t found enough fossils yet. After 150 years of looking, we still haven’t found the “rich fossiliferous deposits” of earlier periods that Darwin claimed should be there for his theory to be true. The conclusion is simple. His theory is not true.

4. Evidence of the Phyla – (body plans)

Further evidence coming out of the evidence from fossils found in the Cambrian layer is that of the body types or body plans which scientists call phyla. Before moving on to the actual evidence lets review the importance of graphical evidence using as an example the proof cited for the recently discovered Higgs Boson (also known as the “God” particle).

The Higgs decays much too quickly for scientist to detect it directly so the scientists were looking for the signature of particles (photons) that the Higgs decays into. They measure those particles in units of gigaelectronvolts (GeV). The range for the particle they were looking for was between 115 – 127 GeV.

On July 4, 2012 the heads of the Atlas and CMS projects, teams working independently to find the Higgs headed by Fabiola Gianotti and Joe Incandela respectively, called a press conference and presented the above graphs. The graphs – independent verification of the long sought after particle – show a particle weighing in at 125.3 +- 0.6 GeV was discovered. It was taken as
unanimous evidence that the Higgs particle had finally been found.

I point out these graphs to illustrate the importance of accurate, visually depicted data – which is what a graph presents. Scientists use such graphs to determine if their theories are correct or not. In the case of the Higgs, it shows Peter Higgs was correct in his theory of a mass producing particle. What about Darwin and his prediction of phyla as a result of evolution?

Darwinian evolution predicts you’d start with one phylum, then go to 2 phyla, then more in a gradually increasing curve over time which would look something like this:

But what is actually found in the fossil record is this:

As philosopher of science Stephen Meyer puts it:

“What you actually have in the fossil record is a sudden spike in the number of phyla that appear during the Cambrian, and then a few that trickle in across the rest of geologic time. This kind of discontinuity is radically at odds with the Darwinian picture of the history of life”¹⁵

As Meyer points out, the evidence is “radically at odds” with what Darwin’s theory predicts and requires. Put another way – the evidence of the phyla as graphed above from the Cambrian explosion falsifies Darwin’s theory.

When you bring up such evidence, believers in evolution go into full damage control mode to convince you that the evidence above does not mean what it clearly means. (It clearly means that evolution as they depict it does not happen.) Just as they want to convince you that the above bacterial flagellum motor diagram, a representation of what Michael Behe calls an “irreducibly complex system” came about without design; (a ludicrous proposition) likewise they want to convince you that graphs of data that contradict evolution don’t mean anything. In their minds, the only graphs that mean anything are graphs that agree with their point of view. That is not science; that’s religious belief masquerading as science.

Now don’t misunderstand me – they have a right to their beliefs. But if what they believe is impervious to evidence; if they refuse to change their beliefs regardless of what the evidence shows, that’s an indication what they believe is not science, it’s faith; it’s religion. It’s fine to have faith and religion, but they should identify it as such, and not masquerade it as science. If they don’t want creationists to present their beliefs as science (and they don’t – there are strong efforts to deny “Creation Science” is science¹⁶), neither should they masquerade their religious beliefs as science; particularly those beliefs that have been falsified multiple times by multiple lines of evidence.

Duane Caldwell | posted 2/14/2015 | printer friendly version

Follow-up (2/27/2015)