The Case for a Creator - Lee Strobel [27]
As I mentally wrestled with this concept, I stood to stretch my legs. Walking over to the window, I looked down at cars backed up along the busy street and people hustling down the sidewalks on either side. A rudimentary illustration popped into my mind.
“Let me see if I understand you. If I were to chemically analyze that street and sidewalk,” I said, pointing out the window, “I’d find they would be identical or very similar. They’d both be made of concrete. But that wouldn’t mean that they shared a common ancestor—say, a path for a golf cart—that got wider and more substantial over millions of years. A better explanation would be that there was a common designer who decided to use basically the same materials to construct similar, but functionally different, structures.”
Wells thought about my example for a moment. “Essentially, that’s right,” he said. “It sounds ridiculous to suggest a golf path could evolve into a sidewalk and street, but it’s not any more outlandish than some of the claims for biological evolution. The important point is that similarity by itself doesn’t distinguish between design and Darwinism.”
We had strayed from Haeckel’s embryos, but the issues were the same: is there persuasive evidence through embryology or homology that all living creatures evolved over time from an ancient progenitor? I concluded that Darwin was wrong: examining embryos of different creatures in their early stages does not yield support for his theory. And the undeniable similarities between some vertebrate limbs certainly doesn’t distinguish between design or descent as a cause. Once again, the persuasive power of the evolutionary icons had been deflated.
I glanced at my watch; if I were to catch my plane back to Los Angeles, I would need to turn to the last of the four evolutionary images from my days as a student: the awe-inspiring fossil of a prehistoric creature that once effectively silenced many of Darwin’s critics.
IMAGE #4: THE ARCHAEOPTERYX MISSING LINK
When Darwin’s The Origin of Species was published in 1859, he conceded that “the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory” was that the fossil record failed to back up his evolutionary hypothesis.
“Why,” he asked, “if species have descended from other species by insensibly fine gradations, do we not everywhere see innumerable transitional forms?” He attributed the problem to the fossil record being incomplete and predicted that future discoveries would vindicate his theory.
As if on cue, two years later scientists unearthed the archaeopteryx (pronounced ar-key-OPT-er-icks) in a German quarry. Darwin’s supporters were thrilled—surely this missing link between reptiles and modern birds, unveiled so promptly after the appearance of Darwin’s book, would just be the first of many future fossil discoveries that would validate Darwin’s claims.
Like many people, including the scientist who “actually fell upon his knees in awe” when he first glimpsed the archaeopteryx at the National History Museum in England, 34 I was enthralled by the dramatic pictures of the prehistoric creature. I was under the impression that it was featured in my books on evolution because it is just one example of many transitional links that have been found. But I was wrong.
Since that time I have come to learn that the fossil record has utterly let Darwin down. Michael Denton, in his book Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, summarized the bleak situation this way:
. . . [T]he universal experience of paleontology . . . [is that] while the rocks have continually yielded new and exciting and even bizarre forms of life . . . what they have never yielded is any of Darwin’s myriads of transitional forms. Despite the tremendous increase in geological activity in every corner of the globe and despite the discovery