The Case for a Creator - Lee Strobel [32]
“In fact, a paleoanthropologist named Misia Landau wrote a book in which she talked about the similarities between the story of human evolution and old-fashioned folk tales. She concluded that many classic texts in the field were ‘determined as much by traditional narrative frameworks as by material evidence’ and that these themes ‘far exceed what can be inferred from the study of fossils alone.’ ” 56
I took a few moments to soak in what Wells had said. He was right—certainly Java man’s fall from grace is instructive. It highlights how many people, including myself, became adherents of Darwinism through fossils or other evidence that later discoveries have either undermined or disproved. But the damage has already been done in many cases—the student, unaware of these subsequent findings, has already graduated into full-fledged naturalism.
As I leaf back through my time-worn copies of the World Book from my childhood, I can now see how faulty science and Darwinian presuppositions forced my former friend Java man into an evolutionary parade that’s based much more on imagination than reality. Unfortunately, he’s not the only example of that phenomenon, which is rife to the point of rendering the record of supposed human evolution totally untrustworthy.
“There is no encompassing theory of [human] evolution,” conceded Berkeley evolutionary biologist F. Clark Howell. “Alas, there never really has been.” 57
OUTDATED, DISTORTED, FAKE, FAILURE
At the end of our discussion about the fossil record, I reflected back on the four images that had paved the way for my descent into atheism. I could only shake my head.
I was left with an origin-of-life experiment whose results have been rendered meaningless; a Tree of Life that had been uprooted by the Biological Big Bang of the Cambrian explosion; doctored embryo drawings that don’t reflect reality; and a fossil record that stubbornly refuses to yield the transitional forms crucial to evolutionary theory. Doubts piled on doubts.
Are these icons the sole evidence for Darwinism? Of course not. But their fate is illustrative of what happens time after time when macroevolution is put under the microscope of scrutiny. As I continued to investigate the scientific and philosophical underpinnings of evolutionary theory, in a long-standing probe that goes far beyond my encounter with Wells, I kept getting the same kind of results. No wonder a hundred scientists signed a public dissent from Darwinism.
Yet every time an icon of evolution is discredited, Darwinists claim with religious zeal that it was never really the whole story in the first place and insist that new findings really do buttress macroevolution. New narratives are created; new stories are told. The theory of evolution, now unsupported by the original icon, is never questioned; instead, it’s used afresh to justify a redesigned model.
For instance, several years ago Gould and a colleague proposed a new hypothesis, called “punctuated equilibrium,” in a desperate bid to explain away the fossil gaps. They suggested that radically new species somehow managed to develop rapidly among isolated populations, conveniently leaving behind no fossils to document the process. When these new creatures rejoined the larger, central populations, this resulted in the preserving of fossils that suggested the sudden appearance of new species. This model has been roundly criticized, and rightly so, for creating far more questions than answers. 58 In the end, Darwinism has remained a philosophy still in search of convincing empirical data to back it up.
Similarly, neo-Darwinists have proudly displayed four-winged fruit flies as evidence that small genetic changes can yield major physiological differences in organisms. As Wells reveals in his book, however, these fruit flies must be carefully bred from three artificially maintained