 
 
                       DOUBTS ABOUT DARWIN 
 
                      by Thomas E. Woodward 
 
   In the face of mounting evidence, more scientists are abandoning
evolution. 
 
      For the last 18 months or so I've been kicking around 
      non-evolutionary or even anti-evolutionary ideas. For 
      over 20 years I had thought I was working on evolution 
      in some way. 
         One morning I woke up and something had happened in 
      the night, and it struck me that I had been working on 
      this stuff for more than 20 years, and there was not one 
      thing I knew about it. It's quite a shock to learn that 
      one can be misled for so long. 
         For the last few weeks I've tried putting a simple 
      question to various people and groups: Can you tell me 
      anything you know about evolution? Any one thing ... that 
      is true? 
 
                               Colin Patterson 
                               Senior Paleontologist 
                               British Museum of Natural History

  
 
   In June 1987, the Supreme Court battle lines were drawn again:
evolutionists on one side, creationists on the other. The battle
was over Louisiana's "Act for Balanced Treatment of Creation- 
Science and Evolution," which required the teaching of both 
theories in public school biology classes. 
   Once again the creationists were soundly defeated, prompting 
Steve Shapiro of the American Civil Liberties Union to call the 
decision "a legal end to the creationism movement." 
   But what the creationists have not accomplished in courts and
classrooms, they are now winning in universities and science labs
around the world. You probably won't read about it in Time, 
Discover, or National Geographic, but a growing number of 
scientists and intellectuals are abandoning Darwin and their faith
in evolution. 
   Recent advances in biology and other sciences have dealt such
heavy blows to evolution that one scientist said, "This whole thing
is coming apart at the seams." 
   In 1981, British paleontologist Colin Patterson started asking
other scientists to tell him one thing they knew about evolution.
Lecturing to biologists at the American Museum of Natural History
in New York City, he said, "I tried that question on the geology
staff at the Field Museum of Natural History and the only answer
I got was silence. I tried it on the members of the Evolutionary
Morphology Seminar in the University of Chicago, a very prestigious
body of evolutionists, and all I got there was silence for a long
time and eventually one person said, 'I do know one thing --- it
ought not to be taught in high school.'" 
   Patterson says modern science assumes that "a rationalist view
of nature [evolution] has replaced an irrational one [creation]."
He made that same assumption until 1980. 
   "Then I woke up and realized that all my life I had been duped
into taking evolutionism as revealed truth in some way." He said
he had experienced "a shift from evolution as knowledge to 
evolution as faith." 
   Patterson says one of the main reasons for his skepticism is 
that there are no real transitional forms anywhere in the fossil
record. (Transitional fossils would be in-between forms, such as
fish gradually developing arms and legs and turning into land 
animals.) 
   "I don't think we shall ever have any access to any form of 
[evolutionary] tree which we can call factual," he says. 
   Although Patterson still believes that evolution has occurred,
he emphasizes that belief in creation or belief in evolution is 
equally a faith-commitment. This is the heart of his Darwinian 
"heresy." 
 
                        Reasons for Doubt 
 
   Actually, Patterson is far from being the most extreme of 
evolution's new intellectual skeptics. Some researchers have 
completely abandoned Darwinism as a credible theory. 
   Because of recent findings in genetics, molecular biology, and
information science, a growing number of these skeptics are also
embracing the concept of an intelligent creator as the most 
plausible explanation of the origin of life. 
   Still, they have developed their views independently of the 
Genesis creation account. Most assume the earth is billions of 
years old. And because their critiques are directed to a scholarly
audience, their methods differ from those of traditional scientific
creationists. Through careful research and quiet reasoning, these
creationists have calmly presented their case to evolutionary 
scientists and earned a hearing. 
   Their greatest inroads have been through critiques of the widely
accepted chemical evolution theory (which says the first cell 
evolved from a "chemical soup" rich in amino acids and other 
organic substances). 
   As scientists have studied in detail the intricacies of the cell
--- with its chemical factories and spiral-ladder molecules of DNA
that record millions of bits of genetic information --- many have
started wondering how all this could have happened by chance, 
through natural processes. 
   One prominent skeptic is British astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle, 
famous for his research on the origins of the universe. Hoyle 
claims that believing the first cell originated by chance is like
believing a tornado could sweep through a junkyard filled with 
airplane parts and form a Boeing 747. 
   Instead, through a theory of "genes raining down from space,"
Hoyle theorizes that where there are major gaps in the fossil 
record, new genetic material was incorporated into existing species
to produce more complex structures. He believes the creator of 
these genes from space is not God, but some superintelligent 
extraterrestrial life. 
 
                     Reassessing the Mystery 
 
   In 1984, three former evolutionists, with doctorates in 
chemistry, materials science, and geochemistry, wrote the first 
comprehensive critique of chemical evolution, The Mystery of Life's
Origin: Reassessing Current Theories (see "Books About Origins,"
page 24). With pages of mathematical equations and chemical 
formulas, it dealt serious blows to the theory that life started
by chance. 
   Despite the book's creationist content, evolutionists have 
widely praised it. The most surprising endorsement came from Dean
Kenyon of San Francisco State University, co-author of Biochemical
Predestination, a key work on the evolution of the first cell. 
   After he read Mystery, Kenyon offered to write the book's 
foreword. In it, he says the book is so full of fresh and original
critiques of chemical evolution that he is puzzled that other 
scientists have not voiced similar criticism. 
   According to Kenyon, many scientists hesitate to admit or study
the theory's problems because they "would open the door to the 
possibility (or the necessity) of a supernatural origin or life."
So they continue looking for naturalistic solutions. 
   Others, recognizing chemical evolution's problems, have adopted
a theory called "directed panspermia," or that life was sent here
from another part of the universe. The problem is, they still 
haven't answered how life originated. They have just moved the 
question out of our solar system. 
   In the epilogue of Mystery, the authors explain how 
philosophical biases have prevented many scientists from 
considering the possibility of creation. Then with scientific 
precision, they argue that a "Creator Beyond the Cosmos" is the 
most plausible explanation of life's origin. 
   That does not mean that science has discovered the God of 
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. According to one of the book's authors,
chemist Charles Thaxton, science cannot affirm a supernatural 
origin of life. This is because science is limited to what can be
known through man's senses, and God cannot be known by our senses
alone. 
   But science can distinguish natural causes from intelligent 
causes, Thaxton says. For example, through our senses we can 
conclude that the faces on Mount Rushmore had an intelligent cause
and that the ripple marks on the seashore had a natural cause. 
Similarly, science can conclude that the vast storehouse of 
information recorded along the DNA molecule of even the simplest
cell must have an intelligent cause. 
   What science cannot do is show what kind of intelligence caused
it, whether a Creator-God, extraterrestrials, or something else.
That must be shown through apologetics, Thaxton says, not science.
   Twenty years ago, evolutionists would not have seriously 
considered any book criticizing chemical evolution and advocating
creation. Yet even the Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine and the
Journal of College Science Teaching have given Mystery high marks.
   "The volume as a whole," the Yale Journal said, "is devastating
to the relaxed acceptance of current theories of abiogenesis 
[chemical evolution]." 
   And Yale biophysicist Harold Morowitz, no friend of creationism,
called the book "an interesting start with considerable scientific
thrust." Several of the world's authorities on chemical evolution
have described the book as a "brilliant critique" and an "important
contribution." 
 
                       A Theory In Crisis 
 
   On another front, Michael Denton, an Australian biologist and
self-described agnostic, has also challenged Darwinian faith. His
book Evolution: A Theory in Crisis shows that evolution's 
intellectual foundations have been steadily eroding and that only
a philosophical "will to believe" in Darwin remains. New findings
of biology are bringing us very near to a "formal, logical disproof
of Darwinian claims," Denton says. 
   Citing evidence from fossils, embryology, taxonomy, and 
molecular biology, Denton shows that Darwin's "grand claim" --- 
that all life forms are interrelated and evolved from a single cell
--- has not been supported by one empirical discovery since 1859,
when Darwin published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural
Selection. 
   Murray Eden, professor emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, said Denton's book "should be made required reading for
everyone who believes what he was taught in college about 
evolution." 
   Even the renowned British anthropologist Ashley Montagu has 
praised Denton: "I found him to be a writer of the most astonishing
range of knowledge in the natural sciences, and a scientist whose
criticisms are, for the most part, just and telling." Still, he 
says Denton's critique does not destroy the "fact" of evolution;
it only questions how it happened. 
   On this point, Montagu seems to have missed Denton's summary of
Darwin's theory as the "great cosmogenic myth of the twentieth 
century." Denton shows not only that there is no fossil evidence
of any major changes between different kinds of animals, but also
that it is impossible to imagine how these radical changes could
have happened step by step through natural selection. 
   Denton carefully probes, for example, the absurdity of a land
mammal gradually evolving into a whale and the implausibility of
a reptilian scale transforming into a feather or a crude amphibian
egg becoming a vastly more complicated reptilian egg. 
   He points out that birds, which supposedly evolved from 
reptiles, have a completely different "flow-through" lung. What,
Denton asks, are the possible intermediate stages between a 
reptile's branching, dead-end lung and a bird's flow-through lung?
   More important, Denton shows how molecular biology is posing 
even greater problems for evolution. Since scientists have started
probing the structure of proteins and DNA, they have been able to
compare the "chemical spelling" of these structures in different
species. In the 1970s, some scientists claimed this new data would
be the final blow to creationism. Instead, the sequences of 
chemical units in proteins and DNA seem to show no trace of the 
family tree that evolution teaches. 
   Denton traces the striking pattern of "equidistant isolation"
of every group, as shown in the variations in Cytochrome C, a 
protein found in species as diverse as yeast, carp, and man. 
"Thousands of different sequences, protein and nucleic acid, have
now been compared in hundreds of different species," he says, "but
never has any sequence been found to be in any sense the lineal 
descendant or ancestor of any other sequence." 
   Later, Denton adds, "There is little doubt that if this 
molecular evidence had been available one century ago, it would 
have been seized upon with devastating effect by the opponents of
evolution theory like Agassiz [a Harvard biologist who opposed 
Darwin], and the idea of organic evolution might never have been
accepted." 
   According to Denton, science has so thoroughly discredited 
Darwinian evolution that it should be discarded. Yet because he is
agnostic and does not accept biblical creationism, he offers 
nothing to take its place. Instead, he suggests that science may
find some other natural explanation in the future. 
   He appears to be open, however, to the general concept of 
intelligent cause. 
   "Is it really credible," he asks, "that random processes could
have constructed a reality, the smallest element of which --- a 
functional protein or gene --- is complex beyond our own creative
capacities, a reality which is the very antithesis of chance, which
excels in every sense anything produced by the intelligence of 
man?" 
    
                         Pointing to God 
 
   Paul said, "For since the creation of the world, God's invisible
qualities --- his eternal power and divine nature --- have been 
clearly seen, being understood from what has been made" (Rom. 
1:20). 
   Despite the evidence against evolution, most biologists will 
probably not abandon Darwin. Many will continue to belittle 
creationism as the equivalent to believing in a flat earth and will
continue to teach evolution as a basis fact of biology, just as 
gravity is a fact of physics. 
   But because of scientists like Patterson, Thaxton, and Denton,
the scientific community is no longer ridiculing those who doubt
evolution and believe there is an intelligence behind DNA and the
beginnings of life. Several researchers have admitted that reading
The Mystery of Life's Origin has made them think positive thoughts
about God for the first time in years. 
   In fact, as the evidence pointing to a "creative intelligence"
at work in the universe accumulates, and the number of Darwinian
skeptics grows, more scientists are openly considering the 
possibility that this intelligence has already communicated with
man. 
   Christians now have the opportunity to show them the wealth of
apologetic evidence that identifies that intelligence as the God
of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Then the historical evidence of 
Christianity can be presented in the "courtroom of the intellect"
without it being thrown out on the technicality that God does not
exist. 
 
==================================================================

Thomas Woodward, an assistant professor at Trinity College of 
Florida, formerly served with UFM International in the Dominican
Republic. From Moody Monthly Magazine, September 1988.