To purchase the entire DVD set of the Summit Lecture Series, visit summit.org.
As recently as in 2008, Kenneth Miller and Joseph Levine were quoted in national textbooks:
“In their early stages of development, chickens, turtles, and rats look similar, providing evidence that they shared a common ancestry.”
If the publishers and educators were honest about the data, they could (maybe even should) equally say that they shared a common designer. That is an equally legitimate interference from the evidence. But it’s ruled out because of the current definition of science.
Similarly, in 2011 book, Inquiry into Life, Sylvia S. Mader wrote:
“At these comparable developmental stages, vertebrate embryos have many features in common, which suggests they evolved from a common ancestor.”
And likewise, the argument of bacterial mutations comes up all the time in scientific debates, classrooms and coffee shops all the time. One example: if you have a certain culture of bacteria and expose it to an antibiotic, the bacteria are killed. However, sometimes bacteria will emerge that resists the antibiotic. There’s a myth that the origin of antibiotic resistant bacteria is shown here and that it is due to the creative potential of natural selection and random mutation as in the case of the bacteria responding to threats and creating its method of survival.
Now, in some cases, and antibiotic resistant strain of bacteria will arise from a point of mutation. There will, in fact, be some sort of mutation that will arise naturally, in which there will be bacteria already present that can resist the antibiotics. Therefore, when exposed to the antibiotics, only the resistant bacteria survive and the others all die. Then, over time, this resistant bacteria reproduces and multiplies until it is prevalent over the non-resistant strain. When the antibiotic is removed, the resistant strain goes back to the form that the bacteria had in the beginning of it all.
So, what’s the point?
Antibiotics is a lot like Darwin’s finch beaks on the Galapagos Islands. There are incremental, tiny changes that do take place over time in both the bacteria and the finches in order to adapt to certain changes or threats. But there is no evidence at all for the creative capacity of bacteria to start evolving new features and adaptations that weren’t already present before the antibody was made present, just as the finches beaks didn’t mutate and create new mouths that weren’t already on existing birds.
We could actually go on and on about this, but in the interest of time, I’ll quote William A. Dembski who said:
“Darwin was like a magician performing far enough away from his subjects that he could dazzle them – until somebody starts handing out binoculars… You can’t get design without a designer.”
So what do you do when you encounter somebody who tells you that the evidence for evolution is overwhelming?
A) Tell them about Haeckel’s embryos.
B) Tell them about the Cambrian Explosion.
C) Tell them about the Miller-Urey experiment.
D) Laugh at them.
E) All the above, except D.
Always remember that even those who believe in Darwinian evolution and reject the evidence for a Creator are still made in the image of that Creator, Who loves them and Who yearns to be in a relationship with them.