A short note on Evolution and Science
It
is often assumed that Evolution is based on hard
Science, it never has been. When the theory of
Evolution was revived in the nineteenth century,
Lord Kelvin, the greatest Victorian scientist
with others such as John Phillips pointed out that based
on the well established science of the cooling of the Earth
there could have been no more than 100 Million years
between a molten earth and the current
inhabitable globe, while Darwin wanted 300 Million
years for the denudation of the Weald alone!
In the face of such hard science it was Geologists
such as Charles Lyell who invoked the idea divine intervention
to enable the earth to be older than science could allow.
[Lord Kelvin and the Age of the Earth, Joe D. Burchfield,
University of Chicago Press 1975/1990, p43, pp58-86,
ISBN 0-226-08043-9].
Only
when radioactivity was discovered to explain why
the earth was not cooling at the rate it was
losing heat could the age of earth be extended to
that required by the theory.
However
today there are many more significant problems
for the theory. For example the rock layers
are supposed to be layed down slowly at an inch
every four hundred years to give the great ages
of the Geological column contradict the requirement
of rapid deposition needed to preserve and fossilise
vegetable matter and soft parts of animals which
would have been destroyed unless covered very
rapidly to exclude air, erosion, and predators.
Again if the moon is so old, why is it not
covered by a deep blanket of cosmic dust as predicted
by Isaac Asimov and others before we landed there
and found practically none. However the
biochemical challenge mentioned by Professor Behe
in his book below perhaps ought to be the death
of the theory.
Radiometric
dating, glibly quoted as supporting Evolution, often results in dates unacceptable to
both creationists and evolutionists. This may be
due to the proportions of the substances being
compared having changed over time, other than by radiometric
decay. For example Argon is a gas and can accumulate from
below or leak out to above. Over thousands of years even solid
minerals can be leached out or forced in by high pressure,
superheated, chemically active gasses.
However the main
problem is that the original proportions are
unknown making any sensible calculations impossible.
This flaw was dramatically demonstrated by the
apparent age of rocks created the in
Mount St Helen's eruption of May 1980. Using
standard radiometric dating these young rocks dated
to millions of years.
Today
there is a growing movement called the
"Intelligent Design Movement". These are
professional scientists who are not necessarily
committed to a Christian view of origins such as
the six day Special Creation, but have concluded
that chance events could not have caused life and the
universe as we know it. So they are being forced to
the conclusion that life was created.
The book that
perhaps started all this was Michael Denton's
"Evolution, A Theory in Crisis" (1985)
[Adler & Adler ISBN: 0-917561-52-X], another
is Michel J. Behe's "Darwin's Black Box, The
Biochemical Challenge to Evolution" (1996)
[Free Press: ISBN: 0-684-82754-9].
Alan
Bartley, BSc, ARCS.
