Remember earlier, I mentioned how things started to get dicey in the late 1700’s early 1800’s. The Church started to compromise the Bible regarding the age of the earth. Up till then it was accepted that God created everything roughly 6000 years ago. About 4400 years ago, there was the Noahic flood that laid down the fossil layers. Then about 2000 years ago, Christ came to “fulfill the law, not to destroy it.”
He came to complete the Old Testament. Never once in all of Jesus’ quotes did he ever deny any part of the Old Testament, including His quotes regarding Adam and Noah. This is absolutely crucial to understanding the creation/evolution controversy. Was Jesus a liar? Or, he obviously didn’t understand evolution?! As we mumble “I believe in God…….Creator of heaven and earth.”
Some early geologists started to disbelieve in a catastrophic global Noah’s Flood. They felt everything is happening today as it always has – “The present is the key to the past.” Remember that little quip from your science courses? What is ongoing in the present world, geologically speaking, has always been going on: local floods, regional weather patterns, and varying degrees of volcanic and tectonic activity over the millennia.
Charles Lyell, an amateur geologist and lawyer, was Charles Darwin’s mentor. He gave Darwin the first volume of his “Principles of Geology” before Darwin embarked on his famous voyage of the Beagle in 1831. Darwin went on that ship, and to the Galapagos Islands, already believing in long ages. He was previously influenced by his Grandfather Erasmus Darwin in evolutionary thought. Erasmus had written a book years earlier on evolution called Zoonomia, which Charles liberally borrowed from. Lyell encouraged Darwin to publish his theory before a competitor named Wallace. In 1859, “On the Origin of Species” was published. It’s been downhill ever since for the Church.
The Bible and evolution are NOT compatible! The Bible states: Creation (Adam, animals, etc.), then Adam sins, then Noah’s flood which formed the fossils (death)! On the other hand, evolution states: organisms (live and DIE) evolving toward man (call him Adam) while forming the fossil layers (DEATH) over the millennia.
Upward and onward, “The secrets of evolution are death and time,” from Carl Sagan, Cosmos 1980. Ooooh, death (fossils) BEFORE Adam??!! Reflect on this heresy!
Man, by his sin nature (remember Adam & the forbidden fruit), doesn’t really like being answerable to anyone. Of course if you are a staunch evolutionist, then by definition there is no such thing as “sin.” You decide right and wrong. You evolved from that pond of slime and are answerable to no one. Think back a million years ago when you were a teenager. Oh yeah, the original “Rebel Without a Cause.” James Dean had nothing on you. Mankind, at least as far back as the Greeks Epicurus and Lucretius (the original evolutionists), has been trying to explain life without God. Charley Darwin finally did it – the icing on the cake. Atheists had, up till then, remained fairly quiet and in the closet with some exceptions. Not now! You’ve come a long way, baby! I first want to give a big shout out for Thomas Huxley. Known as “Darwin’s Bulldog,” this atheist was the first to jump on the evolutionary bandwagon. Within 6 months of “Origins” release, there was a creation/evolution debate between Huxley and Bishop “Soapy Sam” Wilberforce. Wilberforce lost, and the Church as a whole was humiliated. The evolutionists and atheists have been riding high ever since.
By 1871, Karl Marx attempted to dedicate his 2nd edition of his masterwork “Das Kapital” to “my friend Charles Darwin” (they were contemporaries). Communism needed a scientific support or base for this radical new world philosophy without God. It is claimed that Darwin declined, because he felt by lending his name to so obvious a direct attack on God would not sit well with family and friends. Vatican I, which met in 1868, began to organize in 1864, just a few short years after “Origins” release. “Origins” and evolution were spreading like wildfire.
OK, let’s slow down and backtrack for a minute. What about God getting involved in the evolutionary process now and again. Yeah, that’s the answer! Let’s call it Theistic evolution. That solves how man’s brain came about over those millions of years. That’s it! Boy, are you smart. Question, would anyone, any – one send me the reference to the science textbook you used in school (especially Parochial school or a Catholic University) where it states that some animal started to evolve into an entirely different animal and during this evolutionary process – ding – God did something to help it along the way? Or some element, from the periodic table, changes into a different element or compound, say, hydrogen and oxygen into water, and again another – ding – by God? Sounds like the fairy Godmother in Cinderella. Somehow I just don’t remember reading about those “dings” in any of my science textbooks. The hardcore atheists and evolutionists look at Christians, who are trying to compromise the Bible and make evolution/millions of years fit into it, as plain fools! Period. They have no respect for them. None! P.S. And you still have death before Adam!
Let me play the Devil’s (evolutionary) advocate for a moment. I like doing this with many of my medical colleagues of color. I get such a chuckle out of doing this. I’ll be talking with say one of the Pakistani, Indian or Black physicians. Somehow the topic of evolution just happens to come up. Ahem! I ask them if they believe in evolution. Invariably, the answer is yes. We have all been well indoctrinated the same way. So you believe life started as a unicellular organism and then evolved upward and onward – fish, amphibians, birds, reptiles, mammals and man? Oh yes, they reply. I corner them further. And man started out as a basic ape like hominid of some type and continued to evolve upward to where he is today? Again, yes, they answer. Are you sure? Absolutely! Then the fun really starts. I have the most fun with my black colleagues. I ask them where do the anthropologists find the most primitive remains of man? In a heartbeat, they proudly respond “out of Africa! – Olduvai Gorge! – Louis Leakey! – Donald Johanson! – Lucy!” Then I ask them what color was the first man? You can literally see them straighten up and proudly say – Black! Great, I reply. What color was the next to evolve upward? All of a sudden the smile is gone; the eyes narrow and dart back and forth as the cog wheels slowly turn in their brain searching for an answer. I break the silence. We are still talking about evolution, aren’t we? I get a weak “yes.” Well, maybe it was brown, then yellow and finally Caucasian!? The mouth seems to just drop open and hang. Still silence on their part. I proceed. But the Caucasian is not the most evolved! They dumbfoundedly look at me and say – “it’s not?” No, I reply, it’s – and I snap to attention, crack a Nazi salute and in my best imitation-German say – “zee Aryan race, sieg heil!” Their eyes bug out and the jaw drops to the floor. At this point, they’re in a catatonic trance. They don’t know what to say. Hey, they did say they unquestionably believed in evolution. While they are trying to compose themselves, I calmly and quietly say “OR all mankind came from Adam and Eve.” I stop and wait. Inevitably, they ask, “what color were Adam and Eve?” The first intelligent question you have asked. Very simple, they were both mid brown. They were? They ask still stunned.
Just think back to your basic biology and the Punnet Square. First, there are not different skin colors. Only different concentrations of a pigment called melanin which creates different shades/concentrations of melanin. This creates all the “colors” of the different people groups. Adam and Eve both would have been a middle brown skin shade. Their children and children’s children could have ranged from very dark to very light – in one generation!
Humans have 46 chromosomes. The sperms and eggs however have half that number. Therefore, at conception, the fertilized egg is back to its normal 46 chromosome count. Geneticists have found that 4-6 genes, each with multiple alleles (variations), control the amount and type of melanin produced. To illustrate the basic genetic principles involved in determining skin shade, we’ll use a simplified explanation, with just TWO genes controlling the production of melanin.
A and B versions of the genes code for a lot of melanin.
a and b versions of the genes code for a small amount of melanin.
If the father’s sperm carried the AB version and the mother’s ovum carried the AB also, the child would be AABB, with a lot of melanin, and therefore have very dark skin.
Should both parents carry the ab version, the child would be aabb, with very little melanin, and thus have very light skin.
If the father’s sperm carries AB (very dark) and the mother egg carries ab (very light) the child will be AaBb (a mid brown shade of skin).
A simple exercise with a Punnet Square shows that if each parent (Adam and Eve) has a middle brown shade of skin (AaBb), the combinations that they could produce result in a wide variety of skin shades in the children in one generation. Remember eggs and sperm have half the number than the rest of the body cells.
1 2 3 4
Adam sperm possible combinations AB Ab aB ab
Eve ovum possible combinations 1 AB AA AA Aa Aa
BB Bb BB Bb
2 Ab AA AA Aa Aa
Bb bb Bb bb
3 aB Aa Aa aa aa
BB Bb BB Bb
4 ab Aa Aa aa aa
Bb bb Bb bb
As you can see in this simple modified example, there are 16 different combinations or shades in the offspring (children), ranging from very dark in the upper left (AABB) to very light in the lower right (aabb). And remember, Adam and Eve had a lot of kids.
I usually ask my colleagues, “by the way do you know the full title of Darwin’s book”? They answer “On the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection”. Partially correct, it has a sub-title. “Or the preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life.” Favored Races!? Oopsy! If you have any doubts read his second book “The Descent of Man.” Darwin makes it crystal clear that women “are biologically inferior to men.” The primitives of Africa and the Aborigines of Australia “are savages and must be eliminated.”
The late Stephen J. Gould, a self-avowed Marxist, atheist and evolutionist, and professor of biology and paleontology at Harvard, stated, “Arguments for racism may have been common before 1859 (Origin published), but they increased by orders of magnitude following the acceptance of evolutionary theory.”
Ota Benga, an African pygmy, in 1905 was placed in the monkey cage at the Bronx Zoo with an orangutan and put on display as evidence for an evolutionarily inferior race. He later committed suicide.
During the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, thousands of Australian aboriginal men, women and children were hunted, killed and their skulls boiled down to be shipped to museums throughout the world. They, too, were considered a “missing link,” or not quite human. The Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. holds the remains of 15,000 individuals. All in the name of scientific evolutionary progress.
Margaret Sanger, a rabid evolutionist and eugenicist, looked upon the poor, minorities, and many immigrants from Europe as “breeding human weeds.” “We do not want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the (Black) minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.” Sanger was the founder of what is called today, Planned Parenthood – funded with your tax dollars.
Many famous people were affected to one degree or another by the “proof” of evolution. Andrew Carnegie, an industrialist of the late 1800’s/early 1900’s, and other “robber barons” of that era, subscribed to the “survival of the fittest” motif. They were surviving, so they must be the fittest. The worker be damned. He/she was an expendable cog in the wheel. “Not only had I got rid of Theology and the supernatural, but I had found the truth of evolution.” Even Teddy Roosevelt, a progressive and one of the guys on Mount Rushmore, supported a Eugenics movement. “I wish that the wrong people…..were prevented from breeding.” And he is credited also with saying that “9 of 10 Indians should be dead Indians.”
Adolph Hitler, in his opus “Mein Kampf,” looked upon the Jew as sub-ape. He had found his scapegoat for the annihilation to come. He was going to breed a race of blue-eyed, blonde Nordic supermen – the Aryan race! When Jesse Owens, a black-American, out ran Hitler’s supermen at the 1936 Munich Olympics, Hitler was incensed with rage. Owens had garnered four gold medals. Hitler rationalized his losses due to the fact that his Nordic supermen were at an unfair disadvantage since they were “racing against an animal.”
Need I bother to mention mass murderers: Joe Stalin, Mao Tse-Tung, Pol Pot, Castro, “Che”, etc.? Atheists and hardcore evolutionists all! In China, if you converted to Christianity, they would say “You gave up Darwin!” Downed US pilots were “brainwashed,” not with sleepy time readings of Chairman Mao, but with Darwin!
You say that stuff is all water under the bridge. We are now more enlightened in our evolutionary walk. Those silly objections are just old hat, and mean spirited thinking. Can’t we all just get along? By the way did you hear that Susan is having a designer baby? They select the fertilized egg with the traits that she and her husband want and implant it in her uterus. Isn’t science wonderful?! What happens to the other fertilized eggs? Come on, does anyone care?
Gene Conti, MD
contig@cox.net