Looking for His glorious appearing! Titus 2:13

Darwin's Errors Pt. 1
Feb 18th, 2015
Commentaryfbns@wayoflife.org. - David Cloud
Categories: Creation - Evolution

In the late 19th century, the evolutionary doctrine of Charles Darwin was thought to have disproven the Bible. This was a great turning point in history, and each quarter century since then has witnessed an increase in skepticism and open animosity toward God and His Word. Today it is widely assumed that the Bible is filled with myth and scientific blunders while Darwin has been authenticated.

The truth is quite the opposite. Scientific research since Darwin has authenticated the Bible and discredited Darwin. In reality, it is Darwin's writings that are filled with myth and scientific blunders. 

It can be argued that Darwin couldn't have known scientific facts that weren't yet discovered in his day and that he is not to be blamed for the blunders that appear in his writings, but that is not the point. The point is that Darwin's writings are filled with scientific blunders, whereas the Bible, which was written thousands of years earlier, has no such blunders. This is clear evidence of its divine inspiration.

Consider some of Darwin's errors:

THEOLOGICAL LIBERALISM

It is theological liberalism that paved the way for the acceptance of Darwinian evolution. Originating in Germany and spreading though England during the first half of the 19th century, liberalism attacked the divine inspiration and historicity of the Bible. The Tubingen School of liberalism in Germany was founded by F.C. Baur, who lived at the same time as Darwin, dying a year after Darwin published On the Origin of Species. German liberalism had made strong inroads into the Church of England. 

Just five years after Darwin's death, the Baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon described the effect that theological liberalism had upon British society:

"Attendance at places of worship is declining and reverence for holy things is vanishing. We solemnly believe this to be largely attributable to THE SCEPTICISM WHICH HAS FLASHED FROM THE PULPIT AND SPREAD AMONG THE PEOPLE" (C.H. Spurgeon, Sword and Trowel, November 1887).

All of the founders of Darwinian evolution were influenced by theological liberalism, assuming that the Bible had been discredited by the liberals.

Darwin said that the Bible "was no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindoos, or the beliefs of any barbarian" (Autobiography, p. 85).

Thomas Huxley, "Darwin's Bulldog," called the Bible a myth and claimed that Jehovah God was an invention of man.

In Darwin's day statements like the following were being published and widely accepted:

"The time, of which the pre-Mosaic narrations treat, is a sufficient proof of their legendary character. It was a time prior to all knowledge of writing" (H. Schultz, Old Testament Theology, 1869).

"These wanderers [Moses and Israel] had no written language, they could neither read nor write" (Robert Ingersoll, About the Holy Bible, 1894).

Since then, the popular liberal theories about the Bible have been disproven. 

Consider the idea that Moses didn't write the Pentateuch because writing wasn't sophisticated enough in his day. Secular archaeologists now date writing to the middle of the 4th millennium BC, which is 1,500 years before Moses! 

"Inscribed artifacts from excavations show that man had a knowledge of writing as early as the late 4th millennium BC" (Joseph Naveh, Origins of the Alphabets). 

Ancient libraries have been unearthed at Ugarit, Mari, Ur, Ebla, Nippur, Nineveh, Persepolis, and many other places. Tens of thousands of documents dating to Abraham's age and earlier prove that the ancient civilizations described in Genesis were highly literate.

Another popular liberal theory in Darwin's day was that the New Testament was not written until a century or more after the apostles. This has been totally disproven by the discovery of New Testament manuscripts dating to the end of the first century and the existence of hundreds of quotations from the New Testament books in the writings of Christian leaders dating to the late first and early second century. (See the report "The Bible Critics Were Wrong" at www.wayoflife.org.)

Darwin was wrong in his acceptance of liberal views of the Bible.

ABIOGENESIS

Charles Darwin and Thomas Huxley believed in abiogenesis or spontaneous generation, which is the idea that life can spring from non-life. 

This was widely believed until the last half of the 19th century when it was disproven by the experiments of Louis Pasteur. He discovered that wine and milk do not ferment if they are sealed from the air, and he concluded that fermentation is caused by microorganisms. He developed what he called "the germ theory of fermentation" and "suggested a microbial etiology (cause) of disease" (Alan Gillen and Douglas Oliver, "Creation and the Germ Theory," Answers in Genesis, July 29, 2009). He called the souring of grape juice by microbes "the disease of wine." By 1870, Pasteur had identified the microbe that causes silkworm disease. He invented the process of pasteurization to kill the germs in milk and other liquids by the process of heating. His understanding of germs led to the invention of life-saving vaccines and ultimately, to the invention of antibiotics. The entire field of modern medicine is based on the concept of germs as pioneered by Pasteur.  

Building on Pasteur's findings, Joseph Lister, a Quaker medical doctor, did further research into the germ cause of disease. His research into the souring of milk led him to the same conclusion that Pasteur had made. He considered milk spoilage a type of infectious disease. Concluding that microbes caused infection in his patients by entering wounds, Lister pioneered the use of antiseptics. His use of carbolic acid dressings and spray, sterilization of instruments, and asepsis (hand washing and maintaining a clean environment) significantly reduced gangrene. Prior to this, 50% of his amputation patients died of infection. By the end of his lifetime, 97% of amputees survived. Lister's pioneering work led to the widespread application of these practices by the early 1870s. Lister is considered the co-founder of the germ theory with Pasteur. Both were creationists who believed in the God of the Bible and rejected Darwinism.

Charles Darwin was wrong about abiogenesis.

Yet though abiogenesis has been disproven for 140 years, and new experiments have further confirmed the findings of Pasteur and Lister, Darwinists still believe it. When asked how life began, they say that it arose spontaneously from non-life. They hold to a disproven theory because it is necessary for their theory of life. 

A SIMPLE CELL

Darwin thought that the cell was a very simple thing and it would have been no great feat for it to have evolved somehow in a "warm pond." His disciple in Germany, Ernst Haeckel, called the cell "a simple little lump of albuminous combination of carbon" (John Farley, The Spontaneous Generation Controversy from Descartes to Oparin, 1977, p. 73).

Of course, Darwin was grossly wrong. The cell is a fantastically complex thing, more complex than a modern city. It's a little living body with organs called organelles. It has blueprints, decoders, error checkers, quality control, power plants (mitochondria), power storage units, manufacturing plants (cytoplasm, endoplasmic reticulum, Golgi apparatus), chemical plants, assembly lines, disposal units (proteasome), trash compactors, a complex communication system, recycling centers (lysosomes), detoxification plants (peroxisomes), transportation highways and tracks and tunnels, transportation vehicles (dynein and cargo proteins that walk along tubular pathways), living walls with many types of one-way and two-way guarded, gated portals to the outside world, an intelligent external matrix to connect with other cells, and a host of other things.

The very complexity of the living cell has convinced many scientists that life could not have evolved from blind naturalistic processes. Consider some sample statements:

"I believe in a Creator because I see the Creator's designs in nature everywhere and evidence of intelligence in the DNA of each cell" (John Kramer, Ph.D. in biochemistry, In Six Days, edited by John Ashton, p. 54).

"Though I once embraced the evolutionary paradigm, its inadequate explanations for the origin of life coupled with the sophistication and complexity of the cell's chemical systems convinced me as a biochemistry graduate student that a Creator must exist" (Fazale Rana, Ph.D., The Cell's Design, p. 17).

"Complexity of the cell is now just too daunting to flippantly assert biochemical evolution to explain it, unless you close your mind and press on blindly and boldly. It has now become quite a feat to think about cells originating through biochemical evolution. And if cells could not originate naturally, then nothing else could" (Henry Zuill, Ph.D. in biology, In Six Days, p. 68).

Even many scientists that don't believe the Bible's account of Creation and that believe in the evolution of creatures, have become convinced that the formation of life from non-life would be impossible without intelligence. 

Francis Crick, who received a Nobel Prize as co-discoverer of DNA's double helix construction, described himself as a sceptic and an agnostic with "a strong inclination towards atheism" ("General Nature of the Genetic Code for Proteins," Nature, Dec. 1961). Yet he acknowledged that the complexity of the living cell points to the "miraculous."

"An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going" (Life Itself: Its Origin and Nature, 1981, p. 88).

Francis Collins, head of the Human Genome Project, believes that the complexity of the living cell and life itself points to a Creator. He develops this theme in his book The Language of God. 

Michael Denton, Ph.D. biochemistry, also argues that nature shows evidence of design in Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (1986) and Nature's Destiny: How the Laws of Biology Reveal Purpose in the Universe (2002). Denton is not a creationist; he believes in long geological ages and some sort of evolutionary change and is probably an agnostic. 

Michael Behe, Ph.D. biology, has published books (Darwin's Black Box and Signature of the Cell) to present the case that life is "irreducibly complex" and points to "intelligent design." Behe delves into the amazing mysteries of DNA and the other biological machinery of the living cell and the impossibility of naturalistic explanations for the origin of life. 

Darwin was wrong about the living cell