Darwinian evolution must be split into two parts…microevolution and macroevolution.
At the time of the writing of Darwin’s book The Origin of Species in 1859…microevolution was then and still is today a non-controversial fact…demonstrated in the artificial selection by humans of the variant traits put out in a host of living things…from dogs, horses, cattle, and sheep…to agricultural crops of corn or wheat…to rose bush flowers of different shapes and colors…that can thus be intentionally altered to produce radically exotic varieties…far exceeding what nature produces that can survive in the wild.
When scientists confidently assert that evolution is a fact…if they mean by this that microevolution is a fact…then they are entirely correct.
Macroevolution…on the other hand…is the idea that the concept of microevolution can be extended and extrapolated into the existence of genetically open borders in ancestral and current living things…putting out variant traits extreme enough over long periods of time…to be able to turn a fish into a bird…without foresight or a premeditated end-point in mind.
Without foresight or direction…the concept of macroevolution producing the vast diversity of life…arriving at well-defined architectural body plans and lifestyle habits…in essence…is equivalent to the book writer’s random-chance search for a meaningful story through an eyes-closed approach while hitting keystrokes on their laptop computer keyboard.
What is not clearly explained or articulated by Darwinists is that this macroevolutionary program of a random-chance search strategy…of genetic accidents putting out variant traits chosen by natural selection…for the moment again changing gears over to my more easy to understand example of the murder mystery fiction novel…could by mere random chance…type-out for the final two or three chapters a comedy, American western, romance, biographical history, cookbook, or cold-war spy-novel ending…rather than the sought-after, suspense-filled, who-done-it murder mystery book ending.
Yet in the natural world we see living things that have incredibly fine-tuned end-points of unique definition…possessing the capacities for survival and reproduction.
We do not see living things that have made a momentary wrong turn in their development…requiring a course correction that is obvious…from deleting the chapter endings to the book that were erroneously comedic…to get back into the correct groove toward producing by a random-chance search for the murder mystery ending to match the first four-fifths of the book.
Not only do we not have libraries full of books having their final two or three chapters consisting of nonsensical gibberish…we do not see in our current natural world even the slightest hint of living things part-way in development or in transition toward something else.
And like the murder mystery story having the wrong comedic ending…of having a failed attempt at achieving function…we do not see inconsistent monstrosities in nature like grizzly bears having lion heads, or leopards having wings that can fly, or the top-half of humans having two arms connected to the bottom-half bodies of horses having four legs.
Darwinists assert that the genetic changes of evolution are too small for us to be able to detect within one human life-time.
This assertion is not valid.
Every living thing in the natural world appears at this present time to be at their functional end-point of development…beyond which even our imaginations cannot carry us further.
To suggest that we cannot find anything amongst the billions of life-forms on earth…that would be caught mid-stream in our current snap-shot in time…along a pathway of continued partial development toward some easily discernable final end-point culmination…simply points-out the extremely difficult tightrope that Charles Darwin postulated…in attempting to come up with an explanation for the origin of species and the resulting diversity of life…through a wholly naturalistic process…having no intelligent designer help…having no Agatha Christie utilizing her creative imagination to complete her murder mystery books…producing story-endings having the most creatively specified information…analogous to the narrow bandwidths of definition that characterize all living things.
The second important point to complete the ending to my own overly long essay here…that will offend many people in our modern culture…but which cannot be helped or avoided…is the idea that when contemporary scientists look at the obvious design in the natural world…and come away with only a materialistic, non-theistic conclusion…they fall within the same category as Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden choosing going our own way…and stand foursquare alongside the Pharisees and scribes in first-century Jerusalem…that upon hearing the evidence for Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead…were not influenced or deterred in the slightest from proceeding within the status quo of worldly conventional normalcy and thinking.
Going our own way (Isa. 53:6) cannot be imported into God’s kingdom of heaven…upsetting and plaguing peace and harmony…for all eternity.
Likewise, the pride-filled, humanistic approach of thinking we can save ourselves as junior gods through the knowledge of good and evil (Gen. 3:5)…will generate the blindness of the Pharisees in missing the divinity of Jesus Christ after the bringing the four-days-dead Lazarus back to life…and will permeate the materialistic bias of some modern scientists who cannot see and acknowledge design as part of their worldview…design that is resplendent everywhere we look in the natural world.
At Calvary, God did not focus upon the issues of bank fraud, bank robbery, stock market fraud, stage-coach robbery, the stealing of funds from the Temple treasury, or any other common crimes.
At Calvary, God focused on the one issue that is the most important in all of reality…self-sovereignty versus God-sovereignty.
In the Garden of Eden…Satan introduced a new worldview of implied distrust and unbelief in the character of God (Gen. 3:4-5)…creating the worldview of trust and faith in ourselves alone…of going our own way…which is empirically proved daily in our newspapers…as going the wrong way…culminating in the extreme demonstration of this through the crucifixion of Jesus Christ…the expediently desperate measure taken by the Pharisees and scribes to perpetuate their worldview of going our own way.
When scientists look at the natural world…then confidently write in their books that evolution is a fact…not only is this a semantics error in not differentiating between micro and macro evolution…but this is a conclusion that originates from their overriding worldview of going our own way…and not as a result of scientific fact-based evidence.
The atheistic philosophy of naturalistic materialism allows us to remain in the worldview of going our own way…of attempting to figure-out the natural world through scientific investigation…on our own.
The viewpoint of theistic creation…of “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” (Gen. 1:1)…is not and never has been a science-stopper.
At some point the orderliness and intelligibility of the natural world we investigate through science…may hit a ceiling beyond which further research cannot go…regardless and irrespective of worldviews.
As stated earlier…scientific investigation has appeared to reach a dead-end in the field of origin-of-life studies…the leap from the non-living world to the living world being too large to cross…at least for now using a non-theistic explanation.
But this is not a science-stopper. Nothing prevents further investigation and theorizing as to how to cross this gap from non-living materials to the complexity of living things.
I am not in favor of God-of-the-gaps or science-of-the-gaps explanations in lieu of the hard investigative research into the mysteries of the natural world.
I love science. I am fascinated by the history of science. The biographies of Copernicus, Newton, Einstein, Hubble…and yes, Darwin…along with the modern Scientific Revolution…the two Industrial Revolutions…and the Doctrine of Progress…are all of enormous interest to me.
If I could go back in time and choose another career path…historian of science or philosopher of science…with an undergraduate college degree in mathematics or physics or chemistry… would be an appealing choice.
But this negative exposure of the worldview of going our own way…in the Garden of Eden…in first-century Jerusalem…and in our modern-day culture in the scientific investigation into the natural world using materialism as the operative worldview…that this exposure is extremely offensive to and will be soundly rejected by worldly conventional normalcy and thinking…is a fundamental problem for our world.
The fundamental problem here…as big as it gets…is that this extremely divisive offense…to worldly conventional normalcy and thinking…of critically exposing the negative downside of going our own way…comes to us by the deliberate intention of God (Rom. 9:33; Gal. 5:11; 1 Pet. 2:7-8)…lovingly for our benefit.
The tragic scene of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ on the hill of Calvary is a divinely surgical separation of self-sovereignty versus God-sovereignty…into two violently opposing camps…that only God could and would orchestrate…for our benefit for the highest reasons imaginable.
This is another compelling evidence for the divine origin of the Bible and the truth of Christianity.
The acceptance of a random-chance search strategy through genetic accidental mutations…putting-out variant traits over and above microevolution…chosen by natural selection…to explain the progression of life from the early single-cell bacteria of 3.5-billion years ago to the brilliant diversity of life we can watch on nature programs on television of the large mammals inhabiting the African plains…is every bit as logically absurd…in terms of mathematical improbability…as Agatha Christie with eyes closed hitting random keystrokes in a futile attempt to produce the highly specified information of a murder mystery book.
Our worldview influences and directs everything we think about and choose.
Worldview is the most important factor in the broad array of moral concepts…the first among many things being fought over in spiritually high places (Eph. 6:12) between God and Satan…for the hearts and minds of people.
This is why God-composed journey of faith life-scripts…producing the biblical narrative stories of faith…were invented by God…to shift our worldview from the horizontally conventional viewpoint of me, myself, and I…sitting upon our thrones of self-sovereignty…instead to a vertically inclined vision of the higher ways and thoughts of God.
Going our own way…or picking up our cross to follow Jesus into a God-composed journey of faith life-script designed individually for each one of us…exists at the pinnacle…the zenith of moral choices as we look at the cross of Jesus Christ on Calvary Hill…as complex, specified, and coherently integrated an event…as any in all of time eternal.
“I said therefore unto you, that ye shall die in your sins: for if ye believe not that I am he, ye shall die in your sins.” (Jn. 8:24)
“If we this day be examined of the good deed done to the impotent man, by what means he is made whole;
Be it known unto you all, and to all the people of Israel, that by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom ye crucified, whom God raised from the dead, even by him doth this man stand here before you whole.
This is the stone which was set at nought of you builders, which is become the head of the corner.
Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved. (Acts 4:9-12)
From A Popular Defense of the Bible and Christianity.
The Cross in the Christian Life 