Cracks in the Evolutionary Facade -- By: John T. Baldwin

Journal: Bible and Spade (Second Run)
Volume: BSPADE 09:4 (Autumn 1996)
Article: Cracks in the Evolutionary Facade
Author: John T. Baldwin


Cracks in the Evolutionary Facade

John T. Baldwin

John T. Baldwin, Ph.D., is an associate professor of theology, Theological Seminary, Andrews University, Berrien Springs MI.

Is Darwin invulnerable? Is the evolutionary theory of origins so formidable as to make Christian faith in Genesis weak and obsolete? Not so. Fresh winds blowing across the academic world indicate that scholars are raising new questions on Darwinism.

Samples:

Richard Dawkins in his book The Blind Watchmaker attempted to undercut the argument from perfection. He assumed that the first small incipient stages of a future eye on the way to completion might have had vision. Kenneth T. Gallagher shows how unconvincing this assumption is (1992), pointing out that incomplete stages of a future eye could not have vision, thereby fatally undermining Darwin’s theory of origins. No Darwinian biologist has yet adequately addressed this critique.1

Can life and human consciousness be reducible to the laws of physics and chemistry? No, argues Michael Polanyi (1968).

John Cobb, Jr., asserts that subjectivity cannot arise from objectivity, thus indicating that from its own materialistic resources and without help from a divine power, Darwinian evolution cannot occur.2

After subjecting Darwinian theory to the principles of probability theory, mathematicians Sir Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe expressed surprise how so simple and so decisive a disproof of the Darwinian theory has escaped the attention of social scientists for so long. “There can, we think, be no explanation other than intellectual perversity” (1982: 32–33).

Contemporary German advocate of polymeric chemistry Bruno Vollmert writes:

The stricter my argumentation takes place in the frame of the exact sciences by treating the biological evolution in the sense of Neodarwinism as a process by chance, that is to say (the terminology of polymeric chemistry) as a statistical copoly-condensation, the less I am afraid to understand the world as the creation of an almighty creator as an alternative

to Darwinism (1965: 26, quoted in Hübner 1992: 406).

Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould challenges the rate of Darwinian developmental theory:

The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology. The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips. .. of their branches; the rest is inference,...

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