A Mountain of Evidence? (Part 1)

One of the most frustrating situations a person can find themselves in is when a fact seems very apparent or “true” to them regarding a particular subject, but not to the person with which they are engaging.

If you’re in this situation, you may catch yourself thinking, “It’s just so obvious, what’s the matter with them? Why can’t they see it?” It can feel as if you are sitting beside one another in a movie theater, watching the same screen—but seeing two completely different movies!

And the creation/evolution debate can be an arena that exemplifies this phenomenon. We can see that, at the base of almost all these types of conflicts, there are certain presuppositions that people hold to which guide their interpretations of certain facts and drive their conclusions—often without them even realizing it.

Evolution as “Science”

I remember feeling frustrated when I was growing up and dialoging with Christians. I was so inundated in the evolutionary worldview, fully believing it as purely scientific, that I had a very hard time relating to who I thought of as “people of faith.”

I saw confirmation of my evolutionary worldview everywhere! In education, in entertainment, from my peers—even from the Christians that seemed comfortable with the story of evolution being compatible with their beliefs.

I saw confirmation of my evolutionary worldview everywhere!

At least they had science figured out, I reasoned—but I just couldn’t understand why they wanted to tack God onto the end of it when a creator clearly wasn’t needed for it all to work.

Little did I realize that though it was far from being “scientific” in the empirical sense, evolution lay fully in the realm of faith as well.

Evolution was founded on a materialistic mindset—fueled by imagined, unobserved events that supposedly happened in the past—based on brute facts observed in the present. Like in a court of law where facts are presented to promote certain conclusions, those facts can be reinterpreted to support a multitude of various proposed historical narratives that may or may not be true.

As far as to whether or not evolution has been directly observed, even famed atheistic evolutionist Professor Richard Dawkins has admitted as much:

Nobody has actually seen evolution take place over a long period but they have seen the after effects, and the after effects are massively supported. It is like a case in a court of law where nobody can actually stand up and say I saw the murder happen and yet you have got millions and millions of pieces of evidence which no reasonable person can possibly dispute.1

So, in essence, the story of evolution is a historical science at best.

Far from Open-Minded

However, I went along with it because the “mountain of evidence” (as Dawkins alludes to) seemed so staggering. I felt it was unintellectual to not claim belief in it, and that believing in God would be like believing in the Tooth Fairy or the Easter Bunny. It might make other people feel good, but I certainly wasn’t willing to chuck my brains out the window to buy into it.

Peppered moths, Archaeopteryx, Piltdown Man, 98% human/chimp DNA similarity, Tiktaalik, Lucy, Haeckel’s embryo drawings, natural selection, dinosaurs, vestigial organs, the Stanley/Millar experiment, homologous structures, the fossil horse series, Pakicetus, Nebraska Man, Junk DNA, etc. The list went on and on. How could anyone deny the “facts” of evolution?

How could anyone deny the “facts” of evolution?

I’d only ever seen evidence explained in an evolutionary sense, never according to a biblical creation view or even in light of “intelligent design,” so to me, anything to do with God or supernatural creation seemed like a fairy tale.

And whenever I came across someone who didn’t believe in evolution, I instantly put them in a little box on a shelf in my brain labeled “One of those people,” and left it at that. To be honest, I felt they were beneath me intellectually, and didn’t even bother to engage in conversation with them. What was the point?

Looking back at my arrogance is a little embarrassing, but of course, I have met many versions of the “old me” over the years, at seminars and online—it often gives me a more sympathetic view and reminds me to be as gracious as I can to them.

Frauds of Evolution

Years later, I was challenged to re-examine the evidence I’d been taught regarding evolution after hearing a lecture from a very well-educated man who challenged me to do so. That investigation uncovered many things that caused me to reconsider my commitment to my belief.

The first thing that rocked my trust in the story of evolution as science was some of the outright frauds and misinformation used to promote it over the years. I couldn’t help but ask—if evolution is scientific, why would someone make up fake evidence or use dishonest arguments for it? And why would the mainstream scientific community promote and go along with them for so long?

For example, I can remember seeing Ernst Haeckel’s infamous forged embryo drawings in textbooks when I was in school, but these have been recognized as completely fraudulent since they were first produced in the 1860’s. Yet they persisted in textbooks for over 100 years after they were shown to be illegitimate!

It seems to be a fraud that refuses to die—it was as recent as 2008 when I saw a modern colorized version of them with my own eyes while flipping through my daughter’s science textbook in Guelph, Ontario.

I was immediately suspicious that this information was disseminated to young minds in public schools without correction. Where was the outcry from evolution-believing scientists demanding the removal of this material? Surely, scientists wouldn’t want any unscrupulous information out there that could tarnish the scientific community.

This and other fraudulent evolutionary evidence made me realize that there were ideological factors and commitments being expressed within a scientific framework.

My understanding of science was that it (unlike “religious” ideas) was impartial, accurate, and trustworthy. However, this and other fraudulent evolutionary evidence made me realize that there were ideological factors and commitments being expressed within a scientific framework—far from what I had been taught as unbiased “truth.”

Another example was the famous peppered moth. This example of evolution had been taught to (and accepted by) me in school—I was astonished to find it was not, in fact, an example of evolution whatsoever! Even the eminent British evolutionist zoologist L. Harrison Matthews admitted so when writing his introduction to Darwin’s Origin of the Species,

The experiments beautifully demonstrate natural selection—or survival of the fittest—in action, but they do not show evolution in progress, for however the populations may alter in their content or light, intermediate or dark forms, all the moths remain from beginning to end Biston betularia.2

And apparently I wasn’t the only one who was shocked at discovering this illegitimate “prize horse” in the evolutionary stable of arguments, as popular evolutionary biologist Dr. Jerry Coyne expressed the following when he discovered the same:

My own reaction resembles the dismay attending the discovery, at the age of six, that it was my father and not Santa Claus who brought the presents on Christmas Eve.3

Complete forgeries such as Piltdown Man (promoted worldwide in museums and textbooks for over 40 years), and dubious examples of other supposed ape-men such as Nebraska Man (based on a single tooth which was later discovered to be from a pig), etc. caused me to hit pause on my presuppositional auto-acceptance of evolution as “science,” and triggered a re-examination of the entire body of evolutionary evidences with a far more skeptical mind.

A Never-Ending Supply of Evolutionary Evidence

What I discovered shattered my unquestioning acceptance of evolution. As I examined the history of almost every single example of evolution I had seen (or have seen since), I noticed they were initially released with much fanfare by mainstream science and news sources as “proof positive” for this materialistic mindset, only to be quietly swept under the carpet later after being exposed as irrelevant, ingenuous, and/or completely illegitimate.

Unfortunately, these “facts” for evolution are often smuggled into science textbooks and used to promote naturalism to young minds for a decade or two (sometimes much longer) who, for the most part, never see its overthrow. And this, along with the constant promotion of new evolutionary discoveries, creates the increasing perception that there is an ever-growing mountain of facts supporting evolution.

Next week, we’ll continue our examination of how “evidence” for the story of evolution is perpetuated long after it has been disproven in “A Mountain of Evidence? (Part 2)—How Ideology Informs Evolutionary Evidence.”