Is the Theory of Evolution a Myth or…?

 

In the West, the theory of evolution continues to be promoted as if it were a proven fact or a secure, testable and tested law — something that no-one in their right minds questions any more. This presentation implies that there is no room, let alone any need, for discussion. The most common media cliché is that the evolutionary chain has been confirmed yet again by yet another discovery of the missing link proving human ancestry from apes. Faced with this kind of promotion and presentation, and the sheer pervasiveness of it, it is no surprise if non-specialists come to accept that the theory must be true, and that it must be accepted by all the specialists, the whole scientific community, with no serious doubters. However, that perception is far from the reality. In the first place, the theory lacks completeness on two major counts and there is no likelihood of these deficiencies ever being made up. In the second, there are major voices of dissent from within the scientific community, alongside alternative theoretical explanations which demonstrate a far superior conformity with observed or experimentally obtained data.

The origin of life

To have any enduring claim to viability the theory of evolution must explain the origin of life in its own terms. It must be able to answer the question, “How did life evolve from non-living forms?’ It needs also to explain how the notion of “selection for survival” operates before life exists, to explain how “life” is the best way for non-living forms to exist longer. Just as the theory tells us that, because rhinoceroses with the thickest skin did best in battles with other rhinoceroses, over aeons of time rhinoceroses evolved skins as thick as skins can possibly get while still functioning as skins ñ so too, it needs to tell us how life is an adaptation. If it is, what is it an adaptation to? Moreover, if life is an adaptation, why is it the same across the whole range of living forms (animal or plant or in-between)? We have innumerable varieties of living forms (adapted, we are told, to different conditions of climate and competition for food resources) but we do not have different varieties of being alive. Is that what we should expect? Should we not expect that the creatures who lived longest (and had offspring the least often) would have out-survived all competition, until eventually they lived so long it was for ever? Or, vice-versa that those who lived the shortest lives (and therefore had more offspring more often) eventually fell back, after aeons of trial and proof, into hardly being alive at all individually, but merely replicating themselves? In fact, of course, the same climate and conditions of competition for food resources support both relatively long- and relatively short-lived forms at every level of complexity and thoroughly intermingled within even the same individual life-form.

Life rests upon an infinitely precarious equilibrium among the proteins, the building blocks of life, found in the simplest to the most complex of living forms. Denying the existence of a conscious Creator, the theory of evolution cannot explain how this equilibrium was established and protected. The theory proposes chance and coincidence as the only scientific way to think about the question. But a scientific way of looking at a problem must have at least some likelihood of being true, if we are to expend energy fruitfully on verifying or falsifying it. In other words, a hypothesis must be reasonable to start with so that we can test and judge it. It must not be irrational: the appeal to chance and random coincidences is nothing if not an abandonment of reason. A protein is made up of the combination of on average 1000-1500 aminoacids in 20 different types in a certain sequence. Even a single error in that sequence renders the protein useless. There is zero probability of this happening by chance, not even if the universe is billions of light-years wide and long. One of the foremost advocates of evolution, the Russian scientist A.I. Oparin confesses this impossibility in his book The Origin of Life (pp.132-133). Even the simplest of these materials (proteins), consisting of thousands of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen atoms, each with a unique design presents highly sophisticated structure. For those who study the structure of the proteins, it is as hopeless for these proteins to have formed by chance as the Aeneid (the long Latin epic by Virgil) to have been composed by random association of the letters of the Latin alphabet.

Another evolutionist scientist has offered a different analogy with the same conclusion. The probability of a chance formation of only one of the proteins required for life (Cytochrome-C) may be likened to the probability of a monkey writing out the history of humanity by randomly pushing the keys of a typewriter.

What evolution theory defends is exactly this nonsensical assertion. Yet, the examples above are only the probability calculations for the chance formation of a single protein. However, millions of similar impossible coincidences should have been realized consecutively in order for the evolution of life to be effected.

The probability of chance formation of a Cytochrome-C sequence is as low as zero. If life requires that certain sequence, it is likely to be realized only once in the whole life-time and space of the universe. Now it could be proposed that some metaphysical power(s) beyond our definition consciously enabled its formation. But to entertain such a proposition is, apparently, not appropriate for the modern enterprise of science. Therefore we have to fall back on the first hypothesis as the best we have at present.

If, as it appears, the theory of evolution is not justified by the information we have, how does it survive? Has questioning it become, among the specialists, a taboo which they violate at the risk of their reputation and their careers? If so, why? We will return to this question.

The problem of transitional forms

Another of many difficulties with the theory of evolution is that the theory requires there to exist or have existed in the past transitional forms. For example, if the theory claims, as it does, that life originated in the sea and then sea creatures were driven (by some force, let us say, a climatic change like a fall in sea-level) to move on to dry land, the theory must produce evidence (or at least convincing argument) of the transitional forms between the sea-creatures and the land-creatures they evolved into. Our present experience of, for example, fish, is that if they come out of the water, they very quickly die. We have no reason to believe that fish were so radically different aeons ago from what they are now. If anything, the evidence is all the other way: that fish as fish were the same then as now. So how could enough of them have lived long enough in shallow-water or no-water to establish in their gene pool the skill to evolve gills into lungs? Nobody can say that maybe some of these fish happened to acquire a lung at the end of the four-millionth year while they were in the throes of death. It is entirely nonsensical. But this nonsense is exactly what the evolutionists assert. The same problem arises when we look for transitional forms between land-bound reptiles and flying birds.

Some allegedly extinct intermediate transitional forms have turned out to exemplify only the temptations of forgery and distortion in the service of falsehood into which some scientists have allowed themselves to fall. For instance, the fish Coelacanth (Rhipitistian Crossopterigian) presented by evolutionists as a transitional form between marine and land creatures ,and supposedly extinct about 70 million years ago, was found alive and well in 1939 near Madagascar, and has been caught about 50 times since in the open seas. Furthermore, the organs that prompted the evolutionists to present the coelacanth as the transitional intermediate form (inner ear alcoves, head typed backbone and swimming bag), do not have these properties at all. The same is true for other fossils presented as transitional intermediate forms. The well-known nature scientist A.H. Clark acknowledges that, since we have no single evidence indicating a transition between fossils and living groups, we must accept that such transitional forms never existed.

A well-known genetic and evolutionist, Richard B. Goldschmidt admits that there is no such a thing as the transitional intermediate form. He explains the differences in species by sudden leaps. Now to say that a species originated all of a sudden is tantamount to saying that it was consciously originated or “created”. Although the evolutionists are embarrassed on scientific platforms, they do not have a hard time deceiving the ordinary person in the street, because the theory is so well-packaged. You draw an imaginary schema representing transition from water from land, you invent Latin words for the animal in water, and for its descendant on land, and you draw sketches of both (both wholly imaginary constructs), and the package is completed or, as we should rather say, fabricated. “Eusthenopteron transformed into first Rhipitistian Crossoptergian, then Ichthyostega in a long evolution process.” If you put these words in the mouth of a scientist with thick glasses and a white apron, you are half way to convincing most people. For the great many people who see reality through the media packaging of it, this kind of presentation is good enough to be truth: it is easy to believe, it makes no demand on consciousness, or reason, or conscience: we are all here by chance, we are not here by the will of a Creator to Whom we are answerable.

The most common package is, inevitably, the one that relates to human beings. A central feature is the string of related sketches (all imaginary constructions) of an all-ape, three-quarters-ape, half-ape/half-man figure, gradually ending in a drawing that looks more or less like a European male of average build an features. This is offered as our story, our beginning long ago, our present being now. This string of sketches will be found on virtually every classroom wall, from primary schools to secondary schools and in every popular textbook or encyclopedia which touches upon the subject, and in the form of stuffed exhibits in every science museum in the West.

In these drawings, half-ape half-human creatures are seen as a family. Having a hairy body, a slightly bent walking posture, and a face in between a man and an ape, these creatures are supposedly drawn from the fossils found by the evolutionist scientists. But the fossils found give information only about the bone structure and skeleton, and examination of the teeth will reveal information about the probable range of diet. The fossils tell us nothing at all about  how hairy the body was that hung upon those bones, nor what kind of nose, ears, lips or hair would once have rested upon the particular skull. But the evolutionists’ sketches picture do, almost always, show the organs like nose, lips and ears, and these are drawn (to fit the theory) and do indeed show something half-man, half-ape. This is not science, it is fiction or, more precisely, it is myth. Another support for this fiction, and another proof that it is fiction, is that the same bundle of bones can give be made to give rise to quite different re-constructions, depending upon the particular theorist’s preference: for example, the three totally unlike re-constructions of the fossil called Australopithecus Robustus (Zinjanthropus). There is certainly a power behind these presentations of the theory, but it is not the power of reason disciplined by facts and evidence, but the power of myth-making imagination inspired by a particular ideology.

The ideological background to the theory

In order to understand why the evolution theory is promoted and defended so insistently, we need to look to the historical background behind it. Until the modern period, the intellectual life of Europe was basically subject to the authority of the Church. Starting from the 16th century, the order justified and underpinned by the authority of religious beliefs and principles started to conflict with the interests of certain social groups. Acquiring great wealth through commerce but having no political power, these groups began a long struggle to limit the authority of the Church. They did so not only on the political and social fronts but also on the philosophical front: religious beliefs and the authority of religion had to be weakened before the social-political system underpinned by religion could be radically reformed. Almost all the 18th century “enlightenment” intellectuals and 19th century positivists came from these secularizing groups and were funded and supported by them. (The French Revolution was the biggest single social transformation realized by their machinations.)

The space opened by the weakening or elimination of religious beliefs was filled by new ideologies generated by the same social groups. The first ideology was liberalism, followed by socialism which developed as a reaction to it. Later came fascism meddled with racism. Despite containing some opposing ideas, these ideologies were all by-products of the new secular system and stood on the same anti-religionist ground. None of them spoke of the man’s responsibility before his Creator or the obligation to organize personal and collective life according to His guidance. Conversely, the principles that necessitated belief in religion were harmful to the new ideologies. One of the most important of these principles is that man was created, as the Church had always held (following the same belief in Judaism), by God in His own image, for the purpose of doing His will and worshipping Him.

It was very noteworthy that socialism, the most radical and outspokenly anti-religious of the modern ideologies, showed a particular zeal for the theory of evolution. Karl Marx wrote of Darwin’s Origin of Species in a letter to his comrade Friedrich Engels (dated December 18, 1860) that this book presented the natural-historical basis for their critique of capitalism (Marx and Engels Letters, vol. 2, p.426).

Darwinism laid the basis for fascism which is one of the by-products of the new secular order. Holding some human races superior to the others, this notion proposed that some races were in advance of others in the evolutionary process. This trend called Social Darwinism inspired many racists from Arthur de Gobineau to Adolf Hitler. Darwin himself prepared the ground for racism by proposing that the white man was more advanced in evolutionary terms.

Besides socialism and fascism, the capitalist ideology dominant in the Western world and now in nearly the whole world, needs people to believe in evolution. To undermine people’s commitment to religion and moral principles, to reduce their aspirations and relationships to merely economic ones, it was necessary to convince them that man was not created by God as a morally responsible being. It is very noteworthy that major capitalist dynasties like Rockefeller and Carnegie come first among those who have granted funds and other support to the flourishing of Darwinism in the U.S.A. Michael A. Cremo and Richard L. Thompson, in their book The Hidden History of the Human Race, explain how the Carnegie Institution was virtually aiming for the victory of the scientific cosmological vision over the old religious cosmologies. The Rockefeller Foundation supports the same materialist cosmology and serves the mission of “modern civilization’, aiming to confine the concepts of God and spirit to the mythology museum. The evolution propaganda promoted in the distinguished media organs of the West, and reputable science journals is a consequence of this ideological requirement.

Conclusion

No ideological program, whatever the illusions of its supporters, and whatever their means of promoting and packaging their untruths, can survive for ever. Precisely because man is God’s creature, made for nobility of being and action, he must and will seek truth, albeit temporarily deviated.

All the information revealed by modern biology shows that the origin of life, especially the molecular structure of living creatures, cannot be explained by coincidence in any way. The transcendent consciousness ruling over the whole universe is the ultimate evidence of God’s existence. As a matter of fact, some eminent names in microbiology have come to the point where they cannot defend evolution any longer. Instead, another theory has begun to get a long overdue hearing among these scientists: the theory of conscious design. The scientists defending it remark that it is very evident that life has been created by a conscious designer.

 

This article has been adapted from Risale- i Nur Collection.