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Theory rose prominently as German theologian exported liberal brand of “higher criticism.”
If readers wondered how they got here and from where, the magazine headline promised an answer: “A Theory Evolves?How evolution really works, and why it matters more than ever.”
The story in the July 29, 2002 issue of U.S. News & World Report is one of many in major news magazines that seems to give the theory Charles Darwin championed in the mid-19th century a journalistic pass. It has taken new forms since Darwin, but unmistakably, macroevolution?the idea life arose from primordial goop into varied, complex species?is dogma the intelligentsia dare not question.
In most academic settings, to believe in a Creator who spoke the universe into existence with divine power and purpose is a rarity, though a growing, vocal and scorned minority of scientists and philosophers is increasingly given a platform to propagate their view that a Designer is behind the universe’s orderly grandeur.
Called the Intelligent Design or ID movement, this corps of crusaders ranges from evangelical Christians to theists of various stripes, all committed to show what they believe is undeserved homage to macroevolution as verifiable fact. Their rumble has been heard in a handful of state houses, including Texas, where textbook errors have been challenged.
Nearly 150 years after Darwin published “On the Origin of Species,” no transitional fossils or “missing links” have been found, though some trumped as such have been invalidated.
The U.S. News article admits as much, noting, “paleontologists have searched far and wide for fossil evidence of gradual progress toward these advanced creatures but have come up empty.”
“Paleontologists have the best eyes in the world,” Whitey Hagadorn of Amherst College, told the magazine. “If we can’t find the fossils, sometimes you just have to think that they just weren’t there.”Such conjecture has the ID crowd crying foul while the evolutionists seem unrelenting.
The article’s author, Thomas Hayden, asserts, “By now, scientists say, ‘evolution is no longer ‘just a theory.’ It’s an everyday phenomenon, a fundamental fact of biology as real as hunger and as unavoidable as death.” Of course, Hayden is equating microevolution?change within a species?with macroevolution.
Unwitting readers are to swallow such assertions whole without chewing.
A THEORY IN FLUX ?
Even noted evolutionists such as Stephen Jay Gould, a Harvard paleontologist, admit the fossil record lacks evidence for Darwin’s position of gradual evolution over time. Gould has said a spotty fossil record “persists as the trade secret of paleontology.”
Gould is perhaps the best-known proponent of an macroevolutionary model called “punctuated equilibria”?the idea that “speciation” from one form to another doesn’t occur gradually as Darwinists propose but rather in rare bursts so punctuated the fossil record doesn’t record them clearly. Thus, no clear transitional forms. The U.S. News article noted this as well. “Many creatures still appear quite suddenly in the fossil record, and the growing suspicion is that evolution sometimes leaps, rather than crawls. ?”
Wrote Christian apologists Norm Geisler and Peter Bocchino of Gould’s ideas: “We believe that this view is punctuated, not with scientific reasoning or observational evidence, but instead with implausible attempts to explain away the fossil record. Again, it is merely a rearranging of the facts to save a theory built on unjustified philosophical and scientific assumptions of the naturalistic view of the universe.”
OR A THEORY IN JEOPARDY?
In fact, evolutionists such as Gould have been on the defensive during the last decade as formidable ID theorists such as Philip Johnson, Berkeley law professor and a devout Presbyterian, and Lehigh biochemist Michael Behe, have tenaciously challenged evolution dogma.
Behe’s book “t1:City>Darwin’s Black Box” was Christianity Today’s Book of the Year in 1996. It proposed the cell, the building block of life, is “irreducibly complex”?all components must be in place and working simultaneously or the entire system fails. Thus, a living organism would not survive while macroevolution developed its parts or its supposed ascension to higher forms.
