I’ve heard some version of the statement, “Evolution is based on science, and creation is based on faith,” so many times now, it’s hard not to roll my eyes every time I see it posted in response to an article I’ve done.
What they mean by “faith,” of course, is blind faith—not the biblical faith that’s connected to logic, reason, and evidence. And I see this portrayal of “trust in the Bible is like believing in fairy tales” constantly in the comment section of many of the videos I produce.
But when someone touts facts and science as “being on their side,” so to speak, you naturally think of someone describing something observable, repeatable, and testable, etc. After all, isn’t that what we were told in school—that science is based upon observation and testability?
Storytelling as Science
However, with so many people declaring evolution as “science and fact,” you would expect that evolutionists should be able to give us numerous examples of having observed evolution. Obviously, if you are performing repeated experiments on something, then you are observing and experiencing the results in real time.
So, let’s go to a leading expert and ask just how many examples of evolution in action they actually have. Well, according to Richard Dawkins—still the most famous atheist and evolution promoter on the planet—none.
Evolution has been observed, it’s just that it hasn’t been observed while it’s happening.
Now, anyone with a rudimentary grasp of the English language understands what Dawkins said here. The former Holder of the Chair of Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University and Amazon best-selling author of numerous books championing evolution publicly admitted that evolution hasn’t been observed!
In Your Inbox
Am I misrepresenting him? No. That was Dawkins’ honest response to the question, “Is evolution a theory, not a fact?” from Bill Moyers, host of the TV show Now.
And this quote has surely caused Dawkins great pain (and will continue to do so) as creationists like myself quote him (in context) in presentation after presentation, much to the dismay of many of his evolution-believing devotees who have been convinced that evolution is a demonstrable fact.
Dawkins’ Damage Control
Now, I’m not sure this is what prompted him to say this next quote as damage control or not, but several years after Dawkins’ initial “Evolution has been observed but not while it’s happening” gaff, he was on another TV program called The Genius of Charles Darwin where he attempted to clarify this “non-observable” problem with evolution. Did it help?
Nobody’s actually seen evolution take place over a long period, but they’ve seen the aftereffects, and the aftereffects are massively supported. It’s like a case in a court of law where nobody can actually stand up and say, “I saw the murder happen,” but yet you’ve got millions and millions of pieces of evidence which no reasonable person could possibly dispute.
Well, obviously not. If it’s like a murder case where no one saw it (the murder) happen, then once again, no one has observed evolution. And we’ve all seen examples where all the evidence seems to point to Mr. Bad Guy at the start of a murder investigation, only to see it get reinterpreted to show it was really the butler who did it after all.
Theistic Evolutionists Agree
However, I don’t want people to think I’m picking on Dawkins as if he’s the only evolutionist admitting this, because he isn’t alone in his admission that evolution hasn’t been observed. His most prominent evolutionary-believing and supposed Christian counterparts—the theistic evolutionary group BioLogos—has agreed to the same.
Many still wonder why macroevolutionary changes have never been observed. The simple answer, as Darrel Falk puts it, is that we haven’t been watching long enough. The types of genetic mutations that eventually lead to macroevolutionary changes are rare, and this accounts for the slow pace of evolutionary development.
Here we see another clear admission by a whole group of evolution believers that–despite all of our scientific observation (even with the microscope being around since the 1590s)—it (evolution) hasn’t been observed.
Yes, We See It
However, some evolutionists take a completely different tack when asked, and they declare evolution has been observed. They want to talk about a different kind of change observed in living things so as to bolster the story of evolution’s credibility by claiming positive experimental evidence. Here’s a good example.
Actually, there is superabundant evidence for animals evolving under our eyes: British moths becoming darker since the Industrial Revolution (industrial melanization), insects evolving DDT resistance since World War II, malaria parasites evolving chloroquine resistance in the last two decades, and new strains of flu virus evolving every few years to infect us.4
Wow, according to this source, the evidence is overwhelming!
But wait a minute. If these were truly good examples of evolution to use, then wouldn’t we expect expert scientists like Dawkins and those in the BioLogos group (literally an evolutionary think-tank) to know about these “superabundant” examples? How could specialists in their fields of science be so unaware of this vast treasure trove of evolutionary evidence?
Well, the reason they don’t use examples like this is that these are all instances of natural selection and/or a corruption of existing DNA, and unlike the average “true believer” in the story of evolution, these informed scientists understand natural selection only selects from genetic information already there.
Natural selection doesn’t create new distinct forms, functions, and features in creatures, and neither do genetic mutations—which is what evolution would be required to demonstrate experimentally and yet never has.
To say it more plainly, fruit flies turning into fruit flies, finches turning into finches, or peppered moths turning into peppered moths isn’t exactly proof that molecules turned into moths, mules, mammoths, and men over millions of years!
As evolutionist L. Harrison Matthews (discussing the peppered moth example) admitted in his 1971 foreword to Darwin’s Origin of 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 of light, intermediate or dark forms, all the moths remain from beginning to end Biston betularia.
The Devil Is in the Details
Are you starting to see the distinctions in the arguments being made? The BioLogos group used the term “macroevolution” to describe what has never been seen: big changes in creatures where one kind turns into another—a lizard-like creature supposedly turning into a bird over unobserved millions of years, for example.
On the other hand, evolutionists often use the term “microevolution through natural selection” to describe little changes in living things, like creatures expressing various coloring or varieties of beak shapes, and then lump those concepts in as somehow part of the evolutionary process.
Trying to equivocate the terms evolution, natural selection, and change over time is a common tactic used by many evolutionists. This is also an example of the logical fallacy called bait-and-switch. Changes in living things have certainly been observed from generation to generation—creationists are aware of and acknowledge this—but that isn’t what people mean when they say the word evolution in a big-picture sense.
Also, creationists have long pointed out that natural selection is an important part of the creation model because it explains the variation from the relatively few kinds of creatures on Noah’s ark into the wide range of species we have today.
We often use the dog kind as an example, as you can see a wide variety of them all over the world. But they are all still dogs. And if they breed with each other, they make more dogs. However, that’s not evolution—that’s just a recombination of the genes that were already in existence resulting in genetic variety being expressed differently.
So, both creationists and evolutionists use natural selection to support their views.
Mutations to the Rescue?
Of course, evolutionists argue that mutations in DNA coding are the supposed engine of evolution that cause de novo genetic information to appear and that natural selection then favors this new information to supposedly evolve creatures. But if evolution hasn’t been observed, then logically, mutations generating such information haven’t been observed either—otherwise evolution would have been observed. Do you remember what the BioLogos group admitted earlier?
The types of genetic mutations that eventually lead to macroevolutionary changes are rare, and this accounts for the slow pace of evolutionary development.
Yes, they are rare indeed. So rare, in fact, that BioLogos admitted that evolution (which would require information-building mutations) hasn’t been observed.
Let Me Explain It to You . . .
Another very common experience I’ve had over the years is the average evolutionist trying to explain away some of the clear and embarrassing admissions of their popular representatives. For example, a Dawkins-defender tried to nuance his “Evolution hasn’t been observed while it’s happening” admission by using a cringy analogy about whether aging is observable to explain what Dawkins supposedly “really meant” on the now-defunct Yahoo Answers website. A search on key words “Evolution has been observed but not when it’s happening” showed this evolutionary internet warrior saying,
I suppose you agree that ‘aging’ is also accepted on faith. I mean no one has been observed constantly getting older. We do know people appear older at different points in time, but no aging has been observed “while it happens.”
And, of course, no one can identify the ‘transitional’ point where a young man becomes an old man. So, there’s no evidence that humans age, right? This same logic would also explain why human growth has never been observed “while it happens.”
I know, it’s hard to imagine someone trying to use such a weak argument to prop up their beliefs. It seems as if this Dawkins-defender isn’t aware that aging can be observed in real time, while evolution cannot.
Aging is observed and can be measured over the course of minutes/hours (under the microscope), days and weeks (just watch a Great Dane puppy during its formative growth spurt), months (watch a baby develop into a toddler), and years (just keep looking in the mirror every morning).
And embryonic development (aging in the sense of an organism’s development from a single cell to its mature form) is observed in real time by those studying fetal development.
Also, we age in the sense of becoming older and less healthy in large part because of DNA damage (mutations) during cell replication. There are approximately 2,500 total “DNA damaging events per cell per hour” in humans.7
Fortunately for us, most of that damage is repaired by ingenious machines inside us, so only a few of these mutations remain from each event. However, because we now live in a sin-cursed world with thousands of mutation events over the course of years, we eventually succumb to genetic deterioration and death.
Obviously, if the example of observing aging is like observing evolution occurring, has anyone had the experience of witnessing someone’s birth, teen years, middle age, old age, and death during their lifetime? Yes.
OK, to go along with the analogy: Has anyone ever observed one kind of creature turning into a different kind during their lifetime? The answer is a huge emphatic “No!” even according to Richard Dawkins himself.
We are condemned to live only for a few decades, and that’s too slow, too small a time scale to see evolution going on.
Evolutionary Scientists Committing Intellectual Suicide
It seems to me that the biblical creationist community has done great damage to the story of evolution in many average people’s minds by demonstrating evolution is believed on faith, not observation. And why do I say that?
Well, amazingly, when unable to provide observational evidence for evolution, the atheist-founded-and-operated anti-creationist lobbying group (snobbishly called the National Center for Science Education [NCSE]) felt it had to address this fact and try to deal with the problem this way:
The failure of many students to understand and accept the fact of evolution is often a consequence of the naïve views they hold of the nature of science. . . .
According to this naïve view, the key to the unique success of science at producing true knowledge is “The Scientific Method”, which, on the standard account, involves formulating hypotheses, making predictions, and then going into the laboratory to perform the crucial experiment. . . .
In contrast, the work of many evolutionary biologists involves the reconstruction of the past. The methods they use do not conform to the standard view of “The Scientific Method”.
Oh, I see. According to the NCSE, if you can’t actually prove your theory using repeatable, controlled experiments, what do you do? You redefine what science means (so you can still declare evolution is scientific) by simply declaring that only “naïve” people think that the scientific method is the primary way to perform scientific investigation.
As admitted, they attempt to reconstruct the past, which means they tell stories about what they think might have happened—but which they weren’t there to see and can’t duplicate in a lab. And that is why you will always hear me refer to this faux history as the story of evolution, not the theory of evolution, because storytelling does not meet the scientific criteria required to be dubbed a scientific theory.
Creationists Vindicated
Creationists have been saying for years that both creation and evolution fall into the realm of historical science. And although we’ve been accused of making up that category to obfuscate the debate, even evolutionary giant Ernst Mayr agreed.
Evolutionary biology, in contrast with physics and chemistry, is a historical science—the evolutionist attempts to explain events and processes that have already taken place. Laws and experiments are inappropriate techniques for the explication of such events and processes. Instead one constructs a historical narrative, consisting of a tentative reconstruction of the particular scenario that led to the events one is trying to explain.
I couldn’t have said it better. Unlike trusting and relying on the biblical, historical narrative given by the God who was there, evolutionists construct (i.e., fabricate) a historical narrative, a tentative reconstruction—they invent a made-up history. For evolutionists, storytelling is “science.”
Ironically, look at this definition of a scientific theory found on the evolution-promoting American Museum of Natural History’s website.
A theory is a well-substantiated explanation of an aspect of the natural world that can incorporate laws, hypotheses and facts.
But facts are observed. And Mayr says, “Laws and experiments are inappropriate techniques for the explication of such events and processes,” so evolution doesn’t meet the museum’s own criteria! Therefore, far from its far too lofty position, evolution is a hypothesis at best.
What evolutionists have done is fabricate an imagined history which cannot be verified by eyewitness accounts and then given it a veneer of intellectual credibility by glossing over it with scientific terminology.
You see, if you write a story saying that when a princess kisses a frog, it turns into a prince, that’s just a fairy tale. But if you say that hydrogen from an uncaused explosion turns into molecules that eventually become men over imagined millions of years, then it’s supposedly scientific.
They Don’t See It, but They Believe It
They don’t believe it because they see it. Just like Dawkins, they see it because they believe it. And unfortunately, many in the professing Christian community (such as the BioLogos group) have bought into this narrative as a replacement for the true history recorded in God’s Word.
They would do well to hold to the Apostle Paul’s instructions to Timothy:
1 Timothy 6:20–21 KJV – “O Timothy, keep that which is committed to thy trust, avoiding profane and vain babblings, and oppositions of science falsely so called: Which some professing have erred concerning the faith. Grace be with thee. Amen.”
