White Unto Harvest: Teaching on Evolution and Evidences in a Foreign Land

One of the main features of our work in Lithuania is the weekly Bible lectures. We started having lectures when we first started working there in April, 1992, and have continued the practice until the present date. A variety of subjects have been addressed in these lectures, but the one we want to concentrate on in this article is one that I preached in November, 1998. The theme of the lectures that day was, “Creation or Evolution?” The first lecture called into question a number of the main tenants of evolution while the second one was simply an exegesis of Genesis 1. Doing the lectures in this order one has the opportunity to clear away many of the misconceptions which “science falsely so called” has spread concerning the origin of man before approaching the Bible’s account of creation. The advertisements for the lecture brought unexpected interest and I was invited to give it again to a loosely knit Protestant group the following Sunday afternoon. About 70 people were in attendance. I hope to repeat this lecture in other places.

The lecture constituted more work than any lecture I can remember. At least 20 charts were presented, most of which had to be translated into Lithuanian. It was introduced with a chart showing the difference between the general theory of evolution which teaches that everything evolved from a common ancestor and the Genesis account of each “kind” or species having its origin with the creating word of God. We next looked at a picture of the geologic time table as the evolutionists see it from John Clark and David Eakin’s booklet, The Theory of Evolution and Special Creation. This table presents the view of the earth’s rock strata so vital to the evolutionist’s theory which, according to their interpretation, allows billions of years for man to evolve from non-life.

We then moved on to the main body of the lecture which was entitled, “Known facts and the general theory of evolution.” Darwin said the fossil record would prove his theory, but time, excavation, and research have not shown this to be true. As Philip E. Johnson writes,

• 1. Stasis. Most species exhibit no directional change during their tenure on earth. They appear in the fossil record looking pretty much the same as when they disappear; morphological change is limited and directionless.
  2. Sudden appearance. In any local area, a species does not arise gradually by the steady transformation of its ancestors; it appears all at once and “fully formed.” In short, if evolution means the gradual change of one kind of organism into another kind, the outstanding characteristic of the fossil record is the absence of evidence for evolution. Darwinists can always explain away the sudden appearance of new species by saying that the transitional intermediates were for some reason not fossilized. But stasis — the consistent absence of fundamental directional change — is positively documented. It is also the norm and not the exception. (Darwin on Trial, pp. 50-51)

The fossil record was revisited in the 1970’s in works by Stephen Jay Gould, Niles Eldredge, and Steven Stanley. Gould and Eldredge proposed a new theory called “punctuated equilibrium…to deal with an embarrassing fact: the fossil record today on the whole looks very much as it did in 1859, despite the fact that an enormous amount of fossil hunting has gone on in the intervening years. In the words of Gould:

The history of most fossil species includes two features particularly inconsistent with gradualism:

In light of the above information the following admission by a scientist about origins is very helpful in showing the actual paucity of information contained in the fossil record on that subject:

“It (science) has not yet witnessed the origin of the smallest trace of life from dead matter; all life, so far as has been watched, proceeds from antecedent life. Given the life of a single cell, science would esteem itself competent ultimately to trace its evolution into all the myriad existences of plant and animal, and man, but the origin of protoplasmic activity itself as yet eludes it….The law of evolution not only studies change and progress, it seeks to trace sequences back to antecedents; it strains after the origin of all things. But ultimate origins are inscrutable. Let us admit as scientific men, that of real origin, even of the simplest thing, we know nothing, not even of a pebble.” (Sir Oliver Lodge, Man and the Universe. Sixth Edition, 1909, pp. 19- 20, via Reason & Revelation, vol. I, No. 7, p. 27)

At this point we were ready to make some hard-hitting application to the evolutionist’s assertions about the origins of man. A chart was introduced which showed one of the commonly taught views of man’s beginning: a pool of “primordial soup” laying under a heavy magnetic field being struck by lightning or acted upon in some way and life coming out of the pool as a result. (Other views of man’s origins could be inserted here in place of this one with the same effect.) Today, when higher intelligence exists in the form of man, scientists can recreate almost any atmosphere in a laboratory — and yet they have never, in any of their experiments, caused life to come from non-life. In light of this it is simply amazing that they expect us to believe that life came from non-life (was created) at a time when they say no higher intelligence existed. And then they chide those who believe in the Genesis account of creation for believing in miracles!

With these things before the audience we showed a chart from Wayne Jackson’s book, The Mythology of Modern Geology. This chart effectively shows the problem with the evolutionists’ view of the geologic time table. (Brother Jackson’s legend for the chart introduces it.)

The Geologic Time Table and the Fossil Record

The following chart (left column) illustrates the geologic time table that is common in most textbooks dealing with geology, biology, etc. It proposes to show the development of living organisms, in an ascending order, from the ancient past to the present. The four major eras appear in bold print. The columns represent: 1)The twelve periods of the upper eras; 2)The alleged duration of time in millions of years; 3)Some prominent life features of the various periods. The data in charts to the right compare known facts with the assertions diagrammed in the left column.

Periods	Millions of Yrs.	Life Features	Missing Strata in Grand Canyon	Reversed Strata, Lewis Mt. Range, Montana	Human Occupation of Geologic Strata
Cenozoic Era
Quaternary	1	Men	?		Alleged appearance of man
Tertiary	74	Mammals	?		Human skull, engraved letters
Mesozoic Era
Cretaceous	60	Reptiles & Flowering Plants	?	Precambrian OVER Cretaceous	human bones
Jurassic	30		?
Triassic	40		?		dinosaur carvings
Paleozoic Era
Permian	25	Amphibians, Ferns & Conifers	Permian
Pennsylvanian	25		Pennsylvanian		spoons/tools
Mississippian	25		Mississippian		human footprints
Devonian	45	First Land Plants & Fish	?
Silurian	35		?
Ordovician	65		?
Cambrian	80	Invertebrates	Cambrian		trilobite/human prints
Pre-Cambrian Era
Pre-Cambrian Era	1 1/2 Billion – 2 Billion Years	Pre-Cambrian

Several things are noteworthy about the above chart. First, note the missing strata in the Grand Canyon. The evolutionist must explain these exceptions to the picture he paints of the geologic time table. However, it gets even worse when one looks at the reversed strata in the Lewis Mountain range. There Precambrian rock strata, said to be the oldest layer with an estimated age of one and a half to two billion years old, is on top of a layer of Cretacious which is supposed to be only 60 million years old. Indeed, as brother Jackson observes, as the evolutionist tries to explain how this might have come about he must have the faith that moves mountains. The evidence for man’s existence on the right of the chart destroys the assertions of the evolutionist concerning the relevance of the various strata with regards to man’s appearance.Having described in detail the first point of the lesson so as to give a sample of this lecture, we now summarize the rest of the lesson for the sake of brevity. Survival of the fittest, the supposed “blind watchmaker” that controlled the evolutionary process was examined in order to show the utter improbability of its being able to produce the literally endless number of positive changes necessary for man to gradually evolve from nonliving matter. Mutations, which usually produce negative change in any species, were called into question as the means for producing consistently positive change. We next examined comparative embryology and then spent some time on missing links. We noted the progression that pictures from text books show us and then examined how baseless these pictures were in fact, spending some time examining some of supposed the missing links. To argue for a younger earth, we used a chart from Scott Huse’s book, The Collapse of Evolution. In addition to this, a translation of Bert Thompson’s article, “The Young Earth,” from Reason and Revelation, was handed out with the lecture.With the help of Michael Behe’s book, Darwin’s Black Box, we spent some time looking at some of the revelations that have come from the field of microbiology, a realm of study unknown in Darwin’s time, and noted the baffling intricacies of the unseen world that the electron microscope reveals. Evolution was, by comparison, easy to explain when man was in ignorance of the things microbiology has brought to light. With the first lecture behind us the second one, on the Genesis Account of Creation, was relatively easy. There was no need to try to find ways to insert long periods of time into the text or to try to make the appearance of man to be any later than that found in Genesis 1. (I apologize for not having the exact page numbers for every quote in this article. My library is in the process of being packed for moving back to the U.S. and I do not have access to the books I cite herein.)