Getting from Darwin to Engineered Biology | thebereancall.org

Getting from Darwin to Engineered Biology

September 8, 2023
Randy Guliuzza

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Dr. Randy Guliuzza is a captivating speaker who presents well-documented and often humorous scientific and biblical talks to audiences of all ages. He has represented ICR in several scientific debates at secular universities and in other forums. Dr. Guliuzza has a B.S. in Engineering from the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, a B.A. in theology from Moody Bible Institute, an M.D. from the University of Minnesota, and a Master of Public Health from Harvard University. Dr. Guliuzza served nine years in the Navy Civil Engineer Corps and is a registered Professional Engineer. In 2008, he retired as a lieutenant colonel from the Air Force, where he served as 28th Bomb Wing Flight Surgeon and Chief of Aerospace Medicine, and joined ICR as National Representative. He was appointed President in 2020.

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Transcript:

Randy: Good, good, good. Thank you, Rob, for that wonderful introduction! 

Well, I am the last thing standing between you and lunch, so I will press on with the mark so that we can–we won’t run overtime, Lord willing, on all of this. 

So is it up there on the screen? There is the topic. Let me see…boom! Praise the Lord, it worked. All right, “Getting from Darwin to Engineered Biology”–wow! What a major topic here. As I mentioned last time, we want to cover things that are both new and useful. New and useful for you. We don't want to just be replowing a bunch of other stuff. 

So very, very quickly, ICR’s mission statement—you know, we didn’t really have a very definitive mission statement when I took over, so I put one together. And ICR exists to support the local church. Hmm! That’s what we do—we support the local church. And the church has three major areas of ministry: worship, edification, and evangelism. And if this church isn’t doing something to fulfill those three duties, you probably should jettison it, because it’s not part of your mission!

So if we are to support the local church, how do we support the church’s mission of worship?

So first one (and Rob mentioned this yesterday): Glorify the Lord Jesus Christ by emphasizing in all our resources the credit He is due. 

Now, why is this important? Long before I was a believer, I heard Christians, Christian high school students, talking about Jesus. Jesus did this, Jesus heard my prayers, Jesus acted on my behalf, Jesus did all kinds of things. And you know what it did for me? It made me think this Jesus is real! He’s real! He’s active on that. 

I speak at lots of churches–in fact, I was speaking at about 40 churches a year, and I could go to many services where they never mentioned the name of Jesus once. They’re not bad churches, not bad churches at all. In fact, there are some messages here that have been mentioned where the name of Jesus hasn’t been mentioned. Nobody even mentions it, nobody even realizes it anymore. Everybody talks about God did this, God acted, God intervened. Well, you know who’s head of His body and Lord of His church? Jesus is. So if it’s happening in this church, if He’s head of His body and Lord of His church, Jesus did it, and you should credit Him for it. Amen?

Audience: Amen.

Randy: And then people will think He’s real. So we want to do that. So now you’re going to be listening to yourself. Next time you say, “God,” bite your tongue off and replace it with “Jesus,” who’s active in your life. We’re going to do that.

Number 2: Oppose the deification of nature by exposing Darwinian selectionism and its idolatrous worldview. That will be a major emphasis of today’s talk, and I hope, Lord willing, it’ll come through why that is important.

Two: In terms of edification, we help–help pastors. I could have said, “Help Christians.” That would have been true. But pastors are the head of their flock, so we want to help pastors lead, feed, and defend their flock. They love the “lead” part, they like the “feed” part, the “defend” part’s kinda hard. So we want to help them lead, feed, and defend their flock–by doing what? By providing them the scientific resources that they’re going to need to face off these secular attacks, which are coming everywhere. 

Next: Change Christians’ view–that’s all Christians’ view–of biology by constructing an organism-focused theory of biological design. That is a major course correction for Christianity, which you will see here today.

And then 3: In terms of evangelism, defend the gospel by showing how natural processes cannot explain the miracles of the Bible. Oh, please don’t go that way! Miracles are miracles. You can’t explain them by natural processes. If you could, then they wouldn’t be…what? 

Audience: Miracles.

Randy: Miracles! So don’t go there. Miracles are miracles. And counter-objections to the gospel, which are everywhere, by equipping believers with Scripture-affirming science. ICR’s a science-related ministry. We provide you guys the science so that you can go out and tell your friends. This look like a pretty good mission for ICR?

Audience: Yes!

Randy: Yep. All right, well, we’re going to jump into…oh! I wish I had a signup sheet, but thanks to UPS, we don’t! I checked last night, our boxes are still lost somewhere in transit. If you–if you haven’t…if you’re not getting Acts and Facts, please see my good wife! She’s holding a piece of–she’s holding a notebook. She would love to sign you up, and we will make sure you get that wonderful, life-changing magazine, which has been free for over 50 years. So please do that. 

If there are any young people who even know what these icons mean on that, you can follow us on any one of those, and we have some wonderful podcasts which are on YouTube. And so if you come there, you can subscribe. We’ll let you know when they come out. So this is just a little promo so you can hear about us.

So the question is why move from Darwin–actually Darwinism–back to engineered biology? Hmm…why did I say “back?” Because the status quo prior to Darwin was that creatures looked designed because they are designed! And the picture of that man there is William Paley, who was a really famous Christian apologist who wrote this famous book called Natural Theology. But then Darwin came along and changed a lot of things.

So what has been the status quo in Christianity today since then? And I hate to say–it’s the bottom phrase–Darwin’s mechanism is true, but it can’t do what Darwin claimed. And that is how we’ve been approaching it for over 50 years. And I’m going to submit to you that has been a huge mistake–huge mistake to ever acquiesce, and I hope you’ll see why it’s a big mistake to ever acquiesce to the fact that what Darwin claimed was true. And you’ll see why he put it together. 

And so we’ve pushed back against Darwinism, and we look at a picture like this, and we say, “Oh, that’s Darwinism.” Mm-hmm, that’s one element of Darwinism–something that explains the diversity of life from a universal common ancestor. And so our response is to show why all of this stuff right here is just nothing but imaginative speculation. That’s a good…that’s good. But it isn’t enough.

Or we glom onto things that even other evolutionists say: “Darwin Was Wrong: Cutting Down the Tree of Life.” 

By the way, just yesterday another researcher, a secularist, evolutionist, was promoting on the webpage “Cutting Down the Tree of Life.” Hmm! So evolutionists are pushing back against these things. 

But that is not nearly enough, because the poison of Darwinism has crept into the church, and it’s crept into even our own explanations. 

So when we see fish like these–here’s a surface fish, here’s a blind fish, surface fish, blind cave fish–the question is how in the world do you explain going from a sighted fish with pigmentation to a blind fish with no pigmentation?

Well, let me read to you what a museum says about all of this, the conventional explanation for this, even by creationists. And this is a quote right from the little display where it shows the cave fish. It says this: “As genetic information is copied and passed on generation after generation, occasionally there are copying mistakes known as mutations. Mutations have been observed to destroy, damage, or corrupt genetic information or be neutral, but have never been observed to add new information. This is true of even so-called beneficial mutations that may be advantageous to the surviving organism in some circumstances.” 

So they’re talking about random information-destroying mutations.

They go on to say, “When a mutation occurs in a light environment that causes animals’ offspring not to have eyes, it’s an enormous disadvantage. So natural selection eliminates this flaw. When the eyeless defect occurs here, that is, in a cave, it does not give any disadvantage so it is not eliminated. In fact, it gives advantages. Those with eyes can crash into things injuring their eyes and can get diseases of the eyes, possibly leading to death. Eventually selective pressures ensure that all are eyeless. These ghostly fish are prime examples of how mutation and natural selection can lead to a reduction of functioning systems. These adaptations are no evidence at all for the belief that complexities arisen by such processes. They only show how information can be lost in a fallen world.” 

Hmm…well who–who put this up? ICR put this up. This is–this was our original explanation still in our museum down in San Diego, California. We wrote this and every other creationist ministry since us has copied it. And it’s still on their web pages right to this very second. Hmm….

So what were we saying? We were saying that creationists claim that the surface dwelling ancestors gradually morphed into cave dwelling forms due to random genetic mutations leading to broken genes to a purposeless trial and error process of death and survival, natural selection that results in a loss of information that produces depigmentation and blindness and eventually selection pressures ensure that all are eyeless. 

Brothers and sisters, may I submit that this is not a formidable response against Darwinian evolution for one main reason: it is Darwinian evolution. It is! What’s the difference? There is no difference. So how in the world can you beat the pants off Darwinian evolution…oh, I shouldn’t have said that, I’m now the president. How in the world can you defeat Darwinian evolution when you’re teaching the same thing? Oh, we put this little phrase in: “Oh, all that shows is how you can break something, but not make something.” Really? Brothers and sisters, do you really believe this is how the Lord Jesus created creatures to adapt? Hmm…shame on us.

Shame on us for not thinking this through more carefully. Tsk.

So what are some of the problems and harms that come from all of this? 1) This derailed scientific research, because we were not looking for non-random mechanisms. That’s a bad deal. You’re not even looking for it! It derails scientific research because we were not looking for the non-broken. Mutations were adaptations? I mean, what rational engineer would ever use something like that? Theistic selectionism as you just saw is just a lighter version of evolution. It’s just a light version of evolution. It’s nothing to do with engineering. It didn’t explain anything in any way that would glorify the Lord. 

So this, because you guys are The Berean Call, this is the first time I’ve ever done this talk. I’m going to discuss theological problems, theological issues with natural selection. We’re going to read what evolutionists themselves have said, so we have to get through a lot of quotes. I’m going to try to read them very, very quickly. I know you’re hearing them for the first time. I’ll try to point out the important points on them, but everything I’m going to be reading you with the exception of one quote–these are all written by atheistic evolutionists. And I’m not going to assert for one moment that they’re supporting my position. But they are bringing out some important points, and I want to point out these theological evils. 

First, it’s anti-theistic evolutionary thinking, because it’s anti-design. If it’s anti-design, by nature it is anti-theistic. Can you see that? God is the Creator, He’s the engineer, He’s the designer. When you say it isn’t design, then it’s inherently anti-theistic. Now, why would I say that? 

This gentleman that just recently passed away, Francisco Ayala, was the president of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science, and he proved–he published a good article in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences saying Darwin’s greatest discovery was what? Common descent? No. Design without a designer. That’s not a real chuckle! This is what Darwin was after. And this is how he did it according to this right here. This is the abstract from the paper. With Darwin’s discovery of natural selection, he didn’t discover it. He invented it and you’ll see that as we go through this talk. He didn’t discover anything that’s real that could really be observed. He invented an interpretative framework to interpret observations called “natural selection.” 

Anyway, “The Origin of Adaptations of Organisms are brought into the realm of science. The adaptive features of organisms can now be explained like the phenomenon of the inanimate world as the result of natural processes without recourse to an intelligent designer.” That is his goal. He wants to explain why we look so incredibly designed without referring to God. Ooh! Or even more specifically, if he knew any better, the Lord Jesus Christ. 

He goes on to say this: “Darwin’s theory…” this is so good–in this one sentence here he summarizes it: “Darwin’s theory of natural selection accounts for the design of organisms [it doesn’t really, but this is his attempt] and for their wondrous diversity as the result of natural processes. The gradual accumulation of spontaneously arisen variations (mutations) which are sorted out by natural selection.”

Bingo! Mindless, purposeless things called mutations which can be acted on and sorted out. This phrase–these two words “sorted out,” “sorted out.” You need to get that through your mind because that is the operative thing that he invented. He invented something that could sort by natural selection. This was Darwin’s fundamental discovery, that there is a process that is creative, although not conscious. 

Now, you should immediately think that makes no sense. You have never seen something unconscious that was creative. But, millions and millions of people believe it, and when we were putting it in our explanation for blind cave fish, don’t you see that was a major compromise? It was a major faux pas. 

So, one of–and I had four of these slides and I reduced it down to one, but you can–have to believe me, there were others. 

One of the major core tenets of evolutionary theory according to Graves is this: “A classical or Darwinian evolutionary system embodies a basic principle. Key word: Purposeless. Genetic variation of reproductive individuals united by common descent coupled with natural selection of those rare individuals that fortuitously expressed the traits. It is a process replete with chance.” 

Bingo! Chance, purposelessness, is a major core tenet of evolutionary theory, because it is fundamentally anti-design. And the way they’re going to carry that in everybody’s mind is by the words that they are going to use to characterize what is happening. These words are going to–they’re going to skew people’s thinking, and they’re going to skew them in thinking about origins. 

Like what kinds of words? Well, characterizations are really the overlooked workhorses of evolutionary theory. They set the narrative. So when they saw organs that they didn’t immediately know what they were useful for, they called them vestigial. When you labeled it vestigial you were putting an interpretation on it. Does that make sense? And you’re interpreting it in terms of evolutionary thinking, and vestigial has hung on up to this very moment. 

When they saw DNA which they didn’t know what it was useful for, they labeled it as “junk,” which is an idea that it was useless and that it was evolutionary garbage. And all of that is swaying people against thinking it was designed. 

And then of course when they see features on creatures which look like this, they call them “primitive,” primitive harkening back to its evolutionary origins. These are all ways to shade the truth with their interpretation. 

But of course we all know that these were all wrong, and there was not a shred of evidence showing that they were vestigial or junk or whatever. But the point is it’s the characterizations which are working on people’s minds. Working on their minds. 

So words are very important on how you’re going to characterize things, and they convey thoughts about origins. So as you go through evolutionary literature, hey, you know which show this is. It’s Family-what? Feud. Family Feud. These words are all the top eight words that I have found in evolutionary literature which are conveying the idea that organisms were not designed. 1) Purposeless–hmm, that makes sense. 2) Random. 3) Accidental. 4) Trial and error–broken, unplanned, cobbled together, and messy. Hmm. These words are doing work. They're doing work in people’s minds, and the work these words are doing is they’re saying to everybody “not designed. Not designed.” Does that make sense? Because these words–no engineer would do something like this. So if no engineer would do something like this, why would we as creationists copy these same words and project them onto the Lord Jesus? Huh! Bite your tongue off. Shame on us.

So how does mutation and selection tend towards atheism? Well, they begin of course with their materialistic worldview, and then that leads to their anti-design assumptions. These are all just assumptions that when you see a genetic change it is something that is broken or purposeless or random. And then, through their relentless outpouring of one scientific paper or scientific television program after another, they will put in everybody’s minds these words: that genetic change is this, this, this on that. And when they have done that work, which are all summarized in one word–mutation. Because when I say “mutation” to you, you’re thinking purposeless, you’re thinking accidental, you’re thinking random and broken. So this word of the mutation-selection mechanism, this word is conveying tons of anti-design thinking in everyone’s mind. Because no rational engineer is going to break something on purpose in order to make it better. And that’s what it’s doing. So this is fundamentally anti-design. 

And then they couple it with this other thing which we’ll talk about in just a second, selection. And they’ve rammed this down relentlessly in people’s minds over and over again, and this is how they build it. So they say that mutations, which are somehow sorted by natural selection, is some kind of unconscious yet creative force–which everybody knows is a little counterintuitive, but it is fundamentally anti-design. Why is it counterintuitive? Because everybody knows that no rational engineer in their right mind would ever build by accidental things. So it is inherently, inherently anti-design. 

Yet when they repeat this over and over again, and they say it’s “true, true, true,” and people are hearing it and there’s no push back from creationists, because we’re acquiescing to it. We’re saying it’s true, but limited. They’re saying it’s true but unlimited. We’re saying it’s true but what? Limited. But we should have been saying it’s what? Not true! It’s not true. But we were saying it’s true but limited. 

And you know what? That was a difference without a distinction. And then suddenly in people’s mind, they say, “Wow, that sounds an awful lot like Darwinian evolution and it definitely doesn’t sound like a direct creation by God.” And that’s why they’ve been so successful in convincing everybody. They control the microphone, they repeat it incessantly and there hasn’t been an effective push back by us. But those are going to change. 

So, it was anti-theistic because it was fundamentally anti-design, and that’s why it’s evil, when it’s anti-theistic. The second theological evil is nature then suddenly becomes personified as a substitute creator. 

Now, how in the world would nature become personified? You know, this is–this is so important—there was a talk, two talks yesterday, one by Jay, and one by a good brother whom I had never met named Carl–how do you pronounce your last name? Teichrib. With that good Canadian accent. Eh! All right. Good to have ya! 

My good brother, you talked a lot about personifications of nature. You talked a lot about nature worship. You talked a lot about nature, nature being exalted. And you said multiple times it’s Romans 1. It is! Exactly! Spot on target!

I’m going to let you know how Darwin slipped it in so easily to worship and personify nature. And we’ve been missing it! How did he do that?

Well, he suddenly added this idea of agency—that nature could work like an agent. Why is that important? Because when you look at creatures, sure, there was an agent working on them, and that agent was the Lord Jesus. He wants that agent out, but he’s not going to get rid of it with no agency. He’s going to slip in a substitute agent, and the substitute agent is going to be nature itself. And he’s going to put it in his book, Origin of the Species. 

This man here, he’s now dead, too. His name was Richard Lewontin, and he was a famous evolutionary theorist. A very thoughtful man.

And he’s pushing back against Darwin’s personification of nature. And he said, “The most famous and influential example of Darwin’s Invention of the term ‘natural selection….’” He’s exactly right. Darwin didn’t steal the term. Darwin didn’t copy the term. Darwin didn’t copy anybody’s idea. Darwin invented a lot of this, “...‘natural selection,’ in which he wrote On the Origin of Species.” And now Richard Lewontin is going to quote Darwin here, where Darwin said that “Nature is daily [or natural selection] is daily and hourly scrutinizing throughout the world every variation, even the slightest, rejecting that which is bad and preserving and adding up all that which is good.”

This should give you a lot of pause. Natural selection is…where, on this planet? Everywhere. Natural selection is seeing what? Everything! Natural is selecting unfailingly that which is good. This is beginning to sound an awful lot like natural selection is–what? God! Omnipresent, omniscient, unerring, unfailing, working on…how many creatures? All! How often? All the time!

Hmm. How come this atheist is spotting this? You know why? Because he’s a good atheist. He likes his atheism straight. He doesn’t want his atheism mixed in with magical things, and Darwin’s doing it. Hmm. 

This gentleman here, he’s a believer. His name is William Dembski. He’s going to explain what Darwin did. He’s an intelligent design advocate in his book The Design Revolution. He says, “In short, evolutionary biology needs a…” what? “...designer substitute to coordinate the incidental changes, which they call mutations.” 

Mutations just happening everywhere make no sense. But remember back in Francisco Ayala’s statement, he says nature can…what? Sort out. So nature is going to go through and it’s going to sort out. That’s what he’s saying here: to go through and coordinate all these incidental changes that pass from one generation to the next. And there’s only one naturalistic candidate on the table, to wit, natural selection. Hmmm. How does it sort? Because it can select. Indeed, it is no accident the word “selection” and the word “intelligence” are etymologically related. The “-lec” in “selection” has the same root as “-lig” in “intelligence.” Both derive from the same Indo-European root meaning “to gather,” and therefore to choose. 

Hmmm. Creationists have been saying Darwin copied someone’s idea. No, no, no, no! Before Darwin, Dembski says, “The ability to choose was largely confined to designing intelligences. That is, to conscious agents that could reflect deliberately on the possible consequences of their choices.” True! People were smarter! Only something with a brain could make a choice! And so nobody with a brain would ever say something without a brain could make a choice.

But Darwin did! Darwin’s claim to fame was to argue that natural forces, lacking any purposiveness or prevision of future possibilities, likewise have the power to choose via natural selection. And ascribing the power to choose to unintelligent natural forces, Darwin perpetuated the greatest intellectual swindle in the history of ideas: Nature has no power to choose. He is exactly right!

Why don’t you pull off your shoe and say “this can choose”? Why don’t I hold up this water bottle and say “this can choose”? “This can choose your mate.” You know, it sounds stupid. Well, nature is full of living things, but nature isn’t alive. How in the world can it choose? How can it sort? How can it select? It can’t! And yet, people have slipped into ascribing that ability to it, and therefore you begin to personify it! 

And so all of these atheists in the picture here are upset because Darwin just took out God’s agency and put in another pseudo-agency. And Darwin, by 1868 (that’s the date of the quote)–he published his book in 1859. So just nine years later, the thinking people in the 1800s were swacking him around for personifying nature. Pow, pow, pow, pow, pow! And so he was under attack!

And he said the term, in defense, “Natural selection is in some respects a bad one [huh!] as it seems to imply conscious choice.” No, duh! And his whole intention was to apply conscious choice to nature. “But this will be disregarded after a little familiarity.” And he was right! Who disregarded it? Everybody did, including the creationists.

“I have also often personified the word ‘nature,’ for I have found it difficult to avoid this ambiguity.” Ha! You know why? Because we look like we’re the product of an agent! And so how do you get around this being a product of an agent without bringing in some kind of agency to do it? His agency is a massive personification of nature. And now if I were to give you a quiz, he personifies nature by one word: the word…what? “Select.” 

Someone here caught it. One word: “select.” This is a teaching class. What word does he use to personify nature? He says nature can…[audience:] “Select!” And only things with intelligence, and only things with volition can really select. Ergo, when he says nature can select, he projects onto nature intelligence and volition. That’s how he does it in the scientific realm. 

This gentleman, Michael Hodge–he’s an historian of science–he wrote (talking about the controversy that Darwin had started) was this: “One source of trouble was that Darwin liked the term—Darwin liked the term ‘natural selection,’ because it could be used as substantive governing a verb.” I read that, and I thought, “What in the world does that even mean? A substantive….” So I looked it all up. When you treat something as a substantive, you treat it as a real thing.

So Darwin is taking a concept and he’s treating it as real, and he says it can “govern a verb.” Oh, this is so good! What he’s telling us here is the source of all idolatry. The source of all idolatry! When you take a concept, and you can govern a verb—“get me some verbs.” “Select.” (I’ll prime the pump.) “Choose.” “Favor.” “Act on.” “Work on.” “Do.” “Make.” “Create.” These are all verbs, and we have been using them. So when you push back against natural selection to your friends, and you say something like this, “All natural selection can do is select from something that’s previously there,” you have just done…what? You have just made it a substance governing a verb. You have—YOU! YOU—have just slipped into the realm of idolatry, because you said, “All natural selection, a concept, can do is ‘select from.’” So you think you’re pushing back, but you’re really enforcing it. 

So let me swap it out. “All Dagon can do is select from.” You see that? I just… “All Baal can do is…” You’ve taken a concept, and you’ve given it the ability to work. You’ve given it the ability to do something, which isn’t true, and that is the basis of all idolatry. 

If I held up a statue, and I said, “All this statue can do is…” I’ve immediately jumped into the realm of idolatry. And this is what we need to remember: the idol, idolatry, is not in the statue. It’s not in the statue! Idolatry exists in a person’s mind. It’s what they think the rabbit’s foot can do. It’s what they think the statue can do. It’s what they think it can do. Idolatry is in the realm of the mind and the heart. It’s not in the thing.

It’s what the people in all these different countries, whatever it is–totem poles, this, that–it’s what they think their particular god can do, and in the scientific realm it’s what someone thinks nature can do.

Does this make sense? Wow! This is the link. This is the link in the scientific realm. That’s why Hodge says, “But such uses appear to reify, even to deify, natural selection as an agent.” Hmmm. Wow! Really, really bad! Really bad. 

So when you think you’re defending something, and you say, “All natural selection can do is…” Is this making sense? You’re just reinforcing it.

Natural selection can’t DO anything anymore than Baal can do, any more than a rabbit’s foot can do. It can’t do anything. It’s a concept. Wow!
So, this guy, Greg Graffin, professor at UCLA, he says—here is his complaint: “The trick is, how do you talk about natural selection without implying the rigidity of law? We use it almost as an active participant; almost like a…” what? “...a god! In fact, you could substitute the word “God” for natural selection in a lot of evolutionary writings and you’d think you were listening to a theologian.” This guy’s an atheist! “It’s a routine we know doesn’t exist but we teach it anyway: genetic mutation and some active force to choose among the favorable ones.” 

Wow! This is how they’re slipping in the idolatry. This atheist sees it! Hmmm.

This gentleman (he’s also dead), Robert Reed, but he was a biologist–an eminent biologist from a place up north of here called Canada. He was a major Canadian apologist. 

And in biological emergencies, he says, “Indeed, the language of neo-Darwinism is so careless that the word “Divine Plan” could be substituted for “selection pressure.” And any popular work in the biological literature without the slightest disruption and the logical flow of argument. He goes on to say, “Selection pressure is now given a metaphorically creative sense by modern biologists who ought to be flagellating themselves for selection pressure.” 

Because he’s a scientist, and he sees they’re moving in idolatry and magical agency into science! That’s why he’s upset. I’m upset because it slaps at the face of Christ. 

This gal, Lynn Margulis, inventor of the symbiotic idea and theory, she’s also dead. She said, “Darwin was brilliant to make natural selection a sort of godlike term, an expression that could [what?] replace God who did it—created life forms. He made it easy for his contemporaries to think and to verbalize Mr. Big Omnipotent God in the sky, picking out those he wants to keep. He has been conceived of as the natural selector; he throws the others away.”

Steven Talbott, another evolutionist: “Evolutionary biologists routinely speak of Natural Selection as if it were an agent. Natural selection becomes rather like an occult power in the pre-scientific age.”

Why are these atheists smacking down natural selection as this occult power, but creationists are here defending it? Wow! What a major role reversal! Huh!

And then this gentleman, Jerry Fuldor (he’s also dead), he wrote this booklet, “Darwin Got it Wrong,” He’s pointing out how selection was used as the substitute god, and he says this: “What breeds the ghosts in Darwinism is its covert appeal to intentional [that’s how he spelled it] biological explanations? Darwin pointed the direction to a thoroughly naturalistic, indeed, a thoroughly atheistic theory of phenotype that is their trait formation, but he didn’t see how to get the whole way there. He killed off God, if you like, but Mother Nature and other pseudo-agents (and he’s talking in context about Natural Selection) got away scott free. We think it’s now time to get rid of them too.”

You know what I would say to that? Amen! Amen! Amen! That’s why ICR is leading this way to purge this whole idolatrous concept of “selection.” 

Did this make it clear, the link of how Darwin personifies nature? He personifies nature through one word: what is it? “Select.” When he projects onto nature the ability to select, he’s projecting onto it intelligence and volition in an omnipresent, omniscient, unerring fashion, which can act as the substitute creator. And you just saw all of these evolutionists who spied it out. And you saw by 1868 other scientists—the Head of the French Academy of Sciences in 1860, one year after Darwin published his book, called it nothing but silly personifications. 

Hmm. He spied it out. Okay. So how in the world, then, does mutation selection tend towards Atheism? Well, we saw here—you start with this materialistic worldview, and the process and everything that they’re talking about is so purposeless, so jumbled, so unorganized, which they wrap up in one word, “mutation,” that is totally anti-design. 

You start with the same materialistic worldview and you start with anti-designer assumptions. And you begin by assuming that nature can act like a human breeder! That’s what Darwin did. He compared nature to a pigeon breeder. Said pigeon breeders can get all these different shapes over a short period of time, maybe nature over a long period of time can get you something that aren’t even pigeons!

Nobody—no creationist—was making this comparison of nature to a human breeder. That is a strictly Darwin invention. So he thinks that nature can act like a human breeder, and then just like the relentless barrage of words over here, they come up with a relentless barrage of words in everything they talk about, that nature can favor. 

By the way, where do you find favor? Right in the subtitle of Darwin’s book, On the Origin of Species or The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life. He’s not talking about races of people, black and white. He’s talking about just different creatures. “Preservation of Favored…” so he immediately introduced this mysticism into it. Nature can favor work on act, or as Jerry Coyne says, “See, Select, Save, and Build.” And it’s relentlessly put out there so that nature becomes a mystical substitute agent. Pow! 

Anti-design, substitute “agent,” you have just replaced the Lord Jesus as the Creator. This is really a very clever way of doing it. I’m inclined to think that Darwin was inspired—not by God–in some other way to come up with something that is so subtle, so clever as this!

Siri: I’m not sure about that.

Number 3: The next theological evil… You ought to be sure about that! [Audience laughing] Man alive! I was like…that was an inspired thing from Siri. Did anybody catch that? That’s going to have to be put out there on the web on there! 

Wow, okay. We’re running out of time, so we need to press!

Next: It perverts death as the best invention of life and not as a curse and an enemy. This is something that’s also been slipping past us as Christians. What we did is we just accommodated it by saying, “Oh, this is the process for a fallen world.” What an accommodation. 

As I mentioned last night, it was Steven Jobs who came up with the idea. He had this phrase that “Death is very likely the single best invention of life. It’s life’s change agent.” Hmm! 

But he’s just summarizing what Darwin said. Darwin said this, from Origin of Species: “This is the doctrine of Malthus applied to the whole animal and vegetable kingdoms. As many more individuals of each species are born that could possibly survive, and as consequently there is frequently recurring struggle for existence, we shall then see how natural selection almost inevitably causes much extinction of the less-improved forms of life.”

This is another Darwin invention. He’s the one who applied Malthus to biology, where it’s like, “Oh, there’s more offspring born than resources. Therefore they fight, and the winner, the most improved, is the one that survives.” And therefore Darwin ends his book (this is from the last few paragraphs of his book), and he says, “To reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, all of the design in Nature, have all been produced by laws acting around us, such as growth, reproduction, and inheritance, from the indirect and the direct action of the external conditions of life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection [those are his capitalizations and his italics], and tailing the extinction of less-improved forms, thus from the War of Nature, from famine, and death, the production of higher forms directly follows.” And then he says, “There is a grandeur from this view of life.”

He is promoting a worldview, and he thinks it’s grand. The struggle for death.

But Stephen J. Gould saw through this in 1994. He wrote, a very perceptive atheistic evolutionist, “Moreover, natural selection expressed in inappropriate human terms is a remarkably inefficient, even cruel process. Selection carves adaptation by eliminating masses of the less fit.”

You notice, he’s still personifying it here: “Imposing hecatombs, that is, great slaughter of death as preconditions for limited increments of change, natural selection is a theory of trial and error externalism.”

Later when he was older in life, he said this: “The radicalism of natural selection lies in its power to dethrone some of the deepest and most traditional comforts of western thought, particularly the notion than Nature’s benevolence, order, and good design, with humans as a sensible summit of power and excellence, proves the existence of an omnipotent and benevolent Creator who loves us most of all. To these beliefs, Darwinian Natural Selection….” You notice these guys are smart. They’re not talking about Evolution. They’re talking about the root of the problem, which is not evolution. So when you hear Creationists talking very broadly about evolution, they’re off topic. The topic is natural selection. 

“To these beliefs, Darwinian natural selection presents the most contrary position imaginable. Only one causal force produces evolutionary change in Darwin’s world: the unconscious struggle among individual organisms to promote their own personal reproductive success, nothing else and nothing higher.”

That’s what it is! So what you see on the screen is how good comes about.

A final theological evil is Darwinian selectionism mocks the good character of God. 

Now, I’m going to read to you a longer quote where Stephen Gould is going to explain something that has really never been discussed by Creationists, but he’s very perceptive in seeing it. He says this in his book Structure of Evolutionary Theory there: “Now suppose as a problem of an abstract [what?] perversity [this is the lead-off] that one made a pledge to subvert Paley…” Remember, Paley was the early Creationist. He’s the early Design advocate. So you want to subvert Paley in a very perverse way, in the most radical way possible. “What would one claim? I can imagine two basic refutations: One might label Paley’s primary observation as simply wrong by arguing that the exquisite adaptation is relatively rare and that the world is replete with error, imperfection, misery, and caprice.” 

In other words, you could take the position that some evolutionists do that say that, well, there’s just not good design. Things are broken. Things are bad.

Darwin didn’t take that way. 

“If God had made such a world, we might want to reassess our decision to worship him, an upsetting argument indeed, but Darwin chose an even more radical alternative.” Listen to what he says, “With even more perversity, one might judge Paley’s observation as undoubtedly correct. When you do look at creatures, they do look incredibly designed. Nature features exquisite adaptation at an overwhelming relative frequency. But the unkindest cut of all of them holds that this order, the very basis of Paley’s inference about the nature of God…” 

In other words, Paley, the theologian, was saying, “When you look at creatures, you can infer something about God’s nature. That He is good, He is loving, He is benevolent, that He is wise, that He’s a genius, that He has power.”

He’s saying, “You used to be able to infer those things, that the very basis of Paley’s inference about the nature of God arises not directly from omnipotent benevolence, but only as a side consequence of a causal principle of an entirely opposite import, namely as the incidental effect of organisms struggling for their own benefit, expressed as reproductive success. Could any argument be more subversive? One accepts the conventional observation, but then offers an explanation that only inverts orthodoxy, but seems to mock the standard interpretation in a manner that could almost be called cruel. This more radical version lies at the core of Darwin’s argument for natural selection.”

In other words, what he’s saying is this: When you look at creatures and you think all of this good thing is due to a good, benevolent God, you’re totally wrong. Everything that you see in nature is nothing more than the outworking of individual organisms in their own self-interest, in their own selfish way to advance their own personal survival at the expense of everything else and nothing more. 

Wow! That’s it! That’s why it’s so cruel. That’s why it’s so perverse. You think it’s an outworking of good, it’s nothing but the outworking of selfishness. That is so theological. God, the selfless one, has now been replaced with the selfishness of nature.

Hmm. If you’re Christians and you have any love and passion for the Lord’s glory and His character, this should boil your blood! You should say, “Wow! This is a very clever way to spit in the face of your Creator, to loathe Him with every last word and ounce of your strength.” 

This is why it’s evil! I hope you guys never again come out and say, “All natural selection can do is…” On that, you’ve just jumped into a really perverse realm. That’s why I held it for The Berean Call. You guys would appreciate this.

So, Darwin’s anti-designer approach to interpreting out organisms is he replaces the engineering reality with broken, purposeless systems that are sorted out by hit-and-miss outcomes. He inverts the cause of organisms from an internal to external, and he personifies nature as exercising pervasive agency to work on organisms as a substitute designer. 

Now, if we were good creationists, we would attack every one of these things. “No! This is what he did; this is what he did; this is what he did.” We would push back against every one of them if we had a good strategy for reclaiming things. 

So we have the four problems and harms already. The fifth is it personifies nature as an idolatrous pseudo-creator. Natural selection, oh! We said, “Well, it’s just a conservative process. It’s eliminating those genetic diseases from the population to preserve her for the rest of us!” That makes God a eugenicist. You know, when some creature dies, or some baby dies, or some young child dies before it can reproduce due to a genetic defect, that’s not a good thing for the rest of us. It’s a tragedy!

Natural selection: Gould’s idea was perverse indeed. It mocks the goodness of God. So that’s why I share as mission statements that we oppose the deification of nature by exposing Darwinian selection as an idolatrous worldview.

So, wow! That’s all the bad stuff. Is there any biblical justification for chucking that over and going with the exact opposite and saying, “No, organisms are not the product of random mutation, but they’re the product of purposeful, intentional design by a real Engineer, the Lord Jesus, who put these creatures together!

Well, Psalm:19:1, as I mentioned yesterday, says, “The heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament shows His handiwork.” 

Psalm 8 says that the Cosmos is “work of Your fingers and humans were to have dominion over the work of your hands.”

Psalm 9 speaks of the Lords’ sovereignty over the creation that those hands had formed.

Psalm 102 said, “He laid the foundation of the earth, and the heavens are the work of His hands.” 

Psalm 143: “I meditate on your works and I ponder the work of your hands.”

And Romans:1:20, as I mentioned yesterday, says the “creation is His handiwork, or His workmanship.”

Hmmm! All of these verses are telling us that when you look at living creatures, you’re seeing the work of God’s what? Hands! His work! 

What if He’s not just using poetic language? What if He’s trying to tell us something about how we should begin to study creation? Maybe we should study it as if it really is the product of engineering. Maybe it really is handiwork. Maybe it really is workmanship. Maybe we should set up our experiments to find this workmanship and handiwork.

Well, how in the world do we even know what handiwork and workmanship are? The only way we know it is we compare it to what humans have made.

So, God is saying, “When you see what humans have engineered and you see all the evidences of that, look for those same kind of things in creatures!” Look for evidences of workmanship. And that’s how we’re going to be able to pick out Christ’s workmanship.

Well, what are some evidences that we see in man-made things? We see numerous interconnected parts, particular arrangement, proper alignment, precise timing, and on and on and on. And we see these exact same things in living creatures. We see DNA maintenance machines. They go through and they cut things out and they splice it in. They unwind DNA. They’re real little machines inside there. We see little railroad tracks inside cells where they lay down a track, and a machine goes along it and delivers something to its place. And what’s cool about there is they pick up the track behind them! Lay it down and pick it up. Go all around the cell. We see elevators. We see all kinds of things. Brace filters, we see clamps and hooks and screws and benches and vices and welding points. We just see all this kind of stuff of evidence! 

We see gears, as I mentioned yesterday, in all of that. So when we’re actually looking at real created things, we see purposeful, regulated, complex, targeted, orderly, specified, fitting and suitable, and precise. This is what we’re really seeing in all of these characteristics. They shout…what? Design! Creation! Engineering. All of these things.

So here is a major key concept: it is the engineered workmanship that we see in living creatures which corresponds to the engineered workmanship in manmade things doing the same things that is the primary and undeniable general revelation of Christ’s power, genius, and wisdom. That’s what general revelation is, and that’s why it’s so undeniable.

So, what happens when we take that phrase “mutation selection,” and we chuck mutation and we start describing genetic changes as directed genetic change, and we chuck the magical selection and we say these are successful solutions—directed genetic change led to successful solutions? 

The whole “antidesign” power of mutation selection goes down the drain. That’s what we need to replace it with. 

And so what have we done? Well, we’re looking on adaptation and control of that, and we’ve put together another model to explain it called continuous environmental tracking. Continuous environmental tracking posits, as we mentioned last night, that organisms are using sensors and they have logic and they have output responses that when those sensors detect similar conditions and the logic has similar programming, we should expect similar responses.

So when creatures detect that they’re in a cave, and if they are internally programmed to lose their eyes and their pigmentation and change circadian rhythm and their metabolism and lots of other things, and augment all of these other traits, then we should expect similar responses. And that’s not only why we find blind cavefish, but blind salamanders, insects, spiders, and on and on and on. Hmm! It looks like they were engineered to be fruitful, multiply, and fill the earth, including caves.

So how in the world do we explain these observations? Remember our old explanation which was nothing but a lighter version of evolutionary thinking? Hmm. Let’s do some research. 

So, here’s one of our blind cavefish. It’s a female. You can see she’s blind. You can see she’s hypopigmented. What if, what if…we took her, we took this fish, and we put her back in the sunlight? So that’s what we did. We put her back in simulated sunlight where we had the exact same wavelengths and the exact same intensity as outdoor light, what would happen to her?

Well, this is her 36 days later. She’s not dead, she’s just been stunned with some cold water to take a picture of her. Wow! Thirty-six days later! That to that! She’s got sensors! What kind of sensors? Light sensors. She’s got programming that says, “When I detect the light, put on…” what? Pigmentation! Huh.

Here’s the male, 36 days later. He was as pink as she was. Now he’s all pigmented on that. There’s a surface fish by comparison. Huh! It looks like they’re morphing back in pigmentation toward the surface form.

Well, what happens if I took one of these surface fish and I put them in the types of water, similar type of water, that you might find in a cave? They look like this and then they go to that. This fish went to this in two weeks. Two weeks! Not two million years. Two weeks.     

Now it’s not just the time, it’s the programming that did this. These are highly regulated rapid and repeatable changes where we expect corresponding elements between a car which can detect its surroundings. This is a bot car. There’s no driver in it. This was an early version of the self-driving cars, and it had sensors. It has computer logic. And these guinea pigs can do the same thing! They can do the same thing. I’m out of time, so I won’t explain this experiment unless you want to hear about it.

Okay! They’re going to beat climate change by tweaking their DNA. They took these male guinea pigs. They put them in a cage with a heater, a heating pad underneath it to raise the temperature to simulate climate change.    

Well, if you know anything about male guinea pig anatomy, what’s sitting on the heater? Yeah! They’re getting roasted on that. So they did that for 70 days, the time it takes to make one generation of sperm. Then they took these male guinea pigs and they mated them with female guinea pigs that were not in heated cages, and she had pups. And they analyzed their DNA, specifically for genes that regulate temperature tolerance, and at least 18 genes in Dad and the pups were changed in that one generation to live in higher temperatures. 

Wow! That’s quite remarkable. So that’s why we have this continuous environmental tracking model, which is an engineer-based approach that is focused on the organisms to explain adaptation. So organisms are not acted on by some magical selector in nature. Organisms are not passive modeling clay being shaped by their environments. We see organisms not as passive modeling clay but as active problem-solving entities that can detect their challenges, solve those challenges, to be fruitful, multiply, and fill the earth. 

And that is a mechanism that truly honors and glorifies the Lord Jesus, as the Creator who He is.

Well, Rob, thank you once again for the time to be here. It’s been a blessing, and I’ll turn it back to you.

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