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I have been reviewing Tom DeRosa’s book “Evidence for Creation”.  It has been a difficult task, because it takes hours for each review, and I feel like it is nothing but an exercise in bashing my fellow Christian as he makes himself look foolish before the world.  I realize the scriptures say that God’s wisdom is foolish in the eyes of the world, but quoting that scripture doesn’t make every contrary view wise.  In fact, the church can be just as foolish as the next guy.

So far, every chapter has been a dismissal of evidence, and a misunderstanding of the scientific process.  DeRosa concentrates on mankind’s inability to duplicate God’s work, without acknowledging the patterns scientists are finding within God’s creation.  He insists that a theory is only valid if you can duplicate the process that generated the evidence.  What he misses is that a theory is also validated if it provides a successful framework future findings, a perspective DeRosa does not even hint at, except as it applies to the Flood.  The few times DeRosa has described bonafide scientific processes, they are often processes he doesn’t think secular scientists embrace, such as the role of water in creating crystals, the fact that higher levels of fossilization is a sign of catastrophes, or the fact that ancient soil beds should be fossilized.  These are the most scientific theories I have read in the book so far, yet they were brought up to show gaps in Evolutionary theory, when in fact Evolutionists embrace them.

By the same token, other reading has shown me that DeRosa makes some valid points about Evolutionists.  Such truths can fall on dead ears because of his flaws above (which are shared with many other Creation Scientists), but that is not an argument for dismissing them.  Specifically, Evolutionists have no idea how the primordial ooze came about, and do not know how it was possible to go from non-life one moment to life in the next; yet is obvious to them that moment happened.  The answer is clearly God, and like DeRosa, I believe that atheists continue on stubbornly in their scientific endeavors because they don’t know God when they see Him.  On the other hand, it is that stubbornness that has produced scientific results brings people like me closer to knowing God and His work.  Having people in the world sure complicates things!

Okay, on to Chapter 4…

In his first paragraph DeRosa suggests that breaks in the fossil record are evidence against evolution.  This is a reminder of his apparent impression that Evolutionists view fossilization as a continuous uniform process across time.  On that point, Evolutionists actually agree with Creation Scientists that a lot of fossilization happens sporadically, and during special conditions that may not last very long.

DeRosa then accurately explains a dilemma that Evolutionists were initially surprised to find.  To summarize, the “Cambrian Explosion” is represented in the Geological Column in a seemingly inverse order.  One expected simpler life forms lower down in the column, then larger life forms higher up.

Surprise!  What was found was totally unexpected!  Paleontologists discovered what they call “bursts” of life forms that appear abruptly, representing the major groups of animals.  It confounded evolutionary thinking, because the higher levels of life forms appeared first, before the lower.

Glenn Morton’s response to this common observation is as follows:

The biggest single factor for how fast an object settles in a fluid is the size. The relevant physical law is Stoke’s Law. The larger an object, the faster it falls. A cat can survive a fall from a 20-story building because it falls at a speed of “only” 60 mph. A human dies because he reaches a terminal velocity of 120 mph if laid out like a skydiver, 180 if he falls feet first. Thus, for any given habitat, the largest animals should be on the bottom. There are a lot of very small dinosaurs found in the Morrison Formation, with the giants, both of which are below the Niobrara, which contains the 20-foot long fish and micrometer-sized chalk particles. Large, teleost fish are found well above the layers in which fish are first found.

DeRosa goes on to explain how many life forms actually are found during the short Cambrian period, hence the name “Cambrian Explosion”, and then states the following (emphasis added):

Cambrian fossils are of every basic body type.  It is because they are so numerous and appear so abruptly in the geological record that this find has been called the Cambrian Explosion.  Organisms from hard-shelled clams to mollusks to extinct trilobites, and even fish, have been discovered in this layer.  This vast array of organisms, all found on one layer, is a huge problem to the evolutionary thesis that slow change over eons accounts for all life forms now in existence.

Glenn Morton has an excellent article on this.   Some excerpts will address DeRosa’s point quite directly (emphasis added):

The first red-herring to be corrected is  the false idea that virtually all phyla appear in the Cambrian.  Ray Bohlin writes:

“Nowhere is the problem of sudden appearance better demonstrated than in the Burgess Shale found in the Canadian Rockies. The Burgess Shale illustrates that in the Cambrian period (which evolutionists estimate as being over 540 million years ago) nearly all of the basic body plans (phyla) of animals existing on earth came into existence in a geological instant (defined as only 5 to 10 million years). No new phyla have appeared since that time (the Bryazoa [sic—grm] are one possible exception, but many paleontologists believe they will eventually be found to originate in the Cambrian period).” (Bohlin, 2000, p. 23)

This simply isn’t true.  Berkeley has posted an interesting display of when the various phyla appear. It can be found at http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/phyla/metazoafr.html.

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This yields Cambrian Explosion 13 [phyla], Post-Cambrian 32! Sounds like a football score! And given that 13 phyla first appear within the past 10,000 years (having no fossil record) one could, if one wanted, claim that we are in another explosion. I wouldn’t make that claim but it would fit within the data. To claim that all or even the majority of animal phyla appear in the Cambrian is demonstrably FALSE yet the claim is blindly made being repeated endlessly by apologist to apologist with no one even questioning the validity of the statement.

The Big Problem

DeRosa finds it problematic that below the Cambrian layer, there is essentially nothing.  Then, all of a sudden, we have the Cambrian Explosion.  That doesn’t appear to leave any time for the Evolution that Evolutionists believe in so strongly.  What’s the deal? Again, from Morton’s article:

…why do apologists still treat the Cambrian as an explosion? Basically, it is because they have not kept up with the increased knowledge of this time period over the past 50 years. Lazarus J. Salop (1983, p. v) wrote:

“Progress in Precambrian geology has been exceptionally great, indeed, quite striking for geologists of the older generation; only some 30-40 years ago the Precambrian appeared as an uncertain and even mystic prelude to geologic evolution. Even the very name-Precambrian-means some indivisible unit in the early history of the Earth, the beginning of which is poorly known.”

In general it is my belief that apologists have not really studied the Precambrian in any detail or have merely re-stated what others have erroneously written.

Another point is that mathematical models have been made that show how reasonable it is to have periods of stability followed by periods of change.  One such model was programmed by Glenn Morton.  Another model, showing how quickly the eye could evolve is here.  The latter model is the one I criticized yesterday, in In fairness to the opposition, Dawkins proves their point.  However, what it shows successfully is that once you have living cells with something simple to evolve, the number of mutations between it and something complex is not as overwhelming as one would think.  Combine that with God, and I think “The Big Problem” goes away.

The Amazing Trilobite

DeRosa explains that the Trilobite’s eye is so advanced that Natural Selection doesn’t explain it.  I have not yet found any articles on the Trilobite’s eye, so let me grant DeRosa this point. In that case, my answer is that Evolution is not as Godless as DeRosa and most Evolutionists define it.

The Fossil Record’s Real Testimony

…evolutionists divide the fossil record into theoretical eras… As more and more fossils are discovered, these theoretical divisions are disappearing.  Fossils keep appearing at the wrong places, suggesting that the system needs to change.  As fossils are discovered, it is apparent that that the organisms are not simple and that they challenge, by their unexpected complexity, evolutionary assumptions about the fossil record.

This sounds like a restatement of the arguments above, about larger organisms being fossilized beneath smaller.

Living Fossils

I agree there are organisms alive today that are fossilized from millions of years ago.  I am presuming his point to be that after all this time, the organism should have evolved into something different by now, and no longer exist.  On the contrary, Natural Selection is “survival of the fittest”.  This sounds like proof of that concept!

Even More Complex Than You Think

 DeRosa explains how genuinely complex life is, down to the cellular level.  Basically we are systems of systems of systems, many of which are “irreducibly complex”, as Michael Behe describes.  DeRosa correctly says

The parts and instructional manual for the cell did not produce themselves.  The had to come from a divine planner, the Creator–Jesus Christ.

Absolutely.  But arguing that Evolution cannot happen without God only proves that God was involved in the Creation, and I already believe that.

Next time, I will pick up at DNA From a Higher Source

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