Graceful Insights with Dr. Kathy Wood

Today’s Episode is titled “No faith? Great faith? Saving faith?” Sometimes the most unlikely people show greater faith than the so-called “religious people” around them. How can that be? What does great faith look like? And what does a person look like who has stopped growing in his faith? In this last episode, let’s answer these questions and we will also look at the most important faith of all – faith that will rescue you.” And once you have it, is it possible for you to lose it?!

Today’s Episode is titled “Where does faith come from… And how does persistence make it grow?” In this segment, we will dig a little more into the origins of faith – where does it come from? And once you have faith, how does it grow? What does persistence in prayer have to do with it?”

Today’s Episode is titled “Is faith that important?” God says that without faith there is absolutely no way that you can please Him. Nothing else you might do can overcome lack of faith in your life. So, how much faith is enough? And can we pray for more faith? We will look into this during this segment.

The way we define “faith” is very different from what the Bible says it is. In fact, biblical faith changes what you do and how you do it… And it is visible to those around you. We’ll look at what faith REALLY is in this podcast.

Many of us say a blessing before we eat and some of us actually ask God to bless us and other people. But what are we asking for? Is a blessing just some vague set of words before a meal or toward a person? No!

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One of my favorite Psalms in the Bible is Psalm 103. Here is how it starts: “Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless His holy name. Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all His benefits.”

The verses after that list some of the things that our God does – some of the things that we should bless God for. Those verses talk about not forgetting all that He has done for us and, since I am prone to forget things, I figure it is a good idea to go over and over and over those things.

As I lay in bed thinking about getting up every morning, it is not unusual, if you could read my mind, to hear these verses flow through my thoughts.

Even in the New Testament of the Bible, there are many references to blessing God. One of them is in Luke 24:53.

The disciples have just seen Jesus, after His resurrection from the dead, ascend into heaven. The disciples go back to Jerusalem rejoicing and verse 53 says “they were continually in the temple blessing God”. They were so excited that this was all they could do! So, what does this word “bless” actually mean?

The Hebrew word is BERAKAH. It means to increase – to increase joy or peacefulness or goodness if it is used toward men.

If it is used toward God, it means an expression of praise or thanks. In Psalm 103, it means we do not hold anything back in our praise and worship of Him – our entire being is praising Him. When it is used to describe how God blesses people, it means “to endow with power for success.”

The Greek word is EULOGEO. It is where we get our English word “eulogy”. It means to praise someone or, if God is doing the blessing, it means to cause a person to prosper or to make them happy.

Blessing God:

Question – Why should we bless God?

Answer – Because we are commanded to bless Him. We are commanded to praise Him, worship Him, exalt Him. As we see the overwhelming beauty of his greatness, how could we not burst out in blessing Him?

Question – How can we bless Someone who lacks nothing? How can we bless God?

Answer – God does not need us to begin with and He does not need anything from us. But He chose us before we ever even knew Him. So, when we bless God we are honoring Him for all that he has done, for His control over all things, for His greatness. That is always appropriate. And it must be a constant part of our relationship with Him. And it must consume our very soul – this is very sobering because most of us are consumed by everything else but this.

Ask yourself this question – if God is who He says He is and if I should be consumed by praise and worship of Him, why am I worried about anything?

Blessing other people:

Numbers 6:22-27 “Then the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, ‘Speak to Aaron and to his sons, saying, “In this way you shall bless the sons of Israel. You are to say to them: The Lord bless you and keep you, the Lord make His face shine upon you, and be gracious to you, the Lord lift up His countenance upon you, and give you peace.”

In these verses, you see that the “blessing” is by God toward his people. If we go back to the definition above, it means that God is asked to bless or increase the security of His people, His favor on His people, His grace toward His people, His peace toward His people. What a wonderful blessing!

Question – So, how can we bless other people?

Answer – A follow-up question to this one is “how does God bless a person”? If we imitate what God does to bless someone, we are making a good start in blessing other people. No, we do not have the power or wisdom to bless people like God does. But there are some ways that we could imitate Him.

For example, maybe you see someone who is sad – God does comfort people when they are sad or troubled so could you comfort that person? Maybe you see someone who has physical needs – God provides what we need so could you share some of what God has given you to help that person?

So, think about all the ways that God blesses you and ask Him how you could do the same for other people. He knows exactly what they need and you may be the one He has given the ability to meet that need and bless that person.

Question – Why should we bless other people? OR How does blessing another person affect you?

Answer – Look at this verse out of the book of Proverbs. Proverbs 11:25 says “the one who blesses others is abundantly blessed; those who help others are helped.” So God helps and blesses those who bless other people. And He blesses them “abundantly”, even more than the blessing that they have given to others.

Question – So, how do blessings work?

Answer – This is a good question. How can just saying a blessing for somebody else make a difference in their life? Aren’t these just “words”? No! When we offer words of blessing to someone, we are actually praying – talking to God – and asking Him to give them favor. God is really the source of all blessing.

Sometimes I really don’t know what another person needs but I do know that that person needs God’s favor. So I ask Him to bless them in any way that He sovereignly knows that they need.

So, speaking of God really being the one who does the blessing, let’s briefly look at… Some other verses that talk about God blessing people or, putting this a different way, how a person can be blessed:

Deuteronomy 30:16-20 “I [Moses] command you today to love the Lord your God, to walk in His ways and to keep His commandments and His statutes and His judgments, that you may live and multiply, and that the Lord your God may bless you in the land where you are entering to possess it. 17 But if your heart turns away and you will not obey, but are drawn away and worship other gods and serve them, 18 I declare to you today that you shall surely perish. You will not prolong your days in the land where you are crossing the Jordan to enter [v]and possess it. 19 I call heaven and earth to witness against you today, that I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. So choose life in order that you may live, you and your [w]descendants, 20 by loving the Lord your God, by obeying His voice, and by holding fast to Him; for [x]this is your life and the length of your days,”

Question – So, how can a person be blessed by God? What did He say?

Answer – By loving God, by obeying God, and by clinging to Him. This next verse is similar.

Jeremiah 17:7 “Blessed are those who trust in the Lord and have made the Lord their hope and confidence.” God says He will bless those who trust Him.

Question – What is this verse really saying?

Answer – That we can expect – expect – God to bless us if we choose to trust Him with everything. God’s blessing is up to Him. He knows what form the blessing needs to take and He can be counted on to do what is perfectly right toward you in every case. That is why He becomes that person’s hope and confidence.

Here is another similar one – Matthew 11:6 “And blessed is any person who does not take offense at Me.” – Jesus said this in response to some questions about John the Baptist. John had sent some of his disciples to Jesus to ask Jesus if He was really the one they were looking for, the Messiah. This verse is essentially saying that if a person believes that Jesus is who He says He is, that person is blessed.

And finally, this next verse in Acts 3:26 “God raised up His Servant for you 1st, and sent Him to bless you by turning every one of you from your wicked ways.”

This verse talks about another way God blesses people – He works in their hearts to turn them away from evil so that they can turn to Him and be saved.

This topic on blessing is a little different for me because defining a blessing is difficult, as far as I am concerned. When I ask God to bless someone, a lot of the time I don’t know exactly what I am asking! I just know that God knows what that person needs and I am asking Him to carry out what He already knows that person needs. And then when I think about blessing God, what an awesome opportunity I have to exalt the greatest Person in all creation and outside of creation. If you think about it, it is actually a great gift God has given us to be allowed to bless Him. He doesn’t need my blessing. He is complete without it. But He has granted us – me – the privilege of blessing Him.

Wow.

In our final episode on evolution, we ask, exactly how did life begin on the earth? Did it crawl out of a primordial soup? Did God really create all the plants and animals – and even humans? Or did humans evolve from animals called primates? And finally, isn’t it possible to believe in both evolution and creation and avoid the controversy altogether?

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Today we will actually touch on several additional questions that arise in the evolution/creation controversy plus we will look at the origins of life and the universe as a whole.

Let’s talk about life first. Evolutionists believe in the spontaneous origin of life, although it is unknown how that might have occurred. In fact, the probability of life arising by chance on earth over 5 billion years ago was calculated by 2 evolutionists (Sir Fred Hoyle and Dr. Chandra Wickramasinghe) as being one chance out of 1 followed by 40,000 zeros, or essentially 0. Both of these individuals now say that any life in the universe had to be created. They are not biblical creationists but are atheists, and they believe life had to be created – somehow.

Most evolutionists do not believe there is a God but many of them do believe there is a God. In fact, in a round table discussion on PBS a few years ago, the comment was made that “science has nothing to say one way or the other about the existence of God”.

The most generally held evolutionist belief about the origin of life says that life arose on the early Earth by a series of progressive chemical reactions. That is how it is put in the Britannica encyclopedia. These progressive chemical reactions are unknown and may have been highly improbable chemical events.

Well, what do the science textbooks say about all this? Most of them report on an experiment in 1952 set up by Dr. Harold Urey and a graduate student named Stanley Miller. Their theory was that life began in something called a primordial soup – a primordial soup made up of ammonia, methane, and water, among other things and zapped with an electric current as if it had been struck by lightning. When they looked at the molecules that came out of this experiment, they found amino acids. Amino acids make up all of our proteins. They thought that perhaps these were the beginning molecules that would later come together to form something that was living.

Since then, scientists have decided that Earth’s early atmosphere may not have been exactly like the Urey-Miller experiment assumed but they believe that some kind of primordial soup was a precursor to life.

Creationists on the other hand, propose that the Bible is a credible source of how life and the universe originated and we will get into that in a moment. First, though, let’s do some physics! Creationists bring up the 2nd law of thermodynamics to explain why the evolutionist concept of how life began can’t be true. The 2nd law of thermodynamics assumes that things become more and more chaotic or disordered over time. If the 2nd law is true, those primordial soup molecules should go from order to disorder and that is what we see in nature. Evolutionary theory, on the other hand, is essentially saying that these beginning molecules become more and more ordered until they were so complex that life somehow occurred. They suggest that the universe itself started in a state of chaos because of a Big Bang. This Big Bang Theory proposes that billions of years ago all energy and all matter somehow was crammed into a small space. It suddenly exploded and expanded at a large speed – the Big Bang. From this, everything in the universe somehow evolved. From this chaos, everything in the universe became less and less chaotic. That is not what the 2nd law of thermodynamics says. Creationists therefore say that life could not have started that way.

Evolutionists, however, counter that argument by saying that the 2nd law of thermodynamics is big enough to handle that apparent problem. If part of the universe is becoming more and more chaotic and disordered, other parts could become more and more ordered at the same time. A very good example of this is the snowflake. Snowflake crystals are highly ordered and form naturally. This is a physics argument and it is a good one.

So, how did humans come about? Evolutionists believe that humans evolved from ape-like beasts which had evolved from lower forms of life – evolution. Creationists on the other hand point back to the Bible which declares that God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit were each personally involved in creation, including the creation of humans. This is first mentioned in the book of Genesis in the Bible which describes how God created woman by transforming a rib of Adam, the 1st man, into Eve, the 1st woman. According to Genesis, Adam was immediately made in the image of God and Eve was made Adam – they were both created fully formed. We find this confirmed in the New Testament in 1st Corinthians 11:8 which talks about “the man does not originate from the woman, but the woman is from the man”. Jesus also confirmed this in Matthew 19:4 when he quoted Genesis 1 as a historical authority. Since Jesus accepted the early chapters of Genesis as literal, the Christian who is in evolutionist essentially finds himself in disagreement with Jesus.

More recently, theistic evolution has grown in popularity because of its acceptance by some of the leading evangelical pastors and theologians. Theistic evolution proposes that Genesis 1 does not refer to 6 normal days of creation; and that the flood described in Genesis was not a worldwide flood. They also say that God used evolutionary processes to create everything that has ever lived. Therefore, another question that must be answered by theistic evolutionists is how can one decide which portions of the Bible should be taken literally and which parts should be considered impossible and unscientific, or perhaps just parables? What about the raising of Lazarus from the dead? What about the changing of water into wine? What about the virgin birth of Jesus Christ? All of these involved divine creation and none of them can be explained biologically.

Some creationists have come up with a different take on this, saying that yes, God created Adam and Eve directly but that there were people outside the Garden of Eden who God created in a different way, i.e., by evolution. They say that those people ended up intermingling with the descendants of Adam and Eve. Currently, this is a fringe idea.

Creationists argue that evolution of man from a primate does not include a fall from an initially perfect man, such as we find in Genesis. If there was no fall, there would also be no need of a Savior from sin. Another thing to consider is that “death” entered the picture when Adam and Eve sinned. Prior to that, apparently all life was immortal according to Genesis 2:17. In Romans 6:23, we read that “the wages of sin is death”. So death was not originally part of the plan. According to the Bible, creation was cursed after Adam’s sin when death entered the world. And without death, evolution is not possible. Evolution depends on death occurring.

So, we have finally reached the end of our discussion of the controversy between creationism and evolution. Honestly, we could have continued looking at this argument for several more podcasts but I really just wanted you to be aware of the main points that are argued. When all is said and done, both evolutionists and creationists depend on faith that their viewpoint is the correct one. Evolutionists have faith in science and its ability, they say, to explain life and origins. Creationists have faith in what God has said in the Bible about life and origins. Neither group can go back in time as far as to actually prove what they believe.

So, why does it even matter? Even in the 1920s, some religious fundamentalists charged that teaching evolution in the schools would destroy faith in God and faith in the Bible. They also argued that there was a danger to morality and ethical standards because students would be taught that humans are only advanced animals, no more than that. If the evolutionary concept of survival of the fittest is followed, this would promote stepping on others to get what you wanted – stepping on others to survive – and that is not what the Bible teaches.

So, in conclusion, as a Christian, I believe in the inerrancy of the Bible. I accept what it says even if I can’t explain all of it as a scientist. As a scientist, I am okay with that because there is a God who ultimately is in control of all that we see. He can intervene in our world at any time. I have no idea all that happened during the creation of the world and the universe and life as we know it. I do, however, believe that a God as powerful as our God is can do anything He wants to at any time. We have a choice to believe what the Bible says or to come up with an explanation outside of what we read in the Bible. It’s really kind of simple.

Some kinds of evolution DO occur, like dogs and Archaeopteryxes. And what about fossils? They do exist so isn’t that an example of evolution? And what about those vestigial organs? We will hit on all of these in this segment.

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So far, we have looked at evolution/creation terminology as well as a brief history of the controversy overall. In our last podcast, we also looked at one piece of evidence used by evolutionists to support the evolutionary theory – similarities between living plants and animals. This led us into a brief look at how DNA in different organisms is remarkably similar and what that might mean. We also looked at mutations and how some mutations might produce different species. Let’s continue on with this idea.

As I mentioned in the previous podcast, this is probably a good place to bring up another common disagreement between creationists and evolutionists – the subject of macroevolution versus microevolution. Macroevolution means that a species of plant or animal will change, generally over a very long period of time, into a completely different species, generally because of gene mutations. (Remember that 2 organisms are considered to be different species if they cannot successfully breed with each other. We’ve discussed this in a previous podcast.)

Microevolution looks at changes within a species over time which may be the beginning of making a new species. The bacteria I just mentioned are an example of this. Maybe a more familiar example is the dog species. We have lots of very different looking dogs out there! Think of tiny Chihuahuas and huge great Danes. Even though they look very different, they are still a single species – the dog. All the different breeds of dogs are due to tiny changes in their DNA, i.e., microevolution. Creationists agree that microevolution does occur and occurs relatively often. They disagree, however, with the idea of macro evolution. Their main evidence for disagreeing with macro evolution is that we should find what are called transitional organisms – these are organisms in the fossil record which are clearly “in between” 2 different species. They are “transitional”. Evolutionists claim that we see these transitional forms in human fossils but creationists disagree. Creationists say that the supposedly transitional forms in human fossils are really just a different variety of human.

To continue on with this thought, evolutionists point to the Archaeopteryx as a transitional form, saying that it has feathers and a skeleton similar to birds but also has features of dinosaurs. Creationists disagree with this view of Archaeopteryx and say that it is simply a bird that went extinct and it had some features of reptiles but was not a reptile.

Talking about Archaeopteryx actually takes us into the 2nd area of evidence for evolutionary theory – the fossil records. In fact, the fossil records are the primary piece of evidence for the evolutionary theory, but also for creationism. Over the centuries, scientists have found literally thousands of fossils. However, in all this time, few fossils have been found that could be viewed as “transitional forms”. Even Darwin noticed this, but he thought it was because the fossil record was still incomplete. He hoped that this would change the longer that fossils were being studied. One noted evolutionist has said that most of these “gaps” are still there a century later – not much has changed as far as transitional forms are concerned.

In earth history as the evolutionists see it, there are at least 6 large time divisions which are characterized by the increasing complexity of life forms found in them. Each of these large time divisions is further broken up into smaller periods of time. One of these smaller periods of time is called the Cambrian Period. During this period, many complex invertebrates all of a sudden appear. (An invertebrate is a life form without a backbone. So, a good example of this is an earthworm or an insect or a snail or… Lots of animals are classified as invertebrates.)

What is surprising to evolutionists about the Cambrian Period is that there are no transitional fossils found for any of the lifeforms seen during this period of time. A staunch evolutionist named Richard Dawkins says “It is as though they were just planted there, without any evolutionary history. Needless to say, this appearance of sudden planting has delighted creationists.” According to another evolutionist, Douglas Futuyma, “all the invertebrate phyla have appeared in the fossil record with absolutely no evidence that they arose from preceding lifeforms”, (i.e., there are no transitional fossils for any of those organisms).

There are also no ancestors or transitional forms in the fossil record for the major classes of fish either. Some very well-known evolutionists all agree on this. This lack of evidence actually supports creation, not evolution.

I remember some questions that my college students brought up several years ago, questioning how long it took to make a fossil. Would not fossils take hundreds or thousands or even millions of years to be made naturally? This is actually an interesting question and I looked into it at the time. Fossilization typically requires 3 conditions – the organism must have some hard parts, like bones, in its body; the organism must not be immediately destroyed; and the right geochemical conditions must be in the sediment or dirt where the organism dies. The 2nd condition – the organism not being immediately destroyed – mostly depends on how many soft parts are found in that organism. Soft parts are eagerly chewed on by surrounding bacteria and fungi, so once an animal dies, its body rapidly decays. That would prevent fossilization of those soft parts of the body. If there is a way for the soft parts to be preserved – i.e., may be the minerals in the soil prevent bacterial growth – the soft parts may become fossilized.

So, if all the conditions are good, something could become fossilized in a short amount of time. An interesting example of this is a fossilized hat found in a mine in Tasmania. Obviously, the hat was not millions of years old, or even hundreds of years old. It was estimated to be about 50 years old but every part of it was now hard rock. Evolutionists recognize the possibility of fossilization occurring in a very rapid span of time, but they do not believe that this occurred in most of the fossils in our fossil record.

Let’s move on to another piece of evidence used to support evolutionary theory – how species are distributed geographically. It is clear that some species only exist in certain places in the world. For example, it is interesting that Australia has many marsupials but few placental land animals. What do these terms mean? A marsupial is a mammal known for carrying its young in a pouch. We have a marsupial here in Texas – the opossum! Australia has kangaroos, wallabies, wombats, and several other marsupial species that you have probably never heard of. More than any other large landmass in the world. But Australia has relatively few placental land animals. A placental land animal is an animal that carries its young inside the body until they are born. Like a dog or cat or human. So why do the majority of marsupials live in Australia and surrounding islands? Perhaps because Australia is where this type of animal originated and then it spread to other places, producing new species through evolutionary change as it spread.

Evolutionists further suggest that sometimes a group of organisms becomes isolated from the rest of its species geographically. Conditions for this group might be different than they are for the others of that species. Then the isolated group starts accumulating genetic changes to such an extent that if you put the 2 groups back together again, they would not be able to breed with each other anymore. This could be the 1st step in making a new species. We see evidence of this happening even today when a small group of animals become separated from a larger group of the same animal. If the separation lasts too long, and if environmental conditions are very different between the 2 groups, those 2 groups may not be able to interbreed if they are ever put back together.

We only have a few minutes left in this podcast so let’s change topics for a moment and look at vestigial organs. A vestigial organ is an organ found in a present-day organism that has no function currently. Evolutionists several years ago had a list of such organs that they considered vestigial but all of the organs on the list have since been found to have important functions. An example of such a vestigial organ is the human appendix. The appendix is a thin tube found where the small intestine and large intestine meet. For many years it was considered to be completely useless but scientists now think it is involved in the development of immunity. Especially in early life, the appendix helps certain white blood cells mature and is involved in the production of certain antibodies that help us fight disease.

So that’s it for this podcast. In our next and final segment to this fascinating controversy between evolution and creation, we will take a look at the origin of life, including humans, and briefly touch on how the universe came about.

In today’s episode, we’ll finish up with a history of the controversy, even looking at how Texas plays a part. Then, onto the “hot issues” like how old is the earth? And what “flavors” of creationism are there? And finally, lots of different organisms are really very similar – what is that all about?

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So far, we have gone over some of the terminology dealing with evolutionary theory and we have also taken a quick look at a large part of the history of the evolution/creation controversy. So, in this podcast we will finish up the history and then jump into some of the “hot issues” surrounding this controversy. But history first!

As I mentioned in the previous podcast, creationists have been unsuccessfully arguing since the 1980s for equal opportunity to teach creationism in public schools along with evolution. We looked at several court cases to illustrate this. Let’s continue with this line of thought.

In 2019, there were 5 anti-evolution bills introduced in the United States, mostly to protect teachers who wanted to add information about creationism as they taught evolutionary theory, in the interests of “academic freedom”. The main argument that these bills have faced is that in teaching alternative theories to evolution, it presents these theories as equally scientifically valid even though the scientific community as a whole does not agree with them.

It is argued by the scientific community that this anti-evolution and pro-creationist sentiment could have a huge negative impact on students and our educational system as a whole. According to the pro-evolutionist argument, 1st of all because it is unconstitutional to teach creationism and secondly because it may let students reject science and the scientific method in favor of keeping their pre-existing beliefs without questioning those beliefs at all. As the world becomes more scientifically oriented, a larger number of students would be unprepared to compete.

Now let’s take a quick look at Texas. What we do in Texas sometimes affects the entire United States, believe it or not. In 2013, the Texas Board of Education approved a biology textbook presenting evolution as the only explanation for development of life on earth. This was followed in 2017 by the elimination of any language that openly questioned evolution in the science curriculum of Texas schools. Since public schools are funded by the state, it was decided that much care had to be taken to prevent infringing on the 1st Amendment which deals with establishing religion within a government entity.

Well, why does that matter, except in Texas? Here’s the answer – Texas purchases more high school science textbooks than any other state. That means that whatever science standards are approved by the Texas Board of Education will be in the textbooks ordered by the state and this to a great extent determines what textbooks are used throughout the United States.

I think we have had enough history for now!

Now, let’s shift over to some of the hot issues surrounding this controversy. Let me say from the beginning that we could actually spend hours on the “hot issues”. If you simply Google the evolution/creation controversy, you can immediately see that lots of people have lots to say on both sides of the argument. We don’t have time to deal with all of that but, as I mentioned in the last podcast, we will touch on the biggest areas of disagreement – the origin and age of the earth, the origin of life on the earth, and the origin of humans as we continue. So here we go!

Exactly how old is the earth? Evolutionary theory states that organisms originated/developed about 4.5 billion years ago and that humans are a relatively “new creation” which evolved from previous, lesser organisms and that we are still evolving into something even better. Creationists, on the other hand, base their position on what the Bible says about God creating the earth and all life, and specifically, humans. However, creationists do not all agree on how long it took God to create the earth and life – we will look at some differences in a minute. Nor do they agree on HOW He did it. They do, however, believe that the Bible clearly indicates that we are God’s final creation. In other words, humans are not evolving into something else.

So, let’s look at the different “kinds” of creationism that are out there. We won’t get into all the different types of creationism out there but let’s look at a few of them. The Young Earth creationists and Gap creationists state that God created humanity and that humans did not evolve from earlier primates. (The primates include monkeys, apes, and humans, among a few other animals.) They believe that humans were specially created by God, not by evolution. The main difference between Young Earth and Gap creationism is that the Young Earth creationists say that the earth is less than 10,000 years old and is probably actually around 6000 years old while the Gap creationists believe that the earth really is billions of years old – that whatever science says about it is true. The Young Earth creationists base their belief on a literal reading of the book of Genesis in the Bible which says that all life was created in 6 days. They also look at the genealogical records recorded in the Bible – these records show how long individuals lived and if you add up all the times, it approximates 6000 years, although if the records are not complete, there may be a few thousand years more to reckon with.

Progressive creationists say that humans were specially created by God, but that He based their creation on the anatomy of evolving primates. Intelligent Design creationists say that there was divine or special intervention in the creation of humans and the rest of life on earth because life is too complex to have happened randomly by natural selection. Those holding the theistic evolution viewpoint believe that God “oversaw” creation but strictly used normal evolution to carry out the creative process. Theistic evolutionists differ from strict evolutionists primarily in that they believe God managed the evolution – that the appearance of life on earth was not random in any way.

So what are the main pieces of evidence cited by evolutionists as supporting the theory of evolution? First, similarities between different organisms, especially within their DNA, then the fossil records, the distribution of species geographically, and recorded changes in species. We should also add that in some cases, direct observation, especially in organisms that have short life spans, is also evidence used to support the theory of evolution.

Let’s look at the similarities between different organisms. When scientists began to classify living organisms into different taxonomic groups, the groupings primarily depended on similarities in the anatomy of organisms and, especially in the anatomy of the embryos of those organisms. It was thought that if 2 embryos looked pretty much alike, they probably had a common ancestor.

Since we are able now to look at the actual sequences of genes in different organisms and then compare those sequences to each other, it did not take long to figure out that the compared gene sequences were remarkably similar. The explanation for this by evolutionists is the idea of “common descent”. Common descent means that creatures that have similar genes in their DNA must have evolved from a common ancestor. So, according to evolutionists, if genes in different species are similar in their DNA sequence, that means that there was a common ancestor whose genes changed a little bit so that we ended up with different species. Other than the theistic evolutionists, most creationists do not agree with the evolutionary theory idea of “common descent”. Instead, they say that common genes only mean that the different species had a common designer, which was God.

Since we are talking about DNA right now, this is the perfect place to talk about mutations that can occur in DNA. These mutations are changes in the DNA sequence that can be inherited by the offspring of those animals or plants. Geneticists have long realized that most mutations are deleterious – i.e., they hurt that species – but some mutations are actually helpful to the species. For example, bacteria commonly pick up mutations and even other genes from other species of bacteria that allow them to be resistant to our antibiotics. Obviously, this is a positive mutation as far as the bacteria are concerned!

Along these same lines, creationists consider the process of evolution to be a random process. Evolutionists disagree with this. Indeed, mutations in DNA and in genes may occur randomly but once they have occurred, natural selection is not at all random. For example, if an organism gets a new characteristic because of the mutation, and this characteristic helps them survive a little better and reproduce, that particular characteristic will tend to increase in the population of that organism. Of course, the reverse is also true. That is what natural selection or “survival of the fittest” is and it is not random.

This is probably a good place to bring up another common disagreement between creationists and evolutionists – the subject of macro evolution versus micro evolution. But we have run out of time! Macro evolution and microevolution really introduce the 2nd area of evidence for evolutionary theory anyway – the fossil records. Let’s save that for the next segment, where we will also talk about something called biogeography and those tricky vestigial organs, like the appendix. See you next time!

The idea of evolution as a logical way to explain how we get the great variety of living organisms that we see today has not been around forever. In fact, it is a relatively new concept that gained ground when science came on the scene. Let’s explore how the theory of evolution became so entrenched in our society.

FULL TRANSCRIPT:

Well, here we are again, part 2 of the Evolution/Creation controversy. In the 1st podcast, we covered some of the terminology that goes along with evolution and looked at some survey results in the United States to see what people say they believe about evolution and creation. In this podcast, we are going to look at some of the history behind this controversy.

Some evolutionary concepts show up even in early Greek writings but not much. We don’t really see the idea of evolution of plants and animals to make different species show up until scientific observations and experimentation began to grow in the mid-1800s. Until that time, the church prevented these evolutionary concepts from developing. Divine creation as explained in the Bible was the predominant belief. The church was very powerful in determining what its membership believed – a person could even be excommunicated if they deviated from church doctrine.

However, as science began to develop, nonbiblical ideas of how life came about started to show up. The 1st evolutionary theory promoted by a scientist was the “inheritance of acquired characteristics”. Essentially, this theory proposed that anything that happened to a living organism during its life (a.k.a., and acquired characteristic) could be passed down to its offspring. A man by the name of August Weissman was not so sure that this was a good theory so he set up an experiment to test it out. He took some mice and cut off their tails and let them breed. The offspring had perfectly normal tails. So he cut those off too and let them breed. He kept doing this for 22 generations of mice. The offspring never had short tails – obviously the “acquired characteristic” of their parents did not affect the kids!

In the 1880s, August Weissman published the currently held germ-plasm theory which defended natural selection, a key part of evolutionary theory. Remember that natural selection says that variations among individuals arise in nature and some variations are advantageous under some conditions because they enable the organism to leave more surviving offspring. These variations are inheritable. Scientists believe that natural selection actually drives evolutionary change.

So, how does natural selection happen? Changes occur at the gene level in our DNA either as genes mutate or as they recombine in different ways during reproduction. These changed genes are passed on to future generations. Genes determine what an organism looks like and how it operates. Mutations are “mistakes” in the DNA that often occur naturally. Positive mutations give a benefit of some kind to the organism and may help that organism be better able to survive in its environment. Most mutations, however, seem to be negative mutations. Some of these mutations are serious enough that the organism does not survive and cannot pass the mutation down to its offspring.

Modern evolutionary theory was founded by the observations of Charles Darwin and, independently, by Alfred Wallace. We don’t hear much about Wallace. However, Wallace believed that divine intervention was required for human origin. Darwin wrote up his observations in a very famous book called “On the Origin of Species” published in 1859.

There were several other well-known scientists at that time and over the years that agreed that genetics and natural selection could explain the development of different species. So, by 1950, Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection was universally accepted by biologists.

Going along with this acceptance, questions arose about what should be taught in the schools. Perhaps the most well-known trial in the court system occurred in 1925 in Tennessee. It was called the Scopes Monkey Trial, named after John Scopes, a teacher in Tennessee. He began to teach evolution in his classes but Tennessee state law prohibited evolution being taught. The trial was a big sensation and was even broadcast on the radio! Scopes was found guilty but this verdict was overturned in the Tennessee Supreme Court, apparently because of a technicality, so that the state law preventing evolution from being taught was upheld in Tennessee.

By the late 1950s, the United States was becoming afraid that we were falling behind in science so Congress passed the National Defense Education Act to improve science education. As a result of this, several new textbooks were written by scientists who made sure that evolution was a part of those textbooks.

As evolutionary theory was becoming more common in the classroom because of the textbooks, the controversy between evolution and creation also became more common in society. In 1968, the US Supreme Court in the Epperson versus Arkansas case, determined that banning evolution education was a violation of the First Amendment. The First Amendment prohibits government from establishing a religion. So, if only creation could be taught in the classroom and if creation is supported by religion (i.e., the Bible), the court decided this was supporting religion. Their decision, as mentioned a moment ago, therefore also required that teaching evolutionary theory be allowed.

19 years later, in 1987, the Supreme Court used the same reasoning to ban a Louisiana law, which required that if evolution were taught in school, creation science must also be taught in that school. This was the Edwards versus Aguillard case. The court ruled that requiring the teaching of creationism or forbidding the teaching of evolution would violate the separation of church and state. The court added that “teaching a variety of scientific theories about the origins of humans might be validly done with the clear intent of enhancing the effectiveness of science instruction”.

This is a good time to bring up the accompanying controversy associated with the term “creation science”. Prior to 1923, those upholding the belief in creationism did not seriously argue against evolutionary theory on the level of science. This was about to change. “Creation science” is a form of Young Earth creationism which claims to offer scientific arguments for the biblical account of the origins of the universe, earth, life, and humanity. Creation science proponents claim that the Bible contains an accurate and literal account of these origins – that all life was created in 6 days.

Evolutionists take exception to the term Creation Science because they claim there is nothing scientific about it. They say creation science is unscientific because it cannot be tested and events cannot be observed or re-created. Interestingly, this is the same argument that creationists use against evolution!

The last court case I will mention today, although certainly not the last one in reality, is the Kitzmiller versus Dover case which was tried in Dover, Pennsylvania in 2005. A local school board required teachers to begin biology classes by reading a statement about Intelligent Design. The court ruled this unconstitutional because “creation science” was deemed a religious theory, not a science. You may remember that Intelligent Design or ID is the belief that life is so complex that it could not have come about except by the activity of an intelligent designer of some kind.

So, creation versus evolution is still as big an argument today as it used to be and since the 1980s, creationists have argued for equal opportunity to teach creationism in the public schools along with evolution so that academic freedom is insured. Evolutionists, however, argue that evolution is supported by evidence that is testable using the scientific method but that creationism cannot be tested in the same way. Therefore, creationism should not be in any science curriculum.

So the bottom line as far as the courts are concerned is that teaching evolution cannot be banned in a school and requiring equal time for the teaching of creationism along with evolution is not acceptable.

We still have a little bit of “history” to go over, some of which is specific to Texas. And we also need to go deeper into why this controversy between evolution and creation is important to understand, especially as far as education of children is concerned. But we have run out of time in this podcast to get into that. That’s where we will start in the next podcast.

How does a scientist who is also a Christian know where to stand on the evolution/creation controversy? Is there a point in the middle? And where do most people stand in the United States? We will look at all of these questions in this segment.

FULL TRANSCRIPT:

I have been asked to prepare a series of podcasts dealing with the controversy surrounding creation and evolution. As a biologist who is also a Christian, the tension between these 2 points of view has been ongoing in my life for many years. When I was a very young Christian as a graduate student studying biology, I remember sitting in a classroom where the evolution of a particular protein was being discussed. I was kind of clueless – I did not know that questioning evolution was a hot topic, so to speak. So I raised my hand and asked how the professor knew that this protein had actually evolved this way? My professor immediately stopped talking, looked me in the eye, and asked me if I was one of those people who was a creationist. At the time, I was quite shocked to be called out like that and I really did not know what to say. Frankly, it about scared me to death!

Since that time, I’ve come to realize that there are some serious tensions between science and religion when evolution and creation are brought up. For many years I just tried to ignore these tensions. I tried to believe both sides of the argument. Kind of hard to do, but somehow I managed to do it! (In fact, as I have talked with college students over the years, I find that many of them who were brought up in a Christian home have some considerable concerns about how to make what they learn in school agree with what they learned in church. Most of them just choose not to think about it too much.)

So, back to my story: Then as a college professor myself, I was asked to teach an introductory biology course in which the textbook described the idea of special creation by God as being “pseudoscience”. Now the tension between evolution and religion was in my face and I had to decide what I truly believed.

My plan for these podcasts is to introduce some of the terminology used when discussing evolution and creation and then to look at the history behind the controversy. We also need to look at why it even matters. What are the repercussions within our society for believing evolution over creation? Then I plan to take a closer look at just a few of the evolution topics found in a typical college introductory biology textbook. Frankly, it would take too long to cover all aspects of the argument surrounding evolution versus creation – currently in my library, I have a book over 500 pages long dealing with some of those arguments! We don’t have time to get into it but there’s plenty of material out there if you want to read further. Finally, we need to decide which of these points of view is correct. So let’s get started.

Evolution, more properly called Darwinian evolution, is the theory 1st put forward by Charles Darwin that life on earth has evolved through natural selection. Natural selection is a process through which plants and animals change over time as they adapt to their environment. If a plant or animal has a trait that makes it able to live longer or more successfully adapt to the environment, it may be able to pass that trait onto its offspring whereas other members of that species aren’t as well adapted and die without passing their traits on. Over a long period of time, these very small changes in traits could theoretically develop an entirely new species.

A species is considered any group of animals or plants that can only reproduce with others like it – one species cannot reproduce with a different species even though they may look very much alike. There have been too many changes within the species to allow it to reproduce with another species. (I will say here that some cross species reproduction may occur at times if the 2 species are closely related but it is definitely not the norm and usually has to be “set up” by human intervention – for example, a lion and a tiger can be crossed to get a “liger” but this is quite infrequent.)

Now, I mentioned that evolution is a theory. So what is a theory? It is a statement or principal which, through scientific observation, reasoning, and experimentation, explains a natural phenomenon. Essentially a theory is a law or fact that is accepted by scientists as being true. The way that scientists see “theories” is very important because in common language, most people consider a theory as something that may or may not be true. They look at it as kind of like a “guess”. But that is not how scientists use this term. In discussions with a scientist about evolution, you must be careful about saying that evolution is “just a theory”, as if it really might not be true.

So, what is creationism? It is the belief that the creation story in the Old Testament of the Hebrew Bible, specifically in the 1st book of the Bible called Genesis, is literally true and that it is an explanation for the creation of the earth and the development of life by God out of nothing.

There is a movement within creationism that has attempted to uncover scientific evidence to show that the biblical creation story is true. This movement has labeled itself “creation science”. Evolutionists question the accuracy of calling any form of creationism “science” since those holding the view that creationism is true, cannot go through the normal processes of observation, reasoning, and experimentation to prove that it is true.

In order to somehow resolve the controversy between evolution versus creation, some people have come up with positions somewhere in between the two. We are not going to get into all of those but one common position that you might run into is the idea of “theistic evolution”. Theistic evolution is a belief held by some religious groups that God is the guiding force behind the process of evolution. These individuals believe that evolution is the true way that life developed on earth – with God’s help or guidance – but they disagree with strict evolutionists who say that evolution had nothing to do with God or any supernatural being.

I remember reading a book several years ago written by a strict evolutionist where he said that if there was a God involved in our world who could “interfere” at any time with the natural processes that we see operating in the world, how could we possibly ever accurately define laws and theories? If God could change things anytime He wanted to, how could we ever know what was really going on? Since we do know what’s going on because we observe it happening all the time, there must not be a God. At 1st glance, his logic might seem pretty good but what if God has set up the laws of nature the way He wanted them set up – gravity, for example – and what if He upholds those laws almost all the time? And what if it is only infrequently that He enters into the creation that He has made and makes something happen that is outside of those laws? Hmmm.

Before going into some of the history behind the controversy between evolution and creationism, I should also mention another frequently held position called Intelligent Design. Intelligent design is a belief that life is too complex to have evolved entirely through natural processes and that therefore an outside, possibly divine force, must have played a role in the origin and development of life. The argument of intelligent design has also made its way into the court system when groups holding that position have tried to influence what is taught in pre-college science curriculums. So far, in every case that has come before the courts, intelligent design has been seen as a non-viable way for creationism to be equally taught with evolution in the classroom.

We don’t have enough time in this podcast today to discuss the history of this controversy. However, you might be interested in some surveys that have been taken over the years in the United States. In 2013, in a Pew Research Center survey, 60% of Americans said humans and other living things evolved over time. This percentage rose to 81% in 2018. In that same survey, 24% said a supreme being guided the evolution of living things – this number increased to 48% in 2018. So it appears that a large percentage of people in the United States agree with the theory of evolution, whether it involves a supreme being or not. In fact the involvement of a supreme being of some kind in evolution (let’s call it “theistic evolution”) seemed to increase over those years.

In 2014 in another survey, 37% of Southern Baptists believed that humans evolved but they believed their evolution was mainly due to God’s design. So, again, theistic evolution. However 58% of Southern Baptists in that survey believed that humans have always existed in their present form – in other words, they did not evolve from something else. In this last group, most of them are in the 30 and above age group – so the younger Southern Baptists are not so sure that humans have always existed in their present form, i.e., were created by God as they exist today.

Finally what about scientists in America? What do they believe? As I have previously mentioned, they say evolution is well-established as a scientific theory and that it is an established explanation for what we see in nature. Most scientists say that evolution through natural selection is a fact. In a 2009 survey, only one third of scientists believed in God. In that same survey, 83% of the general public said that they believed in God. So, as you can see, there is a big difference between these 2 groups as far as their belief in God.

That’s all we have time for today. The next podcast will look at the history of this controversy. I’m not a real history buff myself but I think this is very interesting! Hopefully you will too.