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EVOLUTION – FACT OR SCIENCE FICTION?

by Dr. C. L. Cagan

A sermon preached at the Baptist Tabernacle of Los Angeles
Saturday Morning, September 5, 2015

“Knowing this first, that there shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts, And saying, Where is the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation” (II Peter 3:3-4).


Until about 200 years ago, no scientist believed in evolution. That is the idea that man evolved from lower animals, and ultimately from one-celled creatures called microbes, through small changes over millions of years. Until about 200 years ago, all scientists believed in the Great Flood. All scientists believed that the entire human race had descended from a single man and woman who the Bible calls Adam and Eve.

Then came a man called Charles Lyell (1797-1875) who said there had never been a catastrophic flood. Lyell said that everything on earth had gone on just the same for millions of years. He fulfilled our text in II Peter! He was the first major scoffer “in the last days.”

A few years later, in 1831 Charles Darwin (1809-1882) took a copy of Lyell’s book with him on a ship to the Galapagos Islands. Darwin had no scientific training. His only education was a bachelor’s degree in theology! But he decided that all living things had evolved through a series of small changes, starting from very small and simple microbes of just one cell. From time to time, a creature would be born that was a little different from what came before it. If that change was good, the creature would survive and have its own offspring. In this struggle for the survival of the fittest, gradually more and more advanced creatures would take over the world, until finally ape-like creatures evolved into people. Darwin’s books, The Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871) were instantly sold out of the bookstores. His theories were really science fiction, but people wanted to believe it. Evolution became adopted by the universities and the so-called intellectuals of this world.

I used to believe in evolution. I thought that we had all evolved from lower forms of life. I thought that the Bible was full of errors and had been proven false long ago. I wanted to be a scientific “big shot” – and also make a million dollars before I was thirty. But God intervened and showed me He was real. I still wrestled against Him for two years, even knowing that God was real and that Jesus had died for me. I didn’t want Jesus to be in control of my life, or change my plans. Then one day God drew me to Jesus. I trusted Him. Jesus forgave my sins by His Blood. It was as simple as that.

When I was born again by the Holy Spirit, it was simple to give up evolution. I went to some meetings where two men from the Creation Research Society explained what was wrong with evolution and the evidence for creation. I gave up evolution and have believed in creation ever since! It was really a matter of the heart.

The creation itself points to the God who created it. The Bible says,

“The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge. There is no speech nor language, where their voice is not heard. Their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world” (Psalm 19:1-4).

Again, the Bible says,

“For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse” (Romans 1:20).

If you look at the stars, and at the universe itself, and the beauty of its scientific laws, you know there must be a Lawgiver – a God who made it all. But unconverted people don’t want to submit themselves to God. The Bible says, “the carnal [unconverted, unsaved] mind is enmity against God” (Romans 8:7). That’s why they believe in evolution and not in the Bible. The Bible speaks of them when it says,

“For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness” (Romans 1:18).

The Greek word translated “hold” literally means “hold down” or “suppress.” Yes, the truth is there! But lost people don’t want God’s truth. They hold it down and suppress it, so the truth doesn’t bother them and show them they are sinners. Belief in evolution is not a decision of the mind, it’s a matter of the heart. Today I’m going to show you just that. I’ll show you that evolution is scientifically impossible. The only reason for believing it is to resist God’s truth.

I. First, evolution is impossible because the fossil record is against it.

If evolution were true, there would be an incredibly large number of missing links in the fossil record. There would be millions and billions of what are called transitional forms of life, gradually evolving from fish to bird and from mouse to man. Most of you have seen textbooks with a picture called the “tree of life,” with simple animals at the bottom of the tree going all the way up to humans.

But that just isn’t true! There is no “tree of life” in the fossil record. There ought to be billions of missing links of animals partway between one kind and another – but there just aren’t! There should be as many or more intermediate forms as there are fossils of known kinds – but there aren’t! There are no “missing links” at all!

Every ten years or so, someone finds a tooth or a toe-bone which they claim is a “missing link” between apes and people. Each one of these somehow shows the others were wrong! Fantastic theories have been built on one tooth or one bone – because people want to believe them. Early in the twentieth century, a man named Harold Cook discovered a tooth in Nebraska that was supposed to come from “Nebraska Man.” But in 1927 it was revealed to be the tooth of a pig. In 1891 in Java some bones were found (not together) that were supposed to be the “Java Ape-Man.” Later it was proved that these were the bones of a gibbon, an ape. And in 1912 some bones were discovered that they said proved the missing link was the “Piltdown Man.” That was an outright fraud, with bones stained to make them look old. In 1974 a set of bones were found in Africa that were labeled “Lucy” and called a missing link, but that turned out to be bones of an ape. Some people have said that “Neanderthal Man” was a missing link, but they turned out to be humans who shared our DNA and had children with our ancestors. There has never been a missing link, or a series of transitional forms, that is the evolutionary shift from apes to man, and there never will – because it isn’t there!

Instead, the Bible has been proved true again! In the Book of Genesis we are told,

“And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so. And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good” (Genesis 1:24-25).

The Bible divides animals into what are called “kinds.” A “kind” is a little bigger than what is called a “species” in biology today. There is the dog “kind” which includes dogs and wolves. There is the cat “kind” which includes cats, lions, tigers, lynxes, and other animals. There is the horse “kind,” and so on.

There can be “micro-evolution” within a kind, but never “macro-evolution” from one kind to another. That is, you can put big dogs together for generation after generation and get a breed of big dogs. Or you can breed dogs with white hair, or big ears. You can even put a wolf with a dog. But you can never breed a dog with a cat, or a horse with a bird.

If you put dogs with black hair and send away all dogs with any other color of hair, you will get a breed of dogs with only black hair. You can do the same thing with birds, or cats, or horses. But you can never change a cat into a horse, or a dog into a bird. That can’t happen. The Bible says that creatures breed “after their kind” and in no other way.

The record of fossils provides no support at all for evolution, but a great deal of support for the Bible. The great fossil deposits are evidence of the Great Flood of Noah’s time. Dr. John Whitcomb and Dr. Henry Morris pointed this out:

It is inconceivable that deposits of this sort could be really due to normal, slow...processes. Unusual transportation and rapid burial are indicated…the Sicilian hippopotamus beds, the fossils of which are so extensive that they have actually been mined as a source of commercial charcoal; the great mammal beds of the Rockies; the dinosaur beds of the Black Hills and the Rockies, as well as the Gobi desert; the astounding fish beds of the Scottish Devonian strata, and on and on. To attempt to account for these vast graveyards in terms of present-day processes and events...is absolutely impossible! And yet it is in deposits such as these that most of the fossils are found on which is based much of the generally accepted uniformitarian scheme of historical geology (The Genesis Flood, pp. 160-161).

There are places where fossils are laid down in the opposite order from what Darwinian evolution would state. In Siberia in the 1950s prisoners sometimes lived on what are called “edible fossils” – that had been killed and frozen so quickly that they could be warmed up and eaten. In the same part of the world mammoths (bigger than an elephant) have been found with grass and flowers fresh inside their stomachs. Those animals didn’t die and slowly turn into rocks over millions of years. They died very quickly with the food preserved in their stomachs. They died suddenly, in the Great Flood.

I have seen the Grand Canyon in Arizona. It is hundreds of miles long, five to ten miles wide, and thousands of feet deep, all carved out of solid rock. At the bottom is a small river of water. The evolutionists say the canyon was slowly carved out over sixty million years. But it is obvious to me that there was once a lot more water than there is now. That canyon was carved out by the water of the Great Flood!

There are legends of the Flood in almost every culture and tribe of the world. When I was a boy I read about the Indians of the Northwest United States. The city of Seattle is named after one of their chiefs. They have a story about a man named Coyote who escaped from a worldwide flood in a boat! I have read that the Fijians had this story,

The god Ndengei...caused the earth to be flooded with rain. The [people] sat securely as the surrounding lands were submerged, until the waters reached their walls. They prayed to another god for direction, and they were brought canoes (or taught how to make them) by Rokoro, the god of carpenters, and his foreman Rokola...They floated around picking up other survivors. The receding tide left a total of eight survivors on the island of Mbengha. [Hans Kelsen, 1943. "The Principle of Retribution in the Flood and Catastrophe Myths,” in The Flood Myth, edited by Alan Dundes, University of California Press, Berkeley and London, 1988,.p. 131; and Theodor H. Gaster, Myth, Legend, and Custom in the Old Testament, Harper & Row, New York, 1969, p. 106].

In this Fijian story, why were there eight people saved – the same number as in Noah’s Ark? Did the memory of Noah’s Ark carry on so far and so long? I think so.

When evolutionists see that the geological record doesn’t support their theory, do they repent and turn to Christ? When they see that the millions of missing links they are supposed to find just aren’t there, do they believe the Bible? No! They invent another idea to hold down the truth.

Now they are saying that evolution moved forward in a few great leaps. For many millions of years at a time, there was little or no evolution. But in a few short periods of time, there were gigantic changes where entire new groups of living creatures suddenly appeared. That is, evolution is too slow in the present, but it was too fast in the past! It can’t be seen either way – and you’re supposed to believe it by faith. Evolution demands far more of a “leap of faith” than Christianity ever did.

They speak of the “Cambrian explosion.” They say that about 543 million years ago the major groups of animals suddenly appeared. They have many hypothetical causes. They say something happened with the oxygen or the ozone in the atmosphere, or something in the ocean. But suddenly the major types of animals appeared. They didn’t evolve slowly, they just appeared. That sounds like the Bible, not evolution! On one day of the Creation week,

“God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so. And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good” (Genesis 1:24-25).

That’s what really happened. God did it. That’s good enough for me!

They wonder what killed the dinosaurs. They don’t want to believe that the dinosaurs died in the Flood. They don’t want to believe that dinosaur footprints have been found next to human footprints, showing that men and dinosaurs lived on earth at the same time. Instead they say something which at first they refused to believe – that 65 million years ago a giant meteor landed in southern Mexico and stirred up dust into the air, which changed the climate and killed the dinosaurs. They’ll believe anything and try anything to hold their theory and not believe what God says.

Man has sent robots to the planet Mars. The main mission of these spacecraft was to search for life – life in the present, or at least life in the past. They had cameras and equipment for chemical analysis. They tried to find living creatures on the surface of Mars, or buried under the surface. Then they tried to find evidence of dead creatures on the surface or under the dirt – fossils, bones, pieces of bodies, even single cells. What were they trying to do? They were trying to prove evolution! They want to believe that evolution is a universal truth that will happen anywhere where there is light and water and certain chemicals. They don’t want to admit that they need God! But they couldn’t find any creatures on Mars, living or dead. Now they say there are oceans of chemicals on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, and there might be something living there. They keep on trying, because the alternative is believing in God? If there is a God, then how do you know Him? Through the Bible. If there is a God, how do you stand before Him when you die? Through Jesus Christ and His Blood sacrifice on the Cross. But unbelievers don’t want to turn to Christ. They want to “hold [hold down, suppress] the truth in unrighteousness” (Romans 1:18).

Can you believe in evolution and be a consistent Christian? No! Evolution and Christianity are opposites that contradict each other. The Bible says,

“Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned” (Romans 5:12).

One man – Adam – sinned, and brought sin and death upon the whole human race, down to you and me. The only way to deal with sin was for Christ Himself to come and die on the Cross, and make a Blood sacrifice for sin. Again, the Bible says,

“For as by one man's [Adam] disobedience many were made sinners, so by the obedience of one [Christ] shall many be made righteous” (Romans 5:19).

Adam brought sin and death. Christ died to pay for our sins. He rose from the dead to bring us life. Christ undid what Adam did. The Bible says, “The first man Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam was made a quickening [life-giving] spirit” (I Corinthians 15:45).

There is a clear and direct correspondence between Adam and Christ. In fact, Christ is called “the last Adam.” But if the human race evolved from ape-like creatures, there was no Adam. There was no act of sin that brought death into the human race. Death is something natural that has happened to all creatures for billions of years and can never be changed. There is no salvation and no eternal life. Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones said that he couldn’t be a Christian if there wasn’t a man named Adam who sinned. There would be no explanation for sin in the human race, and no special place for Jesus Christ. Without Adam, Christianity doesn’t make sense.

In evolution, there is no such thing as sin. People kill each other because in the past they had to live by hunting, and before that animals lived by killing other animals and eating plants. People commit sexual sin because they have an urge to have sex, and this urge leads to reproduction. That is, people sin because they can’t help it. They act like animals because they are animals. They don’t have to feel bad about what they do, because it’s the way they are evolved to be. There is no concept of right and wrong. There is no such thing as sin. You follow the urges of your body, and then you die like an animal, and that’s it.

People don’t believe in evolution because it is scientifically true. Quite the reverse. We know that evolution has no support from the fossil record. Now we’ll see that evolution cannot have happened at all. Life is too complicated to have developed that way.

II. Second, evolution is impossible because life is far too complex to have developed by chance.

Who said that? Why, Charles Darwin himself! Darwin admitted his theory would break down if there were systems that could not be done by small changes. He said,

If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down (The Origin of Species, 6th edition, 1872).

In biology, there are many organs and systems which are too complicated to evolve by small changes by chance over time.

In the time of Darwin, people thought that a single cell was just a very small blob of protoplasm, a bag of biological mush. But now we know better. Even a single cell is an incredibly complicated construction, which could not possibly have risen by chance.

Dr. Michael Denton, in his book, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, tells us that one cell resembles a huge automated factory, larger than a city, carrying out hundreds of different functions. Remember that it is just a single cell he is writing about! The human body consists of trillions of cells of different types, organized in incredibly complicated arrangements. The complexity of one cell, not to speak of the human body itself, is impossible to understand in terms of simple molecular motion and semi random combinations. The amount of information required is simply staggering, which points to an intelligent Designer (see Michael Denton, M.D., Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, Bethesda, Maryland: Adler & Adler, 1986, pp. 328-329).

But the most serious evidence against evolution is what is called irreducible complexity. There are many examples of organs and creatures which work – which make sense – only as complete systems. The separate parts don’t work. They don’t help the animal that has them, and so under evolution would not be passed on to the next generation. If something only works on an “all or nothing” basis, this is called irreducible complexity.

A mousetrap is an example of something that works only as a complete system. The individual parts are no help to anyone. Which part could be missing and still allow you to catch a mouse? If the wooden base were gone, there would be no platform for attaching the other components. If the hammer were gone, the mouse could dance all night on the platform without being pinned to the wooden base. If there were no spring, the hammer and platform would jangle loosely, and again the rodent would be unimpeded. If there were no catch or metal holding bar, then the spring would snap the hammer shut as soon as you let go of it; in order to use a trap like that you would have to chase the mouse around while holding the trap open (see Michael J. Behe, Ph.D., Darwin’s Black Box, Free Press, 2006 edition, pp. 42-43).

There is no way that a mousetrap could evolve piece by piece. One piece of the trap, or even two or three pieces, are worthless. Under evolution, they wouldn’t survive. A mousetrap only works if all the parts are there at once, in their right places. It is all or nothing. It is irreducibly complex. A mousetrap can’t evolve. It has to be built by a designer.

There are one-celled bacteria that swim in water using what is called a “flagellum,” a spinning whip (see Behe, ibid., pp. 70-73). This whip needs to be attached to the body by a socket. It needs a motor to turn it. There are other parts as well. Each of these is made up of many proteins. How could this evolve bit by bit through small changes? Any one piece is no help at all to the bacterium, so it wouldn’t help the creature to survive. This only works when it is a complete system set up in just the right way. That can’t evolve by itself. It needs an intelligent designer. Other bacteria swim by an oar-like motion, just as people paddle a boat across the ocean. That system can’t be built piece by piece. It only works all together. It needs an intelligent designer. No one has ever explained this by evolution.

In Africa there is an insect called the bombardier beetle. It defends itself by squirting a hot liquid at its enemy. But it does this by using chemistry! Inside its body are two separate chambers that operate as storage tanks. One of them contains hydrogen peroxide. The other contains hydroquinone. Separately, these chemicals are harmless. But when the beetle feels threatened, it squeezes its muscles and the two chemicals mix in another chamber. There they form a nasty chemical. Also, heat is generated which makes this liquid hot and some of it boils into steam. The mixture explodes! The beetle’s muscles can direct this exploding liquid at its enemy, and make it go away! (See Geoffrey Simons, M.D., Billions of Missing Links, Harvest House Publishers, 2007, pp. 29, 210).

How could this beetle evolve from a simpler beetle? Why would it need a bag inside of it, let alone two? Would that help it to survive? What if it somehow evolved one of the two chemicals? That wouldn’t help it at all. It would make it harder for the beetle to live; it would die sooner, and this would not be passed on to the next generation. If somehow it got two bags at once, how would it get the right two chemicals? Two chemicals that don’t explode when they mix is no help. But if somehow chance produced a beetle with two bags with just the right chemicals, and a chamber for them to mix, the beetle also needs the muscles to squirt it all out – and it needs to know how to shoot. This weapons system only works when it is all together at once in just the right way. If it is missing a part or two, it is no good. This is irreducibly complex. It can’t happen by evolution. It needs an intelligent designer.

There are many, many examples in biology of complex systems. There are known parasites that require at least two unrelated and distant hosts to complete one life cycle. Many plants need other species such as bees to pollinate them. There are insects that depend on bacteria in their stomach to survive, which in turn depend on even smaller organisms attached to them for survival. These systems need a designer.

Many evolutionists are now saying that evolution happens in giant leaps. I told you about a so-called explosion 500 million years ago in which the major kinds of animals suddenly appeared. I told you another story where 65 million years ago an asteroid landed and killed the dinosaurs. Some evolutionists speak of progress by a “hopeful monster.” Every once in a great while there is born a creature that is radically different in many ways from its parents. It has new organs and major changes in its body. It would be as if a rat gave birth to a monkey, or a snake gave birth to a bird. That’s a “hopeful monster.”

These evolutionists admit that progress can’t happen in many small steps, and there are no fossils of intermediate forms to show it. So they say there were giant leaps. It would be as if suddenly a “Superman” was born. But there are many problems with this crazy idea. First of all, how does the super-creature know how to use the new equipment he’s got? His parents don’t have it. There is no teacher. But even more important, how does this super-creature or superman have children? He’s too different from the others to produce children. So there have to be two hopeful monsters, one male and one female, born at the same time and the same place, with the same gigantic improvements. The two have to both live, then get together, and have children. All of this is too hard to believe! It is a desperate attempt of lost evolutionists to hide from the God who made them.

But that’s not all they come up with! Some of these theorists admit that it was impossible for life to have evolved here. So they say that life was put here by aliens from outer space, or that evolution was guided by these aliens who stepped in from time to time to make things better. One of these theories is called directed panspermia. It says that aliens “seeded” the earth a long time ago with the things it needed to make life.

Richard Dawkins is one of the most famous atheists of our time. He was interviewed by Ben Stein for a documentary film called “Expelled.” Stein asked Dawkins, “How did life begin?” Dawkins had no idea. He was in fact admitting that evolution wasn’t the answer. Then Dawkins said that perhaps life was delivered to our planet by aliens.

Saying “the aliens came and did it” explains nothing. After all, how did the aliens get started? Did they evolve somewhere? If they did, how did that happen – and there was less time for them to evolve! Or did some other aliens get them started? If that happened, how did they come to exist?

The only answer that makes sense is that God is the Creator and the Designer, who made the universe, the earth, human beings and every other creature. Before someone says, “who created God?” let me remind you that God said to Moses, “I AM THAT I AM” (Exodus 3:14). God is what is called self-existent. He doesn’t need anyone to create Him. He is outside of our space and time. He just “is.” God is the final cause and the final answer.

Some people say that it takes a “leap of faith” to believe in God. I say that it takes a much bigger leap of faith to deny the scientific evidence and believe in evolution. It is much more intelligent and reasonable to believe in God and the Bible. People deny God by a deliberate effort of their will because they don’t want to think about Him. They want to live their lives their own way. I’m asking you to believe in the God of the Bible and reject the science fiction of evolution.

But there is a greater wonder than the existence of an intelligent God. The greatest wonder of all is that God loves you personally. He did not leave you alone in your sin. Instead, He sent His only Son, Jesus Christ, to die on the Cross to pay for your sins. “Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures” (I Corinthians 15:3). Jesus gave His Blood to wash your sin away. “The Blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanseth us from all sin” (I John 1:7). Christ rose from the dead to give you eternal life. I am asking you to trust Jesus Christ. The Apostle Paul said, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved” (Acts 16:31). That’s all you do. Trust Christ Himself. He will forgive your sin and save you for all time and all eternity. Father, I pray that someone here would trust Jesus Christ. In His name, Amen.


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