by Jeff Harwell,
DuPont Professor of Chemical Engineering, The University of Oklahoma

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Obviously Christians say the answer to this question is "No". Perhaps a better question to ask would be, How does a Christian reconcile the Bible's story of creation with the modern theory of evolution. If we ask this latter question, there are several possible answers. While I don't think all of these answers are equally good, I want to emphasize that every Christian doesn't give the answer I will give below. This is Ken Stephenson's point in his answer to this FAQ; we believe Christianity is true for good, verifiable reasons; we deal with The Theory of Evolution through several possible options and different Christians have chosen different options. Whatever your answer to the question of evolution, Christianity is able to stand on its own.

When I first became a Christian, I assumed that the correct answer was that the Bible is not a science book, and that the first chapters of the Book of Genesis should be understood in a figurative or poetical sense; they could then be interpreted in a manner consistent with the scientifically proven Theory of Evolution. Many Christians hold this view, including some of my favorite theologians.

But I was challenged by a friend to look at the scientific evidence for the Theory of Evolution before making up my mind about my answer, and having done so, I find that fewer inconsistencies arise if I interpret the first chapters of Genesis as narrative, not poetry. This means that the Theory of Evolution, as a theory of the origin of life or of the origin of the species, is wrong. I want to present a brief outline of the thinking that led me to this conclusion.

Fist of all, much of what we call evolution has nothing to do with the origin or the species or the book of Genesis. Christian scientist in the 19th Century utilized something like the concept of the survival of the fittest to explain the large number of variations observed in the plant and animal kingdom. Did God have to create both red squirrels and brown squirrels? Did God really create 1000s of kinds of beetles or 100s of kinds of bats? No. He created basic types which had within them the potential variations that, through interactions with specific environments, have developed into the rich variety seen in creation today. Where I and many other Christians part company with scientists like Carl Sagan and Jay Gould is whether survival of the fittest is a sufficient mechanism to explain the origin of the species; more explicitly, do we have a sound, scientific explanation of how the rich variety of life on earth today arose from inanimate matter through a series of increasingly complex forms, culminating in the appearance of self consciousness, culture, morality, and ethics? As an 18 year old who had grown up loving everything related to science, I was shocked to find that the preponderance of the scientific evidence (not opinion) is against such a conclusion.

Do the results of modern science compel one to accept or reject that the complexity of modern life forms arose through a series of increasingly more complex organisms? There are two compelling reasons to conclude that this is not the case: First, there is a great dearth of fossil evidence of transitional species; that is, there is actually no evidence that evolution did occur. Second, there is no known mechanism by which new species can arise from pre-existing forms; in other words, we don't know how it even could occur.

Doesn't the fossil record prove that complex life evolved from simpler forms? In fact it does not. When Darwin first proposed evolution as an explanation for the origin of the species--rather than the explanation for the tremendous variation within the species--the fossil record was only beginning to be explored. At that time the fossil record showed that in the past many animals and plants had existed that had no modern representatives. There was a great confidence that as the fossil record was explored more fully, we would find a multitude of examples of animals that were neither amphibian nor reptile, but all manner of somethings in between; neither fish nor amphibian, but all manner of somethings in between. And, in fact, if the species had originated by a slow accumulation of inherited, incremental changes in the organisms, then this is what we should have found. Instead, we have found only more of what we already see today: great numbers of variations on the same basic themes. We may find fish that walked on their fins, but we don't find fish with legs, much less all of the thousands of intermediate forms that must have existed if reptiles did evolve from fish, each with improved survival traits relative to its antecedents. All of us have seen fossilized fish. You can buy one at the Nature store in the Galleria Mall for a few dollars. They are not rare. Where are all the fossils of the fibians? We should be finding more transitional forms than we find variations on existing forms! But those kinds of fossils just aren't there. Why can't you buy a fossilized fibian at the Galleria? The conclusion reached both by myself and by many modern evolutionists, including some of the most vocal opponents of the Bible's version of the origin of the species [1], is that the fossil record does not contain proof of this kind of evolution; instead, the almost total absence from the record of anything that can be construed to be a transitional form, actually disproves classical Darwinian evolution.

But the absence of transitional forms in the fossil record is not, in my mind, the greatest argument against Darwinian evolution. The greatest argument is the absence of any known mechanism by which evolution could occur.

When Darwin wrote his famous treatise, it was widely believed that acquired traits of the parents were inherited by the children; thus, a blacksmith's children would be born with greater muscle mass. This was Lamarck's explanation for the evolution of the giraffe, and it fit beautifully with Darwinian evolution in providing a mechanism by which beneficial changes could accumulate until they produced a new species: As the climate changed in the region where the ancestors of the giraffe lived, they began to stretch to reach the leaves on the trees to find food. Each generation had a greater ability to survive droughts as more food was within their reach. As their necks grew from generation to generation, they stretched further and further until we arrived at the modern giraffe. But when Mendel discovered the gene, and developed his laws of inherited traits, Darwinism was temporarily in turmoil. It was saved from this turmoil by the discovery, in the early 20th century, of mutations. Mutations temporarily provided the mechanism by which change was introduced into the form of the parent. The problem was that mutations are random changes, not necessarily advantageous to the organism; hence, progress could only occur through making many attempts, most of which would be failures.

The death knell for this explanation actually occurred when the genetic code was broken. The structure of the gene, when interpreted in light of modern information theory, makes clear that the possibility of an accumulation of random mutations explaining the origin of the species is so remote as to be implausible. Imagine an electronic version of Shakespeare's Hamlet, composed of 1s and 0s stored on a floppy disk; bring into the picture the word processing program, residing in the computer's CPU. The DNA of the fertilized egg is like the code for Hamlet, and the word processing program is like the womb of the mother. Now imagine a gamma ray changing one or more of these 1s or 0s into a different state. What are the chances that this would improve Hamlet? Indeed, what are the chances that the change would even make sense, rather than just crashing the program? And what are the chances that an entirely new masterpiece of literature would result from millions of years of students preferring to read each generation of improved versions of Hamlet? The idea is ludicrous in the extreme. But what is the information required to code for the human eye? Or even the cornea or the retina by themselves? How about the optic nerve or the portion of the brain required to make sense of the electrical signals? Yet how could any of this "information" profit the new organism without the rest of the "information" being present? But if there is no imaginable pathway by which random changes in the chemical coding of the genes could produce survival enhancements, what do we have left as an explanation for the mechanism by which changes accumulate in a sequence of organisms until a new species eventually emerges? In fact, we have no explanation, only wishful thinking that there may exist some kind of master genes that can trigger sudden changes in the organisms offspring. And even if these master genes were to exist, by what miracle might they have been created?

In point of fact, most people who know the fossil record think that while it doesn't contain the transitional forms to prove evolution, the proof is to be found in biology, while those who know that biology has no proof assume that the proof is found in the fossil record. The truth, however, is that neither can provide proof for evolution as the explanation for the origin of the species.

Actually, the greatest argument in favor of the Theory of Evolution is that it appears that everybody but a few idiots believes it! If the proof is really as shaky as I have presented it, how do we explain the apparent consensus regarding its validity, especially among the scientific community? I believe the answer is to be found in the "Emperor's New Clothes" syndrome. Remember the story of the ancient charlatan who convinced the king and his advisors that he could make clothing so marvelous that only those with a perfect moral character could see them? When the clothing was "presented" and neither the king nor his advisors could see them, everyone was afraid to be the first to say that there was, in fact, nothing there, for fear of being found out to be only one with a blemished moral character. There are very few among us who dare risk the ostracism of our peers; this is especially true of those who aspire to acceptance into the academic community. Who is willing to dare risk the dismissal of their credentials as an intellectual by admitting that it appears to them that there is, in fact, no scientific evidence to support the validity of the Theory of Evolution? There are very few.

Let me conclude by encouraging you to read Ken Stephenson's answer to the FAQ on evolution if you haven't already read it. You may choose not to become a Christian. But if this is your choice, don't make it because you are afraid of being branded an anti-intellectual. And don't cloak your choice in any kind of intellectual superiority to those who are Christians. Today, it is those who disbelieve the scientific establishment's Doctrine of Evolution who are the descendants of Kepler, Galileo, and Boltzmann.

1. "Since we proposed punctuated equilibria to explain trends, it is infuriating to be quoted again and again by creationists--whether through design or stupidity, I do not know--as admitting that the fossil record includes no transitional forms. Transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level, but they are abundant between larger groups." Stephen Jay Gould, "Evolution as Fact and Theory. Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes," 1983, Norton, New York.

Jeff Harwell
DuPont Professor of Chemical Engineering,
The University of Oklahoma

Reprinted with the permission of Prof. Harwell.
Source: www.ou.edu/faculty/organizations/ouchrfas/evolhar.htm