What are the odds?

A few weeks back, I wrote about the voodoo science that evolutionists invoke when they estimate the number of extinct species. You might pop over there real quick and read it if you haven't already but I'll recap my point briefly. You've probably heard it cited that more than 99% of all species that have ever lived are extinct. According to Wiki, there have been an estimated 5 billion species throughout the history of the world. However, only around 2 million species have been identified – either currently living or known through the fossil record. There is no fossil trace for more than 99.9% of the species evolutionists claim have existed. Their vastly inflated estimate is merely the consequence of assuming an ancient earth which virtually demands countless generations to fill all those millinea.

One major weakness of evolution is the glaring lack of transitional forms in the fossil record. Darwin himself said that “innumerable transitional forms must have existed.... [J]ust in proportion as this process of extermination has acted on an enormous scale, so must the number of intermediate varieties, which have formerly existed on the earth, be truly enormous.” Why are there so few candidates for transitional forms when so many must have lived? Evolutionists blame the lack of transitional forms on the extreme rarity of fossilization. In a real sense, they are hiding the transitional forms that must have existed among all those imagined species that must have existed but never left any fossils. How convenient.

A couple of days ago, I was listening to a debate on YouTube between a creationist and evolutionist. The evolutionist was making the usual straw man arguments and appeals to authority but he finally did trot out some real “evidence” by showing a series of alleged transitional forms representing whale evolution. I reject the evolution-of-the-whale story, by the way, but I'll save my criticism of the series for another post. Anyway, having just written about how few fossils there are compared to the number of species evolutionists claim have lived, I remember thinking how unlikely it should be for such a complete series to exist. Suddenly, another realization hit me that pokes another huge hole in the story of evolution.

I couldn't find a stat about how many living species are also found as fossils but I know there are several. There are bats, frogs, fish, turtles, sharks, crocodiles, and scores of other modern species that I know have been found in the fossil record (in some cases they're even called, “living fossils”). There are about 1.5 million living species that have been named. There are another 250,000 or so species only known from fossils. All together, there are less than 2 million identified species out of 5 billion believed to have existed. So more than 99.96% of all the species claimed to have lived have left no fossil trace. Not a single fossil! Are you still with me? OK, let me get to the point:

According to Wikipedia, “More than 50 specimens of Tyrannosaurus rex have been identified, some of which are nearly complete skeletons.” I find it incredibly odd that 99.96% of all the species that have supposedly lived left no fossils yet this particular species has left dozens. I mean, what are the odds? It doesn't stop there, though. On Humanorigins.si.edu website, we read that “Australopithecus afarensis is one of the longest-lived and best-known early human species—paleoanthropologists have uncovered remains from more than 300 individuals!” If you agree that it should be unlikely to find t-rex fossils by the dozens, you'll agree it's downright queer that we find A. afarensis by the hundreds! Keep in mind too that these are larger, terrestrial creatures – the least likely to fossilize; we find trilobite fossils by the millions! If evolutionists are right, why are some species so over-represented in the fossil record when billions of other species aren't found at all?

As I've said, the billions of species claimed by evolutionists are merely a consequence of their belief in an old earth yet their claims don't square with the facts. What we observe in the fossils is the exact opposite of what evolutionists allege. They say there have been billions of species, the vast majority of which left no fossilized individuals. What we observe are relatively few species abundantly represented by dozens, hundreds, or even millions of fossils.

There is no longer any room for billions of years in the fossil record. The missing links are still missing. The storytelling is over. Their billions of species is a lie. What we observe (aka, “the evidence”) is much more consistent with a recent creation and a catastrophic flood.

Wouldn't there have been a Grand Canyon on every continent?

I wonder if Bill Nye wishes he hadn't debated Ken Ham. I've heard that his friends were generally telling him that it was a bad idea – lots of risk with very little upside. After the debate, die-hard evolutionists breathed a sigh of relief, thinking he'd done a good job defending Darwin's theory while sufficiently bashing creationism.

I have a completely different opinion. A lot of the points Nye made were epic fails. He wasn't just a little wrong; he blew it. I've written before about his flimsy, 11-new-species-per-day argument. I've exposed his failed Tiktaalik prediction. There is also his blatant argument from ignorance when he said Noah could not have built a wooden boat to the dimensions given in the Bible. And some people think he won? I'm struggling to think of one thing he said that was factual. Oh, wait! I know one...

About 50 minutes into the video, while he was trying to attack the creationists' position that the Grand Canyon was carved out catastrophically at the time of the Flood, Nye made this comment:

And by the way, if this great flood drained through the Grand Canyon, wouldn't there have been a Grand Canyon on every continent? How could we not have Grand Canyons everywhere, if this water drained away in this extraordinarily short amount of time, 4000 years?

In this comment, Nye is making a prediction. Remember that successful predictions are the mark of a good scientific theory. His prediction is that, if the Flood really happened, we would expect to see canyons the size of the Grand Canyon on every continent. Am I lying? Isn't that what he said? OK, let's move on.

I'm going to put his prediction to the test. It's not hard, really; I simply consulted Wikipedia. You can read the article for yourself but let me just point out a few highlights:

The Grand Canyon is big, but it's not even the biggest canyon in North America. Mexico's Copper Canyon is both longer and deeper.

Two canyons in Peru, the Cotahuasi Canyon and Colca Canyon, are both deeper than the Grand Canyon. Each one is over 3,500 meters deep while the Grand Canyon averages only 1,600 meters deep.

The largest canyon in Africa is the Fish River Canyon. Its gigantic ravine is about 100 miles long.

National Geographic reported a giant trench discovered under the snow in western Antarctica that is deeper than the Grand Canyon. It is 15½ miles across and up to 1.9 miles deep.

Another subglacial canyon was found in Greenland in August 2013. Named, Greenland's Grand Canyon, it is believed to be the longest canyon in the world.

Australia has the Capertee Valley which is wider than the Grand Canyon, though not as deep.

Some of the deepest canyons in the world are found in Asia. They are the Indus Gorge, the Kali Gandaki Gorge, and the Yarlung Tsangpo Gorge. All are deeper than the Grand Canyon with the latter also being longer.

Nye made his comment out of ignorance. He obviously wasn't aware that, everywhere in the world, we do find canyons that are longer, deeper, and wider than the Grand Canyon. In his own words, it is exactly what we would expect to find if a deluge of water drained off the continents in a short amount of time.

Yeah. Nye has to be kicking himself over that one.

Estimating the number of extinct species: Voodoo science

For years, I've heard people reciting the statistic that 99% of all species that have ever lived are extinct. I heard it often enough that I assumed it must have some merit but I never really bothered to look into it at first. When I did investigate the claim, I saw that, like most secular theories of our origins, it was mostly smoke and mirrors. It's sort of like the false claims that human and chimp DNA is 99% similar or that 99% of all scientists believe in evolution. There's an old joke that says 99% of all statistics are just made up on the spot! In this case, that's not far off.

For a while, I looked at the absurd estimates of the number of extinct species in the same light as the scientific evidence for Big Foot: namely, that it's junk science but there's really no harm in it. However, I've been coming around, lately, to the realization that the inflated number of species is being used as evolutionary propaganda. For example, I've heard more than one person ask what's the point of God creating all these species only to have 99% of them go extinct? Such questions seek to cast doubt on a belief in creation. However, there's a far more devious implication in the inflated number that had completely escaped my notice until now.

According to Wikipedia: More than 99 percent of all species, amounting to over five billion species, that ever lived on Earth are estimated to be extinct. Estimates on the number of Earth's current species range from 10 million to 14 million, of which about 1.2 million have been documented and over 86 percent have not yet been described.

I'm not sure who is in charge of checking math at Wikipedia but he's slipping. 10 million is 1% of only 1 billion so I'm not sure where they are getting the 5 billion number. Actually, the whole passage is poorly worded. What do they mean, “... estimated to be extinct”? Are they extinct or not? They mean to say, “an estimated 99% of all species... are extinct.” I know I have misspellings and typos on my blog but jeez!

But I digress.

Anyway, did you notice how even the number of species living currently is only estimated to be 10-14 million? The number actually identified is only around 1.2 million. They're taking a guess – perhaps a reasonable guess but still a guess – as to how many other species haven't been discovered yet. It's almost certain there are species we haven't discovered but another 10 million or so of undiscovered species is probably a little generous. Even so, let's go with that number.

From another Wiki article, we find that, “the number of species known through the fossil record is less than 5% of the number of known living species.” From that sparse sentence, it's hard to estimate how many species we're talking about. Five percent of 1.2 million is only 60,000. Five percent of 10 million is 500,000. I've heard various estimates about the number of species identified in the fossil record and it's only around 250,000. Again, for the sake of argument, let's say it's more like the 500,000. So, we have 1.2 million named living species and another 500,000 species known from the fossil record. That totals only 1.7 million of species known to exist.

Here's where things start to get devious.

We have identified approximately 1.7 million species yet evolutionists estimate there have been as many as 5 billion that have lived. However, there is no fossil trace for 99.99966% of the species evolutionists have alleged. Why not? Evolutionists claim it's due to the extreme imperfection of the fossil record. In other words, since fossilization is such a rare event, most species that lived never left a fossil. Hmm. That could explain it... or maybe it could be that the other 99.99966% of species never even lived!

How do they get such a high estimate? It all has to do with their assumptions – primarily their assumptions about the age of the earth. It works sort of like this: if life began 1 billion years ago, and if the average species only appears during 5 million years in the geological record, then all species have been replaced around 200 times. If there are 10,000,000 identified species (an inflated number to begin with), that means there must have been 2 billion total species that have lived! Get it?

You might still be asking me what is so devious about this. Well, it's a couple of things. First, if creationists were to believe that 99% of all species have gone extinct, then we're tacitly conceding the long ages assumed by evolutionists. The earth is not billions or even millions of years old. An earth that's only thousands of years old means most of the species that have lived are still alive!

The other thing about the claim is that, if it were true, then the fossil record truly is imperfect and would only preserve less than 1% of the transitions between a modern species and its ancient ancestor. One weakness of evolution is the lack of transitional forms in the fossil record. If we believe so few species are preserved as fossils, we're basically giving evolutionists an excuse for not having fossil evidence for a critical part of their theory.

There is no evidence that billions of species have existed. The belief they existed is merely a consequence of evolutionary theory. It's voodoo science.  The observable, testable evidence is better explained by creation: the earth is thousands of years old, most of the species that have ever lived are still alive, and the fossil record is remarkably complete yet shows a glaring lack of transitional forms.

More About Koalas

A recent visitor commented anonymously on blog “Koalas on the Ark.” He took many exceptions to my arguments. Though he claims to be a creationist, his comments sound more like what I usually hear from atheists, evolutionists, and other critics. I started to write a reply but realized I had written enough to make a post so rather than reply in a comment, I thought I'd simply use his comments to make another post. It's actually longer than a typical post so I apologize in advance.  

The visitor's comments are in blue and are italicized.  He begins very abruptly.

HORRIBLY explained.

That's odd. Another commenter on the same article, “roylopez,” felt it was “well explained.” Of course, “horribly” is a somewhat subjective term and difficult to quantify. I'll put the “horribly” aside for now and see if any specific criticism has merit.

I stumbled onto your site while looking up pics of platypii.

People find my blog in all sorts of strange ways. I'm sure I don't have any pics of platypuses. But, hey, however the visitors get here, they're welcome.

By the way, there's some disagreement over the correct plural form of “platypus.” I lean toward “platypuses.” To me, it seems to follow the same form as “walruses.” No one would say, “walrusi.” Most words that use the “i” ending for their plural (like “alumni”) are Latin. “Platypus” is Greek.

I am open to lots of theories but this thing you've written has mistakes, dead ends, and huge leaps of logic to 'conclusions'.

Wow, how could I make so many mistakes in so few words? For some reason, I don't believe this poster is sincere when he says he's open to lots of theories. It sounds very much like he already has one interpretation of the fossil record and anything that doesn't comport with that is “wrong.” Let's look at a few of his criticisms.

You would lose miserably in an argument against an evolution scientist.

I guess we'll get to the criticisms in a moment.  Considering that I was a business major and am not a scientist, I don't think anyone would expect me to do well against a PhD biologist in a debate. However, I have engaged many scientists online for years (including those who comment on my blog) and I feel I've held my own. I appreciate his concern, though. If I ever have the opportunity to formally debate a biologist on evolution, I'll remember that I was warned!

I am a Creationist.

“Creationist” is a fairly broad term. I'm a young-earth creationist. From his comments, I suspect my visitor is not a YEC. I don't want to misrepresent him but if he's not a theistic evolutionist, I would guess he's a progressive creationist in the same vein as Hugh Ross.

But the Bible is not specific on everything.

Yet the Bible is specific on some things. We use the things we know to help us understand the things we don't know. We KNOW that all terrestrial mammals outside of the Ark died in the Flood. We KNOW the Ark landed in the middle east. Therefore, we must conclude that the ancestors of koalas were on the Ark, they landed in the middle east, and migrated to Australia after the Flood. There is no other possibility.

One point you make is that we don't know much about koala distribution before the flood. But we DO know where they Weren't hanging out. There are no fossils, no matter how old they might be, of any koalas anywhere but Australia.

Finally, a specific criticism!

First, this is an argument from silence. He's saying that since we've not found koala fossils outside of Australia that it's evidence there were never any koalas outside of Australia. There is an oft quoted phrase that says, “the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”

Besides that, I refer my readers to my article, “They Weren't Polar Bears Before They Got There.” We have found marsupial fossils on every continent. Koalas are a species (Phascolarctos cinereus) and speciation occurs when “kinds” become adapted to their environments. The “Phascolarctidae-kind” (if I may invent a term), to which the koala species belongs, was on the Ark. There were no koalas on the Ark. They weren't koalas until they reached Australia and became adapted to that environment.

Fossils, even if they were created 12,000 yrs ago, of all Australian mammals are found there.

Ditto my last comment. They weren't “Australian mammals” until they reached Australia. Panda bears, too, for example, weren't panda bears until they reached Asia. The bears that reached the Arctic became polar bears. Get it?

Where ever the surface of Australia was located before the flood, that's where they lived.

You have got to be kidding me! This visitor is saying virtually the same thing as the atheist-evolutionist I was quoting in my article. His straw man argument of the Bible was that Koalas swam from Australia carrying eucalyptus leaves, lived on the Ark during the Flood, then swam back to Australia.

Actually, the visitor is probably a subscriber to a “local flood” interpretation of Genesis. In that case, he is using the shifting views of science to interpret the clear, immutable words of Scripture.

Marsupial fossils are found on every continent... but Australian mammal fossils are only found in Australia. [ellipsis in original]

That's really funny, when you think about it. “Australian fossils are only found in Australia.” What a riot! And American Indians were only found in America. Asians were only found in Asia. Australian aborigines were only found in Australia. Please excuse the sarcasm but I thank my visitor for stating the obvious.

[quoting RKBentley] "In the case of koalas, they ended up in what is now Australia." What do you mean by 'ended up'? This implies that they were traveling, and then they stopped there. Huh? How? And along with all the Australian-specific animals?

I mean exactly what I said. The ancestors of koalas were on the Ark. They landed in the middle east. They began to spread out over the globe. Their descendants ended up in what is now Australia. And every other animal that ended up in Australia could now be considered “Australian-specific.”

Did you know that ALL native mammals in Australia are marsupials? That's pretty significant to the evolutionists.

Technically, no animal is native to anywhere. Wherever their ancestors lived before the Flood, all animals arrived at their “native” habitat after the Flood. Marsupial mammals simply arrived in Australia first. Since marsupials generally don't compete well with placental mammals, perhaps it's only because there were no placental mammals there that allowed the marsupials to prosper in Australia.

Panda bears are different since they live, and are from, a huge continent, which is known to have been connected in the past to other continents, fairly recently in geologic terms. Not the case for koalas or any other Australian land animals.

It's comments like “fairly recently in geological terms” that make me suspect my visitor is a progressive creationist. Hugh Ross generally subscribes to evolutionary time lines but believes they roughly correlate to the Biblical days of creation. Ross believes that God specifically created the koala species in Australia and they've been there since. The Flood did not reach them since it was a local event, limited to the middle east.

It is late and I'm tired, sorry if I am coming off as being crabby... but there are a half dozen more points that even a garage scientist would laugh at...
I'm not saying I have all the answers, but this is def full of holes. But you're right, koalas can eat other stuff but eat mostly eucalyptus, because they taste the best.

Well, at least it was nice of him to acknowledge that I was right in saying koalas can eat other things besides eucalyptus leaves. Look, I'm used to being laughed at by evolutionists so that doesn't bother me. Laughter and ridicule hardly rebuts any argument I've made anyway. And if we strip away all the “you're so wrong” comments and look at this visitor's actual criticisms, I don't see any rebuttals either.

Tracks Before Trilobites

Answers in Genesis is a wonderful resource. I certainly learn a lot from them. There are many times when they make such great points that I'm tempted to repeat them here but I resist for a couple of reasons. First, I know there are some Christian bloggers out there who simply plagiarize AiG articles. That's just wrong. Also, if people want to hear what AiG says, they could visit there instead of my blog. I try to write original material and give people a reason to come here. Certainly I know that many of the points I raise have been raised before, but I at least try to put them in my own words and put a fresh spin on them. You won't find any cut and paste posts here.

Having said all that, AiG has one particular article that nails it so wonderfully that I cannot make a more interesting point than the obvious one. I still am not going to cut and paste the article but I will discuss it in great detail here.

A frequent visitor to my blog, one Steven J (a nice guy and rather rational for an unbeliever), made some comments on my blog about the fossil record. He didn't raise this point directly but some of his remarks reminded me of a point made by other evolutionists about fossils. If the fossil record was primarily made during the events surrounding the Flood, how do creationists explain trace fossils – like footprints – in different layers?

Like I said above, I can't explain this any better than has already been explained on AiG's website. In an article titled, Tracks But No Trilobites, author Kurt Wise talked about this very phenomenon. When describing a visit to Death Valley, he made this observation:

I found a trilobite trackway—the only fossil I found in that layer. In the next layer I found several more tracks, but no remains of the trilobites themselves. As I went up, the tracks became more abundant, but I found not the slightest hint of the animals that made the tracks.

Then suddenly I came to a layer jam-packed with trilobite “shells.” I had been concentrating so hard on finding just one little fragment of a trilobite that the abundance startled me.

Odd. Why would dozens of feet of rock have tracks but not the animals that made them? This finding is especially mysterious if you believe the rock was deposited over thousands of years.

That's very interesting. We have several layers of tracks, which represents “millions of years” in evolutionary reckoning, before finding any fossils of the critters who made the tracks. Wise said this find is rather usual. According to him, “Tracks are found before trilobites everywhere that the lowest trilobite layers are known.”  If evolution were true, we would expect to find tracks and trilobites mingled throughout the “millions of years.” That's not what we find at all.

I believe the Flood scenario is a far better explanation. As the Flood waters began to prevail, tsunami like waves would ebb and flow, depositing sediment on top of trilobites. At each ebb, the critters would scurry to the surface only to be buried again in the next wave. This happened over and over until the poor things were finally overwhelmed. That this is the correct explanation seems obvious to me. It certainly fits the evidence better than the evolutionary explanation.

Let me say one more thing in closing: I know the Flood was a real event because the Bible describes it as a real event. I'm not looking for any more evidence for the Flood. However, knowing that the Flood was real helps me understand why the world looks the way it does. When we find evidence like tracks before trilobites, I almost have a, “Well, duh” reaction. Of course there should be tracks before trilobites!

The 6th Lie that Evolutionists Tell: Evolution could so easily be disproved if just a single fossil turned up in the wrong date order.

"Evolution could so easily be disproved if just a single fossil turned up in the wrong date order. Evolution has passed this test with flying colours." Richard Dawkins, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution.

This quote just annoys me (I mean, besides the peculiar, European way that Dawkins spelled, “colors”). I think I'm going to add it as a 6^th lie to the “Five lies evolutionists tell.” Dawkins may have made this particular quote but I've heard a similar sentiment expressed many times in different ways. You may have heard someone say something like, “Evolution would be disproved if we found a rabbit in the Cambrian.” It's all a lie! It's a lie on so many different levels that I'm not sure if I can cover them all sufficiently in a single post – but, of course, I'll try.

First, there is a very subtle lie that most people completely overlook. Dawkins used the phrase “date order.” By doing this, he immediately projects the idea of time onto the fossil record; thus, fossils found lower in the fossil record are “older” than the ones above them. The reality is that the order in which fossils are buried simply demonstrates the order in which they were buried. It is the long age assumptions of their theory that says lower fossils are older.

According to YEC theory, most of the fossil bearing, geological column was formed during the Flood event. The lower fossils may have buried first but they're not necessarily “older.” If I filled a glass with ice, the cubes on the bottom were laid down first but they're not “older” than the cubes above them. By referring to where fossils appear as the “date order,” Dawkins is creating the false impression that their sequence represents, de facto, when the creatures lived. It's a lie.

From there, we next must understand that evolutionists have constructed their history of life on earth according to where they have found the fossils. We have found shark fossils, for example, very low in the fossil record so most scientists believe sharks lived very long ago. We find dinosaur fossils above shark fossils so scientists assume dinosaurs evolved after sharks. Of course, sharks are still alive today and dinosaurs are extinct; one might ask where are the shark fossils above the dino fossils that represent the “millions of years” sharks have continued living since the dinos went extinct? I ask rhetorically because that's not my point right now. I'm merely demonstrating how evolutionists piece together the history of evolution using the fossil order. Species found at the bottom lived first; species found higher evolved later.

If evolutionists construct their theory according to the order in which fossils appear, then how could any fossil possibly upset the theory? If the fossil of some particular species is found “out of order” from where it was previously expected, the theory is just tweaked to accommodate the new find. I wrote about this common phenomenon in a post titled, “A lot of things seem to have evolved 'earlier than thought'” where I cited a few headlines like, “Complex vision evolved earlier than thought” and “Ants evolved much earlier than thought.” “Out of order” fossils are rather ordinary. When a fossil appears out of sequence (which we often find), we simply see a new headline that says, “New find pushes evolution of this species back to earlier than thought.”  It's a lie to say that such a find would “easily disprove” the theory.

Now, even though evolution is so plastic that it can be stretched to accommodate nearly any discovery, we have occasionally found fossils that present rather thorny difficulties for evolutionists. A few years ago, I wrote about a controversial find in Mexico where dozens of modern looking, human footprints were found in volcanic ash that was dated via radiometric dating to be 1.3 million years old. That means either modern humans were walking around in Mexico 1.3 million years ago or the ash layer isn't really 1.3 million years old. Neither comports well with evolution. In order to rescue their theory, scientists decided the footprints really belonged to cows. No, I'm not kidding.

You can see then how scientists brazenly twist the evidence in order to force it to fit their theory. If a rabbit were ever found in the Cambrian, I predict we would read a headline something like, “Ancient species of lizard looked exactly like a modern rabbit!”

Dawkins quote is fluff. He speaks it with confidence in order to bolster evolution and make it seem unassailable but it's all smoke and mirrors. Evolutionists are constantly redrawing all the lines of evolutionary history every day as new evidence overturns their previous theories about the evidence.  For them to boldly say the theory stands up to every new find is laughable. Could that be what Dawkins meant when he said evolution is “The Greatest Show on Earth”?

What we need to find is a cassette tape in the Cambrian. Wouldn't that be funny? I know it can't happen since we know the Cambrian was already formed before cassette tapes were invented. Even so, I wonder how the evolutionists would explain that away?

Hebrews 11: Faith or Wishful Thinking?

Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.

Hebrews 11:1

A lot of people confuse “faith” with “blind faith” or “wishful thinking.” Archie Bunker once said, “Faith is something that you believe that nobody in his right mind would believe.” Archie never failed to get a laugh but, in this case, I can't say that I endorse his theology.

Hebrews 11 gives us a very different impression of faith then Archie Bunker's. The opening passage – taken from the KJV – describes faith as the “substance” of things hoped for and the “evidence” of things not seen. Other translations use equally concrete terms: words like, “assurance,” “conviction,” and “confidence.” Faith is not a tentative concept where the believer simply “hopes” or “wishes” something to be true. Faith means certainty.

Hebrews 11 makes two statements about faith.

1) It is the substance of things hoped for.

2) It is the evidence of things not seen.

This might sound a little cryptic at first but the epistle writer spends the rest of the chapter explaining what is meant by each of these. In this post, we'll dissect some of the examples.

Verse 3 begins a discussion about how the world was formed – by “the word of God” (ῥῆμα, (rhēma) “the spoken word”). The creation was an event that no one witnessed. How can we know what happened if we didn't see it happen? Many scientists today observe processes that are occurring in the present and use these to extrapolate what happened in the past. They are, quite literally, using the things we see to try to understand the things we didn't see.

Hebrews 11:3 tells us that exactly the opposite is true. The universe was not made by the things that we can see. God created the world ex nihilo (out of nothing). John 1:3 attests, “All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.” The things that God created includes not only time, matter, and space, but also the natural laws that operate within them. Natural laws are a part of the creation; they are not the cause of the creation.

So even though we weren't there in the beginning, we can know with confidence how the universe was created. It is not blind faith. It is not wishful thinking. It is a certainty; an assurance. We know it is true because it has been revealed to us by the One who was there. By faith, we have evidence about an event we did not see.

Likewise, by faith, we can also have certainty in things that have not yet happened, that is, “things hoped for.” The word translated in the KJV as “substance” is the Greek word, ὑπόστασις (hypostasis). In the Bible, it only occurs here but it was a common word used in business documents. It's literally a contract or guarantee. It's an absolute promise that what has been stated will happen.

Hebrews 11:7 says that God warned Noah about the coming judgment. Even though the Flood had not yet happened, Noah built the Ark in faith, knowing with certainty that it would come. Since God said it would happen, it was a certainty that the world would flood. Noah was as sure about the coming Flood as he was about anything. Because of his faith in God's word, Noah and his family were delivered through the Flood.

The chapter mentions several other notable characters of the Old Testament. This chapter has been called “the Faith Hall of Fame.” In each case, these men and women of old were obedient to God, knowing by faith that the promises He made to them would come to pass. Hebrews 11:39a says these people “gained approval” by their faith (NASB). Yet, in their lifetimes, none of them received the promise in which they hoped. It was not simply “faith” that saved these people but rather it was their faith in the promise of what was to come.  What they believed in the most would come centuries after they lived.

People of the Old Testament were saved the same way we are – by faith in Jesus. The characters mentioned in Hebrews 11 could not know Jesus the same way we know Him. Nevertheless, they believed in the Messiah God had promised all the way back in Genesis 3:16, the seed of the woman who would crush the head of the serpent.

Matthew 24:35 says, “Heaven and earth will pass away, but My words will not pass away.” If you are certain the sun will rise tomorrow, you can be even more certain that God's word is sure. The word of God is not equivocal. If He said it, He meant it. Because of His revelation, I have incontrovertible evidence about things I did not see: things like the creation, the Fall, and the Flood. I also have absolute assurance about things that have not yet happened: like the return of Christ and His promise of eternal life to all who believe.

I don't think; I know!

Does Natural Selection Create Diversity?

It's very common for evolutionists to claim that natural selection creates diversity. I could provide a hundred sources where they say this but I chose one succinct one to include here:

After spending time on the islands, he [Charles Darwin] soon developed a theory that would contradict the creation of man and imply that all species derived from common ancestors through a process called natural selection. Natural selection is considered to be the biggest factor resulting in the diversity of species and their genomes. (source)

On the one hand, I can understand the confusion: from a single bear-kind, we have 8 modern species of bear. That's diversification, right? But is natural selection the tool that creates diversity? According to evolutionists, it is. I think they're more than a little confused. There's no doubt that part of their problem is that they notoriously conflate evolution and natural selection. It's compounded by the fact that people who reject the Bible necessarily hold irrational beliefs. It's typical for Bible critics to have opinions in direct contradiction to reality.

Here's the problem: natural selection removes unsuitable traits from a population. That's all it ever does. So it's rather bizarre to believe that removing traits can create diversity. To illustrate the utter folly of such a notion, I will appeal once again to the most famous of all examples of evolution – the peppered moth. If you have a population of light and dark colored moths, and if birds continuously ate the light colored moths, what would you have left? That's right, you would eventually have a population of only dark moths. You see, the population is less diverse than it was; a population of light/dark moths becomes a population of dark moths.

Here's still one more, real world example. A while back, I blogged about a Science Daily article where scientists studied the effect on the population of indigenous lizards when predatory lizards were released onto a group of islands. The predatory lizards began eating the smaller lizards and, in a few months, it was noticed that the surviving lizards tended to have shorter legs. They speculated that the short-legged lizards could climb better and so could escape the predatory lizards. Here's a quote from the article:

Evolutionary biology is by its nature an historical science, but the combination of microevolutionary experimentation and macroevolutionary historical analysis can provide a rich understanding about the genesis of biological diversity.

Perhaps the researcher cannot see the absurdity of this statement. The population previously contained long and short-legged lizards. After the experiment, the islands contained short-legged lizards. Once again, the population is less diverse.

Natural selection cannot explain the origin of diversity. Instead, it only acts upon diversity already present in the creature. It's easy to see, for example, how natural selection can select short-legged lizards from a population which has both long and short legs. However, natural selection doesn't explain how the population came to have both long and short legs in the first place!

Biblical creation explains wonderfully what we observe. God created diversity in the original kinds. Just like two mutt dogs can have pups of all shapes, sizes, and colors, so too could the ancestral kinds on the Ark have offspring that looked different from themselves. Natural selection acted on this diversity and turned varied creatures into specialized creatures, well adapted to their environment. God created diversity; natural selection created species.

I would dare say that evolutionists don't even understand their own theory. The only candidate that could possibly add diversity to a population is mutation. Theoretically, mutations can add feet to fish. Mutations might make short legs become long legs. Mutations (as the theory goes) could explain the origin of diversity. Once mutations have introduced diversity, only then does natural selection begin her methodical task of removing the unsuitable features. Mutations are the hero of evolution. Natural selection is the opposite of evolution.

But as I've already said, evolutionists conflate natural selection and evolution. The addition of novel traits to a population (i.e. diversity) is evolution. The removal of unsuitable traits is natural selection. If evolutionists want to demonstrate the origin of diversity, they need to spend their time talking about trait-adding mutations. However, trait-adding mutations are exceedingly rare - if they exist at all - so they really have no examples they can put forth as evidence for their theory. Therefore, all they can do is talk about is natural selection. They can say that natural selection creates diversity. We know it can't. They can say that light/dark moths becoming dark moths is evolution. We know it isn't. They can say natural selection is evolution. Like I said, they deny reality.

Hybrids: Different Species, Same Kind

During my recent discussions about dogs and foxes, the subject of hybrids came up. Some subjects are a little more weighty than others and the weightier ones are difficult to discuss in a few paragraphs. Hybridization happens to be one of those weightier ones since there are so many examples of hybridization that I can't explore them all. Nevertheless, I'm always eager to give a layman's opinion in my effort to defend the faith so I'm going to plow ahead.

“Hybrid” describes the offspring of two different species. Some people use reproductive tests to identify species. Thus polar bears (Ursus maritimus) are a different species than grizzly bears (Ursus arctos horribilis) because they don't normally reproduce together in the wild. However, we have discovered that, on rare occasions, these species have bred in the wild producing hybrid cubs. The offspring of such unions are called a “pizzly” if the father were a polar bear and a “grolar bear” if the father were a grizzly. Either way, the simple fact that these different species do occasionally hybridize in the wild undermines the use of a reproductive test to identify a species.

I've always favored using morphology to identify a species. Once a population has enough traits in common that they can all be identified as belonging to the same group, then they earn the moniker of species. Thus bears with large bodies, white fur, long necks, and pointed faces are “polar bears”; bears with smaller bodies, brown fur, short necks, and flat faces are “grizzly bears.” Admittedly that definition has it's own difficulties but at least it acknowledges the fact that identifying a species is more subjective than objective. It also dispels the mistaken impression that species are absolutely distinct and don't reproduce together.

The term “hybrid” is a sort of misnomer and gives a false impression of the importance of reproduction between different species. Hybridization is so common that I'm surprised that a reproductive test is even considered as a possible way to distinguish one species from another. The reproductive boundaries are crossed frequently in the wild and are absurdly common in captivity. Let's look at a few of the more interesting ones.

We've already talked about pizzly/grolar bear hybrids but there have been many crossovers between other bear “species” (usually in zoos): a Malayan Sun bear and a sloth bear, a sloth bear and an Asiatic black bear, a black bear and a spectacled bear, and a black bear and a sun bear.

Cat hybrids are fairly well known but the number of combinations is still remarkable. Lions + tigers is especially common; the offspring are called either ligers (lion fathers) or tigons (tiger fathers). Other examples among the Panthera genus include lion/leopard hybrids, lion/jaguars, tiger/jaguars, tiger/leopards, and jaguar/leopard. The features exhibited among the cubs of these unions sometimes blend the parents' features so well they appear to be Photoshopped together.

Horse and donkeys have been bred for centuries to produce mules. However, in spite of their differing chromosomes, horses call also reproduce with zebras (zorse) and zebras can breed with donkeys (zeedonks). The offspring of these combinations are almost always sterile.

Domestic cows can breed with buffalo (beefalo). 

Camels can breed with llamas (camas). 

Wolves can breed with domestic dogs (wolf dogs) and with coyotes (coywolves).

Besides mammal species, fish also hybridize. A while back, I blogged about hybrids between the Australian black-tip shark and the common black tip shark. Scientists called that “evolution in action” but I won't go into that now. It again represents the fact that the boundaries between species is not a reproductive one. Hybridization also occurs among birds, insects, and especially plants. Again, there are far more examples than I can begin to address in a single blog post.

Speciation and hybrization are especially relevant to an understanding of creation. The Bible says that God created animals “according to their kind” (Genesis 1). When Noah entered the Ark, he had “kinds” of animals on board with him. There are millions of known species and perhaps millions more undiscovered. However, the vast majority of these millions include bacteria, plants, algae, fungi, and insects. Noah did not have to make accommodations for any of these (though many probably did make their way on the Ark).

According to Wikipedia, there are only about 62,305 species of vertebrate animals. About ½ of these are fish and another 10% are amphibians. Noah did not have to provide for these either. That leaves less than 25K vertebrate species Noah had to concern himself with (never mind that some of the mammals and reptiles are also marine dwelling). So, does this mean that Noah had to take 50K animals on the Ark (a male and female of each species)? Hardly. We've already seen that “species” aren't distinct. There are eight species of bears but Noah did not have 16 bears on the Ark; he had 2. There are 41 cat species but Noah did not have 82 cats on the Ark; he had 2. Ditto for the many species of dogs, cattle, squirrels, deer, parrots, ducks, etc.

I've heard varying estimates of the number of animals Noah would have had to have on the Ark in order account for the number of species we have today. Some estimates are as low as 3,000 while others range as high as 15,000. Even the highest estimates are far less than the “millions of animals” caricature used by evolutionists to criticize the Flood event.

“Species” is a label we use for convenience. Though I sometimes chide evolutionists about it, I really don't have a problem with the term; I only object to the idea that when populations specieate that they have somehow “evolved.” The ancestral kinds on the Ark were necessarily genetically diverse. The descendants of the original Ark-kinds (cats for example) have adapted to their various ecological niches around the world. The resulting populations are called “species” (lions, tigers, lynxes, ocelots, cheetahs, etc). Each one possesses different combinations of features already present in the original kind. When the different species hybridize, they merely recombine the same features in new ways. We could potentially get new species but we won't get new kinds.

Is Creationism a Belief in Hyper Evolution?

Creationists believe that Noah took animals on board the Ark in pairs that represented kinds. Actually, it's not a creationist “belief” but rather what the Bible states overtly. Consider this passage (Genesis 6:19-20)
  

“And of every living thing of all flesh, you shall bring two of every kind into the ark, to keep them alive with you; they shall be male and female. Of the birds after their kind, and of the animals after their kind, of every creeping thing of the ground after its kind, two of every kind will come to you to keep them alive.”
  

So the Bible is clear that animal “kinds” were represented on the Ark. A “kind” is broader than a species. In taxonomical terms, a kind is probably closer to a family than a species. Noah did not have 2 lions, tigers, cougars, lynxes, leopards, ocelots, cheetahs, and house cats on the Ark; instead, he only had one pair of a “cat-kind.” From these two ancestral cats, all other species of cats have descended. One straw man criticism of the Ark is that there is no way that Noah could fit 2 of every species of animals on the Ark. Since Noah only brought animals on the Ark according to their kind, the number of animals necessarily on the Ark is much less than the critics' inflated estimates.

    
There's a tired, old retort employed by evolutionists whenever creationists talk about speciation after the Flood. They assert that the few centuries or even millennia since the Flood is not enough time for the many thousands of species of animals to have descended from the few thousand kinds of animals that were on the Ark. They say that such rapid diversification is a type of "hyper-evolution."

 
In a NY Times editorial called, “Creationism = Evolution?” (note the use of the word “creationism” by the way; see my last post on that subject), one science blogger made the following comments after visiting the Creation Museum:

The descendants of the ark dog include foxes, states one of the museum signs. This is pretty incredible if you don’t accept the theory of evolution. Dogs (and wolves) have a genome of 78 chromosomes. The red fox has 34 chromosomes. By most any measure, dogs and foxes are different species and yet here in the Creation Museum, it was stated that foxes had diversified from dogs, with major changes in appearance and genetic make-up, in an incredibly short time of less than 4,500 years — far, far faster than an evolutionary biologist would claim.

  
If animals speciate rapidly, evolutionists call it “hyper-evolution.”  Part of the confusion in the above quote stems from their penchant to call any kind of change, “evolution.” I've written about that before.  It's a misnomer but not one which I'll visit again in this post.

  
A common understanding about evolution is that it is a “gradual” process. This stems from several different lines of reason which include things like the rate at which mutations occur in DNA, the length of the reproductive cycles of the host, and common interpretations of geological ages. In some instances, our observations of living populations seems to concur with the idea of gradual evolution since most of the minor variations we observe (what some people call “microevolution”) would have to continue for a very, very long time before they amounted to any significant changes in the populations.

What seems to escape many evolutionists is a very simple point which, to me, seems ridiculously obvious. Animals are adapted to their environment. Unless the environment should suddenly change, there's no reason to expect rapid change in the animals that occupy that environment. So animal populations continue in long periods of stasis, showing only minor changes in response to the minor changes in the environment – like the beaks of Darwin's finches. If these minor changes were all that occurred, then evolution would indeed be a staggeringly slow process.

 
The world after the Flood, however, was marked by dramatic environmental change. The specialized niches once occupied by the animals on the Ark no longer existed. The animals had to make their way in a new, very different world where the rule was to adapt or die. Rapid speciation necessarily was the norm – not over thousands of years or even over centuries. I'm talking about rapid speciation occurring in a few decades!

 
In spite of their claims to the contrary, rapid speciation should not be a surprise to evolutionists because there are many examples of rapid changes in species in response to sudden changes in their environment. Very early on in my blogging career, I posted this quote from Sciencedaily:

"Countering the widespread view of evolution as a process played out over the course of eons, evolutionary biologists have shown that natural selection can turn on a dime -- within months -- as a population's needs change. In a study of island lizards exposed to a new predator, the scientists found that natural selection dramatically changed direction over a very short time, within a single generation, favoring first longer and then shorter hind legs."

Ignore the conflation of “evolution” and “natural selection” for a moment. In light of this comment, it's rather hypocritical for evolutionists to say thousands of years since the Flood is not a long enough time for diverse changes to occur in the descendants of the kinds that were on the Ark. The environmental change in this experiment was rather subtle – they introduced a new predator onto a group of islands. Yet the indigenous species of lizard began to adapt quickly - "within months" according to the article. How much more dramatic was the change in environment after the Flood? The animals then would begin to adapt just as quickly.

Now the quote from the NY Times editorial above specifically said that 4,500 years is not enough time for foxes to split from other dog species. That belief is contrary to the experiments done by Russian scientist, Dmitry Belyaev. In the 1950s, Belyaev used wild, silver foxes in a study about the domestication of dogs. He would put his gloved hand into the cage with a wild fox to try to pet or feed the fox. Foxes that were the most curious or docile were selected to reproduce. Through this form of artificial selection, rapid and dramatic changes took place among the silver foxes:
  

“Belyaev and his colleagues did indeed create a population of foxes that differed in temperament and behavior from their wild cousins. The foxes changed physically as well, with alterations in coat color appearing as early as the eighth generation—typically a loss of pigment resulting in white patches. The foxes also developed floppy ears and curved tails, mirroring traits seen in dogs as well as other domesticated species.” (bold added; source here)

In less than a decade, these wild foxes began to look like domestic dogs. Their behavior changed as well to include things like whining and barking, traits also seen in domestic dogs. Certainly there has been some mutation to the DNA of these creatures since they have a different number of chromosomes but if these foxes could be turned into dogs in a few generations, saying 45 centuries isn't long enough for them to have split from dogs is laughable.

I've said before that, for evolution to occur, novel traits have to be added to a population. The removal of traits from a population will not allow the population to “evolve” regardless of how long the change occurs. On the other hand, if adaptation occurs primarily via different combinations of traits already present in a population, then speciation can occur in a few generations. Long ages aren't even necessary.

  
Time is not the hero of evolution. It's not even a player in the game. Gradual change is a flawed idea that is practically built into the long age assumptions of evolutionary theory. It's contradicted by simple observation.