If I were in the mood for some secular/leftist propaganda I’d read the Roanoke Times, not the Roanoke Star. So I was a bit distressed to run across “One Bad Earthquake” by H. B. Rinker, Ph.D in the Nov 30-Dec 6 issue of the Star. Darwin’s theory of evolution a “robust explanation of life’s origins?” Biblical creationism a “myopic, fearful black-and-white view of the natural world without a shred of evidence?” Wow! Dr. Rinker made some pretty questionable statements, especially when you consider that scientists in Darwin’s era knew nothing of DNA. They thought living cells were just blobs of protoplasm, and thought worms came to life from horse hairs in manure. So I doubt Darwin could really tell us much about the origins of life.
Science is supposed to be based on observation and experimentation. So where are any experiments showing how lifeless chemicals in the hypothesized primordial soup could have possibly organized themselves into the incredibly complex genetic code required for a living cell? Such experiments must exist because Rinker assures us evolution is a “robust explanation of life’s origins.” But I won’t hold my breath until he finds one.
The evolutionary notion that mutations could gradually change one species into another isn’t doing so well either. Has Dr. Rinker, I wonder, heard of the fruit fly experiments conducted over sixty years or so by various geneticists? Hundreds of generations of fruit flies (which produce a new generation every ten days) were bombarded with radiation in an effort to make them mutate or evolve into something else. The little flies did indeed mutate in the color of their eyes, the number of bristles, the shape of their wings, etc; but their DNA would simply not let them “evolve” into anything but fruit flies. When the radiation was stopped, the succeeding generations went right back to the bristles, wings and eyes they had before.
Seriously, devoid of evolutionary speculation, the fossil layers and all we observe in nature actually suggest a sudden creation of distinct kinds by an intelligent designer; and, sadly, a later disastrous flood. After all, to produce a fossil you need water, mud and pressure. A world-wide fossil layer suggests a world-wide flood.
Perhaps when a scientist such as Dr. Rinker rejects the primary obvious meaning of what he finds in the natural world, he is condemned by an angry science god to wander forever in the neverland of evolution – where life springs from dead chemicals, the laws of genetics and probability, badly abused, cower in the shadows, and logic runs madly in circles. Dear God, what a horrible fate.
– Tom Taylor
Roanoke
