I have been going through the book by Nancy Pearcey called Total Truth. Since the concept of truth has become so confusing in our society today, I think it’s worthwhile to cover her material.

In the next section of Nancy Pearcey’s  book, Total Truth, she deals specifically with Darwinism.  She believes that so much of what is wrong today in American society goes back to how we see the beginning of life on earth.  The Christian perspective is that God created everything; the Darwinian view says matter randomly assembled itself without any overall design or plan.  The crucial thing to realize is what Darwinism does for the concept of truth. If evolution is true, than both religion and philosophical absolutes (goodness, truth, and beauty) are false.

She begins by showing how limited the evidence for Darwinian evolution really is.  First, evolutionists trot out the idea of Darwin’s finches, showing the beak size differs according to the habitats where they live.  However, this is nothing but a cyclical fluctuation; the birds were not on the road to evolving into a new kind of bird.  Beak size either grew or went back to a smaller size depending on the amount of rainfall.  This was cyclical, not heading anywhere.

The same thing applies to resistance of bacteria and viruses to antibiotics.  Once the drugs are removed, the changes reverse.  Then there are fruit flies — exposed to radiation, they produce many mutations.  After fifty years of bombarding fruit flies with radiation, scientists have not managed to turn them into any kind of new insect or even a new and improved fruit fly.

The third case involves peppered moths in England.  Supposedly, dark moths survived in England rather than light colored moths because of soot which during the Industrial Revolution darkened tree trunks where the moths perched.  The lighter colored moths were easier for birds to pick off.  This has been touted as the showcase example of natural selection.  Oops – it can now be revealed that the moths don’t actually perch on tree trunks in the wild.  But what about all the pictures of them doing so in textbooks?  Actually, scientists glued those moths onto the tree trunks.  Perhaps the most famous fake was a well-known exhibit of vertebrate embryos lined up side-by-side — fish, amphibian, reptile, bird, and human.  The point of the illustration is to show how similar all the embryos are, suggesting common ancestry.  It turns out the creator of this, Ernst Haeckel, fudged his sketches, making them look far more similar than they really are.  Scientists in his time, more than 100 years ago, already knew these illustrations were fakes, yet only recently have they publicly been talking about them.  Strangely enough, these illustrations still show up in biology textbooks.

OK, enough for now. More on Darwin in the next blog post.