“Evolution by natural selection is a scientific law and not just a theory.” No, this quote wasn’t lifted from an atheist blog or a Reddit rant. It’s not from an angry Facebook outburst either. Instead, it was the title of a recent academic paper.
In other words, the authors were not quibbling over whether evolution is a fact. Instead, their paper explored whether the fact of evolution happened unequivocally by means of natural selection—the survival of the fittest to reproduce—or by some other means (e.g., genetic drift, a type of statistical sorting). In short, the authors sought to resolve an intra-evolutionary quibble.
Academic purposes aside, the claims and assumptions of the paper still present a stark challenge to Bible-believing creationists. Theory, law, fact—all these descriptions of evolution fly in the face of the clear teaching of Genesis 1–11.
For Christians, evolution almost always conjures images of protoplasm turning into people over billions of years. This is the definition that directly contradicts Scripture. It’s also the type of evolution that has never been directly observed.
This is a big deal. The most basic criterion of scientific fact is observation. It’s a bit difficult to advance something as a scientific fact when it fails to meet this fundamental standard.
The other definition of evolution is the “process of evolution” that finds no contradiction in the Bible. In fact, it’s something that I freely invoke to explain how the kinds on board Noah’s ark multiplied into tens of thousands of species today.
The authors of the paper happily conflate the two definitions. In their minds, the process of evolution—over billions of years—naturally produces people from protoplasm.
The biggest arena for creationist success has been the origin of our own species, Homo sapiens. We now can read off the history of civilization in our own DNA. But only when we read the DNA in the context of just 4,500 years of history since Noah. Even better, we’ve found the DNA-based replica of the Genesis 10 genealogy. In other words, it’s not just that the evidence fails to support people evolving from protoplasm. It’s also that the evidence strongly confirms Biblical anthropology."
AIG
