Creation Worldview : Evolution Is Accepted by Faith in Defiance of Facts

Blind searching, illustration By Frits Ahlefeldt [1]

"Given that evolution, according to Darwin, was in a continual state of motion, with ongoing but slow and gradual change accruing over long periods of time, it followed logically that the fossil record should be rife with examples of transitional forms leading from the less to the more evolved. ... Darwin breathed new life into the discipline of paleontology, which was the only field of study that could provide the scientific world with an actual picture of his view of evolution.

Fueled in no small way by the role that paleontology could assume - reconstructing and also demonstrating the course of evolution - the world's leading museums of natural history focused on fossil collecting. ... Now, armed with the possibility of being able to exhibit not just an array of fossils but the drama of evolution itself, museums vied with one another to secure the best fossil localities and discover increasingly older representatives of the lineages of now-extinct animals. ...

But when the dust settled, and the fossils were assessed in terms of whether they validated Darwin's evolutionary predictions, a clear picture of slow, gradual evolution, with smooth transitions and transformations from fossils of one period to another, was not forthcoming. Instead of filling in the gaps in the fossil record with so-called missing links, most paleontologists found themselves facing a situation in which there were only gaps in the fossil record, with no evidence of transformational evolutionary intermediates between documented fossil species. Without fossil intermediates to back up Darwinian predictions of how evolution works, the turn of the century saw both paleontology (an evolutionary discipline) and gradual change via natural selection (an evolutionary model) fall on hard times. Even the paleontologists' special plea - that the gaps in the fossil record were the consequences of poor preservation, the loss of fossils through erosion or other destructive processes - did not work." [2] (Emphasis added - I.B.)

The lengthy quote above, strictly speaking, describes the lack of intermediate fossils at the turn of the XX century. Nevertheless, has the situation changed since then? Not much.

The quoted work by Jeffrey H. Schwartz was published in 1999. One of its reviewers on Amazon.com wrote: "However, credit is due for developing the thesis that the discontinuous fossil record is due to the relatively sudden emergence of species ..." [3] Please, note that in 1999 the reviewer acknowledges that the fossil record is "discontinuous". Thus, at the turn of the XXI century, "a clear picture of slow, gradual evolution" is not forthcoming still.

What did evolutionists do when faced with the the absence of fossil transitions? Did they reject the idea of evolution? No, they didn't. They did not accept it because of some facts in the first place. Why should they reject it because of some facts?

Evolution is accepted by faith in defiance of facts.

For other revealing quotes see Evolution is a Religion" by G.S. McMurtry on our official website.

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