Part II: Is the Earth Old or Young?

…continued from Part I…

For Part I...

Get the Book!

Neither Gould nor Eldredge take kindly to such remarks, however.

Eldredge, for example, in his book The Triumph of Evolution and the Failure of Creationism, anathametizes anyone who puts the Creation/Evolution debate on a moral level. He writes:

“To those who say there are moral lessons and ethical systems – evil or good – implicit in the very idea of evolution, I say, A PLAGUE ON BOTH YOUR HOUSES” (emphasis his).859

Eldredge adds a sardonic touch by printing the words The Failure of Creationism backwards on the front cover of his book. Generally, evolutionists admit that the only alternative to their theory is that of a supernatural Creator who fashioned the world according to his pleasure, but this they automatically dismiss on the grounds that it is “unscientific.” Hence, the religion of Scientism is alive and well among our academia today. Eldredge writes:

...this tremendously diverse array of life...can rationally be explained only as the simple outcome of a natural shared descent with modification. The only alternative is the decidedly vague and inherently untestable (thus inherently unscientific) claim that it simply suited a supernatural Creator to fashion life in this way.860

Geneticist Richard Lewontin is quite candid about the impregnable wall that Evolutionists, like himself, have set up around themselves. He writes:

We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior committment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a-priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.861

Unfortunately, the debate between special creation and evolution will forever be caught in this quagmire over God’s existence, and there is little hope, barring a dramatic conversion experience, that the evolutionist will ever see the light. Since they have camouflaged their failures as triumphs, their house of cards will continue to be built unabated. In the meantime, many people, especially the impressionable young, are greatly influenced by evolutionary theories. A survey conducted in the late 1970’s in Germany, searching for answers why many people no longer went to Church, revealed that a staggering sum of 47% attributed their spiritual apathy to the difference between the theological and scientific explanations for the origin of the world.862

Abbe Michonneau, a 20th century worker-priest in Paris among the peasants, concluded that the conflict between science and the Genesis six-day creation story was much more effective in promoting atheism among the poor and the uneducated than were the social injustices that were inflicted on their flesh and blood.863

It is no secret that some of the world’s most notorious men have attributed their atheistic and humanistic philosophies directly to Charles Darwin. Karl Marx, for example, dedicated his book Das Kapital to Darwin. Lest we believe that the controversy between special creation and evolution is something new, a brief review of the patristics reveals that the Church Fathers were in heated battles with the Greeks over the origin of the world. The Greeks, not Darwin, were the first to propose the evolutionary model, and were also the first to propose a heliocentric solar system, not Copernicus. Writing against his Greek opponents, St. Basil of Caesarea writes:

Some had recourse to material principles and attributed the origin of the Universe to the elements of the world. Others imagined that atoms, and indivisible bodies, molecules...by their union formed the nature of the visible world. Atoms reuniting or separating, produce births and deaths and the most durable bodies owing their consistency to the strength of their mutual adhesion...Deceived by their inherent atheism it appeared to them that nothing governed or ruled the universe, and that all was given up to chance.864

Having similar experiences with the Greek scientists, Hippolytus of Rome, an early Father who lived in the second century (d. 235), writes:

But Leucippus, an associate of Zeno...affirms things to be infinite, and always in motion, and that generation and change exist continuously....And he asserts that worlds are produced when many bodies are congregated and flow together from the surrounding space to a common point, so that by mutual contact they made substances of the same figure and similar in form come into connection; and when thus intertwined, there are transmutations into other bodies, and that created things wax and wane through necessity...”865

After thoroughly examining their works, St. Basil concludes:

Read more