The Institute for Creation Research

But from the beginning of the creation, God made them male and female. (Mark 10:6)

Most of us have been exposed to the illustration depicting the ascent of man from an apelike ancestor to a modern human. This concept has been taught to generations of young people as scientific fact and is now so integrated into Western culture that not only the vast majority of people but also the vast majority of scientists simply accept it as fact without bothering to investigate the actual observational evidence that supports or refutes it.

In the early 19th century the opposite was true—i.e., most people believed that God created man and woman on the sixth day of creation. So what happened in the last century and a half to change that? Charles Darwin published his landmark book The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection in 1859. The secular humanists, who were searching for a hypothesis of human origins that eliminated the need for God, seized the opportunity and quickly integrated the evolutionary principle into their philosophical foundation. They proceeded to identify their philosophy with science itself and systematically persuaded several generations to believe that macroevolution, naturalism, and uniformitarianism were all scientific facts.^1,2,3

However, most people are unaware that Charles Darwin questioned his own hypothesis of origins: “Why, if species have descended from other species by insensibly fine gradations, do we not everywhere see innumerable transitional forms?”⁴ The natural consequence of this philosophical approach to science—meshing philosophy and science together and insisting everyone swallow the mixture as a single proven concept—has been the demotion of man to the same level as animals, which is a very destructive idea.

Until the 20th century, the real facts of science were the thoughtful observations and results of reproducible experiments. Obviously, we cannot go back in time and observe where man actually came from, so we are relegated to analyzing the observational data and forming an opinion about whether it supports or refutes a particular hypothesis of origins. Those data are fossils and the records ancient man left behind. Only one eyewitnessed history actually records the origin of man—the Bible, which obviously supports creation. Other historical records of ancient man cut off rather abruptly around 5,000 years ago,⁵ which, though not conclusive, is consistent with the biblical timescale; we do not find historical documents that go back further than Genesis. So, that leaves us with the fossil record.

The fossil record, in its entirety, clearly shows:⁶

1. Fossils that are indistinguishable from modern humans are found in strata that secularists believe to be around 4.5 million years old. Yet, the fossils of creatures that evolutionists believe to be our apelike progenitors are estimated to be more recent.⁷ How can man predate his own supposed ancestor?
2. A supposed transitional form for humans called Homo erectus demonstrates morphological consistency throughout its entire alleged two-million-year history with no evidence of H. erectus evolving from or into something else.
3. Anatomically modern Homo sapiens (us), Neandertal, archaic Homo sapiens, and Homo erectus all lived as contemporaries at one time or another. These were all people as we define modern people today, 100% human, with only subtle “ethnic” differences in their anatomy.
4. Homo habilis fossils are contemporary with Homo erectus fossils. Therefore, H. habilis could not have evolved into H. erectus. Plus, some evolutionary paleoanthropologists regard this “species” as possessing an invalid name since the fossils are so sparse and of circuitous origin.
5. There are no fossils of Australopithecus or any other primate stock in the proper alleged time frame to serve as evolutionary ancestors to humans.

In summary, the fossil record and ancient history effectively falsify the hypothesis of the macroevolution of humans. Man first appeared on the scene as fully formed man just as the Bible unequivocally states. Creation is the best scientific explanation of the fossil record.

References

1. Macroevolution: Evolution that occurs on separated gene pools, i.e., changes above the species classification level.
2. Naturalism: The philosophical premise that only natural laws and forces operate in the world.
3. Uniformitarianism: The assumption that the same natural laws and processes operating in the present always operated in the past exactly as they do now. It gave rise to the gradualistic concept that the “present is the key to the past.”
4. Darwin, C. 1859. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. London: John Murray, 158.
5. Dritt, J. O. 1990. Man’s earliest beginnings: discrepancies in the evolutionary timetable. In Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Creationism, vol. 1. R. E. Walsh and C. L. Brooks, eds. Pittsburgh, PA: Creation Science Fellowship, 73-78.
6. Lubenow, M. 1992. Bones of Contention: A Creationist Assessment of Human Fossils. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 178-179.
7. Lucy (or Australopithecus afarensis), the famous fossil discovered in Ethiopia by Don Johanson and hailed as the missing link between apes and modern humans, was estimated based on secular assumptions to be 3.2 million years old.

Image Credit: Copyright © P. Newman. Adapted for use in accordance with federal copyright (fair use doctrine) law. Usage by ICR does not imply endorsement of copyright holder.

* Dr. Cupps is Research Associate at the Institute for Creation Research and received his Ph.D. in nuclear physics from Indiana University-Bloomington.