Written by Henry Morris, PhD

Introduction and Tribute: by Mark Stephens, MCS, former Chairman and current board member of TASC

Henry M. Morris, Ph.D. Late Founder and President Emeritus of ICR

Dr. Henry Morris wrote this article for Acts and Facts, the monthly publication of the Institute for Creation Research (ICR), shortly before he died on February 25, 2006, at the age of 87. His messages, as was this article, were always clearly stated and well referenced from the Bible and the scientific literature. I believe God gave Dr. Morris a long life to be a courageous, intelligent messenger to help us understand that truly objective scientific observations and evidences support the Genesis account of creation, that we can rely on this account as the true Word of God, and that God is our Creator. Dr. Morris spent his life to help establish and strengthen our faith in God so that we can wholeheartedly believe in Him, accept His gift of our Savior, Jesus Christ, and go forward joyfully in His grace unto good works as he did.

I inadvertently sat by and met Dr. Morris on a plane trip out of San Diego in the mid-1980s. I believe that this contact with him was a prayer answered, as it influenced my later examination of his writings and other materials from ICR which helped me as a Christian and a trained science teacher to clear up the bias, confusion, and deceit on origins that I had been exposed to in my public education. The creation science knowledge I have gained through the influence of Dr. Morris has helped me to live a stronger Christian life and dedicate my time to help others to understand that God is our Creator and that we did not get here by naturalistic evolution, an atheistic theory taught largely as fact.

The Triangle Association for the Science of Creation (TASC) respectfully pays tribute to the dedicated Christian life of a great creation scientist through the reprinting of the following article in this month’s newsletter. We will miss Dr. Morris but continue to be enlightened and encouraged by his dedicated efforts. We hope you enjoy his article following. 

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EVOLUTION—IMPOSSIBLE TO
EMBARASS ITS BELIEVERS

By Henry M. Morris, Ph.D. *

Reprinted from Back to Genesis 200: Aug. 2005 with permission from the Institute for Creation Research, El Cajon, California

Creationists have often pointed out that evolution is unscientific because it can never be proved by science to be true. It is not happening at present and without a time machine, they can never be sure that it happened in the past.

Regardless of how much an organism looks like it had been intelligently designed, evolutionists (without even sounding embarrassed) will insist that natural selection has the power to make it look like it was designed, even though it wasn’t. Furthermore, no matter what fossil they find out of its accepted place in the evolutionary “record,” the evolutionists can “explain” how it got there.

The recent discovery of the intact flesh of a Tyrannosaurus rex with its “blood vessels—still flexible and elastic after 68 million years—and apparently intact cells” 1  is a case in point. It would seem impossible for such soft structures to be preserved intact even for 6800 years, but evolutionists accept it on faith.

Similarly, Silurian fossil ostracodes supposedly 425 million years old have been found recently in England virtually identical to their modern-day counterparts and containing “a jaw-dropping amount of detail,” 2  but this discovery does not phase evolutionists. They still believe it was buried 425 million years ago!

On another front, one would think that geophysicists would be embarrassed by their repeated failure to find the so-called Mohorovocic Discontinuity (except by inference from seismic waves) at the boundary between the earth’s “crust” and “mantle.” Since the supposed evolutionary history of the earth is theoretically related to this “Moho,” scientists have been trying to confirm its existence, along with the assumed nature of the mantle, by drilling deep holes in the crust. This has been going on since the early sixties without success, the latest such attempt having failed earlier this year.

The Bible long ago prophesied that it was not possible that the “heaven above can be measured, and the foundations of the earth searched out  beneath” (Jeremiah 31:37). Nevertheless: “Undaunted, oceanographers are ready to try again.” 3

On the heavenly front, the same unembarrassed evolutionary cosmologists will evidently continue trying to “explain” the evolutionary history of the cosmos. Theories abound, and change frequently, the rising favorite being “string theory,” involving multiple dimensions of space and even multiple universes of space/time. However, as one evolutionary astrophysicist admits: “…the universe unveiled by the hellishly complex mathematics of super-string theory is not even remotely close to what string theorists anticipated.” 4

Another cosmologist insists, however, that “string theory possesses a virtue for which many physicists are willing to accept these seeming absurdities: It can reconcile quantum mechanics and Einstein’s theory of gravity.” 5  But then he admits that “the theory itself continues to grow more complicated and mysterious.” 6

Its main virtue is that it can explain the cosmos without God. As Gardner insists, “…the fundamental credo of science is that deep mysteries like these will someday, if only in the distant future, succumb to rational explanation.” 7

And what about human evolution? A recent statistical study of the genetics of human populations revealed,

the most recent common ancestor (MRCA) for a randomly mating population would have lived in the very recent past…. In particular, the MRCA of all present-day humans lived just a few thousand years ago in these models. 8

The writer avoids mentioning the “Adam and Eve” explanation, of course. Nevertheless, he also notes that: “And a few thousand years before that, …the ancestors of everyone on the earth today were exactly the same.” 9

 One would think that analyses such as this, made by evolutionists on the real data of genetics and human populations would be embarrassing to evolutionists who commonly postulate an approximately million-year history of human existence on earth. But even if there were people living all during the past million years, how come they all kept the same genetic makeup until just a few thousand years ago? The Biblical record would seem at least relevant to the discussion!

Then there are the recent research findings by ICR scientists and others working on the RATE project that have uncovered many new evidences that the earth is young, including the ubiquitous presence of radiocarbon in coal beds and even in diamonds. For years, of course, creationists have been pointing out that no real evolution has taken place during the several thousand years of human history and also that there are no legitimate series of transitional forms in the fossil beds of the past, plus the negative effects of mutations and the testimony of the laws of thermodynamics—all of which seem to make any macroevolution extremely unlikely, if not impossible.

Yet evolutionists continue to control the scientific and education establishments, insisting that total evolution is a scientific fact and creation is religion, so only evolution can be allowed to be taught in public schools and colleges. They gloat over the alleged fact that “an unprecedented 14 percent of Americans tell pollsters that they are atheists, agnostics, secular humanists, or simply disinterested in religion.” 10  Even if this figure is assumed to be correct, it still leaves 86% of the population who believe in God.

And they express surprise that so many people have somehow come to believe in creation despite all the brainwashing in schools. The editor-in-chief of the premier magazine Science, recently moaned in a lead editorial that:

Alternatives to the teaching of biological evolution are now being debated in no fewer than 40 states. Worse, evolution is not the only science under such challenge. In several school districts, geology materials are being rewritten because their dates for Earth’s age are inconsistent with scripture (too old). 11

A few evolutionists do seem to have at least a glimpse of why we object to their insistence that evolution be considered a scientifically proven fact. The following commentary on evolutionary science was in a recent issue of Geotimes.

Evolutionists have “Physics Envy”. They tell the public that the science behind evolution is the same science that sent people to the moon and cures diseases. It’s not.

The science behind evolution is not empirical, but forensic. Because evolution took place in history, its scientific investigations are after the fact—no testing, no observations, no repeatability, no falsification, nothing at all like physics…. I think this is what the public discerns—that evolution is just a bunch of just-so stories disguised as legitimate science. 12

Another evolutionist makes an interesting admission. He says: “Contrary to their public image, scientists are normal, flawed human beings.” 13  They are as capable of prejudice, covetousness, pride, deceitfulness, etc., as anyone.

Evolutionists can’t seem to comprehend why most Americans still believe in God, creation, and the Bible, despite having the “fact” of evolution dogmatically taught to them throughout their school years. The fact is that there is an abundance of objective evidence that the Bible really is the Word of God. It is not just a book of religion as they argue, but a book of factual history. Jesus Christ really did rise from the dead and Jesus Christ really did confirm the truth of the Biblical account of origins. Creationists do not believe in the Bible just because they are ignorant of science.

Peter says that “we have not followed cunningly devised fables…. We have also a more sure word of prophecy; whereunto ye do well that ye take heed…” (II Peter 1:16,19). And the apostle Paul, prophesying of the humanists of “the last days” said that they would be “Ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth” (II Timothy 3:1,7) because “they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables” (II Timothy 4:4).

A creationist scientist justifiably might think of the Psalmist’s caustic commentary on the ancient idol-making pantheistic evolutionists:

Their idols are silver and gold, the work of men’s hands. They have mouths, but they speak not: eyes have they, but they see not: …They that make them are like unto them; so is every one that trusteth in them (Psalm 115:4,5,8). 

• *Dr. Henry Morris is Founder and President Emeritus of ICR.
• 1Erik Stokstad, “Tyrannosaurus rex Soft Tissue Raises Tantalizing Prospects,” Science (vol. 307, March 25, 2005), p. 1852.
• 2Erik Stokstad, “Gutsy Fossil Sets Record for Staying the Course,” Science (vol. 302, December 5, 2003), p. 1645.
• 3Richard A. Kerr, “Pursued for 40 Years, the Moho Evades Ocean Drillers Once Again,” Science (vol. 307, March 18, 2005), p. 1707.
• 4James N. Gardner, “Fundamental Cosmological Understanding Eludes Us,” Skeptical Inquirer (vol. 28, July/August, 2004), p. 51.
• 5Adrian Cho, “String Theory Gets Real—Sort of,” Science (vol. 306, November 26, 2004), p. 1461.
• 6Ibid., p. 1462.
• 7James N. Gardner, op. cit., p. 52.
• 8Douglas L. T. Rohde, Steve Olson, and Joseph T. Chang, “Modelling the Recent Common Ancestry of all Living Humans,” Nature (vol. 431, September 30, 2004), p. 562.
• 9Ibid., p. 565.
• 10Promotional brochure published by the Council for Secular Humanism.
• 11Donald Kennedy, “Twilight for the Enlightenment?” Science (vol. 308, April 8, 2005), p. 165.
• 12John Chaikowsky, “Geology v. Physics,” Geotimes (vol. 50, April 2005), p. 6.
• 13David Weatherall, “Conduct Unbecoming,” American Scientist (vol. 93, January-February 2005), p. 73.