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"The Facts Are Not There"
The Preacher and Charles Darwin

I was in my car this past Sunday morning, enroute to the Lawrenceville airport (KLZU). As I sometimes do, I was listening on the radio to a religious broadcast. This one was a sermon being given by Dr. John Avant of the New Hope Baptist Church (newhopebc.org) in Fayetteville, Georgia. The pastor was fairly stereotypic of his kind and gave the standard emotion-charged presentation. Dr. Avant has a nice, energetic speaking voice and I've been told that he preaches to as many as 3,000 people each Sunday. The topic this week was one of my favorites: evolution versus creationism. Maybe it was one of his favorites, too.

The long debated case was no more solved in his church than it will be solved in this monologue. But Dr. Avant made such classic mistakes that his sermon could be used as a case study in misinformation and faulty logic.

Dr. Avant seems to think that "science" is some sort of cult that seeks facts, or even invents them, to support its beliefs. First of all, let me just say that "science" has no ax to grind. Its objective is to discover and understand the truth, regardless of what that truth is. Religion, on the other hand, takes the opposite approach. Its followers are given the "truth" first, then they try to support or explain it. This is rationalization and is totally backwards from what it should be. Science requires that its practitioners rigorously try to disprove their hypotheses. Religious practitioners accept their beliefs on faith. No evidence, no testing. The last thing they want to do is to prove themselves wrong. But lets move on to some of Dr. Avant's comments and observations.

The entire sermon was spiked with the phrase, "the facts are not there, the facts are not there." According to the pastor, the belief in evolution is irrational, unsupported, and not even seriously believed by most people. That was his case. Here are his arguments.

The Cambrian period was a very active time for biology on Earth. So active, in fact, that the term "Cambrian Explosion" is frequently used to describe the abundant proliferation of new life forms. To give you some frame of reference, the Cambrian period started about 540 million years ago and lasted for approximately 40 million years. Dr. Avant claimed that life appeared so abruptly during this period that biologists were at a loss to explain it. I think he used the term "baffled." He argued that since life appeared virtually spontaneously, there was no time for evolution to do its thing. He then went on to imply that many scientists found the Cambrian Explosion so disturbing that they abandoned their own beliefs in evolution. But it doesn't take much more than an introductory course in biology to see the flaws in this reasoning.

Yes, Dr. Avant is correct on one point. The Cambrian period was a time of dramatic growth and diversification in life forms on Earth. But the Cambrian period itself lasted for 40 million years! To say that complex life "suddenly appeared" over a forty million year period is like saying that humans "suddenly" invented calculus. Advanced life did not appear overnight any more than higher math did. Both started out in simpler forms and progressed to more advanced states. This is not theory, it is fact. Incidentally, it is also known that life did exist in Precambrian times. The two-billion year period preceding the Cambrian is called the Proterozoic. It was during this time that the first examples of primitive life appeared as is evidenced in the fossil record. They form a continuum from the simple to the more advanced forms of the Cambrian period. Much, by the way, that evolution would suggest.

Next in Dr. Avant's sermon was a surprising statistic. Now I am not prepared to disprove it since I have not done any research on the subject. But I surely do question its accuracy. According to Dr. Avant, only 9% of the American public believes in evolution. I cannot bring myself to accept this any more than I can believe his contention that most scientists have failed to accept the concept of evolution. If anyone can support that figure I'd certainly welcome hearing about it.

As the sermon moved on to the subject of the chief heretic, Charles Darwin, Avant introduced his listeners to the term "irreducibly complex." His logic was that even Darwin recognized that complex organs and systems could not evolve piecemeal. His example was classic, and one that I heard a number of times before - the eye.

An eye is a complex organ if there ever was one. It has a lens, a retina, sclera, musculature, and all types of complicated enervation. Any one part of the eye, so the argument goes, is useless by itself. Therefore, the entire thing must have come into being intact and operational. This is total hogwash. Clearly Dr. Avant failed to pay attention to the discussion of Planeria in his high school biology class.

Planeria are tiny flatworms commonly found in water. There are carnivorous, have a primitive nervous system, and reproduce asexually. They also have two photosensitive spots on the sides of their heads. The spots have no lens, no musculature, and no retina as we know it. They cannot discern shapes and cannot even determine the precise direction of a light source. But they can distinguish light and dark. This turns out to be a life saver for the little aquatic beasts. Planeria live in the dark and their primitive eyes tell them when they're there. An obvious example of a functioning precursor to a complex eye. And Planeria are not alone in the animal kingdom. Numerous other examples exist with stepping-stone adaptations from primitive to complex eyes.

I will accede this to Dr. Avant: this issue of eye evolution is not fully understood and many different explanations exist in the scientific community. However, there are enough living examples of intermediate forms of eyes to completely destroy the theory that complex eyes must have developed in toto. Put simply, it's bunk.

The pastor moved on to another oft-mentioned analogy. You can smash a watch and throw it up in the air, but no matter how many times you toss it, it will never turn back into a functioning timepiece again. Okay, I'll accept that. It's a very colorful and entertaining comparison. But a watch is a mechanical system. Evolution operates in biochemical systems. To say that a watch cannot spontaneously generate is totally irrelevant to the argument. The good doctor committed an obvious non sequitir.

If you want to discuss broken watches in evolutionary terms, you need to look at their chemistry. A broken watch, or any watch for that matter, will undergo chemical changes over time. Fact. So maybe it will not become a watch again, but who is to say what form its compounds may take in the future?

Evolution does not imply that elements combine to form compounds, and compounds combine to form life. It happens sometimes, but only in the rarest of cases. Evolution, you see, has no goals. Changes happen randomly, and sometimes those changes do something that we find interesting. There is no magic, no hocus-pocus. It's just the way things are.

"The facts are not there," cried out Dr. Avant from his holy pulpit. And that certainly applies to the "facts" he was foisting on his followers and humble listeners. Is Dr. Avant sincerely interested in the truth? Does he really care about the way things are? Or is he simply interested in the way he wishes they were?