The Age of “Enlightenment”

in Great Britain there were numerous instigators in the Age of Enlightenment who had a
great influence. One of these was a man by the name of Erasmus Darwin. That name should be
familiar. He was Charles Darwin’s grandfather, who was born in 1731 and he died in 1802.
Erasmus Darwin was a medical doctor but he had some ideas on the subject of origins. He wrote
a book called, The Zoonomia, in which he laid out the idea that through time, life had progressed
from lower to higher.Erasmus Darwin was a religious man. He worshipped the gods Bacchus and Venus. And he seemed to have a personal agenda to attack biblical authority. Well, certainly he was not alone. In
fact, he was one of fourteen members who formed what was called the Lunar Society. The Lunar
Society met in Birmingham on the Monday closest to the full moon, which may give you some
insight into the spiritual interest that some of these men had. As I mentioned, Erasmus Darwin
himself worshipped Bacchus and Venus. He was interested in Eastern philosophy, Eastern
religion. The Lunar Society projected the concept that the biblical view of the origin of man was a
mythological concept and what we need to do is rely upon science in order to determine the truth.
It is interesting that Erasmus Darwin was one of the members of the Lunar Society, but so was
Josiah Wedgewood—Darwin’s grandfather on his mother’s side.
Then there was this individual who was very influential, named Charles Lyell. Charles Lyell
wrote The Principles of Geology that was published in 1830. And by the way, Charles Darwin
had this book with him when he went on his journey to the Galapagos. It was Charles Darwin,
along with James Hutton who formulated the geological chart we looked at earlier, in which they
proposed that the earth’s history was very, very old. And over hundreds of millions of years of
time, the layers of the earth were laid down gradually. And it was through these long periods of
time that life lived and died and was buried in these layers.
Most people are not aware that Lyell knew exactly what he was doing. He had an agenda that
was, as part of this whole era of the Age of Enlightenment, to cause people to doubt the
authenticity of the Bible—particularly the Genesis record. And that can be documented.
Charles Darwin once wrote regarding Lyell’s agenda,
Lyell is most firmly convinced that he has shaken the faith in the
Deluge far more efficiently by never having said a word against
the Bible than if he had acted otherwise… I have read lately
Morley’s Life of Voltaire and he insists strongly that direct
attacks on Christianity produce little permanent effect; real good
seems only to follow the slow and silent side attacks.
You see, Lyell’s objective was to cause people to question the Bible without attacking the Bible.
And the way that he could do that is to present this view that the layers of the earth were laid
down, not by any great global catastrophic event, but by gradual processes. The theory was called
the theory of uniformitarianism; that is, that the present is the key to understanding the past. And
that caused people to question what the Bible says about the creation that had been destroyed by a
worldwide flood.
You see, Darwin himself was then able to use Lyell’s timeframe to substantiate the years that
would be required for his idea of evolution to have occurred. And that is why reading Lyell’s
book on the way to the Galapagos Islands was very important in helping Darwin formulate his
ideas. Charles Darwin, of course, is often called the father of evolution; but certainly he is only
one of numerous contributors. As we look into his life—in fact as we read his own testimony of
some of the things that he said in the latter parts of his life—we can see that Darwin himself used
evolution as a means of explaining away God.

Building blocks of Life

The idea that non-living materials can assemble to become life has been accepted by the intellectual community that support evolution. And of course, one of the experiments that is commonly referred to is the Stanley Miller experiment. It goes back to the 1950s. Many people today still argue, “Well you know, it’s possible in a laboratory, given the right conditions, to produce building blocks of life.” And this is what Miller did. He had an apparatus which included boiling water. He created an oxygen-free environment; methane was added, hydrogen was added, ammonium hydroxide, and then a 50,000 volt spark. There was a cooling chamber and a rap, and yes, he was able to produce some building blocks—amino acids, glycine, alanine, aspartic and glutamic acid. There were non-biological amino acids—urea, organic acids, formic, acetic, succinic, and lactic. But, there were problems. You see, this was an oxygen-free environment and that would have been totally unrealistic in the original earth if life originated from non-life. And of course, there would be no trap present when life was formed. There was a production of these toxic chemicals which would have destroyed any of these building blocks that were supposedly created spontaneously. Left-handed amino acids are the only ones that are required for life—when in this particular situation, both left-handed and right-handed amino acids were produced. Today most scientists do not refer to Miller’s experiment as
verification of the proof that non-life can become life. For example, an article entitled “A Calculation of the Probability of Spontaneous Biogenesis by Information Theory,” from the Journal of Theoretical Biology, volume 67,page 396, Hubert Yockey states the following:

The warm little pond scenario was invented ad hoc to serve
as a materialistic, reductionist explanation of the origin of
life. It is unsupported by any other evidence and it will
remain ad hoc until such evidence is found. One must
conclude that contrary to the established and current
wisdom, a scenario describing the genesis of life on earth
by chance and natural causes, which can be accepted on the
basis of fact and not faith, has not yet been written.
(Yockey, 396)

It could not be clearer. In other words, what Yockey is saying, is that it has never been
observed that non-living materials can spontaneously formulate life.

John Reader

Regarding the origin of life, John Reader, evolutionist and scientist, from the book The
Rise of Life, makes this statement:

Once life began, its story becomes a logical (not to say inevitable) sequence of evolutionary cause and effect whichscience is able to recount in fascinating detail. But just how life began is still something of a mystery. Not incontrovertibly explained. The chemical constituents ofThe Origin and the Progression of Life organisms have been identified.The biochemical processes that keep organisms alive are known in complex detail, but the vital spark that initiates life awaits precise definition. Life: so obvious and simple a phenomenon, yet so hard to explain.
Well that is another interesting statement made by a scientist who is an evolutionist. And
as you can see, there is no proof that life has originated from non-life by chance.

Big Bang

From Big Bang: The Story of the Universe, Heather Cooper and Nigel Henbest, make this
statement:
In the beginning there was nothing. It was a nothing so
profound it defies human comprehension. A long, long time
ago, there was no matter and no radiation. More
importantly, space did not exist. Time did not flow. Our
story begins, once upon a time when there was no space
and there was no time, from nothing a tiny speck of
brilliant light appeared. It was almost infinitely hot. Inside
this fireball was all of space. With the creation of space
came the birth of time. The energy in the fireball was so
concentrated that matter spontaneously started to appear: a
distant ancestor of the matter that would later become the
building blocks of stars, planets, and galaxies. The infant
universe hit the ground running. As soon as the fireball
appeared, it started expanding not into anything, but
throughout, because the universe was and is everything
everywhere. (Cooper and Henbest 8-10)
If you are having difficulty understanding what they said, so am I. These are examples of statements regarding the origin of the universe which you can find in any high school textbook.

Fat Chance

Scientists have attempted to look at the possibility of proteins formulating spontaneously from amino acids at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and through statistical analysis they came to the conclusion that the possibility of a protein molecule being formulated by chance would be one over ten followed by fifty-six zeros. Now that is an extremely small possibility. How small? Well, this is the analogy which they gave. They said it would be like walking down the street one day and seeing a lottery ticket on the sidewalk, picking up the lottery ticket and discovering that you had won the lottery for that week! But you would also have to do it the second week in a row, and the third week in a row. You would also have to find a winning lottery ticket the fourth week in a row, the fifth week in a row-in fact, every week in a row continuously for one thousand years. That is the possibility of a protein molecule coming into existence by chance.

Richard Leaky

I want to quote from a book by Richard Leakey, Making of Mankind. As you may know, Richard Leakey has been one of the major promoters of the evolutionary assumption through the years, and particularly in the relationship of apelike creatures evolving into man. From the introduction of Richard Leakey’s book he makes this statement:

I express concern about the growing support for
creationism because it has serious and far-reaching
implications. If society legislates against the teaching of
scientific truth on one issue, where will this process stop?
A few people still hold to the belief that the earth is flat.
Should they too, have equal time in schools? The great
achievements of modern science are gravely threatened by
this insane development. (Leakey 2)

Richard Leakey is saying that if you question the evolutionary worldview and you belong
to that creationist camp, you are insane. But I think that it can be demonstrated that the
assumptions of evolution are without evidence. There is no evidence to support:

• The idea that non-life can become life
• The idea that a single cell organism can become a multi-cellular creature
• The idea that a multi-cellular creature without a backbone can become a multicellular
creature with a backbone
• The idea that fish can become amphibians, or that amphibians can become
reptiles, or reptiles can become birds or mammals

So to challenge these things, does that categorize someone as insane? I do not think so. I
think that many people have simply accepted what they have been taught and they have
not checked it out for themselves.

Cambrian Layer

“The Cambrian Period and the Explosion of Life,” taken from National Geographic, October 1993, page 120. And you see a couple of individuals and who are in the Canadian Rockies in British Columbia, Canada-near Field, British Columbia. And they are picking in the rock and what they find there is very interesting. Let me read to you from the article.

More than half a billion years ago, the world’s first monster
appeared. With bulging eyes and fearsome grasping claws,
Anomalocaris cruised the seas during the geological period
known as the Cambrian. Its mouth was a nightmare of hard
plates and teeth. Its body looking like a cross between a
stingray and a lobster. It could grow three feet in length, a
giant for its time. For millions of years animals have been
simple, mostly anemone like creatures or worms. Then in a
geological blink of about ten million years virtually all the
phyla or groupings based on body design of animals alive
today, came into being. Perhaps encouraged by an increase
of oxygen in the seas, this Cambrian explosion was the
greatest burst of animal evolution the planet has ever
known and new fossil finds are highlighting its detail.
(Gore & Mazzatenta 120)

Well, this is amazing! What are they telling us? They are telling us that at the bottom of
the geological chart, the Cambrian layer (one of the oldest supposed layers of earth’s
history) there is a sudden appearance of complex creatures. You see all of a sudden, multi-cellular creatures appeared and many of thesecreatures look like something out of science fiction. Some of them have eyes, tentacles, and complex organs. So now we have a great problem because in the Cambrian, which is supposed to be down at the bottom of the chart as one of the oldest layers, we have the appearance of these complex animals. And they have no intermediates that they can trace in order to show that single-cell creatures have evolved.

Richard Dawkins, the evolutionist, promotes evolution in a great way in Great Britain. In
his book, The Blind Watchmaker, he has made this statement:
The Cambrian strata of rocks, vintage about 600 million
years ago, are the oldest which we find of the major
invertebrate groups and we find many of them in advanced
state of evolution the very first time they appear. It is as
though they were planted there without any evolutionary
history. Needless to say this appearance of sudden planting
has delighted creationists. (Dawkins 229)

You see, this is incredible! The facts tell us that in this supposed oldest layer (the oldest
layer in earth’s history) you have the sudden appearance of multi-cellular organisms.

Asimov

They claim that science has proven that life has originated not because of a Designer-Creator, but because of a natural process. We can quote Isaac Asimov for example, a former promoter of evolution who is now deceased. Asimov has made this statement in the past regarding the origin of life:

We can make inspired guesses, but we don’t know for certain what physical and chemical properties of the planet’s crust, its ocean, and its atmosphere made it so conducive to such a sudden appearance of life. Nor are we certain about the amounts and the forms of energy that permeated the environment in the planet’s early days. Thus the problem that scientists face is how to explain the suddenness with which life appeared on Planet Earth.

Now this is a rather significant statement. Asimov was willing to admit that the best that
we could do regarding the subject of the origin of life is to make inspired guesses. But as
we mentioned in our previous presentations, science must be based on fact, observable
evidence, and repeatable experimentation. Certainly there must be more than this in order to verify the idea that life has evolved.

The Moon

Is it reasonable to say that the moon is simply the product of chance?

I think it can be demonstrated that the moon was designed. You see at certain times
in Earth’s history when the moon passes between the sun and the earth, this phenomenon occurs. It is called an annular eclipse. And as you can see, it looks like the moon is exactly the same size as the sun. It appears to be the same diameter, but of course, we know that that is not the case. If you measure the diameter of the sun and the diameter of the moon (which can be done), the diameter of the sun is actually 400 times greater than the diameter of the moon. But as we said, it looks like the same diameter during the eclipse. So, why is that? How can that be explained?
Well obviously it is the positioning of the moon and its distance from the earth. When we
measure the distance of the sun from the earth and the moon from the earth, we find that it is exactly 400 times further away. The sun is 400 times wider in diameter. And it is 400 times farther away to produce this effect. Is it by chance?