R C Sproul on Creation

In our time a considerable number of theories have arisen denying that the creation, as we know it, took place in twenty-four hour days. Common to these theories is the acceptance of the dominant scientific view that the earth and life on it are very old. Many consider the biblical account to be primitive, mythological, and untenable in light of modern scientific knowledge.

This crisis has resulted in several attempts to reinterpret the Genesis account of creation. We are reminded of the sixteenth century, when Copernicus and his followers repudiated the old Ptolemaic view of astronomy. They argued that the center of the solar system is not the earth (geocentricity), but the sun (heliocentricity). It was a sad chapter in the history of the church, which had believed for more than fifteen hundred years that the Bible teaches geocentricity, when it condemned Galileo for believing and teaching heliocentricity. Both Luther and Calvin opposed Copernicus’s views, believing them to undermine Scripture’s authority.

Actually the Bible does not explicitly teach geocentricity anywhere. Scripture describes the movements of the heavens from the perspective of someone standing on earth: the sun moves across the sky, rising in the east and setting in the west. We use that same language today. The church thought that because the Bible uses this kind of descriptive language, it was therefore teaching something about the relationship between the sun and the earth. This is a clear case of scientific knowledge correcting the church’s interpretation of the Bible.

There are two spheres of revelation; the Bible (special revelation) and nature (general revelation). In the latter, God manifests himself through the created order. What God reveals in nature can never contradict what he reveals in Scripture, and what he reveals in Scripture can never contradict what he reveals in nature. He is the author of both forms of revelation, and God does not contradict himself.

The church has always taken the position that all truth meets at the top, and that science should never contradict Scripture. Scientific discoveries, however, can correct the theologian’s faulty understanding of Scripture, just as biblical revelation can correct faulty speculations drawn from the natural order. When the scientific consensus on a particular point is on a collision course with the unmistakable teaching of Scripture, I trust Scripture before I trust the speculations and inferences of scientists. That is consistent with the history of the church and Christianity. We believe that sacred Scripture is nothing less than the Creator’s truth revealed.

We have a problem not only with a six-day creation, but also with the age of the earth. Is the earth a few thousand years old or billions of years old (as scientists today insist)? Although the Bible clearly says that the world was created in six days, it gives no date for the beginning of that work. It would be a mistake to become embroiled in too much controversy about the date of creation.

In a Massachusetts college I taught Introduction to the Old Testament to two hundred and fifty students. Because the class was so large, we met in the chapel. Once I opened the old pulpit Bible to Genesis 1, and at the top of the page I read “4004 B.C.” I did some research to see how that date had been determined. In the seventeenth century an archbishop, James Ussher, made some calculations based on the genealogies in Genesis 5 and 11 and other chronological clues in the Old Testament. He even pinned down the day of the week and the time of day when creation occurred. I hasten to tell my students that we must be very careful to distinguish between the text of Scripture and additions to the text. In defending the biblical authority, we are not obligated to defend a theory based on the speculations of a bishop in times past.

If we take the genealogies that go back to Adam, however, and if we make allowances for certain gaps in them (which could certainly be there), it remains a big stretch from 4004 B.C. to 4.6 billion years ago. We also have the problem of the antiquity of the human race. It seems as if every time a new skeleton or skull is discovered, scientists push back the date of man’s origin another million years.

Scholars have proposed four basic theories to explain the time from of Genesis 1–2:

1.the gap theory,
2.the day-age theory,
3.the framework hypothesis, and
4.six-day creation.

GAP THEORY
The gap theory was made popular by the Scofield Reference Bible (1909), which more than any other single edition of Scripture swept through this country and informed the theology of an entire generation of evangelicals. It became the principal instrument for propagating dispensational theology throughout America. In this Bible, Genesis 1:1 reads, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth,” and verse 2 reads, “And the earth became without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.” Other Bibles read, “And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.” Verse 2 describes what most scholars consider to be the as-yet-unordered, basic structure of the universe—darkness, emptiness. Then the Holy Spirit hovers over the waters (v.2) and God says, “Let there be light” (v.3). Thus came the light and then the creation of the heavens, fish, birds, animals, and so on.

The Hebrew word in verse 2 translated “was” is the very common verb hayah, which ordinarily means “to be.” Hayah means “to become” only in special circumstances, which are not present here. The Scofield Reference Bible translates verse 2 as “became” instead of “was” in order to facilitate the gap theory. As a result, only verse 1 refers to the original creation. Verse 2 then refers to a cosmic catastrophe in which the originally good and properly ordered creation became chaotic, dark, and fallen. After this period of darkness (the “gap”), God recreates the universe which could have been created billions of years ago, followed by a gap of billions of years (including the “geologic column” of immense ages), after which God returned to his distorted creation and renovated or reconstituted it relatively recently. The gap theory has also been called the restitution hypothesis, meaning that the creation narrative in Genesis is not about the original creation, but about the restitution of a fallen creation.

An entire generation was fed this theory through the Scofield Reference Bible. However, Scripture nowhere explicitly teaches that the original creation was marred and then after many years reconstituted. The broader context of the whole of Scripture militates against the gap theory.

DAY-AGE THEORY
According to the second approach, the day-age theory, each “day” of Genesis 1 may be an age. After all, one day in the Lord’s sight is like a thousand years (2 Peter 3:8). Also, expressions like “in the days of Noah” and “in Abraham’s day” can refer to open-ended periods. The Hebrew word yom, translated “day” in Genesis, can mean something other than a twenty-four-hour period, as it must in Genesis 2:4, which refers to “the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens.” Accordingly, each “day” in Genesis 1 may refer to a thousand years, and perhaps even to millions of years. This will at least ameliorate some of the difficulties we have with those who argue for a gradual evolution of life-forms on this earth.

However, the day-age theory, like the gap theory, ignores the immediate context as well as the large biblical context. It ignores the fact that each of the six days of creation consists of an evening and a morning. If yom here means something like ten million years, then we need to give the words evening and morning the same kind of metaphorical meaning. From a literary, exegetical, and linguistic perspective, the day-age theory is weak. As a Christian apologist, I would not want to defend it.

The day-age theory tends to accommodate a theory of biological macroevolution that is incompatible with the Bible and purposive creation—the creation of all living things by the immediate agency of the sovereign God. Macroevolution teaches that all life has developed from a single, original cell, and that this happened through a somewhat fortuitous, chance collision of atoms, without an intelligent planner or Creator orchestrating the emergence of these species. Those who favor the day-age theory often link themselves with a position called theistic evolution, which grants the basic premises of biological evolution, but says that God, not chance, guided the process of evolution.

Macroevolution differs from microevolution. While the former teaches that all living things have developed from one original cell, the latter teaches that, over period of time, species undergo slight changes in order to adapt to their environment. Microevolution is not in dispute, either biblically or scientifically. Macroevolution has never been substantiated by observation or experiment, and it places its faith in an endless string of extremely improbable, yet beneficial chance mutations.

A frequent argument for macroevolution is the principle of common structure. All forms of life are made up of the same basic substances: amino acids, proteins, DNA, and that sort of thing. Because all living things have similar constituent parts, the argument goes, they must have developed from common ancestors. A common substance or structure, however, does not necessarily imply a common source. The fact that all forms of life are made of the same basic building blocks neither negates the possibility of evolution nor substantiates it. One would expect an intelligent Creator to have made all life-forms with a similar design—one that works on this earth.

When teaching a university course to thirty upper-level philosophy students, I asked who believed in macroevolution. Almost all the students raised their hands. I then asked them to explain why they believed in it. Their only argument was “common substance, therefore common source.” Most said they believed it because they had been taught in school, and they assumed their teachers knew what they were talking about.

Macroevolution, in the final analysis, is not a question of biology or natural science, which rely upon experimented verification, but of history, which tries to interpret evidence left from the past in a coherent fashion. The discipline of paleontology, which studies the fossil record, claims to put evolution on a scientific footing, but it performs no experiments to substantiate evolutionary processes. It simply lines up similar fossils and infers that one creature must be related to another by common decent.

In the recent past in Russia, leading international scholars who favor macroevolution met. While comparing notes, they found that the weakest evidence for their theories is the fossil record. I remember reading the Royal Society’s bulletin at that time and thinking, “What other source matters?” The fossil record is the one that counts, and yet that is the one that militates against their theory. I read an essay recently in which a professor argued for macroevolution on the basis of certain geological formations. He argued for an old earth on the ground that stratifications in the rocks contain fossils, which indicates a uniformitarian process that took millions of years to produce the whole formation. He then determined the age of each stratum by determining the kinds of fossils contained in each. This is a blatant example of what logicians call begging the question. It is circular reasoning to date the fossils by the rocks, and then date the rocks by the fossils. That just will not work.

We now have good evidence that stratification of rocks proves the antiquity of nothing. Within days after the Mount St. Helens explosion had subsided, scientists discovered that the cataclysmic upheaval of that volcanic explosion had laid down exactly the same rock stratification that had been assumed would take millions of years to develop. In other words, Mount St. Helens proved that catastrophic upheavals can produce the same empirical data as twenty million years of gradual deposition. We will not get into uniformitarianism or catastrophism here, except to say that they have been attempts to accommodate macroevolution. This tends to support and popularize the theory of theistic evolution, and it also uses the day-age theory of Genesis—a dangerous thing to do.

FRAMEWORK HYPOTHESIS
The third approach, called the framework hypothesis, was originally developed by the Dutch scholar Nicholas Ridderbos. He argued that the literary form of the book’s first few chapters differs from that of its later chapters. Certain basic characteristics found in poetry are missing from historical narrative, and certain characteristics found in historical narrative are missing from poetry. For example, the book of Exodus, with its account of the Jewish captivity in Egypt, has genealogies, family names, real historical places, and an unmetered literary style (i.e., lacking a particular rhythm), making it clearly prose and historical narrative. After the account of the exodus, the book’s author inserts the song of Miriam, which is in metered rhythm and is therefore clearly poetry. The literary structure before the song manifests all the characteristics of historical narrative, as does the structure following the poem.

Therefore, it is usually not difficult to distinguish between poetry and historical narrative in the Old Testament. But the opening chapters of Genesis, according to Ridderbos, exhibit a strange combination of literary forms. On the one hand is a discussion of the creation of a man and a woman who are given names that thereafter appear in genealogical accounts. In Hebrew literature this clearly signals historicity. The Garden of Eden is said to be set among four rivers, two of which we know were real rivers: the Tigris and the Euphrates. The style of writing is not metered or rhythmic, as Hebrew poetry normally is. All this indicates that the opening chapters of Genesis are historical narrative.

There are some anomalies, however. We find trees in this garden with strange names: “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” and “the tree of life” (Gen 2:9). Had they been apple or pear trees, there would have been no problem. But what does a tree of life look like? Is the author of Genesis telling us that a real tree was off limits, giving it a metaphorical meaning as the tree of life? We are also introduced to a serpent who speaks. Because of these two features, some have argued that the literary structure of the opening chapters of Genesis was self consciously and intentionally mythological, or at least filled with legend and saga.

Ridderbos contended that the beginning chapters of Genesis are a mixture of historical narrative and poetry, with part of the poetic structure being the repeated refrain, “So the evening and the morning were the first day” (Gen 1:5), and so on. Ridderbos concluded that Genesis gives us not a historical narrative of the when or the how of divine creation, but a drama in seven acts. The first act ends with the statement, “So the evening and the morning were the first day.” The author of Genesis, then, is trying to show that God’s work of creation took place in seven distinct stages, which incidentally fit remarkably well into the stages identified by the modern theories of cosmic evolution.

Therefore, the framework hypothesis allows one to step into a Big Bang cosmology while maintaining the credibility and inspiration of Genesis 1-2. This is not history, but drama. The days are simply artistic literary devices to create a framework for a lengthy period of development.

In America Ridderbos’s work was widely disseminated by Meredith Kline, who for many years taught Old Testament at Westminster Theological Seminary, then at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, and then at Westminster Seminary California. Because Kline endorsed the framework hypothesis, many people, particularly in the Reformed community, have embraced it, provoking a serious crisis in some circles. Some Reformed pastors today hold to a literal six-day creation, while others hold to the framework hypothesis, and yet they otherwise hold to the same system of orthodox theology.

SIX-DAY CREATION
For most of my teaching career, I considered the framework hypothesis to be a possibility. But I have now changed my mind. I now hold to a literal six-day creation, the fourth alternative and the traditional one. Genesis says that God created the universe and everything in it in six twenty-four-hour periods. According to the Reformation hermeneutic, the first option is to follow the plain sense of the text. One must do a great deal of hermeneutical gymnastics to escape the plain meaning of Genesis 1-2. The confession makes it a point of faith that God created the world in the space of six days.

Original post: What Is R.C. Sproul’s Position on Creation?

Who Made God?

From Professor Edgar Andrews’ forthcoming book Who made God?:

It’s a question commonly posed by those who would banish the very ideas of God and "creation". Richard Dawkins asks it repeatedly, in various ways, in his best-selling book The God Delusion. The logic runs something like this.

If God exists, then presumably he created everything (why else would we need him?) But if God exists, who made him? And since no one can answer that question, it does nothing to solve the riddle of the universe to say "God made it". We simply push the mystery one step further back and that is a pointless exercise.

No one can doubt that atheists regard their "unanswerable question" — "Who made God?" — as a formidable weapon in their war against faith, but there is more to the question than meets the eye and it crops up in a surprising variety of philosophical contexts.

So let’s look briefly at three such contexts — the "we made God" hypothesis, the "improbability of God" calculation, and the "unanswerable question" dilemma.

... missing out discussion about the first two ...

The third context in which "Who made God?" appears is the most obvious one. The question is deemed unanswerable because the only realistic reply is "no-one made God". And if no-one made God, then he can’t be there, can he? After all, for every effect there must be a cause. An effect that has no cause must be imaginary.

Once again, in their enthusiasm to prove their point, the proponents of this argument entangle physics with metaphysics. Cause and effect do indeed reign supreme in the physical realm — both science and normal life would be impossible unless they did. But why should they operate in the same manner in a spiritual realm (if such exists)?

We have a choice. Firstly, we can assert a priori that there is no such thing as a spiritual realm — that nothing exists that is not physical and open to scientific investigation. On this basis we can proceed to claim, with some logical justification, that every possible effect must have a cause, because that is how the physical world works.

But what we cannot do is use this claim to disprove the existence of God on the grounds that he doesn’t have a cause! Why not? Because our argument would be completely circular. We begin by assuming that no spiritual realm exists and conclude by "proving" our initial assumption. Big deal.

So let’s try to find a different route through the maze, this time without cheating. To avoid assuming at the outset what we want to prove, we must start by allowing that there might indeed be a spiritual realm.

Because cause and effect is only proven for the physical world, we can no longer insist that they are relevant to the origin of a spiritual entity like God. Therefore God doesn’t have to have a cause — he can be the ultimate uncaused cause, a being whom no-one made.

De-Junking DNA

It is becoming more and more apparent that so-called "junk DNA" is not junk after all.

Like so-called vestigial organs, some atheists have claimed that large portions of the human DNA is an evolutionary artefact that serves no present-day purpose.

According to a recent BBC News article, new research, part of the Encyclopaedia of DNA Elements (Encode) study, suggests "genes, so called junk DNA and other elements, together weave an intricate control network".

The researchers focussed on 1% of the human genome sequence, carrying out 80 different types of experiments that generated more than 600 million data points.

The surprising results, explained Tim Hubbard from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, "transform our view of the genome fabric".

Previously, genome activity was thought of in terms of the 22,000 genes that make proteins - the functional building blocks in our cells - along with patches of DNA that control, or regulate, the genes.

The other 97% or so of the genome was said to be made up of "junk" DNA - so called because it had no known biological function.

However, junk DNA may soon need a new moniker.

Dr Hubbard said: "We are now seeing the majority of the rest of the genome is active to some extent."

He explained that the study had found junk DNA was being transcribed, or copied, into RNA - an active molecule that relays information from DNA to the cellular machinery.

He added: This is a remarkable finding, since most prior research suggested only a fraction of the genome was transcribed."

Once again we see evidence that we are "fearfully and wonderfully made". I don't hold out much hope, though, that mainstream biologists will at last start to acknowledge the hand of the superb designer in what they are studying.

Before the Beginning

The basic philosophical problem that faces us is the fact that something—rather than nothing—is there. Furthermore, it is also clear that this something-that-is-there has two parts: I am there and something in contrast to myself is there. Being is there. But the question immediately arises, “Has it always been there?”

There are relatively few answers. In almost any profound question, the number of final possibilities is very few indeed. Here there are four:

(1) Once there was absolutely nothing and now there is something.
(2) Everything began with an impersonal something.
(3) Everything began with a personal something.
(4) There is and always has been a dualism.

For the first explanation to be true, nothing must really be nothing—totally nothing—neither mass nor motion nor energy nor personality. Think, for example, of a circle that contains everything there is; and there is nothing in the circle. Then remove the circle. That is the concept of absolute nothing. I know no one who has propounded the concept that all that now is has come out of such absolute nothing.

The fourth notion, of eternal dualism, has never stood under close analysis, for men naturally press on behind the dualism and its particulars towards a unity by which to comprehend the duality.

The impersonal beginning, the notion that everything began with an impersonal something, is the consensus of the modern Western world and of almost all Eastern thinking. Eventually, if we go back far enough, we come to an impersonal source. This view is embodied in the notion of the uniformity of natural causes in a closed system.

However an impersonal beginning raises two overwhelming problems which neither the East nor modern man has come anywhere near solving.

First, there is no real explanation of the fact that the external world not only exists but has a specific form. As I look at the Being which is the external universe, it is obviously not just a handful of pebbles thrown out there. What is there has form. If we assert an impersonal beginning then we have no explanation for this.

Second, and more important, if we begin with an impersonal universe, there is no explanation of personality. The assumption of an impersonal beginning can never adequately explain the personal beings we see around us; and when men try to explain man on the basis of an original impersonal, man soon disappears.

But the Judeo-Christian tradition begins with the opposite answer. And it is upon this that our whole Western culture has been built. The universe had a personal beginning—a personal beginning on the high order of the Trinity. That is, before “in the beginning” the personal was already there. Love and thought and communication existed prior to the creation of the heavens and the earth,

Something was there before creation. God was there; love and communication were there; and therefore, prior even to Genesis 1:1, love and communication are intrinsic to what always has been.

(Summarized from Genesis in Space and Time, by Francis Schaeffer.)

Creation in Schools

Another petition for you to sign.

There are various moves afoot to prevent creation being taught in UK schools on the spurious grounds that it is not science. Some of this hostility has been prompted by the recent (September 2006) distribution to secondary schools—by Truth in Science—of a resource pack that disparages the theory of evolution. One manifestation of this opposition is a petition calling on the government to abolish all faith schools and prohibit the teaching of creationism and "other religious mythology" in all UK schools. (Science Questions and Answers explores some of the reasons why trying to drive a wedge between creationism and science is misleading.)

In response, another petition has been started to request support for "faith schools" (horrible term!) and the teaching of creation alongside other views about origins. Please sign up. It's very simple and takes only a minute or so.

The full text is below. I'm not sure that I agree with all the sentiments expressed and would have preferred it if the two issues had been separated. However, the overall aims are laudable.

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to continue the support for faith schools and to ensure that in all schools the teaching of traditional 'faith' views of origins is included alongside the more recent scientific 'theories' which many scientists 'believe'. Faith schools help to ensure that children develop mentally, physically, emotionally, spiritually and morally. As such faith schools ensure children are well placed to choose their own religious, philosophical and ethical beliefs. Schools should be places where children are given a full education, not centres where the spiritual and moral is excluded. Evolution and other scientific theories should not be taught as fact but instead along side other 'faith' views of origins. Supporting faith schools will provide children with a fuller education, parents with the choice of such for their children and help to promote a fully multi-cultural and peaceful society.

Thermodynamics and Evolution

The ID in the United Kingdom blog has an interesting post that includes Andy Macintosh's comments about the laws of thermodynamics and their relevance to the creation/evolution debate. Some argue that the second law of thermodynamics is irrelevant to the creation/evolution debate because the earth is not a closed system; energy is being continually pumped into it by the sun. However, as Andy points out, energy alone is not sufficient to produce new information. Here's an extract from the quote:

The reason of course why this subject of origins will not go away is that there is a scientific case, whether Dawkins likes it or not, which is a challenge to the neo-Darwinian attempts to explain life in terms of common descent. It is a straightforward case of testable science versus the modern evolutionary ‘just-so’ story telling. Scientists like myself who believe in Creation have no problem with natural selection. It is simply the natural equivalent of artificial selection. But natural selection has no power to create new functional structures. It does not increase information and does not build machines which are not there already (either fully developed or in embryonic form).

The principles of thermodynamics even in open systems do not allow a new function using raised free energy levels to be achieved without new machinery. And new machines are not made by simply adding energy to existing machines. This was the point at issue in the programme of Dec 10th. Intelligence is needed.

And this thesis is falsifiable. If anyone was to take an existing chemical machine and produce a different chemical machine which was not there before (either as a sub part or latently coded for in the DNA template) then this argument would have been falsified. No one has ever achieved this.

Intelligent Design: Not so Stupid

In October, Professor Steve Jones gave a lecture entitled "Why Intelligent Design is Stupid". His notes have been published on the UCL website.

Several flaws in his arguments were posted by James Miller on the GenevaNet discussion list. I think they are worthy of a wider audience:

1. He persistently and very heavily relies on argumentum ad hominem. Anyone who believes in anything different from him is "stupid" (p.1); they are people who believe in "myths" and "magic" (p.1); they are by implication "book burners" - i.e., fascists with all the baggage that entails - and are guilty of "ignorance, idleness and incuriosity" (p.2). And his opponents' arguments are "cunning"; they use "tricks" (p.2) and so on throughout.

2. He argues ad misericordiam - he appeals to pity. He's speaking from "Darwin's bunker" (p1), using under siege imagery. Science is under "active attack" (p.4). This is to gain sympathy from his audience.

3. Despite his bluster, the shoe of arguing ad ignorantiam is actually on his foot. He argues that creationism must be false because it cannot (to his limited empirical knowledge) be proved true. His argument is in effect, "Of course evolution is true; we know of no better scientific theory."

4. He argues ad novitatem. Evolution is a more modern theory than creationism, so it is more likely to be true than ancient theories.

5. He uses logical non sequiturs. Darwin spent 8 years studying barnacles, so the theory of evolution must be true (p.2). George Bush is open to hearing creationist arguments, so creationism must be false (p.1). Birds and bats and squirrels fly by different methods, therefore they can't have been designed (p.8). (Sailing ships, paddle steamers and screw-driven ships cross the sea by different methods, so by that logic they can't have been designed either.)

6. He indulges in circulus in demonstrando - arguing in circles. Evolution is the only possible scientific explanation for life because (for him) only evolution counts as a scientific theory. Later he argues that there's no need to debate creationism simply because evolution is true and there's no need to debate it (p.4).

7. He commits a clear fallacy of composition. Someone who studies a subject knows more about it that someone who doesn't. Darwin studied biology for years and the creationists didn't. So evolution is more likely to be true than creationism.

8. He converts a conditional premise. If evolution is true, then selective breeding of a species would be possible. Selective breeding is possible, therefore evolution is true. A comparative argument: If fairies live in your garden, there will be dew on the grass in the morning. There was dew on my grass this morning; therefore, fairies live in my garden.

9. He repeatedly begs the question. In response to the ID question, "What use is part of eye?" he simply asserts part of an eye is more use than no eye at all (p.3). No it isn't. An eye that doesn't see is no better than no eye that doesn't see! Later he asserts that the fact a Boeing 747 needed a designer proves nothing because birds can fly more efficiently "without a designer" (p.7).

10. He gives us an ad hoc explanation fallacy. A Boeing 747 could have been created by wind blowing through a hangar long enough to randomly assemble the parts, or it could have been designed and built. That much he admits. (In fact, it was designed and built.) But, Jones says, earth could have been created or evolved by chance; however, the only possibility acceptable to science is a random series of events.

11. He appeals to the gallery - argumentum ad populum. George Bush, boo hiss, is open to creationist arguments. So are Islamic terrorists. So you (his audience) shouldn't be open to such nasty arguments.

12. He employs the No true Scotsman fallacy. No Scotsman puts sugar in his porridge. "But I do," says wee Jimmy from Glasgow.  "Ah, but no true Scotsman puts sugar in his porridge." No scientist believes in creationism. But I have a book written by 50 scientists who do believe in it. Ah, well, no true scientist believes in creationism. Ergo - to believe in creationism means you are not a scientist.

13. He uses one or two red herrings to throw anyone critical of his argument off the scent. Instead of dealing with the question for evolutionism, "What use is part of an eye?" - in other words before eyes evolved, how did one blind creature have an advantage over another blind creature in order to survive the natural selection process? - instead of dealing with that, he throws in a red herring: "Why do we need microscopes if the eye was designed?" (Answer: we don't "need" microscopes - ha ha). A comparative argument: “Why do we need houses if skin was designed?”

14. Finally, there are quite a few straw men wandering around Prof. Jones' notes. For example: questioning evolution, which has never been observed and can never be proved, is equivalent to denying 2 + 2 = 4, which no creationist has ever doubted as far as I'm aware.