What Do Rocks on The Ground Prove?

Evolution and The Fossil Record

One huge problem with Darwinian evolution is not the theory itself but rather those evolutionists who believe it and who say the evidence for it is in the fossil record. However, when asked about the anomalies and other problems with the fossil record, they will say the problem is that the earth tends to erase its history and therefore the fossil record is not complete, which may be true. But if the fossil record is complete enough to say that Darwin’s evolution is a fact[1], it seems it should be complete enough to answer the anomalies and other problems that the fossil record presents. The truth is that evolutionists have made so many claims about the fossil record that it hard to know the truth from fiction. The truth is that fossils are just like rocks lying on the ground. The narrative that you give to explain them comes partially from preconceived ideas, one’s imagination, and one’s indoctrination. However, absolute knowledge of how they actually got there is unknowable unless you were there to witness it, and the only way you could get that kind of knowledge is to create a time machine to carry you back in time so you could witness those past events. The problem is that for many evolutionist the narrative has become the facts and the evidence in itself. In other words the map has become the territory.

The other day I saw a truck dumping a pile of rocks on the ground. I wonder what the explanation of this event would look like 10,000 years after a great ice age had erased human history, a time when there were no dump trucks. How do you think the rocks would be explained? Do you think mankind would just throw up their hands and say there are no answers to the rock pile, or would they come up with a convoluted story? What kind of story would they come up with if they were told they could not make any appeal to intelligence of any kind, and that they would have to explain it totally by citing natural causes?

Let’s take my illustration of stones on the ground and analyze it using the scientific method. The question would be: How did the stones get on the ground? For the fun of it, let’s use some real stones. Let’s look at the rocks at Stonehenge, which is a prehistoric monument in Wiltshire, England. The fact is that these stones are sitting on the ground in an orderly fashion in Wiltshire, England. With this observation, we have the facts that there are rocks on the ground and they are arranged in an orderly fashion. Next comes the question: How did the rocks get there? Then we would have to come up with a hypothesis or a guess of how they got there. Well, because they are arranged in an orderly way, we would think it safe to infer that an intelligent creature was involved in placing them on the ground. Of course, that is an assumption, something which we had inferred from the order and design of Stonehenge. So this data that points to design would rule out any hypothesis that an act of nature alone placed them there, or at least it makes it highly improbable. Therefore, we could eliminate the theory that stones were placed by glaciers, volcanoes, or the shifting of the earth. Now, I have heard a few hypotheses about those stones and how they were placed on the ground. (1) They were placed by a deity. (2) An alien life form from space placed them on the ground. (3) Lastly, somehow ancient man placed them on the ground through some method as yet unknown. All these theories have one thing in common. They all have an element of intelligence built into them based on the intelligent order of the stones.[2].

Now, here is the problem. The Stonehenge stones are prehistoric. In other words, they were placed before recorded history began. There are no written records of how they got there and there are no witnesses left alive that were present at their placing. This means that if I put together a narrative or a story of how these stones came to sit on the earth the way they do; it would have to come from my imagination more than the facts, for the facts end with their existence and their orderly placement. They have no story to tell other than they exist in their order. If I am good at spinning a story with graphic details, one could write a textbook and even make a movie of how the stones were set on the earth. If I was really good, I could come up with a whole scientific scenario which would explain how they got where they are, but no matter how detailed or graphic the story was, it still would only be a story made up by my imagination. However, if the story was told enough times by people, others would begin to believe the story to be a fact. It still would be only a myth. You see, man is incorrigibly gullible and will fall for a good story every time. In fact, the more unbelievable the story, the more likely they will fall for it. The bigger the lie, the more believable it becomes. The reason for this is that people cannot believe that anyone would have the arrogance and audacity to tell such a story.

What about applying the scientific method[3] to discover the truth about the stones? The scientific method will not work for the question of how the stones got there for two reasons. Though the facts can be observed (the rocks on the ground), the way they got there cannot be observed, and the scientific method requires the observation of the thing being studied or questioned.[4] The question is how the rocks got on the ground. You can observe the rocks on the ground, but you cannot observe how they got there, for it was a onetime happening, which took place before recorded history and cannot be observed. Therefore, the scientific method cannot be applied. The scientific method also requires experimentation to verify one’s hypothesis. There is no experiment that could reproduce the erection of the stones. How could there be, seeing as we know nothing of how they were first erected? We could bring in equipment, e.g., bulldozers, excavators, and cranes and reproduce the site, but this would not be re-creating the original erection or construction method. The new model that we erect would prove nothing more than the original facts, i.e., that there are stones on the ground and that an intelligent being erected them. In view of this, we have to conclude that any hypothesis about how Stonehenge was constructed would be nothing more than a guess and would not be science and could never be called a fact of science.

To say that the knowledge we have of Stonehenge is not based on science is not earthshaking, but what if we apply the same logic to the fossil record? The truth is that fossils are like the stones of Stonehenge. They’re just there. In themselves, they have no story to tell other than the one we read into them. And what story do we read into them? It is a story that was popularized by Charles Darwin; one he created without any scientific evidence that natural selection had ever produced a new species.[5] Darwin had heard these stories of how evolution happened from his father and grandfather all of his life. When he sailed to the islands on the ship H.M.S. Beagle, he did not go as an unbiased bystander, but rather as man on a quest to prove a preconceived idea. He surely did not come to his conclusion by the scientific method nor did the scientific community of his day which accepted his theories without any evidence. Their beliefs in his story came out of a need to tie together or complete a naturalistic way of looking at everything. The result was that the scientific method was completely ignored when it came to the new science of evolution. It was given a pass because the only other explanation would be God, which the scientific community could not accept. Necessity is the mother of invention and we can add, it is the mother of some unbelievable stories.

Another example of a tall tale is the story of the caveman, which is used to support the evolution story or could it be that the evolution story is used to support the caveman story? Either way, it goes something like this: Once upon a time there were hairy ape-like creatures that lived in caves in Europe and elsewhere. The caveman creature was the ancient ancestor of modern man but quite primitive in his morals and mating practices. The caveman was less intelligent than we are and secured his food by hunting. He painted pictures on the walls of his caves, and we know that he knew how to use primitive tools because we have found them in caves with some of his remains. He was so different from us that he was not the same species and could not interbreed with us Homo sapiens.[6]

How much of the caveman lore is based on science and how much is based on the preconceived idea of progressive evolution read into the fossil evidence? The facts that are based on science, which can be proven, are very few. The actual facts tell us that there were some men in the past who sometimes inhabited caves. However, there are probably more living in caves today than there were then. At least some of these prehistoric men used tools and could draw pictures. That’s it for the science. The rest of what you have learned about cavemen is fiction and came from the fertile imagination of those who could spin a fine tale.

Here are a few things that are based on modern man’s assumptions, which in turn are based on our belief in progressive evolution. The caveman was less intelligent than we are. He had a lot of hair all over his body, a protruding jaw, huge eye sockets, a large sloping forehead, all of which is actually the description of one of my neighbors. Maybe my neighbor is the missing link. Back to the unscientific gibberish. He was a brute and forcibly mated with the females of his species. He carried around a club to subdue the females. He was a polygamist and had a herd of females with whom he mated. He lived permanently in caves. In actuality, this sounds like a want-to-be list for a lot of American males.

But did he really live in caves or were they just temporary shelters in severe weather, or were they places of worship? Could they have been safe places for woman and children? Could the picture on the walls of the caves have been done by children, like children write on the walls of their bedrooms as my children did? I know, for I had to clean the writing off. Could caves have been a burial ground like the Pyramids in Egypt, a stronghold in time of war, or maybe a nursery for the kids?

All this was said about cavemen to point out there are many things we assume to know, which in truth, we are actually quite ignorant of. It would seem that much of what we call science and history is nothing but speculations drawn from our imaginations and presented as facts.[7] We tend to blindly trust the system of authority which teaches these things without anyone questioning the source of its facts and its interpretation of the facts. These authorities propagate their assumptions by setting themselves up in privileged positions of authority in our universities and schools, leaving the impression that they have special access to the truth, which sounds a little like priest craft to me.

The answer is for us to start asking a similar question as the one which God asked Adam: “Who told you that?” We need to ask this question to ourselves and of other men we are listening to. This includes those in our universities. We also need to learn how to distinguish or discern the difference between the facts and people’s interpretation of the facts. You will find that this is very difficult for most people and involves a great deal of thought and practice.

[1] Evolution is a fact, you see it taking place everywhere in the creation. However, Darwinian evolution is not a fact but only a theory.

[2] What would you say of a discipline or men who told you to ignore the design and come up with a theory of how the stones got there without making any appeal to intelligent design? Is not design in this case a self-evident truth?

[3] The scientific method is a systematic system used by scientists to logically form their conclusions. (1) Frame a question. (2) Collect the data. (3) Create a hypothesis. (4) Do experiments. (4) Make observations. (5) Try to falsify the hypothesis. (6) Publish your findings to the community for review.

[4] Hypotheses without tests are no more than cocktail party chatter and are without value except perhaps as entertainment. They are not science. (My emphasis) Henry Gee, Deep Time Henry Gee is a senior editor at Nature. He holds a PhD in Zoology from Cambridge.

[5] The Road of Science and the Ways to God by Stanley L. Jaki Page 282, the University of Chicago Press.

[6] This has just been debunked by DNA studies at Harvard. Harvard Gazette, January 29, 2014.

[7] Henry Gee in his book Deep Time gives a realistic history of what we know and what we don’t know about the history of the earth.