Taking firm hold on an illusion
A review of Coming to Peace with Science: Bridging the Worlds Between Faith
and Biology by Darrel R. Falk
InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL, 2004
by Alex Williams
Falk argues from his personal journey as a biologist and professing evangelical
Christian that only science, not Scripture, can reveal the details of creation.
Evangelical Christians must therefore reinterpret Genesis to be consistent with
long-age theistic evolution. There is nothing new in this book, yet Falk writes
as if he is breaking new ground—he appears to have not researched the field!
Fundamental errors, omissions and contradictions confound the book’s message
to the point that one has to question the competence not only of the author but
also the publisher. Such comprehensive ignorance on an issue so important to the
Christian faith is inexcusable.
Introduction
If you wanted a respectable-looking, easy-to-read reference to justify your belief
in theistic evolution then this book could be it. The author is a long-time and
respected Professor of Biology at an ostensibly Christian university, the publisher
is well known and has a stable of similarly orientated books, the Foreword is by
the Director of the US National Human Genome Research Institute, there are plaudits
on the back cover from respected academics, and the book has five-star ratings on
Amazon.com. However, the respectability is only superficial. The author’s
understanding of the Bible, theology, philosophy, science (he claims to be an expert
in science) and the subject of origins is abysmal and the result is self-contradictory.
At no point does he engage with published criticisms of his position, so he writes
in an uncritical vacuum of his own making. The result is bad science and bad theology.
Contents
He thus presumes to contribute a complementary view of creation to the YEC position
without having researched the subject!
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Falk writes as if he is breaking new ground, but it has all been said before. On
the one occasion that he does address two critiques of his position (p. 199), he
does it as if in response to spoken comments from his students, not from any published
literature that he has read. He quotes three young-earth creationist (YEC) authors
(Morris, Gish and Whitcomb) but only to make points in his own arguments, and at
no stage does he attempt to address published YEC critiques of compromise positions,
including his own. He thus presumes to contribute a complementary view of creation
to the YEC position without having researched the subject!
His stated aim is to build a bridge between six-day recent creation and long-age
evolution by using Scripture (pp. 14,16). But by ‘building a scriptural bridge’
he means reinterpreting six-day recent creation to fit what he considers ‘overwhelming
scientific data supporting evolution and an old earth’. Thus, from the very
outset, he is self-deceived about his aims and achievements in the book.
One feature that gives the book popular appeal is that it relates Falk’s personal
journey (Ch. 1). He grew up in a church that taught a literal Genesis, but his parents
and teachers were not equipped to answer his questions about apparent contradictions
between the Bible and the real world. He drifted away from Christianity, discovered
a vocation in biology (with a Ph.D. in genetics, he teaches biology at Point Loma
Nazarene University, California) and came back to Christian faith but with a long
age point of view. He argues that Galileo and Kepler, both Bible-believing Christians
(among others), insisted that Scripture never errs, but interpreters do, so ‘literalists’
beware!
In chapter 2, he deals airily with the text of Genesis 1–3. He argues elsewhere that only scientists
can give the complete story of origins, for the Bible only gives us ‘a little
more than one page’ on the details of creation (p. 42), and that is couched
in ‘baby talk’ (p. 31).
The centrepiece of his argument (Ch. 3) is that the ‘data of science’
demand a very old Earth and universe; therefore Scripture must be adjusted to fit.
He cites isotopes, tree rings, lake sediments, ice cores, Hubble’s red shifts
and the time of light travel to the furthest galaxies, all to show that the earth
and the universe are far older than a literal Genesis will allow.
In chapter 4, he makes the following astonishing statement about the origin of life:
‘When scientists look at this data without the lens of faith, they propose,
given the atmospheric conditions and the composition of the earth, that the origin
of life is a highly probable natural event. As Christians, we believe that
although it was indeed a highly probable event, its high probability
relates to the fact that it was responding to God’s command and God’s
Presence [emphases added]’ (p. 89).
Even the most elementary knowledge of biochemistry shows that a naturalistic origin
of life under any conditions is highly improbable!1
Copyright Carl Buell
Falk refers to Ambulocetus (literally ‘walking whale’) as a
whale ancestor. But this recent skeletal reconstruction (lower panel) and artist’s
impression (upper panel) from the discoverer’s website, shows that the creature
did walk but looked nothing like a whale (even though the discoverer believes it
to be a whale, and also believes the wolf-like Pakicetus is a whale). (From
The Thewissen Lab pages14).
He offers three possible interpretations of the fossil record: Possibility 1—God
created individual species; Possibility 2—God created prototypes
which diversified into related genera and species over time; Possibility 3—God
continuously creates by guiding and assisting the process of evolution. He is willfully
unaware that no creationists today espouse the first of these so it is a ‘straw
man’, and the third directly contradicts Genesis 2:3 where God finished His work of creation and
rested—a theme repeated in the Sabbath commandment Exodus 20:11.
He offers the usual fossil evidence for vertebrate evolution, but on the question
of ‘Why can’t scientists find more transitional forms?’ (p. 125)
he retreats into Darwin’s excuse—incompleteness of the fossil record.
He conveniently overlooks its great completeness when it comes to finding extant
creatures in the fossil record; the ‘evidence’ for incompleteness is
the lack of intermediates!
He then asks: ‘If creation occurs by gradual modifications (Possibility 3)
why don’t we see it happening today?’ (p. 130). His solution is ‘God’s
command and God’s Spirit working through an influence on natural processes
down through eons of time’ (p.131–132). That is, supernatural processes—a
fatal blow to the whole purpose of his book (see below).
Biogeography, he says (Ch. 5), shows the same variation today in space that we see
occurring back through time in the fossil record, and thus ‘our theology must
not be based upon a view of God that prohibits this’ (p. 168).
In his specialty area of genetics (Ch. 6) he argues that mutations, duplicated genes,
pseudogenes, silenced virus insertions and retrotransposons allow us to trace genetic
histories back across millions of years, millions of generations, and across genus,
family and higher order taxonomic categories.
Finally, he comes to ‘human creation’ and the question of whether Adam
and Eve were real or figurative people (Ch. 7). He cannot answer it from Scripture
so he turns to science:
‘There is no “break” in the genetic data that implies that the
human body was created in a manner that is different than the way in which God created
other living creatures. The [human] fossil data is especially poignant [because
intermediate forms appear in the right order at the right time]. … Adam and
Eve would simply have been the first humans to experience what it really means to
live in the image of God’ (pp. 224–226).
At the end, he returns to his purpose, ‘to present the view of gradual creation
… to show that it is not inconsistent with the foundations of the faith’
(p.229). He appeals for a downplaying of the alternative ‘sudden creation’
so that we might ‘not allow a particular interpretation of a tiny section
of God’s precious Word to become so central that it creates a gulf blocking
the access of any individuals to the experience of God’s love in the church
[emphasis added]’ (p.234).
Critique
There are so many fundamental errors, omissions and contradictions in this book
it is hard to know where to start. I shall focus on four points that Falk emphasizes
in his speaking ministry, then look at four contradictions that invalidate his main
argument.
- The church made a terrible mistake with Galileo by wrongly interpreting the
Bible to say the sun went round the earth. We should not try to make the Bible
say things that it was never meant to say (Ch. 1).
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Falk has adopted a secular worldview and he changes the Bible to fit this worldview.
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This is an entirely reasonable argument to make in Galileo’s case. Indeed,
nowhere does the Bible make a cosmological (i.e. at the grandest possible scale)
statement about how the earth moves in relation to the sun. There are Earth-referenced
descriptions of the sun rising and setting, of course. But we today still use the
same language in our weather forecasting, e.g. ‘sunrise’ and ‘sunset’,
so it is a non sequitur. On the other hand, the Bible contains numerous
cosmological statements about the fact, the nature and the timing of God’s
work of creation. God spoke the universe—heavens, earth, life, man—into
existence (Genesis 1; Psalm 33:6, 9; 148:5; John 1:1–3; Hebrews 11:3), over a six ordinary-length-day
period (Genesis
1; Exodus 20:11). Also, God wrote this down with His own
finger in stone (Ex. 31:12–18; 32:16) to make sure the Israelites could not neglect
it, and He instructed Moses to provide a written record (Exodus 34:27; Deut. 31:24–26) as a witness for all generations
to come.
Furthermore, the Galileo affair turned upon non-biblical issues, and was first of
all an attack by the Aristotelian scientists on Galileo’s challenge to the
reigning Ptolemaic cosmology.2 The
apparent biblical conflict was with the post–Council-of-Trent Catholic Church,
which had arrogated biblical interpretation to the constraints of church tradition
by its own ordained priesthood. Today, both Falk and his opponents (YECs) enjoy
the Protestant freedom of personal interpretation according to the grammatical-historical
hermeneutic method (i.e. we interpret the books of Moses as Moses and his contemporaries
would have interpreted them). When we do that, we are forced to conclude that Scripture
really does intend to mean six-day recent creation.
- It is beyond challenge that the earth is billions of years old and not 6,000
years. All different lines of science agree—astronomy, geology, isotope
dating—and we have to accept this (Ch. 3).
Falk is ignorant of the presuppositional nature of all discussions on origins,
and of the difference between data and interpretations of data. No one
has a time machine to revisit the past and study it, so all our thinking about it
has to be based upon assumptions. Those assumptions constitute our worldview—our
fundamental belief about where the world came from and how it got to be the way
it is. Isotopic ‘ages’ are not data—they are interpretations
of data. The isotope ratio measurements are the data. Other interpretations of those
ratios are possible, given different starting assumptions.3
Falk has adopted a secular worldview and he changes the Bible to fit this worldview.
He is also ignorant of the limitations of science in regard to the past—that
it works by observation and experiment and can thus only function in the present.
No one has ever measured the age of the earth. Isotope daters only ever measure
isotope ratios—they never measure age. Layer counters never measure age, they
only count layers.
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Jesus’
death and resurrection ‘according to the scriptures’ (1 Cor. 15:3–4) is our guarantee that the Bible is
authoritative when speaking about ‘earthly things’ so that we can be
confident of its authority when it talks about heavenly things (John 3:12). There is therefore always room to look for alternative
young-earth explanations of scientific data.
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To properly measure the age of the earth you would need to be there at the beginning
to start your reliable timing device, and then you would need to keep a reliable
record of all the time that has elapsed since then. No one has ever done this—except
the God of the Bible, and He has given us an eyewitness account of what He did,
when He did it, and how He did it, and wrote it down with His own finger in stone,
as recorded in the Bible (Ex. 31:12–18; 32:16).
Jesus’ death and resurrection ‘according to the scriptures’ (1
Cor. 15:3–4) is our guarantee that the Bible is authoritative when
speaking about ‘earthly things’ so that we can be confident of its authority
when it talks about heavenly things (John 3:12). There is therefore always room to look for alternative
young-earth explanations of scientific data.4
- It is beyond challenge that animals have evolved over millions of years.
The fossils have a clear sequence. The early fossils are quite different from
later fossils. The transitions are well documented (fish to land, turtle, whale,
elephant). The transitions occur at the right time in the fossil record, therefore
evolution is demonstrated fact (Ch. 4).
Fossils do not unequivocally support evolution, as Darwin acknowledged. Arguments
based on vertebrate remains are always equivocal, for the remains are always partial
(usually just bones). For large groups like arthropods and plants where whole organisms
are preserved—often in exquisite detail—no evolutionary series exist.
As Gould said repeatedly, ‘paleontologists have always recognized …
the central fact of the fossil record [to be] geologically abrupt origin and subsequent
extended stasis of most species.’5
The overall fossil sequence is better explained in terms of baraminology,6 and Flood geology,7
than by universal ancestry over billions of years. Falk selects evidence to suit
his argument, is ignorant of YEC critiques of his material,8
and so fails to critically assess the real issues.
Falk claims the rarity of transitional fossils to be a victory for evolution by
saying that geneticists predict that evolution occurs too quickly for the fossilizing
process to catch it, so the few we have today prove this prediction to be correct
(p.128). Yet in the very next section, entitled ‘If creation occurs by gradual
modification why don’t we see it happening today’ (p.130), he argues
that the answer lies in the immensity of time. A theory that predicts the evidence
to support it will be absent is self-refuting.
- It is beyond challenge that humans have evolved from apes. Genetics shows
that chimpanzee chromosomes 12 and 13 joined up to form human chromosome 2, and
we can still see the join in the middle part where there are two telomeres and one
centromere.
This ‘chromosome fusion’ was identified in 1982 by matching chromosome
banding patterns amongst primates. However, it is an interpretation, not data. In
a detailed molecular analysis of the relevant chromosomes, the authors stated:
‘Because the fused chromosome is unique to humans and is fixed, the fusion
must have occurred after the human–chimpanzee split, but before modern
humans spread around the world, that is, between 6 and 1 million years ago. …
This gross karyotypic change may have helped to reinforce reproductive barriers
between early Homo sapiens and other species, as the F1 offspring would
have had reduced fertility because of the risk of unbalanced segregation of chromosomes
during meiosis [emphasis added].’9
The ‘data’ are an imperfectly matching set of chromosomes—none
of several sequence comparisons provided a perfect match, so other chromosomes could
have been involved or none at all. The pattern is unique to humans so it could have
been created that way, and the fusion theory has difficulties (reduced fitness in
the F1), so no one really knows. Given that there are about 125 million base pair
differences between chimps and humans,10
and no one yet knows which the developmentally crucial ones are, Falk’s argument
is nothing more than evolutionary speculation.
Any similarities between ape and human chromosomes is no more remarkable than the
fact that ape and human bodies are made up of the same kinds of molecules, and have
a broadly similar shape. The real difference lies in how chromosomes are activated
during embryonic development. But Falk does not even mention this crucial
subject. The definitive information is missing, and Falk is either ignorant of the
fact or has papered over it.
Comprehensive contradictions
Falk cites (on p. 144) parallel but independent development of cichlid fished in
lakes Tanganyika and Malawi as proof of evolution. However, all it shows is similar
assortment in varied combinations of the same characters from the same ancestral
gene pool. (From Kocher et al.15).
(click
here for larger image)
Had Falk read books like Henry Morris’ The Genesis Record or Jonathan Sarfati’s Refuting Compromise, he could never say that Genesis
creation constitutes only a ‘tiny section’ of Scripture. Genesis creation
and the Fall are foundational to Christ’s work of redemption, His resurrection,
and the new creation—all the major doctrines of the Bible.
To the objection that his views put death before sin, Falk answers Romans 5:12 and 1 Cor. 15:22 by saying it was only man who died, and
then only spiritually. By this logic, the resurrection of the Last Adam would also
have to be spiritual, rather than the bodily one that left the tomb empty—and
the only sort of ‘resurrection’ that would be meaningful to a Jew.
To the question of the impact of the Fall upon the rest of creation, he answers
Romans 8:20–22 by saying that the Fall resulted in mankind’s
sinful exploitation of the earth, which then resulted only secondarily in creation’s
suffering. This ignores the cosmic scope of the last passage and its connection
with the Fall.11
The absurd consequences of this view for eschatology are astounding. Falk’s
new creation will feature God’s creatures doing what comes naturally, suffering
and dying as they did before, but without the exploitation of fallen humans to bother
them. And humans will live eternally in their resurrected spirits with God, but
their bodies will continue to do what is natural and they will suffer and die as
usual.
Falk entirely undermines his own agenda of championing science on the subject of
origins with his claim that God creates by continually intervening in nature (pp.
131–132) in a ‘secret’ and ‘hidden’ way that is undetectable
by man (p. 15). The scientific method is devoted to the search for proximate causes
in observable (at least in principle) and repeatable natural phenomena. If God continually
intervenes supernaturally, then science is no longer authoritative and Falk’s
argument—that science is the only authority on origins—collapses. He
should rightly be ostracized from the scientific community for proposing such a
self-contradictory idea.12 Note
that Falk’s concept of continuing intervention is quite different to the biblical
concept of God upholding his creation (Heb. 1:3)—that is, holding it in existence in a regular
and law-like way that is amenable to scientific investigation and rational understanding.13
Falk’s stated purpose—building a bridge between evangelical faith and
science by providing a figurative interpretation of Genesis creation to fit the
‘data’ of long age evolution—goes nowhere. His ‘bridge’
does not reach the position of evangelical faith, because evangelical faith is in
the word of God (Romans 10:17) as revealed by exegesis (not as reinterpreted
by eisegesis). What Falk is actually doing—as opposed to what he
is trying to do—is asking people to transfer their faith from the
Bible to science. Nor does his bridge reach the side of ‘science’, with
his talk of continuing supernatural interventions.
If Falk really believes that what he writes is true, then he should come to the
conclusion that his position on a figurative view of Genesis creation is the correct
one and that the literal view is therefore incorrect. But he does not come
to this conclusion. He concludes that ‘There needs to be room for both
views in evangelical Christianity [emphasis added]’ (p.227). So all his protestations
about ‘overwhelming evidence’ and ‘the data of science demand
it’ do not lead him to any certainty for himself. How then can he provide
any guidance for his readers? Obviously he cannot.
Related article
Recommended Products
References
- See for example Origin of Life Q&A.
Return to text.
- See Galileo, Geocentrism Questions and Answers.
Return to text.
- See the RATE project reports, e.g. <www.icr.org/article/114/>,
26 September 2006. Also, De Young, D., Thousands not Billions, Master Books, Green Forest,
AR, 2005. Return to text.
- See for example, De Young, D., Thousands not Billions, Master Books, Green Forest, AR,
2005; Williams, A.R. and Hartnett, J.G., Dismantling the Big Bang: God’s Universe Rediscovered,
Master Books, AR, Ch. 5, 2005; and numerous articles at ‘Young’
age of the Earth and Universe Q&A. Return to text.
- Gould, S.J., The Structure of Evolutionary Theory,
Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, p. 749, 2002. Return to
text.
- Wise, K.P., Baraminology and the Flood/post-Flood Boundary,
Exploring
the History of Life, Proceedings of the Fifth BSG Conference, 5
June 2006. Return to text.
- See for example, <www.biblicalgeology.net/>, 21 September
2006. Return to text.
- E.g. Sarfati, J., Refuting Evolution, Master Books, Green Forest, AR, 1999:
ch. 3 on turtles and others, ch.
4 on on bird evolution, ch. 5 on whale evolution (available
online); Tiktaalik—a fishy ‘missing link’,
on fish to amphibians. Return to text.
- Fan,Y., Linardopoulou, E., Friedman, C., Williams, E. and Trask,
B.J.,
Fusion site in 2q13-2q14.1 and paralogous regions on other human chromosomes,
Genome Research 12:1651–1662, 2002.
Return to text.
- DeWitt, D., Chimp genome sequence
very different from man, Journal of Creation 19(3):4–5,
2005. Return to text.
- See Smith, H.B., Cosmic and universal
death from Adam’s Fall: an exegesis of Romans 8:19–23a, Journal
of Creation 21(1) (in press), 2007. Return
to text.
- He notes in his Acknowledgments that a severe adverse reaction
greeted release of an early draft of his book amongst his academic peers, but he
does not say why. This may (or may not) be the reason. Return to
text.
- Williams, A.R., a review of Stark, R.,
For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch-hunts and
the End of Slavery, Journal of Creation 18(2):49–52,
2003. See section ‘God’s handiwork: the
religious origins of science’. Return to text.
- The Thewissen Lab pages. 22 September 2006.
Return to text.
- Kocher et al., Similar morphologies of cichlid fish
in Lakes Tanganyika and Malawi are due to convergence, Molecular Phylogenetics and
Evolution 2(2):158–165, 1993. Return
to text.
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