Dear Mr. Dowd,
In reading the free download portion of your book “Thank God for Evolution”, I find I’m struggling to decide between a “righteous anger” and a sorrow for the loss of your own soul. I’m not sure that you will read this, but I will at least write and try and address a few points where I believe you have greatly strayed from truth and reality. I write with a spirit of hope that you will be restored, not with a spirit of confrontation.
Here is a list of passages from your book (noted by MD), along with my comments (noted by “KR”) on where I believe you have erred:
MD: I was taught that evolution was of the devil and would seduce people away from godly thinking and living. I believed Darwinism was the root of most social problems, and I was deeply concerned for my friends and family—especially those caught in the snares of a secular humanistic worldview.
KR: Here I share your former concern and believe that you yourself have fallen prey to that which you once feared. The result may not yet be showing bad fruit in the form of ungodly thinking and living in your own life, but then that story is not done yet is it? I would also say that as you travel around evangelizing this view, you are spreading this disease to others, who may not be as good at suppressing or concealing their own godless behavior.
MD: Only when the evolutionary history of the Universe is articulated in a way that conservative religious believers feel in their bones is holy, and in a way that liberal believers are passionately proud of, will evolution be widely and wholeheartedly embraced.
KR: If you believed the Bible were truly the word of God, you would know that God has a special wrath set aside for those who package evil and deception as truth. How can you condone such a thing in good conscience? There is a reason conservatives and fundamentalists don’t feel in their bones that your doctrine is holy, because it is contrary to the Holy and True Living God. When they begin to accept this evolutionary history as “holy”, they will cease to be conservative or fundamental in their beliefs.
MD: Most people, in my experience, simply don’t know that more than 95 percent of the scientists of the world—including scientists who are devoutly religious—agree on the general flow of natural history.
KR: This statement is preposterous and false. The truth is nowhere near 95% of scientists agree on the general flow of natural history. There is an increasing number of credible scientist who not only question evolution, but see that a young earth is actually supported by more real evidence.
MD: Even those impressed by “intelligent design” arguments, I’ve discovered, are unaware that the leaders of the ID movement agree with evolutionists on the basic timeline of cosmic and biological emergence.
KR: …which is exactly why ID proponents who believe in an evolutionary timeline are flawed in their thinking.
MD: But the fact that our Universe has been transforming along a discernible path for billions of years—the fact that creation was not a one-time event—is of little or no dispute.
KR: Again, complete conjecture, and totally false. It is greatly disputed, and for good reason. There are huge questions and issues that cannot be resolved by the “billions of years” believers.
MD: Our next step will be to learn to organize and govern ourselves globally, and to enjoy a mutually enhancing relationship with the larger body of Life of which we are part.
KR: See also end times one world government of the antichrist. It’s always struck me as odd that some how the world will one day wake up and find itself in the very place foretold in Revelation, in spite of us knowing beforehand what to watch for. Your line of thinking goes hand in hand with the same line of thought that will be proclaimed in that day.
MD: We encounter a Universe astonishingly well suited for life and our kind of consciousness.
KR: Has it ever occurred to you that this is because we have a loving Creator God who designed a world specifically for us? Of course it’s well-suited for life and for our own proliferation…it is as designed!
MD: Although none of this world history is mentioned in the Bible, no historian alive today would deny the following: Before Moses was born and before the story of Adam and Eve was written, southeast Asians were boating to nearby Pacific islands; Indo-European charioteers were invading India; China, under the Shang Dynasty, entered the Bronze Age; indigenous peoples occupied most of the Western Hemisphere; and the Egyptian empire’s age of pyramid building had come and gone.
KR: Again, false. There are plenty of credible scholars who believe that your timeline is based on flawed dating systems. Carbon 14 dating is only reliable to a few thousand years. I love how you turn blatant presumption into hard fact based on no evidence. Seriously? “No historian alive today?”
MD: There is, of course, no one right way to express our relationship to Ultimate Reality. Nevertheless, how and where we imagine God makes a huge difference.
KR: It doesn’t matter how we imagine God, God is unchanged by our whims. If I imagine Anchorage, AK is a tropical paradise, does it automatically become so? This is utter foolishness.
MD: Perhaps you, too, will experience the saving grace I felt when I learned how our evolutionary past is still influencing each and every one of us.
KR: This presumed evolutionary past is influencing us because it is being crammed down our throats, much to the chagrin of the large majority of the population. There is no salvation, and no grace. How can there be grace? In your world, you have done nothing wrong for which grace is necessary. This feeling you experience is your feeling free from having to answer to God. Unfortunately, you have unknowingly sworn allegiance to another master.
MD: We also will revisit the question of who and what we humans really are in the evolutionary process, and thereby fashion a believable and empowering story of why we are here.
KR: This seems to be one of your main points, that there can be a “why” to evolution. At this point, you’ve left science and are again meandering through the vastness of your own imagination. There can be no why, except maybe for survival alone. Evolution teaches that we are here because we have survived. Nothing more.
MD: What drives human evolution today is no longer primarily our genes.
KR: I love this about modern evolutionists. Since we cannot see any evidence of evolution taking place around us, then we have to manufacture some. Instead of physical changes, which have mysteriously ceased, we now say we are evolving technically or socially. It is a total fabrication due to the lack of real evidence of evolution now or in the past.
MD: The evolutionary view of life should be as fundamental to a college degree as Psychology 101 or Western Civilization. But rather than asking students to memorize and regurgitate mountains of testable facts, we should emphasize study of the history of the discovery of evolution, its major characters and ideas, and the basic lines of evidence. This would do far more to inform citizens and prepare teachers than forcing students to remember the Latin names of taxa. We are stoning our children to utter boredom with little pebbles and missing the big picture. The drama of the story of evolution will recapture student interest. —SEAN B. CARROLL
KR: This would be a great idea, except that the real story of evolution is littered with deception, lies, and falsified evidence. If the true story of evolution were told, students would laugh their way out of the classroom. See also Piltdown Man and others. Even new “discoveries” from “Lucy” to “Ida” to “Ardi” take bone fragments from various strata or from miles away and piece them together with a lot of imagination and plaster to create what the sculptor presumed the creature to have looked like.
MD: What I and others mean by the Great Story is humanity’s common creation story. It is the 14–billion-year science-based tale of cosmic genesis—from the formation of galaxies and the origin of life, to the development of consciousness and culture, and onward to the emergence of ever-widening circles of care and concern.
KR: As I said before, there is no scientific evidence that can prove this alleged 14-billion year history. It is based on circular reasoning and assumption. Your bigger problem here though is the first law of thermodynamics which says matter and energy cannot be created or destroyed. I commend you for mentioning it, as most evolutionists gloss over the origin of life. Science has not even a believable guess as to where matter or energy came from, much less life itself. Solve this problem, and I might begin to believe you. It cannot be done.
MD: The Great Story not only tolerates a multiplicity of interpretive meanings; it welcomes them.
KR: “Broad is the road that leads to destruction…” (Matt. 7:13). The great thing about the enemy is that he loves tolerance and inclusiveness. The only person that is not welcome in his camp is the one who is firm in his belief in the Bible. So the fact that you are inclusive and welcome all ideas doesn’t shock me. In that way, you are no different than most of the world.
MD: “Keeping current means we would be celebrating the story of the changing story.” —TYLER VOLK
KR: That’s convenient. You can easily change your story because it is so often found to be in error. God’s Word is unchanging. Yes, there may be a few minor translation errors over the years, but for what it is (age, number of authors, controversial content, specifics about places and nations, etc.), it is amazingly accurate.
MD: In truth, science is quintessentially open to revision and discovery. Science is also open to fresh interpretation.
KR: Again, secular science is open to fresh interpretations, as long as you fit the basic mold. Question so-called evidence of evolution and you will quickly find yourself shunned and excluded.
MD: For example, Big Bang cosmology is almost universally accepted within science.
KR: This is laughable! Big Bang cosmology is most certainly NOT accepted by most scientists. Even secular scientists agree that it is an unworkable theory. Again, where did matter and energy come from? What caused it to compress? It would take an unimaginable amount of energy and force to compress all the matter in the universe. Even still, where is the source of life? Inertia tells us a force remains in motion until acted upon, so what force caused rotation and orbiting in what should be an outward-only motion? It just doesn’t add up.
MD: Whichever version is preferred, the tellers are challenged to offer an emotionally satisfying picture and to evoke a sense of belonging without compromising truth.
KR: The evolution story requires fabricated emotion because it reduces man to equal to a rat or a fish. We require a meaningful “story” because we have been created with this God-shaped vacuum, and until we find the Living Creator God, we will continue to try and fill it with other things.
MD: It is crucial to remember that four hundred million years ago, when an ancient lobe-finned fish set out across a tidal fl at in desperate search of water, that fish had no inkling that its effort would ultimately lead to feathered flight and cathedrals.
KR: This is where one of the most foundational flaws of your theory come in. Lamarckism is widely known to be impossible, un-provable, and as having zero real evidence in the real world. A fish does not desire to walk on the land and manufacture the genes required to sprout feet. This is the tired old logic that a giraffe has a long neck so he can reach the leaves on tall trees. This was a nice theory prior to our modern knowledge of DNA, cellular complexity, etc. It just doesn’t exist in the real world. Man has wanted to fly since the beginning, yet not one of us has sprouted so much as a feather on our heads.
MD: Random mutations that are functional, that help an organism survive or reproduce, will tend to be passed on to the next generation—not all the time, but oft en enough to serve as a shaping force.
KR: Random mutation theory are only slightly better off than Lamarckism. They do actually occur in the real world; however they are almost never beneficial to the organism. When they are, they often render the host sterile so that the gene cannot be passed on. Assuming it gets passed those hurdles, the species would have to have thousands of successive and successful mutations that build upon each other over generations, without so much as one negative mutation causing death or lack of reproduction. Mathematically, it just can’t work knowing what we know about cells, genes, and all that is required to effect the smallest change. If random mutation were a credible theory, the Chernobyl disaster should be a hot bed for proving it true.
MD: Empirical science offers these well-substantiated facts: This Universe is billions of years old. Complex atoms were forged in the cores of stars. Earth is younger than the Milky Way Galaxy. Life evolved from the simple to the complex.
KR: None of these are factual and none can be proven to be true. I’ve addressed the age of the universe above. I assume you are basing the simple to complex theory based on fossil discoveries in the geologic column. Unfortunately, this view ignores huge amounts of evidence to the contrary. For one, polystrate trees run upward through some of these same strata that are supposed to span millions of years. Nowhere in the world does the geologic column exist with all layers in tact. And in many cases, you have layers switched. It would make sense that in the case of a catastrophic world-wide flood, that the smaller “simpler” water-dwelling creatures would survive longer, while more “complex” mammals and birds would climb to temporary safety, and as a result be found in higher layers of sediment. Plus, we now know that even the apparent simple creatures are hugely complex at the cellular level.
MD: Consider this scenario: When our ancestors came down out of the trees, stood upright, and developed a relationship with rocks sufficient to defend themselves from formidable predators
KR: There is zero evidence for this. It is complete conjecture. There should be hundreds and thousands of transitional fossils. There are maybe three suspect fragments that are pieced together with lots of imagination. To believe this theory, ignores a mountain of evidence to the contrary.
MD: The arrow of evolution moves not just from sea to land but cycles back to the sea, in the form of eelgrass, whale, walrus, sea otter, manatee—each foray independent of the other and each body form bearing conspicuous signs of past lives on land.
KR: The cow to whale theory doesn’t work. Again, what was the agent of change? Cows and whales have very different DNA, and are not likely cousins even by evolution’s standards.
MD: The circuitous course of each is apparent in the skeletal architecture, which is surely no product of engineer-like intelligent design, but clearly is the product of intelligent innovation and adaptation.
KR: There is no intelligent innovation. As I said, a creature does not will itself into something it is not. And I’m floored that anyone can look at the complexity and intricacies of living things and not see that there is no other explanation than an engineer-like intelligent designer. You even touched on it yourself in saying “Not in a billion years will a tornado whip together a functioning bicycle (much less a jet plane) from a heap of unassembled parts.” Then you claim that it is not the result of a designer? What?
MD: Looking up in a forest, one can witness the results of a savage “arms race” of competition for sunlight that long ago made trees into towers, driving the redwoods and the pines and the beeches into a frenzy of skyward longing.
KR: Again…Lamarckism. Flat wrong.
MD: It was strife that suggested armor to the armadillo, quills to the porcupine, shell to snail, carapace to terrapin. It was strife that gave keen eyesight to coyote and eagle, night vision to owl, and wings to archaeopteryx…
KR: Knowing what we now know about a lack of evidence for Lamarckism and a lack of likelihood for successful macro mutation, how about a creative designer that gave each species it’s own unique means of defense, weaponry, or ability to survive. Is that so hard to believe?
Thank you for your time. May God grant you grace and mercy and bring you to a place of personal conviction and restoration to himself.
Kevin Rollins
