I encourage everyone to read the book 'The Case for a Creator' by Lee Strobel. Much of what I'm going to quote comes from this book...
One hundred biologists, chemists, zoologists, physicists, anthropologists, molecular and cell biologists, bioengineers, organic chemists, geologists, astrophysicists, and other scientists with doctorates from such places as Stanford, Cornell, Rutgers, Michigan, and Yale, put out a two-page banner in a national magazine under the title "A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism." It said, amongst other things:
Johnathen Wells, who holds a bachelors in geology and physics with a minor in biology from the University of California as well as a Doctorate in molecular and cell biology from Berkley and another doctorate in religious studies from Yale, said of the strongest pieces of evidence for evolution:We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged.
Wells:That they're either false or misleading. ... The end result is the same - much of what science teachers have been telling students is simply wrong.
Also from Wells:Darwin knew the fossil record failed to support his tree [of life]. He acknowledged that major groups of animals - he called them divisions, now they're called phyla - appear suddenly in the fossil record.... His theory predicts a long history of gradual divergence from a common ancestor, with the differences slowly becomming bigger and bigger until you get to the major differences we have now. The fossil evidence, even in his day, showed the opposite: the rapid appearance of phylum-level differences in what's called the 'Cambrian explosion.' Darwin believed that future fossil discoveries would vindicate his theory - but that hasn't happened. Actually, fossil discoveries over the last hundred and fifty years have turned his tree upside down by showing the Cambrian explosion was even more abrupt and extensive than scientists once thought.... This is absolutely contrary to Darwin's Tree of Life. These animals, which are so fundamentally different in their body plans, appear fully developed, all of a sudden, in what paleontologists have called the single most spectacular phenomenon of the fossil record.
Wells on the ability to construct fragments into meaningful skulls or skeletons:One of the major problems with paleoanthropology is that compared to all the fossils we have, only a minuscule number are believed to be of creatures ancestral to humans. Often it's just skill fragments or teeth. So this gives a log of elasticity in reconstructing the specimens to fit evolutionary theory. For example, when National Geographic hired four artists to reconstruct a female figure from seven fossil bones found in Kenya, they came up with quite different interpretations. One looked like a modern African-American woman; another like a werewolf; another had a heavy, gorilla-like brow; and another had a missing forehead and jaws that looked a bit like a beaked dinosaur. Of course, this lack of fossil evidence also makes it virtually impossible to reconstruct supposed relationships between ancestors and descendents. One anthropologist likened the task to trying to reconstruct the plot of War and Peace by using just thirteen random pages from the book. I thought Henry Gee. the chief science writer for Nature, was quite candid about this issue in 1999. Gee wrote, 'The intervals of time that separate fossils are so huge that we cannot say anything definite about their possible connection through ancestry and descent.' He called each fossil 'an isolated point, with no knowable connecton to any other given fossil, and all float around in an overwhelming sea of gaps.' In fact, he said that all the fossil evidence for human evolution 'between ten and five million years ago - several thousand generations of living creatures - can be fitted into a small box.' Consequently, he concluded that the conventional picture of human evolution is 'a completely human invention created after the fact, shaped to accord with human prejudices.' Then he said quite bluntly: 'To take a line of fossils and claim they represent a lineage is not a scientific hypothesis that can be tested, but an assertion that carries the same validity as a bedtime story - amusing, perhaps even instructive, but not scientific.'
Berkley evolutionary biologist F. Clark Howell:But what if the other evidence for Darwinism is faulty - which, in fact, it is?... And without any compelling evidence for Darwinism in these areas, the whole question of evolution is up for grabs. Instead, Darwinists assume the story of human life is an evolutionary one, and then they plug the fossils into a preexisting narrative where they seem to fit. The narrative can take several forms depending on one's biases. As one anthropologist said, the process is 'both political and subjective' to the point where he suggested that 'paleoanthropology has the form but not the substance of science.'
Wells:There is no encompassing theory of [human] evolution. Alas, there never really has been.
Well's conclusion:Some paleontologists, even though they may think Darwin's overall theory is correct, call it a lawn rather than a tree, because you have these seperate blades of grass sprouting up. one paleontologist in China says it actually stands Darwin's tree on its head because the major groups of animals - instead of coming last, at the top of the tree - come first, when animals make their first appearance.
It's becoming clearer and clearer to me that this is materialistic philosophy masquerading as empirical science. The attitude is that life had to have developed this way because there's no other materialistic explanation. And if you try to invoke another explanation - for instance, intelligent design - then the evolutionists claim you're not a scientist.
