I attended the talk Dr. Jonathan Wells gave to the 13th Educational Policy Conference in St. Louis on January 25, 2002. Dr. Wells talk was one of three listed under a “creative” program subheading “The Creation of Taliban John.” I suspect the heading was not of Wells choosing and, in fact, he said nothing specific that might help us to understand the intellectual development of “Taliban John.” The actual title and subject of Wells talk was “The Icons of Evolution in Biology Textbooks.” The talk briefly described and critically evaluated the same ten classic evolutionary “evidences” that Wells covered in his excellent book “Icons of Evolution.” These are: the Urey-Miller experiment, Darwin’s tree of life, homology in vertebrate limbs, Haeckel’s embryos, Archaeopteryx – the missing link, peppered moths, Darwin’s finches, four-winged fruit flies, fossil horses, and apes to humans. All of these tired old evolutionary icons have long been refuted by scientists and understood to be myths by most creationists and even many evolutionists. Indeed, at least one evolutionist reviewer of Wells book has conceded that he got most of his facts right but came to the wrong conclusions (i.e.. macroevolution has never been observed to occur and cannot explain our origins). Wells retorts that evolutionists insist that they came to the right conclusions even though they got their facts wrong.
I found Dr. Wells to be an excellent speaker who presented well organized information in a systematic and logical way using well designed PowerPoint text slides and illustrations. Having just read his book, I benefited most from his numerous examples of how virtually all of the mythical icons of evolution are still being presented as fact in the most popular of the currently used high school and college biology textbooks. Wells confidently predicts that most of these myths, including the fraudulent scam of industrial melanism in peppered moths and the falsified drawings of embryonic homologies by Ernst Haeckel will continue as icons of evolution for generations to come. His prediction is a safe one because if the discredited icons of evolution were removed from the biology textbooks, there would be no remaining understandable evidence for evolution.
As much as I enjoyed and benefited from the presentation of Dr. Wells, there are a few points where I must disagree with him. He seems to argue that biology textbooks are unique among the sciences in being overtly anti-Christian in many of their claims and pronouncements. He certainly gave some glaring examples of this from current popular biology textbooks, but I have read similar comments in earth science text books. Criticisms of ill supported evolutionary icons in geology were missing in Wells presentation. There was no criticism of the presumed great ages of fossils or the presumed vector of progress in the geological column. No criticism of the “big bang” or of the claim that the earth is 4.5 billion years old. There was no suggestion that fossils must be formed quickly if they are to be formed at all. No mention of the growing evidence that strata may be deposited quickly and not even necessarily from the bottom up. I suspect the reason for his silence on these issues is that Wells, like many others in the Intelligent Design Movement,” including Phillip Johnson, Michael Behe and William Dembski, are old earth progressive creationists. These men distance themselves from biblical creationists, presumably hoping thereby to gain some credibility from the scientific/evolutionary community. Sadly, they appear to be just as much maligned by the evolutionary community as those who would hold God’s word above scientific speculation on even the age of the earth.
At the end of Dr. Wells excellent presentation, I found myself asking the same question I was once asked after an anti-evolution presentation of my own – “So What?” Is the whole point merely that science is being taught incorrectly? Many who profess to be Christians will ask, “does it really make any difference how God created as long as we give him the credit.” Is the element of design the only thing we need to hold up against an evolutionary world view? Most importantly, what about the matter of death? Is death natural or even a biological necessity? Did the Designer in fact design us and all animals to suffer all manner of pain, diseases and violence and finally to die? The fossil record after all is full of dead animals and people. If we look to the fossil record as evidence of God’s progressive creative work over millions of years we are inevitably led to accept death as natural. The Bible tells us, however, that God is not the author of death but rather death came into the world through man’s sin and that death is an enemy that must be destroyed by our Savior. “Jesus must reign until He has put all enemies under His feet and that last enemy that will be destroyed is death” (1 Corinthians 15:26). What have we gained if we have merely discredited the icons of evolution and in so doing have left intact the most insidious icon of all – that death is not the wage of sin as the Bible claims but is biologically “natural”? Surely this would be the very undermining of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
