A Parable:
Suppose a man walks up to you and says "I'm made of straw."
You say "Prove it, set fire to yourself"

What is the evidence?

A Parable:
Suppose a man walks up to you and says "Jesus is the son of god."
You say "Prove it."
He says "ok", and he points across the street at a church. "My Jesus
is in that church there." (The church is closed.)
You say "What does that prove?"
He says "Everyone knows churches have jesus in them"
You say "I know there is jesus belief in the church, but why should I
believe that it's GOD'S Jesus?"
"Because I said so" he says.
"What else can you show me?"
He reaches in his pocket and pulls out a cross. "See -- I'm a
believer." You're still skeptical. 'What does that prove?', you
ask. "I'M A BELIEVER" he states loudly (obviously annoyed that you
would question him). He reaches in another pocket and pulls out
another cross, "Do you believe me now?"

What is the evidence?

A Parable:
Suppose a man walks up to you and says "I'm a billionaire."
You say "Prove it."
He says "ok", and he points across the street at a bank. "My money is in
that bank there." (The bank is closed.)
You say "What does that prove?"
He says "Everyone knows banks have money in them"
You say "I know there is money in the bank, but why should I believe that
it's YOUR money?"
"Because it's GREEN" he says.
"What else can you show me?"
He reaches in his pocket and pulls out a penny. "See -- I'm a billionaire."
You're still skeptical. 'What does that prove?', you ask.
"I'M A BILLIONAIRE" he states loudly (obviously annoyed that you would
question him). He reaches in another pocket and pulls out another penny, "Do
you believe me now?"

What is the evidence?

The number of intermediate and transitional links between all living and
extinct species, must have been inconceivably great.~ Charles Darwin

But just in proportion as this p rocess of extermination has acted on an
enormous scale, so must the number of intermediate varieties, which have
formerly existed, be truly enormous. Why then is not every geological
formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Ge ology
assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this,
perhaps, is the most obvious and serious objection which can be urged
against the theory. The explanation lies, as I believe, in the extreme
imperfection of the geological record. ~ Charles Darwin

He who rejects these views on the nature of the geologic record, will
rightly reject my whole theory. ~ Charles Darwin

Darwin invoked his standard argument to resolve this uncomfortable problem:
the fossil record is so imperfect that we do not have evidence for most
events of life's history. But even Darwin acknowledged that his favorite
ploy was wearing a bit thin in this case. His argument could easily account
for a missing stage in a single linage, but could the agencies of
imperfection really obliterate absolutely all evidence for positively every
creature during most of life's history? Darwin admitted: "The case as
present must remain inexplicable; and may be truly urged as a valid argument
against the views here entertained." (1859, p.308)

Darwin has been vindicated by a rich Precambrian record, all discovered in
the past thirty years. Yet the peculiar character of this evidence has not
matched Darwin's predicti on of a continuous rise in complexity toward
Cambrian life, and the problem of the Cambrian explosion has remained as
stubborn as ever -- if not more so, since our confusion now rests on
knowledge, rather than ignorance about the nature of Precambrian life. ~
Stephen Jay Gould

Darwin's prediction of rampant, albeit gradual, change affecting all
lineages through time is refuted. The record is there, and the record speaks
for tremendous anatomical conservatism. Change in the manner Darwin expected
is just not found in the fossil record. ~ Niles Eldredge

There seems to have been almost no change in any part we can compare between
the living organism and its fossilized progenitors of the remote geological
past. Living f ossils embody the theme of evolutionary stability to an
extreme degree...We have not completely solved the riddle of living fossils.
~ Niles Eldredge

When we descend to details, we can prove that no one species has changed
(i.e. we cannot pr ove that a single species has changed): nor can we prove
that the supposed changes are beneficial, which is the groundwork of the
theory. ~ Charles Darwin

As Ernst Mayr, one of the founders of the modern synthetic theory of
evolution, point ed out in his Systematics and the Origin of Species (1942)
Darwin never really did discuss the origin of species in his The Origin of
Species. ~ Niles Eldredge

It is now approximately half a century since the neo-Darwinian synthesis was
form ulated. A great deal of research has been carried on within the
paradigm it defines. Yet the successes of the theory are limited to the
interpretation of the minutiae of evolution, such as the adaptive change in
coloration of moths; while it has remarkably little to say on the questions
which interest us most, such as how there came to be moths in the first
place. ~ Mae-Wan Ho and Peter Saunders

Anything truly novel always seemed to appear quite abruptly in the fossil
record. ~ Ernst Mayr

There is no doubt that natural selection is a mechanism, that it works. It
has been repeatedly demonstrated by experiment. There is no doubt at all
that it works. But the question of whether it produces new species is quite
another matter. No one has ever produced a species by mechanisms of natural
selection. ~ Colin Patterson

What is the use of their unceasing mutations, if they do not change? In sum,
the mutations of bacteria and viruses are merely hereditary fluctuati ons
around a median position; a swing to the right, a swing to the left, but no
final evolutionary effect. ~ Pierre Grasse

Anatomy may fluctuate over time, but the last remnants of a species usually
look pretty much like the first represent atives. ~ Stephen Jay Gould

All paleontologists know that the fossil record contains precious little in
the way of intermediate forms; transitions between major groups are
characteristically abrupt. ~ Stephen Jay Gould

Fossils may tell u s many things, but one thing they can never disclose is
whether they were ancestors of anything else. ~ Colin Patterson

The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips
and nodes of their branches; the rest is inferenc e, however reasonable, not
the evidence of fossils. ~ Stephen Jay Gould

The Origin of Species converted the majority of its readers to a belief in
Darwinian evolution. We must now ask whether this was an unadulterated
benefit to biology and to mankind... I do not contest the fact that the
advent of the evolutionary idea, due mainly to the Origin, very greatly
stimulated biological research. But it appears to me that owing precisely to
the nature of the stimulus, a great deal of thi s work was directed into
unprofitable channels or devoted to the pursuit of will-o'- the-wisps. I am
not the only biologist of this opinion. Darwin's conviction that evolution
is the result of natural selection, acting on small fortuitous variati ons,
says Guyenot, was to delay the progress of investigations on evolution by
half a century. Really fruitful researches on heredity did not begin until
the rediscovery in 1900 of the fundamental work of Mendel, published in 1865
and owing no thing to the work of Darwin. ~ W.R. Thompson

Through use and abuse of hidden postulates, of bold, often ill-founded
extrapolations, a pseudoscience has been created. It is taking root in the
very heart of biology and is leading astray many biochemists and biologists,
who sincerely believe that the accuracy of fundamental concepts has been
demonstrated, which is not the case. ~ Pierre Grasse

The opposite truth has been affirmed by innumerable cases of measurable
evolution at this minimal scale-but, to be visible at all over so short a
span, evolution must be far too rapid (and transient) to serve as the basis
for major transformations in geological time. Hence, the "paradox of the
visibly irrelevant"-or, if you can see it at all, it's too fast to matter in
the long run. ~ Stephen Jay Gould

The central question of the Chicago conference was whether the mechanisms
underlying microevolution can be extrapolated to explain the phenomena of
macroevolution. At the risk of doing violence to the positions of some of
the people at the meeting, the answer can be given as a clear No. ~ Roger
Lewin

Molecular biology has shown that even the simplest of all living systems on
the earth today, bacterial cells, are exceedingly complex objects. Although
the tiniest bacterial cells are incredibly small, weighing less than 10-12
gms, each is in effect a veritable micro-miniaturized factory containing
thousands of exquisitely designed pieces of intricate molecular machinery,
made up altogether of one hundred thousand million atoms, far more
complicated than any machine built by man and absolutely without parallel in
the nonliving world. ~ Michael Denton

On experimental grounds, I have shown that there are no known random
mutations that have added any genetic information to the organism. I go
through a list of the best examples of mutations offered by evolutionists
and show that each of them loses genetic information rather than gain s it.
One of the examples that where information is lost is the one often trotted
out by evolutionists nowadays in an attempt to convince the public of the
truth of evolution. That is the evolution of bacterial resistance to
antibiotics. ~ Lee Spetner See also: virus

It is the great irony of modern evolutionary genetics that the spirit of
explanation has moved more and more towards optimal adaptation, while the
technical developments of population genetics of the past 30 years hav e been
increasingly to show the efficacy of non adaptive forces in evolution. ~
Richard Lewontin

By irreducibly complex I mean a single system composed of several
well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function,
wher ein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively
cease functioning. An irreducibly complex system cannot be produced directly
(that is, by continuously improving the initial function, which continues to
work by the same me chanism) by slight, successive modification of a
precursor, system, because any precursors to an irreducibly complex system
that is missing a part is by definition nonfunctional. ~ Michael Behe

In the abstract, it might be tempting to imagine t hat irreducible complexity
simply requires multiple simultaneous mutations -- that evolution might be
far chancier than we thought, but still possible. Such an appeal to brute
luck can never be refuted... Luck is metaphysical speculation; scientific
explanations invoke causes. ~ Michael Behe

The information necessary to specify the design of all the species of
organisms which have ever existed on the planet, a number according to G. G.
Simpson of approximately one thousand million, could be held in a teaspoon
and there would still be room left for all the information in every book
ever written. ~ Michael Denton

They conceived the evidence that would carry the vital intellectual
argument, but at its core lay flawed sci ence, dubious methodology and
wishful thinking. Clustered around the peppered moth is a swarm of human
ambition, and self-delusions shared among some of the most renowned
evolutionary biologists of our era. ~ Judith Hooper See also: 1 2

I t was a failing of Haeckel as a would-be scientist that his hand as an
artist altered what he saw with what should have been the eye of a more
accurate beholder. He was more than once, often justifiably, accused of
scientific falsification, by Wi lhelm His and by many others. For only two
examples, in"Anthropogenie" he drew the developing brain of a fish as
curved, because that of reptiles, birds, and mammals is bent. But the
vesicles of a fish brain always form in a straight line. He drew the
embryonic membranes of man as including a small sac-like allantois, an
embryonic organ characteristic of and larger in reptiles, birds, and some
nonhuman mammals. The human embryo has no sac-like allantois at all. Only
its narrow solid stock remains to conduct the umbilical blood vessels
between embryo and placenta. Examples could be multiplied significantly. ~
Jane Oppenheimer See also: 1 2 3 4

All K-Ar and Ar-Ar "dates" of volcanic rocks are questionable, as well as
fossil "dates" calibrated by them. ~ Andrew Snelling See also: 1 2

Beginning in 1980 with the dinosaur/asteroid controversy, it has more
recently become popular for geologists to consider not just local, but
global catastrophes to account f or the geologic evidence they see. One can
be assured that for a community to have made such an incredible shift -- in
spite of the strong association which exists between catastrophism and
creationism -- there must be profound evidence for catas trophe throughout
the geologic column. ~ Kurt Wise

To press the matter further, if there were a basic principle of matter which
somehow drove organic systems toward life, its existence should easily be
demonstrable in the laboratory. One could, for instance, take a swimming
bath to represent the primordial soup. Fill it with any chemicals of a non-
biological nature you please. Pump any gases over it, or through it, you
please, and shine any kind of radiation on it that takes your fancy. Let the
experiment proceed for a year and see how many of those 2,000 enzymes have
appeared in the bath. I will give the answer, and so save the time and
trouble and expense of actually doing the experiment. You would find nothing
at all, except possibly for a tarry sludge composed of amino acids and other
simple organic chemicals. How can I be so confident of this statement? Well,
if it were otherwise, the experiment would long since have been done and
would be well known and famous throughout the world. The cost of it would be
trivial compared to the cost of landing a man on the Moon... In short there
is not a shred of objective evidence to support the hypothesis that life
began in an organic soup here on Earth. ~ Fred Hoyle

If you wanted to produce carbon and oxygen in roughly equal quantities by
stellar nucleosynthesis, these are the two levels you would have to fix, and
your fixing would have to be just about where these levels are actually
found to be... A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a
superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and
biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature.
The numbers one calculates from t he facts seem to me so overwhelming as to
put this conclusion almost beyond question. ~ Fred Hoyle

In fact the a priori reasoning is so entirely satisfactory to me that if the
facts won't fit in, why so much the worse for the facts is my feeli ng. ~
Erasmus Darwin

Complete objectivity in science is an illusion. Because so much of one's
analysis depends upon metaphysical assumptions, it should be acknowledged by
this writer, and by all readers, that the answer one gives to a quest ion
depends to a great extent on the metaphysical position one has previously
adopted. ~ Dean Overman

Darwinists believe that the mutation-selection mechanism accomplishes
wonders of creativity not because the wonders can be demonstrated, bu t
because they cannot think of a more plausible explanation for the existence
of wonders that does not involve an unacceptable creator, i.e., a being or
force outside the world of nature. ~ Phillip Johnson

It struck me that I had been worki ng on this stuff for twenty years and
there was not one thing I knew about it. That's quite a shock to learn that
one can be so misled so long...so for the last few weeks I've tried putting
a simple question to various people and groups of people. Question is: Can
you tell me anything you know about evolution, any one thing that is true? I
tried that question on the geology staff at the Field Museum of Natural
History and the only answer I got was silence. I tried it on the members of
the Evolutionary Morphology Seminar in the University of Chicago, a very
prestigious body of evolutionists, and all I got there was silence for a
long time and eventually one person said, 'I do know one thing -- it ought
not to be taught in high school'. ~ Colin Pattersonu

What is the evidence?

What is the evidence?

A Parable:
Suppose a man walks up to you and says "I'm a billionaire."
You say "Prove it."
He says "ok", and he points across the street at a bank. "My money is in
that bank there." (The bank is closed.)
You say "What does that prove?"
He says "Everyone knows banks have money in them"
You say "I know there is money in the bank, but why should I believe that
it's YOUR money?"
"Because it's GREEN" he says.
"What else can you show me?"
He reaches in his pocket and pulls out a penny. "See -- I'm a billionaire."
You're still skeptical. 'What does that prove?', you ask.
"I'M A BILLIONAIRE" he states loudly (obviously annoyed that you would
question him). He reaches in another pocket and pulls out another penny, "Do
you believe me now?"

The number of intermediate and transitional links between all living and
extinct species, must have been inconceivably great.~ Charles Darwin

But just in proportion as this process of extermination has acted on an
enormous scale, so must the number of intermediate varieties, which have
formerly existed, be truly enormous. Why then is not every geological
formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology
assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this,
perhaps, is the most obvious and serious objection which can be urged
against the theory. The explanation lies, as I believe, in the extreme
imperfection of the geological record. ~ Charles Darwin

He who rejects these views on the nature of the geologic record, will
rightly reject my whole theory. ~ Charles Darwin

Darwin invoked his standard argument to resolve this uncomfortable problem:
the fossil record is so imperfect that we do not have evidence for most
events of life's history. But even Darwin acknowledged that his favorite
ploy was wearing a bit thin in this case. His argument could easily account
for a missing stage in a single linage, but could the agencies of
imperfection really obliterate absolutely all evidence for positively every
creature during most of life's history? Darwin admitted: "The case as
present must remain inexplicable; and may be truly urged as a valid argument
against the views here entertained." (1859, p.308)

Darwin has been vindicated by a rich Precambrian record, all discovered in
the past thirty years. Yet the peculiar character of this evidence has not
matched Darwin's prediction of a continuous rise in complexity toward
Cambrian life, and the problem of the Cambrian explosion has remained as
stubborn as ever -- if not more so, since our confusion now rests on
knowledge, rather than ignorance about the nature of Precambrian life. ~
Stephen Jay Gould