4TH ORIGIN
Refuting the Myth of Evolutionism and Exposing the Folly of Clergy Letters
by Michael Ebifegha
According to Ebifegha’s creationist treatise, belief in Darwinian evolution is its own religion—and one that clerics of different faiths should avoid.
The author advances several intersecting scientific and religious arguments against what he refers to as “evolutionism”—the belief that Darwinian “macroevolution” through natural selection, acting on random mutation, can cause major changes in organisms that give rise to novel species. (He does allow that “microevolution”—small-scale evolution that does not create new species—does exist.) On the scientific side, Ebifegha reprises the traditional argument of intelligent design, contending that even rudimentary life forms are too complex to have arisen through random mutation and must have been designed by a cosmic intelligence; he also asserts that biologists have no satisfactory explanation of how the first living cells emerged from inanimate matter. The author also emphasizes gaps in the fossil record, which rarely shows intermediate organismal forms as predicted by Darwin’s notion of gradual evolution through the accretion of incremental mutations. On this point, he quotes Darwin, who acknowledged that this lack was the gravest challenge to his theory. Ebifegha instead spotlights the Cambrian Explosion, a geological era in which a profusion of advanced organisms suddenly appeared in a short period without fossil precursors; he feels that this development supports the biblical account of God creating the world over a period of six days. He further cites criticism by evolutionary biologists who theorize that evolution proceeds in rapid, non-random bursts. On the religious side, Ebifegha castigates the Clergy Letter Project, an effort by pro-evolution clergymen urging school boards not to teach creationism; he argues that Darwinism is an unprovable religious doctrine that contradicts the Bible and promotes atheism.
Ebifegha presents a cogent, if one-sided, critique of evolutionary theory’s shortcomings, written in lucid, often tart prose: “No scientist has ever presented a test that demonstrates the transformation of a reptile to a bird.” His brief against liberal pastors who want to reconcile evolution with Christianity (“God Almighty is not pleased when clergy are lukewarm, and blend what is sacred with what is secular,” he warns) will resonate with those who believe in the inerrancy of the Bible, as will his painstaking exegeses of Scripture. Readers who lack a religious commitment to biblical literalism, however, may find these arguments less compelling, and they may scratch their heads at Ebifegha’s hairsplitting epistemological pronouncements: “The existence of dinosaurs, just like that of every other creature, is a fact of history and not a fact of either science or religion,” he writes, addressing the question of why there are no dinosaurs in the Bible if God created them at the same time as humans; more to the point, he suggests that the “behemoth” described in the Book of Job was in fact a herbivorous dinosaur rather than an elephant or hippopotamus. Readers in search of a full exploration of this book’s issues will want to pair Ebifegha’s volume with one of many defenses of Darwinian theory by biologists.A vigorous but not always convincing attack on Darwinian thought and its religious apologists.