This is the final part of my response write-up to some skeptics I was speaking with.
For part 4, I thought I’d send this quote from Gerald
Schroeder’s book “The Science of God” (pp 34-37). It’s a great story for those who believe
evolutionary processes are responsible for the diversity of life we see today:
Charles D. Wolcott had finally reached the Burgess Pass. The adjacent valleys were 5,000 feet
below. Walcott loved the Canadian
Rockies. It is spectacular country. He was on a combined summer holiday plus
field trip, packing by horse across the mountains of eastern British Columbia
in search of fossils. And for fossils,
the ridge connecting Mount Wapta and Mount Field near the Burgess Pass was to
become a very special location. The
shale rocks over which Walcott was climbing were about to yield the most
important fossils ever found. They were
to reveal the origins of all modern life...
...Walcott was a world-renowned paleontologist and the world’s expert
on the explosion of multicellular life that occurred in the Cambrian period,
500 to 600 million years ago. Ever on
the watch for new fossils, a slab of the Burgess Shale caught his experienced
eye. The rock may have borne a telltale
clue: parallel lines scraped onto its surface by a glacier’s motion. Ten thousand years before, at the close of
the last ice age, glaciers originating in the Arctic had skimmed the top off
this mountain. Shale, buried for more
than 500 million years, now lay exposed.
Using his geologist’s hammer, Walcott would have rapped the
multilayered slab on its edge. The
layers separated and there, held within, was the fine imprint of a
crustacean. But this was
impossible. The shale was too old to
contain a fossil as complex as this specimen.
Some 550 million years ago, at the start of the Cambrian, the only life
on Earth was the most simple of forms, one-celled bacteria, algae, protozoans,
and some pancake-shaped life of uncertain definition known as Ediacaran
fossils. There was no way evolution could have advanced life from
one-celled protozoans to the complexity of this crustacean in the twenty or so
million years of the Cambrian. There
simply had not been the time for that development. Well into the 1970s, evolutionary theory
assumed that in excess of 100 million years were needed for the basic body
plans of advanced life to evolve from the simplicity of pre-Cambrian life.
Other shale pieces yielded a variety of equally fantastic animal
fossils. Walcott, meticulous as always,
recorded their shapes in his diary.
During the next decade Walcott collected and shipped between sixty and
eighty thousand of these specimens to his institution in Washington, DC.
That Walcott realized he had made a major discovery is obvious from the
vast number of fossils he collected. Representatives of every animal
phylum, the basic anatomies of all animals alive today, we present among those
half-billion-year-old specimens.
These fossils revealed an extraordinary fact.
Eyes and gills, jointed limbs and intestines, sponges and worms and
insects and fish, all had appeared simultaneously. There had not been a gradual evolution of
simple phyla such as sponges into the more complex phyla of worms and then on
to other life forms such as insects. According to these fossils, at
the most fundamental level of animal life, the phylum or basic body plan, the
dogma of classical Darwinian evolution that the simple had evolved into the
more complex, that invertebrates had evolved into vertebrates over one hundred
to two hundred million years, was fantasy, not fact.
The question that arises for me out of this is the
following...if evolutionary processes couldn’t explain this amazing profusion
of life, where did it come from?
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