Primate Ancestors: A Response, Part 1
June 28, 2009
In my spare time, I have been struggling my way through a paper entitled, Primate Ancestors: Evidence From DNA Comparison. If you are interested in reading it, it is linked in the 'Collected Papers' section at the reformedacademic.blogspot.com website.
At the risk of being accused of not dealing with the evidence, or of not having the scientific background necessary to understand the evidence, I am going to begin by conceding a point, just for the sake of argument:
Dr. Van der Meer provides a plethora of scientific evidence that points to the conclusion that there is a common ancestry between non-human primates and human beings. Since I do not fully understand the evidence, and since I do not have the scientific wherewithal to argue cogently against it, I will concede his point. Scientific evidence provides incontrovertible proof that we share a common ancestry with chimpanzees.
I'm not going to argue with that scientific conclusion, because Dr. Van der Meer has his doctorate in the area of which he is speaking, and any argument I might have against the evidence he provides would carry no weight whatsoever, and would not (and should not, given my lack of scientific acumen) be taken seriously. What I am going to deal with is the following quote from Dr. Van der Meer's conclusion. He writes:
If people living today would have been created by fiat creation rather than by evolutionary creation, there would have been no branching pattern unless the Creator would have wanted us to believe there had been a history which never actually occurred. Since the Creator does not deceive us[,] I conclude that He created us by means of an evolutionary process[,] thereby giving us a real evolutionary history...
As Christian biologists we add that insights from divine revelation will also be needed to understand what makes us human. The answer is captured in the fact that humans have been created in the image of God.
There are serious problems with these statements (and others in Dr. Van der Meer's paper which put forward similar ideas), and I will deal with them in future posts. Until then, consider Jesus' words to His disciples in Matthew 13:
The disciples came to Him and asked, 'Why do you speak to the people in parables?' He replied, 'The knowledge of the secrets of the Kingdom of Heaven has been given to you, but not to them. Whoever has will be given more, and he will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken from him. This is why I speak to them in parables: Though seeing, they do not see; though hearing, they do not hear or understand. In them is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah: You will be ever hearing but never understanding; you will be ever seeing but never perceiving. For this people's heart has become calloused; they hardly hear with their ears, and they have closed their eyes. Otherwise they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts and turn, and I would heal them. But blessed are your eyes because they see, and your ears because they hear.'
At the risk of being accused of not dealing with the evidence, or of not having the scientific background necessary to understand the evidence, I am going to begin by conceding a point, just for the sake of argument:
Dr. Van der Meer provides a plethora of scientific evidence that points to the conclusion that there is a common ancestry between non-human primates and human beings. Since I do not fully understand the evidence, and since I do not have the scientific wherewithal to argue cogently against it, I will concede his point. Scientific evidence provides incontrovertible proof that we share a common ancestry with chimpanzees.
I'm not going to argue with that scientific conclusion, because Dr. Van der Meer has his doctorate in the area of which he is speaking, and any argument I might have against the evidence he provides would carry no weight whatsoever, and would not (and should not, given my lack of scientific acumen) be taken seriously. What I am going to deal with is the following quote from Dr. Van der Meer's conclusion. He writes:
If people living today would have been created by fiat creation rather than by evolutionary creation, there would have been no branching pattern unless the Creator would have wanted us to believe there had been a history which never actually occurred. Since the Creator does not deceive us[,] I conclude that He created us by means of an evolutionary process[,] thereby giving us a real evolutionary history...
As Christian biologists we add that insights from divine revelation will also be needed to understand what makes us human. The answer is captured in the fact that humans have been created in the image of God.
There are serious problems with these statements (and others in Dr. Van der Meer's paper which put forward similar ideas), and I will deal with them in future posts. Until then, consider Jesus' words to His disciples in Matthew 13:
The disciples came to Him and asked, 'Why do you speak to the people in parables?' He replied, 'The knowledge of the secrets of the Kingdom of Heaven has been given to you, but not to them. Whoever has will be given more, and he will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken from him. This is why I speak to them in parables: Though seeing, they do not see; though hearing, they do not hear or understand. In them is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah: You will be ever hearing but never understanding; you will be ever seeing but never perceiving. For this people's heart has become calloused; they hardly hear with their ears, and they have closed their eyes. Otherwise they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts and turn, and I would heal them. But blessed are your eyes because they see, and your ears because they hear.'