“Breaking the Laws of Nature” 

  Isaiah 45:12

Dear Friends in Christ,                                                                                   

   Those of you who were here last Sunday can probably recall that I concluded my sermon by saying that today we were going to spend some time taking a look at the theory of evolution and pointing out some major flaws and weaknesses in that theory.  And I don’t know about you, but sometimes I am amazed at how blatantly and matter-of-factly the theory of evolution is promoted, pushed, and proclaimed in our day and age, especially through the press and the media because after all, it is just a theory.  It is not a proven fact and yet it is so often treated as such.  And just so you know what I mean when I use that term evolution, this theory states that about 14 billion years ago all the matter in the universe was infinitely compressed into a tiny ball – some say it may have been the size of a grapefruit, others say it may have been as small as the dot of an i.  Whatever the case, they never tell you where this dot or grapefruit of infinitely compressed matter came from, but they do tell you that for some unknown reason it exploded in what they call the Big Bang and ultimately resulted in the formation of the universe that we see all around us today.  And just to show you how readily this is accepted and promoted in the press and media, I brought a couple of examples with me today that I recently came across.

   The first one is from an article that appeared in Parade Magazine on Sun., June 22.  The title of this article is “For the Love of Hubble,” and the subtitle is “The amazing telescope, scheduled for its final repair mission, has changed what we know of the universe.”  Then, right in the midst of the 1^st page of that article, in big bold letters it tells us one thing we’ve supposedly learned from this telescope.  It says: “It has taught us so much – including that the universe is 14 billion years old.”  You see how it states it as though it’s a given, as though it’s a proven fact?

   Here’s another article I cut out of the Post-Dispatch a few weeks ago entitled “New Mars theory suggests meteor hit it.”  Listen to what it has to say… 

   The theory of evolution is everywhere.  Just a few Saturdays ago I was in my car listening to the Home Improvement Show with Scott Mosby on KMOX and I like that guy.  He’s so knowledgeable and he sounds like such a nice guy.  But out of the blue he made a comment about how since man has been around for millions of years, such and such has happened.  Evolution, pure and simple.  When Marilyn and I have been on vacations to some of our national parks, they invariably and unashamedly proclaim the theory of evolution by stating that certain rocks are billions of years old or that certain plants have been around for millions of years.

   So is evolution really a proven scientific fact?  And are those who disagree with it just a bunch of Bible-thumping fundamentalists who are slow to accept the facts and to let go of their precious 6-day creation myth that is found in the 1^st chapter of Genesis?  Well, why don’t we let some scientists answer that question for us?  Like Dr. T. N. Tahmisian from the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission who back in 1959 stated the following: “Scientists who go about teaching that evolution is a fact of life are great con-men, and the story they are telling may be the greatest hoax ever.  In explaining evolution, we do not have one iota of fact.”  Professor Louis Bounoure, former President of the Biological Society of Strasbourg and Director of the Strasbourg Zoological Museum, and later the Director of Research at the French National Centre of Scientific Research, said in 1984: “Evolutionism is a fairy tale for grown-ups.  This theory has helped nothing in the progress of science.  It is useless.”  That’s pretty shocking stuff coming from a member of the scientific community.  As is the following quote that comes from Dr. Colin Patterson, the Senior Paleontologist at the British Museum of Natural History, which boasts the largest collection of fossils in the world.  But back in 1981 he said in a keynote address at the American Museum of Natural History: “One of the reasons I started taking this anti-evolutionary view, or let’s call it a non-evolutionary view, was last year I had a sudden realization for over 20 years I had thought I was working on evolution in some way…and there was not one thing I knew about it.”  Then a little later he added: “Question is: Can you tell me anything you know about evolution, any one thing, 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.’”

   I share these quotes with you (and I have many others besides) to let you in on a secret that the press and media do an incredible job of keeping from the general public.  And that is that not everyone in the scientific community embraces or endorses the theory of evolution.  They have studied this theory in greater detail than you or I ever could or ever will.  They have examined the facts.  They have checked the data.  And they have come to the same conclusion that Bible-believing Christians have arrived at as well.  And that conclusion is stated in the very 1^st verse of the Bible: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”  And that same Creator God tells us in our text for today: “It is I who made the earth and created mankind upon it. My own hands stretched out the heavens; I marshaled their starry hosts.”

   Last Sunday I started a brand new sermon series that I am calling “Back to the Basics.”  The purpose of this series is to take us back to the fundamentals, back to the essentials of our faith.  And in my sermon last Sunday, we began by exploring one of the most basic questions we could ever ask, the question: How can we know that there is a God?  I used Romans 1:20 as my sermon text which states: “For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities--his eternal power and divine nature--have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.”  That simply says that the fingerprints of God and the handiwork of God are evident everywhere we look because of the incredible design that we see all around us. 

   So why doesn’t everyone believe that?  Why don’t people see what we see?  I believe the primary answer to that question came in the 1^st video that we watched in our “Defending the Faith” Bible class that we started a little over a month ago.  Ron Carlson, who is the speaker in these videos, quoted one scientist who admitted that the evidence for evolution was virtually non-existent.  But when he was asked why he still clung to that belief, he simply said because it was “morally comfortable” for him.  In other words, if he were to give up his belief in Darwinian evolution, which denies the existence of God, then he would have to go along with the only other alternative that is out there, which is divine creation.  And if he were to do that, then all of a sudden he would find himself accountable to this divine Creator, which would mean that he would have to live as the Creator instructed him to live.  And since he didn’t want to have to deal with those kinds of rules and regulations and restrictions, he has chosen to go against all the facts and all the logic that his studies have revealed to him and he has opted to believe what he knows deep down in his heart is a lie.

   So what are some of the weaknesses, some of the major flaws in the theory of evolution that you might be able to share with someone whose belief in evolution is perhaps keeping them from the Bible and especially from a Savior named Jesus?  Well, one problem with evolution is that it completely goes against some of the most basic laws of nature.  Now before we get in to any of those laws, let me explain a few terms to you that scientists use.  The 1^st one is a hypothesis, which is an idea or an educated guess that they might have about something, but they just don’t have any facts yet to determine whether it is true or false.  The 2^nd term is a theory.  If something is a theory, that means there are facts which show it might be true. Further testing will settle the matter.  The final term is a law.  A law is something which has been shown to be true all the time.  In science, a law means there are no exceptions to the rule. The Law of Gravity is one example of this. Everyone knows that gravity holds things down—no exceptions. Gravity is not just a theory, it's a law.

   Well, one law that evolution completely contradicts is the Law of Biogenesis.  This law states 2 things: 1. Living things always come from living things; and 2. Living things produce only more living things like themselves.  Now that makes sense, doesn’t it?  Yet evolutionists tell us that life actually came from nonliving matter and that one kind of animal gave rise to a different kind of animal. And not just once, I might add, but multiple times over millions of years.  So that is an obvious violation of the Law of Biogenesis.

   But there’s another law of nature that evolution contradicts and that is the Law of Entropy, sometimes called the 2^nd Law of Thermodymanics.  Now don’t let those fancy scientific terms scare you because what they mean is something that we see happening all around us each and every day.  Basically, the Law of Entropy states that everything in the universe is running down.  It’s wearing out.  We don’t have to look very far to see evidence of that, do we?  All we have to do is look in a mirror, especially those of us who are getting along in years, and we see evidence of the Law of Entropy at work through the toll that the aging process takes on us.  It was exactly 34 years ago today that Marilyn and I met.  Well, if you were to look at pictures of me back then and compare them to what I look like today, you will see a real good example of the Law of Entropy at work.  Now notice I was very careful not to include my wife in that illustration because as beautiful as she was back then, she has defied the Law of Entropy and only gotten more beautiful with time.  She’s kind of like a fine wine; she gets better with age. 

   But do you understand the Law of Entropy?  It’s not rocket science.  Everything in the universe is wearing out.  It’s that simple and that obvious.  But that’s not what evolution says.  Evolution says just the opposite.  It says that everything is running up rather than running down, that things are getting better, that life which started out as simple one-celled creatures that evolved in some ancient primordial soup millions of years ago has continued to progress upward to the very complex creatures that we see all around us today. 

   So I hope you can see that in order for evolution to have occurred, it would have had to go completely against some of the most obvious and best known laws of nature that science has come up with.  That is a huge weakness in this theory that many people today are not aware of.  But there are more.  And the next time I preach, which will be 2 weeks from today since next Sunday is Vicar Josh’s last Sunday, I want to share some more of those weaknesses with you.

   But let me close by saying that the Bible is in total agreement with the 2 laws of nature we’ve just looked at.  It agrees with the Law of Biogenesis which teaches that life comes from life and that living things produce only after their kind.  That is stated very clearly for us in Genesis 1.  But the Bible also agrees with the Law of Entropy.  In fact, in Genesis 3 we discover why there even is this law of nature which states that everything is running down rather than getting better.  It’s the result of Adam and Eve’s fall into sin.  For that fall brought an end to God’s perfect creation and culminated in the death and destruction, the corruption and chaos that we see all around us today.  But thankfully God loved us too much to allow the effects of sin’s curse to have their way with us forever.  So he sent his Son Jesus Christ into this world to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves.  As Paul puts it in Gal. 3:13: “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us.”  Through his sacrificial death on the cross, our sins have been paid for in full and we will one day enjoy a life with him that is described by the Apostle John in Rev. 22:3 with these beautiful words: “No longer will there be any curse.”  So thanks to Jesus we have a lot to look forward to, don’t we?  And my prayer for all of you is that you will remain true and faithful to him so that you might one day reap the benefits of all that he did for you and all that he made possible for you.  Amen.