Page 714 - Atlas of Creation Volume 4

Consciousness cannot be explained in terms of any
Darwinist claims

. . . In the physical realm, any theory of human evolution must explain how it was that an ape-like ancestor,
equipped with powerful jaws and long, dagger-like canine teeth and able to run at speed on four limbs, be-

came transformed into a slow, bipedal animal whose natural means of defense were at best puny. Add to this
the powers of intellect, speech and morality, upon which we “stand raised as upon a mountain top” as
Huxley put it; and one has the complete challenge to evolutionary theory. 123

— Evolutionist science writer Roger Lewin

After Darwin, ev o lu tion’s pro po nents tried var i ous ex pla na tions for the sub ject of con scious ness,
some thing which was ut ter ly in ex pli ca ble in Darwin’s terms. They claimed that im ag i nary prim i tive hu -
mans had en cour aged the ev o lu tion of the brain by es tab lish ing com mu ni ca tion with one an oth er and
by be gin ning to hunt and use tools. They then main tained that with the sup posed de vel op ment of the

brain, lan guage de vel oped and that the abil i ty to speak gave rise to ra tion al thought—the most im por -
tant dif fer ence be tween the hu man and the oth er an i mals.
But these claims lacked any sci en tif ic foun da tion. The fos sil record pro vid ed not a sin gle find ing that
con sti tut ed ev i dence for any of them. Scientific re search, and ex per i ments re gard ing lan guage and con -

scious ness, elim i nat ed any pos si bil i ty that such de vel op ments could have oc curred.
All Darwinists had to of fer were claims, which in rough ly the same man ner as all ev o lu tion ist lit er -
a ture, were de scribed in terms of a dy nam ic sce nar io, but which re ferred to no sci en tif ic ev i dence. Why?
Because ev o lu tion nev er hap pened.

Despite be ing an ev o lu tion ist, Henry Gee, ed i tor of the well-known mag a zine Nature, makes the fol -
low ing com ments con cern ing the il log i cal na ture of this ev o lu tion ist claim:

. . . the ev o lu tion of Man is said to have been driv en by im prove ments in pos ture, brain size, and the co or di -
na tion be tween hand and eye, which led to tech no log i cal achieve ments such as fire, the man u fac ture of tools,
and the use of lan guage. But such sce nar i os are sub jec tive. They can nev er be test ed by ex per i ment, and so
they are un sci en tif ic. They re ly for their cur ren cy not on sci en tif ic test, but on as ser tion and the au thor i ty of

their pres en ta tion. 124
In ad di tion to be ing un sci en tif ic, this claim is log i cal ly in con sist ent. Evolutionists main tain that the
in tel li gence—which sup pos ed ly emerged by way of ev o lu tion—de vel oped the use of tools, and that in -

tel li gence then de vel oped thanks to the use of those tools!
Evolutionists need to be able to ac count for the con tra dic tion in her ent in this chick en-and-the-egg
sce nar io. This on ly em pha siz es the di chot o my in to which Wallace fell as he pro posed his the o ry of ev o -
lu tion, but it still ap plies to the the o ry of ev o lu tion to day.

Phillip Johnson, one of the most in flu en tial crit ics of Darwinism, writes on the sub ject:
A theory that is the product of a mind can never adequately explain the mind that produced the theory. The
story of the great scientific mind that discovers absolute truth is satisfying only so long as we accept the mind

itself as a given. Once we try to explain the mind as a product of its own discoveries, we are in a hall of mir-
rors with no exit. 125

Robert Jastrow, Chairman of George Marshall Institute, com ments:
It is hard to ac cept the ev o lu tion of the hu man eye as a prod uct of chance; it is even hard er to ac cept the ev -
o lu tion of hu man in tel li gence as the prod uct of ran dom dis rup tions in the brain cells of our an ces tors. 126

Darwinists must have re al ized that their claims re gard ing the ev o lu tion of hu man con scious ness,
based sole ly up on in ter pre ta tion, were in ad e quate, in as much as they felt the need to dress the mat ter up

with sci en tif ic ter mi nol o gy. They there fore sug gest ed a concept they called “the phenomenon of emer-
gence,” which, they claimed, played a role.

712 Atlas of Creation Vol. 4