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Creation, Evolution, & Intelligent Design
By Zecharia Sitchin
FATE :: November 2002

You are walking on a sandy beach, barefoot. Your foot touches a seashell, and you pick it up. Then you see another, even more beautiful. What are these seashells? Of course, you know: They are the skeletal remains of marine life, remains of a myriad living creatures that fill up the oceans, having evolved over millions of years—perhaps billions of years.

And now the watery waves that wash the sandy shore bring to light something that glitters. You bend down and pick it up. It’s a watch! Not one of those new gizmos that have a tiny chip inside, but an old-fashioned-needs-winding kind of watch that someone must have lost. Does it still work? Curious, you open up the back. There are tiny wheels-within-wheels, rods, springs—an ingenious contraption. Like the seashells, remains of once living things, the watch too is dead, remains of a once ticking thing.

And now you ponder: Did this find on the beach, like the seashelled animals, evolve—or was it made by an intelligent designer?

And therein lies the most recent and newly erupted debate between Evolutionists and Creationists, reviving the clash between Darwin and the Bible.

It was in March 1925 that the Tennessee legislature passed a law outlawing the teaching of any doctrine that denies the divine creation of Man as taught by the Bible. In July of that same year, John T. Scopes, a high school teacher, was brought to trial for teaching Darwin’s theory of evolution in violation of the new law. The ensuing trial, known as the Scopes Trial (or, derisively, the “Monkey Trial”) drew worldwide attention to the seemingly irreconcilable conflict between Creationism (the acceptance without reservation of the biblical account that God created Man—like a watchmaker deciding to make a watch) and Evolution (based on Darwin’s findings of gradual, slowly evolving natural selection).

John Scopes was found guilty and fined $100; the Tennessee law was repealed in 1967. But the debate has not ended: Is Man, Homo sapiens, merely the end-product of a long process of natural selection (“Evolution”), or the result of a single decision, a deliberate act by a Creator (“Creationism”) as the Bible states?

The Evolutionists cannot fathom how the other side can ignore the overwhelming evidence for life’s beginnings billions of years ago, and claim that it is all the result of six days of creation. The Creationists, citing the watchmaker simile, cannot see how the sudden appearance of Homo sapiens as an intelligent being so distinct from apes and chimpanzees can deny the Hand of God the Creator.

Over the years, skeletal remains of early hominids have established southeast Africa as the place where humans branched off from apes several million years ago. The fossil remains without doubt paint an evolutionary picture, with this or that find—we shall skip the fancy scientific names—evidencing a progression that has taken what was first assumed to have been two million years, then three or four, and very recently (a find more in the center of Africa, in Chad) five or six million years old. It has indeed been a slow, very very slow, progression (Evolution, as some prefer) from the early hominids through Homo erectus to Homo sapiens.

But this slow evolution presents a puzzle, and the slower the discovered pace, the greater the puzzle. Sometime circa 300,000 years ago—a mere eye blink in evolutionary terms—modern man, Homo sapiens sapiens, suddenly appeared, emerged out of Africa, and inhabited the Earth. The anthropologists used to refer to this phenomenon as that of the Missing Link; recent discoveries that push back the hominid development expose, rather than explain, this missing link ...

Read the rest of this article in the November 2002 issue of FATE

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