 Natural selection is often considered the very engine of evolution. Are adaptive traits due to external ecological variables that shape an organism's genetic information? Or are an organism's abilities to adapt due to non-natural internal capacities programmed into them by God? Discover how to properly identify the true cause of an organism's dramatic capacity to self-adjust to different environments, revealing a powerful display of God's creative design. This second program explains more of the latest scientific research on this subject. Coming up on today's edition of Origins, Darwin's Sacred Imposter Part 2 with Dr. Randy Galusa. Hello and welcome to Origins. I'm Ray Hypal and it's an honor to be your host today. During this program, we showcase interesting guests who present evidence from science along with other important facts validating the truth of creation and the accuracy of the Bible. Today's guest, Dr. Randy Galusa, has undergraduate degrees in engineering and theology. He has earned an M.D. and also a Master of Public Health from Harvard University. Dr. Galusa is a registered professional engineer. In 2008, he retired as Lieutenant Colonel from the U.S. Air Force. Now he's the President of the Institute for Creation Research in Dallas, Texas. Dr. Galusa, welcome once again to the program. Thank you very much. Well, last time when we did Part 1 of Darwin's Sacred Imposter, we left sort of on a cliffhanger and I said please come back soon so that we can do Part 2. So I'm excited about this program. Can we summarize for our audience who may have missed Part 1, what did we conclude in Part 1 of Darwin's Sacred Imposter? Well, we concluded that Darwin changed the way people view biology by doing two things. He inverts the cause of organic change from inside the organism to outside. That's the externalistic view which we've talked about prior to this. And second, he personifies nature to act as a substitute agent in lieu of God and he personifies it by projecting onto nature the ability to select for or select against creatures or to favor other creatures along those lines. And that takes us to today's issue where we really need to let evolutionists use their own words against them. So we're going to, as much as we can, let these evolutionists speak for themselves very candidly, everybody we're going to talk about today as an evolutionist of what they say about evolution. And right off the bat, one of their major criticisms of Darwin is that he substituted one agent, in other words, God's agency for another agency, another mystical agency, which was nature itself. So he got God out and he brought in another substitute God. We're going back to our old friend Richard Luanton right there and he's again critiquing Darwin's use. He says the most famous and influential example is Darwin's invention of the term natural selection, which he wrote in On the Origin of Species is quote, daily and hourly scrutinizing throughout the world every variation, even the slightest, rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good. He's pointing out here that Darwin has this personification of nature where it's acting as if it's an omnipresent omniscient dot where it can see everything, selecting and favoring some of those. So he's immediately pointing out this problem and that was pointed out to Darwin right from the very beginning. And in 1859 he wrote Origin of Species by 1868. He's kind of backpedaling a bit and this is a quote right from Darwin himself where he says, the term natural selection is in some respects a bad one. Richard, many people haven't heard that as it seems to imply conscious choice, but this will be disregarded after a little familiarity and it really wasn't. He says, I have also often personified the word nature for I have found it difficult to avoid this ambiguity because it's almost impossible because creatures look like they were created. We get a lot of critiques of our program. People like to, you know, say that we're not doing things right. And I can imagine there were people from the last show saying, Darwin never personified nature. Here's Darwin saying, you know what? I personified nature. Exactly. I know he's saying it right there himself that he personified nature. 1868 people are already pushing back against it and the pushback even continues. Another graph and a professor of biology at UCLA in his article Darwin was a punk in 2010 says, oh, the trick is how do you talk about natural selection without implying the rigidity of law? We use it as almost an act of participant, almost like a God. In fact, you could substitute the word God for natural selection in a lot of whose writings? Evolutionary writings and you think you're listening to a theologian. It's a routine we know doesn't exist, but we teach it anyway. Genetic mutation and some active force to choose is the most favorable one. And this gentleman, Robert Reed, he was a famous evolutionary biologist in Canada. He's now passed away, but he has another frank admission where he points out that indeed the language of neodarwinism is so careless that the words divine plan can be substituted for selection pressure in any popular work in the biological literature without the slightest disruption in the logical flow of the argument. Robert Reed isn't the only one. Another gal who saw this mysticism in Darwin's use of selection, Lynn Margulis, another gal who has passed away, but she pointed out very incisively that Darwin was brilliant to make natural selection a sort of what? Godlike term, an expression that could replace God who did it, created life forms. He made it easy for his contemporaries to think and verbalize Mr. Big Omnipotent God in the sky, picking out those he wants to keep. He has been conceived of as the natural selector he throws the others away. And that's exactly how Darwin uses it as an active agent, favoring some and not favoring others. What an incredible admission. And then finally, we have an extensive quote, but this is very perceptive. This man is a critic of evolution in the sense that Darwin has it. He believes in evolution, of course, himself, but he sees the problem with natural selection and Stephen Talbot. And he points out that natural selection is always doing things. It's always as if it is an active agent. What kinds of things is it doing? And so we hear about the mechanism of selection, as well as the forces or pressures that operate in it. By the way, nobody's ever measured a selective pressure. You'll hear talk about that these hot conditions or these cold conditions or these predators were selective pressure. That's just another concept that only exists in someone's mind. There's no real forces. There's no real pressures that actually operate on creatures. It's just another one of their rhetorical devices to see that nature is somehow molding and shaping them. But there really isn't any selective pressure, and Talbot and Reid are obviously able to see these things. So he talks about as well as the forces or pressures that operate in it. We learn that natural selection shapes the bodies and behaviors of organisms, builds specific features, targets or acts on particular genomic regions, favors or disfavors or even punishes various traits. And what he's doing is he's pointing out all of these verbs that are attributed to nature by evolutionists as real causal forces in their best scientific literature, and most people are completely missing this altogether. And that's why he says, this sort of language is all but universal. I think it is safe to say that relatively few references to natural selection by biologists fail to assert or imply that we are looking at something like a humanly contrived mechanism with the well-designed power to do things beginning with the activity of selecting. Evolutionary biologists routinely speak of natural selection as if it were an agent. Natural selection becomes rather like an occult power of the pre-scientific age. They're really speaking in figures of speech. They're speaking in metaphor. They can't just say it directly. They have to use these human, causative, creative, and intelligent terms. And it sort of makes you wonder, I wonder what it would sound like if they would get rid of all of those. What would they have left to even say? They really wouldn't have much left to say because when you look at creatures, when we look at each other, we see activity of agency. We see the evidence of somebody who with real foresight, with real intelligence, with real volition, who, like an engineer, can select one mechanism or not another, can select one type of material and not another. And so you are seeing real evidence of real agency. And that is what the powerful witness of the biological world is, that there really is a creative God. You see evidences of his agency. And so Darwin's brilliance from his perspective of what he was doing is he was able to slip in very subtly, very cleverly, a substitute agent by this personification of nature, which through that word selection he did because selection immediately projects onto nature, volition and intelligence. And that's how, as this gentleman points out, they can attribute to nature the power to actually do things, work on, favor, act, even punish. And even some people on our side have used these same kinds of words along these lines. And what we have to remember, and what the viewer needs to know, is that even though they're attributing these acts and these purposes to nature, the evolutions are saying, we know that it can't have that. That's right. And so that's what we got to remember, that Darwinian evolution can't purpose. It can't choose. It can't try to do something better, improve or punish. It's all just doing random. It's like water making the dirt into mud. It's always going to make the dirt into mud. It's not trying to do anything. And that's what we have to remember here. That's right. They're speaking one way, but ultimately they're saying that that's not true. And they know it's very subtle. And they know it's very crafty along these lines. And that's why Robert Reid comes back. And again, he's going to address that concept of selection pressure, which people talk about as if it's a real pressure. It's a real doing thing. But he points out, no, this is just a mental construct, a way of interpreting things so that you attribute power to these predators or prey or different temperatures as if their pressure is really working on creatures, but they're really not. And that's why he again, readdresses selection pressure, where he says, selection pressure is now given a metaphorically creative sense by modern biologists who ought to be flagulating themselves for selection pressure. And then he points out what the problem is. Fuzzy logic is a necessary part of tentative thought experiments. Now, we don't really see everything, but we kind of attribute those powers. But there's a point when we have to move past it. Fuzzy logic is a necessary part of tentative thought experiments, but it should not continue to be used so vaguely into the maturity of a theory. And so how do we actually see this working out? How do we actually see it happening? Well, this gentleman, Jerry Fodor, he also was passed away. He was a philosopher at Rutgers University, but he had a very insightful book, What Darwin Got Wrong, and towards the end of the book, he points out that Darwinism was basically a substitute agent. He and his fellow author, Massimo Pietelli Palmarini, points out that what breeds the ghosts in Darwinism is its covert appeal to intentional biological explanations. Darwin pointed the direction to a thoroughly naturalistic, indeed a thoroughly atheistic. And both of these gentlemen are atheists, and they like to take their atheism straight. They don't want to mix in any mysticism in their atheism. We pointed away to a thoroughly atheistic theory of phenotype, that's your traits, formation, but he didn't see how to get the whole way there. He killed off God, if you like, but Mother Nature and other pseudo-agents, and he's talking about natural selection, got away scot-free. We think it's now time to get rid of them too, and I would say with him, preach it, brother. We think it's time to get rid of these pseudo-agents in lieu of God as well. And so one source of the trouble, as Michael Hodge points out, and this is really important from a theological standpoint, was that Darwin liked the term natural selection because it could be used as a substantive governing of verb. That means a concept, a concept that could actually do things. But as he points out, such uses appeared to reify, even to deify natural selection as an agent. And so if I held up to you a statue, and I said, this statue could select your mate, or this statue could do something, you'd immediately see it as idolatry. You would say that that statue can't do those things. But if I hold up nature, which is a lot vaguer, and I said, well, nature can do these things, it's a lot harder to point out. But the moment you attribute to a statue, or to a totem pole, or to a golden calf, the ability to do things, or to favor, work on, you can immediately see that's idolatry, and it is no less idolatrous to do it for nature as well. So how do we see this worked out? New scientists had this out just a few years ago. Intelligent evolution, how life's processes act like an all-knowing brain. Wow, an all-knowing brain, and all of these things. And they go on, not them, but another one says nature's brain, the view of evolution. How does, of course, not evolution, but how does natural selection create so much complexity so fast, a bold new theory says it learns and remembers past solutions, just as our brains do. And now we have to say it learns. I know. And it remembers. And it does these things. Yes, and I wanted to throw these in so that when our viewers see this, when they read these kinds of things, that now their antenna is up, and they're going to have to go through the same surgery, which is implicit, and all of these kinds of things. And so someone might say, well, the metaphor abuse goes away if we just correct the definition of natural selection. I mean, you're just using a wrong definition. If we could just use the right one, well, then, of course, we would get rid of these problems. But then the question comes up, well, who has the correct definition of natural selection? Let's take a few moments, Ray, and just look at what people in the field say about natural selection. Going back to our historian of science, Michael Hodge, he asked the question, a quite general thing. Now, this should be an important question because we think we know what natural selection is. A quite general issue has still received no canonical treatment. What kind of a thing is natural selection anyway? A law, a principle, a force, a cause, an agent, or all are some of these things. The view that natural selection is a law has been countered by the view that it is a principle while that conclusion has been countered and turned by an insistence that it is neither. So we have a term which we commonly use, survival to finish or something, but people who actually deal with this recognize that this is really a hard term to define. Going back to our philosopher again, Jerry Fodor, who brings out the same thing. The present worry is that the explication of natural selection by an appeal to selective breeding, which we talked about in a previous episode, is seriously misleading. And you pointed out, that's why they use it is because it is misleading, and that it thoroughly misled Darwin. What then is the intended interpretation when one speaks of natural selection? The question is wide open as of this writing. This is not a creationist saying this. This is an evolutionist saying that when I use this term, I really don't know exactly what I'm talking about. Dr. Veluza, I have to stop you right there. I can't wait to see what we're going to say about this question. Stay with us. We'll be back right after these messages. We hope you're enjoying Origins TV. It all started at Cornerstone Television in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. We've been producing new episodes for over 37 years now. We praise God for the success of the program and are excited to introduce you to Origins and to us. If you're interested in watching more episodes of Origins, you can find them on our YouTube page. Simply go to YouTube and search Cornerstone Television Network. Click the like and subscribe buttons, then you'll find the best episodes of Origins in our playlist. You can also visit our website at ctvn.org Origins. One more way you can stay connected with us is to subscribe to our free Monthly Hope Today newsletter, which you can do from our website. And if you have any questions, call us here at Cornerstone Television at 888-665-4483. We'd love to connect with you. Thank you for watching. Welcome back to Origins. We're talking to Dr. Randy Geluza, who's been sharing about Darwin's Sacred Imposter Part 2. Randy, we left talking about this concept that's used all the time that everybody would say that they know or at least they're aware of or could give some kind of understanding of natural selection, but we just saw from a lot of evolutionists that really they don't even know what natural selection is. Can we give or has anyone given a precise definition of natural selection that would satisfy the vast majority of evolutionists? The answer to that is unequivocally, no. And you think you know what you're talking about when you say natural selection, but when they start to define exactly what it means and nail down, they can't say that. And that's why fortunately we come to another evolutionist who is still alive, Dr. Doolittle here, and he mentions that even practicing biologists may be surprised at how natural or process natural selection is and on what sort of entities it might act in the meaning of fitness. We readily invoke, but often cannot easily explicate these concepts. And so he doesn't really know exactly how to use this term or what he's saying and that is a recent quote, that's from 2015. And here's a book from 2021 on the causal structure of natural selection by Charles Pence, just published last year and of course right at towards the beginning of the book, he asks, how should we define natural selection in genetic drift? You would think a book on it would be able to define it right up. Are they to be considered as processes acting upon populations or population level outcomes or statistical identities? If they are processes, are they causal processes, Newtonian forces, or something else? And here's a gentleman who wrote a whole book on the structure of it and yet he can't really define it any better than Dr. Doolittle did or Jerry Fodor did or any of these other people around him. And this is why Michael Hodge in the book, Keywords in Evolutionary Biology, which is a text that's supposed to define for evolutionists what the keywords are when speaking about natural selection and particularly the historical context right, he says this, to understand the history of the term natural selection, we must ask why people starting with Darwin himself have felt themselves able to grasp and wield the concept adequately in the absence of consistent or authoritative definitional analysis of the term. So how can any of us presume that we can use the term authoritatively and even know what we're talking about when nobody who actually tries to use the term in the field knows what they're talking about. That's an amazing admission and we've seen it over and over and over again and again these evolutionists, these secularists, these atheists these are not Christians, these are not Bible believing or even just believing in an intelligent designer. These are people who deny God, who believe in Darwinian evolution. This is truth for them and the foundational concept they can't agree on, they can't define, they recognize it's been used in all these different contexts, which seems to me, if you would precisely define it, you would eliminate much of the literature because suddenly it wouldn't work for that because it's so fluid, it's not going to fit with any kind of precise definition so you almost have to keep it vague at this point. They do keep it vague and they keep it vague on purpose and so I'd really like to just kind of end this whole discussion with a quote from a gentleman who is not an evolutionist. Dr. William Demsky, he's actually an intelligent design advocate and he wrote a very good book on the design revolution and it's kind of an extensive quote but I think it'll wrap everything up for us and summarize it very, very well. And he points out that in short, evolutionary biology needs a designer substitute. They need something that's going to coordinate the incidental changes that hereditary transmission passes from one generation to the next. Any ads and there's only one naturalistic candidate on the table to wit natural selection. Indeed it is no accident that the word selection, which I've pointed out to you is the offending word over and over again, that the word selection and the word intelligence are etymologically related. The lack in selection has the same root as lig and intelligence. Both derive from the same Indo-European root meaning to gather and therefore to choose. And then he points out this really very, very insightful. Darwin's claim to fame was to argue that natural forces lacking any purposeiveness or provision of future possibilities likewise have the power to choose via natural selection. In ascribing the power to choose to unintelligent natural forces Darwin perpetuated the greatest intellectual swindle in the history of ideas. Nature has no power to choose. And you know Ray I was swindled for a good portion of my life. I used that term natural selection can do this, natural selection can and I didn't realize that I had been swindled. I didn't realize that it wasn't a real operative thing. I didn't realize that it really couldn't be defined in any operative sense of the term. And I was swindled for a long time but I praise the Lord that I now can see that this term is used as a substitute agent in lieu of God. I don't know how anyone can deny that with what we've seen. That's why this is Darwin's sacred imposter. And I'd love to come back. Well we would love to have you. You know since its inception in 1859 Darwinian evolution has been using terms to get rid of the notion of God as creator even while they continue to speak of creation as that which is intelligently and purposefully designed. And while some evolutionists are admitting this inconsistency no one has been able to clearly set forth a coherent explanation of a mechanism for creation without a creator. It just goes to show you once again we know what the Bible says is true and the proof it's all around you. If you enjoy Origins we sure could use your help to keep this creation TV program on the air. Your support both prayerfully and financially make a big impact. So let's work together to reveal how awesome our creator truly is and we will see you next time. Thank you for watching this edition of Origins. 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