Free The Case for a Creator by Lee Strobel

conventional picture of human evolution is ‘a completely human invention created after the fact, shaped to accord with human prejudices.’ Then he said quite bluntly: ‘To take a line of fossils and claim that they represent a lineage is not a scientific hypothesis that can be tested, but an assertion that carries the same validity as a bedtime story—amusing, perhaps even instructive, but not scientific.’ ” 54
    Wells put down the book. “In other words, you’re not going to reconstruct human evolutionary history just based on examining the few fossils we have,” he continued. “The only reason anyone thinks the evidence supports human evolution is because Darwinism is assumed to be true on other grounds. If it is, then it makes perfect sense to extrapolate that to human history, which is what Darwin did in his book The Descent of Man .
    “But what if the other evidence for Darwinism is faulty—which, in fact, it is? You and I didn’t even go into the major flaws with a whole host of other evolution icons that are used to teach students today. There’s no shortage of books debunking Darwin. And without any compelling evidence for Darwinism in these areas, the whole question of human evolution is up for grabs.
    “Instead, Darwinists assume the story of human life is an evolutionary one, and then they plug the fossils into a preexisting narrative where they seem to fit. The narrative can take several forms depending on one’s biases. As one anthropologist said, the process is ‘both political and subjective’ to the point where he suggested that ‘paleoanthropology has the form but not the substance of a science.’ 55
    “In fact, a paleoanthropologist named Misia Landau wrote a book in which she talked about the similarities between the story of human evolution and old-fashioned folk tales. She concluded that many classic texts in the field were ‘determined as much by traditional narrative frameworks as by material evidence’ and that these themes ‘far exceed what can be inferred from the study of fossils alone.’ ” 56
    I took a few moments to soak in what Wells had said. He was right—certainly Java man’s fall from grace is instructive. It highlights how many people, including myself, became adherents of Darwinism through fossils or other evidence that later discoveries have either undermined or disproved. But the damage has already been done in many cases—the student, unaware of these subsequent findings, has already graduated into full-fledged naturalism.
    As I leaf back through my time-worn copies of the World Book from my childhood, I can now see how faulty science and Darwinian presuppositions forced my former friend Java man into an evolutionary parade that’s based much more on imagination than reality. Unfortunately, he’s not the only example of that phenomenon, which is rife to the point of rendering the record of supposed human evolution totally untrustworthy.
    “There is no encompassing theory of [human] evolution,” conceded Berkeley evolutionary biologist F. Clark Howell. “Alas, there never really has been.” 57
    OUTDATED, DISTORTED, FAKE, FAILURE
    At the end of our discussion about the fossil record, I reflected back on the four images that had paved the way for my descent into atheism. I could only shake my head.
    I was left with an origin-of-life experiment whose results have been rendered meaningless; a Tree of Life that had been uprooted by the Biological Big Bang of the Cambrian explosion; doctored embryo drawings that don’t reflect reality; and a fossil record that stubbornly refuses to yield the transitional forms crucial to evolutionary theory. Doubts piled on doubts.
    Are these icons the sole evidence for Darwinism? Of course not. But their fate is illustrative of what happens time after time when macroevolution is put under the microscope of scrutiny. As I continued to investigate the scientific and philosophical underpinnings of evolutionary theory, in a