Evolution’s Achilles’ Heels

A Review of the DVD by Kevin Moritz

I usually prefer single-topic DVDs to ‘overview’ ones, if only because they tend to be more in-depth on a particular issue. Thus, I was expecting Evolution’s Achilles’ Heels,¹ whose subtitle is 15 Ph.D. Scientists Explain Evolution’s Fatal Flaws—in Areas Claimed to Be Its Greatest Strengths, to be good but not necessarily as interesting as it might otherwise have been.

Ironically, it was the comprehensiveness of the presentation—the range of issues dealt with effectively in only 96 minutes—that surprised me and made it all the more impressive and enjoyable. There was a wide range of topics discussed, pretty much a summary not only of evolution’s seemingly best arguments, but of Creation’s best refutations of those arguments and simultaneously its own best evidences.

The scientists featured were Jonathan Sarfati, Donald Batten, Robert Carter, Tasman Walker, John Hartnett, Emil Silvestru, John Sanford, David Catchpoole, Stuart Burgess, Horace Skipper, Matti Leisola, Peter Borger, Marcus Ross, James Mason, and Mark Harwood—genuine Ph.D. creation scientists, who many evolutionists will tell you don’t exist. As a layman, I’m honoured to know some of them, in person as well as on Facebook, and appreciate the great work that they do. They really are on the cutting edge of creation thinking and research. Therefore, this review is coming from a ‘regular’ guy who happens to be a big fan of some of the most amazing scientists I know of.

The wide-ranging discussion was broken into several areas, which were (with some representative quotes):

Natural Selection

“But [the finches that Darwin saw were] just variations of finches; in fact, today we know that many of them can interbreed, so they shouldn’t even be called different species. So this is not an example of evolution, in the sense of microbes to mankind.”

—Donald Batten

Genetics

“Information, communication, and language—they’re nonmaterial entities, they arise through intelligence, and they’re mutually defining. So you can’t have one without the other; they all have to arise at the same time.”

—John Sanford

Origin of Life

“So here’s a real chicken-and-egg problem … because the information in the DNA requires enzymes to read it; but the instructions to build the enzymes are built on the DNA, which cannot be read without enzymes. So which came first, the enzymes or the DNA?”

—Jonathan Sarfati

Fossil Record

“A lot of people claim that maybe the animal is perfectly adapted to its environment, so it didn’t need the change—but that is silly. I mean, some of those species have survived the greatest episodes of climate change and disaster in earth history….There has been no constant environment in which to live during all of earth history, so [according to evolutionists] animals had to evolve to their surroundings in order to survive.”

—Robert Carter

Geologic Record

“When we look at the geology of the earth, we find that present processes do not explain what we see. Rather what we see points to catastrophic processes in the past. And when we think about what those could be, it fits exactly with the account in Genesis of Noah’s Flood, which destroyed the whole earth.”

—Tasman Walker

Radiometric Dating

“Even though radiometric dating seems like a very scientific process, we’ve seen from measurements that it produces highly erroneous results. And due to the unknowable assumptions that are behind its normal application, it is unreliable and untrustworthy in many cases.”

—James Mason

Cosmology

“If the [Big Bang] theory is the incorrect description of what we observe, when we try to apply it to what we observe we’ll have to make up fictitious entities to make the theory fit. Dark matter is invoked….”

—John Hartnett

Ethical Implications

“It’s difficult to anticipate what any one society would do if it fully adopted an evolutionary view, because if you try and derive morality from the animal kingdom, for example, there are all sorts of moralities that you might choose.”

—Marcus Ross

All of the above were capably dealt with by the great group of fifteen Ph.D. scientists in various disciplines featured in the presentation, whose credentials are far too lengthy to repeat here, though there is a bio for each of them on the DVD as well as bonus interview footage for many of them. At the end of each category discussed was a handy summary list of points made.

During the discussion of these major categories, several issues came up that are familiar to anyone who’s been involved in any sort of debate on Creation/evolution:

1. Natural selection, or survival of the fittest—what it is and why it should not be equated with evolution. Natural Selection is, in fact, an important part of the biblical Creation/Fall model.
2. ‘Kinds’ vs. ‘species’ and the diversification of life—as with other ‘evidences’ frequently invoked by evolutionists, something that’s explainable by both sides, i.e., speciation, can’t be considered a proof of only one side. (Compare the discussion on overlapping predictive realms in the article How to think (not what to think).)
3. Operational science (testable, observable, and repeatable) and historical science (dependent on an eyewitness)—evolutionists often conflate these.
4. The evolutionary ‘tree of life’ vs. the ‘orchard of Creation’—what the fossil record shows us—important to answer the straw man of fixity of species, rejected by creationists both before and after Darwin.
5. Molecules of life and the chirality problem (left-handed, right-handed, and random mixtures) and polymerization problem (how do they join together rather than come apart?).
6. Uniformitarianism vs. catastrophism—“slow and gradual” vs. “episodic” views of earth’s geological history and which fits the evidence.
7. The ‘light-travel problems’—the plural shows that the evolutionary big bang model has a ‘light-travel problem’ of its own, and EAH explains some creationist solutions.
8. Dark matter and dark energy—the stuff we know nothing about that allegedly makes up 96 percent of everything.
9. The lack of an ultimate basis for morality in an atheistic worldview, and proof of the Nazis’ dependence on Darwinian ideas—from one of their own videos!

And, of course, the Gospel was given as well, without which the presentation, though it would still rightly give praise to God, would do less to further the kingdom of God—the ultimate goal of a defense of Christianity in the first place.

I recently saw a presentation by Dr Sarfati in Longmont, Colorado and figured it was a good time to stock. I chose a number of different resources, including both the Evolution’s Achilles’ Heels book and DVD. Sarfati was joined by many others in Achilles’ Heels, which effectively highlighted their abilities and the relevance of their subject matter—all of whom, though already respected in my eyes, have had that respect increased.

Be sure to note, though, that this is my respect of them. None of them come across as anything contrary to humble, godly, yet knowledgeable fellow members of the body of Christ. Much as I would like to be able to consider them “colleagues,” that’s something that will never happen—not in this life—but I’m content to think of them as my brothers and consider it a privilege to do so.

If you haven’t seen the DVD, do yourself a favour and do so, especially if you aren’t familiar with the various areas of Creation evidence (or have no idea which would be most interesting to you). In a relatively short time it, amazingly, deals effectively (though of course not exhaustively²) with a wide range of evidence for Creation. I learned a fair bit, and I had at least a passing familiarity with all of these areas.