The Bible underneath it

Evolution vs. Literal Genesis

It refutes literalism and the design argument. Not theism. Name the target precisely.

Say this first, it matters

The Catholic Church accepts evolution. So do most mainline Protestant seminaries and many believing scientists. John Paul II's 1996 message

The sharp conflict is with young-earth literalism and with a literal Adam and Eve as sole ancestors with no death before the Fall. Name the target precisely and you will be taken seriously.

The status of the science

The National Academy of Sciences: evolution is "one of these well-established explanations," among "the strongest and most useful scientific theories we have," on par with germ theory.

Genetics is the strongest evidence, because it is not about fossils

Three things in your own genome

None of these are fossils, and none of them require trusting a dating method.

23 vs 24

chromosome pairs: ours carries two ape chromosomes fused end to end, with the telomere sequences still stranded in the middle

ancient viral insertions sitting at identical positions in humans and chimps

vitamin C gene, broken in humans and other primates by the same mutations

Each is sourced in the list below

These are not similarities. They are shared typos.

A working design can look like another working design by coincidence. Two documents do not acquire the same errors in the same places unless one was copied from the other, or both from a common original.

Human chromosome 2 is two ape chromosomes fused end to end. Great apes have 24 pairs, humans 23. The fusion site still carries telltale telomere sequences in the middle, where they do not belong. PNAS
Shared endogenous retroviruses. Ancient viral infections insert at random genome locations. Humans and chimps have at least seven at identical loci. The odds of independent insertion at the same spot are effectively zero.
The broken vitamin C gene. Humans and other primates carry the same gene for making vitamin C, broken by the same mutations.

Where it collides with Genesis

Genesis 1 has plants on day 3 and the sun on day 4. Plants before the sun. And birds before land animals, which is backwards.
No Adam and Eve as sole ancestors. Human genetic diversity rules out a two-person bottleneck. Estimates put the historical minimum in the thousands. Ayala, Science 1995
Death long before any Fall. The Permian extinction, 252 million years ago, wiped out most life on Earth. Humans appear 300,000 years ago. Berkeley

For a Latter-day Saint this bites harder than for most Christians, because LDS teaching holds a literal Adam, a literal Fall, and no death before it.

Why the design argument fails

The recurrent laryngeal nerve runs from the brain down to the heart and back up to the larynx. In a giraffe that is a fifteen foot detour to travel a few inches. McGill
The vertebrate retina is installed backwards, photoreceptors facing away from the light, with the optic nerve punching a blind spot through it. University of Utah

The common rebuttals

"It is only a theory." Confuses everyday "theory" with scientific theory. Gravity and germs are theories too.

"Irreducible complexity." A federal court examined this in detail and ruled intelligent design "a religious view, a mere re-labeling of creationism, and not a scientific theory." Kitzmiller v. Dover, 2005

"Evolution cannot explain how life started." Correct, and worth granting cleanly. Abiogenesis is a separate open question. Rejecting evolution for not answering a different question is a category error.

This page is part of a 76-topic library. Every claim links to its source, most of them the Church’s own. Read it on the full site or browse every topic.