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Amazing Facts

Joe Crews

Living Fossils

Fossils are usually found embedded in ancient rocks and mud, but a living fossil has been discovered which defies the entire scientific world.

I'll be back in a moment with a fish story of the centuries.

Hello, this is Joe Cruz of the Amazing Facts broadcast, facts which affect you.

You know, friends, we're astounded today by the tremendous state of ferment and change in which our world is now involved.

Even religious faith has been shaken about and altered by the upheaval in current ideas.

Now what's led to this incredible confusion, anyway?

Let me assure you that it didn't happen all at once or overnight.

The seeds of religious skepticism were sown long ago when theologians first accepted the higher critical methods of Bible study.

Under the cloak of scholarship and biblical exegesis, the critics began to dissect the message of the Bible point by point in order to expose its supposed errors.

Many many of the so-called mistakes tabulated by those scholars have been completely refuted by more recent discoveries of archaeology.

Now 1 of the greatest areas of doubt has been that of creation according to the Genesis account.

When religious leaders chose to believe the philosophical conclusions of evolution over the clear-cut record of the Bible, they embarked on a perilous downward road.

By denying the act of creation, which God claims as His identifying mark of authority, men set themselves on a path which has culminated in gross skepticism.

These extravagant end products of evolution and modernism should serve as a fearful warning to every Christian who is attracted by the theories of man.

There can be no trifling with God's Word, friends, not even in the name of science.

No 1 yet has been able to fabricate a theory of origins which did not require more faith to accept than the simple Bible account.

Some of the great men of science must be commended for the faith they have to believe certain of their own speculative propositions.

Probably no 1 was more surprised than Darwin himself when science began to recognize the theories he worked out to explain the variation of species.

I have before me right now a copy of a letter written by Darwin soon after he published his views on natural selection.

I saw the actual letter in Darwin's handwriting in the British Museum and made a photograph of it.

Here's what he wrote a friend who had criticized his book.

He says, I feel not a shade of surprise that you're entirely rejecting my views.

My surprise is that I have been successful in converting some few eminent botanists and geologists.

I entirely agree with you that there is no more direct proof of variation being unlimited in amount than there is that it is strictly limited.

Now doubtless Darwin was a sincere person when he went on that world voyage and observed how the animals were apparently separated according to variety and strength.

And as a suggestive possibility of how this could have happened, he presented the theory on natural selection and the survival of the fittest.

Since many scientists were searching at that time for an alternate to the Bible account of special creation, they eagerly grasped this to use against the despised fundamentalists.

But let it be said that the creationists of that day were undoubtedly too narrow and ironclad in their concepts.

Their explanation of variation involved a belief that God created a special family of Spaniel dogs and a special family of collie dogs, and so right on through the hundreds of varieties.

Actually, God needed only to create 1 basic family of dogs, from which all the varieties have developed.

Since all dogs belong to the same family and can cross-breed, their differences can be explained entirely on the basis of mutational changes.

It was not necessary for each different kind to be specially created.

But please notice, friends, that dogs can only produce other dogs.

They can never produce any other species of animals.

If the evolutionist could ever prove that even 1 basic kind or species had ever crossed over into another species, he would have at least a small evidence to begin building evolution upon.

But that missing link is just as missing today as it was when Darwin wrote his theory.

In spite of worldwide searching by the most famous scientific researchers, there has never appeared 1 single integrated form of life which is in the process of changing from 1 species to another.

Everything continues to reproduce only after its kind, exactly as God decreed in the book of Genesis.

Now, there have been some exciting moments when the scientists felt that the missing link had been found, but alas, it always ended in disappointment.

For example, a few years ago, a strange-looking new sea creature was hauled out of the ocean near the shores of Malaya.

Evolutionists rushed excitedly to the scene, feeling that the missing link might have been found.

To their amazement, they discovered a fish which was supposed to have become extinct millions of years ago.

Identified as a coelacanth, this fish has been an embarrassing exhibit against the basic claims of evolution.

1 scientist made this shocking admission in the Scientific American magazine.

He said, throughout the hundreds of millions of years the coelacanths have kept the same form and structure.

Here is 1 of the great mysteries of evolution.

But friends, it's only a mystery to the evolutionists.

Although they assigned millions of years for this fish to pass through several stages of evolutionary development, it insists on remaining unchanged.

It refuses to conform to the theories of speculative man.

The coelacanth is just 1 of many living fossils which continue to confound the poor evolutionists.

Upon the published admissions of evolutionary scientists, the cockroaches and ants still retain almost the exact form which they bore millions of years ago according to their beliefs.

In fact, according to the Scientific American, the cockroach was almost identical 250 million years ago.

Now, if the scientist really believes that cockroaches were here that long ago and that they have not changed till this very day, What happens to the theory of evolution?

And the same stubborn resistance to change can be found in the dragonfly and the common fruit fly.

In the 1950s, a deep-sea mollusk was recovered off the coast of Central America.

It lives in the sea at a depth of about 2 miles.

Notice what science has conceded about this creature, and this is taken from the book Essentials of Earth History, quoting, its fossil relatives have been discovered in rock estimated to be some 350 million years old where they are with the Trilobites.

Now friends, evolution teaches that the Trilobites are among the Earth's earliest inhabitants.

They constituted the earliest forms of evolutionary life, yet here is a mollusk which existed side by side with Trilobites and who was confessorily made little, if any, change in form.

Those mollusks were supposed to have become extinct 280 million years ago, according to Science Magazine.

They're fossils, all right, but living fossils, and instead of providing any missing link or evidence favorable to evolution, they absolutely shatter the whole theory to pieces.

Now here's a question that has only 1 answer.

Why have the scientists failed to discover a single intermediate type, and yet they've discovered multiplied millions of fossils which are strictly classified under well-defined species.

If life did evolve slowly from the simple to the complex, then there would actually be far more intermediate forms than a fixed species.

In the absence of a single 1, how can the theory survive?

This is a question that puzzles and perplexes.

There's some valid scientific reasons to accept the account of creation as it's given in the Bible, friends.

It's more reasonable to believe that God can work a miracle by making matter than to believe that dumb, unintelligent nature and time could create matter.

It would have to be a miracle under either condition, but a miracle by a God of design is more easy to believe than a miracle by blind force or chance.

It all boils down to the faith we exercise in the Bible.

If we believe it, our faith will accept God as the Creator.

If we reject the Word of God, we can choose between a score of man-made theories about the origin of life.

Perhaps it's easier to understand the secular scientists than the religious leaders of our day.

With the living, powerful Word of God before them to testify of a Creator who spoke and it was done, who commanded and it stood fast, They still choose to believe fables instead.

Step by step, this rejection of Bible truth has led them to dare question even the very existence of God.

There are actually theologians today who are doubting that God exists.

Now I press this point, friends, because there are so many who started the same path of doubt toward God's Word.

Gradually the Word of God is humanized and robbed of its divine power.

Soon only the covers of the Bible are left, and inspiration has been cast out the window.

You know a survey of 3, 000 Protestant ministers throughout the United States reveals that they are disturbed.

Nearly half of the clergy in their 20s and 30s confessed that they thought seriously of leaving the ministry.

Much of the disillusionment among church leaders is caused by the hypocrisy of their preachers, so said the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner.

And what about the attitude of the clergymen toward the Bible?

The survey concluded with these words, The Bible is not only not to be taken literally, less than 5% of the whole sampling did so, but also there's little specific guidance in it for specific problems.

And that's what most of the theologians said, friend, believe it or not.

Consistent with their downgrading of the Bible, only 20% of the ministers, 35 years and under, did not condemn extramarital sex.

Now, if these ministers are disillusioned with their parishioners, they'd better examine what they're teaching them, themselves.

In the letters section of Christianity Today, a spokesman for the United Church of Christ who wants to enlist evangelical Protestants in an ecumenical dialogue frankly declares that many ecumenical leaders strongly hate the evangelical doctrine of an infallible Bible.

This man himself has characterized this notion of an infallible Bible as demonic.

He said, I consider adherence to the infallibility of Scripture demonic.

Then he said this, But hatred for the doctrine of the perfect book is very strong in a very large segment of ecumenical leadership, and I can hardly be considered irresponsible and ecumenically inauthentic in voicing this hatred.

Now there's a man who's a leader of the ecumenical movement who says I hate this idea of an infallibility of the Bible.

Well a recent convention of the National Council of churches produced the following results when a survey of delegates was made.

Remember now, this is the elite of this organization which purports to represent millions of Protestant Christians.

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Living Fossils

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