Living Things Engineered for Change

There are several ideas floating around about what creationists believe and teach, but honest inquirers who prefer going to the sources instead of relying on hearsay can quickly learn the difference. Consider what creationists teach about species, for example.

As regular readers know, we affirm speciation (a new species arises from an extant species). Unfortunately, some professing but uninformed creationists oppose this fact. The two articles presented below have a prairie schooner-full of material that will inform and equip folks.

House finch image credit: Freeimages / Maria Corcacas

Creationists use the biblical word kind, which is somewhere around the family level of standard classifications. Species are way down the list. The definition is about as certain as nailing gelatin to a wall. Species can change quickly, and this is demonstrated in the case of Jacob and the flocks of Laban.

We believe that the Master Engineer gave creatures the abilities to adapt and change — they were front-loaded with a great deal of genetic information. Mutations are not as random as Darwin's votaries tell us (nor as dramatic as people may think), and epigenetic switches play a large part as well.

Creationists do not, and have never, taught that God created all species as we see them today. People in the past certainly believed in ‘the fixity of species’ but this was more due to the pervasive influence of the pagan Greek philosopher Aristotle than to anything in the Bible. One of Darwin’s primary influences, the lawyer-turned-geologist Charles Lyell, taught fixity of species. He also believed that species were placed in “centres of creation”. In other words, species were more or less created in their current locations. Many of Darwin’s points in the Origin of Species and later books were designed to refute Lyellian and Aristotelian arguments, although we can see their influences in his earlier writings.

To read the rest, click on "Species were designed to change, part 1 — But how much change is allowed?" Be sure to come back for the next part!

You can be certain that the Creator of the universe never said, "Wow, I never saw that one coming!" He equipped living things to be able to roll with the changes in the environment. Sometimes these are called "microevolution", and people think a lot of micros add up to a macro. Ain't happening, old son. Change has limits. Looks like our Creator had that evolutionary equivocation in mind as well.

We will now broaden this discussion to include population-level changes that lead to the rise of new species. But first, we must define what a species is. This is not easy to do, and many different definitions exist. . . .

The easiest definition to understand is the ‘biological species concept’. Basically, if two organisms can successfully breed (i.e., not make sterile hybrids), they belong to the same species. If they can’t, they are separate species. Yet, the lines between ‘species’ are often quite blurry. This is perhaps not unexpected in the creation model. If you take a group of organisms from a single created kind and spread them out across the earth, it is not hard to imagine each of the resulting subpopulations changing in different ways while maintaining the ability to interbreed with other subpopulations.

You can read the entire article by heading on over to "Species were designed to change, part 2 — Speciation and the limits of change". Also, Dr. Carter is doing a series of videos on this subject. At this writing, there are two so far. I'll embed the first one below, and you can follow the YouTube link and find subsequent videos. You'll thank me later.