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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Wayne Grudem
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March 15 - December 27, 2021
Random Mutations Are Overwhelmingly Harmful.
Matti Leisola is professor emeritus of bioprocess engineering at Aalto University in Finland.
actual mutations are very rare and seldom beneficial: “What, then, happens in nature? Average mutation rates are in the order of 10-10 (how often a certain...
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Negative mutations exceed positive ones by a thousand...
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Nonliving Matter Does Not Contain and Cannot Produce the Information Necessary for Life.
“Building a living cell in the first place requires assembly instructions stored in DNA or some equivalent molecule.”
Creating New Life Forms Would Require More Changes than Just Mutations in DNA.
Embryo Development Requires the Coordinated Activity of Thousands of Genes.
“Experiments which generate mutations in genes acting on body plans tend to produce overwhelmingly defective or lethal embryos,”
“transformations from one form to another are never ‘simple’ but require completely integrated transformation of form for all associated structures, and all of these must be functional.”
The “Irreducible Complexity” of the Living Cell Defies an Evolutionary Explanation.
The Fossil Record Is Filled with Gaps and Characterized by the Sudden Appearance and Then Continuity of Recognizable Kinds of Animals.
Darwin’s greatest problem in 1859, and it has simply become a greater problem since then.
Similarities in Structure and Appearance Are Better Understood as Evidence for the Same Designer than as Evidence for the Same Ancestor.
Archaeology Points to an Abrupt Appearance of Humans on Earth, Clearly Distinct from Older Apelike Animals.
Known hominins fall into two separate groups: ape-like and human-like, with a distinct gap between them. The genus Homo appears in an abrupt, non-Darwinian fashion, without evidence of an evolutionary transition from ape-like hominins.
Many researchers have recognized an “explosion” of modern human-like culture in the archaeological record about thirty-five to forty thousand years ago, showing the abrupt appearance of human creativity, technology, art, and even paintings—
Human Beings Are Vastly Different from Chimpanzees.
told, based on current knowledge, there is at least a 5% difference in our DNA, and that does not count rearrangements in the DNA, where segments of the DNA appear flipped end to end in relation to chimp DNA, or where one segment of human DNA is in a different location than in chimpanzees.
Our culture is exceptional, even unique, by any standard of the animal kingdom. It is orders of magnitude more sophisticated than anything chimpanzees do.”
many of these features had to arise at the same time in a coordinated fashion, meaning some number of mutations also had to happen at the same time. For example, an enlarged brain would require changes to the jaw and teeth as well as to the brain case.
The Genetic Diversity in the Human Race Could Have Arisen from One Original Couple.
The Unproven Assumption behind Evolutionary Theory Is “Methodological Naturalism.”
is tragic that the common opinion, perpetuated in many science textbooks today, is that evolution is an established scientific “fact.” Behind this viewpoint is one key assumption, the assumption of what is called “methodological naturalism.”
Methodological naturalism asserts that, to qualify as scientific, a theory must explain all phenomena by reference to purely physical or material—that is, non-intelligent—causes or processes.
What If Scientists Far in the Future Actually Create Life?
Believing Anything but the Bible.
a theory that Crick calls “Directed Panspermia.”
The Destructive Influences of Evolutionary Theory in Modern Thought.
simply the result of random occurrences in the universe, then of what significance is human life? We are merely the product of matter plus time plus chance, and so to think that we have any eternal importance, or really any importance at all in the face of an immense universe, is simply to delude ourselves.
Theistic Evolution Is Inconsistent with the Teachings of Scripture
Theistic Evolution Claims There Were Not Two but 10,000 Ancestors for the Human Race.
Theistic Evolution Denies at Least Twelve Events in Genesis 1–3.
The evidence they give is that Cain’s wife (Gen. 4:17) had to come from somewhere, and Cain expected that there were other people who would want to kill him (Gen. 4:14). Genesis even says that Cain built a “city,” which had to be a place populated by numerous people (Gen. 4:17).
Theistic Evolution Denies the Ability of the Bible to Teach Us about Vast Areas of Human Knowledge.
the origin of all living things on the earth, the origin of human beings, the origin of moral evil in the human race, the origin of human death, the origin of natural evil in the world, the perfection of the natural world as God originally created it, and even the nature of Christ’s own personal involvement as the Creator of “all things . . . in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible” (Col. 1:16).
There Are Gaps in the Genealogies of the Bible
closer inspection of the parallel lists of names in Scripture will show that Scripture itself indicates the fact that the genealogies list only those names the biblical writers thought it important to record for their purposes.
Matthew says that Uzziah was “the father of Jotham,” it can mean that he was the father of someone who led to Jotham.
Now we know from Exodus 2:22 that Gershom was the son born to Moses before the exodus, sometime around 1480 BC (or on a late date for the exodus, around 1330 BC).
How many gaps there are and how many generations are missing from the Genesis narratives, we do not know.
The life of Abraham may be placed at approximately 2000 BC, because the kings and places listed in the stories of Abraham’s life can be correlated with archaeological data that can be dated quite reliably
The Age of the Human Race
The genus Homo appears in an abrupt, non-Darwinian fashion, without evidence of an evolutionary transition from ape-like hominins.
If current dating methods are accurate, that would place human beings on the earth 35,000–40,000 years ago.
Did Animals Die before the Fall?
From the information we have in Scripture, we cannot now know whether God created animals subject to aging and death from the beginning, but it remains a real possibility.
What about Dinosaurs?
“God blessed the seventh day and made it holy” (Gen. 2:2–3). The possibility, if not the implication, suggested by this is that the seventh day is still continuing. It never ended but is also a “day” that is really a long period of time
Hugh Ross sees a significant benefit to billions of years of plants and animals dying before human beings appeared on earth
