[_ Old Earth _] What Good is Part of an Animal?

[John]

What Good is Part of an Animal?
The late Dr. Werher von Braun, a renowned space scientist and former director of NASA, made the following statement concerning our origin, “One cannot be exposed to the law and order of the universe without concluding that there must be design and purpose behind it all...To be forced to believe only one conclusion - that everything in the universe happened by chance - would violate the very objectivity of science itself. What random process could produce the brains of a man or the system of a human eye? It is in scientific honesty that I endorse the presentation of alternative theories of the origin of the universe, life, and man in the classroom. It would be an error to overlook the possibility that the universe was planned rather than happened by chance.â€Â1 This is not the statement of an unintelligent, uninformed, non-scientist. Furthermore, there are now dozens of creation organizations engaged in research to explain our world based on creation.
A powerful example of the evidence for creation is the interdependence of the parts within an organism. Could completely different yet fully functioning parts of an organism have all arisen in a step-by-step fashion? If not, their origin must have been simultaneous creation. The butterfly is a perfect example. How could some worm-like creature have mutated with both the ability and desire to seal itself inside a cocoon? For either to happen would require thousands of simultaneous and useful changes to the chemical structure of this mysterious “pre-butterfly†type creature. What would have happened to some worm-like creature that sealed itself inside of a cocoon but did not yet have the ability to rearrange its biomatter into an adult butterfly? There has never been a logical explanation of how an insect other than a caterpillar (which already possesses the necessary information to become a butterfly) could transform itself into a butterfly by a series of small genetic changes.
Another example is the woodpecker. Evolution teaches that some kind of bird turned into a woodpecker at some time in the distant past. But what would happen to the first bird born with its feet modified with a backwards claw... yet without the instinct to search for insects while holding onto a vertical tree trunk? Or to the first bird born with backwards talons and the desire to beat its head against a tree... but the incorrect bill? Or the correct feet, desire, and bill...but no instinct to blink its eyes at the moment of impact to keep its eyeballs from popping out? Or the correct feet, desire, bill, and blinking ability... but with a tongue too short to reach the insects inside the hole which it had just beaten into the tree? Or the correct feet, desire, bill, blinking ability, shock-absorbing membranes in the back of the skull, and tongue...but now the tongue too long to fit into its mouth because its skull was not yet redesigned to hold the tongue? In each case, the bird would be at an incredible disadvantage and natural selection would have brought its evolutionary development to an end.
There are thousands of other examples in nature. It is easy to look at a perfectly designed organism and say, “Look at how well this creature is adapted to its environment!†The critical question is ignored by evolutionists and not presented to students - “Is it logical that this animal could have developed by one small change at a time?â€Â

1. Excerpts from an original interview in “Applied Christianityâ€Â, from the Bible-Science Newsletter,
May 1974, p.8.
NOTE:
Throughout this book ‘evolution’ will refer to its original meaning: the transformation of one type of animal into a completely different type. No one disputes that there can be minor variations within a given class of organism (micro-evolution). However, this has never been shown to lead to completely new features or types of creatures. No example of macro-evolution has ever been demonstrated.