Church of Christ Articles

The apostle Paul warned his young protégé Timothy, “O Timothy, keep that which is committed to thy trust, avoiding profane and vain babblings, and oppositions of science falsely so called” (1 Tim. 6:20, emp. SW). The term “science” refers to knowledge (as other translations translate), and some commentators believe that it refers to the body of inspired knowledge. Regardless, that which Paul warns deals with a body of truth for which some have created contradictions or hoaxes.

One of the staunchest supporters of Charles Darwin in the nineteenth century was German scientist and noted atheist Ernst Haeckel, who used fraudulent material to promote evolution. Even evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould conceded as much when he wrote,

Haeckel’s forceful, eminently comprehensible, if not always accurate, books appeared in all major languages and surely exerted more influence than the works of any other scientist, including Darwin…in convincing people throughout the world about the validity of evolution…. Haeckel had exaggerated the similarities [between embryos of different species] by idealizations and omissions. He also, in some cases—in a procedure that can only be called fraudulent—simply copied the same figure over and over again….Haeckel’s drawings never fooled expert embryologists, who recognized his fudgings [sic] right from the start. [“Abscheulich! (Atrocious!),” Natural History, March 2000, 42-44]

Unfortunately, much of his noted inaccuracies have become permanent fixtures in many standard biology textbooks, of which one noted educator numbered at least fifty!

Embryology is certainly one area where the strains of evolution are pronounced in science books all over the land. Dr. Jonathan Wells wrote of the time when he was working on his doctorate in cell and development biology,

The textbook I was using prominently featured drawings of vertebrate embryos–fish, chickens, humans, and such like–where similarities were presented as evidence for descent from a common ancestor. Indeed, the drawings did appear very similar. But I’d been studying embryos for some time, looking at them under a microscope. And I knew that the drawings were just plain wrong. I re-checked all my other textbooks. They all had similar drawings, and they were all obviously wrong. Not only did they distort the embryos they pictured; they omitted earlier stages in which the embryos look very different from one another. [“Survival of the Fakest,” The American Spectator, December 2000, Vol. 33, Issue 10, 18-26]

He admitted that most of these very drawings came from Ernst Haeckel. He has since written a book, Icons of Evolution (2002), exposing these misrepresentations and hoaxes of science.

While he barely mentioned the topic of human genesis in The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin later wrote extensively about it in his later book, The Descent of Man, when he said, “My object is to show that there is no fundamental difference between man and the higher animals in their mental faculties” (1871, p. 34). In other words, as the materialistic philosophers of ancient Greece, he believed that humans are nothing more than animals, but during his day, he lacked the evidence (fossils) to prove such.

However, evolutionists thought they had arrived at such in 1912 when Charles Dawson found part of a human skull and jawbone in a gravel pit in Piltdown, England. Nevertheless, forty years later, scientists proved that the “Piltdown man” was not the intermediary fossil, but a modern human skull and a jawbone of a modern orangutan, with the jaw being chemically treated to make it look as if it were a fossil, and its teeth deliberately filed down to resemble human teeth. Such was a forgery for sure!

Dr. Harry Rimmer details the infamous “Nebraska Man” hoax in his book, The Theory of Evolution and the Facts of Science (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing, 1946, pp. 118-123). In 1922, Mr. Harold Cook discovered a fossil that was supposed to prove once and for all that evolution was factual, but it turned out that the single tooth he found was not even human—it was from an extinct pig.

In the November 1999 National Geographic was published an article (“Feathers for T. Rex?”) detailing its discovery of Archaeoraptor—the missing link between birds and dinosaurs. In the issue, it appeared to be a large feathered bird with the tail of a dinosaur. However, closer examination by experts shows the specimen to be two fossils stuck together with strong glue!

Luke Harding reports that Professor Reiner Protsch von Zieten was a professor of anthropology at Frankfurt University for thirty years. However, in April 2004, the University forced his resignation when they discovered that he falsified dates on many “stone age” fossils, including a skull fragment that supposedly linked humans and Neanderthals, passing off fake fossils as genuine ones. In addition, the University caught him attempting to sell his department’s complete chimpanzee skull collection to the United States (“History of modern man unravels as German scholar is exposed as fraud,” The Guardian, February 19, 2005).

Why are not more scientists speaking out on the forgeries and hoaxes within their field? Douglas Futuyma’s Evolutionary Biology describes the situation best when it informs students that Darwin’s theory of evolution, Marx’s theory of history, and Freud’s theory of human nature together “provided a crucial plank to the platform of mechanism and materialism,” and Oxford Darwinist Richard Dawkins stated more bluntly, “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist” (The Blind Watchmaker, New York: Norton, 1986, pp. 6-7).