LIFE ISSUES NO. 39-16

MORE EVIDENCE FOR CREATION

Today, let me bring you a comment by the famous Dr. Andrew Snelling.  It’s on creation vs. evolution.  Let me quote him:

“Perhaps my favorite example of intelligent design is that of the trilobites.”  You don’t know what they are?  I didn’t either, but these are arthropods—that means animals without vertebraes but with jointed legs.  So these are arthropods that are extinct and only found as fossils worldwide.  “They occur among the earliest fossils in the so-called Cambrian rocks and are the lower-most multi-cellular fossils with hard parts found in the Grand Canyon, for example.  Often regarded as primitive creatures, their anatomy reveals that they are perhaps the most complex of all invertebrate-creatures. 

“They are thought to have been marine animals, because their fossils are commonly found with the remains of creatures that still live in oceans today.  Furthermore, they appear to have had a set of gills associated with every leg.  The animal’s shell is usually divisible into three sections or lobes – the head, the thorax, and the tail—hence the animal’s name (tri for three, and lobite for lobes). 

“Because of their jointed legs and antennae, the trilobites are classified with lobsters, crabs, scorpions, spiders, and insects.  The legs require them to have had complex muscle systems and, because of their similarity to modern arthropods, trilobites are thought to have had a circulation system, including a heart.  They also had a very complex nervous system, as indicated by their antennae, which probably had a sensory function and the presence of eyes in many species.

“Indeed, some scientists believe that the aggregate eyes of some trilobites were the most sophisticated optical systems ever utilized by any organism.  This type of eye is a compound eye, made up of many single lenses, each specifically designed to correct for spherical aberration, thus allowing the trilobites to see an undistorted image under water. 

The elegant physical design of their eyes also compensates for the optics of bi-fringent crystals.  Such a vision system has all the evidence of being constructed by an exceedingly brilliant designer!

“Their extraordinary complexity hardly warrants the creature being called “primitive,” but herein lies the dilemma for evolutionists.  There are no possible evolutionary ancestors to the trilobites in the rock layers beneath where they’re found, for example, in the Grand Canyon.  In fact, the trilobites appear in the geological record suddenly, fully-formed and completely integrated, with the most sophisticated optical systems ever utilized by any organism, and they appear without any hint or trace of an ancestor in the many rock layers beneath. 

There is absolutely no clue as to how the amazing complexity of these creatures arose, and thus they quite clearly argue for intelligent design creation, just as we would predict from the biblical account in Genesis.”

Thank you, Dr. Snelling.

[03/31/03]