The other week I attended a winter retreat sponsored by the Fellowship of Bible Churches at Camp Tohiblo in Mercersburgh, Pa, and the featured speakers were the Institute of Creation Research’s Dr. Randy Guliuzza and Frank Sherwin. I’ve heard both the men speak in the past, but this was the first time I had the pleasure of hearing them in person, so this was a real treat. I’ll open this article with Dr. Guliuzza’s presentation, and then write a follow-up article for Frank Sherwin.

Dr. Guliuzza holds a B.S. in Engineering, a B.A. in theology, an M.D. from the University of Minnesota, and a Masters in Public Health. In his first session he discussed four biological facts the Bible got absolutely right, and evolutionists got absolutely wrong. I’ll provide a brief outline of his presentation without giving away too much.

The first fact he presented was concerning the origin of life. The Bible tells us that life comes from pre-existing life, but evolutionists claim that life came from non-living material. They claim that self-replicating material “came together” as a result of nature’s emergent properties or a creative dynamic. But Guliuzza explains that these explanations are a mystical substitution for God, and that Louis Pasteur demonstrated that life only comes from life- and there are no known exceptions. We have no credible accounts of the origin of life as is demanded by evolutionary belief.

The next fact was regarding reproduction. According to the Bible, creatures have always had an innate ability to reproduce as directed by God. Genetic information has always been fully functional. Evolutionists, however, tell us that the ability to reproduce was originally extrinsic to the environment and is a property of selective pressures.

Actual scientific evidence demonstrates that reproduction has only been observed to be intrinsic. Every living organism has the necessary genetic material to function according to their cellular machinery.

The third fact concerns how organisms fit into their environment. According to the Bible, God commanded organisms to be fruitful and multiply, and to fill the earth. With this command, organisms generate new traits that allows them to adapt to their environment. But evolutionists resort to natural selection or survival of the fittest, suggesting that the environment selects the fittest traits, and organisms are driven by death. But the problem is that nature cannot select anything for the organism.

What we find is that 100% of an organism’s adaptive capacity is within that organism, producing traits that will solve challenges to the environment. One thing we can be certain of is that some traits that have never appeared in a population do exist, but haven’t been expressed yet because it hasn’t been necessary in their current habitat.

The fourth fact is regarding the limits of change. According to the Bible, creatures reproduce after their kind, and this implies that the organism will be similar and unique, but not identical, to the parent organism.

Evolutionists say that the diversity of life is the result of evolution and descent with modification. They believe in one universal common ancestor, and given enough time, any change is possible to produce unlimited modification.

However, we have never observed one kind of organism change into a different kind. Animal groups are known to have stabilized. Plant and animal breeders have acknowledged the limitations to how far traits can be varied. Charles Darwin knew about this, but ignored its significance. The tree of life presented by evolutionists is imaginative speculation.

In sum, new organisms always come from living creatures programmed with the innate ability to reproduce, enabling future generations to diversify, multiply, and fill environments with variations of offspring, while reproducing after their kind. The Bible got it right, while evolutionary predictions were wrong.

In his next session, Guliuzza built upon some of his earlier points and considered how evolutionists often ascribe intellectual capacity to nature. We hear how nature “selects” certain traits as a survival advantage, but Guliuzza explains that nature cannot select because nature doesn’t have a brain- it’s an invalid explanation. Nature isn’t alive; the environment is made up of mindless, impartial, unconscious conditions to which organisms are exposed.

He suggests that the primary cause of organisms to adapt is totally innate, or inborn to that organism, and part of its basic nature. Living things display amazing, self-adjusting capabilities as they face difficult challenges and express solutions. This ability gives credit to an incredible designer who purposely created organisms with the ability to adapt so that they could fill the entire earth.

Young earth creationists believe there was no death prior to The Fall. Therefore the purpose of organisms at the beginning of creation couldn’t have been related to survival because they weren’t in danger of dying. Instead, they would have been equipped to spread across the earth, adapt to various environments, and fill different niches. We, like the animals, were created with a design to handle changing environments, so that when the conditions do change, we’re ready.

Guliuzza explained how organisms “auto-sense” their environment and surroundings and adjust through physiologic, multi-generational changes. These targeted self-adjustments happen over a certain number of generations, and have been observed in mice, tadpoles and blind cave-fish. These changes can occur within a single generation (not through millions of years of mutations) and are known as epigenetic changes.

Epigenetics is the study of cellular and physiological traits that are inherited. Studies show that characteristics outside the organism may trigger a genetic code that is passed through inheritance by molecules acting as markers that determine how the genome is read. How the DNA sequence is read varies, and that affects the development of the organism and its traits, helping it survive in the new environment.

Guliuzza actually predicted this type of engineering in blind cave fish prior to the study being published in 2013. I think it’s great to see creationists ahead of the game like this. Guliuzza is a tremendous, engaging speaker, and if he’s ever in your area, be sure to attend. You won’t be disappointed.