The evolutionists’ tendency to accept an unproven hypothesis on faith exceeds the faith of some religious people who accept the theory of divine creation. The evolution theory appears to have more than the cat’s proverbial nine lives. As soon as one piece of alleged evidence of the missing link is exposed as a fraud, the evolutionists invent another.
From 1912 to 1953, it was fashionable to believe that a missing link, called the Piltdown Man, had been discovered in Sussex, England. A painting still hangs in the London office of the Geological Society which shows nearly all the leading British anthropologists putting their stamp of approval on the skull itself.
During those four decades, anyone who did not accept the Piltdown Man as authentic was treated by the academic and scientific world much like the mother who, upon watching her darling son drilling with other army recruits, remarked, “Everybody’s out of step except my son, John.”
In the 1950s, the Piltdown skull was finally examined and exposed as merely fragments of a contemporary human skull, an ape jaw, and a canine tooth colored with oil paint. The 1960 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica describes it under “F” for Fraud.
Last month the final chapter in the Piltdown Fraud was written. The British journal Nature published a tape recording made by the late British geologist, James Archibald Douglas, who revealed that it was a prank devised and perpetrated by one Oxford geology professor to trick and discredit his professional rival.
But when the entire scientific community credulously accepted the fake as genuine, the prankster was too embarrassed to admit that he had manufactured and planted the skull in the ground near the village of Piltdown.
The Peking Man was also believed by many to be evidence of the missing link. In 1926 a Canadian archeologist named Davidson Black supposedly discovered under Dragon Bone Hill near Peking a collection of bones of 44 persons who allegedly lived a half million years ago in China. The bones mysteriously disappeared during World War II.
In 1972 a wealthy Chicago stockbroker named Christopher Janus was conned into spending time and money to rediscover the Peking Man. He spent $700,000 of his own money and offered a reward of $150,000, but the bones were never found. Mr. Janus became the victim of people who wanted the reward but could not produce the bones.
Mr. Janus finally withdrew his reward offer, saying, “The long end short of it is, they had carefully picked a guy who would fall for it, and I did.”
It takes an act of faith superior to the faith of those who believe in God to believe that the Peking Man was ever anything more than a fraud like the Piltdown Man.
Time-Life recently published a book called “The Missing Link.” It purports to show “how the ‘missing link’ looked about two million years ago … about 4-1/2 feet tall and 80 pounds.” The “proof” is provided by “dramatic ‘photo-paintings.'”
Of course, there are no photographs of the missing link, nor any scientific findings to show how he looked or that he ever existed. But then a picture is said to be more convincing than a thousand words — even if it is drawn only from imagination.
It is strange that the unproved evolution theory of how life began dominates public school textbooks, while the evidence of our creation by God is never mentioned. The evolutionists can be described in words borrowed from the poet, John Dryden: “Fool’d with hope, men favour the deceit … tomorrow’s falser than the former day.”
