A Christian's Guide to Evolution

Lying for Jesus. Atheists often dismiss “creationists” as liars for Jesus. Unfortunately, this pejorative is true. Somehow, these “creation scientists” have decided that it is acceptable to be dishonest if you are defending the Bible against evolution or Jesus against atheists. Just today, I saw someone’s comment on Facebook that read, “Creationists don’t take the Bible literally; they don’t believe lying is a sin.”

Dishonesty in “creationist” arguments is among the most powerful arguments there is for the accuracy of the theory of evolution. I put “creationist” in quotes because I do not think dishonest anti-evolutionists who give Jesus and other Christians a bad name, should be allowed to monopolize “creationist.” In  the US, half of those who believe God created the earth also believe humans evolved. I will use “anti-evolutionist” rather than “creationist” throughout this post.

I do not believe that anti-evolutionists in general are compulsive liars. I believe that most of them are not only sincere Christians, but even avid about their faith.

Why would they do that?

The best reason I can come up with is that they don’t have real evidence against evolution.

Thus, lying for Jesus becomes strong evidence for evolution by being evidence that anti-evolutionists have no or few solid arguments. Only those without a case have to resort to lying to support their case, and that is especially true when we’re talking about Christian men with good reason to both try to be and appear honest.

Are They Really Liars for Jesus?

All these men, I’m certain, would love to be speaking honestly. Further, they’re trying to be honest. But the desire to win the argument—to be right about evolution and to “defend the faith”—compels them to grasp at whatever arguments they can find.

And all they can find are manufactured ones.

I don’t want to call these men liars. I don’t believe they’re trying to lie. I think they feel like their misquotes and selective overlooking of important facts are a real attempt to defend the faith.

I understand the temptation to lie for Jesus. Anyone who has argued for anything has felt the temptation to be “selective” in their presentation of evidence.

But we have to resist that temptation.

People who are perpetrating falsehoods, though, need to realize they are lying for Jesus. They need to use harsh words with themselves so that they can see that they are not defending the faith; they are not presenting evidence; they are lying, deceiving, and slandering.

When you find out you are lying for Jesus, deceiving, and slandering, you are a lot more likely to feel the need for repentance than when you’re just “leaving something out,” or “making selective use of evidence” or “bending the truth a bit.” A lot of these lies for Jesus are accusations that scientists are lying, so they also amount to slander.

Let’s be real, folks. This is the church of the Lord Jesus Christ we’re talking about. Are we really doing Jesus a favor by lying and slandering while claiming to be his representatives?

Examples of Lying for Jesus

Lying for Jesus comes in many forms:

• Quote Mining: Quote mining is citing quotes out of context to make the author or speaker seem to be saying something different than what he was saying. anti-evolutionists often “quote mine” evolutionists to make them appear to be saying that there’s no evidence for evolution.
• Misrepresenting the Evidence
• Slander: Accusing scientists of purposely altering the facts when there’s no evidence it happened (and lots of reasons to believe it can’t).

Quote Mining

The example I ran across this morning was this quote from Allan Feduccia, Professor of Biology at the University of North Carolina. It’s cited by Answers in Genesis among their 99 Quotable Quotes.

Paleontologists have tried to turn Archaeopteryx into an earth-bound, feathered dinosaur, but it s not. It is a bird, a perching bird. And no amount of “paleobabble” is going to change that.

This is a problem for evolution because Archaeopteryx is now generally recognized to be a true bird. (AiG references an Indiana University Press book called Feathered Dragons as the source for their contention; I haven’t read it.)

The problem is that despite what AiG believes and despite the AiG quote mine, Allan Feduccia believes that Archaeopteryx is intermediate between birds and reptiles. I have access to Science articles, and AiG is quoting a Feb. 1993 issue of Science when they quote Feduccia.

The quote is accurate enough, but the context gives the quote a very different meaning than AiG implies. Thus this misrepresentation is an example of lying for Jesus.

The Science article explain that there are “two opposing views of avian evolution.”:

• “Birds are directly descended from dinosaurs.”
• “Both birds and dinosaurs share an earlier, crocodile-like ancestor.”

In 1973, a paleontologist from Yale named John Ostrom argued that Archaeopteryx flew very little, if at all. He argued—rather successfully—that Archaeopteryx was barely more than a feathered dinosaur, making it seem like the first of those views is true. Birds came straight from dinosaurs.

Allan Feduccia argues, later in the same issue of Science, that Archaeopteryx lived in trees and flew regularly. Thus, Archaeopteryx qualifies as a bird, making the second of those propositions more likely. Birds and dinosaurs descended from a crocodile-like ancestor.

Allan Feduccia, like all other ornithologists, believes that Archaeopteryx has many reptilian features that modern birds don’t have.

In fact, one of the differences between anti-evolutionists and real scientists is that scientists keep asking questions until they know the truth. Anti-evolutionists, like Answers in Genesis, ask only enough questions to create a cloud of doubt—usually only 1 or 2—and then they quit asking questions.

So when I hear a quote like the one from Allan Feduccia, I look up the context in Science. AiG should at least have done that. Another fellow, though, who runs a web site called AiG Busted!, went even further. He actually wrote Allan Feduccia. His response?

Yes, of course this is preposterous. I was the person who coined the phrase in 1980 that, “Archaeopteryx is a Rosetta Stone of evolution!”

Hmm. Little different picture than AiG paints, isn’t it? This is the sort of thing that lead to them being called liars for Jesus.

I wrote that one out for you as an example. Here are some other versions of lying for Jesus in much shorter form.

• One of the more famous on the internet is A Tale of Two Cites. Carl Wieland and a creationist organization in Australia quoted Colin Patterson, senior paleontologist at the British Museum of Natural History, out of context. When someone wrote Dr. Patterson to ask if he was being quote mined by the anti-evolutionists, he replied, “Your interpretation … is correct, and the creationists’ is false.”
  Unfortunately, he also wrote, “The specific quote … is accurate as far as it goes.” Rather than pull their quote mine, the anti-evolutionist organization quote mined again and added just Dr. Patterson’s statement that their quote—at least the wording—was accurate to their next book of quotes!!!
• Perhaps the most famous quote mine of all is a constantly quoted line from Charles Darwin’s book On the Origin of Species. In chapter 6, he wrote, “To suppose that the eye … could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree.
  Darwin, of course, goes on in the same chapter to explain that no matter how absurd it might seem, there is real evidence that the eye evolved.
• A quick search of AiG’s 99 quotes produced another quote mine (#81). In a Discover article from May, 1992, the author says that confusion over an ancient specimen called Hallucigenia concerns “two radically different–indeed, inverted–views of the history of life on earth.”
  Feel free to read the article yourself. I linked it. The two views of life on earth are only “radically different” if you’re a paleontologist. To the creation-evolution debate, those two views are irrelevant. To the average person, they’re of very little interest. Were there phyla that went extinct after the Cambrian explosion, or did all or almost all the phyla survive until today? That’s the only question addressed in that quote. (Also, note that I wrote this article more than a decade ago, and AiG’s quote #81 is still there on October 21, 2025, dishonest as ever.)

Finally, TalkOrigins.org has a list of anti-evolutionist misquotes.

Someone once pointed out that anti-evolutionists misquote so often that it is best to assume any quotes they provide are doctored or fabricated unless proven otherwise. That has definitely been my experience as you see above.

Misrepresenting the Evidence

My first experience of misrepresentation of evidence was a list of inaccuracies in The Genesis Flood by Henry Morris. I saw these inaccuracies in 1995, 35 years after the book was published. It had been through four printings, but despite the public nature of these inaccuracies, none had been corrected.

It is true that Charles Lyell originally went to college to be a lawyer. He graduated and began a law practice in 1820 at the age of 22. By 1823, at the age of 25, he was in full-time geology and was joint secretary of the Geological Society. He wrote books and received awards in geology for the next 50 years.

It is deception to say he wasn’t a geologist.

In Morris’ defense, I should point out that Morris himself was not a geologist by education, and he only makes this claim to defend his own right to author a book on geology, not to deprecate anything Charles Lyell had said.

Other examples of lying for Jesus by misrepresenting evidence are:

• One of Kent Hovind’s (“Dr. Dino“) primary claims  is that the entire geologic column is not found anywhere in the world except in school textbooks. Not true; it’s found 26 places in the world.
• The ridiculous, often-repeated claim that there are no transitional fossils.
• The Cambrian explosion—the “sudden” expansion of multicellular life between 600 and 550 million years ago—is often cited as a problem for evolution. The argument itself is bizarre because if the Cambrian explosion is admitted, then the earth is old and evolution happened. But it becomes a lying for Jesus problem when anti-evolutionists cite the fact that all phyla (the classification just below kingdom) were present in the Cambrian explosion. The claim itself is almost true and not a problem; A UC Berkeley web site says that only one phylum has appeared after the Cambrian. But that hardly means that the Cambrian explosion refutes evolution! Our phylum, Chordata, is represented by things like sea squirts (see picture below). They now think there may have been a couple very primitive fish, but no amphibians, no reptiles, no birds, and no mammals. Even if the Cambrian explosion was an instantaneous creation by God, we would still need to explain how we got from sea squirts to humans!

Slandering Scientists

My very first experience with lying for Jesus was the slander of  Dr. Donald Johanson, mentioned above. The most common slander I see, though, is Christians, friends over the years, who have been taught that evolutionary scientists are bunch of frauds and deceivers. What they are missing, though, is that on the rare occasions that scientists commit fraud, they have always, without exception, been caught and exposed by fellow evolutionary scientists. Interestingly, there is a scientific paper, published in a peer-reviewed journal, Evolution: Education and Outreach, addressing some anti-evolutionist accusations:

Piltdown man: Piltdown man was a hoax, from 1912. A scientist combined a human skull with an ape jaw and claimed it was a link between man and ape. The paper describes the process that resulted in exposing the hoax and concludes:

But far from being a humiliation to paleoanthropology, Piltdown is a marvelous example of how science works: the constant interplay between evidence and interpretation. The discovery of new fossils caused a revision in the way scientists understood human evolution. Fitting Piltdown into the overall scheme became more and more difficult. There was only one Piltdown (with two skulls, one found in 1917), and much contrary evidence. Eventually the idea of Piltdown as a human ancestor was abandoned. It is also important to note that it was evolutionists themselves, not creationists, who exposed Piltdown as a forgery and in so doing demonstrated the self-correcting nature of science.

Peking Man: (the short version) Peking man remains were found in China between 1927 and 1937. A Catholic missionary (Patrick O’Connell) accused the scientists of fraud, saying they created the skulls from plaster, described them, then destroyed the evidence in order to hide their deceit. Duane Gish, a prominent Christian anti-evolutionist, published the missionary’s arguments in 1979 in his book, Evolution: The Fossils Say No. Nothing about the charges of fraud were true. Instead, Peking Man is now known as Homo erectus, considered an early human species, and their fossils have been discovered all over Europe and Asia (see Smithsonian history).

I could go on, but every “hoax” will be shown to be rooted out by other scientists or not to be a hoax.

More Examples of Lying for Jesus

• Here is a referenced report on Duane Gish using false information concerning Bombardier Beetles after being corrected.
• Here is a blog article (accessed 1/10/2014) on David Menton of ICR, who made up evidence in order to deny that Tiktaalik is a transitional fossil. This is an egregious case.
• Duane Gish popularized a debate method now known as “the Gish Gallop.” An anti-evolutionist can simply pour out false accusations, unresearched and undocumented misinformation, misquotes, and other forms of deceit one after another. Most don’t take long to say, no more than a minute, and often 30 seconds. Kent Hovind makes a habit of this in his videos. Of course, Hovind tried to do the same with the IRS and the US justice system, and he wound up in jail. Someone responding to the Gish Gallop has no time to respond to the falsehoods with real evidence during their time to speak. Refuting even one can consume the whole 5 to 10 minutes that debaters are often given to defend their positions.