The Face That Demonstrates The Farce of Evolution [Hardcover]

Hank Hanegraaff (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 22, 1998

Looking into the face of our alleged ape ancestor, popular Christian apologist Hank Hanegraaff dissects and debunks the astonishingly weak arguments for the evolutionary theory, revealing it as nothing more than a "fairy tale for grown-ups." The author uses his own Memory Dynamics to make it easy for Christians to speak intelligently about evolution and speak persuasively about the Creator.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Thomas Nelson (October 22, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0849911818
• ISBN-13: 978-0849911811
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.8 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 2.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (73 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #703,194 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Hank Hanegraaff serves as president and chairman of the board of the North Carolina-based Christian Research Institute International. He is also host of "The Bible Answer Man" radio program, which is broadcast daily across the United States and Canada as well as around the world through the Internet at http://www.equip.org.

Widely considered to be one of the world's leading Christian apologists, Hanegraaff is deeply committed to equipping Christians to be so familiar with truth that when counterfeits loom on the horizon, they recognize them instantaneously.

Through his live call-in radio broadcast, Hanegraaff equips Christians to read the Bible for all it's worth and answers questions on the basis of careful research and sound reasoning. Additionally, Hanegraaff regularly interviews today's most significant leaders, apologists, and thinkers.

Hanegraaff is the author of award-winning best sellers, including "The Prayer of Jesus," "Christianity in Crisis," and "Resurrection," the latter providing a stirring and persuasive defense of the central event in Christianity. "Resurrection" and "Christianity in Crisis" both won the Gold Medallion for excellence in Christian literature awarded by the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association. Hanegraaff's books "Counterfeit Revival" and "The FACE that Demonstrates the Farce of Evolution" each won the Silver Medallion. "The Prayer of Jesus" was honored as a top 10 best-selling nonfiction book in both 2001 and 2002 by the Christian Booksellers Association, while the small-group video presentation "The Prayer of Jesus EZ Lesson Plan" taught by Hanegraaff won a Telly Award in 2003.

Recent releases include "The Apocalypse Code: Find Out What the Bible REALLY Says about the End Times . . . And Why It Matters Today"; "The Legacy Study Bible"; "The Bible Answer Book, Volume 1," which answers common questions regarding Christianity, culture, and cults; and "The Bible Answer Book, Volume 2," in which he tackles tough questions, including "How can Christians legitimize a God who orders the genocide of entire nations?" and "How could the Bible command a rape victim to marry her rapist?"

He is also coauthor of the novel "Fuse of Armageddon"; The Last Disciple fiction trilogy ("The Last Disciple," "The Last Sacrifice," and, forthcoming, "The Last Temple"); "The Da Vinci Code: Fact or Fiction?"; and "Seven Questions of a Promise Keeper."

Other works include "The Covering: God's Plan to Protect You from Evil"; "The Third Day"; "Fatal Flaws: What Evolutionists Don't Want You to Know"; and "The Millennium Bug Debugged."

Hanegraaff is a regular contributor to "Christian Research Journal" and "The Plain Truth" magazine. A popular conference speaker, he addresses churches, schools, and businesses worldwide. He is frequently invited to appear on national media programs to discuss a wide range of issues.

Hanegraaff and his wife, Kathy, live in North Carolina and are the parents of nine children--Michelle; Katie; David; John Mark; Hank, Jr.; Christina; Paul; Faith; and baby Grace--and the grandparents of five.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

59 of 72 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Despite endorsements, bad even by creationist standards, December 25, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: The Face That Demonstrates The Farce of Evolution (Hardcover)

In the chapter on "Chance," Hanegraaff quotes a well-known passage in _Origin of Species_ in which Darwin admits to shuddering every time he contemplates the eye. He omits, or is ignorant of, the following paragraph, in which Darwin argues that the various intermediate grades of eye which exist in nature, from a simple eye spot to the most complex box camera eye, show that a complex eye can develop from a very simple one by small steps. This seems pretty typical of Hanegraaff's method, with arguments that sound good if you don't know what he's leaving out -- whether he's giving facts, or quotes, out of context. Of course, his discussion of chance includes no discussion -- not even a bad one -- of natural selection. Nor does it include any recognition that the origin of life and the subsequent evolution of life are separate problems. Indeed, this confusion among the origin of the universe, the origin of life, and the evolution of life once it existed, are a central feature of the book's "Empirical Science" chapter, and well as the one on "Chance." Hanegraaff evidently does not think his subject -- or his readers -- worthy of clear and careful thought.

A chapter on "Fossil Follies" misrepresents _Archaeopteryx_, ignores the vast array of mammal-like reptiles, and cannot even be bothered to consider the renowned (or notorious) horse series. It regurgitates earlier creationist misunderstandings of Punctuated Equilibrium without bothering to find out the differenced between Eldridge and Gould's theory and Goldberg's saltational notions. It does not note, of course, that any evolutionist would tell you that the fossil record has never, in any case, been the main support of evolutionary theories. Instead, the "nested hierarchy" (the way organisms fit neatly into groups which fit into larger groups, which fit into still larger groups), the use of similar designs for dissimilar ends (e.g. the greater similarity between the bones of bat wings and whale flippers than between bat and bird wings) and dissimilar designs for similar ends (e.g. bat wings and bird wings, or the primate thumb and the panda's thumb), and biogeography are the main pillars of the theory.

In the chapter on "Ape-man Frauds," Hanegraaff discusses Peking man and Java man, and is either unaware, or thinks the reader should be, that both are now classified as _Homo erectus_. He finds ample space to discuss Piltdown man, not used as evidence for human evolution for decades, and Nebraska man, which was show not to be a hominid five years after its discovery and was never used as evidence for human evolution, but finds no space to mention a single African fossil. Australopithecines like Lucy? Habilenes? The Turkana boy? Hanegraaff seems too busy with 80-year-old confusions about pig teeth to worry about fossil finds in the last 50 years.

Much of the book's material is devoted to showing the bad moral effects of evolutionary theory. Again, quotes out of context are a major factor (Hanegraaff quotes several unfortunate -- but very typical of his time -- passages from Darwin on race, but ignores well-known quotes from Darwin showing his abhorrence of slavery). Hanegraaff argues that consistently following Darwin leads to racism and slavery, while consistently following the Bible leads to the abolition of both -- but it is the Bible, not the _Origin_, that contains many passages authorizing slavery) and racism. On the basis of Hanegraaff's mere assertion, we are to accept that every evil done in Darwin's name (including those which Hanegraaff merely says were done in Darwin's name) were the true and inevitable consequences of Darwinism, but every evil done in the Bible's name was a perversion or misinterpretation of the Bible. Nothing that could be confused with argument is presented to support either assertion.

A chapter of "Recapitulation" is dedicated to a hypothesis of no importance to Darwin himself and rejected by all modern Darwinists. Because recapitulationism -- the idea that an organism, in the course of its development, retraces its entire evolutionary history -- was important to many racists who accepted evolution, Hanegraaff gives it much attention despite its unimportance to the actual theory. Here, as in much of the book, the fallacies of guilt by association and argument from bad consequences form the backbone of his case; a valid argument is nowhere in sight.

A chapter on "Empirical Science" argues against a theory in biology by noting that it cannot explain the origin of the universe. It also shows that Hanegraaff knows less about entropy than one would need to learn to pass a freshman chemistry class -- or perhaps, since on this subject he is aware of arguments against his position, he is merely feigning such ignorance. Many natural processes, not involving life, increase order if energy can enter a system and waste heat leave it -- if Oparin's famous experiment assembling biochemicals from simple inorganic chemicals proved nothing else, it proved this. The argument, "entropy prevents increases in complexity," is simply and utterly false.

There is more to the book than this -- as even a couple of mainly favorable reviews have noted, the author has trouble staying on topic. But overall the book is very bad, derivitive, illogical, and either unscrupulous or incompetent in its arguments. As an appendix to the book, the author warns creationists against relying on bad arguments; this is the best advice in the book, and if the author had taken it, he wouldn't have written the chapters preceding this appendix.

27 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars A Big Disappointment, June 10, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Face That Demonstrates The Farce of Evolution (Hardcover)

I bought this book not because I seriously entertained the possibility that evolution didn't happen. I settled that years ago when I took the time to understand the issues at hand. One thing creationists fail to understand is that if you are trying to explain something, call it X, you either come up with a plausible mechanism or explanation of X, or you simply say I don't understand. If a machine breaks down, we either find the problem and fix it or we say we don't know and replace it.

I was frankly very dissapointed with the book. Not only is it shallow and trite in the treatment of evolution - it isn't even defined in the text - but it revels in taking quotations out of context.

One example of a quotation taken out of context is the one by Monod that chance is the sole source of order in evolution. If he bothered to read the passage in context, he would have understood that Monod was simply making the observation that evolution depends upon mutations to occur in a statistically unpredictable non-directed way which is in turn sorted out by natural selection. For the life of me, I cannot understand how creationists think that evolutionists are so stupid to think that evolution occurs by chance like monkeys typing away and producing sonnets. It ought to be mounted on the rooftops - NATURAL SELECTION IS NOT CHANCE. Natural selection is the cumulative effect of small gradual changes built up usually over long periods of time. The so-called impossibility of producing long complicated strings like the haemoglobin molecule from DNA changes in a short time has been proven false, as is claimed in the book (and using statistics from Behe's book). This has been demonstrated in the lab such as selected RNA strains time and time again. Refer to good examples in "Selection - the Mechanism of Evolution" by biologist Graham Bell.

Another quotation famously by now out of context is the one by Colin Patterson. Patterson was pointing out that transitional forms are not found at the specific level - the level of species but have been found between major groups - e.g., Reptiles and Mammals.This is true for at least two reasons. First, it is difficult to define a species in paleontology because all you have to go by with different forms is the bones. Second, statistically it is more likely that large wide ranging species will be fossilized - therefore, transitions will generally only be found between one set of large wide ranging species to another later large wide ranging species and as such there is room for plently of change to occur in between. There isn't sufficient appreciation of how poor the fossil record really is and how remarkable the transitions are given this fact. Almost none of the species alive today are found in fossils. A minor point on the Archaeopteryx - it is a transitional form because it shares features common to either reptiles or birds but not both, and it is irrelevant to this that the latest one has a bony sternum - there are still plenty of purely reptilian features to the skeleton - see any competent paleontology text.

I could go on and on with the mistakes and misunderstandings in the book without dealing with all the inflammatory rhetoric in the book. For example, Hanegraaff says that enthropy does not work on living things without the mysterious property of teleonomy. What does he mean? In plants, photosynthesis happens as a well known yet still to be fully understood chemical process in the cloroplasts. Basically sunlight is used to transform carbon dioxide into basic sugars with oxygen as a byproduct. Complex but nothing mysterious.

Every argument almost with out exception put forth by creationists and anti-evolutionists have been based on misunderstandings and taking scientific statements out of context. I'm sorry to say but this book will make no impact on rational curious seekers of the truth. Actually, I feel sorry for people like Mr. Hanegraff who populate their world with such flat and impoverished views. I challenge him to not be threatened by the grandeur of evolution.

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Falls Short of Author's Potential, November 25, 2000

By 

Christopher Boyce (Chapel Hill, NC USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Face That Demonstrates The Farce of Evolution (Hardcover)

I have read two other works by Hank Hanegraaff, 'Christainity in Crisis' and 'Counterfeit Revival', both were excellent. However, this book does not live up to the author's potential. In the books mentioned previously he was carefull to throughly document his statements, but he does not do so in this book. Instead, he jumps onto the very popular bandwagon of Creationism without knowing anything of science. This one fact causes the book to be ladden with assumptions that are never throughly researched or documented, which leaves much of the book giving opinion, but no strong evidence for the case of creation. Unfortunately, I was disappointed that in writing this book he choose to leave his objective mind at home.