Debate over man's origin grows

Nicole Berthelemy-Okazaki, a microbiologist at WSU and a Christian who believes in evolution, said that "creation stories are, for me, accounts of humankind on Earth." While most mainstream Christian faiths accept the theory of evolution, she said, a few "fundamentalist Christians reject evolution and insist on imposing their theories on others. There is no scientific evidence for creation as told in the Bible," she said.

Evolution presents an ordered scientific theory for how human beings came to be, while those who hold to the biblical account "have never given any explanation of how the Creation came about. It just happened," she said.

Guliuzza said evolutionary predictions "fail to conform to the reality of the fossil record," noting scientists can't explain the "abrupt appearance of distinct types of vertebrates. You can't even look in the fossil record and see any kind of transformational types," where one life form evolved from another, he said.

At Weber State as part of a speaking engagement at First Baptist Church in Ogden, Guliuzza is an adjunct speaker and debater with the Institute for Creation Research in San Diego, which promotes scientific creationism, biblical creationism and related theories.

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