Classifications, Cladistics, and Creation

To classify things is probably a part of human nature, whether with kitchen utensils, music collections, software, living organisms, and so forth. When classifications are uniform, then we can communicate with other people who need to have the same references. The cladistics system has numerous serious flaws, including circular reasoning.

Family of Acrobats with Monkey/Pablo Picasso, 1905

Biological classifications went all the way back to the beginning, but Carl Linnaeus (a Christian and a creationist) initiated the system that we use today. Evolutionary sidewinders bushwhacked Linnaeus and made biological classifications all about their fundamentally flawed worldview. It has been skewed to affirm evolution, and similarities in organisms supposedly do just that. This is circular reasoning (using evolution to prove evolution through cladistics), and they choose to ignore the fact that the Creator saw fit to use similarities in his designs.

In addition, evolutionists get into the occasional dust-up over cladograms and such because the whole thing is arbitrary and subjective; it is not science. Stuck in the middle of all this are Christians who are trying to work in biological sciences but have no real choice but to use the evolutionary classifications as reference. The same happens with us reg'lar folk as well.

While God built certain classifications into the creation, man has named animals since the Garden of Eden. One of Adam’s first jobs was to classify the animals. “Now out of the ground the Lord God had formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field. But for Adam there was not found a helper fit for him.” Adam was the world’s first taxonomist. He spent part of the sixth day naming the birds and the beasts. While this was a much easier job then than it would be today since no variation had occurred yet, it still would have taken him perhaps a few hours to name the kinds.
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When Darwin came along, the classification system Linnaeus envisioned was hijacked to imply that the structure inferred from the taxonomic system actually existed in nature and was used to allege a continuous relationship into the past. “[T]he theory of evolution states that the apparent relationships of organisms in a systematic classification are real relationships, because “relationship” in such classification is not a metaphor but is actually to be ascribed to community of descent.”5 In other words, the structure of the classification system is actually the structure of a giant, universal family tree of all life. While this was not the Linnaean intent, it is what classification has come to in the modern world.

To read the entire article, click on "How Should Christians View Biological Classification?".




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