That discussion, however, got my mind going. The Evolution-Creation issue has been one of my interests ever since I was a child. Since second grade, when I got my first book about them through a book club at school, dinosaurs have been my favorite animals. That book was by Roy Chapman Andrews, who worked for New York’s American Museum of Natural History. He was one of my childhood heroes, and I wanted to be a paleontologist when I grew up.Of course, along with the cool reality of dinosaurs, evolution hops on for the ride. And for many years I was, like so many others, enamored with evolutionary theory, assumed as fact. I went through my elementary school years almost as an evangelist of evolution.
Early in my high school career, I started attending a bible study youth group. Within a short time, one of the small groups I was in for a few months went through a tape series by a guy named John C. Whitcomb on Biblical Creation. There were many points he made that opened my eyes to the incompatibility between evolution and the Bible’s claim of God having created the universe.
Then I chanced upon a copy of “The Genesis Flood” by Mr. Whitcomb and Henry Morris, in our high school’s library no less (I figure no one would be able to find a copy of that in his/her school library today!), and I read the whole thing with great interest. The information in this book is hotly contested by evolutionists and even other creationists (mostly of the old earth variety). This book almost singlehandedly started the modern Creationist movement.
The ideas from these and other sources soon changed my views on origins. But I also have had more than thirty years now to ponder, read and research. Am I still a creationist? Do I still believe that “in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth?” You bet! But have my views been modified over these years? Yes.
But I am convinced that evolution has no leg to stand on, with all the new information we have on the subject.
When I use the term “evolution,” I mean the theory (or public school dogma) that all the universe and all life began from simple to complex with no input from any kind of intelligent mind or force originating any aspect of it or directing it, i.e. God. That is what evolutionists will insist it means, and that it and all science must be interpreted and approached with the philosophy of naturalism—that “the cosmos is all there ever was, ever is and all there every will be,” to quote Carl Sagan. It is said by the evolutionists that it is unscientific to appeal to Divine agency for the origin or direction of it all.
Here’s a couple of points in this regard:
The origin and development of the universe.
Now, we all know that the current ideas of the origin of the universe hinges on a theory called the Big Bang. Supposedly, all evidence of astronomy and astrophysics seems to indicate that all the universe expanded rapidly at the beginning from an exploding ball of matter, super-heated and compacted, about the size of a basketball. That’s pretty dense!
It’s easy to see all matter could possibly fit into that, when we consider that, with the size of protons and neutrons and electrons in orbit inside each atom, it is really mostly empty space!
Anyway, at some point, this whole mass “exploded” and expanded super rapidly, with such a complex activity of cooling and energy distribution, that it formed the structure of the current universe, and the way galaxies, stars and such things as planets have developed.Now, many Creationists scoff at the Big Bang theory, but it really is a breakthrough in many particulars. For one thing, before this theory was prominent, evolutionists had the freedom to think of the matter in the universe as eternal, with possibly an oscillating universe (contracting and expanding in cycles), or other similar ideas.
Research on the Big Bang has pretty much killed all those concepts, however, with the realization that this universe materially must have had a definite beginning, and it will have a definite end. Research into the mathematics and physics of this event can only go back to the explosion event or perhaps just before it, but it can never explain the origin of the material ball.
The other point to see is the complexity of this event. So many equations and physical events have been needed to explain how the Big Bang could bring this universe’s structure into being, that it couldn’t have been just a common explosion; it would have to have been more like a very sophisticated bomb! Once again, in my mind, it takes Intelligence to do that.
By the way, I’ve always had a nagging question in regards to this super-heated and dense ball of matter the Big Bang starts with: If a super-massive star explodes and collapses on itself with gravity so great no light can escape it, becoming a black hole, what kept the Big Bang’s ball of matter from collapsing on itself and turning into a super black hole, preventing this universe from ever starting?
The origin and development of life.
Compared to the complexities of even a single-celled life form, the celestial universe is easy stuff. I personally don’t have too many issues with the way understanding of the universe developed is shaping up, if it is necessarily billions of years old (More about this in another installment, perhaps.). However, to hurdle over the barrier from inanimate matter to a completely self-contained, and self-replicating organism with no Designer or Creator seems more and more absurd. I think we all need to look up Stephen C. Meyer, in his new book, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design, for a good look into all this.
It has been the position of evolutionary theory that the first single-celled life form eventually evolved from a concentrated soup of organic compounds on the early earth, starting with a globule of simple organic molecules inside a simple membrane. As early as sixty years ago, that idea seemed almost plausible, because our knowledge of the structure of the living cell was so basic. Then scientists cracked the genetic code with the discovery of the DNA double-helix, and the complexity just grew by leaps and bounds!
If we only had to deal with the DNA formation on its own, there might be a way for evolutionists to triumph about life evolving. But really, the living cell is so intertwined with functions that must rely on and support one another, there is no way to posit a gradual development from inanimate to alive. Besides the DNA chain in a cell, you need the RNA molecules to travel up and down the DNA to read the cell functions and chemical production, and the Messenger RNA to get those readings from the RNA to the other cell elements. Also, the RNA needs to “know” what the DNA should read, so that if anything might damage the DNA chain, then the RNA can “fix” it. And all of this has to be fully functioning within the confines of some kind of simple, self-replicating organism. For this to have evolved in stages, there must have been some kind of mechanism, if you will, to get random bunches of amino acid chains to not just bump into each other, but to interact in some meaningful way. And what, pray tell, would that be? And what was the judge of what was meaningful or functional?I like what is said by Dr. Malcom in Jurassic Park, which is typical of evolutionary thought. When speaking of the dinosaurs, he says, “They had their chance, but Nature chose them for extinction.” Wait a minute! If the whole of Nature is one of complete no-Intelligence-guided events, with no ultimate purpose from any Intelligent agency, how can a Nature choose anything? What is to say or even recognize that something is fit or beneficial for survival, and choose that over something else? Innately, there is always some kind of personification given to this Nature. Ever watch the Nature shows on places like the Discovery Channel? The narrator will eventually say something akin to, “Nature gave this animal the ability to adapt to such-and-such.” Nature, according to evolutionary theory, is impersonal. How can anyone say that Nature “gave” or “chose” or “intended” or, and I like this one, “designed” anything?
The other issue about life evolving is that of mutation. Let’s suppose we have a single-celled life form generate or evolve. Very quickly it multiplies, ad infinitum. How can the descendants change to some kind of higher order? With what science can show us now, the only real path is through beneficial genetic mutation, which, it is stated (as fact, remember) eventually leads to an accumulated amount of mutations enough to change characteristics of a creature’s form and functions. What, in Nature, is going to sort out these beneficial mutations? “Well,” the evolutionist replies, “Natural Selection, of course! Only those characteristics that are beneficial to the organism will survive.” So the environment around the organism pressures the organism to make its descendants through the generations mutate their DNA in a way that will adapt it to the environment. Now, for something to realize it must change or die or lose ground, mustn’t it must be self-aware or at least be able to have some emotional response to harmful or helpful environs? So if an organism has no recognition of this, how can it change? Do we see any coral adapting to the changing environment that is slowly killing them off? Why won’t Nature select mutations in them to something that lives in the new surroundings?
There are only two triggers to genetic mutations: radiation that randomly passes through a gene, and chemistry that somehow gets to the gene and changes it.
Most of the chemistry that will cause mutations is man-made pollution, so I don’t think anyone really posits that as a trigger for evolution. And environmentalists are trying to get rid of it anyway. (Why not leave pollution be? Maybe we will see some beneficial mutations come along if we leave it alone or let it grow!)
So radiation is the most important thing to cause an evolutionary change. Now, life on earth only gets limited amounts of radiation passing through its gene pool, as an occasional neutrino comes through, or extra ultraviolet light might somehow concentrate on it, or maybe an animal may stumble upon some uranium somewhere. Now if the organism doesn’t get sick and die, it may pass on mutations to the next generation. In a laboratory environment, the typical results of radiation on gene-splicing techniques only yield about 1 percent of “beneficial” genetic mutations. In Nature, it must be way less. One beneficial mutation may help an organism survive, but one mutation will not generate a new kind of life form. And the DNA code of any organism is highly resistant to change. How many mutations would it take to move an organism from one “kind” to another? A dozen? One hundred? A thousand?
By the way, it is actually given as evidence for the theory of evolution that we can get beneficial gene mutations out of a “random” process of gene splicing done in corporate laboratories. Evolutionists feel that if we can do this in a meticulously-controlled lab, Nature certainly must have been able to do it too! Let’s look at the details of how this gene mutation work is done.
First, rather than leave the genes in a living cell, where Nature is restricted to have them, they are isolated for their specific desired characteristics, taken out, then either bombarded with radiation or chopped up and reassembled.
Then they are “screened” to see what beneficial change may have occurred, and then the beneficial ones are separated from the rest to be used in whatever work the scientists deem appropriate. I wonder how Nature ever “screened” the mutations evolutionists believe MUST have occurred to make one kind of life form change into another.
Many of these and other problems exist with evolutionary explanations of Origins, but evolutionists believe the answers to these will all be solved the more that we can manipulate life in the laboratory, and pound out more ideas with Quantum physics.
I know this has been rather lengthy, and it is a big chunk to digest. I actually have more to present later, if you will. Isn’t that a surprise!
