Evolution: Why It’s Wrong And Why It Matters (Part 1)

I am not a scientist. But that’s okay, because evolution isn’t really science anyway. When you think of science, you probably picture people in white coats looking at test tubes in a laboratory, searching for answers to the big questions in life. Searching for truth, reality, and a way of unlocking all the mysteries of life.

Unfortunately, that is not the case.

What tools does science have for its task, or what tools does it use to answer these questions? Observations, measurements, and repeatable experiments.

With the scientific method, information about our world began increasing rapidly.

But then something happened.

At first, science limited its inquiries to things it could see and observe and measure. Gradually, things that couldn’t be observed and measured were considered less real. They were just beliefs, unworthy of people who were really in the know. Then beliefs became irrelevant, even inimical to truth.

Science can’t observe God, measure Him, or subject Him to repeatable experiments. So first, it merely said that science is not concerned with God, only material things. But then it began working with the assumption that material things were all there was. They went from confining their area of expertise to what can be observed and measured to concluding that what can be observed and measured was for all practical purposes enough. There was no need to accept anything beyond that.

Yes, I know this is a generalization and that there are many individual exceptions. But they came to believe, not from empirical evidence but simply from their working presuppositions, that all reality can be explained entirely by natural processes.

Now if there is a God, at some point, somewhere, you would expect that He and the world would intersect, that He would actually do something in the world. But science would not admit that. It would never conclude that. Whatever happened had to have had only material causes.

If you could take a time machine back to the beginning of the world and you saw God actually call the world into existence by the words of His mouth, science would never accept that as truth. What this means is that, while science is believed to be the source of all truth in the quest for understanding the world, it automatically precludes certain conclusions from its work.

It is interested in truth as long as it doesn’t have anything to do with God. It’s like trying to solve math problems and denying the existence of the number 3.

Whether or not God did indeed create the world, they will act under the presumption that He didn’t. And all their theories, like evolution, are their best ideas of how all this could have happened on its own.

If God really did create the world, anyone who seriously wants to know the truth about the world and life would want to know that. If science really wanted to know the answers to life, it should be able to reach that conclusion. But its methodology is limited (it can’t put God into a test tube or submit Him to a lie detector), so it out of hand dismisses it as a possibility.

They say it is based on the best evidence, but I would like to show that it is rather based on a leap of faith far greater than that attributed to any religious believer.

First of all, evolution believes that life evolved through minute random mutations over millions of years. After millions, even perhaps a billion years, every living thing on earth now should be in the middle of some evolutionary process. Evolution would have no way of knowing or saying that it has reached perfection. Things would have been constantly changing for better or worse, with the worse things gradually dying off.

So every living thing, plant, animal, or human, would/should be in some state of transition. The evidence would suggest then that evolution all over the world has stopped for a few centuries at the same time with everything having reached a state of equilibrium. And this is all supposed to be random, unguided?

Imagine that astronauts were to travel to Mars. While exploring the planet, they find a computer on the ground. Their first thought would be: “Someone has been here.” Why? They know that a computer could not be assembled without intelligence, someone designing it, and then putting it together in a precise manner. You could put all the required components next to each other for billions of years, and they would not make any progress toward making a computer.

If they found only a table and chair, they would conclude the same thing. If they found the words ‘Mary loves John’ scrawled in the ground, they would conclude that some intelligent life preceded them.

Nothing is more complicated in the world than a living thing, particularly human life. The proteins that form our DNA are joined in ways that do not occur naturally and actually constitute a language considerably more complex than ‘Mary loves John.’

To say that humans evolved from apes can almost seem believable when said with a straight face by someone with a beard and glasses and wearing a suit.

It’s when you go back to the beginning of it all that the whole thing stretches all believability to the point of absurdity.

How could life have started in the first place? Let’s say it was caused by lightning striking the ground under the right atmospheric conditions. Poof! Living dirt. A miracle.

But we need some more miracles almost immediately. This living dirt must have some way to create energy; otherwise, it would die in short manner. Another lightning strike would kill it, so maybe a lightning strike close by creates a system for this living dirt to metabolize other dirt for energy. This living dirt can now exist for more than a few moments.

But now for all this to have any significance, it needs another miracle. If this living dirt doesn’t reproduce itself, it will soon be gone forever. So lightning strikes close by again, and now this living dirt is given the ability to reproduce itself.

So now we have had three totally unlikely, impossible (?) miracles; and living dirt is starting to spread over the earth. No, wait. Locomotion. We need another miracle for this thing to be able to move out of its location; otherwise, we will just have a mound of living dirt. So lightning has to strike again, close by; and somehow, this creates the ability of locomotion in this living dirt.

Now if all this had been what the religions had been teaching, scientists would have laughed them to scorn. But it gets better.

At this point, we need another miracle that makes all the previous ones seem run of the mill by comparison.

We have a world filling with living dirt. This living dirt would be changing through random mutations; but now, some of these need to be randomly developing complementary reproductive systems, strictly by chance, of course. And amazingly enough, when at least two of these living dirt things have finally reached completed complementary reproductive systems, these two living dirt things need to be close enough to each other to actually reproduce together.

And science wants us to believe that all this happened by itself, with no intelligence guiding it and no outside power doing anything. And they call faith blind? You would think perhaps that the self-reproducing organisms would have been the one that prevailed through natural selection.

To say that the world and life was created by intelligence is or rather should be a logical conclusion of science. When all natural explanations of the world and life rely on events totally contrary to experience and experimentation, then the God hypothesis is not only fair, but logical.

In my next article, we will consider why all this is so important.

Photo credit: atheism (Creative Commons)