- last post: 01.01.0001 12:00 AM PDT
This contains an in depth examination on whether or not it is possible for life to exist by the means of evolution. This topic was not meant to contain and religious allusions or topics.
For starters, let’s be clear about what I mean by evolution. Prior to the mid-1800’s, most people believed all living things – each type of animal, plant, and microorganism – were directly created by God, and had changed very little, if any, since that time. With few exceptions, most of the great scientists of the 17th and 18th centuries who actually invented the many disciplines that scientists practice today, believed that humans and all other creatures had been designed by a supernatural Creator. Then in 1859 Charles Darwin published his book Origin of Species by Mean of Natural Selections, also entitled The Preservation of Favored Race in the Struggle for Life or Origin of the Species, for shot. Darwin impressed the world with the proposal that all life began from a single cell, and that over millions of years living creatures have continually changed and adapted, becoming more complex and varied.
Darwin was initially praised by some as a marvelous thinker. His evolutionary approach impacted many fields, including biology, astronomy, ethics, religion, psychology, and philosophy. In stark contrasts to his theological training, Darwin later demonstrated enormous contempt for anything Christian. He wrote: The Old Testament, from its manifestly false history of the earth, was no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindus, or the beliefs of a barbarian. The New Testament is a damnable doctrine. I can hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true. Darwin’s theory of evolution today remains the most widely held explanation for the origin of life. In short, it says simply that all living things arose randomly from an inorganic, the inanimate world. In this theory, all living things are interrelated. Humans and apes, for example, are believed to have begun from a single animal five to twenty million years ago. Likewise, primates (including men and apes) are believed to have gun from a single animal approximately seventy-five million years ago.
Evolution, as it is commonly understood today, depends upon four factors. Evolutionists (people who have confidence in the theory of evolution) explain them in this way:
1. Spontaneous generation. This means that life arose from inanimate (dead) material. IN a pond or other moist environment (referred to as the pre-biotic soup), a perfect combination of carbon-based molecules happened to be present at the same instant. Denying all scientific logic, a DNA code, nucleus, cell wall, and energy-generating apparatus – the minimum requirements for a living cell – were all somehow present, each having randomly come together on its own. This first cell reproduced itself and the first life was off to a start.
2. Random mutation. Minor changes in the DNA code are thought to occur spontaneously within a creature. Most of these are attributed to “accidents” that happen when the creature’s genetic code is copied at the time of reproduction. Outside radiation and chemicals are also thought to play a role. Most mutations are harmful to a creature. So, a high number would be necessary to increase the chances of a positive mutation taking place.
3. Natural Selection. Darwin realized that many more creatures were born than actually survived well. He observed a struggle for existence in which the stronger creatures survived and the weaker ones died off. This process is called natural selection. Any random mutation that results in a “weaker” creature, evolutionist’s reason, would cause the early elimination of that plant or animal. By contrast, any random mutation which increased the strength or fertility of a plant or animal would give it an advantage in the struggle for existence.
4. Time. Random mutations do not occur very often, and most mutations are damaging. Yet many positive mutations are necessary to give rise to a new creature. Yet many positive mutations are necessary to give rise to a new creature. What is needed to make the process work is time, and lots of it.
We would expect that the oldest and deepest layers of fossils would contain the earliest, most primitive forms of life. As we search through younger, shallower layers, we would expect to find a gradual transition of the more primitive life forms into more complex ones. We would also expect that fossils of new life would not appear suddenly, but would show gradual changes or transitions. Evolutionists claim, for example, that fish evolved into amphibians, so, we can expect to find transitional forms illustrating the gradual transition of fins into feet and legs, among other changes. Since the transition from fish to amphibian would have required many millions of years (during which time many millions, even billions, of the transitional forms must have lived) fossils of many of these transitional forms should be discovered. The fossil record ought to reveal many millions of transitional, intermediate life forms. However we have found… how many? ZERO.
THE CELL
Molecular biologist Michael Denton, a critic of Darwinian evolution, gives us an idea of the inner workings of a cell:
“Perhaps in no other area of modern biology is the challenge posed by the extreme complexity of biological adaptations more apparent than in the fascinating new molecular world o the cell… To grasp the reality of life as it has been revealed by molecular biology, we must magnify a cell a thousand million times until its twenty kilometers in diameter and resembles a giant airship larger enough to cover a great city like London or New York. On the surface of the cell we would see millions of openings, like the portholes of a vast space ship, opening and closing to allow a continual stream of materials to flow in and out. If we were to enter one of these openings we would find ourselves in a world of supreme technology and bewildering complexity.
Is it really credible that random processes could have constructed a reality, the smallest element of which – a functional protein or gene – is complex beyond our won creative capacities, a reality which is the very antitheses of chance, which excels in every sense anything produced by the intelligence of man? Along side the level of ingenuity and complexity by the molecular machinery of life; even our most advance artifacts appear clumsy…
It would be an illusion to think that what we are aware of at present is any more than a fraction of the full extent of biological design. In practically every field of fundamental biological research, every increasing levels of design and complexity are being revealed at an ever-accelerating rate.”
Cells- The human body has 100 trillion cells. All the cells in the human body lined up side by side would encircle the earth 200 times. If all DNA in a human were placed end to end, it would reach the sun and back 400 times.
The Eye- The human eye can handle 1.5 million simultaneous messages. IN a day the eye moves 100,000 times. (The body would have to walk 50 miles to exercise the leg muscles at an equal amount.) 137 million nerve endings within each eye pick up every visual message the eye sends to the brain.
Charles Darwin himself said that the possibility of the eye forming by evolution is absurd.
The Ear- A single inner ear contains as many circuits as the telephone system of a large city
The Brain- the information in the brain equals that contained in 20 million separate books. It has 10,000,000,000 circuits and a memory of 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bits.
Is it possible for these things to have formed randomly by evolution?
SPONTANEOUS GENERATION
Spontaneous generation is said to have been a random, chance event, with no outside, purposeful influence. Let’s examine what “chance” looks like. If you flip a coin, the probability of heads is one in two. Rolling a six on a die has the probability of one in six. Rolling nine straight sixes would be one chance in ten million. Who would be $100 dollars that you could roll 50 straight sixes ( 1 in 10 to the 39th power) or flip a hundred straight “heads on a coin.”
Sir Fred Hoyle, British Astronomer, calculated the probability of spontaneous generation:
“The likelihood of the formation of life from inanimate matter is 1 to a number with 40,000 zeroes after it….. It is big enough to bury Darwin and the whole theory of evolution. There was no primeval soup, neither on this planet nor any other, and if the beginnings of life were not random, they must therefore have been the product of purposeful intelligence.”
Furthermore, Dr. George Wald, a professor emeritus of biology at Harvard and the Nobel Prize winner in biology in 1971:
“There are only two possible explanations as to how life arose: Spontaneous generation arising to evolution or a supernatural creative act of God…. There is no other possibility. Spontaneous generation was scientifically disproved 120 years ago by Louis Pasteur and others, but that just leaves us with only one other possibility… that life came as a supernatural act of creation by God, but I can’t accept that Philosophy because I do not want to believe in God. Therefore, I choose to believe in that which I know is scientifically impossible, spontaneous generation leading to evolution.”
Mind Boggling Huh?