Evolution Part III

In the third installment of our brief look at the theory of evolution, today, I offer the Earth....(as taken from equip.org and Hank Hanegraaff's book, "The FACE that Demonstrates the FARCE of Evolution.") Again, you will see the precision and design that is evident in creation for which evolution simply cannot account. Again, we are asked to stretch our beliefs and believe that mere chance could effect such an event as the creation of our intricate, complex earth! Again, be sure to read the bibliography at the end for even more eye-opening information concerning the problems with the theory of evolution.

Earth

Like an egg or an eye, the earth is a masterpiece of precision and design that could not have come into existence by chance. Astronaut Guy Gardner, who has seen the earth from the perspective of the moon, points out that “the more we learn and see about our universe the more we come to realize that the most ideally suited place for life within the entire solar system is the planet we call home.”28 King David said it best: The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge. There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard. Their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world. (Ps. 19:1-4) Let’s take a few minutes to explore the miracles that demonstrate life on earth, which a benevolent Creator designed and which could not be directed by blind chance. First, consider plain old tap water. The solid state of most substances is denser than their liquid state, but the opposite is true for H20, which explains why ice floats rather than sinks. If water were like virtually any other liquid, it would freeze from the bottom up rather than from the top down, killing aquatic life, destroying the oxygen supply, and making earth uninhabitable.29 Furthermore, ocean tides, which are caused by the gravitational pull of the moon, play a crucial role in our survival. If the moon were significantly larger, thereby increasing its gravitational pull, devastating tidal waves would submerge large areas of land. If the moon were smaller, tidal motion would cease and the oceans would stagnate and die.30 Finally, consider the ideal temperatures on planet earth — not duplicated on any other known planet in the universe. If we were closer to the sun, we would fry. If we were farther away, we would freeze.31 From the tap water to the tides and temperatures that we so easily take for granted, the earth is an unparalleled planetary masterpiece. Like Handel’s Messiah or da Vinci’s Last Supper, it should never be carelessly devalued as the result of blind evolutionary processes. Yet, tragically, in an age of high technology and supposed scientific enlightenment, many are doing just that. Consider the following introduction to “The Miracle of Life,” an Emmy-award-winning PBS NOVA broadcast on evolution: Four and a half billion years ago, the young planet Earth was a mass of cosmic dust and particles. It was almost completely engulfed by the shallow primordial seas. Powerful winds gathered random molecules from the atmosphere. Some were deposited in the seas. Tides and currents swept the molecules together. And somewhere in this ancient ocean the miracle of life began….The first organized form of primitive life was a tiny protozoan [a one-celled animal]. Millions of protozoa populated the ancient seas. These early organisms were completely self-sufficient in their sea-water world. They moved about their aquatic environment feeding on bacteria and other organisms….From these one-celled organisms evolved all life on earth. (emphases added)32 CHANCE DOESN’T HAVE A CHANCE

The real miracle of life is how so many people could stand for such nonsense in the twentieth century. First, how could the protozoa be the first form of primitive life if there were already organisms such as bacteria in existence? Molecular biology has demonstrated empirically that bacteria are incredibly complex. In the words of Michael Denton, “Although the tiniest bacterial cells are incredibly small, weighing less than 10-12 gms, each is in effect a veritable micro-miniaturized factory containing thousands of exquisitely designed pieces of intricate molecular machinery, made up altogether of one hundred thousand million atoms, far more complicated than any machine built by man and absolutely without parallel in the non-living world.”33 Furthermore, far from being primitive, the protozoa that were thought to be simple in Darwin’s day have been shown by science to be enormously complex. Molecular biology has demonstrated that there is no such thing as a “primitive” cell. To quote Denton again, “No living system can be thought of as being primitive or ancestral with respect to any other system, nor is there the slightest empirical hint of an evolutionary sequence among all the incredibly diverse cells on earth.”34 Finally, as Coppedge documents, giving evolutionists every possible concession, postulating a primordial sea with every single component necessary, and speeding up the rate of bonding a trillion times: “The probability of a single protein35 molecule being arranged by chance is 1 in 10161 using all atoms on earth and allowing all the time since the world began…..For a minimum set of the required 239 protein molecules for the smallest theoretical life, the probability is 1 in 10119,879. It would take 10119,841 years on the average to get a set of such proteins. That is 10119,831 times the assumed age of the earth and is a figure with 119, 831 zeroes.”36 To provide a perspective on how enormous a one followed by a hundred and sixty one zeros is, Coppedge uses the illustration of an amoeba (a microscopic one-celled animal) that sets out to move the entire universe (including every person, the earth, the solar system, the Milky Way galaxy, millions of other galaxies, etc.) over the width of one universe, atom by atom, at the slowest possible speed. (The universe is 30 billion light-years in diameter — to calculate the number of miles multiply 30 billion by 5.9 trillion.) The amoeba is going to move one angstrom unit (the width of a hydrogen atom — the smallest known atom) every 15 billion years (the supposed age of the universe). Obviously the amoeba would have to move zillions of times before the naked eye could detect that it had moved at all. At this rate the amoeba travels 30 billion light years and puts an atom down one universe over. It then travels back at the same rate of speed and takes another atom from your body and moves it one universe over. Once it has moved you over, it moves over the next person until it has moved over all five billion or so people on planet earth. It then moves over all the houses and cars, the solar system, the Milky Way galaxy, and the millions of other galaxies that exist in the known universe. In the time that it took to do all that, we would not get remotely close to forming one protein molecule by random chance.37 If, however, a protein molecule is eventually formed by chance, forming the second one would be infinitely more difficult. As you can see, the science of statistical probability demonstrates conclusively that forming a protein molecule by random processes is not merely improbable but impossible. And forming a living cell is beyond illustration. As King David poignantly put it, “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God’” (Ps. 14:1). Finally, it should be noted that philosophical naturalism — the world view undergirding evolutionism — can provide only three explanations for the existence of the universe in which we live. One: The universe is merely an illusion. This notion carries little weight in an age of scientific enlightenment. As has been aptly put, “Even the full-blown solipsist looks both ways before crossing the street.” Two: The universe sprang from nothing. This proposition flies in the face of both the law of cause and effect and the law of energy conservation. It has been well said, there simply are no free lunches. The conditions that hold true in this universe prevent any possibility of matter springing out of nothing.38 Three: The universe eternally existed. This hypothesis is devastated by the law of entropy that predicates that a universe which has eternally existed would have died an “eternity ago” of a heat-loss death.39 There is, however, one other possibility. It is found in the first chapter of the first book of the Bible: In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. In an age of empirical science, as in any age, nothing could be more certain, clear, or correct

28The Wonders of God’s Creation: Planet Earth, vol. 1 (Chicago: Moody Institute of Science, 1993); videotape. 29Ibid. 30Ibid. 31Ibid. See also Scott M. Huse, The Collapse of Evolution, 2d. ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1993), 71. Huse lists numerous other sensitive design parameters. See also J. P. Moreland, ed., Creation Hypothesis (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1994), 160–69. 32NOVA, “The Miracle of Life,” photographed by Lennart Nilsson (Boston: WGBH Educational Foundation, 1986 [Swedish Television Corp., 1982]); videotape. For a brief discussion, see Johnson, 123. 33Denton, 250. 34Ibid. 35Coppedge writes, “All known life on the earth consists largely of these giant molecules. ‘The chemical basis of all life,’ says the Encyclopedia Britannica, ‘is protein in a watery medium.’” Coppedge goes on to point out that the hemoglobin molecule, the most important protein molecule in blood, has 574 amino acid links and 10, 000 atoms. In addition, there are some 280,000 hemoglobin molecules per red blood cell. Insulin is the smallest molecule qualifying as a protein. Even it, however, has fifty-one amino acid links in two chains — one with twenty-one and the other with thirty amino acids. The two chains are joined together by sulfur bridges. The length of the average protein in the smallest known living thing is at least 400 amino acid links, containing more than 7,000 atoms. (Adapted from Coppedge, 98–102.) 36Coppedge, 110, 114. 37Discussion adapted from Coppedge, 119–24. Evolutionists sometimes make the accusation that this type of argumentation does not correctly represent the evolutionary paradigm. The more sophisticated evolutionists admit that the notion that chance alone is responsible for life is at best far-fetched. They suggest that rather than chance acting unilaterally, natural selection or some other unintelligent nonrandom mechanism was involved in the process. Perhaps beneficial molecular change effects are accumulated over time while natural selection weeds out negative mutations. For one thing, it should be noted that there is no evidence that suggests information in the genetic code is increased in this manner. Nor are there any known physical laws that can be invoked to account for the extremely high information content of genetic material. Furthermore, it is simply a logical fallacy to say that an accumulation of beneficial changes will produce an improved overall design — those individual changes must also harmonize together in order to improve the overall design. Finally, those capable of scaling the evolutionary language barrier realize that this is little more than using the phrase “natural selection” while pouring the meaning of intelligent design into the words. (See Nancy R. Pearcey, “DNA: The Message in the Message,” First Things, June–July 1996, 13–14; and David Berlinski, “The Deniable Darwin,” Commentary, June 1996, 19–29.) 38Besides the preponderance of empirical evidence that indicates that something does not come from nothing, the simple laws of logic require that nothing cannot produce anything — for nothing is not anything. It is a violation of the law of noncontradiction, which says that A is not non-A, to say that nothing can produce something. Since nothing is not anything, the thing said to be produced would have had to either create itself, or it would be an effect without a cause. If it created itself, it would have to exist prior to its existence in order to do the creating, which means it both exists and does not exist in the same way and in the same respect, which of course is a violation of the law of noncontradiction. But if nothing caused it, it is then said to be an effect without a cause. Not only is this impossible by definition (since the definition of an effect involves a cause), but also it is impossible conceptually. In other words, it is absurd to say that nothing causes something because we cannot conceive of how nothing (that which does not exist in any sense whatsoever) can do anything at all, since it would have to exist in order to do anything, let alone create. Now, it is possible for something to exist without being an effect, but in order for something to exist and not be an effect, it must be eternal (i.e., something that did not come into being, but always existed). God is such a being. But this fact in no way helps the case for an uncaused effect. Either way, it violates the most basic laws of logic to say that something comes from nothing. If the laws of logic can be violated, then reason and communication are absolutely meaningless. (See Sproul.) 39Since the laws of thermodynamics remain unquestioned, we know the total amount of energy available to do work in the universe is not self-replenishing but is running out. (We can assume that the total available energy in the universe is finite, since current cosmological models suggest this state of affairs.) Furthermore, we see that work is still being accomplished in the universe at this moment, which means we have not yet exhausted our finite supply of available energy. Since the universe in this respect is running downhill, and there is only a finite supply of available energy, then the amount of time the universe has to exhaust all its available energy is finite. But if the universe eternally existed, then an infinite amount of time has already passed. Infinite time would have consumed our universe’s finite energy in the infinite past — there would not be enough energy left in the finite time available to our universe to last through an infinite past. Since we are still here, the universe could not have had an eternal past. Therefore, the universe had a beginning.