Science – Creation/Evolution | Reformed Perspective

Science - Creation/Evolution

6 days or 24 years: why does the difference even matter?

I recently set about the task of making an enclosure to keep animals, and I want to tell you how I did it. This may seem to be a strange topic for Reformed Perspective readers but please bear with me and I trust that all will become clear.

Quite the creation

My aim was to create a large, secure enclosure and so I began by marking out an area within my back yard. You may think it somewhat eccentric, but for some very good reasons (which I won’t trouble you with) I had to begin the construction at night. So right after I had marked out the area and unraveled some fencing, I erected an enormous halogen lamp over the whole site, which, when turned on, flooded the area with light, which was good.

The following day I began to clear the enclosure, which was somewhat waterlogged. I bailed out most of the water, but took care to leave some behind, as I needed a little in order to provide ponds for the aquatic animals. By the end of the day, I have to say I was well pleased with the result.

When I came back to the site the next day, I began to shift some of the water I had left in the enclosure into ponds by digging holes in some places, and then piling the dirt up into mounds elsewhere to create dry patches. Once this was done, I spent the remainder of the day putting in some plants and food for the animals to eat. By this time, the whole thing was starting to take shape really nicely.

My main task on the following day was to take down the halogen lamp, which I had only intended as a temporary measure, and to put some smaller, permanent lights around the outside of the enclosure, which when fixed up, looked really quite wonderful.

The next two days things began to get really exciting. First I put some fish and other aquatic creatures into the ponds and I also brought some birds into the enclosure. Then on the following day I introduced some land animals into the enclosure.

At this point, the whole thing was almost finished, except for one thing. It had always been my intention to get my son to look after the enclosure, and so the last thing I did was to show him what I had made, telling him that it was a gift to him and giving him some quite specific instructions as to how I wanted him to perform the task of looking after it.

You perhaps won’t be surprised to hear that at the end of all that I took the next day off and had a well-earned rest. Surveying all that I had done, I can honestly say that I was extremely pleased with the way things had turned out. The whole thing had taken me a total of 24 years from start to finish, but it was well worth it.

*****

“Now hang on a second. Did you just say 24 years?”

“Yes, that’s right, 24 years.”

“But from what you said above, it sounded like the whole thing took you six days with one day of rest at the end.”

“Yes, it did sound like that, didn’t it? But if I told you that one day is as four years to me, would that begin to make a little more sense?”

*****

Well no it wouldn’t, but hopefully you’ve got the point by now. The time frame above clearly cannot be stretched out from six days of work into 24 years, yet this is essentially the position taken by those who advocate theistic evolution when they attempt to stretch the creation account in Genesis into billions of years. What I want to do in the remainder of this article is to ask whether there are any compelling reasons why we might want to engage in this particular “stretching exercise.”

Why would it take so long?

Sticking with the above introductory analogy, let me pose the following question: why might such a project end up taking 24 years, rather than six days? There are five possible reasons:

I might actually need 24 years to complete a project because of the sheer amount of work involved (although anyone who has seen the plethora of unfinished projects in my shed might wonder whether even 24 years would be enough time).
I might be impeded by one thing or another – resources, health or weather, for example.
I might just be plain lazy and so somehow manage to turn a six day job into a 24 year job.
I might need to take a long time in order to make sure the work is of sufficient quality.
I might have some other purpose for having taken 24 years, when I could easily have done it much quicker.

Now of all these possibilities apply to men, but only the last one might apply to God. Though the volume of work, unforeseen impediments, laziness and the issue of quality might be factors in the length of time it would take me to build my enclosure, all Christians would agree that none of these things would be factors for God in the creation of the Heavens and the Earth.

The amount of work involved was no obstacle to God, nor could anything have impeded Him in the process. It goes without saying that laziness, whilst applying to men, does not and could not apply to God, and it also goes without saying that the quality issue is not a factor with God, and He could have produced a Universe of the same perfect quality no matter what time period He took to complete it. In other words, there was nothing whatsoever that could have prevented Him from finishing His creation in a nanosecond, six days or 13 billion years – whatever He willed to do.

A reason for six days

Which leaves us with only the final possibility – that of having some other purpose for taking time to finish a job. With men, it is difficult to think of a single reason why anyone, given the option of building an enclosure such as the one described above in 6 days or 24 years, would deliberately choose to do it in 24 years. That would make little sense. If a man were just as able to produce work of excellent quality, whether it took him 6 days or 24 years, why would he choose the 24-year option? Furthermore, if his purpose in creating the enclosure was because he wanted to give it to his son as a gift, wouldn’t it be odd if he deliberately chose to take 24 years to complete it rather than six days?

Now someone might conceivably use this very point to question why God would have created in six days, rather than a nanosecond. After all, He could have finished it all in a nanosecond if He had wanted to. There is, however, a very good reason why this was so, since His purpose was to give the world as a gift to man to tend and keep. The six days of work and one day of rest sets a pattern for how men are to live, worship and take dominion over that gift. This is clearly seen in the reason given for keeping the 4^th commandment: “For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and hallowed it.”

But what good reasons exist why God might have chosen to create in 13 billion years rather than six days? If I am to take the claims of theistic evolution seriously, what I want to know is why He would have done it this way and not done it that way.

Arguments for or against theistic evolution are usually discussions of whether the word "day" (Yom) must be taken literally, or what “the rocks” say, or whether evolution undermines the foundation of the gospel itself. These arguments have been covered very ably by others, but what I want to do is to come at the issue from a different angle. My question is simply this: If God could have made the Heavens and the Earth and all that in them is in six days, what arguments from Scripture and from the purposes of God are there to support the idea that He actually decided to take billions of years and evolutionary processes to do so? In other words, why would He do it like that?

Bring glory to God

In order to test the claims of those who affirm theistic evolution, we must begin by asking the following question: what is God’s overarching creational purpose? Revelation 4:11 supplies us with the answer to this: “You are worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honor and power; for you created all things, and by your will they exist and were created.” In other words, God’s purpose in creating all things was to bring glory and honor to himself.

There are essentially two ways that God gets glory from his creation. One is from the very fact of his creation itself being wonderful and reflecting his glory. There is a sense in which even if there were not one single believer on planet Earth, the creation would still praise Him and He would still be glorified. The Psalms are particularly rich in descriptions of God’s natural order praising Him, for instance verses 3 and 4 of Psalm 148: “Praise Him, sun and moon; Praise Him, all you stars of light! Praise Him, you heavens of heavens, and you waters above the heavens!” But although the creation can and does praise Him, by virtue of their being glorious and reflecting His glory, is this the praise that God ultimately seeks?

Imagine that Beethoven had premiered his 5^th Symphony to an empty concert hall and so at the end there was complete silence. Would the lack of people to applaud the piece diminish it at all or call into question the genius of its composer? Of course not! The music is glorious regardless of whether anyone actually listens to it or applauds.

In much the same way, God’s creation exalts Him and brings Him glory irrespective of whether there exists another being to acknowledge it. Days 1 to 5 of Genesis – prior to the creation of man – are all described as good. But just as Beethoven’s intention was never just to create a symphony and have it played to an empty concert hall, God’s intention was never to create the world and leave it without a creature to praise and thank Him for it. Beethoven’s 5^th is great, regardless of who listens to it, but how much more glorious does the piece become when an audience is there to hear and gives a standing ovation at the end? By the same token, God’s creation is glorious, regardless of who is there to appreciate it, yet how much more is God glorified when He receives the praise of angels and men?

His overarching purpose was therefore to create a being that was not only made in His own image, but also capable of and willing to give Him glory. The Westminster Shorter Catechism famously begins with the question “What is the chief end of man” and gives the answer, “To glorify God and enjoy Him forever.” This can be flipped on its head to become “What was God’s purpose in creating man? That He might be glorified and that man might share in His happiness.” That, in a nutshell, is why God made us and therefore why we are here. We are to reflect his glory in everything we do, we are to enjoy Him and the gifts He gives us, and we are to return praise and thanksgiving to Him in our worship. This fits perfectly into the six days of work and one day of rest worship paradigm, where the pattern for our lives is established and ordered. But how does this fit in with the paradigm given by theistic evolution?

Earth made for us

Theistic evolution assumes that it took billions of years for the earth to even exist, yet alone become inhabited. Yet this is at variance with Isaiah, who says that “the Lord did not create the Earth in vain,” but rather “formed it to be inhabited” (Isaiah 45:18). If God’s purpose for the Earth was for it to be inhabited by men, and that it would be vain not to be inhabited by them, what possible reason would He have had to leave it uninhabited for so long?

Genesis 1:26-28 is clear that the whole purpose of the created order was that it was a gift for His image bearer who was to be given charge over it. If this was the purpose of God’s creation, what possible reasons would He have had to put this off for something like 13 billion years?

The Scriptures plainly teach that God’s purpose for man was not only to bear and reflect his image, but also to praise him in his worship: “I will praise You, O Lord, with my whole heart; I will tell of all your marvelous works” (Psalm 9:1). If this is God’s purpose for man, what possible reasons would he have had to defer receiving praise for billions of years?

Deferred glory, dominion

God’s purposes and His glory simply cannot be reconciled with the theistic evolution paradigm. To come back to the original analogy I used earlier, if my purpose was to create an enclosure and to give it to my son, so that he might tend it and return to give me thankfulness, in what way would I be achieving my purpose if I deliberately took 24 years to complete it when I could have finished it in six days? How then was God’s creational purpose and His glory fulfilled if he took 13 billion years and a multitude of dead animals along the way, when he could have done it all in six days and minus the carnage?

Furthermore, where is man’s dignity in all of this? Psalm 8 states that man is crowned with glory and honor (Psalm 8:5). In the six day creational paradigm, it is easy to see why this is so. The Earth was made for man and given to him as a gift. He was then given responsibility for it and God “made him to have dominion over the works of his hands” (Psalm 8:6). The theistic evolution paradigm robs man of this highly exalted position for over 99% of the history of the creation, and for billions of years the Earth was apparently left to its own devices, without a dominion taker and without one bearing the Imago Dei.

In conclusion, a straightforward reading of the Genesis account clearly suggests that God finished the Heavens and the Earth, including His image bearer, in a period of six days. This entirely accords with God’s purpose in creating all things – that He might receive glory and honor. The onus is therefore on those who advocate theistic evolution to show from the Scriptures and from the purposes of God why and how He would have used billions of years of slow graduated changes, without mankind to glorify Him, in order to bring this about. My contention is that theistic evolution is not only incompatible with the straightforward Genesis narrative, it also misses the entire purpose God had for His creation. As far as theories go, it falls well short of His glory.

This was originally published in the July/August 2013 issue under the title “Why would He do it like that?”

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Optically Excellent

How could evolution craft something as complex as the eye in the first place? And how could it do it again and again and again? ***** Everybody knows that our eyes are wonderfully designed, even those who don’t acknowledge their Designer. All the parts are special and each is important for vision. So many parts The bulging cornea consists of clear material that not only lets light penetrate, but bends it toward the pupil. The iris consists of a thin circular muscle which acts like a camera diaphragm, controlling the size of the pupil opening. The iris expands or contracts the pupil opening in order to control the amount of light entering the eye. Behind the pupil is the lens which focuses light onto the retina (composed of light sensitive cells and nerve cells). The lens is a particularly important component of the eye. This oval shaped object is made up of water soluble proteins, many of which are very large molecules. These proteins are tightly packed together in such a way that they are not only transparent, but they bend the light so that the rays are focused into a sharp point. This provides a clear image. Ideally the lens focuses on the retina (the receiver), but if the focal point is in front of the retina (or behind it) then corrective lenses are required to adjust the focus onto the retina (ie. you’ll need glasses!). It is also most important that the proteins in the lens retain their special tightly packed arrangement, otherwise the lens becomes opaque thereby disturbing vision. The other particularly important component of the eye is the retina. It consists of certain receiver cells which contain light sensitive pigments called rhodopsins. These are composed of a form of vitamin A and a large protein molecule called opsin. Different precisely shaped opsins are sensitive to specific wavelengths of light. In humans there are opsin molecules sensitive to blue light, or to green light or to red light. Cones are cells which contain one or other of the specific color sensitive opsins. Other cells called rods are sensitive only to more or less light. These rods and cones point backward to the back lining of the eye, but the light is coming from the front direction. Before the light gets to the rods and cones, it passes through the nerve cells which lie on top of the light sensitive cells, between them and the incoming light. Some people suggest that this is backward wiring – they say the nerve cells should have gone behind the rods and cones for a more efficient arrangement of parts. But what do they know? Others suggest that having the nerve cells in front, lying on top of the rods and cones, protects these sensitive tissues from getting too much light. When light is sensed an electrical pulse is generated by the rods and cones and conducted by the nerve cells to the optic nerve and to the brain. The brain, for its part, puts the electrical signals together into images which are communicated to the person's consciousness. There are other important components of the camera eye too, like the dark choroid layer lining the inner eyeball, which prevents light rays from scattering inside the eye, and jelly-like material which allows the eye to keep its shape. When we consider the special properties of all these component parts, we have to conclude that the camera eye is indeed a wonderful organ. Other eyes Among living creatures there are other eye designs as well. Some single-celled animals and even some much larger creatures make do with mere concentrations of light sensitive proteins or clusters of pigmented cells. In the many-celled animals, these are often associated with nerve cells. Some animals feature recessed eyespots to better focus the light. Creatures with jointed outside skeletons (exoskeletons) like insects, crustaceans, spiders, millipedes etc., are famous for their composite eyes. These bulbous structures are made up of many tiny eyes all of which focus on a central point. While these eyes are very good at detecting motion, they probably do not have the same sharp focus as the camera eye. Before we become too proud of our fancy eye design however, let us reflect on a biological riddle. It sounds like the beginning of a joke, but it isn't one and it's not funny, not even mildly amusing. I can well imagine the groans from you the reader when asked, “What does a single-celled animal, a highly poisonous jellyfish, a bristly marine worm, an octopus and a fish or dog all have in common?” The question seems so totally meaningless! What could a single-celled animal and a dog have in common beyond the obvious characteristics all animals share? The surprising answer is that all these creatures share a common design in the eye! Now, most of us have likely heard that all creatures with backbones (vertebrates) enjoy “camera-style eyes.” But what about a jellyfish, octopus and a single-celled animal which closely resembles algae that cause toxic red tides in the sea? Do they have camera-style eyes too? Yes, yes and yes! Octopus and squid Octopus and squid are perhaps the best-known animals without a backbone (invertebrates) that enjoy the benefits of a camera-style eye. We have all seen pictures of these creatures with their large eyes. Octopi are particularly intelligent, some say as intelligent as a housecat. Be that as it may, octopi make very good use of their eyes as they navigate their environment and catch food. The term cephalopod means brainy foot and it denotes a subgroup of mollusks which include squid and octopus. The cephalopod camera-type eye includes an iris, circular lens, gel filling the eyeball, pigment cells and photoreceptor cells that send an electrical signal to the optic nerve which is connected to the brain. In the case of the cephalopods, the light sensitive rods and cones are in front of the nerve cells (not behind as in vertebrates). Moreover the crystal proteins in the cephalopod lens act the same way as our lens does, but the proteins are not the same. Since cephalopods have a body design (plan) that is radically different from that of vertebrates, and since the chemical components of the eye are different, not even mainstream scientists see any kind of evolutionary connection between us and the octopus. Underwater worms Most of us have handled earthworms in the garden or as fishing bait. These creatures have a complete digestive tract with a mouth at one end and an anus at the other end. They have strong muscles and a few projecting bristles, but no obvious sense organs although they react strongly to odors and the drying effects of light. This body plan possessed by a group called the annelids, does not seem promising for fancy sense organs. However there are marine annelids called polychaetes (meaning many bristles) which lead more vigorous lifestyles. Among the polychaetes is an obscure group called alciopids. These are slender swimming creatures with conspicuous eyes. They actively pursue and catch prey. Most surprisingly, the eyes of these worms are camera-style eyes complete with cornea, lens and retina. And like cephalopods, the wiring of the retina features the light sensitive cells first with the transmitting nerve cells behind. Obviously there is nothing in the body plan of these annelids that is at all similar to vertebrates. So nobody imagines that there is a shared evolutionary history between the two groups. So where did the fancy plan for these eyes come from? Box jellyfish As we move next to jellyfish consider this: these marine annelids don’t have much that could be called a brain, but they do at least have some small concentrations of nerve cells at the front end of their body. If there is going to be any interpretation of the images detected by the fancy eye, it would be in this "brain." Jellyfish however have no central nervous tissue (which could function as some sort of brain). These creatures therefore do not look like promising candidates for any benefit from camera-style eyes. Nevertheless box jellyfish do indeed possess camera-style eyes. The great differences with other creatures of similar eye design mean that no evolutionary relationship is imagined between eye-possessing box jellyfish, polychaete worms, octopi and vertebrates. It was in some other way that they came to possess the fancy eye blueprint. Warnowiid dinoflagellates If camera-style eyes in a jellyfish are unexpected, how weird would it be to see the same design in a single-celled animal? A July 1, 2015 Nature article communicated the astounding news that there are some single celled protozoans – Warnowiid dinoglagellates – that have a sensory structure "so complex that it was initially mistaken for a multicellular eye." The component parts include a cornea, lens, iris and retina. It is these parts, which, declares Gregory Gavelis and colleagues "so resemble the camera-type eye of some animals that they have been speculated to be homologous ." In a July 9, 2015 followup, also in Nature, Thomas Richards and Suely Gomes rhapsodized that: "evolution has stumbled on similar solutions to perceiving light time and time again." Different bodies, same eyes In the course of this survey of creatures with camera-style eyes we have observed that obviously there was no line of descent linking them all – these creatures are too different to even contemplate such an idea, and everybody agrees on that. Instead mainstream scientists contemplate the separate surprising appearance of the same blueprint/design for an eye in wildly different organisms by means of an unguided evolutionary process. In the cases that we have discussed, the lifestyles are not even remotely similar, so it would be surprising to see similar solutions, especially through chance processes. Christians can conclude that, rather than any sort of common process, these common designs came about by the conscious choices of a Creator – the same Creator, rather than the same ancestor. God can bestow what features He likes on whatever creatures He so desires. There does not have to be a pattern or a reason why these creatures are the way that they are. When we see these examples as the work of God, our appreciation of the creation becomes much more profound. A version of this article first appeared in the Sept 2015 issue. Dr. Margaret Helder also writes for the Creation Science Dialogue ...

Book Reviews, Science - Creation/Evolution, Teen fiction

The Farm at the Center of the Universe

by Guillermo Gonzalez and Jonathan Witt 2024 / 167 pages Rating: Good/GREAT/Give An astrobiologist has written a young adult novel with an Intelligent Design agenda, so the obvious questions are: Can he tell a good story? Does he honor God? The answer to question #1 is yes, definitely, and to #2, no, or at least not nearly enough. While the story doesn't quite stand on its own, it'll grab anyone who has even the least bit of interest in learning about atheistic evolution's shortcomings. That's why every Christian teen should read this before they finish high school – undirected evolution is one of our culture's big lies (with fruit like euthanasia, abortion, homosexuality, etc.) so our students need to be ready to contend with it before they head to university or the workforce. And this novel format transforms what could have been a dry, dusty, academic debate into a much easier read. As the opening chapter begins, Isaac and his older cousin Charlie are driving to visit their grandparents' farm for a week. Isaac is a teen who wants to know why God let his dad die from cancer. Charlie is in his twenties, and is also Isaac's science teacher (that's what can happen in a small town) and he's a tough love type, heavy on the tough. As a Darwin devotee, he tells Isaac that his dad's death is proof there is no God, just an uncaring universe. But it turns out Grandpa is not only a more sympathetic listener, he's also a retired chemistry professor who has his own thoughts about how the universe came to be. He introduces Isaac to the "book of nature," which gives all sorts of hints as to what happened in the distant past. And he also highlights how brilliant design gives evidence of a Designer. This is both the book's strongest point and its weakest: it absolutely blows up evolution, but doesn't offer the true, biblical, six-day alternative. Still, it is a very helpful read, and fun too, especially when Grandpa debates Charlie. But Isaac isn't sure exactly who he is rooting for. "Part of him wanted Grandpa to be right about a Creator and Charlie to be wrong. Isaac didn't want his dad's death to just be random. If it were random, then there wouldn't even be a God for Isaac to be angry at for letting it happen. But another part of him saw the attraction of his cousin Charlie's view. The idea of a God so powerful He could create things like these microscopic machines that filled his body, but Who hadn't even intervened to help his dad, was oddly frightening. It was almost easier to just ignore a God like that – insist He isn't out there. The silent treatment. Punish Him for letting good people die. And, after all, maybe just maybe, there really wasn't a God and he could just forget about all the hard questions." That highlights some of the book's depth in raising the "problem of evil." Though it is a theological, rather than scientific objection, it is one evolutionists will frequently raise: if a good God exists, why does He let bad things happen? But this also highlights why this isn't a book teens should read alone, because the objection goes largely unanswered. Isaac rightly notes that his feelings have no impact on whether or not God exists. That'd be a scientific answer to this objection, and a good one to have in hand. But teens should know the biblical answer too, as God gave it to Job, or as Paul teaches in Romans 9:20-21: "Who are you, a human being, to talk back to God?" And this answer needs to be understood in the context of this same God sending His Son to humble Himself and die for us. He has shown He is loving, so while we don't understand all He does, we do know we can trust Him. That's an important point, but one parents will need to provide. (Greg Koukl approaches the problem of evil from another direction with his helpful "problem of good.") As Grandpa and Charlie continue with their back-and-forths, it gives them both a chance to pitch the arguments for and against Intelligent Design. I've followed this debate for decades, and I think this fiction format allows for one of the most concise, clear, and devastating evolutionary takedowns I've read. One of my favorite bits is when Isaac is worried his Grandpa might be exaggerating a bit, when he says the cell is like a miniature factory, because, after all, factories "were massive, complex buildings filled with machinery and workers who built things like cars and trucks and Grandpa's tractor." Grandpa's response? "...you're half right. Calling a cell a factory isn't quite accurate.... It's not quite a good comparison because I'm giving too much credit to man-made factories. A cell is more like, how can I put this? A factory that builds factories that builds factories. Or a robot that builds robots thats build robots. Do you know any man-made factories that do that?" Despite Charlie's best efforts, the legs are kicked out from under his Darwin idol. Caution But what's left standing in its place? Grandpa briefly gives a nod to the Bible, reading from the opening four verses of Psalm 19 about how "the heavens declare the glory of God." But he never addresses the opening chapters of Genesis. Grandpa doesn't believe in unguided evolution, but it becomes clear he also doesn't believe that God created in just six days. The problem here is akin to the situation we have with a Jordan Peterson or even a Pierre Poilievre. In our blind land, these one-eyed men see so much better than most. But they are still seeing only half as well as they could. The book of nature that Grandpa appeals to offers him only hints and clues as to the reality and nature of God, but God has revealed Himself much more clearly in another book, His Word. If only Grandpa was willing to rely on the clearest of the two books, instead of leaning on his own understanding (Prov. 3:5-6). Conclusion While every Christian teen should read this, none of them should read it alone. They should read The Farm at the Center of the Universe because of how it makes quick work of atheistic evolution. It'll prepare them for many of the attacks a university prof might muster. But while evolution-toppling accounts for about 99 percent of the novel's contents, there is also 1 percent that misdirects by leaving open the possibility that God could have created over billions of years. Are the authors proposing some sort of theistic evolution? That's never clearly stated, but it needs to have been ruled out. And since Farm is targeted to teens that 1 percent of misdirection shouldn't be overlooked. Teens should read it, but with a teacher or parent alongside....

Science - Creation/Evolution

My dog ate the evidence for evolution

3 evolutionary theories that are based on the lack of evidence for evolution ***** There are plenty of great, readable books that expose the many problems with evolutionary theory. These include Gordon Wilson’s Darwin’s Sandcastle, Change Laura Tan and Rob Stadler’s The Stairway to Life, and Marcos Eberlin’s Foresight: How the Chemistry of Life Reveals Planning and Purpose (just to name a few). But what about something shorter? My daughter is sometimes allowed to take a notecard full of key facts with her into a test. That’s what I was looking for: not a book-sized rebuttal, but something short enough to remember and use. That meant it couldn’t involve stacks of studies and countless facts to counter the evolutionists’ mountain of materials. Those facts can be had, and include revealing quotes, like this infamous admission by one of the world’s leading evolutionary biologists, Richard Lewontin (1929-2021). Back in 1997 he acknowledged that it wasn’t the evidence that drove evolutionists to accept evolution, but their ideology: “Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. “It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.” As impressive as that admission is, it’s just one guy. I was after something bigger, and also simpler – an argument where, even if I didn’t recall all the details, I might still be able to recall and relay the gist of it. What I found are three instances where evolutionists have accidentally acknowledged the lack of evidence for their theory. That acknowledgement comes, not from anything they’ve said, but instead by the “sub theories” they’ve offered to explain away the missing evidence. And what’s the evidence for these “sub theories”? Only that Evolution needs them to be true. This is akin to the student who, to explain why he hasn’t handed in his homework, claims his dog ate it, and when he’s asked for proof that his dog did indeed chow down on the assignment, he points to what’s missing: “My dog must have eaten it, because my homework’s not here, right?” As his teacher knows, the missing paper isn’t proof at all; the boy is simply presuming the very thing – that he actually wrote a paper – he was being asked to prove. And when he resorts to this kind of logical contortions, all it really evidences is that he has nothing better to offer. I think the same is true in the three evolutionary examples that follow. The most compelling evidence on offer is only the lengths evolutionists are willing to go to, to prop up their theory. Two pillars When it comes to the Theory of Evolution we all know the basics: once there was no life on this planet, but then simple cells formed in the primordial soup. After millions of years, and through the process of natural selection, these simple cells eventually spawned more complex cells and even more complex organisms, until finally we arrived. Greg Koukl has called this the “Molecule to Man Hypothesis.” And as Koukl also noted, if we’re going to take this nice story seriously, then evolutionists would have to prove two key things: 1) That life can come from non-life 2) That transitions from one kind to another do happen. These two ideas are so pivotal to evolutionary theory that if they can’t both be proven, then Evolution wouldn’t have a leg to stand on. 1. Life from non-life The Stanley Miller experiment (also known as the Miller-Urey experiment) consisted of a closed system with tubes connecting a heated water (ocean) chamber down below, with a gaseous chamber above, with sparks simulating early Earth lightning. One of the problems with the Stanley Miller experiment is that it turns out amino acids come in left-hand and right-hand varieties – mirror images of each other – and the experiment produced equal quantities of each. But our bodies don’t use both. Living creatures use the left-hand sort, and just as you can’t fit your right hand into a left glove, the cell can’t use right-handed amino acids – they aren’t a good fit. In fact, their presence can harm cells, and at a minimum, they would need to be sifted out. That means, even before the first cell ever formed, there would need to be some sort of mechanism present which could separate the righties from the lefties. That separation can be done in a lab through intelligent intervention. But who or what could do the selecting on early Earth after that lightning bolt blasts out that first batch of amino acids? Cells don’t exist yet, so there are no cellular mechanisms present to do the separating – there’s nothing in place. It’d be more accurate to say the Stanley Miller experiment didn’t produce building blocks of life so much as a muddled mess. The idea that life came from non-life used to be known as Spontaneous Generation. Maggots, it was thought, were spontaneously formed in dead rotting meat, and many believed that mice and flies were formed the same way. After a bit of investigation this was shown to be untrue. Today the idea persists under a different name: Abiogenesis (literally life from not life). Everyone knows maggots could never spontaneously form from non-living matter, but what if the organisms being formed were much simpler? What if it was only a single cell? And what if we gave it millions and millions of years to develop? Could it happen then? Well, if you read the scientific literature you’ll hear that yes, under those circumstances abiogenesis could happen, and indeed did happen. However, even though scientists are very sure it happened, even they’ll admit they haven’t worked out exactly how it happened. But isn’t evolution supposed to explain the “how” part? To be fair, they do have a variety of interesting ideas, but all of their proposals have serious problems. Let’s take a look at the best-known example – the Stanley Miller experiment in 1953. Though it happened 70 years ago, this experiment is still getting in the news today, because it was so influential. For decade upon decade the experiment has been cited in textbooks as proof that life could arise through a series of random chemical reactions. It’s so pivotal, that many a time it is presented as the proof for life from non-life, with no others given. So what happened in the experiment? Miller subjected a mixture of chemicals to an electric spark. The mixture of chemicals was supposed to mimic Earth’s early atmosphere and the electric spark was supposed to represent lightening. A week later, Miller discovered that some amino acids had been formed, which was significant because amino acids are a vital component of living cells. It should be noted though, that amino acids are not living themselves, but are merely a necessary component of cells. So they are a basic building block of life in much the same way that steel is a necessary building block for cars. These amino acids were presented as proof that life could arise from random chemical interactions. Consider for a moment how overstated this claim was. Miller hadn’t shown how life could be created from non-life, he had only shown how one necessary component might be formed. Going back to the car analogy, this is akin to someone zapping a rock of particularly pure ore and then declaring that the puddling blob of molten metal that results proves a car could come about by chance. Overstatement aside, there were other significant problems with the experiment and its results. For example, at one point many evolutionists thought that Earth’s early atmosphere was in some ways the opposite of what we have today: they believed back then it was hydrogen rich and lacking oxygen. Why? Well, at least in part because they needed it to be that way; oxygen would have interfered with the chemical reactions that they needed. And yes, to work, Miller’s experiment required a lot of hydrogen and absolutely no oxygen. But today even evolutionists will concede that our environment has always had oxygen in it. And that means that the amino acids could never have formed here on Earth via anything remotely resembling Miller’s method. The fix: extraterrestrial life from non-life So here’s where things get interesting. Put yourself into the shoes of an atheistic scientist who knows that Abiogenesis couldn’t have happened here on Earth. What “logical” conclusion will he be forced to draw? That’s right – life must have originated on some other planet first, and then come to Earth! This idea is known as Panspermia and while it’s not evolutionists’ consensus position, that it is seriously discussed at all only emphasizes the problem that evolutionists have with life arising here on Earth. The only “evidence” for Panspermia is that life exists here on Earth and it seems impossible for it to have started via evolutionary processes on Earth… therefore it must have started elsewhere. So Panspermia – this theory of an extraterrestrial origin for life – is actually an acknowledgement that evolutionists can’t explain how life could have arisen on Earth. 2. Transitions from one kind to another Things don’t get any easier for evolutionists when it comes to transitional forms. Evolutionary theory says that molecules evolved into man over millions of years and via millions of tiny changes. So when we start searching through the fossil record we should come across literally millions of transitional forms as one species turned into an entirely new one. Now, depending on which side of the creation/evolution debate you are talking to, the fossil record either doesn’t provide any examples of these transitional forms, or there are museums’ worth of such fossils. The Archaeopteryx has often been mentioned as a transition between dinosaurs and birds, and you can go to Creation.com or AnswersInGenesis.org, to learn about how it and other supposed transitional forms fails as a true transition. (The short summary: if birds evolved from dinosaurs or reptiles, then feathers must have evolved from scales and their wings must have evolved from arms. The Archaeopteryx has true wings and detailed advanced feathers, similar to those of bird species today. It only seems fair that when evolutionists are asked for transitional forms between reptiles and birds they should have to produce the half feather, half scale versions – the true transitional forms. The Archaeopteryx is at best a questionable example of an intermediary stage.) But what I want to highlight is the kind of argument evolutionists have to resort to if they acknowledge that there aren’t good examples of transitions. How would they explain away that lack of evidence? The fix: transitions few and far between Well, if someone absolutely refuses to believe in Creation, what “logical” conclusion will they be forced to come to? Then evolution must have happened in quick spurts, leaving few evidences of transitions in the fossil record! This theory is called Punctuated Equilibrium and was first proposed by Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge in 1972. Again, this theory is not based on the evidence, but rather the lack of it: we’re missing the transitional forms that would be needed to prove Evolution, but since Evolution must be true – that presumption is beyond question – then Evolution must not need transitional forms all that badly after all. Punctuated Equilibrium is an acknowledgement that evolutionists don’t have the abundance of transitional forms they expected to find. It’s also worth noting that until Gould and Eldredge, the lack of transitional forms was not really acknowledged. As Gould put it in 1977, “The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of palaeontology.” Creationists were pointing out the lack of transitional forms long before Gould and Eldredge…but secular scientists don’t listen to creationists. 3. The Anthropic Principle At this point we should see the beginnings of a pattern in the Evolution/Creation debate. And the Anthropic Principle only makes that pattern all the more evident. The phrase “Anthropic Principle” was first coined to describe the amazing way in which our universe seemed to be designed specifically for human life. For us to live here on Earth it seems we need physical constants, laws, and properties to fall within certain narrow ranges. In Designer Universe: Intelligent Design and the Existence of God, authors Jimmy H. Davis and Harry L. Poe give these three examples: Protons and electrons have to have just the right charge. Atoms are composed of two charged particles: a positively charged proton and a negatively charged electron. The proton is 1,836 times larger than the electron and yet these two particles have exactly equal charges. If the two charges weren’t exactly equal in magnitude, if say, there was a charge difference of only one part per billion, all the pieces of your body would fly apart. Our Sun has to be just the right type of star. The Sun is not a typical star, being bigger than 95 per cent of all other stars. These smaller stars aren’t as hot so a planet would have to orbit much closer to stay warm enough. But at closer distances the rotation of a planet becomes locked so that one side always faces the star. This would cause one side of the planet to freeze and the other side to burn (sort of like our moon, or like Mercury). Additionally, our sun is a single star. 70 percent of stars are estimated to be binary or multiple star systems. It is hard to imagine how habitable planets could exist in such systems. Jupiter is just what we need, just where we need it. Jupiter turns out to be in just the right orbit and the right distance away to protect Earth from bombardment by killer asteroids or comets. Jupiter’s large size and high gravity makes it act as an asteroid and comet catcher. Some other stars have Jupiter-like planets orbiting them, but in most cases they are either in the wrong orbit, or are too near the sun, or may be spiraling inward toward the sun. While our Jupiter is necessary for life on Earth all the other “Jupiters” detected so far would prevent life from living in those systems. These are just a few examples of the anthropic (man-centered) nature of our universe. When you add all the factors together that would have to be just so for life to exist in our universe it turns out the odds against life are astronomical. The odds are so amazing even evolutionists are astounded. This makes the Anthropic Principle a powerful piece of evidence for a universe Designer. The fix: An infinite multiverse But imagine you are an atheist and evolutionary scientist who has been confronted with the Anthropic Principle and the astronomical odds against life in this universe. What logical conclusion are you going to be forced to draw if you want to remain an atheist? That’s right – if the odds are infinitely stacked against life in any one universe, wouldn’t the odds even out considerably if there was an infinite number of universes? This universe would then just happen to be that one universe in a million billion where the odds all worked out in our favor. This multiverse theory has become a staple in Star Trek and Marvel superhero movies, but once again there is no actual evidence for it. None at all. It’s another evolutionary story used to fill in for a lack of evidence. Thus the Multiverse Theory is an acknowledgment of just how implausible it is that an undesigned universe would be so well-suited for life. One last example I'll include one bonus example of an evolutionary theory based on a lack of evidence: the Oort Cloud. This is a theorized cloud of icy planetesimals that are said to be on the outer fringes of our Solar System. This cloud is beyond the limits of our current observational technology, so how do we know it is there? Because evolutionists need it to be. We still have comets, and if our Solar System is 4.6 billion years old, as the evolutionists presume, then any icy comets passing around the Sun should long ago have melted away. So, the continuing existence of comets would seem to be evidence of a Solar System that is much much younger – just thousands, not billions of years old.. But, no, evolutionists see them instead as evidence of a comet breeding ground way, way out there, where billions of icy chunks will sometimes bump into each other in just such a fashion as to direct an ice ball inward towards the Sun, starting a new comet. So the evidence for the Oort Cloud is lacking, and based only on the fact that evolution needs it to exist. Conclusion I haven’t tried here to provide facts to counter the evidence for evolution. Instead what we’ve explored is how evolutionists themselves have highlighted the lack of evidence for their theory by coming up with theories to explain away that lack. Evolution’s two pillars – life from non-life, and species’ transition to new species – were supposed to have lots of proof to back them up. But evolutionists have had to come up with “sub theories” – Panspermia and Punctuated Equilibrium – to explain why that proof is missing. And these sub theories are themselves supported, not by evidence, but by the lack of it. When Christian scientists pointed out the amazing odds against a universe supporting life, evolutionists answered this evidence with another unsupported story – the Multiple Universe Theory. Finally, the Oort Cloud is yet another example of evolutionists, instead of relying on evidence, turning to stories that already assume Evolution is true. Reflection questions What are the two pillars of evolution? Explain "Abiogensis." Is it possible? Explain "Panspermia." What does the theory of Panspermia show? What problem is there with the theory of transitional forms? What is meant with "Punctuated Equilibrium”? Why have evolutionists come up with the idea? What is the "Anthropic (man-centered) Principle”? What is the "Multiple Universe Theory"? A version of this article was first published in the January 2003 issue under the title “The Science is underwhelming.”...

Science - Creation/Evolution

Is creation worth fighting about?

Billions of years, or just six days, do we need to care? ***** Does it matter? Of all the questions in the creation vs. theistic evolution debate, whether the debate even matters may be the biggest, and more important than how long it took, what method God used, or how to understand the opening chapters of Genesis. Christians understand we shouldn’t bicker with our brothers and sisters over minor matters – Jesus told us: “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called sons of God” (Matt. 5:9). God doesn’t want us to make big out of little. He doesn’t want us to be quarrelsome, nitpicking all sorts of fights. However, God also warns against making little of big. There is a time and place for fighting, and we mustn’t be like the watchman on the wall who saw the danger coming and stayed quiet (Ezek. 33:6-8). It is a con to say “peace, peace” when war is at the door (Ezek. 13:10-16, Jer. 6:14). Now, in the creation vs. theistic evolution debate, there are a lot of Christians who aren’t prepared to pick a side. They aren’t loyal to 6 days or billions of years, perhaps believing they need a theology or science degree to be qualified to take a stand. They don’t want to be forced to pick one team over the other. However, when the question is “Does this matter?” then not picking a side is still picking a side. Refusing to choose is only legitimate if this is no big thing. So is it really no big thing… or is it huge? To answer that question, let’s look at both sides. Side 1: Who matters more than how Among the “can’t we all get along” folks, the focus is on just how much agreement there is between 6-day creationists and theistic evolutionists. Both acknowledge the God of the Bible as our Creator. We all agree He made us, and that His creative genius is evident in the whole of the astonishing universe around us. Whether we’re looking at the Sun that warms us from 150 million kilometers away, or the chubby toes of our newest grandbaby, we’re all in awe of what He hath wrought. And isn’t that basis enough for fellowship? The argument here is that Who did it matters much more than how He did it, or how long He took. Who matters more than how. As long as Christians all give God the credit, then isn’t everything else incidental? Side 2: How tells us all about Who On the other side there is a ready concession that Who does indeed matter more than how. After all, God matters more than His creation. But how He started it all isn’t incidental. It matters too, because how God chose to create reveals God’s character. How He created tells us about Who God is. So yes, both sides agree it is the God of the Bible who created, but that isn’t as significant as it might first seem. Consider the Muslims, who also declare that the God of the Bible created. And they say their Allah has no Son. That means their biblical creator god, isn’t actually God. Orthodox Jews worship the God who created, but deny Jesus is God. Mormons worship a biblical god who created and even has a son…but he also has a wife. And his son is said to be the brother of Satan. Their creator god is not our Creator God either. It is possible, then, to worship such a distorted image of the biblical Creator that you aren’t actually worshiping God at all. This issue is that big. The argument here is that how God created is an issue worth investigating because, in His chosen means, God is teaching us about Himself – God reveals Himself not only in His Word but also in His creation (Ps. 19:1-4). As Paul puts it in Romans 1:20: “…His invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made.” The how matters because it tells us all about Who. What do the two creation accounts tell us about God? What then, do the two different creation accounts teach us about God? Creationists worship a God whose power was such that He spoke into existence something from nothing, and made a universe appear in just 6 days. Thus the famed chicken and egg dilemma is no dilemma at all for creationists, who know the chicken sprung into being fully formed on Day 5. And while pagans worship the Sun, God showed His great power by creating light (Day 1) before even creating a light source (the Sun on Day 4). Both marriage and the two sexes, male and female, were created in this 6-day period. God affirmed again and again that what He made was “good” and, upon completion on Day 6, even “very good.” What is good? The perfect sinless world was good. And it was good, not only as it was on Day 6, but even as it was being made through Days 1-5 – God found the process good too. Creationists know that death appeared as a result of Man’s disobedience – we broke the world. But there is hope; this enemy, death, has been conquered by Christ’s perfect obedience. And it is through Jesus that the world will be made good once again. The god of theistic evolution took billions of years to form the universe. During that process neither the chicken nor the egg was first: they were preceded by millions of years of incremental evolution that necessarily involved a red-in-tooth-and-claw, survival-of-the-fittest, where the weak were killed off and the strong went on to breed. Death didn’t simply precede Man’s fall into sin, it preceded Man by millions of years. And rather than being the enemy, death was a key tool in God’s creative work. Marriage and gender weren’t always so, but evolved at some point, and who knows but that they may be evolving still. And it is this eons-long process of constant change – with its refining diseases, innumerable mutations, repeated disasters, and, yes, death, death, and more death – that God was calling good and very good in the opening chapters of Genesis. The implications extend to the present, where creationists can turn to Scripture for guidance on issues like homosexuality, marriage, and gender confusion. We can learn what is best for men and women by seeing how God made us at the beginning. But if we evolved, and that process was good, why couldn’t we be evolving still? Our forebearers, when once they were single-celled, weren’t divvied into two genders – that only came later. So if we could go from none to two genders, why can’t we evolve new additions like ze and zir? And why would we presume that marriage has to be between just the first two genders? What answer does theistic evolution have to the craziness of our age? Does theistic evolution present a false god? Thus the god of theistic evolution bears little resemblance to God of the Bible. But does that mean theistic evolutionists are without hope? Are they worshipping a false god? Thankfully, it is not our brilliance that saves us, but God’s grace. And that’s why, even as some theistic evolutionists worship a god of their own invention, we can hope and pray and expect that many others still worship the true God, though in their inconsistency. They might say they believe in billions of years of death, but their faith is still in the God who declared death an enemy and conquered it. They may doubt the accuracy of some of Jesus’s words – how he spoke of a literal Adam and Eve created in the beginning (Mark 10:6, Matt. 19:4) – and yet cling to His promise that there are many rooms in His Father’s house (John 14:2). They may mangle the first few chapters of Genesis, but then take God at His Word for the whole of the rest of the Bible. That doesn’t make this any less of a big deal. Over a lifetime people do work out their inconsistencies. Many theistic evolutionists will either come to acknowledge God’s Word as authoritative from beginning to end, or they’ll subject the rest of God’s Word to further review and revision by outside authorities. It’s no slippery slope fallacy to say that if you scratch a professing Christian who’s pro-choice or LGBT-affirming, underneath you’ll find an evolutionist. Conclusion Like Allah without a son, the god of theistic evolution offers no hope. In seeing billions of years of death as good and very good, what need would such a god even have to send his son to die for us? Thankfully, the one true God did send His Son, so we can have not only hope but an assurance that our sins are paid for, death is defeated, sickness will end, and all of creation will be redeemed. The creation debate isn’t one any Christian can avoid – it is of the first importance, because it is about Who God is....

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ICR’s impactful half century

A look at the Institute for Creation Research (ICR), its work, and its resources ***** [caption id="attachment_28271" align="alignright" width="...

Science - Creation/Evolution

Big Bang Christianity?

Can we fit the Big Bang into the Bible? **** Cosmology is the most important subject in the world. Why? Because it is the story of the world: its...

Science - Creation/Evolution

How does the world explain the origin of life?

or, highlighting the problems with a Naturalistic explanation ***** Naturalism can be defined best by what it doesn’t believe: in the Supernatural; it denies the existence of God. That means that all naturalists are left with to explain all that exists, why we exist, and how we came to be is Nature and natural laws. And that presents them with a problem. Nature cannot provide us with an explanation for abiogenesis – life coming from non-life. You don’t have to take my word for it – this is also acknowledged as a foundational problem by many scientists, sometimes explicitly, and sometimes only by the irrational arguments they’ll offer as an alternative to acknowledging God. In what follows I’m going to share both the publicly acknowledged problems with naturalistic abiogenesis, as well as some of the theories the world has proposed to address those problems. Both are revealing. The RNA problem In paleontologist Peter Ward’s book Life As We Do Not Know It, he addresses how RNA (or ribonucleic acid) – because it is simpler than DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) – is theorized as an evolutionary step in the development of DNA. But, Ward notes: Amazingly, one of the major criticisms of RNA life…the hypothesized last common ancestor of all DNA life, is that it probably did not exist because it would have been impossible to build RNA through natural chemical processes. Paul Davies notes: .… ”without a trained organic chemist on hand to supervise, nature would be struggling to make RNA from a dilute soup under any plausible prebiotic condition.” Or, as organic chemist Clemens Richert wrote in the Dec 12, 2018 edition of Nature Communications: Experimentalists in the field of prebiotic chemistry strive to re-enact what may have happened when life arose from inanimate material. How often human intervention was needed to obtain a specific result in their studies is worth reporting. When Diego Maradona was asked about having used his hand to score a goal in the quarter-finals of the 1986 soccer World Cup, he initially claimed that there had been divine intervention, and the term “Hand of God Goal” was coined. – There had been manual intervention, and there had been an understandable interest of the player not to admit it. – Organic chemists, if not all experimentalists in the field of prebiotic chemistry, are faced with a similar dilemma. We do our best to perform experiments that we believe re-enact possible steps of prebiotic evolution, but we know that we need to intervene manually to obtain meaningful results. Further, the ideal experiment does not involve any human intervention. He also frankly said: Understandably, this has drawn the ire of those who feel that no or only minimal intervention is allowed for a process to be called prebiotically plausible. After all, it is not easy to see what replaced the flasks, pipettes and stir bars of a chemistry lab during prebiotic evolution, let alone the hands of the chemist who performed the manipulations. (And yes, most of us are not comfortable with the idea of divine intervention in this context.) Whether divine intervention or human intervention, there’s a conscious entity doing the intervening. So even if our friends were to succeed in creating life in the lab, that would only demonstrate that intelligence and deliberate intent are needed to create a living thing. I'm glad this issue is explicitly acknowledged. Every honest Origin of Life (OOL) researcher will agree fully. It’s one thing for highly trained chemists to create RNA in a lab, but another thing entirely for unaided Nature to accomplish the same. Especially considering that Nature is not trying to make RNA, and has no intention of doing so. The multiverse “solution” But, if the researcher is committed to Naturalism and atheism, then he has no choice but to maintain a strong (and unrealistic) faith that Nature did it anyway, even though he knows it’s not possible. One such researcher, Eugene Koonin, resorted to “an infinite multiverse” as a potential way out of this problem. This is the view that supposedly, anything that can happen will happen in an infinite multiverse, and this would also include the chance origin of life. In a 2011 book, The Logic of Chance: the Nature and Origin of Biological Evolution, he added this: The origin of life is one of the hardest problems in all of science, but it is also one of the most important. Origin-of-life research has evolved into a lively, interdisciplinary field, but other scientists often view it with skepticism and even derision. This attitude is understandable and, in a sense, perhaps justified, given the “dirty” rarely mentioned secret: Despite many interesting results to its credit, when judged by the straightforward criterion of reaching (or even approaching) the ultimate goal, the origin of life field is a failure – we still do not have even a plausible coherent model, let alone a validated scenario, for the emergence of life on Earth. Certainly, this is due not to a lack of experimental and theoretical effort, but to the extraordinary intrinsic difficulty and complexity of the problem. A succession of exceedingly unlikely steps is essential for the origin of life, from the synthesis and accumulation of nucleotides to the origin of translation; through the multiplication of probabilities, these make the final outcome seem almost like a miracle. “Almost like a miracle” is a frank admission of what OOL entails. Nevertheless, in the same book, Koonin continued to cling to the multiverse hypothesis as a guaranteed solution to the problems involved with OOL. Here’s the summary of Koonin’s argument, in his own words: Simply put, the probability of the realization of any scenario permitted by the conservation laws in an infinite universe (and, of course, in the multiverse) is, exactly, one.... Thus, spontaneous emergence of complex systems that would have to be considered virtually impossible in a finite universe becomes not only possible but inevitable under MWO … What he’s saying is that if you have an infinite number of universes then anything, no matter how improbable, not only can happen, but will happen… in some universe somewhere within the multiverse. Including naturalistic abiogenesis. According to Koonin (and some “Many Worlds” physicists who agree with him), in some universe somewhere right now, there’s a guy who’s a practicing neurosurgeon, a janitor, and the lead actor in a recent blockbuster movie – simultaneously. He owns 271 cars, and is married to his high school sweetheart (who happens to be a princess from a tribe of highly-advanced super-beings). Their son adopted a pet chimpanzee named Wilson, while their twin daughters are ballistic missile experts in the local galactic army. No, this isn’t a hypothetical story I just made up. Or, rather it is, but according to Koonin’s logic these things are actually going on right now as we speak, in some universe somewhere. The pet chimp is also very clever, and has learned how to fly a helicopter, among other things. Now think about this trained monkey trying to synthesize life in a chemistry lab. What are the odds of him succeeding?? Exactly. But even the monkey has a better chance than a prebiotic Nature which has no intent or purpose whatsoever. In any case, simply postulating an infinite multiverse in an attempt to overcome the problem does not help – Koonin doesn’t put forth any mechanism whereby life could be naturally synthesized, but just makes the bold assertion that it must certainly happen given a multiverse. Time is no solution Another factor that is usually seen as a possible helper for abiogenesis is Time. If Nature has billions of years to work with, she should be able to eventually get the right combination to the safe, right? No, not at all. That would be akin to claiming a blind engineer could invent a BMW, or a Model-T Ford, given billions of years to live and try. It’s clear why time isn’t the problem. The blind engineer actually has better odds in this analogy than Nature does, since he at least knows what he’s attempting to accomplish. The language/information problem The origin of life gets all the more complicated when we realize it also necessitates the origin of information, and the origin of a language to convey that information. I could employ many quotes here concerning what information is, but I like how physicist and information theorist Hubert Yockey put it in this simple statement: The meaning, if any, of words, that is, a sequence of letters, is arbitrary. It is determined by the natural language and is not a property of the letters or their arrangement ... For example, "O singe fort!" has no meaning as a sentence in English, although each is an English word, yet in German it means, "O sing on!" and in French it means "O strong monkey". Like all messages, the life message is non-material but has an information content measurable in bits and bytes. Or, as chemistry professor Michael Polanyi already noted way back in 1958, in his book Personal Knowledge: Information in the DNA could no more be reduced to the chemicals than could the ideas in a book be reduced to the ink and paper: something beyond physics and chemistry is encoded in DNA. The origin of encoded genetic information is also assumed to have just happened miraculously under the multiverse scenario. Information here isn’t just the physical nucleobases, or even their sophisticated ordering alone, but the ribosomes’ understanding of the language, and their ability to decode and use those instructions to build the specified proteins. And then we have multiple regulatory genes in addition, which are all information networks. There’s actually a $10 million challenge out there still ongoing, for anyone who can demonstrate a set of coded information that didn’t originate from a mind, i.e., that can be spontaneously generated by Nature. The judges include well-respected biologists George Church and Denis Noble, and the Royal Society has also gotten involved recently. No one has claimed the prize (find out more in the 2 minute video below). The complexity problem Most of us don’t actually know, much less appreciate, the number of things that need to be done in order to arrive at the “simplest” cell. Nature has no goal or aim or plan to create a cell. The fact that highly trained, highly intelligent chemists still can’t do it, speaks volumes. So how is it that some lay naturalists and even some with degrees think all that’s needed is lots of time, and then Nature will eventually produce a living cell? The sheer amount of intellectual effort that goes into OOL research is more than impressive, and we still can’t make life ourselves – we can’t pull it off. But a mindless prebiotic Nature with no intention of creating a cell somehow did? Consider the ingredients needed to make a basic candy. Here’s the list for Skittles: Sugar Corn syrup Hydrogenated palm kernel oil Citric acid Tapioca dextrin Modified corn starch Natural and artificial flavors Colors (Red 40 Lake, Titanium Dioxide, Red 40, Yellow 5 Lake, Yellow 5, Yellow 6 Lake, Yellow 6, Blue 2 Lake, Blue 1, Blue 1 Lake) Sodium citrate Carnauba wax Now consider just a miniscule piece of a Skittle. Would Nature alone be able to synthesize and assemble the ingredients needed to make a tiny piece of a Skittle? No. Never. Not in ten billion years! But many adults believe Nature somehow synthesized and assembled everything that’s needed to make a living, metabolizing, self-replicating cell. The extraterrestrials “solution” But what if we were to claim that life on earth resulted from panspermia – that Extraterrestrials (ETs) seeded the first life on Earth? This is indeed what some among our SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) friends propose. Well, then they’d have the problem of explaining how Nature produced those ETs. As Richard Dawkins wrote in The God Delusion: …there are very probably alien civilizations that are superhuman, to the point of being god-like in ways that exceed anything a theologian could possibly imagine. Their technical achievements would seem as supernatural to us as ours would seem to a Dark Age peasant transported to the twenty-first century…In what sense would they be superhuman but not supernatural? In a very important sense…the crucial difference between gods and god-like extraterrestrials lies not in their properties but in their provenance. Entities that are complex enough to be intelligent are products of an evolutionary process. No matter how god-like they may seem when we encounter them, they didn’t start that way…They probably owe their existence to a (perhaps unfamiliar) version of Darwinian evolution. Saying ETs put the first life on Earth still keeps us inside the box of Naturalism. And then Nature still has to create and evolve the ETs, so the abiogenesis problem – how life can ever have come from non-life – remains. Then there’s at least one scientist in peer-reviewed publication who also thinks panspermia by ETs isn’t a good enough proposal. Brig Klyce concedes there’s one of two possibilities: “supernatural intervention or intelligence” (aka God) or that cellular life has existed from eternity This concession appeared in a paper (“Cause of Cambrian Explosion – Terrestrial or Cosmic?” in the August 2018 edition of the journal Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology) that Klyce co-authored with more than a dozen other scientists. He believed “that the complexity and sophistication of life cannot originate (from non-biological) matter under any scenario, over any expanse of space and time, however vast.” But if that’s so, then how is life here? Rejecting the possibility that God was involved, Klyce then proposes this: A strictly scientific way around this dilemma would be to amend or tweak the big bang theory to allow for life from the eternal past. After all, the big bang theory is relatively new and still occasionally amended. Therefore, it seems unready to forever overrule the unviolated principle and consistent evidence that life comes from life. Yes, that’s an actual suggestion from a peer-reviewed secular scientific paper – that life started here from a universe before the big bang. So either God did it, or self-replicating microbes have always existed. The difference between the two proposals is that: God is an eternal Supernatural This is logically consistent and plausible, and even a metaphysical necessity to avoid an infinite regress of causes. On the other hand, proposing an eternity of replicating microbes, each of which had a beginning and an end, is trying to say that abiogenesis never happened because there was no “first ever microbe.” But things that have a beginning still need to have an explanation for that beginning. Trying to hide that behind an infinite regression isn’t an answer to this problem. Conclusion For decades, highly trained experts have been striving to create life from scratch, using the raw materials found in nature. They have yet to succeed. Even if they did eventually succeed somehow, that would only demonstrate that a high level of intelligent input is needed to create biological life; which is what we’ve been saying the evidence has always shown. Proposing an infinite multiverse where “anything that can happen will happen” is an unsubstantiated assertion with no empirical evidence whatsoever, and doesn’t offer a mechanism for abiogenesis or even address the issue that Nature has no intent to create life. The suggestion that microbial life has always existed and self-replicated is a logical absurdity, since there can be no such thing as an infinite regress of causes. Thus in the question of God vs Naturalism, there is no question as to which answer is absurd. Kenechi Okoli is a Christian who loves science, and in his free time he enjoys reading, music, and cooking. While he lived for over a decade in the US, he now resides in Nigeria....

Science - Creation/Evolution

Masters of disguise!

“Poppa! Have you seen the Mimic octopus?” My oldest granddaughter’s question was lit with excitement. I had been mentioning a presentation I was working on featuring animals with incredible design features, highlighting that some of them were incredibly difficult for evolutionists even to begin to explain. When I mentioned squid and octopus camouflage, her question above popped out. My response of “I don’t think so” initiated a frantic scramble for a nearby phone and a hasty search on YouTube. What I watched for the next minute and forty-nine seconds1 left me with my mouth agape and led eventually to a salt-water aquarium in my home with one of those very creatures inhabiting it. (It’s amazing what homeschoolers learn about!) Like a second skin Even the “average” octopus species is truly incredible, capable of rapid color changes a chameleon could only dream of. Like a pixelated video screen, flashes of light can erupt from their skin surface, sometimes pulsating and other times creating waves of shadowy patterns that make them almost impossible to spot along the ocean floor among its corals and sea plants. They are capable of texture changes to their skin that are downright eerie, which means not only can they simulate the color of objects in their surroundings but also the shape of them to an extent. Rather than describing these creatures’ sophistication and complexity as simply a reflection of the brilliance and glory of their Creator, some naturalists have attempted to explain some of their intricacies as being alien in origin. So “advanced” are these creatures’ abilities (and yet so early do they appear in the evolutionary timeline, supposedly 296 million years ago2), some evolutionary scientists have seriously suggested they perhaps had biological input from alien lifeforms at some point in their “evolution”!3 The mimic octopus’s most impressive copying act is its take on the flounder. It even undulates across the ocean floor just like the founder does. Why do you act that way? But as amazing as “regular” octopi are, the mimic octopus is in a class by itself: it’s the first living thing ever observed to impersonate the shape and behavior of other aquatic species along with color and texture changes. Discovered in 1998 off the coast of the island of Sulawesi (Indonesia), it’s been spotted now as far as the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, so may be more widespread than originally thought.4 Many of the creatures it imitates are venomous, so it fools predators into thinking they are encountering a dangerous adversary rather than a sly cephalopod. The exact number of creatures it’s able to mimic is unknown, but watching video of one hide its body and six legs in a hole, change the color of its two exposed arms to the distinctive black and light stripes of the banded sea snake, and then waving them in opposite directions to impersonate a striped serpent is unnerving to say the least! Known “avatars” the mimic imitates include flatfish, crabs, jellyfish, mantis shrimp, stingrays, lionfish, and sand anemones. The uncanny thing about these octopi is that they seem to be able to make accurate and intelligent decisions as to what creature they should imitate depending on the environment they are in or the predators they encounter. For example, because damselfish are hunted by banded sea snakes, mimics often adopt their “snakelike” form, color, and behavior when they encounter damselfish to frighten them away. When traveling across a seabed with little cover, mimics may transform their tentacles to look like the poisonous barbed fins of a lionfish and imitate its pulsing, distinct movement so as to ward off predators. The mimic octopus will burrow down, leaving just two of its tentacles visible, to do a decent impression of the banded snake eel, on the right. The quick-change artist When considering this creature’s day-to-day activity, you quickly realize it has several sophisticated abilities that depend on accessing and activating tremendous amounts of coded, genetic information. Sensor array: Obviously, the mimic must be capable of monitoring and analyzing its current environment constantly. Response analysis: It must also have the ability to determine an appropriate response(s) needed in different environments or when encountering specific predators it interacts with. (I.e., if A, then B; if X, then Y, etc.). Catalog of aliases: Once a specific creature to mimic has been decided upon, it must then access other detailed “files” for all of the abilities, features, and behaviors of the different creatures it can possibly mimic. Immediate response: The mimic’s systems must then correctly activate commands to alter its shape, color, texture, and movement, which of course requires a body that has the capability to expand or contract, become smooth or rough, rigid or soft, multi-textured, multi-colored and/or precisely patterned almost instantaneously. The pic on the left doesn’t capture the mimic's best lionfish imitation but gives a feel for how it can masquerade as the poison-tipped predator on the right. Meet “Morph” I named my own mimic, procured from a local pet store, Morph. Morph lived for eight months, but he exhibited spectacular behavior and executed many brilliant performances during that time, with nightly “light shows” being commonplace. Although very shy for the first three days I had him, he became more comfortable, and I was able to hand-feed him shrimp for his supper eventually. Because octopus aquariums are typically a one-species environment (either the octopus eats whatever else is in there or they get eaten by what is), he only “mimicked” once, as there was nothing in the tank to react to. Upon entering my tank for the very first time, Morph impersonated a jellyfish, slowly pulsed down, and then switched to his regular form once he had cover. This made sense, because upon entry he was at the top of the tank with nowhere to hide and didn't know if there were predators in that environment. Note that his mimicry involved imitating another creature not immediately present in his environment (rather than simply blending into the background), which leads to the question, how did he “know” what to do? Mimic octopi are only thought to live nine months (the longest-living octopus live for a maximum of five years), so scientists don’t believe they are simply observing and copying other creatures’ behavior; they are born with it. Which means all of that programming is already present and passed on to each subsequent generation. But how could that have come about? Masterful design Consider this: If a person today were to create and program a mechanism that could perform half the functions this creature does, they would likely receive all of the accolades the scientific community could possibly bestow upon a human being, and probably hail them as the most brilliant scientist on the planet. Their creation would be highly esteemed as an incredible example of intelligent design. However, despite the obvious evidence of design in nature, naturalists seem bound to evolutionary interpretations. One evolutionary blogger from Nature.com tried explaining the mimic this way: "In this species we see the evolutionary 'perfect storm' in which a species with flexibility in their skin and body shape is consistently exposed to a predator-rich environment that contains toxic or venomous species such as soles, lionfish and banded sea snakes. This combination provides both the selective pressures and the opportunity to these otherwise vulnerable animals to evolve into the world's greatest masters of disguise!"5 But that isn’t a real explanation of anything. It’s like saying because evolution is true, evolution happened. But design requires a designer, and programming requires a programmer. Natural selection or genetic mutation are simply not sufficient explanations for what we see in creatures like the mimic octopus. And despite evolutionists concocting many “just so” stories to attempt to explain how so many precisely coordinated and irreducibly complex mechanisms could have arisen in creatures without a designer, for those with eyes to see, the conclusion is obvious. "But ask the beasts, and they will teach you; the birds of the heavens, and they will tell you; or the bushes of the earth, and they will teach you; and the fish of the sea will declare to you. Who among all these does not know that the hand of the Lord has done this?" (Job 12:7-9) The master designer, the God of the Bible, created these along with all of the other magnificent sea creatures on day five of creation. As much as evolutionists try to mimic God’s creative power through the story of evolution, creation declares its Creator, even in an insignificant octopus! Be sure to check out the 3-minute video below. Footnotes 1 Most intelligent Mimic Octopus in the world, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-LTWFnGmeg 2 Rachel Nuwer, “Ten Curious Facts About Octopuses,” Smithsonian Magazine, October 31, 2013, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/ten-curious-facts-about-octopuses-7625828. 3 E. Steele, et al., “Cause of Cambrian Explosion—Terrestrial or cosmic?” Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology136 (2018):3–23, doi:10.1016/j.pbiomolbio.2018.03.004. 4 “The Mimic Octopus,” National Geographic, www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/invertebrates/m/mimic-octopus. 5 Sarah Jane Alger, “The Mimic Octopus: Master of Disguise,” October 28, 2013, https://www.nature.com/scitable/blog/accumulating-glitches/the_mimic_octopus_master_of. Picture credits from top to bottom: VelvetFish iStockPhoto; VelvetFish iStockPhoto.com; FtLaud Shutterstock.com; Stephan Kerkhofs, MariusLtu, Jenhung Huang, and Vitalii Kalutskyi, all iStockPhoto.com This article was written by Calvin Smith , is published with permission, and originally appeared at https://answersingenesis.org/blogs/calvin-smith/2020/09/07/masters-disguise....

Documentary, Movie Reviews, Science - Creation/Evolution

Evolution's Achilles' Heels

Documentary 2014 / 96 minutes Rating: 10/10 I’ve watched this at least 5 times now, and many sections many more times than that. This is the best, most succinct, most content-dense, anti-evolution presentation I’ve ever seen. That said, my first go-through didn’t leave me all that impressed. I was watching it while doing some paperwork, not giving it my full attention, and what I saw just seemed to be a bunch of interviews, lots of talking heads. It didn’t seem all that interesting. But when I gave it another go and actually paid attention…. Whoah! What the folks at Creation Ministries International have done here is, in one hour-and-a-half presentation, boiled down all their very best arguments into the shortest possible form. That’s why I’ve watched it so many times already – I had to keep stopping, rewinding, and then listening to sections again because so much of what these interviewees say in just a sentence or two is something that others have written articles and even whole books on. For example, here’s a line from Dr. Donald Batten: “The survival of the fittest does not explain the arrival of the fittest.” At first listen, this struck me as a great turn of a phrase, and it certainly is. But let’s hit the pause button and just think about all that’s being said here in just this one line. Survival of the fittest (AKA natural selection) is supposed to explain how species adapt and change: those with advantageous mutations will prosper, while those without will eventually die off. But "survival of the fittest" is a selective process – it picks the best out of the group. How then, does it work before there is a group to pick the best and brightest from? Natural selection is a key mechanism for evolution, but it doesn’t offer any explanation for how animals come to be in the first place! This one, short, ever so quotable line points out a gigantic problem with evolutionary theory! In addition to Dr. Batten, the documentary features 8 other Ph.D. scientists, and together they highlight, as the title puts it, Evolution’s Achilles’ Heels. They cover a wide range of problems, grouped under categories like the Fossil Record, Genetics, Natural Selection, Cosmology and Radiometric Dating. I really can’t praise it highly enough: from beginning to end this is brilliant, and as good an introduction to the problems with Evolutionary theory as you will ever find. If an evolutionist friend was willing to watch one video of my choosing, this is definitely the one I would pick. And if you like the documentary be sure to track down the book of the same name which, while also concise, has the space to dig even deeper. You can watch the trailer below. ...

Science - Creation/Evolution

Biomimicry recognizes the genius (but not the Genius) behind the wonders of creation

A few years back, Vox media reported on the discipline of biomimicry, which encourages engineering teams to include a biologist to help them solve problems by seeing what already works well in the natural world. It’s a return to copying designs that the Creator put into place thousands of years ago. In Christophe Hawbursin’s Vox article “The man-made world is horribly designed. But copying nature helps.” the illustration he gives of how biomimicry helps is the Japanese Shinkansen Bullet Train. At 170 mph, whenever it exited a tunnel, it caused a sonic boom that annoyed people up to 400 meters away. To get a quieter, faster, and more efficient train, an engineering team was created, headed by Ejii Nakatsu, who was also an avid birdwatcher. It turns out that bird connection was key – the team based components of the redesigned bullet train on characteristics of three different birds: The owl: the pantograph – the rig that connects the train to the electric wires above – was modeled after the owl’s feathers, reducing noise by using similar serrations and curvature The Adelie penguin: the penguin’s smooth body inspired the pantograph’s supporting shaft to provide lower wind resistance The kingfisher: the kingfisher’s unique no-splash beak was copied for the front of the engine By copying designs from creation, the new train became 10% faster, 15% more efficient, and the decibel level was significantly lowered. Other examples of biomimicry include studying sharkskin to learn to repel bacteria, and studying the self-organization of ants to enable autonomous cars to communicate with one another. Biomimicry also studies the eco-system to create a circular economy where there are no wasteful byproducts. And recently, scientists have begun a website at AskNature.org where people all over the world can match problems with solutions advised by “nature.” There is an irony in how Janine Benyus, the author who popularized the term biomimicry, recognizes that the design found in Creation far exceeds that of Mankind’s best minds. And yet she doesn’t see a better Mind behind any of it, choosing instead to credit these wonders to mindless evolution working over the last 3.8 billions years. As the apostle Paul might put it, she worships and serves “created things rather the Creator” (Rom. 1:25). But for Christians, how wonderful it is to be reminded of just how much humans can learn from the genius of our God who declared all the creatures He made “good.” Sharon L. Bratcher has a book with 45 of her RP articles in it, and a 2-year lesson plan entitled “Bible Overview for Young Children” ages 2-6 and 6-9. For information on these, contact [email protected]....

Science - Creation/Evolution

Dinosaurs and dead bodies

If Lenin’s body can't last, how could dinosaur tissue have lasted millions of years? ***** In a Russian laboratory, a team of highly trained Russi...

Apologetics 101, Science - Creation/Evolution

Wrong questions lead to wrong answers

Why don’t brilliant scientists see evidence of God’s design in Nature? Because they deliberately limit the questions they are willing to ask. ...

Science - Creation/Evolution

Squirrel wonders (and the failure of evolution to explain them)

Adult non-fiction, Book Reviews, Science - Creation/Evolution

In the Beginning: Listening to Genesis 1 and 2

by Cornelis Van Dam 2021 / 371 pages Dr. C. Van Dam begins his latest book by explicitly laying out his presuppositions. He’s upfront about h...

Adult non-fiction, Book Reviews, Science - Creation/Evolution

Replacing Darwin Made Simple

by Nathaniel T. Jeanson 85 pages / 2019 How's this for an intriguing thesis for a creationist book: Darwin got it right. So what exactly is the "it" Darwin got right? Author Dr. Nathaniel Jeanson argues that in On the Origin of Species Darwin's scientific argument/approach did successfully poke holes in creationism...but the 1859 version, which held that all the species were created exactly as they are, remaining unchanged. This "fixity of the species" isn't found in the Bible. God tells us He created "kinds" (Gen. 1:11, 21, 24, etc.) but why would we assume that has to mean species? We never see horses becoming deer, but we do see them becoming a whole host of different sorts of horses. So, might the "kinds" God created encompass larger groupings? We know, for example, that horses can breed with zebras. Might they belong together in the same "kind"? As Jeanson explains, this is how Noah could fit the animals on the ark: he didn't have to take horses, zebras, and donkeys, but instead took a representative pair of horse kind, from which these threes species eventually descended. And the same for dogs, and cats, and more. The author not only gives Darwin credit for highlighting the problems with a "fixity of species," he wants today's scientists to question like Darwin. Jeanson argues that if they used this same scientific critical approach it would back today's creationism and tear down today's evolution. Then scientists would find creationism has explanations for some of the same observations evolution is said to explain. And they would also find that evolution has problems that creationism does not when it comes to sexual procreation, rapid speciation, mitochondrial "clocks," and more. Made Simple is actually a simplified version of Jeanson's 2017 Replacing Darwin: The New Origin of Species, which clocks in at 335 pages. The larger version is written for the skeptic, something you can give to a curious friend, and it is larger because skeptics have lots of questions – it is a thorough overview of the creation vs. evolution debate. And that's also why it is the much more technical of the two. Both do require effort, but Made Simpler is probably accessible to anyone who had some high school science and is interested enough to put in the effort – the author describes it as the "Cliff Notes" version. Parts of the larger original are probably at a university level, but don't let that dissuade you if the topic is of interest – you don't need to (and I didn't) understand every last little bit to find it fascinating. So pick up a copy of Replacing Darwin Made Simple to get a good overview of a compelling argument: Darwin rebutted 1859 creationism, but would also do damage to modern-day evolution. And if you want to dig deeper (or have a skeptical friend) then pick up Replacing Darwin: The New Origin of Species. You can also listen to Dr. Jeanson give a presentation on the same subject matter in the 1-hour lecture below. ...

Adult non-fiction, Book Reviews, Science - Creation/Evolution

Foresight: How the chemistry of life reveals planning and purpose

by Marcos Eberlin 2019 / 147 pages Back in 1996 "Irreducible complexity" was Michael Behe's contribution to the origins debate: he argued that some biological structures couldn't possibly have evolved because there is no way they could have come about by evolution's stepwise-process – the complexity of micro-machines like a bacteria's flagellum motor was irreducible. Now Marcos Eberlin is making a similar point, but bringing a new piece of rhetorical ammunition to the fight with Foresight in which he argues the deeper we delve into the biological world the more we discover "artful solutions to major engineering challenges." These solutions, he explains, look to "require something that matter alone lacks.... – foresight." With this term "foresight," Eberlin is arguing some biological abilities couldn't have come about as a response, but had to be the result of anticipation. So, for example, cells, right from the beginning, had to anticipate the problems that would come with using oxygen: The oxygen (O2) molecule is essential to life, but only a life form that can efficiently wrap and transport the devil O2 exactly to a place where it can be used as an energy source would benefit from its angel side. Otherwise, O2 becomes life’s greatest enemy. Rupture the membrane of a living cell, exposing it to the air, and you will see the great damage O2 and a myriad of other chemical invaders can do to a perforated cell. Death would be swift and sure. From an engineering standpoint, then, it was essential that a way is found to protect the cell, life’s most basic unit. The solution was clever: The cell was surrounded by a strong chemical shield, from the very beginning. It is often said that a solution always brings with it two additional problems, and a cellular membrane shield is no exception. A simple shield could indeed protect the cell interior from deadly invaders, but such a barrier would also prevent cell nutrients from reaching the inside of the cell, and it would trap cellular waste within. Small neutral molecules could pass through the membrane, but not larger and normally electrically charged biomolecules. A simple shield would be a recipe for swift, sure death. For early cells to survive and reproduce, something more sophisticated was needed. Selective channels through these early cell membranes had to be in place right from the start. Cells today come with just such doorways... .....a gradual step-by-step evolutionary process over many generations seems to have no chance of building such wonders since there apparently can’t be many generations of a cell, or even one generation until these channels are up and running. No channels, no cellular life. So then, the key question is: How could the first cells acquire proper membranes and co-evolve the protein channels needed to overcome the permeability problem? Even some committed evolutionists have confessed the great difficulty here. As Sheref Mansy and his colleagues put it in the journal Nature, “The strong barrier function of membranes has made it difficult to understand the origin of cellular life.” So Eberlin concludes: "There would be no hope for a cell to become viable if it had to tinker around with mutations over thousands of generations in search of a functional membrane. It's anticipate or die." This is but his first example – Eberlin is arguing that wherever we look at life, "the evidence of foresight is abundant." That's true in the fine-tuning of the universe, where gravity had to be just so, Earth had to be just the right distance from the Sun, and had to have enough water, and water needed to have certain specific properties. Oh, and the planet needed to have just the right amount of lightning too. That foresight is also evident in the structure of our DNA - which has to be stable – and RNA - which has to be malleable. He goes on and on, diving into these examples, and showing how brilliantly problems have been anticipated and solved. But by who? Well, Eberlin doesn't really get into that until the final chapter, and it is in the book's very last line that he gives credit where it is due: "Great are the works of the Lord." I loved this whole book, but will confess to only understanding about two-thirds of it clearly. But even when it got more technical, the gist I did catch was still utterly fascinating. I'd recommend it to anyone with an interest and at least some high school science....

Documentary, Movie Reviews, Science - Creation/Evolution

Dismantled: a scientific deconstruction of the theory of evolution

Documentary 2020 / 93 minutes Rating: 8/10 The Creation vs. Evolution debate is sometimes portrayed as being the Bible vs. Science, but Dismantled wants us to know that while creationists certainly stand on the Bible, they aren't conceding on Science. Flipping the script, the documentary begins by asking if evolution should be considered scientific. "Is it proper to equate evolution with science? Does science have the ability to address questions regarding past events that we were not there to directly observe or verify – events like the spontaneous origins of the universe, the origin of life from non-life, and the evolution of the earliest life forms into mammals? Or might we be giving science a power that it does not have? To answer this, it is important that we accurately define science, as well as its limitations." Evolution has street cred because it's supposed to be scientific – it claims to come from the very same source of knowledge that gave us rockets, microwave pizza, smartphones, and self-driving cars. But as Dismantled notes, evolution has little in common with that sort of science. A quote from the film, taken from a biology textbook, explains that: "Scientific inquiry is a powerful way to know nature, but there are limitations to the kind of questions it can answer. These limits are set by science's requirements that hypotheses be testable and falsifiable and that observations and experimental results be repeatable." It is precisely the testable, repeatable, falsifiable nature of operational science that got us a man on the moon, and it is precisely those points that evolution's historical science doesn't share. Our origins involve events that happened long ago and aren't repeatable, making these events hard to test, and these theories hard to falsify. So the origins debate isn't about the Bible vs. Science, but more about one historical account vs. another... with the notable difference that one of those historical accounts is thousands of years old and unchanging, and the other is a recent creation and constantly being revised. That's the film's lead-off point, and it takes the first 20 minutes to make it. From there, the filmmakers go on to assess which of these two historical accounts seem a better fit with the world we observe around us. That's the bulk of the film, and this 70-minute tour takes us through topics including: the micro = macro fallacy which assumes, without evidence, that small changes can add up to bigger ones genetics including the limits of supposed "beneficial mutations," and the problem of genetic entropy – that we as a species are breaking down faster than natural selection could ever build us up – and the supposed genetic similarity between man and apes the fossil record including Man's supposed ape-like ancestors, and the humanity of Neanderthals radiometric dating and its problems Dismantled is a slick production – the visuals are fantastic! – but its strength is in the scientists consulted. Whether it is Jason Lisle, John Sandford, Georgia Purdom, Rob Carter, Andrew Snelling, Nathaniel Jeanson (PhDs one and all), they all know how to explain big ideas to the rest of us who may not have been in a science class for decades. That doesn't mean this is all easy to understand, and I think most of us will have to (and be happy to) watch this twice, just because there is so much here to chew on. Cautions The one caution I'll note regards a mistake the film could, indirectly, encourage: believing the Bible only when the evidence says it is reasonable to do so. It is important to remember the evidence discussed in Dismantled wasn't available 100 years ago, and yet God's Word was just as true then. We need to know the Bible isn't true because it syncs up with the evidence; rather, the reason the evidence syncs up with the Bible is that the Bible is true. If that doesn't seem like much of a difference, its significance becomes apparent when the evidence doesn't seem to fit with the Bible. In those circumstances, if our trust is grounded in the evidence rather than the Bible, then we will side with it, against God's Word. But if we trust God, then we'll always stick with the Bible, trusting that any apparent conflicts will be resolved in time. Conclusion Dismantled is superb, summarizing important foundational concepts even as it presents the most current findings. I'd recommend it as a purchase, rather than a rental, because you'll want to watch it again to be able to properly digest all that is on offer. The target audience is high school and up, and for those who want to dig in even deeper, a great place to start is the recommended resources list available on the film's website. You can check out the trailer below, and then rent it on Amazon.com or buy the DVD or Blu-ray at Creation.com. And now a half-hour clip of the film can be viewed for free. ...

Science - Creation/Evolution

Our remarkable Sun

Evolutionists like to claim that our Sun is merely an average star, just one among billions. There’s no reason to believe our Sun is unusual…or so they say. After all, if our Sun were special, that might support the idea that a benevolent Creator made it for us! Nevertheless, our Sun is special indeed. As I pointed out in my DVD, Our Created Stars and Galaxies, stars come in a variety of sizes, colors, and temperatures. As a single “Class G” star, our Sun is very well suited to support life on Earth. Most other stars are not. Calm… For example, the most common stars (about 75 percent of all stars) are red dwarfs. These stars commonly emit flares: eruptions of superheated material, radiation, and charged particles blasted out into space. They do this so frequently that they’re often called “flare stars.” Large-enough flares can sterilize any planets orbiting these stars. Although our Sun occasionally releases small flares, they’re gentle compared to what we see elsewhere. We’ve seen other stars produce “superflares” up to 10 million times more energetic than those from our Sun. Is our Sun so quiet merely because of its size, temperature, and other characteristics? No. Even among Sun-like stars, our Sun is unique. A 2012 study of solar-type stars found that many had erupted in superflares. Of 83,000 stars that were observed, 148 erupted in just 120 days of observing. Extend this rate out, and each solar-type star would have more than a 50% chance of erupting every 100 years. This result is consistent with previous studies that showed that solar-type stars erupt about once per century. …and quiet Over thousands of years, a typical Sun-like star should have multiple massive eruptions. Yet there is no evidence that our Sun has ever emitted a superflare. As the study’s summary in Nature noted, “The flares on our Sun are thousands of times punier than those on similar stars.” But why? Secular astronomers are scratching their heads over this. They attribute the Sun’s gentleness to a lack of large sunspots. But that doesn’t really explain anything. Why should the Sun have smaller sunspots than other solar-type stars? They don’t know. But creationary astronomers aren’t surprised by this. As Isaiah 45:18 says, the Lord created the heavens and Earth “not in vain… He formed it to be inhabited.” Since our Sun was designed by a masterful Creator to support life, we shouldn’t be surprised that it supports life very well. Meanwhile, secular scientists are still grasping for some excuse to deny a Creator. They still wish to find other worlds like ours, so that ours won’t seem so unique. But even the most “habitable” places they can find are hellish planets like Gliese 876d. Here’s artist Inga Nielsen’s conception of what the surface of this planet might be like. Conclusion Our Earth, Sun, and Solar System are fearfully and wonderfully made to be our home – and to proclaim the glory of their Creator. May His name be praised! This first appeared in the October 2015 issue. Spike Psarris was once a member of the United States military space program, entering it as an atheist and evolutionist and leaving it as a creationist and a Christian. He has produced three wonderful DVDs about what God is up to in space – “Our Created Solar System,” “Our Created Stars and Galaxies,” and "Our Created Universe". They are available at his website CreationAstronomy.com. For Spike Psarris' testimony about how he became a creationist first, before he became a Christian, see the video below (7 minutes). ...

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