It is Impossible to Prove that Evolution is an Unguided, Naturalistic Process

Evolution is the poster-boy for the naturalism – the worldview that claims that you don’t need God to explain anything, since everything can be explained in terms of natural causation and science. Consequently, students are taught that God is irrelevant since the natural laws explain everything.

I encountered a young college student working on her master’s degree who told me this very thing. She had been raised as an atheist and therefore explained:

• I don’t need to invoke an irrelevant deity. Science explains everything. Of course, we can’t explain everything right now, but evolution proves that science is all that we need to make sense out of this world.

While I don’t believe in macro-evolution – evolution of the big or vertical changes – I could tell that I would be wasting my time by trying to prove evolution wrong. So I argued these points instead:

1. The theory of evolution in no way can prove that an Intelligent Designer wasn’t guiding the process. Evolutionists will counter by saying that evolution seems to be a design-less process with many dead-ends. They then reason that if a God had designed the world, it wouldn’t have progressed in this manner. However, in order to conclude this, they would first have to prove what a designed process looks like and how anything that deviated from their model could not have been designed. But admittedly, they do not know the mind of God or His possible reasons for doing things in a way that might seem chaotic to the evolutionist.

2. Even if unguided evolution could be proved – which it can’t – it doesn’t prove that the existence of everything can be explained by unguided processes.

3. Besides, evolutionists lack a detailed explanation for how anything – whether proteins or DNA – could have arisen naturally.

4. Most damning of all, the evolutionist must appeal to pre-existing laws and properties, all of which give the appearance of design, harmony, universality and immutability. And there exists no natural explanation to explain these things. Besides, such explanations are impossible. Science cannot explain the origin of natural laws before “natural” causation even existed. As such, it makes more sense to invoke an intelligent and eternal Being to explain a universe that had a beginning.

5. For naturalism to be considered a viable theory, it must be able to explain all existence. However, there are many things, in addition to the laws, that seem to defy a naturalistic explanation – DNA, Life, the Cell, Freewill, Consciousness, Objective Moral Law, Irreducible Complexity…

As a consequence of their fundamentalist attachment to the religion of nature-did-it, they see only what will agree with their naturalistic presuppositions and ignore the fact that their theory is fraught with many unsolvable problems. Meanwhile, the evolutionist has also stripped life of any inherent meaning or purpose other than the animalistic pleasures and survival.

The atheist listened carefully but didn’t answer. The conversation moved on, but I hope that some thoughts lingered on.