THEISM AND SCIENCE

Does belief in God stimulate or stifle science. Atheist Peter Atkins believes that to invoke God is both lazy and detracts from the work of science. Lennox counters with the example of Isaac Newton, for whom a belief in God did not stifle his scientific curiosity:

·       After uncovering the workings of gravity, Newton didn’t say, “Now that I understand gravity, I no longer need God.”

Instead, Newton understood that the source of science, the elegant, immutable that made discovery and science possible rested upon its Creator.

NATURALISM VS. THEISM

Atheist Peter Atkins claims that a belief in God(s) is not only wishful thinking but that it also adds unnecessarily to the elegance and simplicity of science by introducing an external and foreign agent.

However, doesn’t the addition of “naturalism” equally introduce an external and foreign agent – a kind of God-substitute?

Instead, it would seem more reasonable to ask:

·       Which of these explanations (theories) of origins and causation better explains the facts?

ARE ORGANS IRREDUCIBLY COMPLEX, THEREBY DEFYING DARWINIAN GRADUALISM?

Irreducible complexity is a theory that argues in favor of an intelligent Designer by showing that random mutation and natural selection are unable to account for new organs or structures. Evolution must take place step-by-step and each step must confer a survival advantage. However, to confer this advantage, many new genes must be simultaneously in place to produce any beneficial structure. Richard Kleiss provides the example of blood clotting as an irreducibly complex process:

• Bleeding must be stopped. While the scab is forming…the blood below is making a completely different kind of clot out of blood platelets and protein…Your body increases the flow of blood enriched with white blood cells. These cells not only search out and kill germs, but clean the wound of damaged cellular tissues. Skins cells start to increase the rate at which they make new cells in order to bridge the cut with new skin. Underneath…cells called fibroblasts fill the wound to strengthen the tender new tissue, and then contract to pull the wound closed. Finally, blood vessels and nerves complete their repairs as the fibroblasts position themselves along the lines of stress to prevent further damage.” (A Closer Look at the Evidence)

Without any one of these processes, any cut could cause death. In fact, any structure is irreducibly complex. Atheist Richard Dawkins admits that:

• The creationists are right that, if genuinely irreducible complexity could be properly demonstrated, it would wreck Darwin’s theory. (The God Delusion, 125)

Darwin himself said as much:

• “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find no such case.”

Is there any evidence that new organs arise through “slight modifications?” Casey Luskin cites the late biologist, Lynn Margulis, member of the National Academy of Sciences: "new mutations don't create new species; they create offspring that are impaired.” She further explained in a 2011 interview:

• [N]eo-Darwinists say that new species emerge when mutations occur and modify an organism. I was taught over and over again that the accumulation of random mutations led to evolutionary change-led to new species. I believed it until I looked for evidence.

Is there any evidence? Apparently none! John C. Lennox quotes several evolutionists to this effect:

• John Maynard Smith, E. Szathmary: “There is no theoretical reason that would permit us to expect that evolutionary lines would increase in complexity with time; there is also no empirical evidence that this happens.” (God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God, 107)

• Siegfried Scherer: “In the whole experimentally accessible domain of microevolution (including research in artificial breeding and in species formation), all variations have certainly remained within the confines of basic types.” ()

• Cell biologist E.J. Ambrose of the University of London argued that it is unlikely that fewer than five genes could ever be involved in the formation of even the simplest new structure, previously unknown in the organism. He then points out that only one in 1,000 mutations is non-deleterious, so that the chance of five non-deleterious mutations [the minimum necessary for any new function] occurring is 1 in a million billion replications.

This means that every organism will probably die before it adds a new organ! But evolutionists assure us that, eventually, they will come up with a solution.

John Sanford and the Utter Failure of the Theory of Evolution

Plant geneticist Dr John Sanford, research scientist at Cornell University, co-inventor of the gene gun, and author of Genetic Entropy and the Mystery of the Genome, had been a true believer:

• I was totally sold on evolution. It was my religion; it defined how I saw everything, it was my value system and my reason for being. Later, I came to believe in God…I would not say that science led me to the Lord (which is the experience of some). Rather I would say Jesus opened my eyes to His creation—I was blind, and gradually I could see.

• On a personal level this was a time of spiritual awakening, but professionally I remained “in the closet”…So I felt the need to take temporary leave from academia and institutional science because of the tension I felt in this regard, and the enormous potential hostility I sensed from my academic colleagues. I think the academic environment is very hostile to the very idea of a living and active God, making it almost impossible for a genuine Christian to feel open or welcome.

Eventually, Sanford’s new-found faith led him to re-examine the “evidential foundation” for the theory of evolution, and found that it was virtually non-existant:

• Institutional science has systematically “evolutionized” every aspect of human thought. Contrary to popular thinking, this is not because evolution is central to all human understanding, but rather has arisen due to a primarily political and ideological process. Consequently, in the present intellectual climate, to reject evolutionary theory has the appearance of rejecting science itself. This is totally upside down…We cannot really explain how any biological system might have “evolved”, but we can all see that virtually everything we look at has extraordinary underlying design.

• I am not aware of any type of operational science (computer science, transportation, medicine, agriculture, engineering, etc.), which has benefited from evolutionary theory. But after the fact, real advances in science are systematically given an evolutionary spin. This reflects the pervasive politicization of science.’

He subsequently concluded that evolution into more complex forms is impossible. For one thing, mutations are the source of de-evolution (the corruption of the genome) and not evolution:

• Mutations are word-processing errors in the cell’s instruction manual. Mutations systematically destroy genetic information—even as word processing errors destroy written information. While there are some rare beneficial mutations (even as there are rare beneficial misspellings), bad mutations outnumber them—perhaps by a million to one. So even allowing for beneficial mutations, the net effect of mutation is overwhelmingly deleterious. The more the mutations, the less the information. This is fundamental to the mutation process.’

Sanford also concluded that natural selection does little to slow the de-evolution process:

• Very rarely a beneficial mutation arises that has enough effect to be selected for—resulting in some adaptive variation, or some degree of fine-tuning. This also helps slow degeneration. But selection only eliminates a very small fraction of the bad mutations. The overwhelming majority of bad mutations accumulate relentlessly, being much too subtle—of too small an effect—to significantly affect their persistence. On the flip side, almost all beneficials (to the extent they occur) are immune to the selective process—because they invariably cause only tiny increases in biological functionality.

• So most beneficials drift out of the population and are lost—even in the presence of intense selection. This raises the question—since most information-bearing nucleotides [DNA ‘letters’] make an infinitesimally small contribution to the genome—how did they get there, and how do they stay there through “deep time”? Selection slows mutational degeneration, but does not even begin to actually stop it. So even with intense selection, evolution is going the wrong way—toward extinction!’

Sanford concludes that:

• The bottom line is that Darwinian theory fails on every level. It fails because: 1) mutations arise faster than selection can eliminate them; 2) mutations are overwhelmingly too subtle to be “selectable”; 3) “biological noise” and “survival of the luckiest” overwhelm selection; 4) bad mutations are physically linked to good mutations, so that they cannot be separated in inheritance (to get rid of the bad and keep the good). The result is that all higher genomes must clearly degenerate. This is exactly what we would expect in light of Scripture—with the Fall—and is consistent with the declining life expectancies after the Flood that the Bible records.

Sanford is not alone. Many evolutionists share Sanford’s assertions about the problems with evolution. All the following quotations are taken from John Lennox’s masterful book, God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God:

• “There is no theoretical reason that would permit us to expect that evolutionary lines would increase in complexity with time; there is also no empirical evidence that this happens.” (John Maynard Smith, E. Szathmary)

• “In the whole experimentally accessible domain of microevolution (including research in artificial breeding and in species formation), all variations have certainly remained within the confines of basic types [species, more or less].” (Siegfried Scherer)

• Cell biologist E.J. Ambrose of the University of London argued that it is unlikely that fewer than five genes could ever be involved in the formation of even the simplest new structure, previously unknown in the organism. He then points out that only one in 1,000 mutations is non-deleterious, so that the chance of five non-deleterious mutations occurring is 1 in a million billion replications. [This means that every organism will probably die before it adds a new organ!]

Nor is there any experimental evidence to counter-balance these assessments:

• In his book, Grasse observed that fruit flies remain fruit flies in spite of thousands of generations that have been bred and all the mutations that have been induced in them…More recent work on the E. coli bacterium backs this up. In this research no real innovative changes were observed through 25,000 generations of E. coli bacterium. (Lennox, 108)

Lennox also informs us that the fossil record, citing many evolutionists, “gives no good examples of macroevolution.” Perhaps it’s time to reconsider the design hypothesis!

Whose “Creation Myth” Makes the most Sense?

The late Allan Sandage, widely regarded as the father of modern astronomy and discoverer of quasars, wrote,

• I find it quite improbable that such order [as exemplified by the laws of physics] came out of chaos. There has to be some organizing principle. God to me is a mystery but is the explanation for the miracle of existence – why there is something rather than nothing.

In opposition to this, naturalism posits that there is a natural explanation for these laws. However, these laws pose a formidable challenge:

1. THEY ARE IMMUTABLE: This is impossible to account for within a universe characterized by molecules-in-motion.

2. THEY ARE SUPREMELY ELEGANT: Explosions – the Big Bang - can’t account for elegance.

3. THEY ACT UNIVERSALLY AND UNIFORMLY: From where do they exert their influence? It would seem that they are transcendent. This would best explain their uniform influence.

Consequently, mathematician and scientist John C. Lennox concludes:

• The world of strict naturalism, in which clever mathematical laws all by themselves bring the universe and life into existence is pure (science) fiction…a rather desperate refuge from the alternative possibility [God].

Darwin: The Fossil Evidence

In response to my recent essay on Evolution and the Fate of the Church, one Christian friend responded, “Asking intelligent people to ignore sound evidence of [evolution] is nonsense and damaging.”

Who’s ignoring the evidence?  Let’s just focus on the most critical area - the fossil record - and the testimony from leading evolutionists. If this most direct form of verification fails to provide evidence of gradual, inter-phyla evolution (macroevolution), the theory is seriously impaired. If I claim that I had made thousands of transactions with a certain bank, and the bank records every transaction, but my transactions cannot be found, it is safe to conclude that I hadn't made the alleged transactions. However, I could charge, "foul play." However, the evolutionist cannot claim "foul play" in regards to the fossil record. So we are back to the "transactions":

• “The impression that microevolution is limited in its scope is confirmed by the comments of Wesson and others to the effect that the fossil record gives no good examples of macroevolution.” (John C. Lennox, God’s Undertaker, 110).

• “The number of intermediate varieties, which have formerly existed on the earth, [should] be enormous. Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such graduated organic chain.” (Darwin, The Origin of Species)

• “The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as a trade secret of palaeontology…The history of most fossil species includes two features particularly inconsistent with the idea that they gradually evolved:

1. Stasis. Most species exhibit no directional change during their tenure on earth. They appear in the fossil record looking pretty much the same as when they disappear…

2. Sudden appearance. In any local area a species does not arise gradually by the steady transformation of its ancestors; it appears all at once and “fully formed.” (Stephen Jay Gould, 111)”

•  “We are now about 120 years after Darwin and the knowledge of the fossil record has been greatly expanded. We now have a quarter of a million fossil species, but the situation hasn’t changed much. The record of evolution is still surprisingly jerky and, ironically, we have even fewer examples of evolutionary transition than we had in Darwin’s time.” (Palaeontologist David Raup, Field Museum of Natural History; Lennox, 111)

• : “We palaeontologists have said that the history of life supports [the story of gradual adaptive change] knowing all the while it does not.” (Niles Eldredge, American Museum of Natural History; 111)

•  ”I tried in vain to document examples of the kind of slow directional change we all thought ought to be there every since Darwin told us that natural selection should leave precisely such a tell-tale signal…I found instead that once species appear in the fossil record they tend not to change very much at all. Species remain imperturbably, implacably resistant to change as a matter of course – often for millions of years.” (Eldredge; 113)

• “All Paleontologists know that the fossil record contains precious little in the way of intermediate forms; transitions between major groups are characteristically abrupt.” (S.J.Gould)

• “No real evolutionist…uses the fossil record as evidence in favor of the theory of evolution as opposed to special creation.” (Mark Ridley)

•  “I will lay it on the line – there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument.” His response when asked why he didn’t include anything about transitional forms in his book, Evolution: “If I knew any, I certainly would have included them.” (Dr. Colin Patterson, British Museum of Natural History)

• : “It is a mistake to believe that even one fossil species…can be demonstrated to have been ancestral to another.” (Dr. Gareth J. Nelson, American Museum of Natural History)

Many paleontologists now concede that we already have a pretty complete picture of the fossil record. New findings are merely repetitions of the prior findings. In other words, no big surprises are anticipated at this point. Forget finding the millions of "intermediate forms."  If the evolutionists themselves remain skeptical about the supporting fossil evidence, why should not the Christian also remain skeptical?