In today’s time, there is a rift between science and religion like you have never seen before. No longer can one be an intelligent scientist and believe in God. No longer can we retain our intellectual integrity and still believe in such superstitions as the existence of an Almighty God. Many people forget that many of the old venerated scientists of the past were Christians and strong in their faith. Sir Isaac Newton, perhaps one of the most influential scientists of our time said “God created everything by number weight and measure.” He also said, “In the absence of any other proof, the thumb alone would convince me of God’s existence” (Quoted in Des MacHale, Wisdom ( London , 2002)). If any prominent scientist were to say this today, what would happen? The scientific community would rip him to shreds. It goes against their credo – which I would summarize in popular physicist Carl Sagan’s mantra that “The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be.”

What is the issue?

Worldviews – what is a worldview?

A worldview is exactly what is says is it – the way that we view the world. It is how we view the “big picture”, the filter through which see everything. Though is may sound abstract, it is very practical. We use it in our daily lives when we read the news or learn new topics in class. It is the sum of our beliefs about the world around us. Thus, genuine Christianity is a way of seeing and comprehending all reality.

Every worldview must start with something – it must start with how the universe began.

Evolutionary Worldview

Naturalism – naturalism is the philosophy of evolution. It is the assumption that the forces of nature are alone adequate to explain everything that exists. That the universe is all that is, was, and ever will be. Notice though that this not a scientific statement – it cannot be tested. It is a philosophy.

Christian Worldview

            Monotheism – the philosophy of Christianity. It assumes that one all powerful Creator or omnipotent God alone is adequate enough to explain everything that exists. As I Corinthians 8:6 says, “yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live; and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, though which all things came and through whom we live.”

Evolution and evolution

When dealing with evolution we can distinguish that there is a difference between evolution with a capital ‘E’ and a little ‘e’. Evolution with a little ‘e’ is the scientific theory and model of the origin of life. Evolution with a capital ‘E’ is the philosophy and worldview that includes little evolution as well as naturalism.

 What does Scripture Teach?

Big Evolution cannot be repeated or tested. Science cannot prove something that happened in the past. It requires a certain amount of faith. Creationism also is an intelligent faith, a faith based on some cold hard facts, but faith nonetheless. Scripture doesn’t take the time to describe “special creation” (the special act of an omnipotent Creator) – it simply declares it. It is the same with God’s existence – it simply declares it.

Romans 1:20 “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities – his eternal power and divine nature – have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.”

Nature declares God’s existence. Psalms 14:1 says that the fool says that there is no God. But let us deal with some of the scientific aspects of Evolution. Since the beginning of an Evolutionary worldview is Naturalism, let’s begin by looking at that.

Life in the Beginning – Dealing with Naturalism

The Marks of Design

-         We’ve all sat down on the grass and looked up at the clouds and tried to find faces or shapes in them that seemed familiar. Sometimes we can find rocks that look like certain things like people or animals. Sometimes dorm eggs resemble limestone. We can find things sometimes, like animals in the clouds, in natural processes that aren’t ‘really’ there.

-         By contrast, imagine driving down the road in South Dakota and suddenly you come by this huge mountain. You look hard at it and realize that the mountain bears an unmistakable likeness of four American Presidents. Would you claim that the formation was the product of wind, rain, and glacial erosion? Of course not. You would immediately notice that it was painstakingly chiseled and carved out by the hands of artist.

-         We intuitively know what sorts of things have been designed and what the product of natural forces is.        

Mathematician William Debski gives a logical explanation of this:

1)      If the natural phenomena are irregular erratic and unspecified, we conclude that it is a random event.

2)      If the phenomena is regular, predictable, and repeatable, we conclude that it is the result of nature.

3)      If it is unpredictable, yet highly specific, we conclude that it is designed.

The Mt. Rushmore example explains this. It is something that is irregular (we usually don’t see erosion forming faces in stone), and something highly specified (a preselected pattern, very particular).

If we look throughout the universe, we find that many things don’t have any natural law to explain them (irregular). We also find that things are highly specified.

Examples:

-         If Earth were just a little closer to the sun, the planet would be scorched, all the water would boil and there would be no life. If it was a little farther away, all its water would freeze and the landscapes would be nothing but deserts.

-         The processes of our bodies rely on a small temperature window. The processes necessary for life occur within a narrow temperature range. For these processes to be maintained, the sun must maintain a constant distance from the sun – and in fact we find that the sun has a nearly circular orbit.

-         Water, which makes up 75% of the Earth, has an array of life giving qualities. It’s solid state is lighter than it’s liquid state. This allows ice to form and certain marine life to survive in the winter. Water molecules have something called a ‘hydrophobic effect’ which gives water the unique ability to shape proteins and nucleic acids in DNA.

-         The force of gravity is extremely fine-tuned. If it were slightly stronger the universe would collapse on itself – if it were slightly weaker matter would streak away from each other so fast in cosmic expansion that galaxies would have been unable to form. (Accurate to 1 part in 1^60).

-         The neutron is larger than the proton and has a tendency to decay. When a neutron is free (not in a nucleus) it has the ability to decay into a proton and a particle of light. If the process was reversed, a proton would then decay into neutron and life would be impossible. Why? If the proton decayed, all things made of protons would be unstable and would decay. Hydrogen is made up of a single proton – and 74% of the known universe is composed of hydrogen.

-         The electron and the proton have the same magnitude of electric charge. If they were different, atoms us would either be positively or negatively charged – meaning that the atoms themselves would repel each other because they are like charges, and structure could not exist.

The universe seems designed because it is designed. There’s a large list of preconditions that must be met to support life. If the universe is designed, then a naturalistic worldview is illogical. A creationist worldview would not be.

Now that we’ve dealt with a naturalistic worldview, let’s look at the meat of the theory of evolution.

Did We Evolve – The Problems of Evolution

Where did it start?

Charles Darwin started it all with his theories in his book the Origin of Species. He had the idea, that in observing creatures, if they can change so much in naturally in short periods of time, perhaps nature can do so much more given an indefinite amount of time.

What is our problem with that?

Nobody denies that animals can be bred to exhibit certain features and that microorganisms can adapt to environments. It would be ridiculous to believe otherwise. This is called microevolution. The problem, or ‘beef’, we have is with what we call macroevolution – or one kind of animal evolving into another kind of animal: interspecies evolution.

Why do we have a problem with that?

            Consider a pigeon – Darwin breeded pigeons. It has a variety of different forms it can take – it can have feathers like a Chinese fan; it can become a pouter with a huge crop under its beak; it can be a Jacobin with a hood of feathers. Yet despite its diversity, they are all descendants of the common rock pigeon found on every street corner of New York . What is the key idea here? No matter what you do to a pigeon, breeding it or changing its environment, it still remains a pigeon.

            He took changes he observed in nature, and extrapolated them back into the past to things he had not observed. If pigeons can be so greatly transformed in the span of a couple generations with a skilled breeder, imagine what nature and time could do given millions of years? Evolution is not stating fact – no one has ever witnessed evolution occurring. It goes beyond observable facts.

            When we intermingle animals and breed them, we get different types of animals. But we never get a new animal. Breeding can no more create new a species than shuffling a deck of cards can make a new card. There is no new genetic material added – you simply mix and match genes that already exist. So we see, Darwin ’s basis case doesn’t even hold water.

            What about mutation and natural selection and things like that? Well, we can talk about that under the category of the ‘mechanisms of evolution’. Though we see that Darwin ’s basis case is not sound, let’s look still at the mechanisms or ‘ways’ that evolution accomplishes what it is theorized to do. We shall see if it is sound or not.

            Mechanisms of Evolution: Mutations

                        Let’s first look at the concept of probability. Consider this – say you had a coin. If you flipped it, what is the probability that you will get heads? 1 in 2 or 50/50 of course. What if you flipped 3 coins? What would be the probability that you would get heads? It would be 1/8 or 12%. What if you flipped 10 coins? You’d have a one in 1024 chance they’d all be heads. It increases exponentially that more you have: when you have 20 coins the odds come to roughly 1 in 1 million.

                        Let’s apply this to the origin of life. Proteins, the building blocks of life, are family of molecules. Here is an example of one:  

                        Proteins come in one or two forms – left-handed and right-handed. Left handed and right handed perform identically in chemical reactions, they merely differ in their 3-dimensional orientation. They are mirror forms of each other. The difference though can be significant – consider glucose.  This sugar that you eat everyday is a right-handed molecule. Humans can only metabolize the natural right-handed sugars. The left-handed form, which is manufactured artificially, is used as a calorie-free sweetener. Among other things, this ‘handed-ness’ determines the function of a protein. 

A typical protein is made up of a chain of 445 left-handed amino acids. No protein found in nature contains right handed amino acids. Living organisms – all living organisms - use these left-handed proteins. If our cells come upon a right-handed version of a protein it will simply ignore it. Know one knows why. Intelligent Design anyone?

But now we can apply the laws of probability to this. For an amino acid to be formed it needs to be of this left-handed form – we have 2 choices like the coin toss. The chances of an average protein consisting of 445 amino acids forming by chance are one chance out of 2⁴¹⁰ (35 of the amino acids would be glycine, which is symmetrical).

This is a huge number – let’s give it some scope. Suppose we give a snail moving at the speed of one inch every million years the task of moving the entire earth atom by atom over to the other side of the universe and back.

Then, imagine the length of time it takes light to travel one millimeter, and a million proteins forming in that length of time hoping to form one protein with all left-handed amino acids. Guess what! The snail would win, many millions of times over before even one left-handed protein would be formed! 

                        That’s not even out point. Let’s say that the proteins can come in any configuration, just for kicks. There are 20 basic amino acids that make the building blocks for proteins. They must come in a specific order or they are no longer the same protein – they are either a different one or not a functioning protein. The order is very important – like computer code or a sentence. Change a word and you change the meaning of the sentence. This is the effect of a mutation. Diseases arise when this happens – it is a departure from what was originally intended.

                        If you have a typing error in a report, you are not likely to improve the report. It’s more likely to make nonsense that better sense. In order for this mechanism of evolution to work, we must hope that a mutation somewhere must be beneficial. And since these mutations must accumulate over time, and beneficial mutations (if there are any) would be the rule instead of the exception. Miracles would become the rule instead of the exception. When the doctor tells the parents that their child has a mutation, they don’t respond with “Oh! Is it a good one?”

            Mechanisms of Evolution: Natural Selection

Darwin 's definition of natural selection was the preservation of favorable individual differences and variations, and the destruction of those which are injurious, and the survival of the fittest (Johnson, 1976, p. vii). As one of the most influential evolutionists, Stephen J. Gould (1977, p. 22) explains, its force comes from the following logic:

1.                    Organisms vary, and these variations are likely inherited by their offspring.

2.                    Organisms produce more offspring than can possibly survive (many do at least).

3.                  On the average, offspring that vary strongly in directions favored by the environment will survive and propagate. Favorable variations will therefore accumulate in populations by natural selection.

That’s natural selection in a nutshell. What are the problems with this?

Peppered Moth

            You’ve probably all heard of the peppered moth in your biology and zoology classes and the like. In 1953 Bernard Kettlewell released peppered moths, which is normally white with black spots, and another moth of the same type with a mutation that made it black, in a wood where trees were darkened by pollution. He recaptured a much higher percentage of dark moths than light moths, implying natural selection has was work. Two years later, he obtained the opposite result in an unpolluted forest. These seemed to be confirmation of Darwin ’s natural selection. What they don’t tell you is that his experiment was inherently flawed. In the respected journal Nature, it explains this:

“…the most serious problem is that B. betularia probably does not rest on tree trunks — exactly two moths have been seen in such a position in more than 40 years of intensive search. The natural resting spots are, in fact, a mystery. This alone invalidates Kettlewell's release-recapture experiments, as moths were released by placing them directly onto tree trunks, where they are highly visible to bird predators. (Kettlewell also released his moths during the day, while they normally choose resting places at night.)...the results of Kettlewell's behavioral experiments were not replicated in later studies: moths have no tendency to choose matching backgrounds...what can one make of all this?...for the time being we must discard Biston as a well-understood example of natural selection in action.”  

Irreducible Complexity

            Late Christian evangelist Francis Schaeffer offered this argument: what happens if a fish were evolve lungs? Would it move up to the next evolutionary stage? No - It would drown. You can’t change things piecemeal – a new organ here, a limb there. If you begin mutating a fish’s gills into lungs, it would be disaster, not an advantage. The only way to turn the fish into a land-dwelling animal all at once – and then you’d have to change other things at the same time too, like its circulatory system, skeleton, etc. Something that is irreducibly complex is yet cannot evolve in gradual steps.

Many living structures are like this. Take the bat – it is supposed to have evolved from a small mouse-like creature. Think about it however. If a mouse-like creature were to start evolving webbing between its toes, what would happen? It would flop around pathetically and become extinct. Consider the eye – it doesn’t work unless all its parts are fully formed and functioning? How can this evolve through slight altercations? In light of this, it is interesting that Darwin himself said, “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." (Origin of Species, 6th ed. (1988), p. 154)

Again we see that even the mechanisms of evolution are as shaky as an elephant on a totem pole. Well, if the mechanisms are not solid, maybe at least history will back it up. Perhaps our theories are just a little off and our records of the past will give us irrevocable proof in evolutionary theory.

Let’s take a look.

What about the fossil record though? Doesn’t that support evolution?

The simple fact is that the fossil record does not support gradual evolution and natural selection – there is not substantial support for intermediary organisms. Though I can’t name you which organisms are hypothesized to be transitional animals, I can say that there are a little more than 200 organisms that are in question. Take this number and put it beside the 5 billion species that are estimated to exist. The fossil record speaks for itself.

Some say that the fossil record simply isn’t complete so that is why we have so little evidence for transitional fossils. Consider these quotes:

“Evolutionists have used the excuse that the fossil record is not complete enough to be an accurate representation of the history of life on the Earth. A recent book, The Adequacy of the Fossil Record (Donovan, S.K. and C.R.C. Paul, eds. 1998), examined the fossil record in terms of its completeness, bias (over and under representation of certain species and groups of organisms), and stratigraphic range (its completeness for a species over the entire history of its existence). Their conclusions were that the fossil record is surprisingly complete, with about 10% of all species that have ever lived being represented. There are some biases and stratigraphic incompleteness in the fossil record, but these problems can be estimated mathematically from the available data. There are many examples of stratigraphic gaps in the fossil record, with these gaps being the rule rather than the exception. In the past, it has been assumed that the gaps represent incompleteness of the fossil record. The authors suggest the "heretical" view that stratigraphic data should be used to test the phylogenetic relationships between species rather than assume that the relationships exist and that the fossil record is incomplete.”

            "Well, 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. By this I mean that some of the classic cases of Darwinian change in the fossil record, such as the evolution of the horse in North America , have had to be discarded or modified as a result of more detailed information..." (Raup, David M., "Conflicts Between Darwin and Paleontology," Field Museum of Natural History Bulletin, vol. 50, 1979, p. 25.)

            Cambrian Explosion

                        One of the hardest facts that evolutionists have to deal with is the fossil record. According to the evolutionary timeline, life began 3.5 billion years ago. Yet according to the fossil record, single celled organisms were and the like were the only thing in existence until 650 million years ago. Then a wealth of species burst on the scene fully formed and functional. According to evolution there should be a wealth of transitional species. But there are none. When textbooks say that the fossil record supports evolution, the claim is simply untrue.

            We find then upon looking at all the evidence that it is impossible to explain evolutionary theory as it currently stands.

That’s all well in good, but if evolution can’t be entirely explained scientifically, what if God had his hand in it?

Theistic Evolution

            Sometimes this view is easy to take and can seem appealing. However, it is fatally flawed. Why?

1)      If God were guiding evolution, he would ensure that each variation was beneficial from the start – God doesn’t do things halfway. If God directed evolution, natural selection would just be irrelevant, or extra. The whole purpose of Darwin ’s theory was to identify a natural process that would mimic design, making design in itself irrelevant.

2)      Psalm 100:3 states that “Know that the Lord is God. It is He who made us, and we are his; we are his people, the sheep of his pasture.” It says clearly that God made us. It also says in Genesis 2:7 that "the Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being". Evolution states that man evolved from life forms that developed in the ‘primordial ooze’. Here it says, God made man from the dust of the ground--not the from ooze.

3)      If evolution is true and the Bible is true then how is the formation of Eve explained? She was created out of one of Adam's ribs (Gen. 2:22). There is no way to explain this if theistic evolution is true; that is, unless you want to say that Eve wasn't made from Adam's side. Then, if you do that, you doubt the very word of God.

4)      Either we must believe the entire Genesis account or not!

So do we believe the Genesis account? As Christians the answer is yes! It is our only logical alternative. Even if it wasn’t, I still trust my Lord enough to stand on His Word and take it as truth. The only question that remains is…do you?