There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true. —Soren Kierkegaard. "…truth is true even if nobody believes it, and falsehood is false even if everybody believes it. That is why truth does not yield to opinion, fashion, numbers, office, or sincerity–it is simply true and that is the end of it" – Os Guinness, Time for Truth, pg.39. “He that takes truth for his guide, and duty for his end, may safely trust to God’s providence to lead him aright.” – Blaise Pascal. "There is but one straight course, and that is to seek truth and pursue it steadily" – George Washington letter to Edmund Randolph — 1795. We live in a “post-truth” world. According to the dictionary, “post-truth” means, “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” Simply put, we now live in a culture that seems to value experience and emotion more than truth. Truth will never go away no matter how hard one might wish. Going beyond the MSM idealogical opinion/bias and their low information tabloid reality show news with a distractional superficial focus on entertainment, sensationalism, emotionalism and activist reporting – this blogs goal is to, in some small way, put a plug in the broken dam of truth and save as many as possible from the consequences—temporal and eternal. "The further a society drifts from truth, the more it will hate those who speak it." – George Orwell “There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.” ― Soren Kierkegaard
For decades, we’ve heard that so-called “junk DNA” is proof of evolution. After all, what kind of Creator would fill our genome with large areas of DNA that don’t do anything? Clearly, those regions are just leftovers from millions of years of evolutionary processes . . . except the latest in DNA research doesn’t confirm this decades-old “proof” of evolution!
For a long time, scientists virtually ignored the “junk” portions of our DNA—after all, if they’re just evolutionary leftovers, there isn’t much point in studying them. But once they began to look into these regions, researchers realized the “junk” is anything but junk! These regions of our DNA don’t code for proteins, but they are regulatory switches that are extremely important to organisms. And that’s what we would expect from a biblical worldview.
These regions of our DNA don’t code for proteins, but they are regulatory switches that are extremely important to organisms.
This new DNA research is fascinating, and it destroys this long-cherished “proof” of evolutionary ideas. On a recent episode of Answers News, geneticist Dr. Georgia Purdom shared about the latest in DNA research and how its incredible complexity confirms it was designed by the all-knowing Creator. I encourage you to watch and share this with others:
Be sure to subscribe to our Answers in Genesis YouTube channel so you don’t miss another episode of Answers News or any of the other video content our social media team produces.
When we launched this ministry in 1993, I could never have imagined YouTube and other social media platforms giving us the opportunity to reach millions of people. But praise the Lord, God has allowed us to use social media to promote the message of biblical authority and the gospel to people across the nation and in many different countries. What an incredible opportunity!
Thanks for stopping by and thanks for praying, Ken
This item was written with the assistance of AiG’s research team.
I have exciting news. Do you remember a long time ago, when the famous atheist professor Will Provine invited Michael Behe to make the case for intelligent design at Cornell University? Well, 22 years later, Behe has returned to Cornell, to give a lecture to students and answer questions. Let’s find out what Behe’s arguments were and whether any biologists showed up to stump him.
So, it’s always fun to start with the announcement of the event. I like to support these events because I am very passionate about events on campus where students are presented with evidence that will help them to form more accurate views about the big questions of life.
Throughout history, most people, including most scientists, thought that the intricate mechanisms of life were purposefully designed. The design hypothesis fell out of favor in academia after 1859, the year Charles Darwin instead proposed that life evolved by utterly unguided random variation sifted by natural selection. In the past 75 years, however, much has been learned about the molecular basis of life that was completely unknown in Darwin’s era. In my talk I will argue that the astonishing discoveries of modern biochemistry require a reversal of our evaluation of Darwin versus design: the conclusion that, in large part, life was purposely designed has once again become rationally compelling.
I would like to get my hands on the slides for this lecture. Roger Pielke just gave a talk at Cornell earlier this month, and he posted his slides. Maybe I can get Mike to do the same. If you have ever seen one of his lectures, he actually has fun slides – he puts Far Side cartoons into his lectures to keep people paying attention.
Anyway, here is the audio from the talk, and here are his main arguments: 1) irreducible complexity and 2) Darwinian mechanisms cannot create new forms over time.
But he actually made 5 points in the presentation:
Design is NOT mystical – it is a normal empirical conclusion from physical evidence
Everyone (even Richard Dawkins) admits biology appears to be designed.
The progress of science has revealed structural obstacles to Darwinian explanations (irreducible complexity “Darwin’s Black Box” and the discovery that most observed beneficial mutations break genes “Darwin Devolves”).
Darwinian claims still rest on imagination and “just-so stories”.
We have strong evidence for real design but almost no evidence that Darwinism can build complex molecular machines.
What was interesting about this podcast? Well, like I said, I am really, really committed to helping students to hear two sides to the big questions of life. Most of the college students that I talk to in the workplace explain to me that their process of forming their worldviews was two-fold: 1) I wanted to have fun, and 2) I wanted the smart people (professors) to like me. It was just easier for them to accept certain beliefs in the college environment, and that’s why they accepted them. A lot of things that are false are just easier to believe for social or professional reasons: the universe is eternal, the origin of life is a solved problem, the fossil record shows gradual increases in complexity, the genome is 90% junk DNA – just complete nonsense. And the best way for them to correct these false beliefs is to bring an honest scholar like Mike Behe or Mike Licona to speak about evidence at the local university campus.
The podcast is fun because they really explain all the details of what happened. Who invited Behe to speak? Where did Behe speak? Who did Behe speak to? Were biologists invited? Did any biologists show up to confront Behe? How long was the talk? How long was the Q&A? Was the tone of the Q&A calm or argumentative? Did the Q&A stop because no one had questions, or was there a long line of people waiting to ask more questions?
Confronting naturalism on campus
I have a friend named Stephanie who just loves all sorts of protests and gatherings and marches. But for me, this is much better. Instead of people yelling at each other over politics, we can actually have some evidence presented, and minds can change. Maybe not right in the moment, but afterwards. This worked well for me when I was in my 20s. I used to order dozens and dozens of lectures and debates from university campuses from places like Veritas Forum and Access Research Network. I would listen over and over, and then when I tried out the evidence on co-workers (and I mean people with graduate degrees from good schools like UIUC and Purdue and Northwestern) they always had to concede. There is just something about being able to listen to Christians speak about evidence to college students – it’s just the right level of difficulty for software guys like me to understand it and learn how to speak like that. And this led to a lot of adventures.
Secrets of the Cell with Mike Behe
Well, if you listen to the podcast, and you like it, and you want to try to explain Michael Behe’s arguments to college students yourself, he does have quite a good series of lectures posted on YouTube:
Everything is so much easier now than it used to be for me in the old days. You guys don’t have to rewind VHS tapes and audio cassettes like I used to have to do! And if you hear a word or phrase that you don’t understand, just ask Grok to explain it to you like it would explain it to a high school student. Anyway, have fun.
The teaching of biological evolution in science classes amounts to the teaching of a materialistic religion based on arguments that lack scientific merit.
Evolution: the naturalistic origin of life and its diversity
(The General Theory of Evolution, as acknowledged by prominent evolutionists, includes the origin of life; see introduction to Origin of life.)
How did life originate? Evolutionist Professor Paul Davies admitted, “Nobody knows how a mixture of lifeless chemicals spontaneously organized themselves into the first living cell.”1 Andrew Knoll, professor of biology, Harvard, said, “we don’t really know how life originated on this planet”.2 A minimal cell needs several hundred proteins. Even if every atom in the universe were an experiment with all the correct amino acids present for every possible molecular vibration in the supposed evolutionary age of the universe, not even one average-sized functional protein would form. So how did life with hundreds of proteins originate just by chemistry without intelligent design?
See:
How did the DNA code originate? The code is a sophisticated language system with letters and words where the meaning of the words is unrelated to the chemical properties of the letters—just as the information on this page is not a product of the chemical properties of the ink (or pixels on a screen). What other coding system has existed without intelligent design? How did the DNA coding system arise without it being created?
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Thanks to “Cowboy Bob” Sorensen for this ‘YouTube’ version of the 15 questions brochure.
How could mutations—accidental copying mistakes (DNA ‘letters’ exchanged, deleted or added, genes duplicated, chromosome inversions, etc.)—create the huge volumes of information in the DNA of living things? How could such errors create 3 billion letters of DNA information to change a microbe into a microbiologist? There is information for how to make proteins but also for controlling their use—much like a cookbook contains the ingredients as well as the instructions for how and when to use them. One without the other is useless. See: Meta-information: An impossible conundrum for evolution. Mutations are known for their destructive effects, including over 1,000 human diseases such as hemophilia. Rarely are they even helpful. But how can scrambling existing DNA information create a new biochemical pathway or nano-machines with many components, to make ‘goo-to-you’ evolution possible? E.g., How did a 32-component rotary motor like ATP synthase (which produces the energy currency, ATP, for all life), or robots like kinesin (a ‘postman’ delivering parcels inside cells) originate?
See:
Why is natural selection, a principle recognized by creationists, taught as ‘evolution’, as if it explains the origin of the diversity of life? By definition it is a selective process (selecting from already existing information), so is not a creative process. It might explain the survival of the fittest (why certain genes benefit creatures more in certain environments), but not the arrival of the fittest (where the genes and creatures came from in the first place). The death of individuals not adapted to an environment and the survival of those that are suited does not explain the origin of the traits that make an organism adapted to an environment. E.g., how do minor back-and-forth variations in finch beaks explain the origin of beaks or finches? How does natural selection explain goo-to-you evolution?
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iStockphotoEveryone recognizes design in a glass vase, but evolutionists refuse to believe that the flowers in the vase must also have been designed. The problem is not that they do not show design, but that they show too much design.
How did new biochemical pathways, which involve multiple enzymes working together in sequence, originate? Every pathway and nano-machine requires multiple protein/enzyme components to work. How did lucky accidents create even one of the components, let alone 10 or 20 or 30 at the same time, often in a necessary programmed sequence? Evolutionary biochemist Franklin Harold wrote, “we must concede that there are presently no detailed Darwinian accounts of the evolution of any biochemical or cellular system, only a variety of wishful speculations.”3
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Living things look like they were designed, so how do evolutionists know that they were not designed? Richard Dawkins wrote, “biology is the study of complicated things that have the appearance of having been designed with a purpose.”4 Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of the double helix structure of DNA, wrote, “Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved.”5 The problem for evolutionists is that living things show too much design. Who objects when an archaeologist says that pottery points to human design? Yet if someone attributes the design in living things to a designer, that is not acceptable. Why should science be restricted to naturalistic causes rather than logical causes?
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How did multi-cellular life originate? How did cells adapted to individual survival ‘learn’ to cooperate and specialize (including undergoing programmed cell death) to create complex plants and animals?
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How did sex originate? Asexual reproduction gives up to twice as much reproductive success (‘fitness’) for the same resources as sexual reproduction, so how could the latter ever gain enough advantage to be selected? And how could mere physics and chemistry invent the complementary apparatuses needed at the same time (non-intelligent processes cannot plan for future coordination of male and female organs).
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Photo by Joachim SchevenThe horseshoe crab is one of thousands of organisms living today that show little change from their ‘deep time’ fossils. In the supposed ‘200 million’ years that the horseshoe crab has remained unchanged (no evolution), virtually all reptiles, dinosaurs, birds, mammals and flowering plants have supposedly evolved.
Why are the (expected) countless millions of transitional fossils missing? Darwin noted the problem and it still remains. The evolutionary family trees in textbooks are based on imagination, not fossil evidence. Famous Harvard paleontologist (and evolutionist), Stephen Jay Gould, wrote, “The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology”.6 Other evolutionist fossil experts also acknowledge the problem.
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How do ‘living fossils’ remain unchanged over supposed hundreds of millions of years, if evolution has changed worms into humans in the same time frame? Professor Gould wrote, “the maintenance of stability within species must be considered as a major evolutionary problem.”7
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How did blind chemistry create mind/ intelligence, meaning, altruism and morality? If everything evolved, and we invented God, as per evolutionary teaching, what purpose or meaning is there to human life? Should students be learning nihilism (life is meaningless) in science classes?
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Why is evolutionary ‘just-so’ story-telling tolerated? Evolutionists often use flexible story-telling to ‘explain’ observations contrary to evolutionary theory. NAS(USA) member Dr Philip Skell wrote, “Darwinian explanations for such things are often too supple: Natural selection makes humans self-centered and aggressive—except when it makes them altruistic and peaceable. Or natural selection produces virile men who eagerly spread their seed—except when it prefers men who are faithful protectors and providers. When an explanation is so supple that it can explain any behavior, it is difficult to test it experimentally, much less use it as a catalyst for scientific discovery.”8
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Where are the scientific breakthroughs due to evolution? Dr Marc Kirschner, chair of the Department of Systems Biology, Harvard Medical School, stated: “In fact, over the last 100 years, almost all of biology has proceeded independent of evolution, except evolutionary biology itself. Molecular biology, biochemistry, physiology, have not taken evolution into account at all.”9 Dr Skell wrote, “It is our knowledge of how these organisms actually operate, not speculations about how they may have arisen millions of years ago, that is essential to doctors, veterinarians, farmers … .”10 Evolution actually hinders medical discovery.11 Then why do schools and universities teach evolution so dogmatically, stealing time from experimental biology that so benefits humankind?
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Science involves experimenting to figure out how things work; how they operate. Why is evolution, a theory about history, taught as if it is the same as this operational science? You cannot do experiments, or even observe what happened, in the past. Asked if evolution has been observed, Richard Dawkins said, “Evolution has been observed. It’s just that it hasn’t been observed while it’s happening.”12
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Why is a fundamentally religious idea, a dogmatic belief system that fails to explain the evidence, taught in science classes? Karl Popper, famous philosopher of science, said “Darwinism is not a testable scientific theory, but a metaphysical [religious] research programme ….”13 Michael Ruse, evolutionist science philosopher admitted, “Evolution is a religion. This was true of evolution in the beginning, and it is true of evolution still today.”14If “you can’t teach religion in science classes”, why is evolution taught?
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I listened to a lot of different apologetics-related shows last week, and the very best one was Dr. Casey Luskin appearing on Dr. Sean McDowell’s podcast to discuss new findings about chimpanzee and human DNA. Have you ever heard the argument for common descent that says “human and chimpanzee DNA only differ by 1% so of course they have a common ancestry”? I had a friend in high school who believed that. Let’s see what the evidence says.
This is the YouTube episode from Sean’s popular YouTube channel:
This is 64 minutes long.
Here are the questions from the interview:
How did you first get interested in the topic of origins, and human origins in particular?
What interested you in the topic of human-chimp genetic similarity?
Can you give us some examples of people who’ve claimed that we’re 99% genetically similar to chimps or apes or kind of 1% different from them as they use that to make an argument for common descent slash evolution?
How do museums present the data to visitors?
When did that data that questions the 1% chimp-human DNA difference first emerge?
What is an “icon of evolution”?
Does human-chimp genetic similarity falls into that category of “icons of evolution”?
Do you have a sense of how significant this piece of evidence is for supporting Darwinian evolution?
How was the original 1% genetic difference calculation made?
So now we have new evidence that the 1% number was wrong. A new paper suggests that there is a 15%. How did they calculate that?
Are these numbers being challenged? Are critics accepting them, saying this is the new data?
Now, one response that I’ve heard is that our genome is full of what’s called junk DNA. So, the differences are like repetitive DNA and thus junk. Thus, we can ignore them and get a much smaller number getting closer to that 1% if we assess the genome that way. Is that fair or reasonable?
Humans can vary by as much as 10% difference in DNA, so is 15% between humans and chimps really a big difference?
Does a small genenetic difference automatically imply common ancestry or it could be because of a common creator?
Is this new 15% difference evidence against common descent?
You’ve written a piece in the New York Post about how this is presented in museums. Did the museums respond at all? And if so, what did they say?
Are there other areas of scientific misinformation at the Smithsonian that either you saw when you were there in person or you’ve just seen in your research?
Where does this go next as far as you can see?
If a follow-up comes in a journal article as prestigious as Nature and they go, you know what, we got it wrong, it’s 0.5% genetic difference and we blew it, whether two years, five years, 10 years, will you come back and say, you know what, I’ll own it.
If you don’t have time to watch the whole video, Casey did write a nice recent article in the New York Post about it.
He writes:
The National Museum of Natural History’s Hall of Human Origins vastly distorts the scientific evidence on human evolution, seeking to convince visitors that there’s nothing special about us as human beings.
“There is only about a 1.2% genetic difference between modern humans and chimpanzees,” the exhibit starts, with large photos of a human and apes. “You and chimpanzees [are] 98.8% genetically similar.”
No doubt you’ve heard this statistic before because many science popularizers say the same thing.
Yet it’s been known for years that these numbers are inaccurate. Thanks to a groundbreaking April paper in the journal Nature, we know just how wrong they are.
For the first time, the paper reports “complete” sequences of the genomes of chimpanzees and other apes done from scratch. When we compare them to humans, we find our genomes are more like 15% genetically different from chimpanzees’. That means the true genetic differences between humans and chimps are more than 10 times greater than what the Smithsonian tells us.
It’s very good for him to point this out, because we a lot of people go to these taxpayer-funded museums and believe things that we now know have been discredited by the progress of science. I had a friend in high school who saw this in some History Channel or Discovery Channel documentary, and he believed it. So I think it’s important for Christians to know that there is evidence available now, to push back against the claim. Even if you don’t know how to discuss it as well as Sean and Casey, you should know how to pull up this discussion, or maybe the New York Post article, and respond.
Have you ever noticed theological or metaphysical premises built into some scientists’ arguments? This might be surprising given how often scientists argue that science and religion are entirely separate. Consider, for example, the arguments that have been made for homologies, which serve as one of the primary evidences for universal common descent in naturalistic evolution.
A homology, in biological terms, refers to a structural pattern that is common to different species and is thought to be the byproduct of evolution. The pentadactyl (i.e., five-digit) structure found in tetrapods (four-limbed vertebrates) is one example. It’s used by mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians alike, but for very different purposes (crawling, flying, climbing, digging, etc.). Evolutionists reason that since these various animal groups share this structure instead of having distinctive structures uniquely suited to their activities and environment, this is an indication of shared ancestry. Charles Darwin went so far as to say the existence of homologies would lead him to “without hesitation adopt [the theory of evolution], even if it were unsupported by other facts or arguments.”
But consider the metaphysical and theological arguments surrounding the evidence of homologies. Darwin says that the existence of similar structures among a variety of species is “inexplicable…on the ordinary view of creation,” and vestigial organs (a type of homology) present “a strange difficulty…on the ordinary doctrine of creation.” But, he argues, they can be readily explained by his theory of evolution. Why does he think homologies pose a problem for the creationist? His argument is that if God had created the different species, we should not find similar patterns among species.
Darwin held to the common view during his time that, as philosopher of biology Stephen Dilley puts it, “just as humans do not invent locomotive machines from a common type, but rather directly for specific purposes, so God created limbs at the species level de novo for specific environments, rather than modifying a more general type.” So, we would not expect to find common patterns, like the pentadactyl structure, in nature if God created the various species. Since we do find patterns like this repeatedly, God did not create them, or so the argument goes. And if God did not create them, then blind naturalistic forces did.
It becomes clear that this argument hinges upon a certain assumption about the way God would have created. Indeed, the utilitarian argument from design, which claims that every part of an organism has a function or purpose (which indicates it’s designed) had been employed by natural theologians like William Paley before Darwin began developing his theory, and Darwin, who had studied Paley’s work, attempted to falsify creationism with this understanding of creation in mind. Homologies were seen to contrast with this widespread notion of anatomical utilitarianism. So, in the words of biophysicist Cornelius Hunter, it appears “the proof of [Darwin’s] theory was the failure of divine creation.”
Evolutionists have used similar arguments in more recent times. Theodosius Dobzhansky, for example, claimed creation is false and evolution is true because God would not use common patterns throughout the various species. Rather, he expected that God would have used new traits and designs when creating different species. But notice once again that this is a theological argument.
Moreover, when we come across an “imperfect design,” philosopher of science Michael Ruse argues that it’s “good evidence that evolution has been at work…rather than a grand, directly intervening intelligence.” The assumption here is that God would not create such “imperfect” designs in nature. Yet Ruse’s argument here is a theological argument since it’s based on how he thinks God would have created.
Further, Stephen Jay Gould, who advocated the “nonoverlapping magisterial” approach to the relationship between science and religion (which holds that science and religion are separate spheres that don’t overlap) has used theological arguments to support evolution. He claimed, for example, that “Odd arrangements and funny solutions are the proof of evolution—paths that a sensible God would never tread but that a natural process, constrained by history, follows perforce.” Once again, this argument deals with Gould’s understanding of what creation should look like if God created it.
In this way, arguments for evolution are often intermingled with metaphysical and theological premises—even though scientists today often argue that religion has nothing to do with science. Evolutionists, from Darwin to today, have used “negative theology”—that is, “the failure to reconcile God and nature”—to support evolution. Keep in mind that these arguments aren’t scientific arguments but instead are metaphysical arguments since they’re based on one’s understanding of the nature of God and of creation.
One could just as easily argue that the Creator used the patterns found in homologous structures so that scientists could more easily analyze his creations and figure out how biology works. On the other hand, one could argue that the imperfections of nature that the homologies reveal are a manifestation of the burden of sin upon the world. Such ideas are no more religious than evolution’s notion of a restricted god.
As unlikely and unexpected as it may be, life exists in our universe, and just as researchers stipulate to the appearance of fine-tuning in the cosmos, scientists also stipulate to the appearance of design in biological organisms. Richard Dawkins would be the first to agree: “Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.” Many other scientists affirm this observation and extend it to include the larger ecosystems in which many symbiotic organisms are dependent on one another for their survival. Smith College professor of biological sciences, Robert Dorit says, “The apparent fit between organisms seems to suggest some higher intelligence at work, some supervisory gardener bringing harmony and color to the garden.” For scientists looking for an explanation within the “garden” to avoid the inference of an external “supervisory gardener,” this appearance of design is difficult to explain.
Dawkins believes, however, the power of natural evolutionary processes can explain “the illusion of design and planning.” If the appearance of design and planning is purely illusory, it is an impressive illusion indeed. The examples of apparent design are plentiful and varied. Lehigh University biochemist Michael Behe describes a number of inexplicable biological systems and micro-machines in his ground-breaking book, Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution. Behe challenges the scientific community to explain the appearance of design in cellular cilium (microscopic oar-like filaments), the interconnected molecular processes involved in blood clotting, the specified complexity of cellular protein delivery systems, and more. He describes these systems in detail and identifies a number of design features similar to those we observed in the garrote.
Behe and other scientists, such as biochemist Fazale Rana, believe the interaction of an intelligent agent “outside the room” (of the natural universe) is the best explanation for the appearance of design in these microscopic structures and processes “inside the room.” In fact, Rana believes the design inference is reasonable in even the simplest life forms: “The incredible complex nature of minimal life, likewise, makes it difficult to envision how natural evolutionary processes could have produced even the simplest life-forms . . . it is super-astronomically improbable for the essential gene set to emerge simultaneously through natural means alone.”
Illustration from God’s Crime Scene
In my latest book, God’s Crime Scene, I describe eight attributes of design and explain how the presence of these attribute is best explained by the activity of a designer. When these eight design characteristics are present in objects we observe in our world, we quickly infer a designer without reservation. As it turns out, the same attributes of design (dubious probability, echoes of familiarity, sophistication and intricacy, informational dependency, goal direction, natural inexplicability, efficiency/irreducible complexity, and decision/choice reflection) are present in even the most primitive biological organisms, making them prohibitively difficult to explain on the basis of chance mutations and the laws of physics or chemistry alone. Life at its simplest and most foundational level demonstrates a staggering level of complexity. According to biochemist Michael Denton, cooperative, interactive, cellular factories appear purposefully designed: “That each constituent utilized by the cell for a particular biological role, each cog in the watch, turns out to be the only and at the same time the ideal candidate for its role is particularly suggestive of design. That the whole, the end to which all this teleological wizardry leads—the living cell—should be also ideally suited for the task of constructing the world of multicellular life reinforces the conclusion of purposeful design. The prefabrication of parts to a unique end is the very hallmark of design. Moreover, there is simply no way that such prefabrication could be the result of natural selection.”
Michael Behe’s numerous biological examples provide an insurmountable challenge to naturalistic theories appealing to causes from “inside the room”. The cumulative design features present in these organisms simply cannot be explained by naturalistic processes. The sheer number of parts required to work together simultaneously for each of these systems to function incline us toward an external explanation: “As the number of required parts increases, the difficulty of gradually putting the system together [through mutations and natural selection] skyrockets, and the likelihood of indirect scenarios plummets . . . As the number of systems that are resistant to gradualist explanation mounts, the need for a new kind of explanation grows more apparent.”
The most obvious and reasonable inference seems to be elusive to naturalists who try to account for the appearance of design in biological organisms. No explanation employing the laws of physics or chemistry from “inside the room” of the natural universe is adequate. The appearance of design in biology is yet another evidence demonstrating the existence of an “external” Divine Designer. This brief summary of evidence for design is excerpted from God’s Crime Scene, Chapter Four – Signs of Design: Is There Evidence of An Artist?
The most obvious and reasonable inference seems to be elusive to naturalists who try to account for the appearance of design in biological organisms Share on X
The “appearance of design” in biological organisms is rather uncontroversial, even amongst atheists who reject the existence of a Designer. Richard Dawkins would be the first to agree: “Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.” Many other scientists affirm this observation and extend it to include the larger ecosystems in which many symbiotic organisms are dependent on one another for their survival. Smith College professor of biological sciences, Robert Dorit says, “The apparent fit between organisms seems to suggest some higher intelligence at work, some supervisory gardener bringing harmony and color to the garden.” For scientists looking for an explanation within the “garden” to avoid the inference of an external “supervisory gardener,” this appearance of design is difficult to explain.
One cellular micro-machine remains the iconic “poster child” for an external intelligent cause related to the design we observe in molecular organisms. Some bacteria swim by rotating a long filament in a whip-like fashion. This spinning motor assembly is called a flagellum. Bacterial flagella are incredibly difficult to explain for scientists who recognize them as a marvel of machine-like precision. Harvard biophysicist Howard Berg has publicly described the bacterial flagellum as “the most efficient machine in the universe.”
Illustrations from God’s Crime Scene
In an effort to nullify the powerful design inference from the irreducible complexity of the flagellum, some have offered a “short cut” of sorts. Philosopher Robert T. Pennock believes the complex flagellum can be formed through an evolutionary process whereby a less complex micro-machine is borrowed from within the cell and used to build something new. Some scientists have suggested Type III secretion systems (T3SS) as a perfect example of one of these borrowed micro-machines. T3SS are needle-like sensory probes used by bacteria. They detect the presence of organisms the bacteria can infect and secrete proteins to aid the infection process. T3SS share many common proteins and are constructed similarly to bacterial flagella.
Scientists sometimes offer these T3SS in an effort to explain how evolutionary processes could jump the divide from a single protein to the complexity of flagellum. By borrowing the T3SS, flagella have a significant head start in their construction. This approach is problematic, however:
The Borrowed Micro-Machine is Also Irreducibly Complex T3SS are just as remarkably irreducible as flagella. The T3SS is constructed from approximately 30 different proteins; it’s one of the most complex secretion systems observed in biology today. Like the flagellum, T3SS requires the minimal configuration of these proteins to function. It cannot be offered as an ultimate explanation for irreducible complexity because its own irreducible complexity requires an explanation.
William Dembski describes it this way: “What you have here is not a fully articulated path but an island (the Type III secretory system) and a huge jump to the next island (namely, the flagellum). If evolution is going to try to explain how you can island-hop from Los Angeles to Tokyo, basically what the evolutionist has found is the Hawaiian Islands and nothing else. What the evolutionist has not found is the entire archipelago [group of connected islands] that will take you across.”
The Pathway To and From the Borrowed Micro-Machine is Evidentially Unsupported Dembski has correctly identified the problem facing those who deny the design inference from irreducible complexity. There is no evidence to explain the gradual evolutionary progression to the irreducibly complex T3SS (from a single protein), nor any evidence to explain the gradual evolutionary progression from the T3SS (to the flagellum). While many naturalists offer the T3SS as a beacon of hope, they are unable to describe the step by step evolution from a protein to the complex T3SS.
University of Rochester biologist, H. Allen Orr, recognizes the deficiencies in evolutionary explanations dependent upon wholesale borrowing: “We might think that some of the parts of an irreducibly complex system evolved step by step for some other purpose and were then recruited wholesale to a new function. But this is also unlikely. You may as well hope that half your car’s transmission will suddenly help out in the airbag department. Such things might happen very, very rarely, but they surely do not offer a general solution to irreducible complexity.”
The proposals offered by scientists attempting to account for the flagellum by borrowing from the T3SS are fanciful but unsupported. When examining these proposals, look carefully at the intermediate constructions required to get from one micro-machine to another. When these pathways are carefully examined, they reveal critical dilemmas and obstacles.
The Borrowed Micro-Machine May Not Be Available for Borrowing To make matters worse, naturalistic evolutionists are increasingly skeptical of the alleged evolutionary contribution TS33 might make to the flagellum. Many experts recognize the structural similarities between the two micro-machines but reject any particular evolutionary hierarchy, order or pathway. Several scientists believe the T3SS is not an evolutionary precursorto flagella, but is more reasonably a product of devolution from flagella.
If the T3SS was unavailable prior to the existence of flagella, it cannot be offered as an explanation for flagella. Researcher Jonathan Witt summarizes the resulting multifaceted problem: “One, the micro-syringe at best accounts for only ten proteins, leaving thirty or more unaccounted for, and these other thirty proteins are not found in any other living system. Second, as a wider body of literature suggests, the system probably developed after the more complicated flagellum, not the other way around. Finally, even if nature had on hand all the right protein parts to make a bacterial flagellum, something would still need to assemble them in precise temporal order, the way cars are assembled in factories. How is such a task presently accomplished?”
There’s an interesting article posted at Universe Today by Dr. Paul M. Sutter. Although he does accept unguided evolution after the origin of life, he doesn’t think that naturalism can account for the origin of life. On this blog, I’ve talked about three problem’s with life’s origin: 1) getting the right building blocks, 2) getting the right information, and 3) irreducible complexity. Let’s take a look.
Paul M. Sutter is a theoretical cosmologist, award-winning science communicator, NASA advisor, U.S. Cultural Ambassador, and a globally recognized leader in the intersection of art and science. Paul is a research professor at the Institute for Advanced Computational Science at Stony Brook University and a visiting professor at Barnard College, Columbia University.
[…]Paul earned his PhD in physics in 2011 as a Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellow at the University of Illinois. He then spent three years as a research fellow at the Paris Institute for Astrophysics followed by two years at the Trieste Observatory in Italy. Prior to his current appointment, he held a joint position as the chief scientist at the Center of Science and Industry in Columbus, Ohio and as a cosmological researcher at the Ohio State University.
Now let’s turn to his article.
It’s always good to remind people what is required for the simplest kind of life, and he does that:
To succeed at evolution and separate itself from mere chemical reactions, life must do three things. First, it must somehow store information, such as the encoding for various processes, traits, and characteristics. This way the successful traits can pass from one generation to another.
Second, life must self-replicate. It must be able to make reasonably accurate copies of its own molecular structure, so that the information contained within itself has the chance to become a new generation, changed and altered based on its survivability.
Lastly, life must catalyze reactions. It must affect its own environment, whether for movement, or to acquire or store energy, or grow new structures, or all the many wonderful activities that life does on a daily basis.
I remember listening to lectures about the origin of life by Dean Kenyon, Charles Thaxton, and Walter Bradley in my younger years. If I remember correctly, the minimal functions of a living system are capture energy, store information, and replicate. Sutter does a nice job of describing an even longer list.
So what’s the problem with appealing to chance and necessity to create all that? Well, in order to do all that, we need to have three components in place: DNA, RNA and molecular machines.
He writes:
Put exceedingly simply (for I would hate for you to mistake me for a biologist), life accomplishes these tasks with a triad of molecular tools.
One is the DNA, which through its genetic code stores information using combinations of just four molecules: adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine. The raw ability of DNA to store massive amounts of information is nothing short of a miracle; our own digital system of 1’s and 0’s (invented because it’s much simpler to tell if a circuit is on or off than some stage in-between) is the closest comparison we can make to DNA’s information density. Natural languages don’t even earn a place on the chart.
The second component is RNA, which is intriguingly similar to DNA but with two subtle, but significant, differences: RNA swaps out thymine for uracil in its codebase, and contains the sugar ribose, which is one oxygen atom short of the deoxyribose of DNA. RNA also stores information but, again speaking only in generalities, has the main job of reading the chemical instructions stored in the DNA and using that to manufacture the last member of the triad, proteins.
“Proteins” is a generic catch-all term for the almost uncountable varieties of molecular machines that do stuff: they snip apart molecules, bind them back together, manufacture new ones, hold structures together, become structures themselves, move important molecules from one place to another, transform energy from one form to another, and so on.
Proteins have one additional function: they perform the job of unraveling DNA and making copies of it. Thus the triad completes all the functions of life: DNA stores information, RNA uses that information to manufacture proteins, and the proteins interact with the environment and perform the self-replication of DNA.
What’s the problem? The problem is that this all has to come together at the start, in order to have life. You can’t build up gradually, from one component, to two components, to three components. All three are needed at the start. This is what Michael Behe calls irreducible complexity, but others have described it as minimal complexity.
Sutter says:
The interconnected nature of DNA, RNA, and proteins means that it could not have sprung up ab initio from the primordial ooze, because if only one component is missing then the whole system falls apart – a three-legged table with one missing cannot stand.
And just to be clear, he would have to provide some evidence of “primordial ooze”. As I’ve blogged about before, life appears almost instantaneously after the cooling of the Earth. He might like to appeal to “billions of years” to get that first replicator, but he doesn’t have billions of years. Molecular oxygen, which is poisonous to origin of life chemistry, was present right after the Earth cooled. And that’s not my opinion – that’s right out of the prestigious peer-reviewed journal Nature.
A recent Nature publication reports a new technique for measuring the oxygen levels in Earth’s atmosphere some 4.4 billion years ago. The authors found that by studying cerium oxidation states in zircon, a compound formed from volcanic magma, they could ascertain the oxidation levels in the early earth. Their findings suggest that the early Earth’s oxygen levels were very close to current levels.
[…]Their findings not only showed that oxygen was present in the early Earth atmosphere, something that has been shown in other studies, but that oxygen was present as early as 4.4 billion years ago. This takes the window of time available for life to have begun, by an origin-of-life scenario like the RNA-first world, and reduces it to an incredibly short amount of time. Several factors need to coincide in order for nucleotides or amino acids to form from purely naturalistic circumstances (chance and chemistry). The specific conditions required already made purely naturalist origin-of-life scenarios highly unlikely. Drastically reducing the amount of time available, adding that to the other conditions needing to be fulfilled, makes the RNA world hypothesis or a Miller-Urey-like synthesis of amino acids simply impossible.
I understand that naturalists want to believe that nature is self-contained, and can do it’s own creating. That belief is practically required in order to have careers in academia. Scientists have to at least claim that “naturalism can do it” or they would draw the unwanted attention of the Darwin mob – the people who got people like William Dembski, Guillermo Gonzalez, Richard Sternberg, etc. fired. However, the scientific evidence doesn’t support naturalism. I wish more people would form their views based on scientific evidence, rather than on the religion of naturalism.
The more we learn about the origin of life in our universe, the more reasonable the case for God’s existence. The building blocks of life (proteins, ribosomes, enzymes etc.) are formed at the direction of specific nucleotide sequencing in DNA, the largest molecule known. In humans, DNA contains as many as 10 billion atoms. The adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine bases in DNA are linked in a particular order to form the genetic code containing the master plan for every organism. The information in DNA guides and instructs the formation of proteins; without it, protein formation would be a haphazard, hit-or-miss proposal. The nucleic sequence in DNA is informational.
Physicist Paul Davies expresses it well: “Once this essential point is grasped, the real problem of biogenesis is clear. Since the heady successes of molecular biology, most investigators have sought the secret of life in the physics and chemistry of molecules. But they will look in vain for conventional physics and chemistry to explain life, for that is a classic case of confusing the medium with the message. The secret of life lies, not in its chemical basis, but in the logical and informational rules it exploits.”
Illustration from God’s Crime Scene
Information in RNA and DNA presents a problem for researchers, especially those who propose RNA as the first molecule to appear through some combination of chance and chemical necessity (known as the “RNA World Hypothesis”). Even if RNA is a precursor to DNA, the first RNA molecules would have to be rich in information to replicate. Information must exist first, before any other transformational process can take place. Without the prior genetic information in DNA and RNA, nothing of significance happens within cells.
Nucleotide sequences are more than statistical gibberish. They are semantically, pragmatically, and apobetically significant sources of information (for more information on these categories of information, see my book, God’s Crime Scene). The genetic sequence has meaning and directs action for a specific purpose.
Our personal experience tells us information comes only from intelligent sources. In fact, in the entire history of the universe (and the history of science) a single instance of information arising from anything other than intelligence has never been identified. This presents a problem for those who attempt to stay “in the room” of the universe to account for genetic information. If we limit ourselves to the materials available to us in the universe, information must be explained from matter, chance, the laws of chemistry or physics, and nothing more. Nobel winning biophysical chemist, Manfred Eigen recognized this challenge when he once said, “Our task is to find an algorithm, a natural law that leads to the origin of information.” Efforts to account for information in this way have repeatedly failed. In fact, the information in DNA proves to be the decisive stumbling block for every naturalistic theory offered for the origin of life.
Every geographiclocation proposed—whether in the atmosphere, in the water, on the ground, under the Earth’s crust, or from outer space—requires an explanation for the existence of information in the genetic code.
Every timeframe offered for life’s origin, be it earlier or later in the history of our planet, requires an explanation for this information.
Every description of why life emerges—whether by chance or some form of physical necessity—requires an explanation for information.
And finally, every mechanism proposed for the origin of life—be it through “protein first” models, “RNA first” models, or any other model—requires an explanation for the existence of genetic information. Cambridge education Philosopher of Science, Stephen C. Meyer, says “Proposals that merely transfer the information problem elsewhere necessarily fail because they assume the existence of the very entity—specified information—they are trying to explain. And new laws will never explain the origin of information, because the processes that laws describe necessarily lack the complexity that informative sequences require. To say otherwise betrays confusion about the nature of scientific laws, the nature of information, or both.”
The chance arrangement of information in DNA is prohibitively improbable, and there are no chemical or physical laws at work to dictate its existence. We are left, then, with a paradox: the laws and forces of nature cannot produce information, but information is required for life to begin. As Paul Davies laments, “we are still left with the mystery of where biological information comes from . . . If the normal laws of physics can’t inject information, and if we are ruling out miracles, then how can life be predetermined and inevitable rather than a freak accident? How is it possible to generate random complexity and specificity together in a lawlike manner? We always come back to that basic paradox.”
Given the utter inability of chance or natural law, and our observations related to the origin of information, intelligence is the best explanation. But this requires us to look for an intelligent source transcending the limits of the physical universe. Scientists trying to account for information by staying “inside the room” seem to be rejecting the obvious. In order to create information, the author of this information must have the ability to select between possible alternatives. This ability to choose selectively requires intelligence, will, and purpose. Unguided physical processes simply cannot accomplish the task. German engineer and IT specialist, Werner Gitt summarizes it this way: “A necessary requirement for generating meaningful information is the ability to select from alternatives and this requires an intelligent, volitional entity . . . Unguided, random processes cannot do this—not in any amount of time—because this selection process demands continuous guidance by intelligent beings that have a purpose.”
Given the utter inability of chance or natural law, and our observations related to the origin of information, intelligence is the best explanation. Share on X
The selection process required in the creation of information requires an intelligent, volitional free agent. That’s why the information in DNA most reasonably points to the existence of God. For a much more thorough description of this evidence, please refer to God’s Crime Scene, Chapter Three – The Origin of Life: Does the Text Require an Author?
Skeptics have argued against the involvement of an external designer on the basis of perceived imperfections within biological structures. If there is an all-powerful intelligent designer, this designer would be working from scratch and should be capable of creating optimally designed micro-machines and biological structures. Evolution, on the other hand, modifies and builds from existing structures, and this process won’t necessarily produce design perfection.
Scientists and philosophers who identify imperfections (and liabilities) in biological organisms point to these deficiencies as evidence against the involvement of an external intelligent agent. Some skeptics have also offered DNA as an example of design imperfection, given the presence of non-functional genes (“junk DNA”) within a variety of genomes.
The Appearance of “Imperfection” Often Results from Entropy or Adaptation
Those who advocate for the existence and interaction of an external intelligent designer aren’t denying the impact of entropy or adaptation over time. Rather than an “either/or” explanation resulting from the creative interaction of an intelligent designer or unguided natural processes, the explanation for “imperfection” we observe in biological systems is most reasonably inferred as the result of intelligent design and processes of modification over time. One example of design “imperfection,” the sesamoid bone “thumb” observed on pandas, is typically offered as an example of poor or inadequate design.
The panda’s “thumb” seems to be an imperfect appendage. Unlike the opposing thumbs of primates, the panda’s “thumb” is unable to grasp as efficiently as would be the case if it were shaped just slightly differently. As a result, the panda’s thumb has been offered by many naturalists as an example of the kind of imperfect shape we might expect from the evolutionary process, and as an evidence against intelligent design.
But this unusual protrusion found in pandas isn’t necessarily the product of an intentional, original design. Mutation and selection operate on all biological organisms, whether they are initially designed or not. The panda’s “thumb” may simply be an adaptation of an original design. Those advocating for an external designer recognize the real and pervasive power entropy has to pervert design in nature. The Second Law of Thermodynamics is an inescapable reality, resulting in degradation from order to disorder. When we see an apparent example of imperfection, entropy may be the better explanation.
The Appearance of “Imperfection” Often Results from Our Limited Understanding
There are times when our limited understanding of biological systems leads us to perceive some degree of imperfection even when this is not the case. This appears to be the situation involving what used to be considered “junk DNA”. The more we learn about apparent “non-functioning” genes and seemingly useless genomic regions, the more we recognize them as important contributors to an elaborate informational system. In the past several years, scientists have discovered a large number of non-protein coding DNA regions under strong “selective constraint.”
Evolutionary scientists recognize these genetics regions have been maintained in the genome for a very long time, even from an evolutionary perspective. The retention of these regions of the DNA molecule indicates their importance to the organism, even if scientists are presently unable to understand why they are important. Typically, those regions of the genome demonstrating “selective constraint” are fundamental to an organism’s ability to survive. These previously under-valued regions of the genome apparently have an important, yet unrecognized, role to play. Scientists have now concluded these “junk sequences” are not junk at all, but “have been under purifying selection and have a significant function that contributes to host viability.” What might at first appear to be an unnecessary, imperfect, extraneous mutation, isn’t necessarily the case. It may simply be a matter of our limited understanding.
The Appearance of “Imperfection” Often Results from Our Narrow Perspective
Prior to serving as a detective, I was classically trained as a designer and architect. Working in an architectural firm in Santa Monica, California, I was typically assigned very limited responsibilities within much larger design projects. While the lead architect was responsible for the overall design of the building, I was sometimes given the limited responsibility of designing an entry portico or the arches in a large courtyard. I would design a prototype, only to have the firm’s principal modify the design later. I often found his modifications were necessary because I’d overlooked some important relationship between design elements. He understood the functional connectivity between these design elements better than I did, and I often had to compromise some aspect of my effort to achieve the larger goal.
This is nearly always the case when engaged in the design process. Every design effort has an impact on some other feature of the overall project, and compromise is essential, even when trying to remove an annoying, apparently “imperfect” feature in the design.
As engineer and historian Henry Petroski writes, “When a new design removes one of these annoyances, it more likely than not fails to address some others or adds a new one of its own. This is what makes engineering and inventing so challenging. All design involves conflicting objectives and hence compromise, and the best designs will always be those that come up with the best compromise.”
For this reason, we simply cannot assume a design is somehow “imperfect” unless we know precisely the goals (or motives) of the designer and the challenges incumbent in the project. As detectives investigating the designs we observe in cellular systems, our limited perspective and understanding sometimes inhibits our ability to fairly judge the design features we observe.
The appearance of design “imperfection” fails to disprove the existence of a designer, both in designed objects created by humans and in designed objects created by God. In fact, the cumulative evidence for a Creator and Intelligent Designer is overwhelming.
J. Warner Wallace is a Christian apologist and former Los Angeles cold-case homicide detective who has been featured numerous times on NBC’s “Dateline” program for his crime scene expertise.
Access Research Network is a group that produces recordings of lectures and debates related to intelligent design. I noticed that on their Youtube channel they are releasing some of their older lectures and debates for FREE. So I decided to write a summary of one that I really like on the Cambrian explosion. This lecture features Dr. Stephen C. Meyer and Dr. Marcus Ross.
The lecture is about two hours. There are really nice slides with lots of illustrations to help you understand what the speakers are saying, even if you are not a scientist.
Here is a summary of the lecture from ARN:
The Cambrian explosion is a term often heard in origins debates, but seldom completely understood by the non-specialist. This lecture by Meyer and Ross is one of the best overviews available on the topic and clearly presents in verbal and pictorial summary the latest fossil data (including the recent finds from Chengjiang China). This lecture is based on a paper recently published by Meyer, Ross, Nelson and Chien “The Cambrian Explosion: Biology’s Big Bang” in Darwinism, Design and Public Education(2003, Michigan State University Press). This 80-page article includes 127 references and the book includes two additional appendices with 63 references documenting the current state of knowledge on the Cambrian explosion data.
The term Cambrian explosion describes the geologically sudden appearance of animals in the fossil record during the Cambrian period of geologic time. During this event, at least nineteen, and perhaps as many as thirty-five (of forty total) phyla made their first appearance on earth. Phyla constitute the highest biological categories in the animal kingdom, with each phylum exhibiting a unique architecture, blueprint, or structural body plan. The word explosion is used to communicate that fact that these life forms appear in an exceedingly narrow window of geologic time (no more than 5 million years). If the standard earth’s history is represented as a 100 yard football field, the Cambrian explosion would represent a four inch section of that field.
For a majority of earth’s life forms to appear so abruptly is completely contrary to the predictions of Neo-Darwinian and Punctuated Equilibrium evolutionary theory, including:
the gradual emergence of biological complexity and the existence of numerous transitional forms leading to new phylum-level body plans;
small-scale morphological diversity preceding the emergence of large-scale morphological disparity; and
a steady increase in the morphological distance between organic forms over time and, consequently, an overall steady increase in the number of phyla over time (taking into account factors such as extinction).
After reviewing how the evidence is completely contrary to evolutionary predictions, Meyer and Ross address three common objections: 1) the artifact hypothesis: Is the Cambrian explosion real?; 2) The Vendian Radiation (a late pre-Cambrian multicellular organism); and 3) the deep divergence hypothesis.
Finally Meyer and Ross argue why design is a better scientific explanation for the Cambrian explosion. They argue that this is not an argument from ignorance, but rather the best explanation of the evidence from our knowledge base of the world. We find in the fossil record distinctive features or hallmarks of designed systems, including:
a quantum or discontinuous increase in specified complexity or information
a top-down pattern of scale diversity
the persistence of structural (or “morphological”) disparities between separate organizational systems; and
the discrete or novel organizational body plans
When we encounter objects that manifest any of these several features and we know how they arose, we invariably find that a purposeful agent or intelligent designer played a causal role in their origin.
Recorded April 24, 2004. Approximately 2 hours including audience Q&A.
I learned a lot by watching great lectures from Access Research Network. Their YouTube channel is here. I recommend their origin of life lectures – I have watched the ones with Dean Kenyon and Charles Thaxton probably a dozen times each. Speaking as an engineer, you never get tired of seeing engineering principles applied to questions like the origin of life.
If you’d like to see Dr. Meyer defend his views in a debate with someone who reviewed his book about the Cambrian explosion, you can find that in this previous post.
Further study
The Cambrian explosion lecture above is a great intermediate-level lecture and will prepare you to be able to understand Dr. Meyer’s new book “Darwin’s Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design“. The Michigan State University book that Dr. Meyer mentions is called “Darwin, Design and Public Education“. That book is one of the two good collections on intelligent design published by academic university presses, the other one being from Cambridge University Press, and titled “Debating Design: From Darwin to DNA“. If you think this lecture is above your level of understanding, then be sure and check out the shorter and more up-to-date DVD “Darwin’s Dilemma“.
The message of many Christian elites about evolution is that Christians should go ahead and believe it. After all, it doesn’t make any difference. Since tells you how the heavens go, they say. And religion tells you how to go to Heaven, they say. But is it true? Or does Darwinism have implications that are are hostile to believe in Christian theism? Let’s see.
First of all, it’s important to understand that Darwinian evolution is fully naturalistic evolution. There is no room in Darwinian evolution for a Designer, or a design. Nature does it’s own gradual creating, and there is no room for jumps in biological complexity.
And what is the implication of a “clockwork” universe? Let the Darwinists tell you themselves.
William Provine says atheists have no free will, no moral accountability and no moral significance:
Let me summarize my views on what modern evolutionary biology tells us loud and clear — and these are basically Darwin’s views. There are no gods, no purposes, and no goal-directed forces of any kind. There is no life after death. When I die, I am absolutely certain that I am going to be dead. That’s the end of me. There is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning in life, and no free will for humans, either.
Richard Dawkins says atheists have no objective moral standards:
In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, or any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference… DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is. And we dance to its music. (Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life (1995))
Well, some people might point to prominent Christians like Howard Van Till and Karl Giberson as examples of people who believe in Darwinian evolution, but profess a belief in Christianity.
Here’s Dr. John G. West to discuss Howard Van Till, over at Evolution News:
In the early years of the intelligent design movement, one of the most significant critics of ID among evangelical Christian academics was Howard Van Till (1938-2024).
A physics professor at Calvin College (the campus chapel is pictured above), Van Till was the pre-eminent example of an evangelical Christian scientist in the 1990s who defended Darwinian evolution. Van Till still ends up being cited by some as an example of how an orthodox Christian can embrace Darwin.
The problem is that after retiring from Calvin, Van Till evolved well beyond Christianity. Indeed, he eventually evolved beyond theism.
By 2006, Van Till was declaring himself a freethinker. By 2016, he was identifying with what he called “a comprehensively naturalistic worldview,” which he described as a belief “that the physical universe is the only reality… and that it is not dependent on a non-corporeal, person-like Agent (the Abrahamic God, for example) to give it being or to guide its evolution.”
And here’s Karl Giberson:
One of the Christian scientists who liked to cite Van Till as a model for integrating Christianity with evolution was Karl Giberson. Also a physicist, Giberson has been a longtime associate of geneticist Francis Collins, with whom he coauthored a book. For many years, Giberson was a professor at Eastern Nazarene University, an explicitly evangelical Christian institution. He helped Francis Collins start the BioLogos Foundation to promote theistic evolution.
Giberson hasn’t yet slid as far down the slope as Van Till. But, sadly, he appears to be on the same trajectory.
In his book Saving Darwin (endorsed by Collins), Giberson denied the historic Christian teaching that humans were originally created good. In Giberson’s view, that can’t be true because it conflicts with Darwinian evolution. According to him, evolution is driven by selfishness, so humans must have been selfish and evil from the start. Giberson nevertheless maintained that he was a committed Christian.
But reading between the lines, his reasons for staying a Christian were rather shaky. He acknowledged poignantly: “my belief in God is tinged with doubts and, in my more reflective moments, I sometimes wonder if I am perhaps simply continuing along the trajectory of a childhood faith that should be abandoned.”
This part is scary. When you marry a theistic evolutionist, they might come to church with you. But they could just as easily be faking it to keep up appearances. Their commitment to Darwinian evolution is absolute, but the Christian theism is just acting:
So why did he stay a Christian? “As a purely practical matter, I have compelling reasons to believe in God. My parents are deeply committed Christians and would be devastated were I to reject my faith. My wife and children believe in God, and we attend church together regularly. Most of my friends are believers. I have a job I love at a Christian college that would be forced to dismiss me if I were to reject the faith that underpins the mission of the college. Abandoning belief in God would be disruptive, sending my life completely off the rails.” Note that Dr. Giberson’s “compelling reasons” to believe in God were sociological. They weren’t about whether Christianity is actually true.
Within a few years of writing Saving Darwin, Giberson resigned his post at the Christian university where he taught. In a book following his departure, Saving the Original Sinner (2015), Giberson made fairly clear that he now regards the Bible as a mish-mash of divergent stories from one particular tribe rather than a divinely inspired text featuring God’s authoritative message. He thinks if Christianity wants to survive it needs to evolve: “Christianity emerged in a different time and must be prepared to evolve like everything else.”
So, if you meet a Christian who believes in Darwinian evolution, make sure they understand the implications of Darwinian evolution, and what it means for the Christian worldview. The conflicts between Darwinian evolution and Christian theism are much more severe than just disagreeing with Bible stories.
Here is a summary of recent podcast of Unbelievable between intelligent design proponent Stephen C. Meyer and UC Berkeley evolutionary biologist Charles Marshall. Dr. Marshall had previously reviewed Dr. Meyer’s new book “Darwin’s Doubt” in the prestigious peer-reviewed journal “Science”.
Details:
Stephen C Meyer is the world’s leading Intelligent Design proponent. His new book Darwin’s Doubt claims that the Cambrian fossil record, which saw an “explosion” of new life forms in a short space of time, is evidence for ID.
Evolutionary biologist Charles Marshall of the University of California, Berkeley has written a critical review of the book. He debates Meyer on whether Darwinian evolution can explain the diversity of life in the Cambrian rocks.
The brief summary this time is not provided by me, it’s from Evolution News.
Excerpt:
This past weekend Britain’s Premier radio network broadcast a debate between Stephen Meyer and UC Berkeley paleontologist Charles Marshall, recorded at the beginning of November. As David Klinghoffer noted yesterday, the subject of the debate was Meyer’s book Darwin’s Doubt. Yes, that’s the same Charles Marshall who reviewed Darwin’s Doubt in Science back in September. See here for our multiple responses.
It was an excellent debate, with both participants offering important insights and good arguments, though in my opinion Meyer unquestionably had the better of it, especially concerning the key scientific question of the origin of the information necessary to build the Cambrian animals. Nevertheless, both parties came to the table ready to engage in serious, thoughtful, and civil discussion about the core issues raised in Darwin’s Doubt, and we commend Marshall not only for participating, but for focusing his critique of the book on the central scientific issues, something other critics have conspicuously failed to do.
The debate was consequently both constructive and civil. Both parties complimented, as well as critiqued, the work of the other. Marshall, for example, described the first third of Darwin’s Doubt — the section that discusses the Cambrian and Precambrian fossil record, Marshall’s own area of principle expertise — as “good scholarship.” He also said it “looks like good science” and that Meyer “writes well,” and that he (Marshall) “really enjoyed reading”Darwin’s Doubt. Meyer, for his, part expressed his admiration for Marshall’s many scientific papers in paleontology and noted that he had been looking forward to the conversation because he and Marshall clearly “shared a passion for the same subject,” despite their different perspectives. Of course, Marshall is not pro-ID and both men expressed spirited disagreements, but they did so in a mostly respectful way that made the debate all the more interesting and engaging to listen to.
I was very impressed with Dr. Marshall’s performance during the debate, although he did try to poison the well a bit against ID at the beginning, and he got nasty at the end. It’s amazing how Dr. Meyer was able to get him to stop it with the politics and get serious, just by sticking to the science. Even when Marshall got insulting at the end, it was still valuable to see how the other side has to abandon rational argument and scientific evidence once they see that they can’t win on the merits. It’s “Inherit the Wind” in reverse.
Evolution News also posted a more complete guide to the debate in this post, and I recommend that you read that post before listening to the debate if you are not familiar with the science.
This is a great debate, and you definitely ought to listen to it. I hope I’ve posted enough here to convince you. If you haven’t yet bought “Signature in the Cell” and “Darwin’s Doubt“, then I urge you to get them, although they are intermediate/advanced level books. The two books are the state of the art in intelligent design research, good enough to be debated with a University of California, Berkeley professor of biology.
MY soul! mark what is here said, for sure it is a sweet Scripture. Amidst all the works of God, there was not one that could be found an help meet for man. The inferior creatures could indeed minister to his bodily comfort, but not to his soul. Eve herself, with all her loveliness, must have failed in this particular. Both the woman and her husband alike needed this help to the soul. How refreshing is the thought, and what a lovely view doth it give us of God’s grace and mercy, that in the seed of the woman an help, in the fullest sense of the word, was found, both for time and eternity. Yes; blessed Jesus! in thee we trace this wonderous gift of God. Pause then, my soul! and add this thought to the vast account: The same love which fitted thee with an help meet in a Saviour, hath fitted thee, and will continue to fit thee, with the supply of all thy need. It were to be wished that every child of God would never lose sight of this certain truth—that he must have the fittest station in life, the fittest frame of mind and of body, the fittest yoke-fellow, the fittest circumstances; in short, the fittest mercies and the fittest trials; because every thing is made subservient to the divine glory in Jesus. Sweet thought! He that spared not his own Son, will, with him, freely give all things.
Hawker, R. (1845). The Poor Man’s Morning Portion (pp. 17–18). Robert Carter.
Having offered a presuppositional apologetic for a six-day creation view for fifty years, Ken has assembled a series of his writings into a daily reading format for use in the home, church, and ministry. He reminds us of how all life issues are contained in the first eleven chapters of Genesis. These chapters provide foundational answers in response to the modern worldly philosophies that promote such wicked practices as abortion, homosexuality, and transsexualism. Ken explains his earnest desire to help parents and teachers equip their children and the coming generations with this book against these radical worldviews. Along the way, he shares with both humor and grace anecdotes of his journey in this ministry, from being on talk shows, interacting with youth groups, facing mocking from Christians, and debating Bill Nye (the Science Guy).
You will find this episode of Three Guys Theologizing fascinating! If you listen carefully, you can also hear a way to enter to win a free copy of Ken’s book. So tune in once again to 3GT!
Supposedly the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial in Dayton, Tennessee, over whether evolution could be taught in public schools, embarrassed Christian “fundamentalists” out of public life until the 1970s. The reality is more complex.
Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation by Brenda Wineapple tells the story of the trial but does not reflect deeply about its long-term impact on religious public witness. Instead, she focuses on the supposed similarities of the trial and its era to today, amid debates over populism, Christian nationalism, and race.
The trial was chiefly about the large personalities of perennial presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, who joined the prosecution, and famed trial lawyer Clarence Darrow, who joined the defense. In 1960, the trial was dramatized in the film “Inherit the Wind,” with Spencer Tracey portraying Darrow, Fredric March as Bryan, and Gene Kelly as cynical Baltimore reporter H.L. Mencken, who despised backcountry America. Of course, the film is not historically accurate. Defendant John Scopes was never jailed. The jail was never attacked by an angry mob. Scopes was not romantically involved with the daughter of the town’s fundamentalist “spiritual leader.” That fiery preacher, whose denomination is never cited, is sinisterly portrayed consigning a drowned unbaptized boy to hell in his funeral sermon, an odd teaching for any Protestant preacher, fundamentalist or not. The film portrays the town’s religious people as dangerously reactionary.
In reality, Dayton during the controversy was friendly and civil. It virtually invited national notoriety by staging the controversial trial to invite publicity and commerce. The American Civil Liberties Union publicly advertised for a schoolteacher to defy the law to precipitate a test trial, which the ACLU hoped would eventually overturn the Tennessee law as unconstitutional. John Scopes amiably agreed to cooperate as a defendant, although it’s unclear whether he ever taught evolution in the classroom. He persuaded students to testify against him. There was never any question that he would be found guilty, with hopes placed on higher court appeals.
Bryan eagerly volunteered to help the prosecution. He was a vociferous critic of Darwinian evolution as dehumanizing and immoral, a threat against the weak and vulnerable. He was the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate in 1896, 1900 and 1908. Secretary of State under Woodrow Wilson, and he strove to be a political kingmaker at the 1912, 1920 and 1924 Democratic Party conventions. At the 1924 convention, he successfully denounced a resolution condemning the Ku Klux Klan. Although a self-styled friend of the commoner, he was not a friend to black people, whom he thought should passively accept subordination in a white-led society. Bryan rejoiced at the 1919 enactment of Prohibition. And like many others, he saw post World War I America, despite Prohibition, as morally degenerating, with divorce increasing, rising religious liberalism and secularism, permissive sexuality, debauched entertainment, and America losing its definitive Protestant character.
Both Bryan and Darrow were political progressives. Darrow had supported two of Bryan’s three presidential campaigns. Both ultimately opposed eugenics as a threat to society’s most vulnerable. Both strove, selectively, to defend society’s outcasts. Both wanted activist government enacting greater justice. But Bryan was an ardent Presbyterian who wanted a society and public life centered on the Bible. Never ordained, he was a popular lay preacher and speaker on the Chautauqua circuit. He was a polished and charming if not sophisticated exponent of American populist folk religion. In the film “Inherit the Wind,” rapturous crowds in Dayton repeatedly great Bryan with the hymn “Give Me That Old Time Religion.”
Darrow was an outspoken religious agnostic who defended unsavory murderers, enjoying publicity and money, but also sincerely defended unpopular political dissidents and racial minorities. He often spoke cynically but was suspected of being a secret idealist. He feared political and religious conformity. Some in the ACLU resented and feared his role in the trial, which they did not want to be clash over religion. But Darrow and Bryan ensured it would be exactly that. And the national media, including newsreels filmed in the courtroom, portrayed it so. It was a battle over God and the Bible.
“Inherit the Wind” portrays the town’s fiery preacher leading a histrionic evening outdoor revival full of threats and thunder that horrified even Bryan and the preacher’s daughter. In reality, Dayton was dominated by more subdued Methodists and Baptists. The trial judge was a devout Methodist who carried a Bible into the courtroom. Amid soaring Summer heat, the trial was eventually moved outdoors, adding to its theatricality.
As the book recalls, Darrow with reporters and others one evening during the trial attended a “holy roller” revival outside town. It was perhaps Pentecostal. The worshippers were anti-Darwin but mostly focused on repentance and salvation with great passion. Darrow and the reporters watched mostly in reverential silence, with Darrow admitting their sincerity and their need for faith amid poverty. He offered respect to them that he could not give to Bryan, whom he deemed self-serving.
Refused permission to call scholarly witnesses about evolution, Darrow surprised everyone by summoning Bryan to the witness stand to query him about the Bible. Appalling the rest of the defense team, Bryan readily acceded, his ego unable to resist. Although a lifelong teacher of the Bible, Bryan was no scholar or deep thinker. He superficially responded to Darrow’s efforts to discredit the Bible with bromides and quips. It was a fiasco for Bryan’s reputation. Darrow won in the court of public opinion even as Scopes was found guilty and sentenced to a $100 fine, later overturned on a technicality. The Tennessee law was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court forty years later.
Bryan died in Dayton, only five days after the trial, after attending church, age 65. As a populist exponent of progressive politics and religious conservatism, he left no successor, which may partly explain why public “fundamentalism” receded as a political force. Prohibition was revoked in 1933. As the book notes, Bryan in 1923 was defeated as a candidate for Presbyterian Church Moderator. The New York Times reported in its front-page story that his “controversy” over evolution factored in his defeat. A nominating speech hailed his “uncompromising position for civic righteousness.” His successful opponent was hailed for not bringing politics into the church.
Wineapple, the author, tries to parallel Bryan with today’s “Christian nationalists.” And perhaps there is overlap but only to the extent that religion of all stripes has always infused American public life. The author stresses that southern segregationists opposed teaching evolution while also admitting that black Christians largely agreed. The Scopes Monkey Trial was about two opposing forms of progressivism. Both claimed to defend the vulnerable. Bryan and Darrow in the end were too absolutist to find common ground.
The idea that one day several billion years ago in some primordial soupy liquid inanimate molecules happen to collide and by sheer chance produce a living entity, which over many eons of time evolved into human beings, is called Darwinian evolution. Others have defined evolution as nobody times nothing equals everything.
As I have shared in several past devotions to believe that nobody times nothing equals everything takes far more faith than to believe that: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” (Genesis 1:1). Whether you believe in Darwinian evolution or the biblical account of divine creation, since nobody today was there to see how life came into existence, both belief systems have to be accepted on faith. And which faith system you believe in has enormous implications.
Let’s take a look at both the creation account and the evolution account and their respective theologies:
Creation – A theology of meaningfulness
The biblical account of creation is rich and full of abundant meaning. First, we know from Scripture that we are created in the image of our Creator, for we read in (Genesis 1:27): “So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” Neither animals nor angels are created in the image of God – only mankind is! God loved us so much that He created us in His own image. We are masterpieces of the Creator of the universe that no Picasso could ever paint or Rodin sculpt. We are image bearers of God and His ambassadors for Christ while here on earth. And as ambassadors we are entrusted by God to represent Him here on earth. What an awesome responsibility and privilege for God to think so highly of us that He would allow us to be reflectors of His glory here on planet earth. I can think of nothing more meaningful than this.
Second, we were created to have a personal relationship with our Creator. Just imagine the sovereign Lord of the universe wants to have a love relationship with you and me. He calls us His treasured possession (Deuteronomy 14:2), and I believe He cherishes His relationship with us. He invites us to enter into this incredible relationship by accepting Jesus into our hearts and having our relationship, which was broken in the Garden of Eden, fully restored. Imagine how special it is to be able to call God our Savior and heavenly Father. What incredible meaning to be able to worship and fellowship with the God of the universe!
And third, our relationship with the Lord is meant to be for all of eternity. As a result, our purpose in life and ultimate destiny will remain meaningful forever!
Evolution – A theology of meaninglessness
When it comes to believing in evolution it is important to note that some people, even some Christians, believe that there is a God and that He used evolution to bring mankind into existence. This belief system is called theistic evolution and quite frankly is an insult to the God of the Bible. To think that God used trial and error, survival of the fittest, and continuous death, to bring mankind into existence is, in my opinion, patently absurd.
But Darwinian evolution, which takes place without God, is one of the most morbid and meaningless worldviews a person can have.
First, evolution can’t answer the three big questions of life with any meaningful explanation. As far as where did we come from evolution says we came from nothing. As far as what happens when we die, evolution says, we go back to nothing. And as far as what is the purpose of life, evolution doesn’t understand that mankind, without a belief in God, will never find lasting meaning since we were created to have a relationship with the Lord. Or in the words of the great French mathematician and philosopher, Blaise Pascal, everyone is created with a spiritual vacuum that only Jesus Christ can fill.
And second, and I ask you to ponder just how morbid evolution really is by carefully examining the words of the late theologian R. C. Sproul: “If we emerge from the slime by accident and finally disintegrate into a void or abyss of nothingness, then we live our lives between two poles of absolute meaninglessness.”1
My friends if there is no God, morbid meaninglessness is your only option if you worship at the shrine of evolution. But praise God, the Lord does indeed exist, and has shattered this myth of meaninglessness and replaced it with meaning beyond our wildest dreams in the person of Jesus Christ! The Christian worldview is indeed a joyous one and as a former atheist, who believed in evolution, I am so glad that God delivered me 43 years ago from the kingdom of darkness into His marvelous kingdom of light!
The Discovery Institute has a new video out in their series on intelligent design, about so-called “junk DNA”. Basically, there are two sides to the origins issue: the design-deniers and the design-recognizers. (And theistic evolutionists belong in the former group). These two groups make different predictions about the information in the human genome. And we can check their predictions.
The myth of junk DNA is much more than just an evolutionary idea that turned out to be mistaken. As the new episode of Long Story Short makes amusingly clear, it also reflects a “battle of predictions” with intelligent design. Going back to the 1970s, evolutionists predicted that, in line with their premise of a randomly generated genome, DNA would turn out to be full of Darwinian debris, playing no functional role but merely parasitic (atheist Richard Dawkins’s term) on the small portion of functional DNA.
Proponents of intelligent design said the opposite. William Dembski (1998) and Richard Sternberg (2002) predicted widespread function for the so-called “junk.” After all, as a product of care and intention, the genome ought to be comparable in a way with products of human genius, with every detail there for a reason.
On that, ID has since been massively vindicated. Scientific theories are tested by the predictions they make. If those fail, it’s a bad sign for the theory. Mainstream science journals like Science are admitting the truth about the erstwhile “junk” — even as a few diehard Darwinists like Laurence Moran at the University of Toronto deny it.
And these predictions by the design side are not new. My young Earth creationist friend even sent me this today (today is Wednesday, I always write these posts the night before and schedule them for the next morning):
While a Creation/Fall model could account for the accumulation of some random, mutationally defective “extra copies,” evolutionists felt they had a strong point that 97% “junk” DNA pointed more to evolution than intelligent design. Creationists have long suspected that this “junk DNA” will turn out to have a function. In fact, junk DNA research is now a hot topic; not only are more and more functions being detected, but it is suspected that junk DNA is full of yet-to-be-discovered “intellectual riches.
That prediction is from 1994. My friend has a whole article about Junk DNA here, with all the predictions from each side.
He says “Carl Wieland founded CMI”. CMI is Creation Ministries International, which is supposed to be the best YEC web site.
Anyway, if you missed the other videos in the series, there is a playlist, but all the videos are out of order! If you want a quick and snarky introduction to intelligent design, this is it.
Recently, I wrote a post about how you can make a simple argument for intelligent design based on junk DNA. Step 1: find out what Darwinian naturalists claim about junk DNA. Step 2: find out what design proponents claim about junk DNA. Step 3: compare those predictions with scientific discoveries about junk DNA over the past decades. Today we’ll do it with the fossil record.
I’m going to use an amazing article from Günter Bechly from over at Evolution News. Günter writes an article about fossils every Friday (he calls it “Fossil Friday”).
Here’s last Friday’s article, where he gave a nice overview of why Christians should care about the fossil record.
He writes:
This Fossil Friday I want to address the common request to provide an expanded written form of my lectures on discontinuities in the fossil record (e.g., on YouTube) together with references to mainstream scientific papers that back up these arguments against neo-Darwinism. Since the sudden appearance of trilobites in the Cambrian Explosion is one of the best known examples for discontinuities in the fossil record, I chose the early trilobite Wanneria sp. from the Lower Cambrian of Canada as today’s featured fossil. So let’s jump right in.
Then he talks about the predictions of Darwinists and design proponents:
Every theory makes certain predictions and these predictions have to be tested with empirical evidence. Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution necessarily predicts a gradual development of life. Therefore he insisted on gradualism, against the advice of his good friend Thomas Huxley. Darwin quoted in his magnum opus The Origin of Species (Darwin 1859) not less that six times the Latin dictum “natura non facit saltus”, nature does not make jumps, because he wanted to present a fully naturalistic explanation for the history of life on our planet, knowing perfectly well that saltations would have tacitly implied miracle-like intelligent interventions. The prediction of gradualism is not accidental and not a dispensable side issue in Darwinism. This was made clear by Richard Dawkins, arguably the most ardent modern popularizer of Darwinism, in his bestselling book The Greatest Show on Earth (Dawkins 2009), where he explicitly clarified that “Evolution not only is a gradual process as a matter of fact; it has to be gradual if it is to do any explanatory work.” In another book titled Climbing Mount Improbable (Dawkins 1996) he explained the reasons with a beautiful metaphor: Imagine the task to reach the top of a steep and tall cliff from the sea shore. It would be an improbable (or rather impossible) miracle to achieve this task with a single big jump. However, if there was a gentle slope on the backside of the cliff, you could easily and effortlessly climb the mountain with a lot of small successive steps. This is the way evolution must operate according to Darwin and Dawkins: not by sudden miraculous jumps, but many small steps, that are each not unlikely to happen accidentally without intelligent intervention, and which accumulate over long periods of time to add up to big biological differences.
Engineers don’t check in code gradually, one letter at a time. We check in a bunch of related changes to different files that implement some feature. Some days, I have a lot of meetings. Some days, I spend time doing code reviews or making diagrams or writing documentation. And some days, I get to write code all day. So, if you look at my Github history, you’ll see that some days I have 35 commits, and other days none. That’s consistent with having a “designer”. The complexity increases in “jumps”, with each jump containing changes to several files, and the changes add some new feature. But that’s not available to Dawkins and Darwin, they don’t like engineers, or sudden jumps in complexity.
Günter lists out a bunch of biological “jumps”, where God pulled an all-nighter, with pizza and Mountain Dew, and checked in a whole bunch of new code all at once.
Here are a few from his list of about 15 of them:
The Origin of Life (3.8 bya)
The Origin of Photosynthesis (3.8 bya)
The Cambrian Explosion (537-508 mya)
The Carboniferous Insect Explosion (325-314/307 mya)
The Early Triassic Marine Reptile Radiation (248-240 mya)
The Mid Triassic Gliding / Flying Reptile Radiation (230-210 mya)
Upper Triassic Dinosaur Explosion (234-232 mya)
The Abominable Mystery of the Origin of Flowering Plants (130-115 mya)
The Paleogene Big Bang of Modern Birds (65-55 mya)
Günter has the details of each of these, but if you have listened to our recent episode about the origin of life with Dr. Fazala Rana, then you already know about the first one. The point is that the fossil record has a whole bunch of “big bangs”, where God checked in a whole bunch of new code in a very short period of time. This is strictly forbidden in Darwinian theory, but the fossil record doesn’t care about theories.
Günter concludes:
The gradualistic core predictions of any unguided evolutionary mechanisms such as neo-Darwinism are strongly contradicted by the empirical evidence. The cumulative conflicting evidence from molecular biology, genetics, population genetics, and the discontinuous fossil record can no longer be explained away as anomalies or as artifacts such as under-sampling of an incomplete fossil record. The total evidence is better explained with pulses of infusion of new information from outside of the system (top-down), rather than with a purely mechanistic stepwise bottom-up process. The only known cause in the universe that is able to produce significant amounts of new complex specified information is the activity of an intelligent conscious agent, so that intelligent design theory qualifies as superior alternative to unguided Darwinian evolution in an inference to the best explanation (abductive reasoning) among competing hypotheses. This is not an argument from ignorance (i.e., God of the gaps) as is often incorrectly claimed by critics, but is based on empirical data and our positive knowledge about the regular causal structure of the universe and the type of causes that exclusively are known to produce certain effects.
And I found a nice lecture that he gave on the topic:
The article was tough for me to understand, but I think I got the big picture of what he was saying. I blogged on it so that I can find it again if I get questions about what evidence there is for a designer. I sure hope that we are making more scientists like him for Team Design, because his post was quality work.
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