App
Darwinian Evolution—The Failed Hypothesis
The world of so-called “science”—which includes numerous scientists, philosophers of science, science writers, academics, and many who wish to convince themselves and others that there is no Creator God—has religiously embraced the Darwinian theory of evolution as if it were thoroughly established, incontrovertible fact. In reality, it is nothing of the sort.
There are several inherent fallacies one must embrace in order to believe Darwin’s theory of evolution:
1) Life can spontaneously generate. It cannot.
2) A large number can be reached from a small number by subtraction. It cannot.
3) Order and the information-rich organization of complex chemical compounds can “just happen.” They cannot.
4) Instructional information, a form of “communication,” does not require a source communicator. The fact is, no “communication” ever occurs without an original communicator as its source.
The Law of Biogenesis Repeatedly Proven
Francesco Redi and Louis Pasteur both proved that life originates only from existing life. Evolutionists, however, argued that Redi and Pasteur had only disproved the “spontaneous generation” of mice, flies, or microorganisms; the theory of evolution, they held, dealt with the actual beginnings of life on earth—a much more “simple” and primitive event, perhaps involving only the mere alignment of simple compounds in a “chemical soup.”
Indeed, as Jonathan Sarfati writes, “In Darwin’s day, many swallowed the theory of spontaneous generation—that life arose from non-living matter. [The theory] was somewhat easier to believe then, because the cell’s structure was almost unknown. Ernst Haeckel, Darwin’s German ‘bulldog on the continent,’ claimed that a cell was a ‘simple lump of albuminous combination of carbon.’ There was no excuse for this, though, because light microscopy had advanced enormously, even before Haeckel’s day, to a level that could resolve many subcellular components.”2
Countering evolution’s supposition on the “spontaneous” origin of life was the late British astronomer and cosmologist Sir Fred Hoyle. Though he remained an atheist to his death in 2001, Hoyle was honest enough to have calculated (with the help of mathematician and fellow atheist Chandra Wickramesinghe) the odds against even an enzyme—a necessary catalyst for biological function in living cells, but not an actual living organism itself—having originated on earth “all by itself” from non-living matter. Hoyle outlines how they arrived at their answer:
“There are some ten to twenty distinct amino acids which determine the basic backbone of the enzyme and these simply must be in the correct position in the polypeptide structure. The rest of the amino acids, usually numbering a hundred or more, then control the inner details of the surface shape. There are also the active sites that eventually promote the biochemical reactions in question, and these too must be correct in their atomic forms and locations.
“Consider now the chance that in a random ordering of the twenty different amino acids which make up the polypeptides it just happens that the different kinds just fall into the order appropriate to a particular enzyme. The chance of obtaining a suitable backbone can hardly be greater than one part in 1015, and the chance of obtaining the appropriate active site can hardly be greater than one part in 105. Because the fine details of the surface shape can be varied we shall take the conservative line of not ‘piling on the agony’ by including any further small probability for the rest of the enzyme. The two small probabilities we are including are quite enough. They have to be multiplied, when they yield a chance of one part in 1020 of obtaining the required enzyme in a functioning form.
“By itself, this small probability could be faced, because one must contemplate not just a single shot at obtaining the enzyme, but a very large number of trials such as are supposed to have occurred in an organic soup early in the history of the Earth. The trouble is that there are about two thousand [necessary human] enzymes, and the chance of obtaining them all in a random trial is only one part in (1020)2000 = 1040,000, an outrageously small probability that could not be faced even if the whole universe consisted of organic soup.”3
Not only that, but the “soup” would have to exist in one contiguous mass, not divided into trillions of separate bodies, as the universe actually is. We are not talking “improbable” here; we are talking impossible!
For anyone who thinks Hoyle’s put-down of Darwinian evolution is “religion masquerading as science,” even a cursory examination of Hoyle’s life and work—while aware of his atheism—should put that patent nonsense to rest.
John Ashton reinforces Hoyle’s conclusions without quoting him directly: “There is no known proven mechanism that can explain all the steps [required] for a living cell to form from non-living molecules (abiogenesis), and statistically it is impossible.”4
Science has proven that life could never have spontaneously generated from inanimate matter. It is not doing so today; it never has; and it never will. The first of the four inherent fallacies of the theory of evolution stands exposed for the false, unscientific, and ridiculous idea that it is.
Second-grade Arithmetic
The fundamental tenet of the theory of evolution is that life evolved from primitive forms to higher, more advanced forms by a process of mutations followed by “natural selection”—all “supervised by no one.” The inherent problem with this idea is that mutations do not add information to the genome. They only garble or subtract information. “Mutations do not produce new, purposeful genetic information.”5 Indeed, “There is no known physical or chemical mechanism [that can] generate heritable variations that will improve adaptivity or increase the complexity of living organisms.”6
We have shown above that life cannot spontaneously generate from inanimate matter. But let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that a primitive life form of some kind has spontaneously come into being. Clearly, its genome would be quite simple—perhaps akin to a single page of assembly instructions for a kiddie car. On the other hand, the genome for any “higher animal,” and certainly for a human being, would be more akin to multiple warehouses full of thousand-page instruction manuals for the assembly and operation of all the rocket engines, controls, and computers—plus training manuals for astronauts, engineers, and technicians—needed to put a man on the moon!
Question: Can we get from the tiny amount of information in the imagined primitive genome to the exponentially greater amount of information in the human genome by subtraction? Remember, mutations do not add to a gnome, they only subtract information. Yet Richard Dawkins, Bill Nye, Jerry Coyne, and their fellow evolutionists would have us believe the opposite—that mutations can somehow advance a gnome. But if you remember your second-grade arithmetic, subtraction does not yield a larger number; it yields only a smaller one!
In spite of evidence to the contrary, numerous books have been written to convince the gullible and unsuspecting public that the mythical god called “Evolution”—by mutations followed by “natural selection”—somehow took a “simple” life form and added information to its genome so that it gave rise to more and more complex creatures, ultimately developing them into the infinitely complex and diverse life forms we find on earth today.
Order and Organization: Accidental?
All life forms have in the nucleus of each cell a molecular substance called DNA. While most people have heard of DNA—indeed, it has become almost a byword of sorts in our everyday speech—few truly understand what it is, except that it plays an important role in the development and function of living things. What DNA in fact represents is a critical feature of life—organization. But do inanimate elements and compounds simply “organize themselves”? Evolutionists would have us believe that they do.
Researcher Stephen Meyer asks, “What about living cells and the complex molecules they contain? Does their organization derive from the physical and chemical properties of their parts? Do the chemical constituents of proteins or DNA molecules have properties that could cause them to self-organize? Are there physical or chemical forces that make the production of information-rich molecules inevitable under plausible prebiotic conditions? [Evolutionist] Dean Kenyon thought the answer to these questions might well be yes.”7
The essence of Kenyon’s argument was that laws of chemistry and physics made the alignment of substances into living material virtually inevitable in the imagined “prebiotic soup” thought to have existed in the primordial earth. After a while, however, even Kenyon began to doubt his own theory, partly as a result of the work of Michael Polanyi.
“Polanyi argued that, in the case of communications systems, the laws of physics and chemistry do not determine the arrangements of the characters that convey information. The laws of acoustics and the properties of the air do not determine which sounds are conveyed by speakers of natural languages. Neither do the chemical properties of ink determine the arrangements of letters on a printed page. Instead, the laws of physics and chemistry allow a vast array of possible sequences, characters, or symbols in any code or language. Which sequence of characters is used to convey a message is not determined by physical law, but by the choice of the users of the communications system in accord with the established conventions of vocabulary and grammar—just as engineers determine the arrangement of the parts of machines in accord with the principles of engineering.
“Thus, Polanyi concluded, communications systems defy reduction to physics and chemistry for much the same reasons that machines do…. [He] insisted that living things defy reduction to the laws of physics and chemistry because they also contain a system of communications—in particular the DNA molecule and the whole gene-expression system….
“To say that the information in DNA does not reduce to or derive from physical and chemical forces implied that the information in DNA did not originate from such forces. If so, then there was nothing Kenyon could do to salvage his self-organizational model.”8
DNA Information With No Source?
Most people have some idea of the role DNA plays in determining how living organisms develop from conception through birth and subsequent growth to adulthood. They also realize that DNA plays a part in bodily cell functions throughout life. But few—unless they are biologists or have at least studied college-level biology—have a clear picture of what this all-important compound called deoxyribonucleic acid really is. James Watson and Francis Crick first discovered in 1953 that its molecular structure was what has been called a “double helix”—looking somewhat like a long ribbon-shaped ladder. The “steps” on the ladder are compounds that contain one of four elements—represented by letters. “Indeed, when Watson and Crick discovered the structure of DNA, they also discovered that DNA stores information using a four-character chemical alphabet. Strings of precisely sequenced chemicals called nucleotide bases store and transmit the assembly instructions—the information—for building the crucial protein molecules and machines the cell needs to survive.
“The DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) molecule is a polymer (a chain) whose elements (the links) are nucleotides. A nucleotide is made up of what is called a nucleoside, which is the main part of the link, and a phosphate group, which serves as the connector joining the links to each other. The phosphate group consists of a phosphorus atom joined with four oxygen atoms. The nucleoside is a combination of two molecules. One is a sugar, the other is called a base…. There are four kinds of bases, and therefore four kinds of nucleotides. The four bases are adenine, which we denote by A, thymine, denoted by T, cytosine, denoted by C, and guanine, denoted by G. The nucleotides are strung together in a long chain with a mixture of the four kinds of bases. The DNA can carry information in the order of its bases.”9
“Crick later developed this idea in his famous ‘sequence hypothesis,’ according to which the chemical parts of DNA (the nucleotide bases) function like letters in a written language or symbols in a computer code. Just as letters in an English sentence or digital characters in a computer program may convey information depending on their arrangement, so too do certain sequences of chemical bases along the spine of the DNA molecule convey precise instructions for building proteins.”10 According to software developer Bill Gates, “DNA is like a computer program, but far, far more advanced than any software ever created.”11
Question: Does computer software “program itself”? If not, then why would any rational person imagine in their wildest dreams that biological encoding—which Bill Gates calls “far more advanced” than any computer software—somehow “organized itself” without any external agency being involved?
Another question: Is there such a thing as controlling, instructional information that has no source? When a person reads a written message or receives instructions, is it not correctly assumed that the communication was written by someone—i.e., a source? Yet Crick insists on reminding everyone, “Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved.”12
Huh?
“The order of the nucleotides on the DNA molecule has all the characteristics of a message, laden with information. A message may be passed on, but in the real world, there can be no message without a message sender…. The ultimate puzzle of life is the origin of the information upon which life is based.”13
“Whatever information is—whether thought or an elaborate arrangement of matter—one thing seems clear. What humans recognize as information certainly originates from thought—from conscious or intelligent activity. A message received via fax by one person first arose as an idea in the mind of another…. Our experience of the world shows that what we recognize as information invariably reflects the prior activity of conscious and intelligent persons.
“What, then, should we make of the presence of information in living organisms? The Human Genome Project, among many other developments in modern biology, has pressed this question to the forefront of public awareness. We now know that we do not just create information in our own technology; we also find it in our biology—and, indeed, in the cells of every living organism on earth. But how did this information arise? And what does the presence of information in even the simplest living cell imply about life and its origin? Who or what ‘wrote’ the book of life?”14
“Darwin’s theory, when he proposed it, seemed to refute the Argument from Design. The theory was supposed to show that life could develop from a simple beginning to the complex organisms of today. It was supposed to be able to do this without the need for a designer or a creator. It was supposed to substitute chance for design…. [However, we have seen that] the NDT [neo-Darwinian theory of evolution], which describes an evolution that contradicts the Torah’s concept of creation, is incompatible with many scientific observations.”15
The Darwinian theory of evolution stands exposed as the failed hypothesis of pseudo-science that it clearly is—defying both rational logic and established scientific fact. The Bible tells us God created life, not that it somehow spontaneously generated and then “evolved” into ever more complex forms. The Bible and scientifically proven fact are in full agreement; but the Bible does not support would-be science.
Which will you embrace—the statements of the Bible corroborated by true science, or scientifically disproved theories like Darwinian evolution, which also contradicts Scripture?
