God's Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (13 page)

Darwin’s explanation that all things have a natural cause made the belief in a creatively superior mind quite unnecessary. He created a secular world, more so than anyone before him. Certainly many forces were verging in that
same direction, but Darwin’s work was the crashing arrival of this idea and from that point on, the secular viewpoint of the world became virtually universal.
¹¹

The scientific community was looking for an explanation for life other than God. Darwin gave them their God substitute:
natural selection
.

Natural selection is the blind process that slowly selects small differences between individuals in species to outsurvive others. Over time the beneficial differences, such as larger size, become more dominant in a population. These small changes are believed to accumulate over time and eventually cause a species to dramatically transform. Natural selection combined with
mutations
is seen as the explanation for all of the variety of life as well as the emergence of every species. For this to happen, life would have emerged gradually over millions of years. “Life on Earth evolved gradually beginning with one primitive species—perhaps a self-replicating molecule—that lived more than 3.5 billion years ago; it then branched out over time, throwing off many new and diverse species; and the mechanism for most (but not all) of evolutionary
change
is natural selection.”
¹²

In Dawkins’s work called
The Blind Watchmaker
, he goes into great detail to laud the complexity of living things only to assert that their complexities arise from natural selection rather than as the result of an intelligent Creator.

Natural selection is the blind watchmaker, blind because it does not see ahead, does not plan consequences, has no purpose in view. Yet the living results of natural selection overwhelmingly impress us with the appearance of design
as if by a master watchmaker, impress us with the illusion of design and planning.
¹³

Evolution
is certainly observable within a species or genus. Even a single type of bird, like the finches Darwin observed, have massive amounts of variety. This type of evolution is called
microevolution
. However, this process can only drive very limited changes. As Hugh Ross has explained,

This microevolution is not linear as Darwin presumed. It behaves like a sine curve (it oscillates). During the few years Darwin spent on the
Galapagos Islands
he observed the beaks of some finch species getting wider and others getting longer. However, now that biologists have been observing those finch species for over 150 years they note that the beaks get wider then narrower and longer then shorter in response to varying available food. That is, each beak characteristic is seen to vary about a mean. Rather than microevolution arguing for dramatic changes it appears instead to argue for stasis.
¹⁴

The theory that this process could eventually cause one species to evolve into another significantly different one (like a fish becoming an amphibian) is
macroevolution
. The former has been clearly observed; however, the latter has no experimental or observational support.

D
ARWIN
’
S
V
ISION

Darwin envisioned all of the history of life resembling a giant tree. The base of the tree would represent the first living
organisms. The branches of the tree would represent the growth and development of various species from one kind to another. As life progressed, natural selection would cause viable organisms to survive and ultimately form completely new species. Therefore, all of life was interconnected, every living thing ultimately a product of common descent.

Darwin’s ideas about
evolution
congealed after his three-year voyage on the
Beagle
as a young naturalist in 1834. He eventually arrived in a chain of islands off the coast of South America called the
Galapagos Islands
, where the bulk of his study focused on the finch species on the island chain. He noticed traits that caused certain finches to thrive in that environment. Once he returned to England, it would be twenty-five years before he would fully develop these observations and publish
On the Origin of Species
by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life
.

Darwin knew his theory would be controversial. He fully understood the religious implication, that natural selection would eliminate the need for divine guidance in nature. But he also understood that his theory had many unanswered questions. Ultimately he knew that if natural selection couldn’t explain the emergence of all of life, it could, in fact, explain nothing beyond trivial changes in species.

Contrary to the current tenets of evolutionary
dogma
that pervade modern science, no conclusive evidence has been presented that all of life arose from a common ancestor by an unguided natural process.

Yes, there are noteworthy connections between humans and chimpanzees, who share a significant percentage of the same
DNA
. In addition, human embryos look a lot like other types
of embryos in the animal world. But the real issue is how these observations are interpreted. These similarities between species could just as easily result from a common Designer rather than a common ancestor.

O
RIGIN OF
L
IFE

When Darwin wrote
On the Origin of Species
, the title mistakenly implied that the
theory
of evolution offered evidence of how life arose from natural processes. Nothing could be further from the truth. His theory was the origin of species, not the origin of life. As Darwin wrote, “Science as yet throws no light on the far higher problem of the essence or origin of life.”
¹⁵

Think about it. According to Darwin’s theory, every living thing from algae in the ocean to elephants in the desert was derived from one single-celled ancestor. Natural selection used the extremely rare occurrence of positive
mutations
and accumulated those variations to produce all the species of everything that is alive. But where did that original cell come from? How could something this fantastic just happen? Natural selection tells you only what happens after you get life. If there is no life or no cell to begin with, then there is nothing to select. This is exactly what Oxford
mathematician
John Lennox pointed out to Richard Dawkins in the God Delusion Debate in Birmingham, Alabama, in 2008: “Richard, evolution only tells you what happens once you get life; it can’t explain where the mechanism of the replicating mutator came from.”
¹⁶

Several Christians in Darwin’s time and today feel that the theory of evolution poses no threat to a belief in the existence of God. They simply see evolution as the tool God used to shape life throughout history. Although it is not a position I hold, I can respect
their interpretation. However, all thoughtful Christians would agree that a
blind
evolutionary process could not produce the wondrous forms of life we see today, particularly humanity. The idea defies abundant scientific discoveries as well as common sense. Even if the mechanism that accounts for all the changes in life from one species to another were natural selection, it would have taken a supernatural Designer to have constructed such an astounding process. The evidence from the microscope points as clearly to a Creator as does the evidence from the telescope.

M
YTH
B
USTERS

Skeptics delight in calling all religion a myth and comparing belief in God to belief in the tooth fairy or one of the multitudes of fictitious deities of the ancient world. But which belief is the myth? One of my son’s favorite shows is
MythBusters
. Each episode takes on a popular legend or myth and tries to validate it. Things like, is it safer to drive a car with an airbag or without one? Or one of the more controversial topics: Are men better drivers than women? I’m waiting for them to take on the most important myth of all: Could life arise from nonlife?

The rumor that life has been created in a test tube is a myth that was busted years ago. In the 1950s Stanley Miller and Harold Urey attempted to reconstruct the
primordial soup
they postulated would have been the conditions of the early earth where life could have arisen spontaneously from nonlife. Although there is no evidence that these were the initial conditions on earth when life began, their experiment gained attention because it was just that: an experiment. Electricity was sent through a concoction of
methane, ammonia, and hydrogen; and the result was very simple nonliving amino acids. However, Dr. Frankenstein was closer to creating life than these men were.

The relevance of this experiment was eventually discredited because the experimental conditions did not match those of the early earth. In more realistic conditions such experiments do not yield significant quantities of the building blocks of life. As Hugh Ross explained,

Earth never had a prebiotic soup nor any kind of prebiotic mineral substrate. Physicists now know why earth never could have possessed any prebiotics. It is due to the oxygen-ultraviolet paradox. If the environment of earth at the time of life’s origin contained any oxygen, that oxygen would immediately and catastrophically shut down prebiotic chemistry. On the other hand, if earth’s environment at the time of life’s origin contained no oxygen, ultraviolet radiation from the sun would penetrate earth’s environment to a sufficient degree as to similarly, immediately, and catastrophically shut down prebiotic chemistry. Either way, earth never could have naturalistically possessed any prebiotics.
¹⁷

L
IFE:
W
HAT
A
RE THE
C
HANCES?

The design argument has been one of the great roadblocks to atheistic dogma because any hint of design logically indicates an intelligent mind behind it. This argument leads smart men like Dawkins to say absurd things like, “Biology is the study of
complicated things that give the appearance of being designed for a purpose.”
¹⁸
The presence of design is so overwhelming that biologists decide the design they witness everywhere isn’t real. Nobel Laureate Francis Crick, who initially discovered
DNA
, would say, “Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but evolved.”
¹⁹
However, as more and more is learned about just how complex life really is, these kinds of disclaimers are becoming increasingly difficult to justify intellectually.

Life is beyond amazing. It’s way beyond explanation. As biologists understand more and more about the processes of life, the intellectual leap is made to assume that its origins are explained easily through naturalism. The stunning miracle of how reproductive life emerged—male and female—is so impossible to imagine that it sounds like a fairy tale. And how did life know that every living thing needed a genetic
code
or that all the parts of the eye had to appear at once?

As mentioned, even if the earth were filled with all of the building blocks of life, those pieces would never have assembled into a cell. In their book
Evolution from Space
, Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe argue that the probability of life arising on earth on its own is on the order of one chance in 10
⁴⁰⁰⁰⁰
.
²⁰
(I hear Jim Carrey’s voice right now from
Dumb and Dumber
: “So you’re saying there’s a chance.”) They said it was the same probability that a tornado could blow through a scrapyard and piece together a Boeing 747 airplane, full of gas, ready to fly.
²¹
(Their point was that since life couldn’t have arisen on its own, it must have come from outer space.
²²
)

Their conclusions point to the fact that naturalists are willing to postulate anything imaginable to account for the evidence for design in life. We have already discussed the great lengths
naturalists will go to in order to avoid the possibility of an intelligent Creator, such as arguing for an eternal universe or an infinite number of universes called the multiverse. In order to account for the complexity of life and the impossibility of life starting itself, one of the most unusual explanations of all is the conjecture that life on earth is simply an alien experiment, or we were somehow planted here by extraterrestrials. So is this science or
science fiction
?

W
HO
D
ESIGNED THE
D
ESIGNER?

The evidence for design is so overwhelming that skeptics such as Dawkins have to try and dismiss or deflect this in order to avoid the obvious implications. In fact, the central claim in his international bestseller
The God Delusion
is that though the universe “appears to be designed,” we must reject this because we can’t answer the question “Who designed the Designer?”
²³

Dr. Daniel Came of Oxford, who is an atheist as well, responded sharply to Dawkins on this central tenet of his book:

Dawkins maintains that we’re not justified in inferring a designer as the best explanation of the appearance of design in the universe because then a new problem surfaces: who designed the designer? This argument is as old as the hills and as any reasonably competent first-year undergraduate could point out is patently invalid. For an explanation to be successful we do not need an explanation of the explanation. One might as well say that
evolution
by natural selection explains nothing because it does nothing to explain why
there were living organisms on earth in the first place; or that the big bang fails to explain the cosmic background radiation because the big bang is itself inexplicable.
²⁴