The Case for a Creator (7 page)

“Gerald Joyce, a biochemist at the Scripps Research Institute, ruled out the RNA-first theory very colorfully by saying, ‘You have to build straw man upon straw man to get to the point where RNA is a viable first biomolecule.’
¹⁵

“In short,” declared Wells, “it was a dead end—as all other theories have been.”

“ . . . AND HENCE A MIRACLE”

In hindsight, my materialistic philosophy had been built on a foundation that history has subsequently dismantled piece by piece. Miller’s experiment, once a great ally to my atheism, has been reduced to a mere scientific curiosity.

“What is the significance of his experiment today?” I asked Wells.

“To me, it has virtually no scientific significance,” he replied. “It’s historically interesting, because it convinced a lot of people through the years—yourself included—that life could have arisen spontaneously, a point which I believe is false. Does it have a place in a science textbook? Maybe as a footnote.”

“But it’s more than a footnote in most texts, right?”

“Unfortunately, yes,” he said. “It’s prominently featured in current textbooks, often with pictures. The most generous thing I can say is that it’s misleading. It’s wrong to even give the impression that science has empirically shown how life could have originated. Now, they may have a disclaimer buried in the text, saying the earth’s atmosphere may not have been what Miller thought it was. But then they say that if a realistic environment is used, you still get organic molecules. To me, that’s just as misleading.”

I thought about a student who encounters the Miller experiment today. Would he gloss over in his mind the complexities of creating life? Would he understand the nuances of the Miller story, or would he hear the term “organic molecules” and conclude that scientists are on the verge of resolving the problem of how nonliving chemicals somehow became living cells? Would a young person looking for an excuse to escape the accountability of God cling to the false conclusion that the origin-of-life problem is only a minor obstacle in the relentless march of evolutionary theory?

“Why do you think the Miller experiment is still published in textbooks?” I asked.

Wells shrugged. “It’s becoming clearer and clearer to me that this is materialistic philosophy masquerading as empirical science. The attitude is that life
had
to have developed this way because there’s no other materialistic explanation. And if you try to invoke another explanation—for instance, intelligent design—then the evolutionists claim you’re not a scientist.”

Wells’s explanation was consistent with another interview I had conducted with origin-of-life expert Walter Bradley, a former professor at Texas A&M University, who co-authored the landmark 1984 book
The Mystery of Life’s Origin
.
¹⁶

I questioned Bradley about the various theories advanced by scientists for how the first living cell could have been naturalistically generated—including random chance, chemical affinity, self-ordering tendencies, seeding from space, deep-sea ocean vents, and using clay to encourage prebiotic chemicals to assemble—and he demonstrated that not one of them can withstand scientific scrutiny.
¹⁷

Many other scientists have reached that same conclusion. “Science doesn’t have the slightest idea how life began,” journalist Gregg Easterbrook wrote about the origin-of-life field. “No generally accepted theory exists, and the steps leading from a barren primordial world to the fragile chemistry of life seem imponderable.”
¹⁸

Bradley not only shares that view, but he said that the mind-boggling difficulties in bridging the yawning gap between nonlife and life mean that there may very well be no potential of ever finding a theory for how life could have arisen spontaneously. That’s why he’s convinced that the “absolutely overwhelming evidence” points toward an intelligence behind life’s creation.

In fact, he said: “I think people who believe that life emerged naturalistically need to have a great deal more faith than people who reasonably infer that there’s an Intelligent Designer.”
¹⁹

Even those who look askance at religious faith have been forced to conclude that the odds against the spontaneous creation of life are so absurdly high that there must be more to the creation story than mere materialistic processes. They can’t help but invoke the only word that seems to realistically account for it all:
miracle
. It’s a label many scientists are loathe to use but which the circumstances seem to demand.

For instance, one of the country’s leading science journalists, John Horgan, who identifies himself as a “lapsed Catholic,” conceded in 2002 that scientists have no idea how the universe was created or “how inanimate matter on our little planet coalesced into living creatures.” Then came that word: “Science, you might say, has discovered that our existence is infinitely improbable, and hence a miracle.”
²⁰

Even biochemist and spiritual skeptic Francis Crick, who shared the Nobel Prize for discovering the molecular structure of DNA, cautiously invoked the word a few years ago. “An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going,” he said.
²¹

Others are more adamant. “If there isn’t a natural explanation and there doesn’t seem to be the potential of finding one, then I believe it’s appropriate to look at a supernatural explanation,” said Bradley. “I think that’s the most reasonable inference based on the evidence.”
²²

IMAGE #2: DARWIN’S TREE OF LIFE

It was time to advance to the next image of evolution. One of the most recognizable icons is the drawing Darwin sketched for
The Origin of Species
to illustrate his theory that all living creatures had a common ancestor and that natural selection drove the eventual development of the countless organisms we see in the modern world. To me, his sketch of the evolutionary tree encapsulated why Darwinian evolution was so compelling: it seemed to explain everything in natural history. The question, though, is whether the tree represents reality.

“We now have more than a century of fossil discoveries since Darwin drew his picture,” I said to Wells. “Has this evolutionary tree held up?”

“Absolutely not,” came his quick reply. “As an illustration of the fossil record, the Tree of Life is a dismal failure. But it
is
a good representation of Darwin’s theory.

“You see, he believed that if a population was exposed to one set of conditions, and another part of the population experienced other conditions, then natural selection could modify the two populations in different ways. Over time, one species could produce several varieties, and if these varieties continued to diverge, they would eventually become separate species. That’s why his drawing was in the pattern of a branching tree.

“A key aspect of his theory was that natural selection would act, in his own words, ‘slowly by accumulating slight, successive, favorable variations’ and that ‘no great or sudden modifications’ were possible.”

I didn’t want to miss the significance of what Wells was claiming. “You’re saying that the tree of life illustrates Darwin’s ideas but that his theory is not supported by the physical evidence scientists have found in fossils?”

“That’s right,” he continued. “In fact, Darwin knew the fossil record failed to support his tree. He acknowledged that major groups of animals—he calls them divisions, now they’re called phyla—appear suddenly in the fossil record.
²³
That’s not what his theory predicts.

“His theory predicts a long history of gradual divergence from a common ancestor, with the differences slowly becoming bigger and bigger until you get the major differences we have now. The fossil evidence, even in his day, showed the opposite: the rapid appearance of phylum-level differences in what’s called the ‘Cambrian explosion.’

“Darwin believed that future fossil discoveries would vindicate his theory—but that hasn’t happened. Actually, fossil discoveries over the last hundred and fifty years have turned his tree upside down by showing the Cambrian explosion was even more abrupt and extensive than scientists once thought.”

That begged for further explanation. “Elaborate on the Cambrian explosion,” I said.

“The Cambrian was a geological period that we think began a little more than 540 million years ago. The Cambrian explosion has been called the ‘Biological Big Bang’ because it gave rise to the sudden appearance of most of the major animal phyla that are still alive today, as well as some that are now extinct,” Wells said.

“Here’s what the record shows: there were some jellyfish, sponges, and worms prior to the Cambrian, although there’s no evidence to support Darwin’s theory of a long history of gradual divergence.

“Then at the beginning of the Cambrian—
boom!
—all of a sudden, we see representatives of the arthropods, modern representatives of which are insects, crabs, and the like; echinoderms, which include modern starfish and sea urchins; chordates, which include modern vertebrates; and so forth. Mammals came later, but the chordates—the major group to which they belong—were right there at the beginning of the Cambrian.

“This is absolutely contrary to Darwin’s Tree of Life. These animals, which are so fundamentally different in their body plans, appear fully developed, all of a sudden, in what paleontologists have called the single most spectacular phenomenon of the fossil record.”

Spectacular, indeed. It was staggering! But I was having trouble thinking in vast geological terms, where words like “sudden” and “abrupt” have meanings quite different from how we might use them in everyday conversation. I needed more clarity.

“How suddenly did these animals come onto the scene?” I asked Wells. “Put it into context for me.”

“Okay,” he said. His eyes swept the room, looking for a suitable illustration. Finding none, he turned to me and asked: “Are you a football fan?”

I felt trapped. I didn’t want to admit that I’ve followed the hapless Chicago Bears ever since I was a teenager.
²⁴
After all, my credibility was at stake! So I kept my answer vague: “Uh, yeah, I like the game.”

“Okay,” he said, “imagine yourself on one goal line of a football field. That line represents the first fossil, a microscopic, single-celled organism. Now start marching down the field. You pass the twenty-yard line, the forty-yard line, you pass midfield, and you’re approaching the other goal line. All you’ve seen this entire time are these microscopic, single-celled organisms.

“You come to the sixteen-yard line on the far end of the field, and now you see these sponges and maybe some jellyfish and worms. Then—
boom!
—in the space of a single stride, all these other forms of animals suddenly appear. As one evolutionary scientist said, the major animal groups ‘appear in the fossil record as Athena did from the head of Zeus—full blown and raring to go.’
²⁵

“Now, nobody can call that a branching tree! Some paleontologists, even though they may think Darwin’s overall theory is correct, call it a lawn rather than a tree, because you have these separate blades of grass sprouting up. One paleontologist in China says it actually stands Darwin’s tree on its head, because the major groups of animals—instead of coming last, at the top of the tree—come first, when animals make their first appearance.

“Either way, the result is the same: the Cambrian explosion has uprooted Darwin’s tree.”

THE HYPOTHESIS FAILS

There seemed, however, to be an easy comeback. “Maybe,” I said, “Darwin was right after all—the fossil record is still incomplete. Who knows how natural history might be rewritten next week by a discovery that will be made in a fossil dig somewhere? Or perhaps,” I speculated, “the organisms that existed prior to the Biological Big Bang were too small or their bodies were too soft to have left any trace in the fossil record.”

Having raised those objections, I sat back in my chair. “Frankly, you can’t prove otherwise,” I said, my words almost a taunt.

Wells yielded a little. “As a scientist,” he conceded, “I have to leave open the possibility that next year someone will discover a fossil bed in the Congo or somewhere that will suddenly fill in the gaps.”

I nodded at his admission. However, he wasn’t finished.

“But I sure don’t think that’s likely,” he added. “It hasn’t happened after all this time, and millions of fossils have already been dug up. There are certainly enough good sedimentary rocks from before the Cambrian era to have preserved ancestors if there were any. I have to agree with two experts in the field who said that the Cambrian explosion is ‘too big to be masked by flaws in the fossil record.’
²⁶

“As for the pre-Cambrian fossils being too tiny or soft to be preserved—well, we have microfossils of bacteria in rocks dating back more than three billion years. And there have been soft-bodied organisms from before the Cambrian that have been found in Australia. In fact, scientists have found soft-bodied animals in the Cambrian explosion itself. So I don’t think that’s a very good explanation, either. Today evolutionists are turning to molecular evidence to try to show there was a common ancestor prior to the Cambrian.”

“How does that work?” I asked.

“Not very well,” he quipped. “But here’s the process: you can’t get molecular evidence from the fossils themselves; all of it comes from living organisms. You take a molecule that’s basic to life—say, ribosomal RNA—and you examine it in a starfish, and then you study its equivalent in a snail, a worm, and a frog. You’re looking for similarities. If you compare this one molecule across different categories of animal body plans and find similarities, and if you make the assumption that they came from a common ancestor, then you can construct a theoretical evolutionary tree.