War of the World Views: Powerful Answers for an "Evolutionized" Culture (2 page)

Christians who are fighting for a return to biblical morality cannot hope to win the ”war of the worldviews” and will only continue to see the erosion of this once-Christian culture unless they understand the real foundational nature of the battle: biblical authority, beginning with God’s Word in Genesis, must be upheld without compromise.

The secular world itself understands the battle—but the church by and large does not. Christian leaders need to be awakened by a battle cry. We need to attack the false foundation of evolution and millions of years and proclaim the true history of the world that is foundational to Christian morality and the gospel of Jesus Christ.

1
. Barna Research Online, The year’s most intriguing findings, from Barna Research Studies, December 12, 2000.

2
. There is no such thing as neutrality. As the Bible states in Matthew 12:30: “He that is not with me is against me; and he that gathereth not with me scattereth abroad.”

3
. It is estimated by the Barna Institute that in this generation two-thirds of the children from evangelical homes will leave the church after they leave home. For more information, see State of the Church: 2002 by George Barna.

2

Can Natural Processes Explain the Origin of life?

Mike Riddle

Have you seen the movie Mission to Mars? Astronauts discover that the “seeds of life” were planted on Earth billions of years ago by an alien race that once lived on Mars. After a meteor destroyed the atmosphere of Mars, these aliens left to colonize a distant planet, but not without first leaving DNA on Earth, which began the process of evolution. Realizing the remote possibility of life spontaneously beginning on Earth, some evolutionary scientists, including the codiscoverer of the structure of DNA, Francis Crick, have proposed that life began on Earth from material that had come from outer space. However, moving the origin of life to another planet does not solve the problem. Could simple life have arisen on Earth or any other planet? What would be involved in such a process? In this chapter, we examine the origin of life and see that only the Bible explains it: “In the beginning God created...”
(Genesis 1:1).

When considering how life began, there are only two options. Either life was created by an intelligent source (God) or it began by natural processes. The common perception presented in many textbooks and in the media is that life arose from nonlife in a pool of chemicals about 3.8 billion years ago. The claim by evolutionists is that this formation of life was the result of time, chance and natural processes. One widely used example of how life could have formed by natural processes is the Miller-Urey experiment, performed in the early 1950s.

Miller’s objective was not to create life but to simulate how life’s basic building structures (amino acids
¹
) might have formed in the early earth. In the experiment, Miller attempted to simulate the early atmosphere of Earth by using certain gases, which he thought might produce organic compounds necessary for life. Since the gases he included (water, methane, ammonia and hydrogen) do not react with each other under natural conditions, he generated electrical currents to simulate some form of energy input (such as lightning) that was needed to drive the chemical reactions. The result was production of amino acids. Many textbooks promote this experiment as the first step in explaining how life could have originated. But there is more to this experiment than what is commonly represented in textbooks.

The Rest of the Story—Some Critical Thinking

When we examine the purpose, assumptions and results of the Miller experiment, there are three critical thinking questions that can be raised:

1. How much of the experiment was left to chance processes or how much involved intelligent design?
   
2. How did Miller know what Earth’s early atmosphere (billions of years ago) was like?
   
3. Did Miller produce the right type of amino acids used in life?
   

The Method Used

In the experiment, Miller was attempting to illustrate how life’s building blocks (amino acids) could have formed by natural processes. However, throughout the experiment Miller relied on years of intelligent research in chemistry. He purposely chose which gases to include and which to exclude. Next, he had to isolate the biochemicals (amino acids) from the environment he had creted them in because it would have destroyed them. No such

system would have existed on the so-called “primitive” earth. It appears Miller used intelligent design throughout the experiment rather than chance processes.

The Starting Ingredients

How did Miller know what the atmosphere was like billions of years ago? Miller assumed that the early earth’s atmosphere was very different from today. He based his starting chemical mixture on the assumption that the early earth had a reducing atmosphere (an atmosphere that contains no free oxygen). Why did Miller and many other evolutionists assume there was no free oxygen in Earth’s early atmosphere? As attested below, it is well known that biological molecules (specifically amino acid bonds) are destroyed in the presence of oxygen, making it impossible for life to evolve.

Oxygen is a poisonous gas that oxidizes organic and inorganic materials on a planetary surface; it is quite lethal to organisms that have not evolved protection against it.
²

...in the atmosphere and in the various water basins of the primitive earth, many destructive interactions would have so vastly diminished, if not altogether consumed, essential precursor chemicals, that chemical evolution rates would have been negligible.
³

Therefore, in order to avoid this problem, evolutionists propose that Earth’s first atmosphere did not contain any freestanding oxygen. We must ask ourselves, “Is there any evidence to support this claim, or is it based on the assumption that evolution must be true?” As it turns out, the existence of a reducing atmosphere is merely an assumption not supported by the physical evidence. The evidence points to the fact that the earth has always had oxygen in the atmosphere.

There is no scientific proof that Earth ever had a non-oxygen atmosphere such as evolutionists require. Earth’s oldest rocks contain evidence of being formed in an oxygen atmosphere.
⁴

The only trend in the recent literature is the suggestion of far more oxygen in the early atmosphere than anyone imagined.
⁵

If we were to grant the evolutionists’ assumption of no oxygen in the original atmosphere, another fatal problem arises. Since the ozone is made of oxygen, it would not exist; and the ultraviolet rays from the sun would destroy any biological molecules. This presents a no-win situation for the evolution model. If there was oxygen, life could not start. If there was no oxygen, life could not start. Michael Denton notes:

What we have is sort of a “Catch 22” situation. If we have oxygen we have no organic compounds, but if we don’t have oxygen we have none either.
⁶

Because life could not have originated on land, some evolutionists propose that life started in the oceans. The problem with life starting in the oceans, however, is that as organic molecules formed, the water would have immediately destroyed them through a process called
hydrolysis
. Hydrolysis, which means “water splitting,” is the addition of a water molecule between two bonded molecules (two amino acids in this case), which causes them to split apart. Many scientists have noted this problem.

Besides breaking up polypeptides, hydrolysis would have destroyed many amino acids.
⁷

In general the half-lives of these polymers in contact with water are on the order of days and months—time spans which are surely geologically insignificant.
⁸

Furthermore, water tends to break chains of amino acids apart. If any proteins had formed in the oceans 3.5 billion years ago, they would have quickly disintegrated.
⁹

Scientifically, there is no known solution for how life could have chemically evolved on the earth.

On the Other Hand...

Because the scientific evidence contradicts the origin of life by natural processes, Miller resorted to unrealistic initial conditions to develop amino acids in his experiment (no oxygen and excessive energy input). However, there is more to the story. Producing amino acids is not the hard part. The difficult part is getting the right type and organization of amino acids. There are over 2,000 types of amino acids, but only 20 are used in life. Furthermore, the atoms which make up each amino acid are assembled in two basic shapes.

These are known as
left-handed
and
right-handed
. Compare them to human hands. Each hand has the same components (four fingers and a thumb), yet they are different. The thumb of one hand is on the left, and the thumb of the other is on the right. They are mirror images of each other. Like our hands, amino acids come in two shapes. They are composed of the same atoms (components) but are mirror images of each other, called left-handed amino acids and right-handed amino acids. Objects that have handedness are said to be chiral (pronounced “ky-rul”), which is from the Greek for “hand.”

Handedness is an important concept because all amino acids that make up proteins in living things are 100% left-handed. Right-handed amino acids are never found in proteins. If a protein were assembled with just one right-handed amino acid, the protein’s function would be totally lost. As one Ph.D. chemist has said,

Many of life’s chemicals come in two forms, “left-handed” and “right-handed.” Life requires polymers with all building blocks having the same “handedness” (
homochirality
)—proteins have only “left-handed” amino acids … . But ordinary undirected chemistry, as is the hypothetical primordial soup, would produce equal mixtures of left- and right-handed molecules, called
racemates
.
¹⁰

A basic chemistry textbook admits,

This is a very puzzling fact … . All the proteins that have been investigated, obtained from animals and from plants from higher organisms and from very simple organisms—bacteria, molds, even viruses—are found to have been made of L-amino [left-handed] acids.
¹¹

The common perception left by many textbooks and journals is that Miller and other scientists were successful in producing the amino acids necessary for life. However, the textbooks and media fail to mention that what they had actually produced was a mixture of left- and right-handed amino acids, which is detrimental to life. The natural tendency is for left- and right-handed amino acids to bond together. Scientist still do not know why biological proteins use only left-handed amino acids.

The reason for this choice [only left-handed amino acids] is again a mystery, and a subject of continuous dispute.
¹²

Jonathan Wells, a developmental biologist, writes,

So we remain profoundly ignorant of how life originated. Yet the Miller-Urey experiment continues to be used as an icon of evolution, because nothing better has turned up. Instead of being told the truth, we are given the misleading impression that scientists have empirically demonstrated the first step in the origin of life.
¹³