God: Fact or Fiction?: Exploring the Relationship Between Science Religion and the Origin of Life

by Brendan Roberts

  Notes

  1. Michael Behe, Darwin’s Black Box, p. 103.

  2. Linda Tagliaferro and Mark V. Bloom. The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Decoding your Genes (New York: Alpha Books, 1999), p. 74.

  3. See Behe, Darwin’s Black Box, p. 121.

  4. Ibid., pp. 122-3.

  5. Ibid., p. 123.

  6. Ibid., p. 129.

  7. William Dembski, ed. Mere Creation: Science, Faith and Intelligent Design (Illinois: InterVarsity Press,1998), p. 120.

  8. Tagliaferro and Bloom, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Decoding your Genes, 69.

  9. Bill Gates. The Road Ahead, Boulder, Col.: Blue Penguin, 1996, p. 228.

  10. Colson & Pearcey, Now How Shall We Live, p. 75.

  11. See ibid.

  12. Paul Davies. The Fifth Miracle: The Search for the Origin of Life (New York: Penguin Books, 1998), pp. 64-65.

  13. Ibid.

  14. Morton Jenkins. Genetics: Teach Yourself Books (Illinois: Hodder Headline Plc, 1998), p. 111.

  15. Michael J. Behe, William A. Dembski, Stephen C. Meyer. Science and Evidence for Design in the Universe (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000), p. 90.

  16. Tagliaferro and Bloom, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Decoding your Genes, p. 69.

  17. Ibid., p. 73.

  18. Dembski, ed. Mere Creation, p. 120.

  19. Ibid.

  20. See Jenkins, Genetics, p. 93.

  21. Quoted from Mere Creation: which cited Behe 1994. Experimental support for regarding functional classes of proteins to be highly isolated from each other. In Darwinism: Science or Philosophy, ed. J Buell and G Hearn, pp. 68-69.

  22. Behe, Dembski and Meyer, Science and Evidence for Design in the Universe, pp. 74-75.

  23. E. Pennisi. “Seeking Life’s Bare Genetic Necessities”, Science p. 272 (1996): 1098-99; A. Mushegian and E. Koonin, “A Minimal Gene Set for Cellular Life Derived by Comparison of Complete Bacterial Genomes”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA 93 (1996): 10268-73; C. Bult et al., “Complete Genome Sequence of the Methanogenic Archaeon, Methanococcus Jannaschi”, Science 273 (1996): pp. 1058-72.

  24. William Dembski. The Design Inference: Eliminating Chance through Small Probabilities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 67-91, pp. 175-223.

  25. See Behe, Darwin’s Black Box, p. 80.

  26. See ibid., p. 86.

  27. Brillouin, L. ‘Life, Thermodynamics, and Cybernetics’, in Modern Systems Research for the Behavioural Scientist. Ed. W Buckley, Aldine, Chicago, 1968, p. 154.

  28. Dembski, ed. Mere Creation, pp. 124-125.

  29. See Behe, Dembski and Meyer, Science and Evidence for Design in the Universe, pp. 134-5.

  30. Ibid.

  31. Behe, Darwin’s Black Box, pp. 72-73.

  32. For further information about the brain see:

  http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/bb/

  http://www.sfn.org (re neuro-science)

  33. Jenkins, Genetics, p. 93.

  34. Broom, How Blind is the Watchmaker?, pp. 87-88.

  For further reading re Michael Behe, including his on-line articles see: www.arn.org/behe/behehome.htm

  CHAPTER 7

  CLUTCHING AT STRAWS Some theories that neo-Darwinists cleave to are so far-fetched and beyond reason. They are trying to sustain them by clutching at straws. If atheistic evolution hadn’t been preserved by public opinion, the media, and especially by enthusiastic ‘disciples’ it would have been dismissed a long time ago.

  Evolution of Birds One part of macroevolution is that all animals have a common ancestor. Evolutionists believe that birds evolved from winged dinosaurs – the earliest known bird was the Archaeopteryx.1 But if we exclude a Creator we are faced with some hard questions due to the creature’s complexity and diversity. The bird’s breathing apparatus is one such example. In other vertebrates the lungs draw in air through a system of branching tubes which end in tiny air sacs called alveoli. Therefore during respiration through the same passage the air is moved in two directions. But in birds the air flows only in one direction through the lungs. Therefore the ‘structure of the lung in birds and the overall functioning of respiratory system is quite unique’.2

  Indeed, the systems described are so complex and unique that no lung in any other vertebrate species is known in any way to resemble the avian system. Therefore we are faced with the question: How could such a unique respiratory system happen merely by chance? The maintenance of the respiratory function is absolutely vital to the life of a bird; the slightest malfunction can lead to death within minutes. So imagine that purely by chance the bird’s ancestor had a different respiratory system and by Darwin’s theory, gradually with intermediate steps and over time the respiratory system evolves. If this was so then the poor creature would have likely to have been doomed to death. The more we explore in-depth the biology of creatures, the more we realise there are pitfalls to neo-Darwinism.

  Miller’s Experiment Some evolutionists postulate that life came to exist from a pre-biotic cocktail. They base this on the work of the American chemist, Stanley Miller who worked in collaboration with his research supervisor, Harold Urey; in a flask Miller heated a mixture of the common gases, hydrogen, methane and ammonia together with water using a pair of tungsten electrodes to produce a spark simulating lightning. After several days a discoloured residue had formed. Analysing this residue Miller detected the presence of several types of amino acids, the foundational building blocks of proteins.

  TIME Magazine praised Miller and Urey claiming, ‘If their apparatus had been as big as the ocean, and if it had worked for a million years instead of one week, it might have created something like the first living molecule.’3

  Dr Norman Geisler and Ron Brooks refute this hypothesis because the sun and cosmic radiation would damage the proteins. He postulates that it is ‘more likely that the elements would be destroyed faster than they could be produced’.4

  Entropy basically means ‘a measure of the amount of energy unavailable for work in a thermodynamic system’.5 The first law of thermodynamics is that ‘no matter or energy is either being created or completely destroyed’.6 For example the atoms of your body will be consumed by bugs at your death.

  The second law says that ‘every system left to its own devices always tends to move from order to disorder, its energy tending to be transformed into lower levels of availability, finally reaching a state of complete randomness and unavailability for further work’.7

  The first law illustrates a finite universe. Sean O’Reilly utilising entropy, and the second law refutes the neo-Darwinists’ hypothesis that an infinite universe is the answer: He says it ‘contains a direction, an “arrow of time”, aimed at the ultimate heat death of the Universe, with its total mass-energy unchanged in quantity, but totally unavailable for further work. It also clearly implies that the universe cannot be infinitely old since if it were, it would be already dead’.8

  O’Reilly then deals a killer blow to the atheistic macroevolution theory, that is to neo-Darwinism. He says that the second law contradicts it because the theory requires ‘a universal principle of upward change; the entropy law is a universal principle of downward change. The latter has been proved to apply in all systems tested so far; the former cannot even be tested scientifically’.9

  Therefore as we learnt at the beginning of this book, Natural Selection only works on positive or upward changes. However, entropy works via downward change, and so without any intervention from a Creator, our universe will eventually die out. Don’t worry it couldn’t happen during your, or your children’s lifetime, as the sun has an estimated life of five billion years still remaining.

  Pre-biotic Cocktail Experiment Flaws

  Remarkably, Miller himself now denounces his famous experiment while still trying to prove macroevolution. Broom believes that the ‘protein first’ hypothesis can be questioned because it does not show us how a protein could actually replicate itself:

  Recall that DNA con
sists of two intimately related strands of nucleic acid chains in which there is a complementary matching between the bases on these two strands…By contrast, in the complex folded 3-dimensional shape of most protein enzymes there is no local amino acid-to-amino acid pairing or complementarity. There is therefore no obvious way by which the crucial amino acid sequence defining a given protein can be communicated to a new set of amino acids so as to provide a mechanism for faithful molecular replication.10

  Moreover you will recall in the Unlocking the Chemistry of Life chapter that amino acids, the building blocks of life, do not produce life in themselves; just having several types of amino acids do not lead to proteins.

  Miller’s experiment does not prove that proteins appeared from a pre-biotic cocktail as the result of the formation of several types of amino acids. Tom Watters, the senior scientist of the Center for Earth and Planetary Studies, National Air and Space Museum Smithsonian Institute states that Earth’s early atmosphere was actually comprised of: ‘carbon dioxide, nitrogen, hydrogen, water vapor, and other volatile elements (that vaporize at relatively low temperatures)’.11

  Once again we are left scratching our heads over the fact that Miller’s highly controlled experiment only comprised the gases methane, hydrogen and ammonia and these gases were in a highly controlled and compacted state for the experiment. Something has to be wrong here. In fact Miller now graciously concedes that he erred with his theory. It seems more likely that the Earth’s early atmosphere was not limited to the gases of Miller’s experiment. Therefore we can conclude that it is very unlikely that complex life could have evolved from such a pre-biotic cocktail.

  Monkeying Around

  The best case in point of the absurdity of such atheistic macroevolution arguments is Thomas Huxley’s famous analogy: Six monkeys tapping away mindlessly on their typewriters for millions of years would eventually write all the books in the British Museum! Another version has a team of chimps typing the complete work of Shakespeare, taking of course a comparably enormous length of time.12

  You do not have to be a rocket scientist to understand how completely far from the truth this statement is. Why not just render a similarly ridiculous analogy of giving the monkeys pens instead of typewriters? Then just give them a million years, and expect them to at least write the complete alphabet instead of the complete works of Shakespeare. It is a bizarre analogy because for the Monkeys what they produced would only be ink blotches on paper. They are not even symbols or letters for anyone until intellectual creatures, such as human beings come along.

  The brilliant author and former atheist, CS Lewis captures remarkably this absurd way of thinking: ‘To the modern man it seems simply natural that an ordered cosmos should emerge from chaos, that life should come out of the inanimate, reason out of instinct, civilization out of savagery, virtue out of animalism.’13

  We are intellectual and highly creative beings and due to our ability to formulate specified sentences (specified complexity), to reason, to love truth and beauty, people like Shakespeare can create such poetic masterpieces.

  The British Council of Arts tried to put Huxley’s theory to the test. The results flabbergasted them. After a month of mindless tapping on the keys and peeing on the computers the six monkeys produced fifty typed pages. Incidentally someone else had to print the pages. But the monkeys did not produce a single word – not even ‘a’ or ‘I’. These single letters only make a word if there is a space on either side.

  The Physicist and Biologist, Gerald Schroeder analysed the results; using 30 characters of the keyboard he deduced that to get a oneletter word is 30 times 30, or one chance out of 27,000. But when he applied the theory with only a Shakespearean sonnet such as ‘Shall I compare thee to a Summer’s Day’ he deduced the likelihood of getting all 488 letters in sequence to 26 multiplied by itself 488 times or 10690 . But in comparison the number of protons in the universe is estimated to be much less, approximately 1080. Therefore he concluded that it would be impossible to come up with the complete works of Shakespeare by chance in the millions of years claimed.

  Neo-Darwinism Forced Upon us It is a travesty that such a twisted theory as atheistic macroevolution is forced into our homes, and also upon children as they learn at school. One of the leading personalities of science, David Attenborough seeks to impose such a view as he tries to envision what the Earth would have been like as it underwent birth-pangs in order to bring forth life:

  The planet then was radically different in almost every way from the one we live on today. The clouds of water vapour that had surrounded it had condensed to form seas, but they were still hot. We are not sure how the land masses lay but they certainly bore no resemblance in either form or distribution to modern continents. Volcanoes were abundant, spewing ash and lava. The atmosphere was very thin and consisted of swirling clouds of hydrogen, carbon monoxide, ammonia and methane. There was little or no oxygen. This mixture allowed ultraviolet rays from the sun to bathe the earth’s surface with an intensity that would be lethal to modern animal life. Electrical storms raged in the clouds, bombarding the land and the sea with lightning 14

  Thus we see the influence of Miller’s experiment as Attenborough includes the same three gases. He then claims that with the passage of time, millions of years, and in conjunction with additional elements, possibly from outer space, it would be possible for the eventual development of the first replicating DNA molecules and so of life itself.

  I find it astonishing that though the scientific community no longer holds to such an experiment, with its strictly controlled nature consisting of only three gasses, this experiment allows for several types of amino acids, which is only a microscopic part of a living organism. If we use a bread-baking analogy we know that if we only add yeast and water and heat it we do not get bread. Therefore if we merely add several types of amino acids and time, we would only get several types of amino acids. Similarly, Neil Broom says, ‘No living organism can be represented by a single molecule any more than a clay brick can represent a house!’15 It is imperative that the protein requires the arrangement of a multitude of amino acids into a meaningful sequence, not just a blob of protein. Therefore Miller’s experiment only revealed a limited number of amino acids, like finding a single clay brick without the spouting, ceiling, or roof and calling it a house.

  To build a house, intelligence, thought, purpose and creativity goes into the design and construction; it is the same with Intelligent Design. The same is needed for the creating of a human person (contingent being). Has not God invested His thoughts, purpose, planning and creativity into the design of the universe and all it contains, including the design of you and me?

  Controlled Experiments Some scientists conjure up their experiments to suit themselves as if they have a hidden agenda. Some of the ways they doctor the experiments are by careful control of temperature, various solutions, and precise timing and sequencing during each step of the experiment. Philosopher Naomi Oreskes elaborates: ‘But just as we may wonder how much the characters in a novel are drawn from real life and how much is artifice, we might ask the same of a model: How much is based on observation and measurement of accessible phenomena, how much is convenience?’16

  Molecular Biologist Gerard Joyce experimented on the evolution of RNA and DNA molecules and reveals the manipulation inherent in the experiment:

  Darwinian evolution fundamentally involves the repeated operation of three processes: selection, amplification and mutation. Selection, whether it occurs naturally or artificially, is a winnowing process that separates the ‘haves’ from the ‘have-nots’. In nature the haves among organisms are those that survive to reproductive age, find a suitable mate and produce viable offspring. In the laboratory the haves are molecules that meet whatever criterion is imposed by the experimenter.17

  Richard Dawkins contradicts himself when he depicts genes as selfish and purposeful, yet asserts that they just are and don’t have foresight.

  Dawkins and Prof
essor of Natural Philosophy Bernd-Olaf Küppers used a computer in a contrived manner, to prove the theory of Natural Selection. They used a computer model to demonstrate the efficacy of prebiotic Natural Selection. First the computer creates random sequences with random variations. As Küppers explains: ‘Every mutant sequence that agrees one bit better with the meaningful or reference sequence…will be allowed to reproduce more rapidly.’18 In this experiment after only thirtyfive generations, his computer succeeds in spelling his target sequence, ‘NATURAL SELECTION’.19

  Dawkins similarly adopts an algorithm to prove the theory of Natural Selection. I’m tempted to say that he’s weaselled his answer out. You’ll get my pun shortly. In his book, The Blind Watchmaker, Dawkins creates the following computer simulation and his target sequence is obtained in short order:20

  1. WDL·MNLT·DTJBKWIRZREZLMQCO·P 2. WDLTMNLT·DTJBSWIRZREZLMQCO·P 10. MDLDMNLS·ITJISWHRZREZ·MECS·P 20. MELDINLS·IT·ISWPRKE·Z·WECSEL

  30. METHINGS·IT·ISWLIKE·B·WECSEL

  40. METHINKS·IT·IS·LIKE·I·WEASEL The theory of Natural Selection allows one to stage the process as above. But as we covered in the Intelligent Design chapter when we’re dealing with language we’re encountering specified complexity. Additionally, there is blatant intention behind the experiment as Natural Selection seems to know what the outcome will be. In other words it has foresight even though neo-Darwinists will deny it. But foresight is a mind-like quality, and this reveals Intelligent Design. We know concerning the human language that any book is the product of Intelligent Design. Therefore if Natural Selection is true, being able to select advantageously reflects the mind-like qualities of a Creator. When we tie this in with the evidence of the Big Bang, through science we can tell this Creator is God.

  Evidence against Neo-Darwinism Throughout God: Fact or Fiction? I have covered several flaws of the theory of neo-Darwinism. These weaknesses include such areas as: the improbability of life occurring by chance; the Big Bang revealing the likelihood of a Creator; the mind-like qualities inherent in the theory of Natural Selection; the virtual impossibility of proteins and DNA forming by chance; and the uniqueness of mankind’s love of truth, high creativity, abstract thought and reasoning. But there is much more evidence to reveal.