The Best Possible Solution Part 2

There is a lot to read here. Please take your time, and let me know your thoughts. My desire is that we could investigate all of the evidence presented, and decide what the best possible explanation is from observable reality. Let us begin.

As we have recently discussed, it appears that the Cambrian Explosion is often used in order to illustrate a flaw in Darwinism. Although I thought I generally knew what it was, what I read shed more clarity on the issue. However, that wasn’t the only issue that seemed to cause many scientists to make a “Scientific Dissent from Darwinism.” I understand that some of what I suggest will not be new to many of you. However, contrary to what some have suggested in previous comments, it may be that the evidence presented against Darwinism is much greater than perceived. Consider:

Jonathon Wells, PHD, PHD

Graduated from University of California at Berkley in geology and physics, senior fellow at the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, doctorate in Religious Studies from Yale Graduate School, specialized in 19th Century controversies surrounding Darwin, received doctorate in molecular and cell biology from Berkley as a post-doctorate research biologist.

Darwinism: theory that all living creatures are modified descendants of a common ancestor that lived long ago.

Neo-Darwinism: Claims that these modifications are the result of natural selection acting on random genetic mutations.

False or Misleading Basic Icons of Evolution:

1) The Miller Experiment

(This experiment, in which Stanley Miller shot electricity through an atmosphere like the one on the primitive earth, created amino acids – the building blocks of life).

“Miller chose hydrogen-rich mixture of methane, ammonia, and water vapor, which was consistent with what many scientists thought back then. But scientists don’t believe that anymore. As a geophysicist with the Carnegie Institution said in the 1960s, ‘What is the evidence for a primitive methane-ammonia atmosphere on earth? The answer is that there is no evidence for it, but much against it.’ In the 1970s, Belgian biochemist Marcel Florkin was declaring that the concept behind Miller’s theory of the early atmosphere had been abandoned. Leading Origin-of-Life researchers, Klaus Dose and Sidney Fox, confirmed that Miller had used the wrong gas mixture. Science Magazine in 1995 said that experts now dismiss Miller’s Experiment because ‘the early atmosphere looked nothing like Miller-Urey simulation. The best hypothesis now is that there was very little hydrogen in the atmosphere because it would have escaped into space. Instead the atmosphere probably consisted of carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and water vapor. So my gripe is that textbooks still present the Miller Experiment as though it reflected the earth’s early environment, when most geochemists since the 1960s would say it was totally off.”

Q: What happens if you replay the experiment using an accurate atmosphere?

Wells:

“You do not get amino acid, that’s for sure. Some textbooks fudge by saying, well, even if you use realistic atmosphere, you will still get organic molecules, as if that solves the problem.” Although this sounds promising for life, “That’s what they sound like, but do you know what they are? Formaldehyde! Cyanide! They may be organic molecules, but in my lab at Berkley you couldn't even have a capped bottle of formaldehyde in the room, because the stuff is so toxic. You open the bottle and it fries proteins all over the place, just from the fumes. It kills embryos. The idea that using a realistic atmosphere gets you the first step in the origin of life is just laughable. Now, it’s true that a good organic chemist can turn formaldehyde and cyanide into biological molecules. But to suggest that formaldehyde and cyanide give you the right substrate for the origin of life – well, it’s just a joke. Do you know what you get? Embalming fluid!”

Q: What if someone finally manages to produce amino acids one day from a realistic atmosphere of the early earth – or say, a comet brought them in some way?

Wells:

“That would be the first step in an extremely complicated process. You would have to get the right number of the right kinds of amino acid to link up to create a protein molecule – that would still be along way from a living cell. Then you’d need dozens of protein molecules, again in the right sequence, to create a living cell. The odds against it are astonishing. The gap between nonliving chemicals and even the most primitive living organism is absolutely tremendous. The problem is, you can’t make a living cell. There’s not even any point in trying. No biologist in his right mind would think you can take a test tube with these molecules and turn them into a living cell.

Strobel: “In other words, if you want to create life, on top of the challenge of somehow generating the cellular components out of nonliving chemicals, you would have an even bigger problem of trying to put the ingredients together in the right way.”

Wells:

“The evidence is just not there. One popular theory was that RNA, a close relative of DNA, could have been a molecular cradle from which early cells developed. This RNA world hypothesis was heralded as a great possibility for a while. But nobody could demonstrate how RNA could have formed before living cells were around to make it, or how it could have survived under the conditions on the early earth. You have to build straw man upon straw man to get to the point where RNA is a viable first biomolecule. In short, it was a dead end, as all other theories have been.”

Journalist Gregg Easterbrook, “Science doesn’t have the slightest idea how life began. No generally accepted theory exists, and the steps leading from a barren primordial world to the fragile chemistry of life seem imponderable.”

2) Darwin’s Tree of Life

Wells:

“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.”

Note: 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.

Although Darwin thought the fossil discoveries of the future would prove his theories, “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.”

Cambrian Explosion:

The Cambrian was a geological period suggested to be a little more than 540 million years ago. The Cambrian Explosion, often called the Biological Big Bang, 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.”

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. 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.”

Q: How did these animals come onto the scene?

An analogy for football fans:

“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 20 yard line, 40 yard line, midfield, and you are approaching the other goal line. All you’ve seen this entire time are these microscopic, single-celled organisms. You come to the 16 yard line on the far end of the field, and now you see these sponges and maybe some jelly fish and worms. Then, in the space of a single stride, all these other forms of animals suddenly appear.”

The reason it turns Darwin’s Theory on its head, from a paleontologist in China: “…because the major groups of animals, instead of coming last, at the top of the tree – come first, when animals make their first appearance. This has uprooted Darwin’s tree.”

Although as a scientist, Wells always has to leave room for new scientific discovery, “The Cambrian explosion is too big to be masked by the flaws in the fossil record. As for Pre-Cambrian fossils being too tiny or soft to be preserved, we have microfossils of bacteria in rocks dating back more than 3 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. Today evolutionists are turning to molecular evidence to try to show there was a common ancestor prior to the Cambrian.”

However, “You take a molecule that’s basic to life – say ribosomal RNA – and you examine it in a starfish, and ten you study its equivalent in a snail, a worm, and a frog. You’re looking for similarities, and if you make the assumption that they came from a common ancestor, then you can construct a theoretical evolutionary tree. But, there are too many problems with this. If you compare this molecular tree with a tree based on anatomy, you get a different tree. You can examine another molecule and come up with another tree altogether. In fact, if you give one molecule to two different laboratories, you can get two different trees. There’s no consistency, even with dating. Based on this, I think it’s reasonable for me, as a scientist, to say that maybe we should question our assumption that this common ancestor exists.”

Stephen C. Meyer:

“The fossils of the Cambrian Explosion absolutely cannot be explained by Darwinian Theory or even the by concept called ‘punctuated equilibrium,’ which was specifically formulated in an effort to explain away the embarrassing fossil record. When you look at the issue from the perspective of biological information, the best explanation is that an intelligence was responsible for this otherwise inexplicable phenomenon. New developments in embryology and developmental biology are telling us that DNA, as important as it is, is not the whole show. DNA provides some but not all of the information that’s needed to build a new organism with a novel form and function. You see, DNA builds proteins, but proteins have to be assembled into larger structures. There are different kinds of cells, and those cells have to be arranged into organs, and organs have to be arranged into overall body plans. According to Neo-Darwinism, new biological forms are created from mutations in DNA, with natural selection preserving and building on the favorable ones. But if DNA is only the part of the story, then you can mutate it indefinitely and you’ll never build a fundamentally new body architecture. So when you encounter the Cambrian Explosion, with its huge and sudden appearance of radically new body plans, you realize you need lots of new biological information. Some of it would be encoded for DNA – although how that occurs is still an insurmountable problem for Darwinists. But on top of that, WHERE DOES THE NEW INFORMATION COME FROM THAT’S NOT ATTRIBUTABLE TO DNA? How does hierarchical arrangements of cells, tissues, organs, and body plans develop? Darwinists don’t have an answer. It’s not even on their radar.”

“The puzzle of the Cambrian Explosion quickly falls into place once the possibility of a purposeful Creator is allowed as one of the explanatory options. Neo-Darwinism predicts a bottom-up pattern in which small differences in form between evolving organisms appear prior to large differences in form and body plan organization. Instead, however, fossils from the Cambrian explosion show a radically different ‘top-down’ pattern. Major differences in form and body plans appear first, with no simpler transitions before them. Later, minor variations arise within the framework of these separate and disparate body plans. This has simply stumped Neo-Darwinists. Not even the punctuated equilibrium idea works, for it can’t account for the ‘top-down’ phenomenon. In fact, punctuated equilibrium predicts a bottom up pattern; it just asserts that the increments of evolutionary change would be larger. If you postulate intelligent design, the ‘top down’ pattern makes sense.”

3) Haeckel’s Embryos

Images depicting embryos of fish, salamander, tortoise, chicken, hog, calf, rabbit, and human side-by-side at three stages of development. This supported Darwin’s assertion that the striking similarities between early embryos is “by far the strongest single class of facts” in favor of his theory that all organisms share a universal ancestor.

To sum up what Wells is about to say, it turns out that these images were faked. “He used the same woodcut to print embryos from different classes because he was so confident of his theory that he didn’t have to draw them separately. In other cases, he doctored the drawings to make them look more similar than they really are. At any rate, his drawings misrepresent the embryos.” This was first discovered in 1860s, when his colleagues accused him of fraud.

“When some biologists exposed this in an article a few years ago, the evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard complained that this was nothing new. He had known about it for 20 years! It was no secret to the experts. Even Gould said textbook writers should be ashamed of the way the drawings had been mindlessly recycled for over a century. At least he was honest enough to call it was it was – ‘the academic equivalent of murder.’

Haeckel only showed a few of the seven vertebrate classes. “He used a salamander to represent amphibians instead of a frog, which looks very different. The ones he cherry-picked happened to look more similar than the ones he omitted. So he stacked the deck by picking representatives that came closer to fitting his idea – and then he went further by faking similarities.”

The most dramatic problem is that, “If you go back to the earlier stages, the embryos look far more different from each other. But he deliberately omits the earlier stages altogether. Remember, embryos are most similar in their early stages, this is evidence of common ancestry. He thought that the early stage showed what the common ancestor looked like – sort of like a fish. But embryologists talk about the developmental hourglass, which refers to the shape of an hourglass, with its width representing the measure of difference. You see, vertebrate embryos start out looking very different in the early cell division stages. The cell divisions in a mammal, for example, are radically different from those in any of the other classes. There’s no possible way you could mix them up. In fact, it’s extremely different within classes. The patterns are all over the place. Then at the midpoint – which is what Haeckel claimed in his drawings was the early stage – the embryos become more similar, though nowhere near as much as Haeckel claimed. Then they become very different again. Of course, some Darwinists try to get around Haeckel’s problems by changing their tune. They use evolutionary theory to try to explain why the differences in the embryos are there. They can get quite elaborate.”

“But that’s doing the same thing that the theory-savers were doing with the Cambrian explosion. What was supposed to be primary evidence for Darwin’s theory – the fossil or embryo evidence – turns out to be false, so they immediately say, well, we know the theory is true, so let’s use the theory to explain why the evidence doesn’t fit. But where’s the evidence for the theory? Why should I accept the theory as being true at all?”


4) Wing, Flipper, Leg, Hand

There obviously are similarities between bone structures in a bat’s wing, a porpoise’s flipper, a horse’s leg, and a human’s hand. These similarities are somehow the “proof” that they all share a common ancestor.

The Developmental Pathway – “If you have 2 different animals with similar features and you trace them back to the embryo, they would come from similar cells and processes. This happens to be mostly untrue. There are some frogs that develop like frogs and other frogs that develop like birds, but they all look pretty much the same when they come out the other end. They’re frogs. So the developmental pathway explanation is false.”

5) Genes

“A more common explanation nowadays is that the homologies come from similar genes. In other words, the reason 2 features are homologous in 2 different animals would be that they’re programmed by similar genes in the embryo. But it turns out this doesn’t work very well, either. We know some cases where you have similar features that come from different genes, but we have lots and lots of cases where we have similar genes that give rise to very different features.”

6) Humans and Apes Sharing 98% of Genes

“If you assume, as Neo-Darwinism does, that we are products of our genes, then you’re saying that the dramatic differences between us and chimpanzees are due to 2 percent of genes. The problem is that the so-called body building genes are in the 98%. The two percent of our genes that are different are really rather trivial genes that have little to do with anatomy. So the supposed similarity of human and chimp DNA is a problem for Neo-Darwinism right there. Second, it’s not surprising that when you look at 2 organisms that are similar anatomically, you often find they’re similar genetically. Not always; there’s a striking discordance with some organisms. But does this prove common ancestry? No. It’s just as compatible with common design as it is with common ancestry. A designer might very well decide to use common building materials to create different organisms, just as builders use the same materials (steel girders, rivets, and so forth) to build different bridges that end up looking very dissimilar from one another.”

Okay, I obviously can’t include everything written here. Just for people who aren’t aware, the archaeopteryx is not a missing link, Java man is a true member of the human family – not a half man/ape.

Evolutionary Biologist F. Clark Howell, “There is no encompassing theory of human evolution. Alas, there never really has been.”

“Every time an icon of evolution is discredited, Darwinists claim with religious zeal that it was never really the whole story in the first place and insist that new findings really do buttress macroevolution. New narratives are created; new stores are told. The theory of evolution, now unsupported by the original icon, is never questioned; instead, it’s used afresh to justify a redesigned model. For instance, in order to explain away fossil gaps, Gould proposed punctuated equilibrium. They suggested that radically new species somehow managed to develop rapidly among isolated populations, conveniently leaving behind no fossils to document the process. When these new creatures rejoined the larger, central populations, this resulted in the preserving of fossils that suggested the sudden appearance of new species. This model has been roundly criticized, and rightly so, for creating far more questions than answers.” - Philip E. Johnson, A Critique on Punctuated Equilibrium from Darwin on Trial

Wells: “I still leave room for some evolutionary processes in limited instances. But saying evolution works in some cases is far form showing that it accounts for everything. The evidence for Darwinism is not only grossly inadequate, it’s systematically distorted.”

Nobel Prize Winner, Arno Penzias regarding the Big Bang, “The best data we have are exactly what I would have predicted had I nothing to go on but the first 5 books of Moses, the Psalms, and the Bible as a whole.”

Sir Fred Hoyle – “A commonsense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed around with physics, as well as chemistry, and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature.”


Biochemistry:

“Time and time again, he found scientists describing complex interlocking biological systems and basically saying, ‘Isn’t it wonderful how natural selection put this together?’ The “how” was always missing.”

The Cell – “An incredible, intricate, Lilliputian world where a typical cell takes 10 million million atoms to build.”

“A single-cell organism as a high-tech factory, complete with artificial languages and their decoding systems, memory banks for information storage and retrieval, elegant control systems regulating the automated assembly of parts components, error fail-safe and proof-reading devices utilized for quality control, assembly processes involving the principle of prefabrication and modular construction…and a capacity not equaled in any of our own most advanced machines, for it would be capable of replicating its entire structure within a matter of a few hours.”

Michael J. Behe, PHD

Degree in Chemistry with honors from Drexel University and a doctorate in biochemistry at the University of Pennsylvania. Served on the Molecular Biochemistry Review Panel of the Division of Molecular and Cellular Biosciences at the National Science Foundation.

The Darwin Test:

“If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.”

THE IRREDUCIBLY COMPLEX:

Behe:

“You see, a system or a device is irreducibly complex if it has a number of different components that all work together to accomplish the task of the system, and if you were to remove one of the components, the system would no longer function. An irreducibly complex system is highly unlikely to be built piece-by-piece through Darwinian processes, because the system has to be fully present in order for it to function.

“The illustration I liked to use is a mousetrap. You can see the interdependence of the parts yourself. If you take away any of these parts, then it’s not like the mousetrap becomes half as efficient as it used to be or it only catches half of the many mice. Instead, it doesn’t catch ANY mice. It’s broken. It doesn’t work at all. So the mousetrap does a good job of illustrating how irreducibly complex biological systems defy a Darwinian explanation. Evolution can’t produce an irreducibly complex biological machine suddenly, all at once, because it’s much too complicated. The odds against that would be prohibitive. And you can’t produce it by successive, slight modification of a precursor system, because any precursor system would be missing a part and consequently couldn’t function. There would be no reason for it to exist. And natural selection chooses systems that ARE ALREADY WORKING.”

“If the simple device like the mousetrap requires design, what about the finely tuned machines of the cellular word? If evolution can’t adequately explain them, then scientists should be free to consider other alternatives.”

“Some components of biochemical machines can have other functions. But the issue remains – can you use numerous, slight, successive modifications to get from those other functions to where we are? The question for evolution is not whether you can take a mousetrap and use its parts for something else; it’s whether you can start with something else and make it into a mousetrap. The problem for evolutionists is to start with less complex system and build a more complex system. Even if every component could theoretically have useful function prior to its assembly into the mousetrap, you’d still have the problem of how the mousetrap became assembled.”

2 examples of Irreducible Complexity:

Flagellum:

Biological machine for propelling cells – the bacterial flagellum. The flagellum has a propeller made out of a protein called flagellin. The whole system works really well – the flagellum’s propeller can spin at ten thousand revolutions per minute.

“Not only that, but the propeller can stop spinning within a quarter turn and instantly start spinning in the other way at 10,000 rpms. Howard Berge of Harvard University called it the most efficient motor in the universe. It’s way beyond anything we can make, especially when you consider its size. Genetic studies have shown that between 30 and 35 proteins are needed to create a functional flagellum. I haven’t even begun to describe all of its complexities; we don’t even know the roles of all its proteins. But at a minimum you need at least three parts. Eliminate one of those parts and you don’t get a flagellum that only spins at five thousand rpms; you get a flagellum that simply doesn’t work at all. So it’s irreducibly complex – and a huge stumbling block to Darwinian theory.”

“The best that Darwinists have been able to muster is to say that the flagellum has components that look like the components of other systems that don’t’ have as many parts, so maybe somehow this other system had something to do with flagellum. Nobody knows where this subsystem came from in the first place, or how or why the subsystem may have turned into a flagellum. So, no, there’s no reasoned explanation anyone has been able to offer.”

Blood Clotting:

If your blood hadn’t clotted in the right place and in the right amount and at the right time, you would have bled to death. As it turns out, the system of blood clotting involves a highly choreographed cascade of 10 steps that use about 20 different molecular components. Without the whole system in place, it doesn’t work. To create a perfectly balanced blood-clotting system, clusters of protein components have to be inserted all at once. That rules out a gradualistic Darwinian approach and fits the hypothesis of an intelligent designer.”

Q: What about Gene Duplication? Why wouldn’t that work with blood clotting?

Behe:

“Sure, gene duplication happens. But what the fans of gene duplication rarely recognize is that when you get a duplication gene, you don’t get a new protein with new properties. You got the same protein as before. And that’s a problem. Darwinists don’t provide the details of how this can actually happen in the real world. But that’s not all. How can blood clotting develop over time, step by step, when in the meantime the animal has no effective way to stop from bleeding to death whenever it’s cut? And when you’ve only got part of a system in place, the system doesn’t work, so you’ve got the components sitting around doing nothing – and NATURAL SELECTION ONLY WORKS IF THERE IS SOMETHING USEFUL RIGHT NOW, not in the future.”

“In science we’re supposed to do experiments to show something is true. Nobody has ever done experiments to show how blood-clotting could have developed. Nobody has been able to show how a duplicated gene can develop some new function where it starts to make a new and irreducibly complex pathway.”

Once again, I can’t include all of the information for practical purposes. Just know that any hypothesis whatsoever, organizing on its own, whether it be take away parts, add parts, has not only been highly suspect, but cannot be provided without human intelligence involved somehow.

DNA:

Stephen C. Meyer, PHD

Director and Senior Fellow at Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture. Doctorate at Cambridge University, where he analyzed methodological issues in origin-of-life biology. For his Masters degree, also from Cambridge, he studied the history of molecular biology and evolutionary theory.

According to Bernd-Olaf Kuppers, “The problem of the origin of life is clearly basically equivalent to the problem of the origin of biological information.”

DNA: Repository for a digital code containing the instructions for telling the cell’s machinery how to build proteins.

Meyer on Prebiotic Soup: The chemicals that supposedly existed on the primitive Earth prior to life

“Even if they were right in order to create a living cell, you would also need information for how to arrange them in a very specific configuration in order to perform biological functions. Ever since the 1950s and 1960s, biologists have recognized that the cell’s critical functions are usually performed by proteins, and proteins are the product of assembly instructions stored in DNA.”

FROM DNA TO DESIGN:

“The origin of information in DNA – which is necessary for life to begin – is best explained by an intelligent cause rather than any other types of naturalistic causes that scientists typically use to explain biological phenomena. DNA is like a library. The organism accesses the information that it needs from DNA so it can build some of its critical components. To build one protein, you typically need 1,200 to 2,000 letters or bases – which is a lot of information.”

“This issue has caused ALL naturalistic accounts of the origin of life to break down, because it’s the critical and foundational question. If you can’t explain where information comes from, you haven’t explained life, because it’s the information that makes the molecules into something that actually functions. It is HIGHLY intuitive to think that there was Intelligence behind it.”

EVIDENCE FOR PREBIOTIC SOUP?

Q: Does evidence for prebiotic soup exist?

Meyer:

“If this prebioti soup had really existed, it would have been rich in amino acids. Therefore, there would have been a lot of nitrogen, because amino acids are nitrogenous. So when we examine the earliest sediments of the Earth, we should find large deposits of nitrogen-rich minerals. Those deposits have never been located. In fact, Jim Brooks wrote in 1985 that ‘the nitrogen content of early organic matter is relatively low – just .015 percent. From this we can be reasonably certain that there never was any substantial amount of ‘primitive soup’ on Earth when pre-Cambrian sediments were formed; if such a soup ever existed it was only for a brief period of time.”

Michael Denton, “Considering the way the prebiotic soup is referred to in so many discussions of the origin of life as an already established reality, it comes as something of a shock to realize that there is absolutely NO positive evidence for its existence.”

WHAT ABOUT RANDOM CHANCE:

Meyer:

“Virtually all of origin-of-life experts have utterly rejected the approach. Even so, the idea is still very much alive at the popular level. For many college students who speculate about these things, chance is still the hero. They think if you let amino acids randomly interact over millions of years, life is somehow going to emerge. But there is no merit to this. Even a simple protein molecule, or the gene to build that molecule, is so rich in information that the entire time since the Big Bang would not give you, as my colleague Bill Dembski likes to say, the probabilistic resources you would need to generate that molecule by chance.”

WHAT ABOUT NATURAL SELECTION:

Meyer:

“Darwinists admit that natural selection requires a self-replicating organism to work. Organisms reproduce, their offspring have variations, the ones that are better adapted to their environment survive better, and so those adaptations are preserved and passed on to the next generation. However, to have reproduction, there has to be cell division. And that PRESUPPOSES THE EXISTENCE OF INFORMATION-RICH DNA and proteins. But that’s the problem – those are the very things they’re trying to explain! In other words, you’ve got to have a self-replicating organism for Darwinian evolution to take place, but you can’t have a self-replicating organism until you have the information necessary in DNA, which is what you’re trying to explain in the first place.”

Q: What if replication first began in a much simpler way and then natural selection was able to take over? Some use RNA as their genetic material. RNA molecules are simpler than DNA, and they can also store information and even replicate it.

Meyer:

“The RNA molecule would need information to function, just as DNA would, and so we’re right back to the same problem of where the information came from. Also, for a single strand RNA to replicate, there must be an identical RNA molecule close by. To have a reasonable chance of having two identical RNA molecules of the right length would require a library of ten billion billion billion billion billion billion RNA molecules – and that effectively rules out any chance of origin of a primitive replicating system.”

In other words, you have to build straw man upon straw man.

WHAT ABOUT CHEMICAL AFFINITIES AND SELF-ORDERING?

Meyer:

“Salt crystals are a good illustration. Chemical forces of attraction cause sodium ions, Na+, to bond with chloride ions, Cl-, in order to form highly ordered patterns within a crystal of salt. You get a nice sequence of Na and Cl repeating over and over again. So, yes, there are lots of cases in chemistry where bonding affinities of different elements will explain the origin of their molecular structure. Kenyon and others hoped this would be the case for proteins and DNA. As scientists did experiments, they found that amino acids didn’t demonstrate these bonding affinities. Nothing that correlates to any of the known patterns of sequencing that we find in functional proteins.”

“What would happen if we could explain the sequencing in DNA and proteins as a result of self-organization properties? Wouldn’t we end up with something like a crystal of salt, where there’s merely a repetitive sequence? Consider the information in DNA, which is spelled out by the chemical alphabet (A,C,G,T). Imagine every time you had an A, it would automatically attract a G. You’d just have a repetitive sequence: A-G-A-G-A-G-A-G. Would that give you a gene that could produce a protein? Absolutely not. Self-organization wouldn’t yield a genetic message, only a repetitive mantra. To convey information, you need irregularity in sequencing. Open any book, you won’t see the word “the” repeating over and over and over. Instead, you have an irregular sequencing of letters. They convey information because they conform to a certain known independent pattern – that is, the rules of vocabulary and grammar. That’s what enables us to communicate – and that’s what needs to be explained in DNA. The four letters of its alphabet are so irregular while at the same time conforming to a functional requirement – that is, the correct arrangement of amino acids to create a working protein. Information requires variability, irregularity, and unpredictability – which is what information theorists call complexity – self-organization gives you repetitive, redundant structure, which is known as simple order. And complexity and order are categorical opposites.”

Dean Kenyon repudiated the conclusions of his own book, saying “we have not the slightest chance of chemical evolutionary origin for even the simplest of cells,” and that intelligent design, “made a great deal of sense, as it very closely matched the multiple discoveries in molecular biology.”

Intuition tells us that where there is information, there is Intelligence.

“When archeologists discovered the Rosetta stone, they didn’t think its inscriptions were the product of random chance or self-organizational processes. Obviously, the sequential arrangements of symbols was conveying information, and it was a reasonable assumption that intelligence created it. The same principle is true for DNA.”

“Naturalism cannot answer the fundamental problem of how to get from matter and energy to biological function without the infusion of information from an intelligence. Information transcends matter and energy. Information is the hallmark of a mind.”

Okay, there is a lot more, but I’m going to offer one more perspective.

KALAK COSMOLOGICAL ARGUMENT:

Nobel-Prize Winner Steven Weinberg:

“In the beginning there was an explosion. Not an explosion like those familiar on Earth, starting from a definite center and spreading out to engulf more and more of the circumambient air, but an explosion which occurred simultaneously everywhere, filling all space from the beginning with every particle of matter rushing apart from every other particle.”

William Lane Craig, PHD, THD

A member of nine professional societies, including the American Philosophical Association, the Science and Religion Forum, and a research professor at the Talbot School of Theology.

The argument goes as such:

Premise 1 – Whatever BEGINS to exist has a cause
Premise 2 – The Universe had a beginning
Conclusion – The Universe has a cause

I’m assuming that an objection that some of you may make here is in Premise 1. You may be tempted to ask, “Who caused God to come into existence?” Notice it doesn’t say that whatever exists – it says whatever BEGINS to exist. Christians posit that God never had a beginning. The question of God’s origin does not work when understanding Atemporal Eternality. Most people commonly define “Eternal” as endless time. However, another definition is TIMELESS. He is without time. There is no sense in asking what was “before God” – for there was no “before.” That is why Christianity has always suggested that God created time. The immediate question then is, how can one create without time? Gregory made an excellent point in a comment he made that essentially stated that we don’t have the language to describe such early phenomenon. This would make more sense for those of you who are familiar with theological language and anthropomorphism. If not, I would like to suggest that anyone hoping to raise a question about "who was before God" read more about the topic. Also, this shouldn’t be very difficult to accept. As Craig states (while reflecting on previous atheistic assumptions about the universe), “How can they possibly maintain that the universe can be eternal and uncaused, yet God cannot be timeless and uncaused?”

I’m assuming that none of you will combat Premise 1 and 2 – for 1 is intuitive, even David Hume asserted, "never asserted so absurd a proposition as that anything might ARISE without a cause." Premise 2 is nearly accepted by all scientists. Therefore, the Universe has a Cause. The question now is, what is that cause?

HOW CAN ANYONE EXPLAIN THE ORIGIN OF A FINITE UNIVERSE FROM A TIMELESS CAUSE?

Craig:

“The cause of the universe is a personal agent who has freedom of will.”

Now, there are several objections that were raised, that Craig dismisses quite satisfactorily. If you have a specific one you want to discuss, we can most certainly do that.

Stephen C. Meyer:

“The cause of the Universe must transcend matter, space, and time. Naturalism, by definition, denies the existence of any entity beyond the closed system of nature.” Therefore, what is the best possible solution?

“There is a form of practical reasoning that we use in life all the time. It says if we want to explain a phenomenon or event, we consider a whole range of hypotheses and infer to the one which, IF TRUE, would provide the best explanation. In other words, we do an exhaustive analysis of the possible explanations and keep adding information until only one explanation is left that can explain the whole range of data. The way you discriminate against between the competing hypotheses is to look at their explanatory power. This is what detectives do. This is what lawyers do in a court of law. Scientists use this approach. This model can enable us to achieve a high degree of practical certainty.”

ARGUMENT FROM IGNORANCE:

Premise: Scientists may not currently be able to find any explanation for how life began, but that doesn’t necessarily point toward a supernatural conclusion.

Meyer:

This is NOT an argument from ignorance. We’re not inferring design just because the naturalistic evolutionary theories all fail to explain information. We infer design because all those theories fail AND WE KNOW of another causal entity that is capable of producing information – namely, INTELLIGENCE.”

MIT’s Phillip Morrison:

“There is a kind of religion in science; it is the religion of a person who believes there is order and harmony in the Universe. Every event can be explained in a rationally way as the product of some previous event; every effect must have its cause; there is no First Cause….This religious faith of the scientist is violated by the discovery that the world had a beginning under conditions in which the known laws of physics are not valid, and as a product of forces or circumstances we cannot discover. When that happens, the scientist has lost control. If he really examined the implications, he would be traumatized.”

Craig:

“Because the cause of the universe transcends time and space, it cannot be a physical reality. Instead it must be nonphysical or immaterial. Well, there are only two types of things that can be timeless and immaterial. One would be abstract objects – like numbers or mathematical entities. However, abstract objects can’t cause anything to happen. The second kind of immaterial reality would be a MIND. A MIND can be a cause, and so it makes sense that the universe is the product of an unembodied mind that brought it into existence.”

FALSIFIABILITY:

Intelligent Design is not falsifiable. A theory cannot truly be scientific unless there are potential ways to prove it false through experiments of other means.

Behe:

“Yes, I know – but what’s really ironic is that intelligent design is routinely called unfalsifiable by the very people who are busy trying to falsify it! My claim is that there is NO unintelligent process that could produce the bacteria flagellum. To falsify that claim, all you would have to do would be to find one unintelligent process that could produce that system. On the other hand, Darwinists claim that SOME unintelligent process could produce the flagellum. To falsify that, you’d have to show that the system could not possibly have been created by any of a potentially infinite number of possible unintelligent processes. That’s impossible to do. So which claim is falsifiable? I’d say the claim for Intelligent Design.”

Darwinian Hypocrisy:

What about Darwinists who say, “Maybe it’s merely too early for us to come up with a road map of how these gradual changes developed. Someday we’ll better understand the flagellum, so have patience – in the end, science is going to figure it out.

Behe:

“You know, Darwinists always accuse folks in the Intelligent Design movement of making an argument from ignorance. Well, that’s a pure argument from ignorance! They're saying, ‘We have no idea how this could have happened, but let’s assume evolution somehow did it.’ You’ve heard the God-of-all-gaps – inserting God when you don’t have another explanation? Well this is evolution-of-the-gaps. Some scientists merely insert evolution when they don’t understand something.”

Collins:

“Let’s say you found some dinosaur bones. You would naturally consider them to be very strong evidence that dinosaurs lived in the past. Why? Because even though nobody has seen dinosaurs, we do have the experience of other animals leaving behind fossilized remains. So the dinosaur explanation is the natural extrapolation from our common experience. It makes sense.”

“Let’s say there was a dinosaur skeptic, however. He was trying to rationalize away the bones you found. Let’s suppose he claimed he could explain the bones by proposing that a dinosaur bone producing field simply caused them to materialize out of thin air. You’d say, ‘Wait a second – there are no known laws of physics that would allow that field to conjure up bones out of nothing. The skeptic would then say – ‘Aha, we just haven’t discovered these laws yet. We simply haven’t detected these fields yet. Give us more and I’m sure we will. My guess is that nothing would deter you from inferring that dinosaurs existed, because this would be a NATURAL EXTRAPOLATION from what you ALREADY KNOW. On the other hand, the skeptic needs to invent a whole new set of physical laws and a whole new set of mechanisms that are NOT a natural extrapolation from anything we know or have experienced.”

Therefore, of observable realities, the MIND is the natural extrapolation.

In terms of Information:

“Based on evidence, scientists assess each hypothesis on the basis of its ability to explain the evidence at hand. Typically the criterion is whether the explanation has causal power, which is the ability to produce the effect in question. In this case, the effect in question is information. On the basis of what we DO KNOW, only one causal power can produce the informational coding necessary – A MIND.”

Michael Shermer, editor of The Skeptical Inquirer, when scoffing at faith:

“The whole point of faith is to believe regardless of the evidence, which is the very antithesis of science.”

Now, based on everything we discussed, I don’t see how anyone can posit, with any intellectual honesty, that the best possible solution is Darwinism or some form of Naturalism. We haven’t even talked about Anthropic Fine-Tuning, Consciousness, or Astronomy which places the probability in dramatic favor of Intelligent Design as the best possible solution.

In order for me to believe in Darwinism and its underlying premise of naturalism, I would have to believe that:

1) Nothing produces everything
2) Non-life produces life
3) Randomness produces fine-tuning
4) Chaos produces information
5) Unconsciousness produces consciousness
6) Non-reason produces reason

When considering the problems with Darwinism and the lack of evidence, the origin of information, the uncaused, immaterial, timeless First Cause – are we still going to say that Darwinism or some Naturalistic explanation is the best possible solution?

Based on all the evidence, out of 2 explanations – I find only one observed entity is capable – A Mind. This fits in with the origin of information and certainly registers with what Christians have posited is the Nature of God – Uncaused, timeless, Intelligence.

He said, “Let there be light.”

Once again, the words of Noble-Winning Prize Physicist, Steven Weinberg:

“In the beginning there was an explosion. Not an explosion like those familiar on Earth, starting from a definite center and spreading out to engulf more and more of the circumambient air, but an explosion which occurred simultaneously everywhere, filling all space from the beginning with every particle of matter rushing apart from every other particle.” Within the tiniest split second, the temperature hit a hundred thousand degrees Centigrade. “This is so much hotter than in the center of even the hottest star, so hot, in fact, that none of the components in ordinary matter, molecules, or atoms, or even the nuclei of atoms, could have held together.” The matter rushing apart, he explained, consisted of such elementary particles as negatively charged electrons, positively charged positrons, and neutrinos, which lack both electrical charge and mass. Interestingly, there were also photons: “The Universe,” he said, “was filled with light.”