All Christian positions on creation (including Theistic Evolution) insist that Darwinian Evolution is incorrect—that is to say, regardless of how Genesis 1 is interpreted, there are significant reasons for believing that life could not possibly have evolved by sheer chance alone. Even if evolution were allowed as a mechanism for some aspects of creation, the weight of mind-boggling improbabilities stand against the idea that pure randomness could be responsible for the complex, ordered systems of life we see around us. As the Intelligent Design model suggests, the combination of complex order with the significant unlikeliness of biological life (a combination referred to as “specified complexity”) points strongly to the inference that this system was designed by a higher intelligence.
The Practical Impossibility of Nonliving Chemicals Combining to Form Life on Their Own
It is commonly taught that the first primitive versions of microscopic life began on Earth some four billion years ago, when the right arrangement of chemicals happened, by random chance, to come together in just the right way. However, even among the most hardened atheists in the scientific community, the odds against this happening are acknowledged to be so astronomical as to lead them to call it a ‘miracle’: “An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that…the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle.” – Francis Crick
- Even the simplest living things require vast amounts of ordered organic data, each set of which have their own specified complexity of arrangement in order to permit life:
- Amino acids, which for life require a selective left-handed orientation
- Proteins/enzymes, which must be exactly ordered and folded in the right way
- DNA and/or RNA, which is coded to a mind-boggling level of complexity—“Each nucleus…contains a digitally coded database larger, in information content, than all 30 volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica put together.” – Richard Dawkins
- Membranes, specified to various kinds and structures
- No modern experiment, despite all our knowledge and our ability to rig the exact conditions, has ever come close to creating a living cell from nonliving chemicals. Even the most famous attempt, the Stanley Miller experiment of 1953, is now widely discredited:
- No modern experiment, despite all our knowledge and our ability to rig the exact conditions, has ever come close to creating a living cell from nonliving chemicals. Even the most famous attempt, the Stanley Miller experiment of 1953, is now widely discredited:
- Miller only produced a few amino acids, which are the simplest level of the necessary molecules. Yet even when he put significant pressures of selection and design into the experiment, he could not produce the right distribution of kinds, nor anything close to all the needed amino acids (he only made about 5% of the required types), to say nothing of the wildly unlikely task of getting them to combine into proteins.
- Further, Miller’s assumptions about early Earth’s atmosphere are now thought to be completely wrong. Under the current understanding of the actual conditions, the main organic chemicals produced by the experiment would be formaldehyde and cyanide, both of which would kill life rather than create it.
- Noted scientist Fred Hoyle’s assessment of the likelihood of life emerging from nonliving chemicals on its own: It is about as likely as a tornado whirling through a junkyard and successfully assembling a working 747 airplane.
Irreducible Complexity in Biological Systems
In Darwin’s day, it was assumed that lower levels of life—such as a single cell—were not very complex, thus the natural production of one seemed like no great feat. Today, however, we know otherwise. Not only is a single living cell filled with immense amounts of complex, ordered data, but even its most basic structures are highly complex.
- “Simple” structures, like a bacterial flagellum, are apparently built from irreducible parts—their component parts would need to come into being at the same time, fully-formed and in conjunction with one another in order to perform a task necessary for survival.
- When one considers the macro-cellular level of highly-specified bodily organs, the problem of irreducible complexity only magnifies: a natural development over many generations would include a vast majority of time in which they were essentially functionless.
- Writing of cellular systems, scientist Franklin Harold writes, “We must concede that there are presently no detailed Darwinian accounts of the evolution of any biochemical system, only a variety of wishful speculations.”
The Challenge of Speciation
Darwinian evolution suggests that natural pressures alone can make use of random mutations that eventually compound to develop into whole new families and genera. While the routine adaptations of micro-evolution have been observed in the natural world, this kind of macro-evolution has not.
- Random mutations are almost universally harmful and have not been observed to add substantial information to an existing genome, which is precisely what would be needed.
- Natural selection allows for micro-evolutionary adaptations within a certain scope, but to aggregate those changes into producing whole new genera appears immensely difficult. Consider the failure of intense selective breeding over thousands of years to produce a single new species—a dog is still a dog, and even the most exclusive breeds, when returned to natural settings for several generations, return quickly to the normal features of their species.
- Observed patterns of natural selection tend to favor the stability of the statistical mean of a species’ traits rather than pressing change at the fringes; thus we have evidence of many current species remaining unchanged from their first appearance at the lowest fossil levels.
Inconsistencies in the Fossil Record
Despite more than two centuries of combing the fossil record for evidence of Darwinian evolution, that record has posed at least as many problems as confirmations. The essential difficulty is that species tend to appear all at once in the fossil record, without a clear trail of transitional forms leading to their development.
- The Cambrian Explosion—in this famous example, all the major body types of animal phyla appear together in a geological blink of the eye, without clear connections to previous forms.
- There is also a significant lack of transitional forms in models of human origins. A large and unexplained gap remains between austrolopithicenes and the Homo genus, and some scientists have made the case that the variety of early “species” of humans in the Homo genus, like Neanderthals, are essentially the same species as modern humans, with regional variations.
- Although genomic history (which is a science still very much in its infancy) is appearing to confirm some evolutionary assumptions, other recent data is calling old assumptions into question.
- Noted scientist Fred Hoyle’s assessment of the likelihood of life emerging from nonliving chemicals on its own: It is about as likely as a tornado whirling through a junkyard and successfully assembling a working 747 airplane.
Irreducible Complexity in Biological Systems
- “Simple” structures, like a bacterial flagellum, are apparently built from irreducible parts—their component parts would need to come into being at the same time, fully-formed and in conjunction with one another in order to perform a task necessary for survival.
- When one considers the macro-cellular level of highly-specified bodily organs, the problem of irreducible complexity only magnifies: a natural development over many generations would include a vast majority of time in which they were essentially functionless.
- Writing of cellular systems, scientist Franklin Harold writes, “We must concede that there are presently no detailed Darwinian accounts of the evolution of any biochemical system, only a variety of wishful speculations.”
The Challenge of Speciation
Darwinian evolution suggests that natural pressures alone can make use of random mutations that eventually compound to develop into whole new families and genera. While the routine adaptations of micro-evolution have been observed in the natural world, this kind of macro-evolution has not.
- Random mutations are almost universally harmful and have not been observed to add substantial information to an existing genome, which is precisely what would be needed.
- Natural selection allows for micro-evolutionary adaptations within a certain scope, but to aggregate those changes into producing whole new genera appears immensely difficult. Consider the failure of intense selective breeding over thousands of years to produce a single new species—a dog is still a dog, and even the most exclusive breeds, when returned to natural settings for several generations, return quickly to the normal features of their species.
- Observed patterns of natural selection tend to favor the stability of the statistical mean of a species’ traits rather than pressing change at the fringes; thus we have evidence of many current species remaining unchanged from their first appearance at the lowest fossil levels.
Inconsistencies in the Fossil Record
Despite more than two centuries of combing the fossil record for evidence of Darwinian evolution, that record has posed at least as many problems as confirmations. The essential difficulty is that species tend to appear all at once in the fossil record, without a clear trail of transitional forms leading to their development.
- The Cambrian Explosion—in this famous example, all the major body types of animal phyla appear together in a geological blink of the eye, without clear connections to previous forms.
- There is also a significant lack of transitional forms in models of human origins. A large and unexplained gap remains between austrolopithicenes and the Homo genus, and some scientists have made the case that the variety of early “species” of humans in the Homo genus, like Neanderthals, are essentially the same species as modern humans, with regional variations.
- Although genomic history (which is a science still very much in its infancy) is appearing to confirm some evolutionary assumptions, other recent data is calling old assumptions into question.