The Casual Christian

The biggest problem for the evolutionist is how to explain the emergence of living organisms from inert matter and conscious minds from a living organism without the involvement of a pre-existent consciousness. Richard Dawkins, noted proponent of evolution, says the answer is luck. He asserts that the laws of nature favor life. Francis Crick, who discovered the structure of DNA, believed that the only explanation for the rapid appearance of life on earth was the deliberate seeding of the planet, but by whom?

Probability of Evolution

Steven Hawkings, author of A Brief History of Time, compared the probability of life evolving to a horde of monkeys producing one of Shakespeare’s sonnets by randomly pecking on typewriter keys. The likelihood of that happening would be minuscule. Even the odds of simply spelling out the poet’s name would be scant. If the monkeys had one random peck for each of the ten letters in the poet’s name, the chance that the first letter typed would be ‘s’ would be one in twenty-six. The chance that the second letter would be ‘h’ would also be one in twenty-six. The likelihood that the first two letters taken together would be ‘sh’ would be one in 26x26 and so on for the rest of the name. So the probability that a monkey could type just the word “Shakespeare” by randomly pecking on the keys of a typewriter is less than one in a trillion. Would you bet on those odds?

 Suppose that, against all odds, a living cell did emerge over time. Without a fully developed reproductive system, it would eventually die without passing on its attributes. Since cellular processes are essentially the same in all organisms, evolution would have to overcome the reproductive barrier over and over against enormous odds.

Dr. Gerald Schroeder, double Ph.D. in nuclear physics and earth and planetary sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and former consultant at the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission says, “It is time to lay to rest the misguided, but popularly believed un-truth that in our world, gradual, step by step random mutations could have climbed the mountain of improbability and produced the magnificent abundance of the earth’s biosphere.”

Simon Conway Morris, professor of evolutionary paleobiology at Cambridge University and Fellow of the Royal Society of England, is one of the world’s leading paleontologists. In his book, Life’s Solutions, Dr. Morris says, “Life is simply too complex to be assembled on any believable time scale,” but then goes on to say, “Evolution has the uncanny ability to find the short cuts across the multidimensional hyperspace of biological reality …” By itself?

So rather than ascribe the order and intricate balance of life to an all-powerful, all-wise agent operating with a plan, he chooses to attribute them to an impersonal, force with the miraculous ability to express purpose.

Irreducible Complexity

Regarding natural selection, Charles Darwin said, “…Natural selection acts only by taking advantage of slight successive variations; she can never take a great and sudden leap, but must advance by short and sure, though slow steps.” Thus, “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.” In other words, any organisms whose individual parts are all essential for functioning could not have evolved piece by piece. Such organisms are called “irreducibly complex.” Remove any part and the organism would fail. We have already mentioned one such example—the reproductive system. The human eye is another good example of an irreducible organism. Darwin himself said of the human eye, “To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.”

Faith or Science?

The atheist's last bastion of defense is that it is not possible to prove the existence of God, and that faith has no place in the scientific realm. It is equally true, however, that evolution has not been proven. If it had been, it would be a law, not a theory. Nor is it possible to prove there is no God. And although it is possibe to point to many exceptions to evolution in the natural world, nowhere is there any evidence that there is no God.

The Casual Christian pp. 28-29