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No matter what some people might say, Darwin was a good scientist and his theory of evolution is a sound scientific theory. This doesn’t mean that it is true, it simply means that it can be tested and shown to either be true or false.
Darwin’s theory in short: life spontaneously coalesced through a series of random chemical reactions. Through countless small mutations over millions of years and natural selection, life evolved from simplicity to the complex world we see today.
Darwin himself showed two ways to test whether or not his theory is accurate. Let’s look at the first.
“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.”
There are countless examples of this. In Darwin’s time, microscope technology was very primitive. The cell appeared to be a randomly functioning blob. The advances in understanding of cellular machinery in the last 50 years have caused Darwin’s theory to “completely break down.” Molecular biochemist, Dr Michael Behe coined the term “irreducible complexity,” which describes a complex system that couldn’t possibly function if any individual part of it was removed. This implies that any system with irreducible complexity could not have evolved naturally because anything simpler or with less components would not be able to function or survive on its own.
A simple example of irreducible complexity is a mousetrap. The very simplest mousetrap has at least 6 pieces. If any of these pieces are removed, it is completely useless for catching mice.
Virtually any system known in life can be broken down to something that is irreducibly complex. Famous examples include the eye, blood clotting, flagellum, cell function, and the bombardier beetle among endless examples. I don’t have time to go into detail about each one. Please google them if you want to learn more. I want to focus on the most important example, the origin of life.
Life changes over time. This is a simple fact. People are bigger, faster, and stronger than they were in the past. Corn ears used to be less than an inch long. It is easy to see why evolution seems logical. The main problem with evolution is the start, how did life form naturally? Basically, it couldn’t have!
One of the simplest forms of self-sustaining life is the single celled organism called the amoeba. The information contained in the DNA structure of the amoeba is enough to fill 1000 sets of the Encyclopedia Britannica! The thought that this amount of data could spontaneously come together in the proper order on accident is completely absurd. There is absolutely no legitimate scientific explanation for how life could have naturally formed and there is a reason why other planets show no signs of life despite having evidence of water and near optimal conditions. Many prominent scientists believe that life couldn’t have formed on earth.
Francis Crick, famous molecular biologist and co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, “An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us could now state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it wrong.” So did Crick decide to believe in intelligent design? Nope, he came up with another idea called “directed panspermia,” which theorizes that life originated somewhere else and was somehow transported to earth. How ridiculous is that!? And it still fails to explain how life could form wherever it originated from.
Nobel Prize winning scientist George Wald, “Most modern biologists, having reviewed with satisfaction the downfall of the spontaneous generation hypothesis, yet unwilling to accept the alternative belief in special creation, are left with nothing. I think a scientist has no choice but to approach the origin of life through a hypothesis of spontaneous generation… One has only to contemplate the magnitude of this task to concede spontaneous generation of a living organism is impossible. Yet here we are, as a result, I believe in spontaneous generation.” Basically, Wald is saying, there is no evidence for spontaneous generation of life, everything points to creation, but because I am a scientist, I reject God and believe in evolution! Many scientists have this view, but at least Wald is willing to admit it! The excuse Wald gives is not science, but rather time itself, “Time is in fact the hero of the plot. The time with which we have to deal is of the order of two billion years. What we regard as impossible on the basis of human experience is meaningless here. Given so much time, the "impossible" becomes possible, the possible probable, and the probable virtually certain. One has only to wait: time itself performs the miracles.”
Now lets get to the second way Darwin said his theory could be disproved:
“The geological record is extremely imperfect and this fact will to a large extent explain why we do not find intermediate varieties, connecting together all the extinct and existing forms of life by the finest graduated steps. He who rejects these views on the nature of the geological record will rightly reject my whole theory. The number of intermediate varieties, which have formerly existed on the earth, must be truly enormous. Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graded organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory.”
Darwin said that if his theory is true as time progresses and more fossils are found, the evolutionary gaps should be narrowed and filled in to reveal a smooth slow change from species to species going all the way back to the beginning. This is obviously not what we have seen since Darwin’s time. We have found fossils for nearly 250,000 different species and the gaps remain virtually identical to what they were 120 years ago. There are actually fewer plausible examples of transitional species now than there were then.
Mathematician and philosopher David Berlinski, “The question to be raised, and it should be raised whenever an evolutionary sequence is mentioned…what are exactly the predicted properties one would expect to find as one passes from a land dwelling creature to a sea dwelling creature? Specifically, how many changes are required to go from a creature such as _______, which seems to have been land dwelling creature to some, to a creature that spends the entire portion of its life in the ocean? Curiously enough, this is not a question that evolutionary biologists ask a whole lot. I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations myself and the most modest estimate I could come up with is that an organism requires roughly 50,000 morphological changes to adapt itself to the open ocean. And as soon as we introduce a quantitative estimate, however weak, however flabby, however spontaneous, then a great deal of puzzlement starts to intrude into an otherwise sunny picture. 50,000 changes and we’ve got two members of the sequence? Where are the other 49,998 members of that sequence if Darwinian changes are incremental and are small? We are not talking about changes that are arbitrary. A creature must have these changes if it is going to survive in the open ocean. And any attempt to put a quantitative number should induce a profound sense of perplexity because of the number of changes are so much greater than anything we see in the transitional record. Now, what is the proper explanation for this? Please understand, I don’t have it…but neither do the other guys. And in my opinion, they refuse to recognize the legitimacy of the question…that is a fundamental question in paleontology…how many changes are required? Can those changes be compared to the fossil record? And if they are compared to the fossil record, why do we see such deficiencies in the record as compared to the necessary changes? A very important issue.”
The fossil record easily shows that Darwin’s theory of steady slow mutation of species is not true. Stephen Jay Gould, anthropologist and evolutionary biologist agrees, “The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology. The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of the fossils.” So does Gould accept creation? Nope, he comes up with a new theory called “punctuated equilibrium.” This theory says that evolution is highly unsteady. Large changes will occur, then the species will remain the same for an extended period of time until another large change occurs. This theory is not logical scientifically, but is actually supported by the lack of fossil evidence for steady evolution.
Conclusion: Darwin’s theory for how life began has been broken down as indescribably impossible, and the slow change of species has been completely debunked by the fossil records. We have two choices: we can believe in creation, or we can believe the modernized theories of evolution: That time mysteriously and unexplainably over several billion years caused life to form and come to earth and that millions of years of illogical herky-jerky large-step changes of species caused what we have today. I’ve said this all my life, it requires more faith to believe in evolution than it does to believe in creation!
Why is all this important? Evolution implies that God doesn’t exist and that Jesus didn’t matter. The other side understands this!
Richard Bozarth, famous atheist, “Evolution destroys utterly and finally the very reason Jesus’ earthly life was supposedly made necessary. Destroy Adam and Eve and original sin, and in the rubble you will find the sorry remains of the Son of God…and if Jesus was not the redeemer who dies for our sins, and this is what evolution means, then Christianity is nothing.”
