Evolution as Bad Science – 8) Getting lucky.

Now, back to that amazingly fortuitous bit of mutation. Evolution depends on mutations to DNA. Of course, it never used to – it was just mutations, which didn’t sound so hard, until someone worked out that it involved DNA, and then it became more of a problem. The problem with mutations is that DNA is all about information, and we only ever encounter mutations that lose information, mutations that don’t add anything new to the creature that wasn’t already there. But for us to get from goo, through the zoo, to you, we need millions upon millions of favourable changes that add new information. The only favourable changes ever seen are when things stopped working which in some situations got organisms in particular situations into trouble, like when various diseases develop antibiotic resistance by losing the characteristic that the antibiotic latched on to. A favourable mutation which added new information has never been seen in all of recorded history. Not one, never mind a few million. Mutations tend instead to be destructive, adding together over the years to produce new weaknesses, as evidence of a genetic burden which gets worse with each generation, not better. Change in nature goes the wrong way for evolution. It is a destructive, rather than a creative force.

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Evolution as Bad Science – 7) …about sex.

R.D. Laing once wrote “Life is a sexually transmitted disease, and the mortality rate is 100%.” It takes two to tango, but evolution has us all descended from a single cell with no particular gender. So let’s say that these cells do well, and there are billions of them, and an amazingly fortuitous bit of mutation (of which more later) gives one of these cells the property and machinery of being male (or female – you decide). What happens? Well, there it is, with all these extra stretches of DNA to mutate with, and all this extra apparatus to go wrong, and it can’t do anything with them, because there’s no one to impregnate (or be impregnated by). The cell, or its descendants (presuming it is still capable of asexual reproduction), have to survive, against competing ‘normal’ cells, that don’t have the risks posed by the extra DNA, for the next one-in-how-many-million-years when another amazingly fortuitous event occurs that turns another cell into the opposite sex, in a way that makes them compatible, and with sufficient chances of them meeting up for it all to turn out alright in the end. Nope – didn’t happen – listen instead to what God says in Genesis 1 v27, “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.”

Evolution as Bad Science – 6) Let’s talk…

…which is itself a problem. Not us talking, you understand, but the whole concept of language and, indeed, understanding. This is one of the biggest problems for evolution, because our DNA doesn’t just have to miraculously form letters that curl up in the right way to form a code. The DNA, which doesn’t occur naturally, is the easy part of the problem. The real problem is the code. DNA means nothing, unless the language for understanding DNA is in place. Think about it – you’re doing it now – recognising each collection of dots as a letter, each collection of letters as a word, and each collection of words as a sentence, intended to convey meaning. You need the language to be in place and the apparatus to be in place to understand it (you know, eyes, brain, half-decent education) before it can truly mean anything to you. DNA is like this, but more complicated. It depends on the pre-existence of information and the whole language of genetics. This does not appear by chance, nor can it, for it exists on a different level from matter, and can only come from an information source – or as John’s Gospel puts it, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

Evolution as Bad Science – 5) One is the loneliest number

Congratulations, you’ve managed to get a cell, some DNA – perhaps it can sustain itself on a diet of rocks. Still not enough for life, I’m afraid, because life requires reproduction. Managing to survive for a while is no good – your cell needs to be a tiny machine that is not only able to function, but is able to make copies of itself. Mankind, with all our assembled intelligence and effort has, as yet, been unable to make any kind of machine that makes more of itself, and yet we are expected to believe it happened by chance. The closest we can get is computer programs that copy themselves, but these are designed, and live in computer worlds that are in turn designed and regulated by people. They don’t exist in the real world, and don’t happen by chance. Evolution depends on someone being able to invent a way for life to kick-start by chance, but no-one can. Life cannot kick start by chance – scientists today only tinker with existing life, despite having expensive educations, top-quality equipment, a pre-existing plan to follow (in the form of existing life), and the ability to remove anything that might otherwise get in the way, modern scientists cannot even create life from scratch themselves, and yet many of them expect us to believe it happened by accident.

Evolution as Bad Science – 4. Everyone needs a place of their own

Bad news about not having a cell – you need one. You and I depend on oxygen in order to live. But, oh dear, oxygen is a highly reactive chemical and will rip our DNA and RNA to shreds if they come into contact with it, which tends to happen, what with all the air and water everywhere, which is one reason why DNA has to hide behind a cell wall, so that any oxygen is only dealt with in a controlled and safe environment. But cell walls don’t just happen – they are constructed… by cells. So you need to have a cell, before you can have DNA – but you need DNA before you can have a cell. Consequently, you don’t start off with dead chemicals, wait a bit, and then get life.

Evolution as Bad Science – 3. The Origin of Life

Even if you’ve got a universe where life is possible, before natural selection can get going, you need to have something to select. In other words, you need life to be in place before it can evolve into something else. Evolution, properly defined, cannot say anything about the origin of life, only about its development. So evolution can say nothing about creation – it just pushes the problem of “how did everything get started” back in time. But this is a formidable problem, because evolution as a theory was up and running way before anyone understood anything about how life was made up, and how difficult it was to start. The simplest forms of life have several hundred genes, each of which needs the pre-existence of DNA, RNA and the whole cell structure before it can exist at all. The DNA needs to be made up of the right proteins, but you need DNA in order to make proteins! The proteins need to be assembled out of amino acids, but it turns out you need the cell to be in place to stitch all the amino acids together, and the really bad news is that there are two mirror-image versions of each amino acid – right handed and left handed, but life only uses the left-handed ones, and if your chain combines with a right-handed amino acid then it will destroy the whole thing. And amino acids aren’t exactly common – you’ll wait a long time to get the right circumstances for even a few of them to occur, (in fact, we’ve never observed this – we had to get scientists to set up experiments to make it happen) and then you get half left-handed and half-right handed, and this is fatal to your chances of getting life. And then you have to get not just a few together, but the 20-or-so that make up life, in the right combinations to make up a letter on the DNA code, and that has to link up with the right other letters and separate RNA, and somehow fall into a double-helix (like a pair of helter-skelters, mating) that is (this time) right handed, (left-handed double helix’s need not apply). And still you don’t have a cell.

It’s too hard to do without God. Is it any wonder that the world’s most prolific atheist author of the 20th Century, Professor Anthony Flew, when he looked at the problem of the origin of life, decided he had better start believing in God after all?

Evolution as Bad Science – 2. The Anthropic Cosmological Principle

Why is the universe a nice place to live? Before you can have life, you need somewhere for life to do all the living in, and for the universe, this means that the laws of Physics need to be set up in such a way that allows life to exist. And they are – hence we are all here. But many Physicists are puzzled, because there is no reason that the laws of Physics have to be the way they are – in fact, many of them seem balanced on a knife edge. A little more one way or the other and there would be no life at all anywhere, just one big dead universe. In fact there are so many variables where our universe is ‘just right’ for it to be too suspicious, and so Physicists have tended to lump into two camps. One camp says, “OK, we hold our hands up. It’s just all too neat. Someone must have made it that way – accidents like this just don’t happen. Looks like we’re going to have to admit there is a God.” The other camp says, “OK, this universe is set up for life in a way that looks like a miracle, but if we imagine an infinite number of universes, the vast majority of which have different laws and consequently no life in them then, by the law of averages, a life-bearing universe had to happen eventually.” There is, by the way, absolutely no evidence for believing there is or ever has been any other universe than the one we are in, but an infinity of other universes is invented by people who know the only other option is God. This violates one of the basic rules of science and philosophy – Ockham’s Razor – don’t multiply entities in order to get round difficulties (Or in plain english,  – don’t just make stuff up – and you don’t get much more of a violation of this than making up an infnite number of alternate universes.)

Next we cover the Origin of Life…

Evolution as Bad Science – Why is there anything at all?

As one patron saint of Evolutionists (Carl Sagan) said, “If you want to make an apple pie from scratch you must first of all create the universe”, so we’ll start at the beginning.

1. Why is there anything at all?

Of course, the Big Bang is all the rage nowadays. You can hardly move in cosmological circles without someone claiming to have heard the echo of this first blast of everything into existence, despite the fact that no-one can quite make the maths work, and so we have the “horizon problem”, and “lumpiness” and a bunch of other things that make it all a little bit suspicious when we are used to being told that scientists have got it all sussed. Forty years ago it was not so. Scientists then tended to believe that everything had always been and, while this view had its problems, they would tick off creationists for even suggesting the world had a beginning. In fact, the term “Big Bang” was invented by eminent British scientist Fred Hoyle as a way of mocking the idea that the universe popped into existence, so forgive us for being slightly smug, when they finally came around to at least a bit of our way of thinking.

But why is it there? When you get to the beginning, what caused things to begin? Those who believe in creation at least can claim a Prime Mover in the form of God. People may not like the answer, but it is at least an answer, and not an obviously stupid one. Those who believe in a Big Bang simply don’t have an answer, or even any basis for evaluating an idea. And it’s difficult for evolution to happen if there is nothing there for it to happen to. So evolution cannot explain how we came to be. But supposing we accept that we are all here, what then?

Our second reason for Evolution and related theories being Bad Science is…

2. The Anthropic Cosmological Principle

Evolution as Bad Science – an introduction

Our next few posts will cover just ten of the reasons that Evolution and its family of naturalistic theories are Bad Science. To let you know where this is all going, this introduction summarises the top ten.

1. Because the universe exists, didn’t need to, and had to be started by someone.

2. Because the universe is so hospitable to life, against all the odds, that it looks suspiciously like someone made it that way. I wonder who?

3. Because DNA cannot happen by chance.

4. Because DNA can only stay safe within a cell, but you have to already have a cell to make a cell.

5. Because evolution doesn’t just require a living cell to pop out of nowhere, but also that it must be able to reproduce itself. This is another impossible thing.

6. Because existence isn’t just about chemicals combining- it requires the existence of a genetic language system – or to put it another way, it needs the existence of information.

7. Because Male and Female need to be around at the same time – they can’t evolve separately, yet there is no reason for them to evolve together.

8. Because there has never been a mutation that increased the information content of a cell.

9. Because the cell, the body and the whole world displays interdependence – yet evolution only deals with individuals, and dependent things cannot wait for evolution to catch up.

10. Because “living fossils” either expose dating methods as nonsense or show that evolution doesn’t happen.

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11. Because the missing links are still missing and the fossil record is a problem for evolution.

Remember – if any one of these points is valid, then the whole theory of evolution collapses – and what will you replace it with?

But first, a few words on ‘Evolution’ and related theories

Currently, the most popular versions of the theory of evolution claim that all living creatures are descended from a common ancestor. This is supposed to have occurred over the last 3 billion years on earth, from an unknown beginning. Somehow, chemicals are supposed to have accidentally got together in order to form something that could reproduce, and reproduction continued, guided only by the relative ability of the thing that was reproducing to survive in its environment. Random mutations are supposed to have happened with some of this “something” (to call it a creature would be to go too far, when we are not even aware of whether it had a cell wall), until they happily developed improvements that made them better able to survive against the original forms. This is supposed to have continued to happen over billions of years, with different creatures emerging remarkably adapted to their surroundings, and improving and adding new functions all the time, until we get to the unparalleled complexity of you, me and the world around us.

Oddly, this view is perhaps best at describing itself. The idea of evolution from a human ancestor has a long history, and uncertain beginnings. It certainly wasn’t Charles Darwin’s idea, and not even the idea of his eminent grandad, Erasmus Darwin, as it stretches back to ancient greek myths. Evolution has changed over the years, although not accidentally, but guided by human purpose, to fit the social environment in which it has come to reside, and the versions of evolution (for there are many) have survived according to their ability to exploit and thrive in their environment. Consequently, as in nature life thrives all over the planet, evolution as an idea has secured dominance particularly in the Western World, and as in nature there are grey squirrels just waiting to displace red squirrels from their habitat, so there are different varieties of evolutionary theory just waiting to step into any gap left by a previous version that has become discredited. In a real sense, in evolutionary theory the theory itself  is the only thing that has been seen to evolve, and every change has been the purposeful decision of an “intelligent” being, rather than the random actions of death and chance. Evolution’s only possible example actually denies its driving force, for it depends on Design from outside the system. Ironically, believers in Evolution need the God of the Bible for their theory every bit as much as creationists do. But as previous posts have shown, the God of the Bible is not available to evolutionists.

Why am I talking about science in an article that is opposed to evolution? Well, actually, there is plenty of scientific evidence that casts doubt on the idea that every living creature in the world is descended from a common ancestor by a system depending on chance, mutation and the ‘survival of the fittest’. Much of this evidence can be accessed via the ‘About’ sections of this site, accessible immediately beneath the logo at the top of the page.

However, it can take a bit of dedication, familiarity with science, and a reasonable amount of time and effort just to understand the debate, and that could seem like a bit too much effort, particularly with creation being dismissed on a regular basis as a ‘fringe’ view that is close to madness. So here I’m giving my current Top Ten among the many reasons why Evolution doesn’t work, in the hope that you might be inclined to take your research further.

As one patron saint of Evolutionists (Carl Sagan) said, “If you want to make an apple pie from scratch you must first of all create the universe”, so we’ll start the next post at the beginning.

1. Why is there anything at all?

Reasons that Evolution is Bad Theology – 8-10

8 ) Evolution denies several points about God’s character that the Bible teaches to be true. Evolution denies the necessity of God, by making his involvement in creation unnecessary, hence Richard Dawkins makes the claim that Darwinism “made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist”. It further denies the Holiness of God, by denying there was a fall of man through sin, and therefore giving no need for man to be redeemed. It denies the Righteousness of God by denying He judged the earth with a worldwide flood, as he claimed, and it denies the Sovereignty of God by denying him the exercise of his power at Babel, when he confused the languages of the earth. See more here.

9) Evolution denies the Resurrection. The Apostle Paul explains in 1 Corinthians 15 that ‘For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive . . . And so it is written, The first man Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam was made a quickening spirit’. If there was no sin and death in Adam there is no reason to believe there will be a resurrection to defeat death, as the Bible explicitly links the two. For the Gospel to be historically true, the account of Adam and Eve must also be historically true.

10) Paul, in the New Testament, specifically made the point that men are not the same flesh as animals, but evolution requires both men and animals to share a common ancestor (1 Corinthians 15 v 39).

See these additional sources for more –

Is it possible to be a Christian and an evolutionist?

A low view of Scripture

The Relevance of Creation

Next we will look at reasons why Evolution is Bad Science.