Foundations of Faith
CREATION (V)
How did our universe, the galaxies, the planets, earth, life, and man come into being? As noted in Jul01, “By the word of the LORD were the heavens made, and all the host of them by the breath of His mouth…. Let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of Him. For He spoke, and it was done; He commanded, and it stood fast” (Psa. 33:6-9).
Our school books, however, give quite a different story. It goes something like this:About 15 billion years ago a super-dense ball of matter exploded, scattering clouds of hydrogen and helium in every direction; gravitational forces caused these gases to be drawn together into stars and stars into galaxies; various other forces caused the hydrogen and helium atoms to combine to form larger atoms, like oxygen, carbon, iron, and many others; large clumps of these heavier atoms spun off the stars to form planets; on at least one of these planets, the action of lightning and other strong forces caused some of the hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen atoms to combine to form various amino acids and nucleotides; unknown forces caused the amino acids to unite together in long chains to form proteins and enzymes and the nucleotides to join together to form DNA (the stuff that makes up genetic material); then somehow or other, the DNA, proteins, and enzymes all got together in exactly the right way to form a living, reproducing cell. At this point, the biologists and evolutionists pick up the story and tell us that the early one-celled organisms, progressively changed into multi-celled organisms, and then into plant and animal creatures of increasingly greater complexity, until finally the highest being of all—man—appeared.
Now this is a most amazing story, because most scientists will tell us—with a straight face, mind you— that the two mysterious powers driving the immense changes from chaos to ever-increasing magnitudes of order and complexity are … Time and Chance! Yes, they say that given enough time all these wonderful things will happen randomly or by pure chance. As noted in Oct01, we all have observed that everything, left to itself without human or divine intervention, tends to run down, decay, and deteriorate. I confess that I haven’t cleaned out the tool shed under the front porch for several years. Is it self-cleaning? Alas, no! Spider webs on the walls, decaying leaves on the floor, garden tools in disarray. Do I see change from chaos to order? No! Change from order to chaos? Definitely!
The Evolution of Life. A scientist named Stanley Miller is a hero among those who worship the gods of Time and Chance. Several decades ago he devised an experiment that showed that by heating the gases methane, ammonia, and cyanogen in the presence of water and an electric spark, which produces ultraviolet light, many different chemical compounds are formed. He found in these preparations nearly all of the amino acids found in all living things. But in spite of many attempts since then to carry these results to the next step, no scientist has found a “natural” way of combining these amino acids into proteins, crucial building blocks of life. Furthermore, no scientist has yet been able—even with great intellectual effort—to “create” a living cell out of non-living chemicals.
But suppose that a simple protein should be formed by chance, what then? An isolated protein does not represent life. A living cell consists not only of suitable proteins but of strands of DNA that make it possible for those proteins to be replicated to form a new cell. The DNA has to be precisely matched with the protein in order to reproduce it exactly. So for that first living cell, not only was it necessary for one or more proteins to be formed by chance but also for the exactly corresponding DNA chain to be formed by chance at the exact same time and place. What is the probability of such a thing occurring by chance? Evolutionists Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe have recently calculated this probability—or the probability of life evolving by chance from non life—to be of the magnitude of 1/10^40,000 (that is, one chance out of the number 1 followed by 40,000 zeros). Hoyle says that a living organism emerging by chance from a soup of chemicals is about as likely as that “a tornado sweeping through a junkyard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein.”
The Bible says that God is the source of all kinds of life (Genesis 1, 2). Which takes more faith? To believe that a Divine Creator brought life into existence by His own wisdom and power, or that life spontaneously evolved from non life over the course of 100 million years?
Evolution and Natural Selection. The theory of evolution states that all living things on earth are here as a result of descent, with modification, from a common ancestor. Charles Darwin in the 19th century proposed a mechanism to explain how evolutionary change takes place. This mechanism—natural selection or “survival of the fittest”—is the cornerstone of the theory of evolution.
Darwin observed what he presumed to be the outcome of evolution in his study of the finches of the Galapagos Islands in the Pacific Ocean. He noted that variations in beak size, body shape and other anatomical features among the finches conformed to variations in climate and vegetation on the different islands. (Something similar is going on whenever drug-resistant strains of viruses and bacteria appear.) Darwin also was impressed with the great variations that could be obtained with artificial selection—such as the breeding of dogs (from Chihuahua to St. Bernard), livestock (for milk, wool production), and crops (for yield, disease and drought resistance). (See Gen. 30:25 43.)
What Darwin observed, and what we observe in plant and animal breeding and in microorganisms that are resistant to antibiotics, is micro-evolution. There may be large differences among different breeds of dogs … but they are all still dogs. No one has ever been able to breed a non-dog from a dog. A new strain of the “staph” bacterium that is resistant to penicillin is still the same species, Staphylococcus aureus.
Running the Race
Assignment 15: Write out at least four verses in Genesis 1 that show, or at least imply, that species of plants and animals are fixed and do not change into other species.