Origins

This section will illustrate six things.

1. How the origins issue may affect your health, lifestyle, and aging expectations.

2. How real science differs from counterfeit science or fake science.

3. Is there a scientific dissent from Darwinism?

4. Why abiogenesis and information science prove evolution to be biologically impossible.

5. Is natural selection the same thing as evolution?

6. The belief in evolution is willful ignorance.

Counterfeit Science

How The Origins Issue May Affect Your Health, Lifestyle, and Aging Expectations.

Your perspective on origins, or the Creation vs evolution worldview issue, likely plays a role in your health or lifestyle choices, and aging expectations. As an example, lifestyle choices such as Paleolithic or the caveman diet, diet based upon your blood type, anti-aging, some aspects of the organic food industry, as well as extreme environmentalism (Mother Earth), are good examples of lifestyles embedded in an evolutionary worldview. But what if the evolutionary worldview were based upon counterfeit science? What if the presumptive or the a priori commitment many researchers have in interpreting data from an evolutionary perspective were illustrated to be scientifically baseless? How would this affect your lifestyle choices and aging expectation? 

What Is Real Science?

As you read the definitions differentiating real science from counterfeit science, keep in mind some comments made by Dr. Frank Schnell, PhD, in his article “The Age of Stupid.” Dr. Schnell is a retired toxicologist for the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, part of the CDC, in Atlanta, Georgia, and is a member of the American Council on Science and Health Scientific Advisory Panel. Dr. Schnell’s worldview is not stated in the article, but his points about “how to tell the difference between a real scientist and a salesman with a political agenda,” directly apply to the origins debate. He points out:

1.    A good scientist would rather live with an unpleasant truth than embrace a comfortable lie.

2.    Good scientists do not suppress debate, they insist on it.

3.    Good scientists with opposing views attack one another’s arguments, but not each other.

4.    A good scientist knows that skepticism, whether or not it is the sign of a heretic, is actually essential to the practice of good science.

5.    A good scientist would rather be right than President.

6.    A good scientist knows that science is not a democracy, that scientific truth is not determined by a show of hands, and that consensus and authority are there to be challenged, not to be accepted without question.

7.    Anyone who is familiar with the defining characteristics of good scientists can always tell whether it is actually raining, or someone is just peeing on your leg.

8.    And, finally, those who persist in behaving like witless sheep will be forever doomed to getting fleeced, on a regular basis, by the politicians, celebrities, and others whom they permit to do their thinking for them.

The two types of science.

Operational (Observational) Science: a systematic approach to understanding that uses observable, testable, repeatable, and falsifiable experimentation to understand how nature commonly behaves. 

Historical (Origins) Science: interpreting evidence from past events based on a presupposed philosophical point of view. Historical sciences include cosmology, astronomy, astrophysics, geology, paleontology, and archaeology. 

The past is not directly observable, testable, repeatable, or falsifiable; so interpretations of past events present greater challenges than interpretations involving operational science. Neither creation nor evolution is directly observable, testable, repeatable, or falsifiable. Each is based on certain philosophical assumptions about how the earth began. Naturalistic evolution assumes that there was no God, and biblical creation assumes that there was a God who created everything in the universe. Starting from two opposite presuppositions and looking at the same evidence, the explanations of the history of the universe are very different. The argument is not over the evidence—the evidence is the same—it is over the way the evidence should be interpreted. 

Video from Answers In Genesis Ministries

Is There A Scientific Dissent From Darwinism?

The Discovery Institute Center for Science and Culture (www.discovery.org) is a science organization who is critical of the evolutionary theory. They have posted a “Scientific Dissent from Darwinism” statement, which has been signed by over 950 PhD scientists as of 2017. In this statement, they declare that “we are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutations and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged,”  and the number of dissenting scientists continue to grow each year. This list can be found here :  http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/filesDB-download.php?command=download&id=660

These scientists’ opinions are not disreputable, aberrant declarations as the media would like to portray. Instead, these scientists are from every field of study and from schools such as Harvard, Princeton, Yale, MIT, UC Berkeley, Duke, John Hopkins, UCLA, Columbia, Rice, Stanford, and Rutgers, to just name a few. Further, this list of well-credentialed scientists only continues to grow. Their fields of study include chemistry, biochemistry, embryology, genetics, microbiology, biology, molecular biology, geology, physics, botany, engineering, etc. Their opinions illustrate there is still much to consider about Darwinian theory before entrusting something as important as lifestyle choices, and, more importantly, eternal choices, to an impossible concept. Although simple deduction from the complex things around us, nature, dictates there is a God.  It is simply intuitive until many allow themselves to be indoctrinated / brainwashed, like "witless sheep," during their public “education,” using counterfeit or junk-science.

If evolution is true, then there must be a naturalistic way of explaining two primary stumbling blocks for evolution, abiogenesis as well as information science, or how all the information that is necessary for life arose. If not, then the very foundation of the evolutionary theology is false. The rest of the argument for evolution becomes a moot point if abiogenesis and information science prove evolution to be biologically impossible.

Why abiogenesis and information science prove evolution to be biologically impossible.

Video from Answers In Genesis Ministries

Abiogenesis

Abiogenesis is defined as “spontaneous generation of living matter without parent life,’ or non-living molecules somehow spontaneously generating living molecules, which was disproved in 1859 by the French microbiologist Louis Pasteur. Ironically, evolutionists attempt to demonize Christianity due to the miraculous events of Genesis. But abiogenesis, or complex reproducing life coming from non-life, would also be a miraculous event. There is simply no naturalistic explanation for the initial fundamental steps to the evolutionary philosophy and evolutionists have readily recognized this for decades. As an example, consider the following few statements from scientists. Many more can be found here: http://www.ideacenter.org/resources/quotes.php

• "The origin of life appears to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to be satisfied to get it going." (Francis Crick [first to resolve the structure of DNA], in John Horgan, "In the Beginning," Scientific American (February 1991).

• "What is so frustrating for our present purpose is that it seems almost impossible to give any numerical value to the probability of what seems a rather unlikely sequence of events... An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle." (Francis Crick, Life Itself).

• "Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose." (Richard Dawkins [Atheist, Zoologist, and Professor for the Public Understanding of Science, Oxford University], The Blind Watchmaker, page 1 (1991 reprint, London: Penguin, 1986).

• "The simplest bacteria is so damn complicated from the point of view of a chemist that it is almost impossible to imagine how it [the natural chemical origins of life] happened." (Harold P. Klein [Chairman of NAS origin-of-life research committee, Santa Clara University], in John Horgan "In the Beginning," Scientific American, page 120, February 1991).

• “When it comes to the origin of life there are only two possibilities: creation or spontaneous generation. There is no third way. Spontaneous generation was disproved one hundred years ago, but that leads us to only one other conclusion, that of supernatural creation. We cannot accept that on philosophical grounds; therefore, we choose to believe the impossible: that life arose spontaneously by chance!” George Wald, PhD, a Harvard Biologist, and a 1967 Nobel Prize winner in Physiology, as published in the Scientific American, “The Origin of Life,” 191:48, May 1954.

• "Over the past sixty years, dedicated and skillful scientists have devoted much effort and ink to the origin of life, with remarkably little to show for it. Judging by the volume of literature, both experimental and theoretical, the inquiry has thrived prodigiously. But unlike more conventional fields of biological research, the study of life's origins has failed to generate a coherent and persuasive framework that gives meaning to the growing heap of data and speculation; and this suggests that we may still be missing some essential insight." (Franklin M. Harold, In Search of Cell History: The Evolution of Life's Building Blocks, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014, p. 164).

• "When I set out to write this book, I was convinced that science was close to wrapping up the mystery of life's origin ... Having spent a year or two researching the field, I am now of the opinion that there remains a huge gulf in our understanding ... This gulf's not merely ignorance about certain technical details, it is a major conceptual lacuna. Many investigators feel uneasy about stating in public that the origin of life is a mystery, even though behind closed doors they freely admit that they are baffled. There are two reasons for their unease. First, they feel it opens the door to religious fundamentalism... Second, they worry that a frank admission of ignorance will undermine funding." (Paul Davies, The Fifth Miracle: The Search for the Origin and Meaning of Life).

• "To insist, even with Olympian assurance, that life appeared quite by chance and evolved in this fashion, is an unfounded supposition which I believe to be wrong and not in accordance with the facts." (Pierre-Paul Grasse [Editor of the 28-volume "Traite de Zoologie", former Chair of Evolution, Sorbonne University, and ex-president of the French Academie des Sciences], Evolution of Living Organisms Evidence for a New Theory of Transformation, page 107 (New York, NY: Academic Press, 1977.)

• "More than 30 years of experimentation on the origin of life in the fields of chemical and molecular evolution have led to a better perception of the immensity of the problem of the origin of life on Earth rather than to its solution. At present all discussions on principal theories and experiments in the field either end in stalemate or in a confession of ignorance. New lines of thinking and experimentation must be tried. Considerable disagreements between scientists have arisen about detailed evolutionary steps. The problem is that the principal evolutionary processes from prebiotic molecules to progenotes have not been proven by experimentation and that the environmental conditions under which these processes occurred are not known. Moreover, we do not actually know where the genetic information of all living cells originates, how the first replicable polynucleotides (nucleic acids) evolved, or how the extremely complex structure-function relationships in modern cells came into existence. It appears that the field has now reached a stage of stalemate, a stage in which hypothetical arguments often dominate over facts based on experimentation or observation." (Klaus Dose [Director, Institute for Biochemistry, Gutenberg University, Germany], "The Origin of Life: More Questions Than Answers," Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, Vol. 13 (4): 348 (1988).

• “The more biologists look, the more complexity there seems to be. … [A]s sequencing and other new technologies spew forth data, the complexity of biology has seemed to grow by orders of magnitude. Delving into it has been like zooming into a Mandelbrot set — a space that is determined by a simple equation, but that reveals ever more intricate.” (Erica Check Hayden, “Life is complicated,” Nature, Vol. 464: 664 (April 1, 2010).

Information Science

Information and the origin of life - Did cells write their own software?

Gain of function mutations: not evidence for evolution

In the 19th century when Charles Darwin popularized evolution, scientists believed the cell was a simple blob of protoplasm. Instead, scientists now know that the cell is filled with microscopic, molecular machines with circuits and assembly instructions loaded with enough pre-written instructions (information) to fill about a hundred million pages of the Encyclopedia Britannica. In 1970, the late evolutionist and atheist Carl Sagan wrote the article “Life,” for Britannica. In the article under the section “Chemistry for Life,” he specifically states, “the information content of a small cell has been estimated as about 10 to the 10 bits, comparable to about 10 to the 6 (or one million) pages of the print version of the Encyclopedia Britannica.” Carl Sagan, was a past professor of Astronomy and Space Sciences at Cornell University as well as a presenter of the popular PBS Cosmos television series, a popular evolutionary indoctrination program.

The cell, one of the roughly 17 trillion in a human body, is essentially a marvel of engineering on a miniaturized scale. Michael Behe PhD, a biochemist at Lehigh University coined the term “irreducible complexity” to describe how all the parts of the cell must be present initially, as well as all the information, to allow it to function or the cell would cease to exist. There is simply no allowance for “numerous, successive, slight modifications” Darwin was hoping for. This complexity of the cell led Jed Macosko PhD, a molecular biologist, to state in the DVD, Where Does The Evidence Lead, that “mainstream scientists no longer think that life or the building blocks of life could have happened by chance … chance is no longer an option.”  Scientific observations clearly indicate that life, and the information necessary to function and replicate itself, can only come from other pre-programmed living organisms. Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist at Oxford University and one of the world’s leading evolutionists stated in his book, The Blind Watchmaker, page 140, “organized complexity is the thing that we are having difficulty in explaining.”

Dr. Behe points out in his book Darwin’s Black Box (p. 243) that those who ignore the irreducible complexity of living things, illustrating a unique design and creation of all things, and continue to embrace the biologically impossible concept of evolution “don’t want a supernatural being to affect nature, no matter how brief or constructive the interaction may have been. In other words, they bring an a priori philosophical commitment to their science that restricts what kinds of explanations they will accept about the physical world, and this leads to rather odd behavior.”

Dr. Don Johnson has earned Ph.D.’s in both Computer & Information Sciences as well as Chemistry and is the author of the book Programming for Life. Dr. Johnson made a point in this book that is normally excluded from discussions with evolutionists. “Each cell of an organism has thousands of interacting computers reading and processing digital information using algorithmic digital programs and digital codes to communicate information. Life is an intersection of physical science and information science. Both domains are critical for any life to exist… yet most scientists have been attempting to use physical science to explain life’s information domain, a practice having no scientific justification.” In other words, explaining the development or manufacture of a functioning computer without including its operating and communications systems would be ludicrous, but this is exactly what evolutionists would like us to believe regarding the development of cells. The irreducible level of complex information to run even the simplest known cell, is far too elaborate to have developed using a naturalistic explanation.

Dr. Johnson also states, “how did nature write the prescriptive programs needed to organize life-sustaining metabolism? Computer science shows programs to require a formal solution prior to implementation. How did inanimate nature formally solve these complex problems and write the programs? How did nature develop the operating systems and programming languages to implement the algorithms? How did nature develop the arbitrary protocols for communication and coordination among the thousands (or millions) of computers in each cell?” (Programming for Life, pages 83-84).

Dr. Werner Gitt, the past director and professor at The German Federal Institute of Physics and Technology as well as head of the Department of Information Technology, states, “anybody who wants to make meaningful statements about the origins of life would be forced to explain how the information originated,” (In the Beginning was Information, page 99, 1997). He also states that “there is no known sequence of events which can cause information to originate by itself in matter,” (page 107).  

Ken Ham, CEO and President of Answers-In-Genesis ministries, states “one thing we know for sure from science is that information must have a source and that source cannot arise from disorder by chance. It always takes (greater) information to produce information, and ultimately information is the result of intelligence,” (Is There Really a God? August 9, 2007).

Jerry Bergman Ph.D., states that “even if they existed, the many parts needed for life could not sit idle waiting for other parts to evolve, because the existing ones would usually deteriorate very quickly from the effects of dehydration, oxidation, and the action of bacteria or other pathogens. For this reason, only an instantaneous creation of all the necessary parts as a functioning unit can produce life. No compelling evidence has ever been presented to disprove this conclusion” (In Six Days – why fifty scientists choose to believe in creation, Master’s Books, page 47-48).

Could all this complexity and inter-dependency have arisen from non-living organic matter by random blind processes which would allow for cell communication within itself as well as other tissues, cellular waste removal, repair, reproduction, production of energy, factories to build proteins, transporters to take the produced proteins to their pre-programmed locations, etc?  Consider the following few statements from scientists. Many more can be found here:  http://www.ideacenter.org/resources/quotes.php

• “Despite considerable experimental and theoretical effort, no compelling scenarios currently exist for the origin of replication and translation, the key processes that together comprise the core of biological systems and the apparent pre-requisite of biological evolution. The RNA World concept might offer the best chance for the resolution of this conundrum but so far cannot adequately account for the emergence of an efficient RNA replicase or the translation system.” (Koonin, Eugene V. (2007) “The Cosmological Model of Eternal Inflation and the Transition From Chance to Biological Evolution in the History of Life,” Biology Direct, V.2, p.8.

•  "...An intelligible communication via radio signal from some distant galaxy would be widely hailed as evidence of an intelligent source. Why then doesn't the message sequence on the DNA molecule also constitute prima facie evidence for an intelligent source? After all, DNA information is not just analogous to a message sequence such as Morse code, it is such a message sequence." (Charles B. Thaxton, Walter L. Bradley and Robert L. Olsen, The Mystery of Life's Origin, Reassessing Current Theories, pages 211-212 (New York Philosophical Library 1984).

•  "Evidently nature can no longer be seen as matter and energy alone. Nor can all her secrets be unlocked with the keys of chemistry and physics, brilliantly successful as these two branches of science have been in our century. A third component is needed for any explanation of the world that claims to be complete. To the powerful theories of chemistry and physics must be added a late arrival: a theory of information. Nature must be interpreted as matter, energy, and information." (Jeremy C. Campbell [Journalist], Grammatical Man: Information, Entropy, Language and Life, page 16 (1984, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, UK: Penguin Books, 1982).

• "The meaning, if any, of words, that is, a sequence of letters, is arbitrary. It is determined by the natural language and is not a property of the letters or their arrangement ... For example, "O singe fort!" has no meaning as a sentence in English, although each is an English word, yet in German it means, "O sing on!" and in French it means "O strong monkey". Like all messages, the life message is non-material but has an information content measurable in bits and bytes." (Hubert Yockey, "Information in Bits and Bytes," BioEssays, Vol. 17: 85 (1995).

•  "The information contained in the genetic code, like all information or messages, is not made of matter ... The meaning is not a property of the arrangement of the symbols or alphabet of the code. The message or meaning in the genetic code is non-material and cannot be reduced to a physical or chemical property." (Dean L. Overman, "A Case Against Accident and Self-Organization" (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1997).

• "The implications are immediate for the issue of evolution. The evolutionary assumption that the exceedingly complex linguistic structures which comprise the construction blueprints and operating manuals for all the complicated chemical nanomachinery and sophisticated feedback control mechanisms in even the simplest living organism simply must have a materialistic explanation is fundamentally wrong. But how then does one account for symbolic language as the crucial ingredient from which all living organisms develop and function and manifest such amazing capabilities? The answer should be obvious-an intelligent Creator is unmistakably required." (John Baumgardner [Geophysicist, Los Alamos National Labs], From "Highlights of the Los Alamos Origins Debate").

Is natural selection the same thing as evolution?

The following video features Dr. Georgia Purdom, who holds a PhD in molecular genetics from Ohio State University. She formerly served as an assistant and associate professor of biology at Mt. Vernon Nazarene University. Following the video are excerpts from her review of this topic with the same title:

Major points why natural selection is not the driver of evolution provided by Dr. Purdom.

1. Natural selection is an observable process that is often purported to be the underlying mechanism of unobservable molecules-to-man evolution.The concepts are indeed different, though some mistakenly interchange the two.

2. Natural selection doesn’t drive molecules-to-man evolution; you are giving natural selection a power that it does not have—one that can supposedly add new information to the genome, as molecules-to-man evolution requires. But natural selection simply can’t do that because it works with information that already exists.

3. Natural selection is a process whereby organisms possessing specific characteristics (reflective of their genetic makeup) survive better than others in a given environment or under a given selective pressure (i.e., antibiotic resistance in bacteria). Those with certain characteristics live, and those without them diminish in number or die.

4. The problem for evolutionists is that natural selection is nondirectional—should the environment change or the selective pressure be removed, those organisms with previously selected for characteristics are typically less able to deal with the changes and may be selected against because their genetic information has decreased. Evolution of the molecules-to-man variety, requires directional change. Thus, the term “evolution” cannot be rightly used in the context of describing what natural selection can accomplish.

So what can natural selection accomplish and not accomplish? 

Natural Selection Can                                                                                                       Natural Selection Cannot

1. Decrease genetic information.                                                                          1. Increase or provide new genetic information.

2. Allow organisms to survive better in a given environment.                             2. Allow organisms to evolve from molecules to man.

3. Act as a “selector.”                                                                                              3. Act as an “originator.”

4. Support creation’s “orchard” of life.                                                                 4. Support evolutionary “tree” of life.

Conclusion:

Simply put, the changes that are observed today show variation within the created kind—a horizontal change. For a molecules-to-man evolutionary model, there must be a change from one kind into another—a vertical change. This is simply not observed. We have never seen a bacterium like H. pylori give rise to something like a dog. Instead, we simply observe variations within each created kind.

Evolution requires an increase in information that results in a directional movement from molecules to man. Natural selection cannot be a mechanism for evolution because it results in a decrease in information and is not directional. Speciation may occur as a result of natural selection, but it only occurs within a kind. Therefore, it is also not a mechanism for evolution but rather supports the biblical model.

Natural selection cannot be the driving force for molecules-to-man evolution when it does not have that power, nor should it be confused with molecules-to-man evolution. It is an observable phenomenon that preserves genetic viability and allows limited variation within a kind—nothing more, nothing less. It is a great confirmation of the Bible’s history.

Why the belief in evolution is willful ignorance.

Willful ignorance is a false belief that is based on an incorrect interpretation of reality. A person with willful ignorance holds a false belief firmly, despite clear evidence or proof to the contrary. 

Those who willfully reject the obvious due to some philosophical reasoning as indicated by Dawkins and Sagan, as well as many others, are classic examples of Proverbs 26:12. “Do you see a man wise in his own eyes? There is more hope for a fool than for him.” Dr. John MacArthur’s commentary on this verse states “there are degrees of foolishness with intellectual conceit being the most stupid and hard to remedy.” A man wise in his own eyes is really a special kind of stupid.

Explain the following video illustrating the mind-boggling complexity of protein transcription and development using the fairytale evolutionary step by step process.