To start off with, I’m a Christian…….you probably guessed.
I believe in a creator……..and I believe in heaven and hell…….because he does.
I also believe that there is some truth in Darwin.
But, I believe that Darwin has been badly “oversold” and that Darwinian evolution will result in more people missing out on paradise and suffering hell than any other idea that mankind has ever encountered.
So……what part of Darwinian evolution (DE) is true?
I am satisfied that DE operates on a small scale. A colony of e coli that is treated with tiny doses of penicillin can develop resistance to penicillin. This resistant bug is not a new species, but it is a example of DE at work.
The problem with this is a problem that any businessman is familiar with…….. scalability. Just because you can make a widget with hand tools in your garage doesn’t mean that you can make a million copies in a factory and sell them at a price that is competitive.
In more concrete terms:
If you put a monkey in a laboratory with a pile of bricks, it is entirely feasible that he will stack 3 bricks in a neat stack. That doesn’t mean that if you assemble a large number of monkeys, give them a large pile of bricks, and allow them a large amount of time that they can build the empire state building. The process of monkeys stacking bricks is legitimate……..but it doesn’t “scale”. And yet that is what Darwin requires us to accept…….that because e coli can develope antibiotic resistance by accident in a lab…..then every living organism in this amazing world can develop…….purely by accident.
DE has 2 components…….random mutation and survival of the fittest.
Last week I addressed the reality that the 100 billion chemical bonds in the human genome could not accumulate by a series of accidents…….by random mutation . This week I will tackle survival of the fittest. Survival of the fittest says that after a mutation produces a trait that is positively adaptive, that, because of its benefits, the trait will spread through the entire population by outcompeting weaker traits. This will then repeat for every one of the millions of traits present in man. This process must occur as a series of individual events, lest positive trait #50589 could undo positive trait # 24775.
So I propose a hypothetical:
Assume that you have a daughter. At age three you realize that she can see through walls……just like superman. This is obviously a highly adaptive trait which she passes on to all of her children. How many generations do you think it would take for that trait to spread through the entire population of the world……now almost 8 billion souls? Remember, DE operated mainly in an era before transoceanic travel. Perhaps 1000 generations?……each 20 years. So maybe 20,000 years for one trait to work through the entire world population? Now multiply 20,000 years per trait by the trillions of traits in the billions of species between the “primordial ooze” and Angelina Jolie.
Science tells us that life has existed on earth for 4 billion years. That’s a lot of time. But it’s not nearly enough time for survival of the fittest to do the job that DE has assigned to it. In Darwin’s defense, he didn’t know the time frame involved and he didn’t know just how big the human genome…….and the billions of other genomes are.
The problem for both random mutation and survival of the fittest is the same…….they don’t “scale”. Even if Darwin has 4 billion years to work with……there just isn’t enough time.
Darwinian evolution, by design, eliminates the creator from the equation. Darwinian evolution replaces the creator with trillions of random, consecutive, positively adaptive accidents. Darwin also
replaces eternity……heaven and hell……with nothing…….a black void.
So……the burning question is this:
Are you prepared to gamble your eternity on Darwin? Are you willing to bet your eternity on a bunch of monkeys building the empire state building?
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
John, NIV
By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible.
Paul, NIV
I am the Lord,
the Maker of all things,
who stretches out the heavens,
who spreads out the earth by myself,
who foils the signs of false prophets
and makes fools of diviners,
who overthrows the learning of the wise
and turns it into nonsense,
God, NIV