Origins “For since the creation of the world His

invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being

understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse. ”

(Romans 1:20)

Evolution and Information

“Some would claim the answer to these questions is that there is a God who

chose to create the universe that way. It is reasonable to ask who or what created the universe, but if the answer is God,

then the question has merely been deflected to that of who created God. In

this view it is accepted that some entity exists that needs no creator, and that

entity is called God. This is known as the first-cause argument for the existence of

God. We claim, however, that it is possible to answer these questions purely

within the realm of science, and without invoking any divine beings.”

– Stephen Hawking The Grand Design

A Quick Overview of Evolution

1. For this discussion, we’ll use the following definition: Biological evolution attempts to explain the change in existing biological entities and their progression over time

2. Micro-evolution describes the changes within a specific type/species 3. Macro-evolution is a major evolutionary transition from one type of organism

to another occurring at the level of the species 4. Survival of the fittest (coined by Herbert Spencer) is argued as to its

definition, but is normally understood to be 'natural selection', or the preservation of favored races/species in the struggle for life.

“In grammar school they taught me that a frog turning into a prince was a fairy tale. In the university they taught

me that a frog turning into a prince was a fact!”

- Ron Carlson

A Quick Overview of Evolution

“Large evolutionary innovations are not well understood. None has ever been observed, and we have no idea whether any may be in

progress. There is no good fossil record of any.”

- Paul Wesson

By contrast, micro-evolutionary variations due to mutation and natural selection have been and are observed. Postulating an unobserved designer is no more

unscientific than postulating unobserved macro-evolutionary steps.

Naturalistic Philosophy’s Assertions

1. Biological evolution is incompatible with the existence of a Creator

2. Biological evolution accounts for the existence of all of life’s complexities

3. Natural selection is a blind, automatic process with no purpose 4. Natural selection is the explanation for the existence of all life

Is Evolution the Answer?

Does evolution answer the critical question of

existence – why we have something rather

than nothing? And does it explain the specific complexity

found in life?

Is Evolution the Answer?

“An atheist before Darwin could have said, following Hume: "I have no

explanation for complex biological design. All I know is that God isn't a

good explanation, so we must wait and hope that somebody comes up with a better one." I can't help feeling that

such a position, though logically sound, would have left one feeling pretty

unsatisfied, and that although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it

possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.”

- Richard Dawkins

Is Evolution the Answer?

“It seems to me that Richard Dawkins constantly overlooks the fact that Darwin himself, in the fourteenth chapter of The

Origin of Species, pointed out that his whole argument began with a being which already

possessed reproductive powers. This is the creature the evolution of which a truly

comprehensive theory of evolution must give some account. Darwin himself was well aware that he had not produced such an account. It

now seems to me that the findings of more than fifty years of DNA research have provided materials for a new and enormously powerful

argument to design.” - Anthony Flew, philosopher and former

atheist

Does Evolution Mean No Creator?

No.

First, we have seen that evolution only deals with existing beings. Second, evolution purports to be a biological mechanism. God is regarded to be a personal Agent who, among other things, designs and creates mechanisms. And there is no

reason randomness cannot be part of a mechanism – for example, software uses random number generators and such all the time. Just as you would not conclude

that a robotic car factory did not evolve, but was designed, in life, perhaps the intelligence is one step removed as well…

Does Evolution Mean No Creator?

“Either half of my colleagues are enormously stupid, or else

the science of Darwinism is fully compatible with

conventional religious beliefs. . . Science simply cannot

adjudicate the issue of God’s possible existence. We neither affirm it nor deny it; we simply

can’t comment on it as scientists.”

- Stephen Jay Gould

Does The Fossil Record Help?

“The number of intermediate varieties which have formerly existed

on the earth [should] 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 graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps is the most

obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory.”

- Charles Darwin

“I will lay it on the line – there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument [for macro-evolution]”

- Colin Patterson

The Fossil Cover Up

In 1889, Charles Doolittle Walcott made a major fossil discovery in the Canadian Rocky mountains. In rocks too old to contain fully formed, complex biological entities, Walcott found some 60,000

fossils of that type. Walcott knew that there was not enough time for evolution to produce such entities from square one – all had appeared

simultaneously and fully formed.

Such a finding challenged Darwinian gradual evolution, so Dr. Walcott hid all the findings in his lab in 1909. At the time, Walcott

was the Director of the Smithsonian Institute.

The Fossil Cover Up

When Walcott’s fossils were re-discovered in the mid-1980’s, the effect was very dramatic. In 1992, Scientific American was moved

years later to print a story about it and ask the question “Has the

mechanism of evolution altered?”

National Geographic, the New York Times, and Time all printed

stories speaking of “Evolution’s Big Bang.”

Yet today, high school biology

textbooks mostly ignore this data and its implications.

Does The Fossil Record Help?

“The history of most fossil species includes two features particularly inconsistent with the idea that they gradually evolved:

1. Stasis – most species exhibit no directional change during their tenure on earth. They appear in the fossil record looking pretty much the same as when they disappear, morphological change is usually limited and directionless.

2. Sudden appearance. In any local area a species does not arise gradually by the steady transformation of its ancestors; it appears all at once and ‘fully formed’”

- Stephen Jay Gould

“The most thorough study of species formation in the fossil

record confirms that new species appear with a most un-

Darwinian abruptness.” Dr. Richard Kerr

"Did Darwin Get It All Right?" Science, 267:1421, 1995

Comment on article: (1) The reality of sudden saltations in the fossil record or

"punctuated equilibrium" implies that those unfound transitional fossils beloved by the gradualists are truly missing. (2) The higher the taxonomic level, the more silent the fossil

record. There are few clues as to how the major divisions of life (the phylla) originated.

What about the Archaeopteryx?

The archaeopteryx is held up as the perfect example of a transitional

species – feathers on wings speak of the bird, but it had jaws and teeth, not a

beak, so it seems to also be a reptile. However, many scientists now believe it

was simply a bird.

Interestingly, in Leviticus 11:18, birds are listed and one of them is the

tinshemet. Then in Leviticus, reptiles are listed, and the tinshemet appears

again. Evidently, the Scripture felt the animal fell into both categories and was

a single animal, not a macro-evolutionary entity.

“The fossil evidence that challenges this classic concept of evolution has been found worldwide. . . . All body plans represented in

the thirty-four animal phyla extant today appear as a single burst in the fossil record.

And it happened 530 million years ago. Those are the data. No one disputes them. . . . One of the great mysteries of animal evolution is why no new phyla have appeared since that

Cambrian explosion of life.”

- Dr. Gerald Schroeder

Evolution’s Main Argument

“The reason we know for certain we are all related, including bacteria, is the universality of the genetic code and other biological fundamentals.”

– Richard Dawkins

This doesn’t rule out a Creator at all. Perhaps everything has similarity because it has a common designer and source vs. a common ancestor. Similarity and

progression does not automatically imply common ancestry. While some studies show that humans and chimps have DNA similarities approaching 90-95%, the

similarities between humans and mice is 90%. All humans DNA are 99.9% identical.

Similarity vs. Progression

Does the similarity between these items mean that one evolved from the other? Did the pot evolve from the spatula or spoon?

The DNA code – ATCG – implies similarity but does not mean they evolved

from each other. For example the following letters in the two sentences are identical, but a slight difference yields opposite meanings:

Charles Darwin was a scientific god Charles Darwin was a scientific dog

A Common Source for Life

“Then God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures after their kind: cattle and creeping things and beasts of the earth after

their kind”; and it was so. ” (Genesis 1:24)

“Out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the sky, and brought them to the man to see what

he would call them; and whatever the man called a living creature, that was its name. ”

(Genesis 2:19)

“Then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living

being. ” (Genesis 2:7)

Look Designed?

“Living objects . . . look designed, they look

overwhelmingly as though they’re designed. Biology is

the study of complicated things which give the

impression of having been designed for a purpose.”

- Richard Dawkins

A Quick Correction on ‘Intelligent Design’

“Intelligent Design” may strike you as a curious expression – don’t we always think of ‘design’ as the result of

intelligence? Therefore the adjective “intelligent” is redundant.

The Difference in Data & Information

DNA Is Information like software

“At first approximation, one can therefore think of

DNA as an instructional script, a software program, sitting in the nucleus of the cell. Its coding language has only for letters (or two bits,

in computer terms). A particular instruction known

as a gene, is made up of hundreds or thousands of

letters of code.” Dr. Francis Collins

Randomness in Software…?

If there is one thing a software developer does not want, it is randomness in their code. One misplaced semi-colon or letter can cause a program that consists of ten thousand

lines to not work.

DNA Is the Result of Intelligence

“It is important to understand that we are not reasoning by

analogy. The sequence hypothesis applies directly to the

protein and the genetic text as well as to written language and

therefore the treatment is mathematically identical.” Dr. Herbert P. Yockey,

Biologist

“DNA did not create life; life created DNA”

- Barry Commoner, Biologist

DNA – Genetic Code

“Investigations of many organisms, from bacteria to humans, revealed that this

‘genetic code’, by which information in DNA and RNA is translated into protein, is universal in all

known organisms. No tower of Babel was to be allowed

in the language of life. . . . How deeply satisfying is the digital elegance of DNA!”

Dr. Francis Collins

“If you’re trying to explain an event in the remote past you should rely on our knowledge of the cause/effect structure of the world and you should be looking for a cause that has

the capability or power to produce the known effect in question. It is the principle of sufficient or adequate reason. Darwin’s mentor Charles Lyell gave this to him. Lyell put it this way: ‘In investigating the past we should be looking for

causes now in operation’. Now as to Information and intelligence: What is the cause now in operation of digital information? That is intelligence. By using Darwin’s own

principle of reasoning, we can use an inference to the best explanation: intelligence produces information.”

- Dr. Stephen Meyer

Evolutionists Admit Information

“What lies at the heart of every living thing is not a fire, warn breath, nor a ‘spark of life’. It is information, words, instructions. . . . Think of a

billion discrete digital characters. . . . If you want to understand life think about

information technology.” - Richard Dawkins

Evolutionists Admit Information

Darwinist Richard Dawkins admits that the message found in just the cell nucleus of an amoeba is more than all thirty volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica, with the entire amoeba itself having as

much information in its DNA as 1,000 complete sets of the Encyclopedia Britannica. The important thing to understand is that the makeup of these entities is not random, but instead the

information is highly organized.

“In no way can the concept of ‘information’, the concept of conveying a

message, be articulated in terms of the concepts of physics and chemistry, even though the latter can be shown to explain

how the molecular machinery (DNA, RNA, and protein) operates to carry

information.”

- Arthur Peacocke, Theologian and Scientist

Confusing ‘basis’ and ‘implication’

“What the media wants to do is say if you believe that the intelligence we see

in life is God then you are doing religion and not science. Not true.

Scientific reasoning and evidence are being used in Intelligent Design.

These have implications that go past the mere scientific. The media

confuses the basis for intelligent design with the implications of the theory in

order to stigmatize it.” - Dr. Stephen Meyer

Design or Chance?

One Design One by Chance?

Pushing Out the Problem Doesn’t Help

There are two possibilities for intelligence: it is either transcendent or immanent. You see design in the fabric

of the universe; not the result of a creature in the universe but something beyond it. Dawkins proposes space

aliens for the reason we see intelligence here but he also says that the alien

would have had to have evolved as well. The problem is if you can’t get the evolutionary process to solve the

information process here on earth, why think it could happen elsewhere?

Kicking it to outer space doesn’t help. - Dr. Stephen Meyer

With all the evidence pointing to intelligence behind the information we see in life, why don’t atheistic evolutionists

admit what is really there?

A Battle of Worldviews – Theism vs. Naturalism

“I am not an agnostic. I am an atheist. My attitude is not based on science, but rather on faith. . . . The absence of a Creator, the non-existence of God is my childhood faith,

my adult belief, unshakable and holy.” - George Klein, Immunologist

A Battle of Worldviews – Theism vs. Naturalism

“In China we can criticize Darwin, but not the government; in America you can criticize the government, but not

Darwin.” - Jun-Yuan Chen, Palaeontologist

“The world needs to wake up from the long nightmare of religion. . .

Anything we scientists can do to weaken the hold of religion should be done, and may in fact be our greatest

contribution to civilization.”

- Steven Weinberg, Nobel Laureate

No Design but Intelligence?

“Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not

designed, but rather evolved.” - Francis Crick

“Given the weaknesses of all theories of terrestrial genesis,

directed panspermia [the deliberate planting of life on

Earth by aliens] should still be considered a serious possibility.”

- Francis Crick

Atheists Know Intelligence When they See it

‘Contact’ was a movie based on a novel by atheist Carl Sagan. It was about scientists searching for intelligent life in space. Before long, the project does, indeed, discover the

first confirmed communication from extraterrestrial beings, a repeating series of the first 261 prime numbers (a sequence of prime numbers is a commonly predicted first message from

alien intelligence, since mathematics is considered a "universal language," and it is conjectured that algorithms

that produce successive prime numbers are sufficiently complicated so as to require intelligence to implement them).

“Incidentally, is it not to be wondered at that our

archaeologist immediately infers intelligent origin when faced with a few simple scratches whereas some scientists, when

faced with the 3.5 billion letter sequence of the human genome, inform us that it is to be explained solely in terms of

chance and necessity?” John Lennox, PhD, Mathematics, Philosophy

“If science is based on experience, then science tells us that the message encoded in DNA must have originated from an intelligent

cause. What kind of intelligent agent was it? On its own, science cannot answer this question; it must leave it to religion and philosophy.

But that should not prevent science from acknowledging evidences for an intelligent cause origin wherever they may exist.”

- Dean Kenyon, Biophysicist

Scientists Know Intelligence When they See it

“Your protein defies the laws of mass action – evolution did it! Your complicated mess of chemical reactions turns into a chicken – evolution! The

human brain works on logical principles no computer can emulate? Evolution is the

cause!” – Dr. John Lennox

God or Evolution of the Gaps?

The Teleological Argument

•Behind every complex design is a designer •The universe has a complex design •Therefore, the universe has a designer

The teleological (telos, from the Greek word which means “design” ) argument says that the universe and mankind

exhibit marks of intelligence and design.

“I think the origins of the laws of nature and of life and the Universe point clearly to an

intelligent Source. The burden of proof is on those who argue to the contrary.”

– Anthony Flew, former outspoken atheist

Origins “For since the creation of the world His

invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being

understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse. ”

(Romans 1:20)

Evolution and Information