Date post: | 15-Dec-2015 |
Category: |
Documents |
Upload: | ulises-claycomb |
View: | 216 times |
Download: | 3 times |
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 UpWhen 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 ear. 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 godCharles 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.
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
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