GOD and SCIENCE - DARWIN and DATING

There are few things one can do that is more politically incorrect than going after Darwinian Theory. Why? Because going after Darwin is seen as going after science itself - all things provable, true and real. It's not, really. In fact, it's quite the opposite; it's very scientific to cross-examine and challenge theories - to question them. And Darwinism has been dodging questions from the get-go.

Darwinism is actually what geocentric theory was five hundred years ago; instead of being a fundamental misunderstanding of the cosmos, it's a fundamentally wrong view of the living world. It is bad science and it's bad for science. And there is nothing that provides more of an intellectual warrant for secularism than this theory.

Lee Strobel, the well-known author and Christian apologist, said he closed the door on anything religious when he learned about evolutionary theory as a junior in high school. God just wasn't necessary. Richard Dawkins remarked that Darwinism gave him the ability to be an "intellectually fulfilled atheist." And Daniel Dennett, a philosophy professor at Tuft's University, and one of the Four Horsemen of the New Atheists, has called Darwinism a "universal acid", something so corrosive it eats through anything used to contain it; Darwinism "eats through every traditional concept and leaves in its wake a revolutionized world view." This is absolutely true. The influence of Darwinism and its adherents are pervasive. It permeates the academy, the media, and the entertainment industry, where so much of our next generation is being shaped. It permeates our culture and is creating a withering nihilism that is destroying us.

The theory simply makes too much intellectual noise for people to hear the gospel. You don't believe me? Have a look at the following comments:

That's a textbook taking a theological stand, by the way. And then Julian Huxley at the Darwin Centennial in 1959:

Well... not so fast. Since then things have begun to come unglued for Darwin.

In 1965, some world-class mathematicians - Murray Eden at MIT and Marcel Schutzenberger in France, along with others - began to model random mutations working with natural selection using probability theory. They couldn't get it to work - not by a long shot. Repeated attempts and adjustments in their assumptions yielded the same results. Some high-level Darwinists got wind of this and a meeting was convened at the Wistar Institute at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia in July 1966. The results and concerns were aired - mathematically there was nowhere close to enough genetic resources or the time needed to do anything like what was being claimed for this theory. And what was the response?

The problem of evil has a number of different facets, which we'll get to, but before doing that I want to address the Greek conundrums Siegfried raises, because your kids are about to.

Nobel laureate, Sir Peter Medawar, told them they were thinking backwards. That the eye had evolved was not in question, so the math must be wrong. Really?? The fact that the earth is the center of the Solar System, Copernicus, is not in question, so your calculations must be off. Ernst Mayr, the godfather of Darwinism on this side of the pond said this: "Somehow or other, by adjusting these figures, we will come out alright. We are comforted by the fact that evolution has occurred." I'm sorry, but that doesn't sound much like science to me. It sounds like there is a lot of emotional skin in the game - like a belief or religious system struggling to survive legitimate questions. In any case, the mathematicians didn't have an alternate, naturalistic idea to offer as a replacement, so their criticisms were DOA.

But then in 1984, Charles Thaxton, Walter Bradley and Roger Olsen produced a book called The Mystery of Life's Origin. One of Darwinism's biggest challenges is telling us how life began. In their book, they surveyed all the origin of life research up until that time. It had all hit a dead end and hasn't progressed anywhere since then. Pasteur tried to tell us all this in the mid-1800's - spontaneous generation is a non-starter. You can't get from chemistry to biology, from the inanimate world to the animate world; it's a bridge too far.

In addition, though, the authors floated the idea that the information in our genome was not like a language, it was a language - a language understood and utilized across an entire matrix of genetics and biology. And meaningful language - transferrable, actionable information - is inherently a rational artifact. Their book is considered the birthplace of the Intelligent Design movement.

Then in 1985, a physician and geneticist named Michael Denton, wrote a book entitled Evolution: A Theory in Crisis. In it, he took the scientific community to task. He basically said, "Here's what we say we know about evolution, but here's what we really know." He went on to point out to his peers exception after exception and problem after problem. By doing so, he opened the gates for other scientists to seriously consider their own doubts. One of those scientists was a biochemist named Michael Behe at Lehigh University in central Pennsylvania.

In 1996, Michael Behe formally falsified Darwinian Theory in examples shown in his book Darwin's Black Box. What is a Black Box? A Black Box was something inaccessible to Darwin due to the level of technology in his day. He thought of the cell as a simple glob of protoplasm. He couldn't see into its mind-boggling complexity, but we now can because of the development of things like the electron microscope.¹ Which is what Behe's done. But it hasn't been an easy ride for him.

Understand, those who lay claim to the story of origins - this story tells us where we're from, why we're here, where we're going and what we mean - are the high priests of a culture. This endows them a tremendous amount of power and prestige. They're not going to let go of that easily. Besides, billions have been spent in research based on the assumption that this theory is true - looking for life on Mars - and tens of thousands of careers have been built on that same assumption. So in 1999, institutional science, in the person of cell biologist Kenneth Miller from Brown University, attempted to refute Behe in his book Finding Darwin's God.

Miller is one of Darwinism's most capable apologists: outgoing, witty, articulate, passionate and convincing because he's convinced. On stage he'll outshine Behe who is a self-effacing introvert. The problem for Miller is that he put himself in print. And in print, you don't win on style; you win on substance. Your readers have a chance to digest and reflect on the construction of your arguments. And Miller utterly failed to refute Behe. In fact, it was an epic fail; instead of refuting Behe, he confirmed him six times over. I have been very specific about this in the appendix of my book Do You Still Think God Is Good? (which you can pick up... on Amazon ).

Behe had been using Darwin's own test. Darwin knew for his theory to be considered scientific, it had to be falsifiable. So he gave us a falsification criterion:

Why would Darwin's theory absolutely break down if a complex organ was found? Because integrated complexity, two or more things operating together to perform a function, shows planning. It shows premeditation... Purpose and intention - thought, will and skill. It's an artifact of mind - a Designer. Darwin's claim to fame was that he could explain all of the living world as a result of mindless and purposeless processes. Remember George Gaylord Simpson's claim? "We are the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have us in mind." So Darwinism and design are antithetical to each other; they are opposites at their core.

After reading Denton, and feeling his intuitions were valid, Behe began in earnest to document these "complex organs" that Darwin couldn't find. As it turns out, the living world is rife with them. In the process of his work, Behe came up with the concept that refined Darwin's falsification test. It's called Irreducible Complexity. Irreducible Complexity doesn't just identify the general parts of a system but specifically those essential parts that are needed for function - if one of the essential parts is removed from this system, function isn't degraded; it's lost. Period. Before I lose you, let me give you a big, clunky example: you and me.

When did you last remember to beat your heart? When did you last remember to breathe? You don't have to remember to do either of these things. That's done for you by your brain. The brain, though, needs blood in order to carry out these responsibilities and that blood needs to be oxygenated which means, for the brain and nervous system to survive, we need a circulation system to carry blood to the brain and a respiratory system to oxygenate it. If we remove one of these systems, we don't work less efficiently; we don't work at all. Game over.

Darwinists will tell us that this can all be explained by the process of mutation and natural selection. But can it? I'm just about to show you why it can't, in fact, why the fatal flaw for Darwinism is found in this little operating mechanism itself. And this is fun...

What's a mutation and why is it important? A mutation is a hitch in DNA's giddy-up - in the informational sequences. There are lots of types - nonsense, missense, insertions, deletions, frame shifts - you don't really need to know what these mean, only that they all are found in the DNA, which is where they need to be if they're to be repeatable or reproducible.

And that DNA can't be just anywhere - a finger, fin or feather. It has to be in the DNA of the germ cells - the sperm or the egg - if it's going to impact speciation - the next generation. But what have we done here? We've taken this organism-wide universe of trials (37.2 trillion cells in humans alone) and made it one that is vanishingly small - the germ cells only. Then we add insult to injury when we consider that the vast majority of mutations break things in the organism or they're neutral... like someone putting a semicolon where someone else would put a period. Only a minute percentage of mutations can be considered at all advantageous or beneficial.

So here's the trick: Out of this vanishingly small universe of trials - the germ cells - that can only use a vanishingly small fraction of the mutations that arise, do we get 8.7 million species of multicellular life - plants and animals. The greatest percentage of that number are animals with circulatory systems, respiratory systems, visual systems, neurological systems, digestive and reproductive systems... All from a vanishing small universe of trials using a vanishing small percentage of mutations. Folks, if your baloney detector isn't at redline by now, you might want to check your pulse!

This is exactly what the professional mathematicians were talking about at the Wistar conference in 1966. The math doesn't add up! It never did! The theory has nothing close to the genetic resources it needs or the time it needs to do anything like what we have around us.

But that's not even the real issue. Here the mutation sits in the DNA. And as long as it's there, it is invisible to Darwinian evolution. It's going nowhere. It's doing nothing. Building nothing. Affecting nothing. Of no consequence, whatsoever!

Until it's expressed. Until the DNA is opened, read and copied, you can have all the mutations you want. They aren't going to do anything for or to the organism. It's only when it's culled and creates the feature that increases fitness does it, at all, become visible to evolution.

So, the mutation has to be accessed and copied along with the surrounding source material in the DNA it has affected as a mutation. And how does that occur? Well... a letter opener shows up called a helicase. The helicase opens the DNA so it can be read and copied. Then the reader/copier called the RNA polymerase shows up to read and copy the genetic section. And what has happened when that occurs? DARWINIAN THEORY HAS BEEN FALSIFIED AGAIN! Why? Because we have a complex in play - three things working together to perform a function. If the DNA and the reader/copier - the RNA polymerase - are there but the letter opener - the helicase - doesn't show up to open the DNA, nothing can be read. And if the DNA is there, and the helicase is there to open it up but there's no reader, nothing gets read. And if the helicase and the polymerase show up but there's no DNA, there's nothing to read. All three have to be in play for the genetic expression to go anywhere. If this isn't a complex, complexes don't exist. And if complexes don't exist, then Darwinism isn't scientific because it can't be falsified. If complexes do exist, then this is one, and Darwinism has been falsified. It loses either way!

By the way, Darwin knew nothing about this system, or he never would have made his ridiculous comment about complexes. We didn't even begin to understand the structure and function of this system until the middle of the last century, nearly a hundred years after Darwin published The Origin. But things only get worse for Darwin from here.

The copy that the RNA polymerase makes of the gene is typically 27,000 bases long; that's the average length of a transcript - the precursor mRNA. Using the scale of this model, the transcript would be 3,037 feet long. That's not one football field; that's over ten football fields long! But that initial transcript isn't usable in the gene expression system; it's a boilerplate that carries recipes for hundreds if not thousands of different finished products, so it has to be edited; what recipe are we looking for? And so off to the editing room in the nucleus - the spliceosome. So we're seeing another component in this apparatus! Component number four.

Once at the spliceosome, this editing apparatus is going to reduce the initial transcript by over 95%--from 27,000 bites/bases to an average of 1300 bites/bases. 1300 is the final, usable template for the typical protein, what's known as the mature, messenger RNA. (Using this scale, the recipe would be 144 feet long - almost half a football field long.) Again, the spliceosome can make hundreds, if not thousands of different recipes out of the same 27,000 bite initial transcript based on what's called up by what from where.

Understand, we haven't made anything yet. All of this is under the Darwinian radar, unseen by evolution. And all of this is going on in each of our 37.2 trillion cells at a virtual lightspeed every day, all day.

Now... once the mature messenger RNA, including our little mutation, is ready, it moves out of the nucleus of the cell to the manufacturing room. This is known as the ribosome. Wow. Component number five. But once at the ribosome, we need one more little machine, a two-headed little transfer agent named - you guessed it - the transfer RNA or tRNA.

The mature, messenger RNA is read in sequences of three bases called codons. So a 1300 bite recipe is made up of 433 codons. SAM ATE THE BUN - words made up of three letters. The tRNA lines up one end with the codon and brings into place an amino acid at the other end that is added to the next amino acid, then the next and the next, until we have 430+ amino acids in specific sequence, the primary structure of an average protein. This will then go off, fold up into its unique 3D configuration and be either a building block or a machine. It's here that what's just been built finally becomes a feature that might increase fitness, helps this little creature run faster or jump higher, swim deeper or see further - anything that allows it outdistance its peers in the competition for resources and therefore reproduction. It's only at this point that this becomes visible to Darwinian evolution; it's only here that natural selection can come into play.

But looks what's going on. We can't get FROM mutation TO natural selection without going THROUGH, a fully integrated, multiple part, irreducibly complex gene expression system! Again, this system is invisible to Darwinian evolution; it's all under the radar. In other words, Darwinism didn't build this system. It's this system that makes the mutation/selection mechanism work at all! It is the essential bridge between these two components in Darwin's mindless story of life, and it's anything but mindless.

So when you hear some PhD-type going on about mutation and natural selection, just rewind the tape; what does it take to get this to work at all?!

The bottom line is this: Darwin can't account for how life began in the first place - how we get from chemistry to biology, how the inanimate world became animated - and never will. The theory can't account for the informational content of our source document, even though every time we encounter actionable information - information that conveys meaning - it's always the product of a rational source. And it can't account for the irreducibly complex gene expression system needed to access and utilize that information in the first place--what makes Darwin's mechanism work at all!

So despite the gleeful claims of Professor Dennett, Darwinism isn't anything like a universal acid. It's just a bunch of smoke and mirrors. It explains the little stuff - finch beaks and the color of moths, but not how the finch or the moth got here to begin with. It's time to move on. You and I are "fearfully and wonderfully made." You can take that to the bank.

So we're back to you-know-where. That's right - a Designer. And we've left deism in the rearview mirror because it can't address the issue of evil, and it can't address the information in the genome. So now we are left with a theistic, designer god. Is that Designer God the Christian God? We'll soon find out.

Before moving on, I want to address the dating stuff. And I must tell you, you don't need to be in the least concerned about a 13.72 billion-year-old universe. Or a 4.55 billion-year-old earth. It doesn't matter. And here's why.

When Jesus was among us, he did some really cool stuff. He walked on water. He fed lots of people with next to nothing. He changed water into wine. He healed the sick, the blind and the lame. He also healed lepers. Now here's the question: For the older lepers he healed - the forty- and fifty-year-olds - did their healed skin have wrinkles? How old do you think a modern dermatologist would say that healed skin was? As old as the person who had it. And they'd be right. But it was just healed five minutes ago. Yep. But it is wrinkled and is fifty years old. There are two timeframes in play here, chronological/physiological and created.

How old was that wine Jesus created at that wedding in Cana? When Jesus changed water to wine, the wine was true wine; it had a vintage. Wine is aged, fermented grape juice. On a molecular basis, it was as old as it needed to be to reach full fermentation. The biochemist might hazard a guess - perhaps weeks or months, but not the minutes the guys who filled the water pots would claim. Which is right? They both are. Truly. Was Adam in his early twenties when he woke up in the Garden? Or was he just minutes old? He was both. Truly.

When you're dealing with a miracle - fixing something or creating something - you're dealing with two timeframes - chronological or physiological and created. For the earth to be the place it needed to be for us - stable and cool, orbiting the sun we needed, with the moon we needed, they all had to be certain physical ages. So did the galaxy. So did the universe. And that's why you shouldn't really be concerned about the age of the universe or the age of the earth. Physics will tell you one thing, and God's word might tell us another. And both would be right. Two timeframes are in play - chronological and created. That's all.

(Flagpole number 6 - bam!)