Evolution Is Running Out of Options: Part 1

For decades now, naturalists have been screeching that science has disproven the Bible so loudly that many people accepted it, likely because of the sheer volume of materialistic messaging they heard on a daily basis. From kindergarten to grade school to university and beyond, the story of evolution (which many view as a replacement for God) permeates culture now like no other narrative in the West. For example, take this quotation from a 2017 article reporting on an address by our former Governor General here in Canada, “In the speech she questioned how it was still possible that people believed that ‘divine intervention’ created life.”1

Incredible, isn’t it? One of our highest officials was recorded publicly mocking belief in God as Creator and (mentioned in the article) specifically targeting those who “believe in creationism.” Of course, the very highest official in our government at the time, the drama teacher turned (former) prime minister, Justin Trudeau, praised her for so boldly “standing up for science” (i.e., evolution:): “Trudeau says his government is grounded in science and applauded the strength of Payette’s convictions in defending science as part of the foundation of a successful society.”2

This is pretty laughable considering Trudeau’s stance on identity issues and his apparent lack of understanding of basic biology. Materialists who appeal to the story of evolution as “science” are trying to equate evolution with the type of observational science that can be observed, tested, and repeated. They mock creation as pseudoscientific when, in reality, both biblical creation and evolution are ways to explain things that happened in the past that we can’t directly test or observe.

Evolution Isn’t Empirical Science

The difference between empirical science and what we would call historical science is not some differentiation without a real difference made-up by creationists. Even famous evolutionists such as Ernst Mayr and E. O. Wilson have admitted the story of evolution isn’t conducted according to the conventional rules of empirical science. Here are two quotations from them (respectively) that demonstrate the point.

Evolutionary biology, in contrast with physics and chemistry, is a historical science—the evolutionist attempts to explain events and processes that have already taken place. Laws and experiments are inappropriate techniques for the explication of such events and processes. Instead one constructs a historical narrative, consisting of a tentative reconstruction of the particular scenario that led to the events one is trying to explain.3

Exactly. Laws and experiments don’t apply to the story of evolution because it’s a “tentative reconstruction,” a historical narrative. In other words, it’s not the kind of science that produces technology and medicines. And here is Wilson’s take:

If a moving automobile were an organism, functional biology would explain how it is constructed and operates, while evolutionary biology would reconstruct its origin and history—how it came to be made and its journey thus far.4

Again, he’s admitting that real science shows us how things actually work, but they make up a story about how it supposedly came about by evolution. Unlike the mechanics of what we are studying that can be directly observed, no one saw the story about how it supposedly came to be. So if you believe that evolutionary story, you do so on faith, no matter how founded you believe that faith is. Even Nature magazine pointed this out in an article discussing evolutionary biology:

Research into evolution is a bit like forensic detective work. Because it’s impossible to carry out million-year experiments, we instead look at what evolution has produced and try to figure out what happened and why.5

Well yes, detectives observe facts but can’t repeat the historical events that lead them to why they are there, and because they didn’t witness those events, they instead have to figure out what happened and come up with a story to explain how they think it might have. But facts within a historical narrative can be interpreted many different ways, and we’ve all seen a scenario where we were absolutely sure we knew “whodunit,” only to have that belief overturned.

As an aside, I find it amusing to see comments on our socials posted all the time from people criticizing us by dismissing whatever detailed argument we are putting forth and saying something to the effect of, “So what you are saying is that if you don’t know how it happened you just say ‘God did it,’ that’s not scientific.”

Well, in this quotation, you can see they clearly start with the conclusion that evolution somehow did it and work backward from there, so if that’s not scientific, then what’s good for the goose is good for the gander, and if the shoe fits, wear it. No, far from having overwhelmingly proven evolution, what those involved in modern science have done is redefined what science is, forbid any appeal to intelligent design outright, and automatically assumed that whatever is being observed has come about through some kind of naturalistic process, regardless of the facts in front of them.

As immunologist S. C. Todd explained in a correspondence to Nature magazine, “Even if all the data point to an intelligent designer, such an hypothesis is excluded from science because it is not naturalistic.”6

Is Intelligent Design Religious?

Is the concept of intelligent design itself religious? To answer the question, just picture the following scenario. Let’s say some scientists entered a cave system and, during their exploration, discovered artwork on the walls depicting animals and what looks like humans with weapons attacking them.

They then discover a rough circle of rocks with burnt pieces of wood inside. Within the coals, they discover some animal remains and even a few stones with a very specific triangular shape scattered about, sharply tapered at one end and thin enough that one could imagine them being able to be fastened to a piece of wood, looking very similar to the weapons depicted in the cave drawings they observed earlier. What would a logical, natural conclusion be based on the evidence they observe?

One could easily imagine a scientific study published in some prestigious magazine or journal that posits a group of ancient hominids used to inhabit this cave system and used it as a home base of sorts. They hunted creatures nearby using spears and arrows, brought them back, and cooked them in the caves. And what would lead to that very logical conclusion? The evidence of intelligent design seen everywhere.

You see, in our experience, rocks don’t usually form into conveniently pointed shapes or arrange themselves in circular formations without intelligent input. Animal fat, coal, clay, and minerals like iron oxide don’t mix themselves up into various colored pigments and arrange themselves on walls in shapes that relate to various creatures, and those creatures don’t tend to hurl themselves into specifically placed wood piles (especially those that are on fire).

So materialistically minded scientists recognize the activity of intelligent beings when they are investigating an archaeological site. But their materialism keeps them from recognizing vastly more complex evidence like the machinery in the cell or the sophisticated language of the genetic code as pointing to a Creator.

Intelligent design is only relegated to the category of “religious” when we discuss where we came from ultimately. Because if we didn’t arrive by natural processes, then it’s very obvious we would be responsible for our actions to whoever made us. The question of ultimate origins is actually a theological query, not a purely scientific one, which is why the attack on the concept of design in nature has always been one at the forefront of the atheistic community’s attacks on belief in God.

Doubting Design

Look at the way famous atheist Bertrand Russell stated it.

When you come to look into this argument from design, it is a most astonishing thing that people believe that this world . . . with all its defects, should be the best that omnipotence and omniscience have been able to produce in millions of years. I really cannot believe it.7

Of course, like most skeptics, Russell was scoffing at the true history of the world contained in the book of Genesis and was postulating a made-up god that was so inept he took millions of years to create a world full of defects and death. He was ignoring the reality of God creating a very good world initially that has been marred by sin and death through man’s rebellion. And in doing so, he also modeled what God’s Word says in 2 Peter:

Knowing this . . . that scoffers will come in the last days . . . following their own sinful desires. They will say, “Where is the promise of his coming? . . . all things are continuing as they were from the beginning of creation.” For they deliberately overlook this fact, that the heavens existed long ago, and the earth was formed out of water and through water by the word of God, and that by means of these the world that then existed was deluged with water and perished. (2 Peter 3:3–6)

Like most scoffers, Russell (now deceased) believed everything was just continuing as it always had, denied the history of Noah’s flood (which explains the fossil record without millions of years), and denied the God of the Bible and the biblical creation account. So he couldn’t explain the bad things in the world as the result of man’s sin and (quite logically) couldn’t imagine why people would believe in a good God that would use billions of years of death and suffering to create only to end up with a world full of defects.

However, great scientists of the past such as Francis Bacon, George Carver, Nicolaus Copernicus, Georges Cuvier, Leonardo da Vinci, Michael Faraday, Galileo, Linnaeus, Richard Owen, Louis Pasteur, Wernher von Braun, Johannes Kepler, etc.—who were Christians—had no problem recognizing the obvious design in nature alongside the expected effects of sin, death, and corruption having been brought into the world via the rebellion of our first father (Adam).

The idea of rejecting God and the clear evidence of design in nature was repulsive to most of them. Even the undisputedly greatest scientist of all time, Sir Issac Newton, once declared, “Atheism is so senseless and odious to mankind that it never had many professors.”8

The Game Is Rigged

However, a majority of scientists today profess atheism, reject the idea of intelligent design, and believe in the story of evolution. Is this because we somehow can’t recognize evidence of design now? No! As I’ve said before, it is because the game has been rigged by those in control of academia and the media (many who are humanistic Marxists and atheists) so that no matter what we see in nature, it is always attributed to the story of evolution, not God. As famous atheist Richard Dawkins put it, “Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.”9

That’s convenient, isn’t it? If we just admit that things appear designed but we declare we somehow know they really aren’t, we can just ignore any appeals to design outright without having to explain them away. But is there some kind of logical, scientific criteria we can consistently apply to know the difference between something that appears to be designed and something that actually has been? Let me share with you a few concepts I heard a few years ago that helped me think this through.

Can We Detect Design?

For example, if you compare a rock face to some actual rocks with faces, such as those visible at the Mount Rushmore National Memorial monument, almost every sane person would agree that those faces were designed by intelligence. Why? Because in all of our human experience, we know that rock (matter with no mind) does not contain the specific information for faces of dead US presidents that lived in the past. You know immediately that someone added that information to the medium (in this case—rock) these images are embedded into.

How about a wooden model airplane or boomerang? Both are made of wood, but does wood in its natural form (i.e., trees) glide long distances or come back when you throw it? My wife has some Scottish heritage, and Scots often toss trees around (called caber tossing) during festivals, but they never seem to come back, do they?

So someone must have added information to the wood in question in order for the plane or boomerang to be able to glide through the air and/or return to sender. Again, because in all of our human experience, we know that wood (matter with no mind) doesn’t contain the aerodynamic information to allow it to fly. You know immediately that someone added information to the medium (in this case—wood) these objects are made out of.

Now, let’s look at something a little more sophisticated, such as your iPhone (or other smartphone). If you broke your iPhone down into its most basic component parts, what would you get? Rocks, sand, and petroleum products:

• Rocks to extract the 60 various metals (some of them extremely rare)
• Sand for silicon chips
• Petroleum products to provide the plastic and rubber required to construct the device.

However, if you took some rocks, sand, and petroleum products and zapped them with random energy over a vast time period, would they arrange themselves into something resembling an iPhone? No. A mind would have to be involved because all of these component parts do not have the information needed to construct the end product (the iPhone) within them.

Unintelligent Design?

So in our everyday experience, the formula we apply to see whether something has been designed (whether we’ve really thought it through fully or not) is to see whether the information in the end product is greater than that of its component parts. And if they are, whatever you are discussing has been designed.

Now at this point, evolutionists will often simply dismiss this reasoning and say that matter has the ability to self-organize, so the argument isn’t valid. And many may point to crystals or snowflakes as examples of nature demonstrating unique, one-of-a-kind designs having come about through natural processes as proof. However, these are not examples of breaking our formula here in the least. Why?

Well, tune in to Part 2 of our series where we will not only show how such examples are completely invalid but demonstrate that what modern science is showing in even the simplest of living things is so sophisticated and so far beyond our level of understanding that some evolutionists are postulating absolutely outlandish ideas in order to explain them!