Making Life’s Big Decisions: Part 1

A common claim from the agnostic or atheistic-minded individuals among us is that there’s no (or not enough) evidence of God’s existence and, therefore, not enough justification to commit to that belief. Especially when that would involve huge changes in behavior and lifestyle for most people, something many wouldn’t be willing to do unless sufficiently convinced.

Making the Right Decision

Their claim implies that a thinking mind should only make life-changing decisions based on reliable and rational information that will produce the best outcome for itself. Of course, we respect clear-thinking individuals. Top-level decision-making is often associated with high-capacity leaders, whether involved in political, business, athletic, or military arenas, where stakes are high and bad decisions can result in severe outcomes for everyone involved.

But when a skeptic asks me for evidence proving that God exists, my first question is always “What kind of evidence would you expect to find if God does exist?” If they can’t supply me with a reasonable criterion to meet, why bother wasting my time trotting out philosophical, archaeological, historical, or scientific arguments of any sort when there’s no possible way to meet a requirement that’s never been set?

Of course, many people haven’t thought out their worldview carefully, and some just believe what they believe because they believe it and may stumble a bit when asked that question.

So the most intuitively understandable argument I suggest to anyone who can’t articulate a clear answer to my question is one clearly laid out in Romans 1:20, where it states that the entire creation is proof of the Creator and that you can tell there is a maker of all things because of what he made.

For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.

Basically, I ask if it would be logical to answer my question this way: “If God exists, I would expect to find convincing evidence of design in nature.” Normally, this would be a reasonable statement because under most investigations where we are trying to determine if a mind was involved in a particular circumstance—such as an archaeological team looking at debris, a CSI team looking for evidence of premeditation on behalf of a suspect, or historians looking at ancient markings—no reasonable person would reject the idea of equating evidence of intelligent design as proof of a designer with a mind being the cause.

The Evolutionary Ace Card: Deep Time

Yet when it comes to the question of ultimate origins, naturalists often deploy what they think is an ace card, which basically amounts to them floating the idea that although living things may appear to be designed, they actually aren’t.

They declare that its mechanisms (namely natural selection and genetic mutations) are able to account for the brilliant engineering we see inside living things. The big picture is that life started off very simply and then gradually built up, acquiring new genes for forms, functions, and features as time went by.

Billions of years ago, the only living things on Earth were single-celled organisms similar to bacteria.

Humans, and all forms of life, have evolved from these primitive ancestors. Over time, countless changes in the shape, size and function of various parts of the body gave rise to new forms of life—from ants to amoebas, hummingbirds to humans. These evolutionary changes have resulted from changes in DNA and the information it contains.1

In essence, they believe nature can achieve the same things that thinking minds can—given enough time—so instead of believing in intelligent design, they believe in unintelligent design. No amount of evidence seems persuasive to those who wave design arguments away with the magic wand of “billions of years” as the supposed explanation. As British Darwinian philosopher, humanist, and rationalist Helena Cronin put it,

All this apparent design has come about without a designer. No purpose, no goals, no blueprints. Natural selection is simply about genes replicating themselves down the generations. Genes that build bodies that do what’s needed—seeing, running, digesting, mating—get replicated; and those that don’t, don’t.2

Cronin made that claim in 1997 in a special edition of Time Magazine titled “The New Age of Discovery,” but almost 30 years later, science has discovered much more about living things, some of which make her statements seem rather silly now. Life isn’t just about “genes replicating themselves.” In fact, life at its most basic level exhibits a unique property that only a thinking mind has been demonstrated to be able to produce. This fact strongly indicates the property has been there from the beginning, not the result of millions of years of tinkering. And that property is the ability to make coordinated decisions in real time, the proof of which we’ll get to shortly. Let me explain.

First, planned decision-making is very difficult to explain via naturalistic processes with no intelligent programming to account for it. After all, decision-making is a hallmark of a thinking mind that can problem solve using anticipatory behaviors and prior knowledge, as this ScienceDaily article3 conceded,

A key feature of intelligence is an ability to anticipate behaviours that that will lead to future benefits. Conventionally, evolution, being dependent on random variation, has been considered “blind” or at least “myopic”—unable to exhibit such anticipation.

And as the Berkeley University website puts it, “Natural selection . . . is mindless and mechanistic.”4

Automated Decision-Making

The question becomes this: How can a mindless mechanism create organisms that exhibit a quality known only to thinking minds? Now, some might say, “Wait a minute, decision-making processes can be automated, like AI technology, and they don’t need a thinking mind to operate. So perhaps the decision-making capabilities we see in living things coming about through naturalistic processes are justified.”

While decision-making can be automated, it is originally automated by someone. Systems like this have only ever been seen to have originated from an intelligent mind.

For example, most people drive cars with automatic transmissions today, so they don’t have to gear down or go to neutral when coming to a stop sign or shift up to gain speed on the highway. Their automatic transmission makes those “decisions” for them, so they don’t even have to think about it. But why is it able to do so, and how did those capabilities originate?

Well, although inventors as early as 1904 had put together automatic transmissions with varying degrees of success, it wasn’t until 1939 that General Motors produced the Hydra-Matic, the first commercially successful transmission. Utilizing a fully hydraulic system perfected by a team of elite engineers led by Earl Thompson, it began being mass-produced for the 1940 production line of Oldsmobiles.

Earl and his team essentially built an analog computer utilizing the physics of fluid dynamics. With limited electronics to rely on, they had to design a purely mechanical device able to perform analog logic, compare the car’s speed vs throttle pressure, and make decisions about when to shift and engage clutches. No one who saw these mechanical marvels in action would dare say that they weren’t designed, even if they had never seen or heard of them before.

Yet this other article from ScienceDaily discusses how scientists have discovered that some simple bacteria not only have the equivalent of an outboard motor on their back end to drive them around but also have a clutch to disengage their flagellum (a whiplike tail that spins facing backward at incredible speeds to move them) so that the bacteria can start, speed up, slow down, and stop when needed.

The action of the protein they discovered, EpsE, is very similar to that of a car clutch. In cars, the clutch controls whether a car’s engine is connected to the parts that spin its wheels. With the engine and gears disengaged from each other . . . the wheels are no longer powered.5

But Daniel Kearns, one of the scientists involved and an Indiana University biologist, chalks it all up to good old mindless matter doing its thing. He said, “We think it’s pretty cool that evolving bacteria and human engineers arrived at a similar solution to the same problem.”

Bacterium Exhibiting “Brain” Function

There’s a huge problem here with Kearn’s assessment. Again, human engineers have minds, but evolution doesn’t—evolution can’t make decisions and arrive at conclusions. And bacteria’s functionality goes far beyond simple motility, as this article from Caltech explains.

Much like you might follow your nose toward delicious odors—or away from bad smells—bacteria sense chemicals in their environments and move around accordingly using rotating tails called flagella. This process of detecting an external chemical signal and taking steps to move correspondingly is called chemotaxis.

“The chemotaxis system sniffs for chemical cues in the environment and guides the bacteria toward beneficial places and away from harmful ones,” . . . “Some consider this system as the ‘brain’ of the bacteria as it is a relatively simple and yet sophisticated mechanism for decision making—it tells the bacteria where to go. It does that by considering a multitude of different chemical cues, integrating the information, and comparing the current state of the environment with how it was a few moments ago.”6

To further understand, other scientists describe how these bugs are now known to operate:

Bacteria also actively probe the environment for information, by releasing molecular probes to measure conditions beyond the cell surface—telesensing. Perceiving the environment beyond is achieved by sensing environmentally induced changes in those probes. . . . This information, captured by chemical and physical changes induced in specifically produced molecules transiting through the environment, enable bacteria to mount a contextually appropriate response.7

Indeed, a Nature article described a certain bacteria believed to “represent some of Earth’s earliest inhabitants” can even “synthesize magnetic iron nanominerals, which function as tiny compasses that allow the microbes to navigate using Earth’s geomagnetic field.”8

So the point I’m making here is this: It’s not just that some bacteria have physical motors with clutches (which is mind-blowing to think about considering their size) and even navigational ability (which is even crazier to contemplate), it’s the fact that they decide when and how to use them based on input from their surroundings that is truly mind-blowing.

Far from a comparatively simple automatic transmission, bacteria is more similar to our Full Self-Driving vehicles such as a Tesla or automated taxis that are used in some cities. These automated driving systems—all incredibly advanced technology that we’ve only recently been able to achieve—mirror how a simple little bacterium navigates its environment.

Just like the car’s sensors gather external data, the bacterium’s receptors detect chemical signals. And just like onboard computers process information gathered from cameras and the vehicle’s control systems adjust steering and speed, so do cellular signaling pathways in the bacterium crunch data and adjust the movement and activity of the bug, such as metabolizing specific nutrients or as a flagellum motor changing its rotation to move it where it needs to go.

“Sentient” Constructs?

Some of these systems found in even the simplest of living things (even such as that inside degenerative9 Mycoplasma10) are so complex that evolutionists sometimes forego their materialistic bias when describing these functions and use more anthropomorphic-sounding terms that almost seem to give the game away:

We now understand that bacteria are highly sentient organisms with a sophisticated and diverse array of systems for sensing their surroundings. Rapidly accumulating genomic information shows that microbes in fluctuating environments are rich in two-component signaling and other sensing systems.11

Intelligent Programming Evident

To fully grasp this comparison, we must understand that our modern automated driving systems are deeply complex because they combine multiple layers of technology working together simultaneously. Sensors (like cameras, radar, or lidar—each extremely sophisticated in their own right) constantly analyze the environment, while powerful onboard computers run neural networks that interpret the data collected to identify lanes, vehicles, pedestrians, and hazards nearby. And for some, mapping and localization systems determine exactly where the car is in relation to its surroundings, while planning software decides what the car should do next (speed up, slow down, stop, turn, or change lanes). All while control systems convert those decisions into precise steering, braking, and acceleration inputs.

Keep all that in mind as you see how the Museum of Natural History at the University of Oxford describes what they believe bacteria are, “Bacteria are the simplest creatures we think of as being alive.”12

There is a crippling thing to the story of evolution regarding the increasing levels of sophistication we keep discovering in the “simplest” life-forms on the planet. If this decision-making capability was in living things from the beginning, then you don’t get to play your “billions of years” reverse card on the creationists as to how this ability came about through gradual, incremental steps over deep time. You are back to explaining Paley’s watch while disarmed of your “given enough time” drivel so common to evolutionary explanations.

Of course, we know evolutionists will say, “Bacteria today are not the same as they were back then and could have evolved these systems since then.” However, the problem is, no evidence supports that claim, as this Research in Microbiology paper confirms.

The oldest fossils found thus far on Earth are c. 3.49- and 3.46-billion-year-old filamentous and coccoidal microbial remains [i.e. ovoid-shaped bacteria]. . . . Life was relatively widespread and advanced in the Archean, between 3.5 and 2.5 billion years ago, with metabolic pathways analogous to those of recent prokaryotic organisms, including cyanobacteria.13

Life Is About Making Decisions

We are familiar with all of the claims by evolutionists saying that there must have been even simpler life-forms that preexisted these bacteria, so they can then argue that perhaps these decision-making abilities evolved during that original life-form’s slow evolution prior to them turning into bacteria. Except, all of that is sheer storytelling and conjecture as well. There are no fossils of them, no direct evidence. Just wishful thinking and speculation, which is not hard science of any sort.

Just look at this peer-reviewed paper discussing The Origin of Life and see if you can spot the difference between observed facts (what true science is based upon) and guesswork based on presupposition so often seen in evolutionary literature.

The earliest microfossils are those of the Apex chert in Australia, about 3.5 Ga [billion years] old. “Prebiotic” simulations of possible biochemistry have made some progress in recent years, but many obstacles remain, and there is no agreement as to the course of development. . . . Even more speculative are suggestions about the origins of metabolic sequences, in particular the origin of the genetic code. Since all modern organisms share this code (and many other things), there had to be a long history of development during the blank period of Earth history.14

Did you spot them? “Simulations . . . possible . . . speculative . . . suggestions . . . there had to be,” and yet, no hard evidence. And saying things like “there had to have been” (earlier life-forms) simply means it must be true if evolution is true, but that isn’t science, it’s just storytelling once again. Aside from the assumed age, all they have are fossils that look like bacteria today, which they admit to being the earliest life-forms ever found in their evolutionary timeline. So except for evolution-based conjecture, there is no reason to believe they were anything else but bacteria with the same capabilities as we see today.

If you’re still thinking, “Surely you’re wrong; the level of sophistication involved in our modern vehicles can’t be compared to something believed by many evolutionists to ‘represent some of Earth's earliest inhabitants,’”15 then tune in for Part 2 where we’ll continue demonstrating that what science is discovering in the most basic components of life have been revealed as so shocking it is causing many committed evolution-believing scientists to reject neo-Darwinian theory outright.