What Are the Chances?

In Northern Canada, Greenland, and Alaska, there are few natural landmarks, and heavy snow can homogenize a setting very quickly, making everything in your surroundings look the same. So the Inuit constructed these stone visages to communicate—whether as identification of what they considered sacred places, as directional signposts, or as markers for good hunting and fishing spots.

Although they have been assigned special meaning by their creators, when it comes down to it, an inukshuk is simply a structure of stones or boulders stacked on top of each other. But no one would look at one of these piles of rocks and conclude it happened by chance. Why? Because we know intuitively that they were obviously intelligently designed.

Designed Without a Designer?

For many people, especially in academia, the term “intelligent design” often elicits a negative reaction—kind of like mentioning tarot cards, flat earth ideas, or conspiracy theories. But why is that?

Well, naturalists have been declaring for decades now that life is simply the result of natural processes operating on matter and energy. These mechanisms somehow supposedly created creatures with minds, some of which (like us) have become self-aware and capable of creative design themselves.

But modern science is revealing a sophistication of design and biological complexity in living things that simply obliterates by comparison the most creative genius ever expressed by the human race in the fields of art and engineering.

In fact, so apparent is the design found in living things, even atheists have to admit to it. But they still attempt to skirt the obvious implication that design indicates a designer. As arch- atheist and anti-creationist Professor Richard Dawkins has said, “Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.”1

So while intelligent design is often scoffed at, the world finds quite acceptable the idea of unintelligent design. But the logical conclusion of their confident claims is that non-intelligence is far better at designing things than an intelligence is—better even than an intelligence “unintelligently designed” by it!

How then is it that even a child stumbling upon an inukshuk while walking along the northern tundra knows that it was designed with a purpose by someone with an intelligent mind?

What Mechanism Could Create “Unintelligent Design”?

Obviously, any attempt to propose that a naturalistic mechanism would arrange rocks in such an order would be met with complete skepticism, especially if someone had to risk something of value based on their guess.

For example, if someone was forced to wager their home over whether the rock effigy had been deliberately built by a person or randomly by a series of tornados combined with an earthquake or two (assuming there was some way of proving it), who in their right mind would bet on naturalism?

Of course, evolutionists make the hand-waving claim that over millions of years, mechanisms like natural selection could accomplish the incredible design we see in nature. They say that given the innumerable biological changes that would have been brought about along the way through inexplicably beneficial genetic mutations, the idea of unintelligent design is viable.

Indeed, the story of “evolution says that tiny changes in living things tht are useful to the organism (providing some kind of survival benefit) are retained”2 and then built upon. “This means [they believe] a bunch of smaller changes can result in big changes (like a leg into a claw or a claw into a ‘sonic gun’).”3 But of course, this is all theoretical, not observational science.

Just such an example came up on a documentary one time where host Jonathan Miller was discussing with Professor Dawkins the idea that on the way to becoming a feather, the scale of a lizard would at one point have likely been no more than a bump or a pimple in an evolutionary explanation.4 So, Miller asked “what advantage that might give a lizard (on its way to becoming a bird)?”5

JM: What was it about that early novelty, before it culminated in something as useful as a feather? Where could natural selection get its purchase upon something which was no more than a pimple?

RD: There cannot have been intermediate stages which were not beneficial. There’s no room in natural selection for the sort of, um, foresight argument, that says: “Well we’ve got to let it persist for the next million years and it’ll start becoming useful.” Er, that doesn’t work. There’s got to be a selection pressure all the way.

JM: So there isn’t a process, as it were, going on in the cell saying, “Look be patient—”

RD: No.

JM: “—it’s going to be a feather, believe me”?

RD: It doesn’t happen like that. Er, there’s got to be a series of advantages all the way in the feather. If you can’t think of one, then that’s your problem not, not, not natural selection’s problem. Natural selection um, err, well, I suppose that is a sort of matter of faith on my part since the theory is so coherent and so, and so powerful.6

As you can see, this means “Dawkins’ belief is based on faith”7 in a so-called theory, not on observation.

Genetic mutations have never been observed to create unique new forms, functions, and features that natural selection could act upon. It’s simply theoretical, and not even soundly theoretical at that.

Is Life from Non-life Plausible?

Evolutionists often dogmatically claim there are many plausible ways to explain life’s origin and yet still fail to provide one. But many intelligent people have challenged the idea—not based on what we don’t know—but rather what we do know about life based on scientific research.

For example, the British physicist and astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle made his case against a materialistic origin of life in this somewhat lengthy statement many years ago.

If there were a basic principle of matter which somehow drove organic systems toward life, its existence should easily be demonstrable in the laboratory. One could, for instance, take a swimming bath to represent the primordial soup. Fill it with any chemicals of a non-biological nature you please. Pump any gases over it, or through it, you please, and shine any kind of radiation on it that takes your fancy. Let the experiment proceed for a year and see how many of those 2,000 enzymes have appeared in the bath. I will give the answer, and so save the time and trouble and expense of actually doing the experiment. You would find nothing at all, except possibly for a tarry sludge composed of amino acids and other simple organic chemicals. How can I be so confident of this statement? Well, if it were otherwise, the experiment would long since have been done and would be well-known and famous throughout the world. The cost of it would be trivial compared to the cost of landing a man on the Moon . . . In short there is not a shred of objective evidence to support the hypothesis that life began in an organic soup here on the Earth.8

That was back in 1983. And yet 10 years later, both Time and Discover carried articles (“How Did Life Begin?” and “Onward and Upward?”) by evolution-believers discussing life’s origins with the following admissions, respectively.

One of these days . . . when someone fills a test tube with just the right stuff, a self-replicating molecule will pop up. . . .

Some people will always hold to the belief that it is a divine spark, not clever chemistry, that brings matter to life, and for all their fancy equipment, scientists have yet to produce anything in a test tube that would shake a Fundamentalist’s faith.9

Everybody knows that organisms get better as they evolve. They get more advanced, more modern, and less primitive. And everybody knows, according to Dan McShea (who has written a paper called Complexity and Evolution: What Everybody Knows), that organisms get more complex as they evolve. . . . The only trouble with what everyone knows, says McShea, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Michigan, is that there is no evidence it’s true.10

Evolution’s Silver Bullet—Information

Of course, as our knowledge regarding the complexity of DNA has grown even more over the past three decades, the silver bullet for believability of the story of evolution simply isn’t just in explaining how physical structures (like the shape of an inukshuk) might have come into being with no intelligence behind them. Indeed, the kill shot for the entire concept hits home when one realizes that each of these structures or systems (nervous system, blood clotting cascade, blinking of eyes, breathing systems, etc.) are all dependent on the copious amounts of genetic information residing inside all living things.

A person can simply look at what’s lying around and decide impulsively which rocks to pile together to create a somewhat random-looking humanlike shape. However, other living things do not assemble in that fashion. They are dependent upon a blueprint with coded genetic information that spells out all the information for the construction, operation, and maintenance of said creature.

Many evolutionists attempt to sidestep the need to explain such sophisticated designs with the idea of “simple to complex” (saying the original living things must have been far less complex, therefore coming about easily). But modern science is allowing us to see that the functionality going on inside the simplest living things on the planet is beyond our capability to fully comprehend, let alone duplicate.

So, the real question to ask naturalists is: where did all this coded genetic information supposedly come from without a mind behind it? Honest evolutionists like Professor Paul Davies (from the Australian Centre for Astrobiology) admit they don’t know.

How did stupid atoms spontaneously write their own software . . . ? Nobody knows . . . there is no known law of physics able to create information from nothing.11

And just in case people think Davies is some outlier in his thinking among the broader evolutionary community, the truth is far from it. Some of the most brilliant evolutionary scientists on the planet—several from Oxford university—are recognizing this as well.

As a matter of fact, the Voices of Oxford, along with outside investors, have set up a contest where the winner can claim a 10-million-dollar prize by solving what they believe is the foremost question in explaining life: “Where did the information come from?”12

And as the rules clearly state that only natural explanations are allowed, unsurprisingly, no one has claimed the prize.

Adding It All Up

So, just to be clear, evolutionists cannot explain how the first living thing supposedly got off the starting block and do not have a viable mechanism to explain how one kind of creature could supposedly change into a different kind of creature. And yet, we are supposed to simply nod our heads and agree that this is a superior explanation of origins than believing in a Creator?

Common sense tells us that if intelligent design is the most reasonable explanation for even simple designs like an inukshuk, there is no reason to believe vastly more complex constructs came about through no intelligence. That idea itself is unintelligent!

What Are You Willing to Bet?

Would you bet your life that something as relatively simple as an inukshuk somehow self-assembled? How about a scarecrow? A mannequin? A robot? Any thinking person would conclude that the more advanced the construction, the more intelligently designed it was.

And yet, millions of people have not only given up belief in God because of their having bought in to evolutionary, “unintelligent design” ideas, but they have rejected the offer of salvation through Jesus Christ for the payment of their sin because of it as well!

And for what? For some form of supposed intellectual credibility from their family, friends, and coworkers who have also acquiesced to these illogical ideas? 1 Corinthians 3:19 reminds us,

For the wisdom of this world is folly with God. For it is written, “He catches the wise in their craftiness.”

And 1 Corinthians 1:25 further explains,

For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.

It is wise not to ignore the truth because of the fear of what others might think. Scripture is clear that we should “not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell” (Matthew 10:28).

For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what shall a man give in return for his soul? (Matthew 16:26)