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 the former Governor General in Canada: “In the speech, she questioned how it was still possible that people believed that ‘divine intervention’ created life.”
Incredible, isn’t it? One of the 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 the 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.”
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.
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.
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.
Well, yes, detectives observe facts but can’t repeat the historical events that led 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 social media 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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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?
To determine whether something has been designed, we should use this formula: Determine whether the end product is greater than that of its component parts. If it is, you can accurately conclude that it has been designed. For example, it would be reasonable to believe that even someone who’d never seen a pencil before could determine it had been designed, because its component parts (wood and pencil lead) in their natural forms (trees and graphite/clay) do not contain the information for the specific shapes (hexagonal and tubular) they are in as a completed pencil for example. But when someone attempts to apply the same formula to living things, naturalists object to the concept.
For example, some evolutionists will point to examples of self-organization in crystals or snowflakes as proof that unique, one-of-a-kind designs can come about through natural processes. Take this (rather sarcastic) example posted by a typical internet atheist on the Facebook page titled Creation VS Evolution.
For those who want to talk about irreducible complexity and evidence for design, take a good look at this [a picture of a snowflake]. Could it ever have been the product of any natural process? Look at all the irreducible complexity! It requires knowledge of mathematics, geometry, and physics. Clearly snowflakes could never [have] simply “emerged” from a natural process. They must be specially designed, all of them (since they are virtually all unique).
But ice crystals and snowflakes, no matter how beautifully designed they may appear, do not disprove the formula we discussed. Why? Because (in our snowflake example) H2O already contains the natural ability to be arranged in various six-sided patterns when subject to below-zero temperatures due to its inherent properties. Water crystals always form six-sided shapes. Unlike our pencil example I mentioned earlier, nothing new needs to be added to the system for snowflakes to form, as an updated 2022 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration article explains:
Q: How are snowflakes formed?
A: A snowflake begins to form when an extremely cold water droplet freezes onto a pollen or dust particle in the sky. This creates an ice crystal. As the ice crystal falls to the ground, water vapor freezes onto the primary crystal, building new crystals—the six arms of the snowflake.
That’s the short answer.
The more detailed explanation is this:
The ice crystals that make up snowflakes are symmetrical (or patterned) because they reflect the internal order of the crystal’s water molecules as they arrange themselves in predetermined spaces (known as “crystallization”) to form a six-sided snowflake. . . .
Q: So, why are no two snowflakes exactly alike?
A: Well, that’s because individual snowflakes all follow slightly different paths from the sky to the ground—and thus encounter slightly different atmospheric conditions along the way. Therefore, they all tend to look unique, resembling everything from prisms and needles to the familiar lacy pattern.
To make the point even sharper, let’s think about the last example they mentioned: the “lacy” pattern often seen in snowflakes. That lacy pattern in a snowflake could easily be compared to a lace doily or other macrame creation. But there isn’t anything inherent in the component parts of a doily (such as cotton, twine, or hemp) that would arrange themselves into that intricate pattern by natural forces of any kind.
Would subjecting cotton, twine, or hemp to freezing temperatures, driving winds, excessive heat, or any other natural phenomenon cause it to arrange itself into a unique, lacy pattern such as those seen in a snowflake? Of course not. Snowflakes arrange themselves because of their component parts’ (water molecules) inherent, God-given qualities—doilies don’t. Someone had to add intelligence to the component parts that make up the doily in order for the end product to be arranged the way it is.
DNA Doesn’t Know Anything
Unfortunately for our naturalistically minded friends, the chemicals that make up DNA do not contain any special superpowers that could have caused them to arrange themselves into the most sophisticated coded language system we have ever seen. This is also true of the myriad of other biological molecules that make up living things—they don’t have any inherent powers to naturally become any of the mind-boggling systems we observe.
As this Oxford University Press blog points out, the component parts of DNA are really nothing special. DNA only contains information because of the arrangement it has, not because of the sugar, phosphates, and bases it’s made of.
The biological information stored in a DNA molecule depends upon the order of its building blocks—that is, its sequence. . . . Indeed, it is the concept on which written communication is based: each sentence in this blog post is composed of a selection of items—the letters of the alphabet—appearing in different sequences. These different sequences of letters spell out different words, which convey different information to the reader.
Do you see what they admit here? Just like the information found in a book isn’t the product of the ink it is carried on, but rather how that ink is arranged, the information in DNA isn’t the product of the component parts but of the arrangement of those parts. They fully admit that the information contained in DNA isn’t derived from its chemical makeup.
There is nothing that special about the atoms found in a molecule of DNA: they are no different from the atoms found in the thousands of other molecules from which the human body is made.
Just like a pool of ink has no inherent ability to arrange itself into meaningful sentences, so the chemicals that make up DNA lack the inherent ability to arrange themselves into the incredibly complex and meaningful structure they do. Instead, the machinery within living organisms follows a program that enables DNA to function, comparable (yet leagues apart in terms of sophistication) to a modern computer system, and everyone knows that programs require a programmer.
Nothing Simple About It
As our science continues to advance, the incredible complexity of even the so-called simplest of living things is becoming more apparent every day. Take this quotation from biochemist Dr. Michael Denton:
To grasp the reality of life as it has been revealed by molecular biology, we must magnify a cell a thousand million times until it is twenty kilometers in diameter and resembles a giant airship large enough to cover a great city like London or New York. What we would then see would be an object of unparalleled complexity and adaptive design. On the surface of the cell we would see millions of openings, like the port holes of a vast space ship, opening and closing to allow a continual stream of materials to flow in and out. If we were to enter one of these openings we would find ourselves in a world of supreme technology and bewildering complexity.
Doesn’t seem very simple, does it? You see, the naturalistic idea that life evolved from simple to complex is nonexistent and certainly not observable today. Living organisms—even the simplest—are not “simple” in any sense of the word. As a matter of fact, evolutionary scientists have admitted that the simplest living things that we study today are actually degenerate versions of even more complex original organisms, as this article explains:
Although the mycoplasmas are often called atypical bacteria because of their salient characteristics, for minimal cell purposes, the exact opposite is true. Mycoplasmas . . . did not evolve as simpler forms of life. They are not ancient bacteria found at the base of the tree of life. . . . They did not originally evolve with small genomes and the other unusual features. Rather, they descended from conventional bacteria of the Firmicutes class (e.g., Bacillus subtilis or Staphylococcus aureus) through a process of massive gene loss.
Indeed, living things don’t range from simple to complex—they actually start off so staggeringly sophisticated that they are not even fully comprehensible by scientists at this point, as the article goes on to say.
Richard Feynman’s statement “What I cannot create, I do not understand” (quoted in Gleick 1992), which has become a mantra for the synthetic biology community, is applicable here. Until we understand all aspects of the minimal cell well enough to build computational models that can replicate minimal cell biology, we do not understand the cell.
Interestingly, Nobel laureate Jack Szostak (while at Harvard Medical School) made this truly incredible statement in an article discussing the possibility of scientists creating life in a laboratory: “We aren’t smart enough to design things, we just let evolution do the hard work and then we figure out what happened.”
Every new study of even the “simplest” living thing reveals that naturalists must believe matter (with no mind) somehow increasingly created more of the kind of biotechnology that even the collective greatest minds on the planet cannot.
Incidentally, the title of that article was “Artificial Life Likely in 3–10 Years,” and it was written in 2007. And like the doomsday predictions of climate change alarmists are ever-changing, so are these predictions from scientists declaring they will soon be creating life in a lab. Of course, if they ever did craft an experiment that created life, all they would be proving is that it takes intelligence to do so anyway, not random processes.
Evolutionary Explanations Are Falling Apart
And all of this is why more honest origin-of-life researchers such as D. L. Abel are beginning to ask tougher questions and are making paradigm-shaking comments such as the following:
We have spent much of the last century arguing to the lay community that we have proved the current biological paradigm. Unfortunately, very few in the scientific community seem critical of this indiscretion. One would think that if all this evidence is so abundant, it would be quick and easy to falsify the null hypothesis put forward above [his null-hypothesis referring to whether life could come about through naturalistic processes]. . . .
. . . Science has an obligation to be honest about what the entire body of evidence clearly suggests. We cannot just keep endlessly labeling abundant evidence of formal prescription in nature “apparent.” The fact of purposeful programming at multiple layers gets more “apparent” with each new issue of virtually every molecular biology journal.
Indeed, this purposeful programming he mentions is now often described as the interactome, which refers to the complete network of interactions in living things and represents the dynamic web of communication that occurs among the entire collection of molecules within organisms. This includes protein binding, protein-DNA regulation, signaling pathways, metabolic reactions, and many other molecular relationships that coordinate cellular activity.
And as scientists have admitted, the gamut of sophistication inside even the degenerate examples of the simplest living organisms we can study is beyond the scientists’ ability to fully comprehend or create. So as time moves on, evolutionists are running out of options as far as their ability to explain how life evolved, as those who’ve done the research have seen that the old natural-selection-plus-genetic-mutations model has pretty well collapsed. These mechanisms absolutely fail to demonstrate the results they are supposed to have been able to produce.
Is Evolution Intelligent?
Evolutionists’ efforts to keep the “creationist wolves” at bay have now reached peak desperation. And one of the best examples of this I’ve ever seen comes from a Science Daily article I read a few years back. The article reports on research from a paper published in the science journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution, which attempted to grant evolution some truly extraordinary abilities. To begin, they explained the following:
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.
Well, yes, “conventionally” (as in, anyone with an iota of intelligence would tell you), matter has no mind or intelligence, and only minds can anticipate or formulate plans that can provide future benefits. In a 2004 interview, atheist champion of evolution Richard Dawkins put that idea to bed when asked the very same question as to whether evolution had some kind of foresight or anticipatory power. He responded,
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.” That doesn’t work.
However, this 2015 article went on to say,
Evolution may be more intelligent than we thought, according to researchers. In a new article, the authors make the case that evolution is able to learn from previous experience, which could provide a better explanation of how evolution by natural selection produces such apparently intelligent designs.
The first time I read that, I nearly fell out of my chair in disbelief. After collecting myself and continuing to read, I thought this statement perfectly capped off their musings regarding the story of evolution.
When we look at the amazing, apparently intelligent designs that evolution produces, it takes some imagination to understand how random variation and selection produced them.
The Story of Evolution
Yes, indeed it does. It takes an immense amount of imagination and, to be honest, for those who’ve examined the evidence for themselves, sheer credulity at this point to believe in the story of evolution.
So, for those of you who are still struggling under the weight of believing “science has disproven the Bible,” just remember that evolution isn’t science in the sense most think it is. It’s actually just as the evolutionists I’ve quoted here have admitted. It’s a “historical narrative.” A “tentative reconstruction” that “takes some imagination to understand.” The bottom line is, it’s actually just a story to explain our existence without God.
As Dr. Michael Ruse—the now-deceased agnostic philosopher of (mainly evolutionary) science from the Department of Philosophy at the University of Guelph in Ontario, CA—once wrote,
Evolution is promoted by its practitioners as more than mere science. Evolution is promulgated as an ideology, a secular religion—a full-fledged alternative to Christianity, with meaning and morality. . . . Evolution is a religion. This was true of evolution in the beginning, and it is true of evolution still today.
Although some may have concluded Dr. Ruse’s comment was a tad hyperbolic back in the day, just look at the vast majority of criticisms against belief in God and his Word that we see in Western culture today. The unhinged zeal of the (predominantly Marxist) atheists out there fighting against the foundational doctrines of the Christian faith—such as the concept of created norms regarding identity, the attempted removal of traditional (biblical) marriage and family, the destruction of the unborn and infirm, and the outright hatred toward the idea of moral absolutes—is founded on the idea that God does not exist and that man decides truth.
Even though they are running out of options, the story of evolution is their foundational belief and doctrine because, without it, they could not justify their entire ideology. So despite the inescapable evidence of design in nature that is becoming more evident with each new study, some evolutionists are assigning God-like powers to mindless matter and positing that it can somehow think and plan.
It’s just as Romans 1:25 says: “They exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator.”
