CREATION

The problem we face today is the numerous and diverse interpretations of this created realm that exist. The only way one has to approach this topic is logical and allow our curiosity to fire our determination to seek answers. Children use to have an instantiable appetite to look for answers about things around them. In the past, kids would spend hours dismantling toys to find out why things work and then reassemble it again. Unfortunately, children, today are inundated by surroundings that have silenced their inherited curiosity to find out how things work—saturated by the materialistic world and stimuli run by microchips, programs, and computer gadgetry. Any attempt to seek knowledge of how it works would require a degree in technology and computer field. Desire knowing has been quenched to a state of indifference, that the new generation today accepts what is being fed to them. Even the source of knowledge today is placed within the corridors of virtual computer superhighways, and internet searches and downloads have dictated any need or desire to learn or expand an individual’s intellectual development or enrichment. Unfortunately, much of this knowledge is filled with opinions and commentaries by farfetched unrealistic, irresponsible, conspiracy-driven advocates that distorts supported factual, evidential, scientific, philosophical, theological commentaries and conclusions. There is no limit to the amount of information anyone can excess and the wide range of different viewpoints of any topic available today.

However, one needs to backtrack and focus on precisely what we are seeking and its reasons. There are many accepted topics that an individual can endeavor in his search for answers. Our focus must be direct and uncompromising as we explore the evidence to the in-depth understanding of the Creation story. When we look at the Creation story, we will realize that many world views look at Creation as a mythical or divine pronouncement. We basically cannot argue that view because they base it on faith and generations of indoctrinated teachings.
Interestingly, they seem to lead to a point when there was nothing, and their was-Creation and Theisms falls within this pronouncement in their beliefs. There is a fundamental similarity amongst theistic beliefs. There is but one arena that denounces this belief. Atheist and, to some extent, agnostics, though their expression of their thought, are not convinced of this claim. The focus of their support in their argument is linked directly to the sciences. The field of science in its many arenas has endeavored to make God extinct. Many of us believe that science represented empirically, the hard facts that things could be proven experimentally, and that was how many looked at life and people who had faith, people who believed in supernatural things like God, were seen as a sign of weakness because we knew that science had the data to back it up.

Laboratory scientist

In early 1953 at the University of Chicago, Stanley Miller, a graduate chemistry student, tried to demonstrate how life first emerged on Earth. Miller attempted to reproduce the Earth’s early atmosphere. He pumped hydrogen, methane, ammonia, and a small amount of water vapor into a maze of glassware and then sparked the gases with electrical discharges to simulate lightning. After five days, he discovered what he had hoped, for a few simple amino acids, the basic building blocks of living organisms, had collected in the dark residue at the bottom of the glass. Many hailed Miller’s experiments had proven that life’s essential components could have formed in the Earth’s oceans billions of years ago. The philosophical implications of Miller’s experiment were instantly apparent to many, and it was a Eureka moment because many heard and thought, what if we can scientifically show that life can emerge without any outside assistance. If life can emerge just from naturalistic circumstances, then God was out of a job. From there, the acceptance of Darwinian evolution and full-blown atheism, for that matter, was pretty easy because if the living organisms could emerge by themselves out of this primordial soup without the assistance of any kind of a God or supernatural intervention, then they certainly could develop naturally over the eons. Just as Charles Darwin had theorized in his book, ‘The Origin of Species,’ it is the more and more complex creatures that began to establish credibility, and many began to embrace Darwinism and its atheistic implications. It was surprising that many theists believed their faith was compatible with Darwinian evolution, but there is no way to harmonize Neo-Darwinism with theism. We never understand how they would say, well, we know we believe in God, yet we believe in evolution. Darwin’s ideas about the development of life led to his theory that modern science now generally defines it as an undirected process. Utterly devoid of any purpose or plan. Now how could God direct an undirected process? Or how could God have a purpose and a plan behind a system that has no plan and no purpose? It just does not make sense. It did not make sense to some people in 1966, and it still does not make sense now. There is one question that remained constant, does the evidence uncovered by contemporary science point us toward or away from the existence of God.

Linus Carl Pauling

Two-time Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling once said that science should be the search for truth, and that is what we must do and look at where the evidence was ultimately pointing to and allows us to uncover the truth about God and what it reveals will shock and stun us. We need to begin our search by examining evidence that challenged materialistic theories of life’s origin, what; we discover that this negative evidence contradicted the textbook explanations that had once convinced many of the blind forces of evolution that could account for the Creation and diversity of life on Earth. An excellent example of negative evidence is the 1953 origin of life experiment by Stanley Miller. This experiment leads to an explosion in atheism. Biologist Jonathan Wells, an American Molecular Biologist, noted that Miller’s experiment had now is thoroughly discredited. Stanley Miller put together a glass apparatus, and in that apparatus, he put a mixture of gases that people at the time thought reflected the atmosphere of the early Earth and those gases were methane, ammonia, hydrogen, and water vapor, but then the professional opinion of what was there on the early Earth changed in the 60s. Geochemists revised their hypothesis and decided that the hydrogen being very light would have escaped into outer space.

The Earth’s gravity is not strong enough to hold it, and the early Earth’s atmosphere then consisted of what we now see coming out of volcanoes today, namely carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and water vapor. If the early Earth’s atmosphere consisted of those gases, Stanley Miller’s experiment would not work. He tried it with those gases, and he found that he could not produce any amino acids at all. So the experiment falls apart once we use a more realistic mixture of gases in the apparatus. Miller’s test repeated many times using the correct atmospheric components, of which the results are always the same. The amino acids that generated so much enthusiasm in 1953 do not appear. Even if Miller’s experiment were valid, we still light years away from making a ‘life.’ It comes down to this, no matter how many molecules you can produce with early earth conditions. Plausible conditions and we are still nowhere near producing a living cell. Subsequently, when we take a sterile test-tube and put in a little bit of fluid with just the right salts, just the right balance of acidity and alkalinity, just the right temperature, the perfect solution for a living cell and place in it one living cell. This cell is alive, and it has everything it needs for life. Then we take a sterile needle, and we poke that cell, and all its stuff leaks out into this test tube but only results in a nice little test tube with all the molecules we need for a living cell. Not just the pieces of the molecules but everything within the molecules themselves, and we still would not create a living cell out of them. We cannot put Humpty Dumpty back together again. So how would we be able, with a few amino acids dissolved in the ocean, to create a living cell? It is unrealistic.

Alexander Ivanovich Oparin

Stanley Miller’s experiment was not the only unsuccessful attempt to explain how life originated. Beginning with Russian biochemist Alexander Oparin, who authored his book ‘The Origin of Life’ in the 1920s, theorists have also proposed chance, chemical attraction, and natural seeding from outer space as possible answers. Each has failed to account for how non-living chemicals could have arranged themselves into the first living cell’s most essential components. The only conclusion is that materialistic explanations for the origin of life were deeply flawed. The examination of negative evidence did not end with the question of early life—the apparent weaknesses in the most celebrated icon of Darwinian evolution. In Darwin’s book and the Origin of Species, there is only one illustration called the Tree of Life. Darwin uses it to explain how every animal and plant species that ever existed on Earth had evolved from the same common ancestor through small gradual steps over enormous periods even though Darwin’s Tree of Life included in virtually every biology textbook published over the last half-century.

Contrary to what we were informed, there is no conclusive evidence of all life’s common origin. Perhaps the most damaging blow to Darwin’s theory is the fossil record. If all living organisms have descended from the same primitive life-form, then the Earth’s rock strata should be filled with the fossilized remains of animals that were once part of a great evolutionary chain. A chain of small biological modifications ultimately led to a spectacular diversity of life, yet after two centuries of research, highlighted by excavations in southern China. The multitude of transitional experiments or missing links that should exist is conspicuous only by their absence. The most graphic example of this void in the fossil record is a geological era known as the Cambrian explosion. Darwin’s theory’s branching tree pattern is not seen anywhere in the fossil record unless we impose it with our minds. So the Cambrian explosion is the most dramatic refutation of the Tree of Life. A Cambrian explosion of life was a dramatic episode in geological history. It usually dated at about 530 million years ago. The exquisitely preserved Cambrian fossils reveal that the body plans for virtually every major animal phylum (the primary subdivision of a taxonomic kingdom, grouping all classes of organisms with the same body plan) appeared not gradually and slowly as Darwin had speculated but instead with astonishing suddenness.

When we imagine the whole history of life on Earth taking place in one 24-hour period, the current standard estimates for the origin of life put it at about 3.8 billion years. When we start the clock than our 24-hour clock, six hours nothing but these simple single-celled organisms appear the same that we saw in the beginning. Twelve hours later, the same thing, 18 hours the same thing, 3/4 of the day has passed and all we have with these simple single-celled organisms. Then at about the 21st hour, in the space of about two minutes, most of the significant animal forms appear. In the form that they currently have in the present, many of them persist in the present, and we have them today less than two minutes out of 24 hours. That is how sudden the Cambrian explosion was. The animal kingdom leaps from small, relatively simple organisms to extraordinary creatures with spinal cords, ‘compound eyes,’ and articulated limbs in a geological instant. The record of this explosion of life looks nothing like Darwin’s slowly branching tree. Darwin’s theory is that there is a tree of life where we have one organism diverging into many other organisms and significant differences appearing at the top. What we see is from here up; this does not exist in a fossil record. Using a botanical illustration, it would be along with separate blades of grass sprouting independently of each other, and those would be the phylum now. There is subsequent diversification within each phylum, but even there, we cannot see the branches connecting that would make them a tree of life. A scientist cannot force the evidence into a theory that just does not fit it, and so we can conclude that there is no reason to uphold Darwin’s theory.

Darwinian ‘Tree of Life’

At this point, it can conclude that what we see today is a series of scientific discoveries that are opening the eyes of more and more scientists. The growing number of them now no longer believe that pure naturalistic processes can account for the origin and diversity of life. There must be something else here. The challenges to Darwinian theory have led more than 600 scientists with Ph.D.’s from major universities throughout the world to sign a document titled ‘A Scientific Descent from Darwinism’ it reads that we are skeptical of the claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. These are scientists with PhDs from Stanford, Berkeley, University of Chicago, and Cambridge, major universities looking hard at the evidence and walked away saying we are not convinced. Maybe there is another explanation. However, these declarations thus highlight the negative evidence to conclude that Darwinism would require a blind leap of faith that many just had no good reason to make Darwinism and materialistic science reject Darwinism based on a large body of positive evidence for intelligent design evidence. When confronted in the science of cosmology, which explores the origin of the universe: How did the universe begin? What is its Source? Few questions have generated as much controversy over the centuries or inspired as many impassioned opinions. In an interview, William Lane Craig, an American analytic philosopher, and Theologian devoted much of his career to cosmology and the question of origins. We see that from ancient Greek materialism at the time of Plato and Aristotle up through 19th-century idealism; the prevailing view was that the universe is eternal and that the universe never began to exist. The universe as a whole was a static, timeless entity.

Albert Einstein

Edwin Hubble

Edwin Hubble studied light from distant galaxies. Hubble determined galaxies beyond our Milky Way are moving away from us at speed proportional to their distance from the Earth. The more distant the galaxy, the faster it is receding. Hubble’s landmark discovery led most astronomers and physicists, including Albert Einstein, to a similar conclusion. That the universe is continually expanding, then at earlier points in its history, it must have been smaller and denser and ultimately stopping when nothing existed. At this point, which cosmologists called the ‘Singularity,’ all matter and energy, physical space and time themselves came into being; this represents the origin of the universe from nothing. Therefore, Hubble’s discovery’s startling implication was the temporal finitude of the universe, that the universe had an absolute beginning at some point in the finite past. During the second half of the 20th century, other discoveries also pointed to a universe with a beginning. Images of the cosmic microwave background radiation document what most scientists now believe are the remnant heat generated during the universe’s early history. Background radiation is found throughout the cosmos and indicates its expansion from a sudden, perhaps violent moment in time. This evidence for a finite universe has reaffirmed the conclusion of an ancient philosophical deduction. It is called the ‘Kalam Cosmological Argument.’ The Kalam argument is deceptively simple in its formulation. It consists of basically three steps.

THE KALAM COSMOLOGICAL ARGUMENT

Premise One is that whatever begins to exist has a cause. Something cannot come into being uncaused out of absolutely nothing. Premise Two is that the universe began to exist, and the remarkable development that has occurred. We now have, for the first time, concrete scientific evidence for the truth. Of that second premise, the universe began to exist, and from those two premises, it follows logically, the third premise, that the universe has a cause of its existence; whatever begins to exist has a cause. The universe began; therefore, it has cause for its existence, and that points to a reality beyond the universe. Transcendent reality beyond space, time, and, therefore, is non-physical and immaterial, which created the universe out of nothing and brought it into being. The implications of a finite universe and other modern cosmology discoveries have led many scientists to unmistakeably theological conclusions. There is no ground for supposing that matter and energy existed before and suddenly galvanized into action. It is simpler to postulate creation ex nihilo Divine Will constituting nature from nothingness. The chain of events leading to man commenced suddenly and sharply at a definite moment in time in a flash of energy and light. We cannot understand the universe in any straightforward way without the supernatural. A supernatural creation of the universe in a flash of energy and light sounds an awful lot like the first chapter of Genesis.

Deep Space series. Design composed of nebula, stars and colors as a metaphor on the subject of astronomy, science, space and religion

Today the vast majority of even the most skeptical astronomers and cosmologists believe that the universe had a beginning. This belief, indifferent to some theological doctrine, is based on scientific evidence. When we follow the evidence wherever it points, it points clearly and powerfully and persuasively in the direction of a ‘Creator.’ Since the beginning of time, all the matter in the universe governed by precisely balanced laws and constants. Dr. Robin Collins, a philosopher with degrees and mathematics and physics, highlights how these laws offer compelling evidence for a creator and conspire to make the universe habitable for life. The laws of physics are balanced on a Razors Edge for life to occur. If we did not have something like gravity that pulled matter together, we would never get planets. We would not get stars; we would not get any complex organisms. If we did not have a strong nuclear force, there would be nothing to hold protons and neutrons together in the nucleus, so we would not have any atoms. No chemistry if we did not have the electromagnetic force, we would have no bonding between chemicals. We would have no light, and the list goes on. We need all these fundamental principles to be in place in order for life to occur. Wipeout one of those principles, wipe out one of those laws, no life. We begin to learn that life also hinges on the specific strengths and relative values of many different physical constants.

One example of this fine-tuning is the force of gravity. Imagine a ruler divided up into 1-inch increments and then stretched across the entire universe a distance of some 14 billion light-years. For illustration, the ruler represents the possible range for gravity; in other words, the setting for gravity’s strength could have been anywhere along the ruler, but it just happens to be situated in precisely the right place so that life is possible. Now, if we were to change the force of gravity by moving the setting just one inch compared to the entire width of the universe, the effect on life would be catastrophic. No large-scale life forms could exist anything that was more than the pea’s size would be completely crushed. So we might be able to get a life of a very primitive level, such as bacteria, but we could never get a conscious life. The strength of gravity is just one of at least 30 separate parameters that must be finely tuned to produce a life-sustaining universe.

Another example is the cosmological constant. The cosmological constant describes the expansion speed of space in the universe. If space expands too
quickly then the universe will spread out so quickly that material objects cannot form. So we cannot get stars and galaxies and planets and the types of things that we, of course, take for granted in our universe. Physicists have determined that the cosmological constant fine-tuned to one part in a hundred, million, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion. Such precision has been compared to traveling hundreds of miles into space then throwing a dart at the Earth and hitting a bulls-eye, measuring one trillionth of a trillionth of an inch in diameter. An area that is less than the width of a single atom Just consider those two parameters; gravity and the cosmological constant, their level of fine-tuning is to a precision of one part in a hundred million, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion minutes. Like one atom in the entire known universe. This fine-tuning is also evident at the atomic level. The strong nuclear force would bind atoms together if this force’s strength were to decrease by one part and ten thousand billion, billion, billion, billion the only element left in the universe would be hydrogen again. Chemical life would not be possible. The fine-tuning of physics laws and forces is so precise that few theorists are comfortable invoking mere chance as an explanation unless our universe is not the only roll of the dice. If the universe looks fine-tuned for complicated life, maybe there is a fine tuner. Maybe it was fine-tuned for life, and this has specific unsavory theological implications. So it is not surprising that those committed to a fundamentally materialistic view of reality would try to find an escape hatch, and the most famous escape hatch for this theological implication of fine-tuning is this idea of multiple universes.

As its name suggests, the theory of multiple universes proposes that our universe is not alone. Instead, it is part of a vast ensemble of universes. Each with a different set of laws and constants. If there is only one universe and then the conclusion that the universe looks fine-tuned because it is ‘fine-tuneda’ is inescapable, but if our universe is just one of a vast set, it would seem there are more resources to manipulate. Chance gets a new lease on life. It is difficult sometimes to imagine what physicists have in mind when they try to postulate this idea of multiple universes. It would mean that there would use a generator that creates them that would look like a giant monolith with dozens of different dials, each of which has to set to the right physical constant. When we accept these parameters, each of the dials is different; we would eventually produce enough universes with enough different dial settings. Where a chance that we would get one just right, so we might have to produce a trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion universes. Sooner or later, we would eventually, if we have a generator that was spitting out just an enormous number of them, then it gets the right dial setting and then by just chance we get conditions right for life. So it is a vast cosmic lottery. That is the idea, albeit an exciting idea, but there is only one problem with it. There is no independent evidence that it is true. Besides, it just pushes the question back a step because we could still ask who built the generator. The suggestion of multiple universes strikes many as a desperate attempt to explain away the obvious: the universe fine-tuned by intelligence to sustain complicated life. In intelligence, it must be beyond the constraints of time and space.

PLANET EARTH FROM SPACE

When we consider the journey through a fine-tuned universe for life, we are inevitably led home to our solar system’s blue jewel, the planet Earth. There we encounter another array of critically balanced conditions essential to human existence. When we are an atheist, it makes us, the planet Earth as being one of probably billions of planets just like it all over the universe; we see our Sun as being an average undistinguished type of a Sun. When we look up at the stars at night, we realize that there must be millions and millions of advanced civilizations out there. There is an ordinariness to our existence. This reasoning line was consistent with many atheistic worldviews, but what w learned is that the view is not consistent with what science is revealing about the Earth. The investigation caused many who were searching to consider the many conditions necessary for a life-sustaining planet. In the process, introduced to the science of astrobiology and the astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez, who is an astrophysicist, once quoted, “I am an astrobiologist and what motivates me is just to examine the conditions necessary for life. While look elsewhere in the universe and see if those conditions are met anywhere else and the answer could be yes and the answer could be no and either answer is interesting.”

For more than a decade, Guillermo Gonzalez has researched the characteristics of a planet required to support complicated life. Estimates vary, but a current list of these factors would be several at least 20 factors, including an oxygen-rich atmosphere, liquid water, and large continental landmasses, home star of the right temperature and mass, an orbital path that is neither too far nor too close to the home star. A moon large enough to stabilize the tilt of the planet’s axis and the movement of its tides. A magnetic field strong enough to deflect the Sun’s radiation and a position in the relatively narrow habitable region of a spiral galaxy. Factors have to meet at one place and time in the galaxy; if we have a planet as habitable as the Earth, we need complicated and even technological life. Theorists have attempted to calculate the odds of all the necessary factors for life appearing simultaneously on the same planet. A conservative estimate is one chance in 10 to the negative 15th or one-one thousandth of one-one trillionth. On those terms, even when compared to the billions of Suns and possible planets in our Milky Way galaxy, the probability of even a single habitable world appears unlikely. There are many probabilistic resources in the galaxy but on the other side of the coin are all these factors that we need; we have to get just right in order to have just one habitable planet like the Earth, and that leads to a conclusion that we are extremely rare in the galaxy.

Gonzalez’s study of the Earth’s habitability led him and colleague Jay Richards to expand their research scope. They began to examine how a life-sustaining planet like Earth would also give its human inhabitants access to the mysteries of the universe. We do not think there has ever been a time in the history of the human race in which at least some people have not contemplated these questions. We asked why we can see distant galaxies millions of light-years away in the universe. Why can we postulate what is going on inside atoms or black holes? Why are we able to discover things about the universe? Answer questions about its age; most scientific discoveries could make these sorts of things unexplainable. In terms of the survival of the fittest of our distant ancestors, not only our ability to do science but the openness of the natural world to science just completely outstrips the reductionist and Darwinian explanations that we are used to in response to this evidence. Richards and Gonzales have argued that our ability to make scientific discoveries is no fluke or accident; instead, it points to an underlying purpose behind the universe. We ultimately designed for discovery. Gonzalez spent several years pursuing a hypothesis that those rare things that life needs in a planetary environment that make a planet habitable also set up the best set of conditions overall for scientific discovery.

There are many examples of this correlation, including our planet’s oxygen-rich atmosphere. Both a critical requirement for our survival and a transparent window allows us to explore the distant universe. The Earth’s precise distance from the Sun and the size of its moon and home star are factors that not only control our planet’s temperature, axial tilt, and the movement of its tides they also ensure perfect solar eclipses. Phenomena provided scientists invaluable data about the composition of stars and the properties of light, and our location in the Milky Way and the Earth, position between two spiral arms within a relatively small region, is possible as a result. We enjoy an excellent platform for transparent, unimpeded views of our galaxy and the rest of the cosmos. The intentionality of everything points eloquently to a God, a habitat for us that allows us to see him through the Creation that he is left behind, and this habitat is conducive for us to do scientific research. It did not have to be that way, but it is why we find God by doing science.
As we explore the deepest reaches of the cosmos, the microscopic universe of the living cell, and the science of biochemistry, we encounter more challenges to Darwinian evolution and new design evidence. Throughout the second half of the 20th century, spectacular technologies revolutionized scientific understanding of the cell, the basic unit of life.

MICHEAL J BEHE

Biochemist Michael J Behe, findings based on this new knowledge had shaken the foundations of Darwin’s theory in the 19th century. When Darwin was alive, scientists thought that the basis of life, the cell was some simple blob of protoplasms like a little piece of ‘jello’ or something that was not hard to explain at all, but with the hard work of science in the 20th century, it has been revealed that the cell is far from simple. It has very complicated molecular machines and things that are very resistant to Darwinian explanation. Michael Behe has devoted his career to the study of the design and operation of the cell. He has also written extensively on the biochemical challenge to evolution. Most people have no idea of how small and complex cells are a typical cell us. Called a eukaryotic cell (cells that contain a nucleus and organelles and are enclosed by a plasma membrane.), is a tenth of the size of the head of a pin, and yet in that single cell, there are about three billion units of DNA making out the chromosomes and those three billion units make the molecular machines of the cell. Machines that make the cell work. When we can enter the cell, the staggering complexity of its molecular machinery is known. It is like going into an automobile factory, a factory that has a large number of machines. The parts have to fit together in particular ways to do their jobs, or things will go wrong. The cell is in big trouble, and just one cell is enormously complex. A Human, made up of trillions of cells, and those trillions of cells have to fit together in the right way and do their job. Darwinism was a lot more plausible when we thought about protoplasm globs than when we are thinking about molecular machines. Each of these biochemical machines is a masterpiece of engineering and nanotechnology. They are essential to functions as vital and diverse as vision photosynthesis and energy production in the cell. Michael Behe has studied several of these machines, including the flagellum.

EUKARYOTIC FLAGELLUM

A tremendous rotary motor many of us remember seeing for the first time we looked in a biochemistry textbook and a drawing of something called a bacterial flagellum with all of its parts. It had a propeller and the hook region and a drive shaft and a motor, and it looked like an outboard motor was designed without any chance of assemblage of parts. Michael Behe’s reaction was not surprising significantly when the bacterial flagellar motor magnified more than 50,000 times to display its construction and operation details. Howard Berg at Harvard has labeled it the most efficient machine in the universe. These machines are running at a hundred thousand RPMs and are hard-wired into signal transduction or sensory mechanism to get feedback on the environment. Tail proteins act like propellers, causing the flagellum to rotate, push against the water, and push the bacterium forward. The motor uses the flow of acid from the outside of the cell to power the cell’s turning.

FLAGELLUM

The bacterial flagellum has two gears, forward and reverse. The water-cooled proton motive forces it like a stator or coil. It has a rotor, and it has a driveshaft. It has a propeller. It is not convenient that we give them these names, but that is genuinely their function. About 40 different proteins are required to build a flagellar motor, and half of them are constructor proteins specialized mechanisms that assemble the individual flagellum components. Since its discovery, biologists have tried to understand how a superb design machine could have arisen gradually without foresight or plan through the biological pathway Darwin had envisioned. Darwin was trying to show that things that look designed are not design but that we can find natural processes to account for life’s complexity.

Darwin theorized that every part of every living organism evolved through natural selection, a blind process that acts upon random changes in the cell. Darwin believed that given enough, these random variations would transform the most superficial cells into the great diversity of life that inhabits our planet. In his study of evolution and molecular machines, Michael Behe has raised a significant challenge to the creative power of Darwin’s mechanism of natural selection. Called ‘Irreducible complexity,’ Irreducible Complexity was coined by Michael Behe to describe these molecular machines that we have are multi-component parts to any given organelle system in a cell. All of these are necessary for function; if we remove one part, we lose that system’s function—irreducible complexity, illustrated by a familiar non-biological machine, a mousetrap. The trap is composed of five essential pieces a catch to hold the bait, a strong spring, a thin bent rod called the hammer, a holding bar to secure the hammer in place, and a platform upon which the entire system mounted. If anyone of these parts is missing or defective, the mechanism will not work all components of this irreducibly complex system that must be present simultaneously for the machine to perform its function, catching mice. The concept of irreducible complexity also applies to biological machines, including the bacterial flagellum. Forty different protein parts are necessary for this machine to work, and if any of those parts are missing, then either we get a flagellum that does not work because it is missing the hook or it is missing the driveshaft or whatever, or it does not even get built within the cell. We cannot put something like that together gradually because they need a large number of parts interacting with each other at the same time before they work.

Without the tools to observe the cell’s machinery and long before the idea of irreducible complexity, Charles Darwin offered a way to test his theory in the Origin of Species. He wrote that if it could demonstrate that any complex organ existed, numerous successive, slight modifications could not have formed that, the theory would break down. Darwin acknowledged that if someone identified a biological system that could not have constructed-in incremental steps over long periods, his theory would be invalid. What Michael Behe and others have discovered is the existence of biological machinery that cannot be explained away by Darwinian processes. Darwin’s failed predictions have falsified his theory of the existence of complex biological machines, raises an obvious question if natural selection was not the agent of their construction, then what was the centerpiece of the argument?

Philosopher of science Dr. Stephen Meyer, who holds a Ph.D. from Cambridge University, introduced the most efficient information processing system in the universe. The DNA molecule in its language of life. The discovery of the information-bearing properties of DNA and RNA is a fundamental challenge to all materialistic theories of the origin of life. Neo-Darwinism and its associated theories of chemical evolution and the like will not survive the biology of the information age: the biology of the 21st century, Myers’s conclusions, based upon his understanding of the DNA molecule, and the genetic instructions that locked within the nucleus of living cells. In 1953 when Watson and Crick elucidated the structure of the DNA molecule. They discovered that DNA was a carrier of genetic information in the form of a four-character in digital code. That is to say that DNA functions like a software program only more complicated than anyone has ever created or devised. For a biological system to run and operate, it needs genetic information to build the proteins and protein machines that cause the cells to maintain their function. The information store in a precise arrangement of four chemicals that scientists represent with the letters A, C, T, and G. Sequences of these chemicals provide the instructions necessary to assemble complex protein molecules that help form structures as diverse as eyes, legs, wings, and hearts. This code is called the language of life, and it is the most densely packed and elaborately detailed assembly of information in the known universe.

DNA STRUCTURE

Geneticist Michael Denton estimated that the amount of biological information necessary to build all of the proteins in all of the species of organisms that have ever existed on planet earth could hold in a single teaspoon, and we would still have room left over for all of the information contained in every book ever written. As we begin to understand about DNA, the more we understand the significance of what Steven Mayer called the most fundamental question facing biology today. Where did the information inside the DNA come from? How did it arise in the first place? Many people have wanted to explain the origin of information by reference to the laws of physics and chemistry or by reference to the chemical properties of the constituent parts of the DNA, but that would be like saying that we could explain the information in this morning’s New York Times headline by reference to the physics and chemistry of ink bonding to paper. A chemical explanation of why the ink sticks to the paper, but that does not explain how the ink got arranged to convey a message understood by speakers of the English language.

MICHAEL DENTON

Information requires a material medium, but it transcends the material medium; an explanation for the origin of the genetic instructions needed to build the first life is the holy grail of the 21st century. Biology theories proposing that this information arose through natural selection acting upon non-living molecules or the self-organizing power of chemicals in a primordial soup have repeatedly failed. Even time and blind chance, they often vouch for saviors of plausible biological scenarios that have fallen far short as accounts for the source of the instructions in DNA. Mathematicians, for example, calculated that a universe filled with monkeys typing relentlessly throughout the oldest estimated age of the cosmos would have no realistic chance of producing Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet, let alone a transcript of the genetic information required to build even the simplest living thing. Based on our uniform and repeated experience, based on all scientific reasoning about the past, there is only one known cause for the origin of information: intelligence. Whether we are looking at a hieroglyphic inscription, a section of text in a book, or computer software, we come to intelligence if we have information and trace it back to its source and variable. Therefore when we find information inscribed along the backbone of the DNA molecule in the cell, the most rational inference based on our repeated experience is that some kind of intelligence played a role in that information’s origin. The scientific evidence’s implications, coupled with Myer’s logic, are profound if we find information inside every cell and every living creature. Could that not be, in a sense, the signature of a Creator? Thirty centuries before science unlock the mysteries of genetic information before telescopes probe billions of light-years into space, the Hebrew Shepard and poet David wrote eloquently of a Creator who revealed his existence and power through all that he had made the heavens, declare the glory of God, the skies proclaimed the work of his hands. Day after day, they pour forth speech; night after night, they proclaim knowledge, and their voice goes out to all the Earth. Their words to the end of the world. God, Himself is invisible; he is a spirit, and yet one of the purposes he has for us is to find him so we can know him, and he has left behind a series of clues, and sometimes we have to take our blinders off and get beyond our presuppositions. Say wait a minute, “I am going to pursue the evidence of science wherever it points and if it takes us to a very uncomfortable conclusion that there is a creator then if the evidence points in that direction that are the way I am going to go according to law.”
In mainstream media, the theory of intelligent design is a faith-based idea, and in saying that, they want to dismiss it as something that has no basis in science, but the media has confused a fundamental issue. They are confusing the evidence for the theory with the implications of the theory; the theory of intelligent design may well have implications that support an atheistic belief, but the theory is not based on theistic belief but based on the discovery of digital code in cells. Miniature machines and cells, the fine-tuning, physics and chemistry laws, and standard ways of scientific reasoning about the remote past in the history of life are questions that plague us today. Forty years ago, a lecture and a high school biology class could convince an inquisitive mind that there was no God. Ironically, years later, science has itself given that same mind a choice in pursuing the truth based on scientific evidence that can lead many to a belief in a creator. One of the most exciting things we have learned on this journey of scientific discovery has been that we do not have to commit intellectual suicide to conclude that there is an intelligent designer because today, science is pointing more directly and more powerfully toward a creator than any other time in the history of the world. To respond to the truth, we have to take a step of faith in the same direction that the evidence is flowing, logical, and rational. We do that every day of our life. We take steps of faith based on the evidence that we perceive, and so it was the most logical and rational step to take and put our faith in the Creator.

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