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Friday, April 25, 2008

Now this is something that should trouble the Darwinian establishment. In a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), researchers found “that a deficiency in an enzyme called pyruvate kinase, which is required for energy production in the body, provides protection against malaria infection."

Here’s the trouble: Darwinian evolution depends on the ability of unguided, naturalistic processes to build genomes over geological time scales. Note that the information content of the smallest genome would fill a 500-page book. (The instructions in the human genome would fill a 50,000 page book!)

The astute person will wonder how an unconscious process could lead to the creation of what amounts to a mini-library from scratch. The catechistic answer is that genetic words, sentences, and whole books are written through the creative power of genetic mutation. Mutations that have “cash value” in evolutionary “fitness” are accumulated over time, leading to an increasingly complex code of life.

It’s like believing that, given two hundred million years, a double-wide trailer could become the Taj Mahal from the combined influences of cosmic rays, wind erosion, tectonic movement and quantum effects. As any homeowner knows, it’s precisely such unconscious effects that lead to home deterioration, not home improvement. But, on occasion, even deterioration can have a beneficial effect.

Consider that double-wide in the tropics without air conditioning. A wind that wasn’t strong enough to destroy it, but sufficiently strong to blow out all the windows, could enhance creature comfort without any structural additions.

And that was what the researchers in the NEJM found. The enzyme deficiency needed for malaria protection, results from the suppression of genetic instructions rather than from their creation.

Increased “fitness” by the shuffling or suppression of existing genes, rather than by the accumulation of new ones, is a direct affront to gradualism. While that should rattle the ranks of the Darwinian faithful, their resiliency against such evidence never ceases to amaze.

Consider the "crystals" and "aliens" offered, in Expelled, as the best answers to the question of life's origin by their most celebrated evangelists. They may be still on the playing field, but the game is long over.

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Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Dawkins Recants After "Expelled"

In Expelled, Richard Dawkins does an unexpected turn-about...or does he? After stating that he didn’t know how life went live on earth, he suggests that it may have been jump-started with the help of super-advanced aliens—in other words, intelligent causation! But I thought that intelligent design was not a scientific theory—at least according to Judge John Jones and Darwinian evangelists like Dawkins.

Was Dr. Dawkins serious or did he misspeak? (He seemed, to this reviewer, quite uncomfortable at this point in the interview with Stein.)

According to Dawkins himself, he was merely handing an “olive branch to these people by pretending to take their ‘space aliens’ political ploy seriously.” Yep, that’s his story and he’s stickin’ to it.

I’m sorry, but that dog just won’t hunt.

Dawkins suggests that the intent of his “olive branch” was to contest ID “by setting up its most plausible version and dismissing it.” Problem is, he never dismissed the ET theory in the interview—without prompting by Stein, he offered it as a possible solution to the origin-of-life question without reservation or qualification.

In rapid retreat from his Expelled disclosure, Dawkins explains:

“Entities capable of designing anything, whether they be human engineers or interstellar aliens, must be complex—and therefore, statistically improbable. And statistically improbable things don't just happen spontaneously by chance without an explanation trail.” (Emphasis added.)

Dr. Dawkins, I think you’ve finally got it!. Wait, but no…

“In fact, natural selection is the very opposite of a chance process…”

Huh? Quite the contrary, Dr. Dawkins. As long as natural selection is fed by random variation (genetic shuffling and mutation) it remains very much a chance process.

“…and it [natural selection] is the only ultimate explanation we know for complex, improbable things.”

We “know"? I think you mean we trust.

“Even if our species was created by space alien designers, those designers themselves would have to have arisen from simpler antecedents—so they can't be an ultimate explanation for anything.”

Maybe you've got it after all! For since those "simpler antecedents," be they quarks, neutrinos or the quantum potential, have proven unable to account for the arrival of the first gene on earth, they can’t be the ultimate Explanation either.

Looks like that ET theory is not only a dog that won't hunt, but is one that has turned on its master.

What do you think about Dawkins' recantation? Comment here.

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Thursday, April 17, 2008

Academic Freedom Loses Again

For those who think that the object of science is to follow the truth wherever it leads, there’s this in from the AP: “Some scientists are urging Florida's Legislature to reject a bill that would protect teachers from being fired if they present information challenging evolution.”

If you’re wondering why any scientific theory should be immune from criticism in institutions which are supposedly training young people for critical thinking, it’s because the stalwarts of science orthodoxy have proclaimed, ex academia, that evolution is “a scientific fact” and that its alternative, Intelligent Design, is “religion posing as science.” Neither is true.

ID is a research program to discover, scientifically, whether the design in nature, universally acknowledged in the scientific community, is actual or merely apparent. ID does not deny the validity of evolutionary processes—only that naturalistic mechanisms alone are unable to account for the complexity of life. ID is based on scientific criteria and empirical data, similar to that used in fields like archaeology, to determine the authenticity of human artifacts; forensics, to distinguish death by natural causes from murder; and cryptography, to decide whether a collection of symbols is a random string of characters or a message of human origin. ID does not attempt to answer or address whether the designer is divine or extraterrestrial, mortal or immortal, or of natural or supernatural origin. The only attribute ID is concerned with is intelligence. Hence, contrary to all the fear-mongering since Dover, there is no religion being smuggled in with ID.

Darwinian evolution is another story. Despite the exercised assertions of the evolutionary establishment, Darwinian evolution is not a fact; it's a theory, and not a particularly scientific one at that, for several reasons:

1. The evidence trotted out in its support is fraught with holes (the fossil record), frauds (Haeckel’s embryology, fake fossils, staged peppered moths), intelligently designed and controlled experiments (Urey-Miller) or just-so stories to explain how a frog could turn into a prince after eons of random variation, adaptation and natural selection.

2. Everything it foists as a product of common descent—e.g., similarities in morphology and genomes—is better explained as a product of common design.

3. Its essential feature, macro-evolution, has never been observed or reproduced even in micro-organisms whose explosive rates of replication should virtually guarantee its validity. Thus, it has no predictive power and, consequently, has not contributed to a single technological or medical advance since it was conjectured 150 years ago.

4. In fact, Darwinian evolution has a tendency to be a science-stopper, as evidenced by the establishment’s readiness to label apparent inert portions of DNA (expected by the theory) as “junk.” As it turns out, those “inert” regions of DNA are increasingly being found essential in direct or indirect gene expression.

5. It is not dictated by the evidence or the science, or by reason of its technological usefulness, but by…theology. That’s right!

For those whose theology makes no room for God or the supernatural, naturalistic evolution promises to answer those BIG metaphysical questions of “How did I get here?” “And who am I?”

For others who desire a moral universe, but want to exonerate the Law-Giver from any culpability for the existence of evil, theistic evolution gives them a not-so-omnipotent or sovereign God who set things in motion, but has nary a clue as to how they’ll turn out or how to set the course straight. And since he’s not in total control, it turns out that he’s not too particular about those morals either.

If you doubt the religious underpinnings of Darwinism consider its . . .

Patron saint: Charles Darwin
Founding text: On the Origin of Species
Magisterium: The National Academy of Science
Holy day: Darwin Day
Sacred relics: humanoid fossils
Evangelists: Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Eugenie Scott, Kenneth Miller
Religious symbol: the Darwin fish plaque, available in assorted styles and colors

And--as this news item exposes, yet again--its unpardonable sin: “Putting other theories before Darwin.”

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Friday, April 11, 2008

The Witness of Creation--Part 1, Evidence from the physical world

“The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge.” (Psalms 19:1-4)

THE “CREATED WORD”
Among religious critics, God is a myth whose origin is traced to the irrational fears and silly superstitions of man. Beyond the imaginings of weak and gullible people, His existence is nil. For the believer, God is as real as maternal love.

A mother’s love is not a material object subject to scientific validation; yet it is communicated in material ways establishing a rational basis for belief. The same is true for God. Although the Creator is not a part of the physical world, He has nonetheless revealed himself through it. Like the artisan whose choices of media, colors, and brush stokes are his signature, God has created a masterpiece writing His name in every corner of the canvas.

God’s masterpiece is “The Created Word”—the corporeal fabric of spacetime through which the divine will is expressed. Of the various ways that God communicates, the Created Word is one (of two) that speaks to every person, directly.

In combination with the “Imprinted Word”—man’s inborn spiritual, rational, and moral dimensions—the Created Word comprises “general revelation.” It is general because it is universally accessible. Furthermore, it is directly accessible. In contrast to sacred texts, teachings and traditions that come through human agents, the Created Word issues directly from the mouth of God for every ear to hear and understand.

THE ELECTRON ORBIT
In a recent online discussion, a Christian asserted that evidence supporting Christianity can be found in every university department. To which one skeptic sniggered, “Well, then, please give me an example from the chemistry department that is best explained by Christianity.” The challenge had a certain swagger.

I jumped into the fray offering that the atom, the most basic component of chemistry, fit the bill. I explained that the atom is made up of a positively charged nucleus enshrouded in a cloud of negatively charged electrons—all in an unimaginably tiny space. The odd thing is, electromagnetic attraction should cause the atom to collapse almost instantaneously. Searching for an explanation, researchers scratched their heads raw before ascribing the oddity to the “quantum potential.”

But had they explained it? No. All they did was give it a lofty name—which is all they could do.

You see, physicists from Heisenberg to Hawking have acknowledged that nature’s innermost region is fundamentally unknowable. It’s not a matter of inadequate tools or techniques, but of the intrinsic opacity of the subatomic world. As quantum pioneer Neils Bohr once admitted, “The quantum world cannot be fully understood nor can physical meaning be applied to its wave-function description… quantum mechanics only explains the external observations. It tells us nothing about the internal structure.”

That is a bracing admission; but Mr. Bohr should have gone one step further, for surely he recognized that without knowledge of that “internal structure,” even those “external observations” cannot be explained, only described.

We can attribute subatomic weirdness to the “quantum potential” or the “guiding hand of God,” but only the latter offers an explanation which, as it turns out, accords nicely with the Christian claim: “The Son is the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word” (Hebrews 1:3).

My example didn’t go unchallenged. The interlocutor granted that “God,” as well as any number of things, could be conjectured, but how is He the best explanation for the electron orbit. Moreover, how could a particle physicist distinguish the Christian God from a pagan deity?

THE BEST EXPLANATION
I reminded him that since the electronic orbit was not explainable by naturalistic science, the most reasonable conclusion is that it is due to something beyond nature (transcendent).

Then I mentioned another interesting thing about the quantum potential: According to field theory, it is thought to be the warp and woof of spacetime. In an invisible gossamer-like web, the quantum potential fills the cosmic expanse. It is a wellspring of unimaginable energy fueling the material world and giving birth to exotic particles that continuously emerge and disappear within the folds of the cosmic fabric.

Together, these characteristics suggest a cause that is transcendent, omnipresent, and omnipotent. While Eastern gods are omnipresent and Greco-Roman gods are transcendent, neither are omnipotent; only the Christian God is all three. He is the One who is “over all, through all and in all” and by whom “all things were made.”

At this point another skeptic objected that if a supernatural agency was at work, it ought to be scientifically verifiable. It’s a common (and logically flawed) charge.

A LOGICAL DISCONNECT
In a 2004 PBS panel discussion, Michael Shermer, editor-in-chief of Skeptic magazine, challenged a Christian physician to explain how God raised Jesus from the dead. As Shermer saw it, the resurrection should conform to what is medically possible, and as a medical professional, the physician should have some idea as to how it was accomplished. In point of fact, it’s quite the opposite.

If the supernatural could be explained by naturalistic science, it wouldn’t be supernatural. It is right to expect that a world created by supernatural Benevolence be governed by laws that make life predictable. But since those laws are fashioned by Supernature and not the other way around, Supernature can never be reduced to the orderly patterns observed.

While Supernature interlocks with nature and, at times, manifests itself in nature to give us a sudden, unexpected glimpse, it has no obligation to conform to the laws of nature. Thus, if we are honest, we would expect a barrier to our investigative pursuit—a point beyond which we could probe no further. And that is exactly what we find.

Although our analytical journey ends in opacity and mystery, we have discovered laws that enable us to build skyscrapers, launch satellites, and surf the internet. And, in the process, we’ve noticed some very peculiar things about our cosmic home.

WITH US IN MIND
Imagine driving cross-country and stopping in a town you’ve never been. Gritty, tired and hungry, you look for a motel, and then,

“There’s one! Just beyond that stop light. The sign reads . . . ‘VACANCY.’”

You pull up, check in, and take the key card.

“Room 1028. That’s my birthday, October 28th. Neat!”

Upon opening the door, your jaw goes slack.

A copy of your favorite painting, Van Gogh’s “Avenue of the Poplars in Autumn,” is hanging on the wall; your favorite aria, “Mio Babbino Cara,” is playing on the radio; there’s a basket stuffed with all of your favorite snacks; the complimentary toiletries are the exclusive brands that you buy; and spread out on the coffee table are the latest editions of Golf Digest, Numismatist News, and Skeptic—periodicals that you had been waiting eagerly to read back home.

The set of coincidences is so unlikely that any reasonable person would assume that the motel staff knew you were coming. And yet the coincidences in our cosmic home are far greater in number and in precision. In fact, researchers have identified dozens of features that have to be just the way they are for life to exist.

For example, the formation of stars depends on a narrow range of values for the gravitational and nuclear forces; and without stars, there would be no habitable planets. The formation of atoms hinges on the strength of electromagnetism and the masses of the electron, proton, and neutron. If these were varied by more than a small amount, chemistry and biological life would not be possible. Astronomer Hugh Ross has catalogued nearly 60 such conditions, including many involving our solar system such as:

The size, temperature, and brightness of our sun
The fact that we have one moon and not more or less
The distance of the Earth from the sun
The Earth’s axial tilt and rotational period
The time it takes the Earth to orbit the sun

The odds that all 60 could come together by chance is 1 in 10⁶⁰(that’s 1 followed by 60 zeros!), about the same chance as landing heads on 200 consecutive coin flips.

On top of that, our position in the universe—not too close to the center of the Milky Way and not too far out, and nestled between two of its spiral arms—is the ideal location for making astronomical observations and discoveries. Some have dared called Earth the “privileged planet.”

We are left with one of two conclusions: our Goldilocks home is a happenstance of mind-numbing improbability or . . . it is a creation meticulously crafted by Someone who had us in mind.

He who created the heavens,
   He is God;
   He who fashioned and made the earth,
   He founded it;
   He did not create it to be empty,
   but formed it to be inhabited

He says,
   “I am the Lord
   And there is no other.” (Isaiah 45:18)

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Friday, April 11, 2008

The Witness of Creation--Part 2, Evidence from the living world

“For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities—His eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.” (Romans 1:20)

THE WONDER OF LIFE
Life is the most awe-inspiring feature of the universe. Living things have the unique abilities to metabolize, grow, reproduce, respond, and adapt to their environment. Discovering how the universe “went live” is the grail of origin-of-life studies.

Nearly 150 years ago, Charles Darwin put forward a theory of life involving innumerable, small changes accumulated over geologic periods of time. Through the holy trinity of random variation, adaptation, and natural selection, the tree of life sprouted and grew with ever-increasing diversity and complexity. Today’s life forms are the fruits of branches that won out over their neighboring limbs in the fierce competition for sun and sap.

While Darwin explained the survival of species, what many people don’t realize is that he never explained the arrival of species. His theory assumed the existence of a common ancestor from which all living organisms descended. Darwin wrote his celebrated On the Origin of Species at a time when the biological cell was thought to have the complexity of grandma’s homemade jelly. But that notion would soon change.

A CELLULAR FACTORY
Over the next century, advances in electron microscopy and x-ray diffraction revealed a structure beyond anything Darwin could have imagined.

As it turned out “grandma’s jelly” is packed with data storage media, information processors, molecular machines, transcription devices, and error correction systems. Inside a bubble of microscopic dimensions a genetic code directs the assembly and repair of cellular components.

Even more amazing, each cell is encoded with addresses, routing directions, and instructions for assembling into one of 200 cells types.

In essence, the living cell is a tiny, self-sustaining biological factory.

Imagine discovering an unmanned space station that 1) manufacturers the equipment it needs to probe deep space, 2) monitors damage done to it by asteroids, 3) repairs the damage, 4) constructs its own spare parts, 4) makes copies of itself and 5) directs those copies in an intergalactic network to optimize exploration. Would any straight-thinking person reason it to be the product of an unguided, haphazard process? Hardly.

And yet the engineering of the biological cell is equally astonishing—down to its most fundamental component, DNA.

COMPLEX SPECIFIED INFORMATION
DNA is the famous double-helix structure that contains the instructions for life. Functioning like the hard disk on your computer, DNA stores the software that controls the construction and maintenance of biological systems.

Cell instructions are written using a chemical “alphabet” of four base molecules—adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G), and thymine (T)—segmented according to functional units called genes. The complete code consists of hundreds to tens of thousands of genes that, in turn, consist of thousands to hundreds of thousands of letters. Even the smallest organism requires nearly one million molecules to “spell out” all of the necessary instructions.

Each molecule attaches to the strand in identical fashion; which means that the DNA sequence, like letters in a sentence, is not determined by its chemistry.

As Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address is not reducible to the chemical reactions between ink and paper, neither is the “complex specified information” (CSI) of DNA a product of chemical laws. That leaves two options: blind chance or design.

Consider the simplest life form, a bacterium—the odds of its million-molecule-long instruction coming about by trial-and-error is about one in 10^600,000. If written in standard notation, that’s a number big enough to fill 300 pages in a book!

Those are crumby odds, to be sure, but in a 15-billion-year-old universe that should be doable, right? Wrong. As I have shown elsewhere, even considering the age and expanse of our universe, there hasn’t been nearly enough time or space to allow for the formation of the smallest gene, much less the smallest genome.

So if CSI is inexplicable by natural laws or chance, it must be a product of design. In fact, the evidence for design is so overwhelming that atheist and DNA co-discoverer Francis Crick warned: “Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved.” Reminds me of another warning I’ve read about people who are “ever seeing but never perceiving” (Acts 28:26).

IRREDUCIBLE COMPLEXITY
From genes to organisms, life also exhibits “irreducible complexity” (IC). A system is irreducibly complex if it has multiple interacting components which are essential for the system to function.

At the genetic level, DNA depends on amino acids and proteins which, themselves, are manufactured by DNA. At the cellular level, cell survival depends on a membrane, DNA, RNA, and assorted cellular machinery. At its most fundamental level, life exhibits an interdependency that cannot be explained by gradualism.

Moving up to organs—the eye, blood clotting and the bacterium flagellum are examples of IC. Each depends on a host of integrated parts which, if any is missing, render the system non-functional.

For instance, the flagellum is a motorized propulsion system made up of 40 different proteins enabling a bacterium to navigate in its aquatic environment. Its onboard components include a stator, rotor, bushings, U-joint, and a propeller that can turn over 1000 rpm and reverse directions in one-quarter revolution. The flagellum is, as Harvard biologist Howard Berg describes it, “the most efficient machine in the universe.” Let that sink in for a moment.

For the Darwinian faithful, the flagellum is a big problem. Any organism whose fitness depends on 40 integrated, co-existent parts, spells trouble for gradualism. However, after years scrambling to keep this pillar of faith from crumbling, evolutionary scientists made a discovery.

They found that the needle-like structure of salmonella used to infect healthy cells was made up of seven proteins identical to those in the flagellum. The similarity was taken as “strong evidence that the two systems evolved from a common ancestor,” and that a partial flagellum could have had a viable function during its evolutionary development.

Come to think of it, my mountain bike shares many similarities with my Ford Escape: both have wheels, brakes, gears, and are made of a metal frame. Yet, who would dare suggest that given enough time, the creative effects of quantum “fizz,” cosmic rays, and wind erosion could morph my bike into an SUV? No reasonable person would imagine such a thing—despite the fact that an SUV comes nowhere close to being “the most efficient machine in the universe.”

COMBINED SPECIFIED COMPLEXITY
Living organisms also depend on numerous functional systems—each, irreducibly complex—for survival. Because of “combined specified complexity” (CSC), a dog can live to a ripe old age without its tail, but it won’t survive a moment without a central nervous system, heart, lungs, or brain.

According to Darwin, land creatures began their evolutionary journey in the sea. To survive in water, they needed gills, but to move to land they needed lungs. A fish with lungs would drown, but a mammal with gills would suffocate. And that’s only one of over 50,000 morphological changes needed for the transition.

Because of the glacial pace of evolution, Darwin’s theory is difficult-to-impossible to verify. In fact, the only changes that have ever been observed are small-scale variations due to genetic inheritance and adaptation; otherwise known as micro-evolution. But one place where large-scale changes (macro-evolution) should be demonstrable is in the microbiology lab. There researchers have access to billions of organisms whose rapid replication allows follow-up for many thousands of generations. One such organism is Plasmodium Falciparum, the single-celled parasite responsible for malaria.

For several decades, researchers have studied Plasmodium Falciparum, applying various environmental pressures to see how it responds. Yet after trillions upon trillions of replications—many more than occurred in the evolution of fish to mammals—the bacterium never evolved into a multi-celled organism. It remained what it had always been: a single-celled parasite which, in some cases, developed a resistance to anti-biotic drugs.

Similar results have been obtained with other microbes and drosophila. While none of these studies disprove Darwinism, they are strongly contraindicative of its macro-evolutionary claims.

Richard Dawkins once wrote, “Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.” Maybe that’s because, to the unbiased seeker of truth, they have been designed for a purpose. Indeed, even Francis Crick was forced to admit,

“An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be a miracle.”

That was 27 years ago, and all the knowledge we have accumulated hence, has only made those “appearances” look all the more actual.

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About Regis Nicoll

Regis Nicoll

Freelance Writer, Speaker, Worldview Teacher, Men's Ministry Leader