How did life get started?

The next section of I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist deals with the design of life. It focuses particularly on the most difficult problem of all for Darwinists – where did the first life come from?

The authors point out that the first problem when talking about evolution is in its definition. Darwinists make no distinction between microevolution and macroevolution, and thus use the evidence for micro to prove macro. Microevolution has been observed (changes within species), but it can't be used as evidence for macroevolution, which has never been observed (the evolving of one organism into another kind of organism). Natural selection, the device Darwinists say that powers evolution, has never been observed to create new types.

There are five reasons the authors list to explain why natural selection can't create new life. For one thing, there seems to be genetic limits built into basic types of animals. For example, dog breeders create different kinds of dogs, but the dogs always remain dogs. Secondly, the change that occurs within types of animals appears to be cyclical rather than directed toward the development of new life forms. The two authors use an example of Darwin's finches, which were noted as having varying beak sizes depending on the weather. No new life forms came into existence; only the beak sizes changed in these birds. The third reason involves something called irreducible complexity. Living things are filled with molecular machines that are irreducibly complex, meaning that all the parts of each machine have to be completely formed and in the right places and in the right size in the correct operating order at the same time for the machine to function. The authors use as an example a car engine, which needs so many systems to operate together for success. These complex biological systems could not have developed in a gradual Darwinian fashion because intermediate forms would be nonfunctional. All the right parts must be in place in the right size at the same time for there to be any function at all. A fourth problem with natural selection is the non-viability of transitional forms. The authors use as an example the Darwinian assertion that birds evolved gradually from reptiles. Such a change would necessitate a transition from scales to feathers, but how could a creature survive that no longer has scales but does not quite have feathers? A creature with the structure of half a feather has no ability to fly. Finally, the authors discuss molecular isolation. If all species share a common ancestor, the authors indicate we should expect to find proteins sequences that are transitional from fish to amphibian, for example. That's not what is found. Scientists have discovered that the basic types are molecularly isolated from one another, which seems to preclude any type of ancestral relationship.

But Darwinists say the fossil record supports their position – does it? It actually lines of better with supernatural creation. There aren't missing links – there's a missing chain. Nearly all the major groups of animals known to exist appear in the fossil record abruptly and fully formed in strata from the Cambrian time period. This is been called the Cambrian explosion or biology's Big Bang. This, of course, is completely inconsistent with Darwinism. There's no evidence of gradual evolution but of instantaneous creation instead.

Again, I'm going to quit at this point even though I have not finished the chapter in the book. There's plenty here to think about.

Total truth--Darwinism on trial

In the next section of Nancy Pearcey’s book, Total Truth, she deals specifically with Darwinism. She believes that so much of what is wrong today in American society goes back to how we see the beginning of life on earth. The Christian perspective is that God created everything; the Darwinian view says matter randomly assembled itself without any overall design or plan. The crucial thing to realize is what Darwinism does for the concept of truth. If evolution is true, than both religion and philosophical absolutes (goodness, truth, and beauty) are false.

She begins by showing how limited the evidence for Darwinian evolution really is. First, evolutionists trot out the idea of Darwin's finches, showing the beak size differs according to the habitats where they live. However, this is nothing but a cyclical fluctuation; the birds were not evolving into a new kind of bird. Beak size either grew or went back to a smaller size depending on the amount of rainfall. This was cyclical, not heading anywhere. The same thing applies to resistance of bacteria and viruses to antibiotics. Once the drugs are removed, the changes reverse. Then there are fruit flies -- exposed to radiation, they produce many mutations. After fifty years of bombarding fruit flies with radiation, scientists have not managed to turn them into any kind of new insect or even a new and improved fruit fly. The fourth case Pearcey discusses involves peppered moths in England. Supposedly, dark moths survived in England rather than light colored moths because of soot which during the Industrial Revolution darkened tree trunks where the moths perched. The lighter colored moths were easier for birds to pick off. This has been touted as the showcase example of natural selection. Oops – it can now be revealed that the moths don't actually perch on tree trunks in the wild. But what about all the pictures of them doing so in textbooks? Actually, scientists glued those moths onto the tree trunks. Perhaps the most famous fake was a well-known exhibit of vertebrate embryos lined up side-by-side -- fish, amphibian, reptile, bird, and human. The point of the illustration is to show how similar all the embryos are, suggesting common ancestry. It turns out the creator of this, Ernst Haeckel, fudged his sketches, making them look far more similar than they really are. Scientists in his time, more than 100 years ago, already knew these illustrations were fakes, yet only recently have they publicly been talking about them. Strangely enough, these illustrations still show up in biology textbooks.

These examples illustrate a flaw in the standard Darwinian argument. The essence of Darwin's theory is that minor adaptations (microevolution) can be extrapolated over vast periods of time to explain major differences in groups of animals (macroevolution). But small changes simply don't add up the way the theory requires. In 1980 there was a landmark conference on evolution held at Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History. Paleontologists reported at the conference that the fossil record does not, and never will, support the Darwinian scenario of a smooth, continuous progress of life forms, nicely graded from simple to complex. What do the rocks show? Forms appear suddenly, with no transitional forms leading to them, followed by long periods of stability where there is little change or none at all. Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard, a popularizer of evolution and science, called this "the trade secret of paleontology."

Something important is going on here, Pearcey says. She believes smart people tout evolution not because of the evidence but because of philosophical reasons. They have already committed themselves to what is called philosophical naturalism -- nature is all that exists, or at least the natural forces are all that may be invoked in science. Once people have made that commitment, they can be persuaded by relatively minor evidence. There’s no good reason science has to be run according to philosophical naturalism. It didn’t used to be—scientists followed the evidence, no matter where it led. Now the playing field has been changed. Only naturalistic answers may be given. So, based on this set of parameters, evolution is the best choice, despite its problems.