I just don’t get it. If I watch a nature show on the BBC or Nature or some such network and see amazing videos of amazing creatures (For this, I thank the videographers and the networks, sincerely.), I sicken of hearing, over and over, ad nauseum, how Nature or Evolution provided this and that creature with the tools to survive or mate or do whatever the creature is doing. Now, if one were to ask a person how this is done, he or she would say, “It happens over time, millions and millions of years.” That’s it. That’s the answer. We dreamily imagine foggy time and grand, magical nature, and, there it is.
Case closed.
Now go away, you science-denying Neanderthal.
Recently, I had a discussion about evolution with an agnostic evolutionist. Nice guy. He had the same answer to my questions about how creatures evolved that I wrote above. So, I asked, “Do you realize how much that sounds like magical thinking to me?” He quickly answered, “Do you realize how much of what you believe sounds like magical thinking to me?”
I responded, “Looks like we’re both magical thinkers.”
Yes. I am a Christian, and I will go ahead and admit that to an atheist or agnostic, when I say that the sovereign Lord God created all things, it sounds like magical thinking to them. What I wish such a person would confess in return is that their “scientific” answers sound like magical thinking as well. I wish they would acknowledge that they don’t have the answers to how the fantastic creation we see around us every day came into being instead of stating it as fact.
Let’s start with what is called the Big Bang. This is a puzzle for which they simply have no answer. “Ex nihilo nihil fit.” “Out of nothing, nothing comes.” It is true, isn’t it? But here we are, with time and gravity and mass and electromagnetism and quarks and neutrinos and dark energy and dark matter and nuclear fusion and Goldilocks Earth and all living things.
Living things. This is the next one they simply cannot answer. Oh, they answer, readily enough. The Primordial Pool. Time plus chance. We go to foggy, magical dreamworld. Some organic materials globbed together and, um, lightning struck, and, um, well, something happened. The Spark of Life.
Three major problems here. What they say “just happened” has never been duplicated in a laboratory. All these wonderfully intelligent scientists—I’m not being sarcastic—they really are wonderfully intelligent—with all the technology available, cannot create life from adding electricity to a murky, globby pool. What astounds me is that they think that even though they cannot do it with intelligent, creative minds and tech, that it just happened without an intelligent, creative mind.
The second major problem is that, in order for a creature to pass down its characteristics to the next generation, genetics must be in play. But how do genes evolve? If a glob in a murky pool struck by just the right amount of electricity from lightning (A bit of a stretch if you think about it. Perhaps you’ve noticed that creatures struck by lightning are always affected negatively.), sparked to life, how would it pass on its “life”? Genetics would have to evolve within that very first “creature.” How on earth would that happen?
The third ginormous problem is genetic mutations which evolutionists maintain lead to positive evolutionary changes. If we close our eyes and go to dreamy, magical-thinking world, we can somehow believe that, given millions and millions of years, there was one mutation that was positive which lead to another mutation which was positive and so on. But how does a wing evolve? A bump on some creature? How does that increase the creature’s ability to survive? How does an eye evolve? From some light sensitive spot? How does it connect to the brain? We could ask such questions about the evolution of bioluminescence—well, shall we add just about everything else? How about ants that cut grass, use it to cultivate algae, and then eat that algae? Large brains, those ants. How about bats and sea creatures that use echolocation? Monarch butterflies that have both a sun compass and a magnetic compass? We’ll just skip how a caterpillar dissolves in a cocoon and comes out a completely different creature with long, spindly legs, antennae, and wings.
Concrete answers, please. Please just start at the murky pool—I’ll give you a pass on ex nihilo nihil fit—and tell me what happened. I know. You have a theory. Just stop talking as if it were a fact.
Murky pool. Go.
Think I haven’t been nice? Well, the Lord is less so:
“The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’ They are corrupt, doing abominable iniquity; there is none who does good” (Psalm 53:1). 1
1All Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible: English Standard Version. (2016). Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles.
Gif courtesy giphy.com
6 comments
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September 18, 2018 at 4:42 pm
Christopher Sheeran
Great post, Jim. I recently read the Stephen C Meyer book called Darwin’s Doubt, which talked about the Cambrian explosion of new life forms, genetics, molecular biology, and the major challenges the neo-Darwinian theorists face. He has some great analogies there, one was dropping a blindfolded man into the middle of a pool the size of our galaxy and figuring out how long it might take him to find the one ladder on the other side. 🙂 Random mutation is their only change engine (through time), and natural selection is only an ‘editor’, not a creator. As molecular biology discoveries keep piling up, it’s gets harder and harder to believe it could have been done randomly in any population within even the age of the universe. Sounds funny, but I don’t have enough faith to believe in evolution in this way.
September 18, 2018 at 5:38 pm
jlthomson
Thanks for your comment, Chris. Did Dr. Meyer also write Signature in the Cell? I think that’s where he said that there wasn’t enough time since the creation of the universe for a DNA strand to evolve, or something like that. Genetics is a rather large problem evolutionists have to face, something Darwin was not aware of at all. I stopped watching those BBC shows with Richard Attenborough narrating. Well, I also got tired of watching the same shows again, too. :–) He just kept stating evolution as a fact. Didn’t like it! :–) Good to hear from you, my friend.
September 18, 2018 at 10:29 pm
Harold W Martin
There is a Golden Gate bridge because someone created it. There is earth in its rarefied place in space, all of the timed seasons, the earth on its axis so places north and south of the equator gets it’s growing season, water, and all of the minerals, plus all of life in it’s many forms that He created male and female even in a ear of corn as all the rows of kernels are even, and on and on. I can’t grasp all of the wonder of it but I do believe in a Creator God, and his son Jesus. Then more recently there is Hawaii that rose from the debts that all the plants were imported from somewhere else so that should erase the big bang evolution theory. ”Maranatha”
September 22, 2018 at 7:19 am
jlthomson
Are you really saying, Harold, that the Golden Gate Bridge didn’t evolve? Didn’t Nature provide its girders so it would survive better than less fortunate, fit bridges? :–)
September 20, 2018 at 2:26 pm
Aleth
Amen!
I had this discussion with a boy who shared a similar sentiment a few days ago. He struggled with the concept of faith, proclaiming he trusted hard science more than some fairy-tale. Imagine his surprise when I told him the theory of evolution had never been proven and it was still only that; a theory!
It baffles me that so many people trust so completely in “hard science” that is less palpable than the God we cannot see.
Regardless, the conclusion he came to was this simple concept: “I don’t need a God.”
He claimed he could make his own moral decisions, without some higher entity making the rules. Despite the arguments I presented, he’d rather put his faith in evolution than the idea of God.
–A
September 22, 2018 at 7:15 am
jlthomson
Evolutionary theory has bee portrayed as fact for decades. People just don’t think deeply about the theory. They go to “Wispy Beautiful Nature Place.” “We’re all one with nature, the trees, the bees, the stardust.”