The Incoherence of Evolutionary Origins (Part 2)

The fusion of confusion

Evolutionists, except the rather small coterie of theistic ones, believe every complex and meticulously ordered thing got here through mechanisms which we neither see now nor can see in the evidence left in the past. Even our cognitive faculties and the immaterial laws of logic and number “evolved.” The Big Bang is the most popular notion of the origin of the universe at the present time, although there is a significant lobby of dissidents. The Big Bang is an explosion. All explosions are chaotic, disorderly things. (The Big Bang exploded flat—not in all directions). In other ways it would have been like every other explosion: confused and irrational.

But from this chaos the vast complexity of the first life sprang: not, it is true, overnight, but over billions of years. From this incoherence the coherent came. Do we ever see coherence, in the form of sequenced “specified” complexity, arise out of chaos and disorder? No we do not. Nothing self-orders in complex and specific ways without a code. And a code needs someone to write it. But evolutionary naturalism requires just the opposite.

Furthermore, as we, the observers, recognize and analyze the coherence in the world, our standing (or existence) as observers must be accounted for. This was one of the questions asked by Richards and Gonzalez in their book The Privileged Planet. It is a good question. Why is the world comprehensible? Why can we do science?

This question must be addressed by creationists and evolutionists. It cannot be ducked on the pretext that evolution does not concern itself with such matters. Biological evolution does not. But there is such a thing as “chemical evolution.” There is even a “Center” for it!

One prominent evolutionist puts the matter clearly:

One has only to contemplate the magnitude of this task, to concede that the spontaneous generation of a living organism is impossible. Yet, here we are as a result, I believe, of spontaneous generation. (George Wald, “The Origin of Life.” Scientific American, 1954)

We must not link this use of “spontaneous generation” with the old idea that new life arises from rotting meat. Once this is kept in mind there is nothing wrong with Wald’s use of the term. But talk about the power of presuppositions! He believes in the impossible. And as we shall see, it is not one isolated “impossibility” that evolutionists have to swallow. In fact, it is not even the first.

Has this kind of evolution (a form of abiogenesis) ever been demonstrated? It has not. One creationist writer comments:

After decades of investigation, no environment has been discovered that facilitates abiogenesis. The richest inventory of chemical compounds have been zapped, irradiated, dried, rehydrated, and subjected to a host of parameters. All of these processes, however, have resulted in disorganized matter. In order to provide an appropriate framework for life, a machinist would still be necessary, one who could construct several thousand specific proteins, nucleic acids, carbohydrates, vitamins, and lipids in their exact configurations, all the while maintaining the integrity of each molecule in the collection. (Brian Thomas, “Origin of Life Research Still Dead”)

Also, as Meyer explains,

Every choice the investigator makes to actualize one condition and exclude another—to remove one by-product and not another—imparts information into the system. Therefore, whatever “success” these experiments have achieved in producing biologically relevant compounds occurs as a direct result of the activity of the experimentalist—a conscious, intelligent, deliberative mind—performing the experiments. (Stephen C. Meyer, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design, 335)

To an evolutionist this means that “when” somebody produces organic cells from its constituents the cry will go up, “We have discovered the conditions in which life arose.” But would it? While some confidence in the deliverances of science, even defined in reductionistic tones, is warranted, and the great successes of scientists lend encouragement to the belief that more is to come, it is extremely doubtful that any of these successes have any logical connection to belief in evolution. Scientists holding to evolution have done marvelous things, and so have scientists not holding to evolution. But the principle of testing competing hypotheses is not bettered by a belief which itself has failed to substantiate any of its major tenets.

To any other person any announcement that scientists have found the original environment for life would only prove that trained scientists, knowing the constituents of cellular organisms, have replicated what was (perhaps) previously done. It would certainly not prove it was achieved by undirected mindless processes. If evolutionists could do such a thing (and they can’t), they would, in their announcements, be sure to divert attention away from the designed and controlled laboratory conditions and the training and funding of the scientists.

The blind and ignorant watchmaker

Richard Dawkins wrote,

Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose. (Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, 1)

We all know this quote, but behind it lies a steely determination not to recognize what we all do recognize in every other walk of life—design. The title of his book is interesting but misleading. Interesting because it evokes a scene where someone blind from birth, and having no prior knowledge of watches, proceeds over time to put together one of these marvelous mechanisms in full working order. Misleading because the watchmaker himself, also envisioned as a product of evolution, but being far more complex than the watch, must also be explained. Although Dawkins is being rhetorical, calling evolutionary processes by this name commits the fallacy of reification—a very common fault with these people.

What these sorts of quotes are telling us is that because of their naturalistic bias, these eminent evolutionists will not even consider special creation as an alternative. And as there are just two models of origins, evolution (in their view), wins by default: it must be true no matter how much evidence accrues to falsify it. Operating from such an outlook the evolutionist is doomed to miss the wood for the trees.

Evolution is treated as unfalsifiable, and is treated as such because it is viewed as having so much power to uphold the philosophy of naturalism. It is the only avenue of explanation open to the materialist, and cannot be allowed to buckle under unwelcome scrutiny. It is treated and taught as an unassailable fact. Evolution supports naturalism. Naturalism is the only methodology permitted by evolutionists. Ergo, naturalism must support evolution. It is viciously circular.

Writing some time ago, two evolutionists admitted that,

Our theory of evolution has become one which cannot be refuted by any possible observation; every conceivable observation can be fitted into it. It is thus outside of empirical science, but not necessarily false. No one can think of ways in which to test it. Ideas, either without basis, or based on a few laboratory experiments carried out in extremely simplified systems, have attained currency far beyond their validity. They have become part of an evolutionary dogma accepted by most of us as part of our training. (E. Birch and PR Ehrlich, The Journal of Nature, 1967, number 214)

Things haven’t changed:

Science today is locked into paradigms. Every avenue is blocked by beliefs that are wrong and if you try to get anything published by a journal today, you will run up against a paradigm and the editors will turn it down. (Sir Fred Hoyle, from Scientific American, March 1995. Quoted by Andy Macintosh, Genesis for Today)

But the law of biogenesis holds. Why look for ways to circumvent it?

Biologists know only that all life derives from proceeding life, and that the parent organism’s offspring are always of the same kind. The idea that life can come from non-life is called abiogenesis, which is assumed by evolutionists to have occurred only once or a few times at most in earth history. This conclusion is not a result of evidence, but is obtained because the current dominant worldview in Western science, naturalism, requires a chance spontaneous origin of life. (Jerry Bergman, In Six Days, ed. by John Ashton, 40)

The blind watchmaker seems to be on a hiding to nowhere.