In the beginning.
Intelligent people have asked themselves many questions over the
millennia and continue to ask the same questions today. Two are
1) How did life begin? 2) How did the universe begin?
In the first book of the Hebrew Bible, which is accepted by Jews,
Christians and Muslims as authoritative, the first verse begins
with "In the beginning". It then goes on to sequence the crea-
tion of matter and life in two different ways.
Both are reasonably close to the sequence deduced by science,
particularly when one realizes that Genesis was written 4000
years ago, and modern scientific methods are only about 300 years
old.
The table below shows the similarities and differences:
Genesis 1:1-2:3 Genesis 2:4 Science
I. In the beginning God Heaven & earth Big bang,
created the heaven & Explosion.
the earth Universe still
expanding. Created
stars, light,
planets, moons.
Created "light", day ----
and night
II. Created "firmament", i.e. ----
"Heaven" between water
above "Heaven" and water
below "Heaven"
III. Land appears from Plants Land & vegetation
waters, vegetation
grows and reproduces
after its own kind
IV. Made stars, sun and ----
moon
V. Created fish, birds ---- Fish & birds
and "every living
creature that moveth"
VI. Created land based "living" Man Land based animals
creatures after his/her
kind, i.e. species Woman
Created man & woman Animals Man & woman
in His own image
VII. Ended His work
(We leave it to the inerrant scholars to reconcile the
differences in the two Biblical creation stories, and the
contradictions and duplications in the first.)
The defining difference between the Biblical narrative and the
scientific explanation is the belief in God the Creator in the
first, and the absence of any intelligent being guiding the
Creation process in the second.
For me, the complexity, the variety, the nature, the existence
of human beings, demands the acceptance of a creator God.
Note below the difficulty in accepting an atheistic, purely scien-
tific thesis of how life on earth began.
Malcolm W. Browne, reporter for the New York Times, writing on
April 30, 1993, describes science's latest thoughts on evolution
based upon the finding in Australia of fossil microorganisms
embedded in tiny mineral grains, which themselves were embedded
in rock that the scientists judged was formed 3.485 billion years
ago.
As scientists believe that the planet Earth solidified into its
present form about 4.6 billion years ago, and that the earth was
subject to meteorite bombardment until 3.9 billion years back,
thus preventing the start and continuation of life, this means
that the discovered life forms had only 400 million years to
evolve from the theorized soup of chemicals consisting of amino
acids and other carbon-based chemicals somewhere on the
primordial Earth from which scientists presume life began by some
yet-to-be explained mechanism.
Just how complex this process can be would be to consider the
mechanism of a single living cell, the building block of all
plant and animal life.
A cell is composed of a central nucleus and an outer region
called the cytoplasm, together constituting protoplasm.
The old puzzle of the chicken and the egg rears its head relative
to proteins and DNA. Hitching says: "Proteins depend on DNA for
their formation. But DNA cannot form without pre-existing
protein."
The instuctions within the DNA of a cell, "if written out, would
fill a thousand 600 page books," explains National Geographic.
The nucleus that contains the chromosonal threads is less than
four ten thousandths of an inch in diameter.
This cell is synthesizing 100 molecules per second of proteins in
a particular sequence of the amino acids under the catalytic
influence of enzymes, themselves a synthesis of proteins under
the direction of the sequences of bases in a molecule of RNA
(ribonucleic acid) transmitted from the nucleus to the cytoplasm
and produced by the nuclear DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), life's
genetic code with 1,000,000,000,000 different combinations per
cell, in a particular sequence of bases.
Put another way, the cell nucleus contains a trillion bits of
genetic information organized in 3 nucleotides per amino acid in
genes and chromosomes.
Although there are more than 100 amino acids. only twenty are
needed for life's proteins. They come in two shapes - the left-
handed and the right-handed. All of the twenty used in producing
life's proteins are left-handed.
Adding to the mysterious primordial formation of the amino acids the
question of how carbon, sulphur, nitrogen, hydrogen and oxygen
happened to come together to form amino acids in the first place.
Inorganic carbon is quite rare, occuring only in diamonds and
graphite deposits.
As for atmospheric carbon dioxide, this is another mystery.
Plants use carbon dioxide for photosynthesis and give off oxygen.
Animals take in oxygen and give off carbon dioxide.
But plant life came first?
Astronomers have not detected free carbon dioxide in the
atmospheres of other celestial bodies.
So where did the carbon come from incorporated in the first amino
acids?
A gene capable of producing a complete protein must be hundreds
of nucleotides long, as proteins are at least comprised of
hundreds of amino acids, each three nucleotides long.
A mutation is the change of one nucleotide in a gene.
Is it any wonder that scientists - or Darwin - make no attempt to
explain how these amino acids came into being as part of the
primordial "soup". Darwin refuses several times to speculate.
Getting back to Malcolm W. Browne and the New York Times,
complicating the riddle for the scientists, the single-celled
fossils resemble certain modern bacteria and cyano-bacteria which
are capable of photosynthesis. This would be a surprising
achievement for organisms that had so little time to evolve (from
the "soup").
Thus, most of the biochemical complexity of life was present
already at the time the oldest surface rocks of the Earth were
formed.
Single celled animals can catch food, digest, get rid of wastes,
move around, build houses, engage in sexual activity, and with no
tissues, no organs, no hearts and no minds - really have
everything that we have got.
Photosynthesis happens in cell bodies called chloroplasts, so
small that 400,000 can fit into the period at the end of this
sentence. There are 70 separate chemical reaction involved in
photosynthesis.
Diatoms... contain green chlorophyll. Their food value is in the
oil that diatoms make, which helps them bob on the surface where
their chlorophyll can bask in sunlight.
SPONTANEOUS GENERATION
It has never been possible to observe the spontaneous generation of
life.
Then again, because of the vast quantity of waters, how could
there be an accumulation of organic soup.... Wald believes
this to be "the most stubborn problem that confronts us
evolutionists."
Unable to explain this phenomenon, some scientists theorize that
life on Earth came from some other place in our galaxy, or the
universe (the Panspermia theory).
Some even go so far as to suggest that intelligent
extraterrestiral beings might have deliberately seeded the galaxy
with durable organisms such as spores or bacteria, known by them
to be capable of surviving eons of space travel in suspended
animation.
(Anything to avoid contemplation that "God" might be this
intelligent creator of life)
As even a single-celled living thing is comprised of many
molecules, is hard to see how polymerization (linking together
smaller molecules to form bigger ones) could have proceeded in
the aqueous environment of the primitive ocean, since the
presence of water favors depolymerization (breaking up big
molecules into simpler ones) rather than polymerization.
CHARLES DARWIN
Charles Darwin (1859-1872), writing in the 19th century, has had
an enormous impact on the thinking of secular biologists and
scientists.
In his book "Origin of the Species", he proves himself to
be a very fair-minded person and scientist.
In addition to advocating his theory of natural selection as an
explanation for (a) progressive improvement in the characteris-
tics of members of a species, and (b) that slight variations in
members of a species could lead to creation of a new species; he
also sets forth in detail the intellectual difficulties with his
theory.
He candidly states that he is unable to explain how life began,
and that this is outside the scope of his book; or the "Origin of
the Species" in the first place.
Darwin makes much of the variations people can achieve through
conscious manipulation and direction of the mating process of
domestic animals, and by implication posits that if variations
can be achieved by the conscious intervention of man, then varia-
tions will occur by the accidental randomness of nature.
But although he often alludes to the existence of God, he does
not advance the hypothesis that God could have used evolution in
the creation process.
(A personal observation on the idea of humans being descendents
of a lower form of life. In no other species is there such a
wide variation of characteristics, in size from dwarfs to giants,
in skin color, shape of facial features, body types, etc. as is
the case with Homo Sapiens.)
There are at least two striking physical differences between
all species of men and apes, one, the opposing thumb, and two,
the voice box.
And on the mental level, the creation and use of artifacts,
evolving into the industrialized civilization of today.
The window of evolutionary opportunity, too, is very, very short,
compared to the millions/billions of years given other evolution-
ary developments.
We are talking of 47,500 years between Homo Neanderthalensis and
early Mousterian Man (50,000 B.C.) and the statue of King Myceri-
nus and his queen (2,530 B.C.) revealing all the facial and body
features of modern man and woman.
That something dramatic occured about 4000-2500 B.C. is apparent.
The earliest historic evidence of modern man in Egypt is 3100
B.C. with the First Dynasty; the earliest evidence in India is
2500 B.C. with a well-preserved statue of a male torso from Har-
appa in the West Punjab; the earliest evidence in Mesopotamia
dates from circa 3000 B.C.
------------
We recommend to anyone trying to comprehend life in all its many
forms that they read Darwin's "Origin of the Species" from cover
to cover. 150 years after it was written, science has not been
able to shed any light on the difficulties to his theory that he
discusses.
We quote from his books, the "Origin of the Species" and "The
Descent or Origin of Man".
Chapter II "Generally the term (species) includes the unknown
element of a distant act of creation".
Chapter III "The causes which check the natural tendency of
each species to increase are most obscure". (Discussing natural
selection and survival of the fittest).
Interaction of plants and animals "Nearly all orchids absolutely
require the visits of insects to fertilize them".
"Visits of bees are necessary for the fertilization of some kinds
of clover".
Chapter IV. "(Man) can neither originate varieties, nor
prevent their occurrence; he can preserve and accommodate such as
do occur".
Chapter VI. Title "Difficulties of the Theory"
"First, why do we not everywhere see innumerable transitional
forms? Why is not all nature in confusion, instead of the
species being, as we see them, well defined?"
"Secondly, can we believe that natural selection could produce,
on the one hand, an organ of trifling importance, such as the
tail of a giraffe, which seems as a fly-flapper, and, on the
other hand, an organ so wonderful as the eye?"
"Thirdly, can instincts be acquired and modified through natural
selection?"
"To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for
adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting differ-
ent amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and
chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural select-
ion, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree".
"How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light, hardly concerns us
more than how life itself originated".
"Have we any right to assume that the Creator works by
intellectual powers like those of man?"
"If we are unable to account for the characteristic differences
of our several domestic breeds, which nevertheless are generally
admitted to have arisen though ordinary generation from one or a
few parent-stocks, we ought not to lay too much stress on our
ignorance of the precise cause of the slight analogous differ-
ences between true species".
"(Some naturalists) believe that many structures have been
created for the sake of beauty, to delight man".
"Can we consider the sting of the bee as perfect, which, when
used against many kinds of enemies, cannot be withdrawn, owing to
the backward serratures, and thus inevitably causes the death of
the insect by tearing out his viscera?"
Chapter VII
"Asserted that the weakest part of my theory is, that I consider
all organic beings as imperfect: what I have really said is,
that all are not as perfect as they might have been in relation
to their conditions".
"Longevity is a great advantage to all species, so that he who
believes in natural selection...that all the descendents have
longer lives than their progenitors!"
"Why have some animals had their mental powers more highly
developed than others, as such development would be advantageous
to all?"
Chapter VIII
"Many instincts are so wonderful that their development will
probably appear to the reader a difficulty sufficient to
overthrow my whole theory. I may here premise that I have
nothing to do with the origin of the mental powers, any more than
I have nothing to do with that of life itself."
Chapter X
On "innumerable intermediate links not now occurring everywhere
throughout nature."
"Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely-graduated
organic chain, and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and serious
objection which can be urged against the theory".
Chapter XI
"Scarcely any palaeontological discovery is more striking than
the fact that the forms of life change almost simultaneously
throughout the world".
THE FOSSIL RECORD
Describing the Fossil Record, Darwin said, "The living world is
not a single array.... connected by unbroken series of
intergrades." Darwin conceded that the "distinctness of
specific (living) forms and their not being blended together by
innumerable transitional links, is a very obvious difficulty."
Darwin: "Why then is not every geological formation and every
stratum full of such intermediate links?..... the most obvious
and serious objection which can be urged against the theory."
He admitted that "If numerous species.... have really started
into life at once, the fact would be fatal to the theory of
evolution."
Darwin: "The abrupt manner in which whole groups of species
suddenly appear in certain formations has been urged by several
paleontologists as a fatal objection to the belief in the
transmutation of a species..... I allude to the manner in which
species belonging to several of the main divisions of the animal
kingdom suddenly appear in the lowest known fossiliferous
rocks...."
It was assumed by Darwin that as time passed the missing fossil
links would surely be found.
(There are a hundred million fossils, all catalogued and
identified, in museums around the world, but the fossil record is
full of trends that paleontologists have been unable to explain.)
Swedish botanist Heribert Nilsson: "it is not even possible to
make a caricature of an evolution out of palaeobiological facts.
The fossil material is now so complete that... the lack of
transitional series cannot be explained as due to the scarcity of
material. The deficiencies are real, they will never be filled."
Geologists have discovered many unaltered Precambrian sediments,
and they contain no fossils of complex organisms.
In the layers above that Cambrian outburst of life, the
testimony of the fossil record is repeatedly the same: New kinds
of animals and new kinds of plants appear suddenly, with no
connection to anything that went before them. The record now
reveals that species typically survive for a hundred thousand
generations, or even a million or more, without evolving very
much.
But at the start of the Cambrian period, the fossil record takes an
unexplained dramatic turn. A great variety of fully developed,
complex sea creatures appear so suddenly that this time is often
called an "explosion" of living things.
beginning of Cambrian times. To the question why we do not find
rich fossiliferous deposits belonging to these assumed earliest
periods prior to the Cambrian system, Darwin could give no
satisfactory answer.
EVOLUTIONARY PROBLEMS
Even as late as February 23, 1995, in that staunch supporter
of the evolutionary theory, The New York Times, the doubts and
"mysteries" surrounding the origin of life on earth are clearly
expressed.
"It may at least be possible... might plausibly... chemicals
presumed to have existed... we cannot know... it looks like a
possibility... gases possibly duplicating... might have caused
them.. could have been... another possibilty... perhaps... the
riddle of life's origin is shrouded in a myriad of mysteries...
understanding how life might have arisen."
"Another possibility was proposed.. perhaps... in any case,
the riddle of life's origin is shrouded in a myriad of
mysteries... how life might have arisen."
And after expressing all these doubts, it definitely states
as fact "the prebiotic soup, the solution of chemicals from
which life spontaneously arose."
This spontaneous generation of life under conditions
"perfect" for its occurence is crucial to an atheistic
explanation of the origin of life.
An obvious objection to this spontaneous generation of life
is that this event occurred eons ago in the hoary past, and has
never been repeated, nor has man, with all his accumulated
knowledge and ability to reason, been ableto duplicate this in
his laboratories.
THE EVOLUTIONARY LADDER
Evolutionists assume that amphibians evolved from fish, but the
metaphoric gulf between fish and amphibian is formidable. The
backbone would have had to undergo major modifications.... a
pelvis added..... gills must change to lungs. Most toads and
frogs have eardrums, fish dont. Tongues would also have to
change.
The gulf between amphibian and reptile is equally formidable.
Creatures before reptiles had soft, jellylike eggs which were
fertilized externally.... shelled eggs require internal
fertilization.... has blood vessels that pick up oxygen that
passes through the shell and conduct it to the embryo.
Embryos in fish and amphibian eggs release their wastes in the
water as soluble urea. But the urea within the shelled eggs of
reptiles would kill the embryos.... so shelled eggs have
insoluble uric acid. The egg yolk is food for the growing
reptile, enabling it to develop fully before emerging from the
shell, unlike amphibians which do not hatch directly into adult
form.
Then there are the inconsistencies between reptiles and birds:
reptiles are cold blooded, birds are warm blooded. Birds must
incubate their eggs; reptiles lay them and leave them. Birds
defend their nests, deliberately exposing themselves to danger
for their young. Bird bones are thin and hollow; reptile bones
are solid. A system of air sacs provide internal air circulation
for birds, something totally unthinkable in reptiles.
Reptiles have a three chambered heart; a bird's heart has four.
It is reasonable to think that a bird's beak evolved by chance
from the nose of a reptile.
Finally, the unbridgeable gulf between reptile and mammal:
mammary glands that give milk for the young which are born alive
with the instincts and the muscles to suck the milk from the
mother. Mammals have a need to maintain a constant body
temperature.
When the amphibian supposedly evolved into a reptile, the wastes
eliminated changed from urea to uric acid. But when the reptile
evolved into a mammal there was a reversal. Mammals went back to
the amphibian way, eliminating wastes as urea.
INEXPLICABLE COMPLEXITIES
Many cases exist where two organisms appear designed to live
together. Algae and fungi team up and become lichens. only then
can they grow on bare rock to start turning rock into soil.
Consider termites How do millions of blind workers coordinate
their efforts to build their ingeniously designed structures?
They exhibit something like a collective intelligence.
The internal clocks of plants and animals. Diatoms come to the
wet beach sand when the tide is out. When the tide is in, they
burrow back into the sand. Even in sand in the laboratory where
there is no tidal ebb and flow, their clocks still make them come
up and go down in time with the tides.
How do homing pigeons, taken 625 miles away in any direction,
return to their home lofts in a single day.
Arguments against evolution are rarely permitted in schools.
Evolution as a theory.... but it is presented as a reality to
students.
Quotations from Charles Darwin's
The Descent or Origin of Man
Human characteristics: "erect, shape of skull, nakedness
(hairless except for head), absence of a tail, every individual
different except identical twins, an opposing thumb, speech,
smaller canine teeth, color of skin".
Humans have a capacity for altruism; anything that has evolved from
natural selection should be selfish without a moral sense.
Chapter II
"The Duke of Argyll, for instance, insists that, the human frame
has diverged from the structure of brutes, in the direction of
greater physical helplessness and weakness. That is to say, it
is a divergence which of all other is the most impossible to
ascribe to mere natural selection".
Chapter III
Universal belief in unseen or spirited agencies, or God.
Chapter IV
"I fully subscribe to the judgement of those writers who maintain
that of all the differences between man and the lower animals,
the moral sense of conscience is by far the most important".
Chapter VI
"The great break in the organic chain between man and his nearest
allies, which cannot be bridged over by any extinct or living
species, has often been advanced as a grave objection to the
belief that man is descended from some lower form".
(The famous "missing link")
Chapter XXI
"Many of the views which have been advanced are highly
speculative, and some no doubt will prove erroneous".
"The high standard of our intellectual power and moral
disposition is the greatest difficulty which presents itself".
"Man...has few or no special instincts."
"The idea of a universal and beneficient Creator does not seem to
arise in the mind of man, until he has been elevated by long-
continued culture".
"Man scans with scrupulous care the character and pedigree of his
horses, cattle and dogs before he matches them."
Man
The gulf between animals and man is enormous, like the extended 7
to 13 year period of growth and parental care....the power of
abstract thought and speech, the ability to record accumulated
knowledge, the conversion of natural materials into artifacts
formed by heat, chemical reactions, etc... Man also has moral and
spiritual values missing from animals.
Conclusion
The bottom line for me is that "God" is the Creator of the
universe and of life on Earth, and that science is unravelling
His methodology.
The founding fathers of the United States also found themselves
accepting this view, even as they laid the foundation of their
nation in a basically secular Declaration of Independence and
subsequent Constitution.
In the Declaration of Independence of July 4, 1776, mention is
made of "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God" and "Men are
endowed by their Creator". But when it came to the drafting
of the Constitution of the United States in September 17, 1787,
there is no mention of God in its Articles.
This is quite unusual because, although most of them (the
founding fathers) resisted the literal Biblical view of creation
almost to a man, they agreed that God had created man.
"Here is my creed. I believe in one God, Creator of the
Universe. That He governs it by His providence. That He ought
to be worshipped. That the most acceptable service we render Him
is doing good to His other children".
"The Divine Author of life."
Benjamin Franklin.
"The whole rational creation of God."
John Adams.
"Well aware that Almighty God both created the mind free."
Thomas Jefferson.
"The duty which we owe to our CREATOR."
James Madison.
"The Supreme Being gave existence to man".
Alexander Hamilton.
"Render to the Creator and Preserver those acknowledgements which
are due to Him for our being."
Samuel Adams.
"I consider myself in the Hands of my Creator."
Thomas Paine.
(from In God we Trust, Chapter 1, by Norman Cousins)
On the other hand, countless thousands of otherwise intelligent,
logical human beings deny the existence of God, and hence the
Creator.
To these people I can only say, if you and mankind are so
ingenious, so clever at the end of the 20th century, make me life
out of inorganic material.
Or as the poet Walt Whitman said in "Leaves of Grass", all
creation is summed up in a blade of grass. Make me a blade of
grass.
It boggles my mind that some rational people can profess to
believe that "life" began millions of years ago in a unique,
"perfect mix" of primeral soup with ideal temperature conditions
that have never been duplicated since, and has evolved "upwards"
in complexity all on its own, without any intelligence to guide
it, culminating in Homo Sapiens.
The natural law of nature is to retrogress. Gardens, farms,
domestic animals all revert to the "wild" when human influence is
withdrawn.
Any science student, any scientist will attest to the difficulty
of conducting inorganic experiments that produce results as they
should.
Any organic scientist will attest to the difficulty of preserving
simple bacteria cultures in the lab.
And life happened on its own? I don't think so; I think God did
it.
The human brain is easily the most mysterious part of the human
miracle. The key brain cells, the neurons, dont actually
touch one another. They are separated by synapses, tiny spaces
less than one millionth of an inch across. These gaps are
bridged by chemicals called neurotransmitters, 30 of which are
known. These chemical signals are received at one end of the
neuron by a maze of tiny filaments called dendrites. The signals
are then transmitted at the other end of the neuron bya nerve
fiber called an axon. In the neurons the signals are electrical,
but across the gaps they are chemical. Thus the transmission of
nerve signals is electrochemical in nature.
It is the cerebral cortex of the brain that sets man apart from
any animal. It is less than a quarter of an inch thick.
We must, by input from our surroundings, program the brain.
Without that immense infusion of experience, scarcely a trace of
intellect would appear. The human brain is genetically
programmed for language development.
It is estimated that the human brain could take any load of
learning and memory put on it now, and a billion times that.
This is the only example in existence where a species was
provided with an organ that it still has not learned how to fully
use. Said Carl Sagan: "the brain is a very big place in a very
small space."
A curious scientific conundrum is the question of the "missing
link", the inexplicable gap in the evolutionary process between
apes, the Neanderthal Man, etc. and modern man.
Egyptian drawings and sculptures dating 4,500 B.C. share the same
faces, the same bodies, hands and feet as man possesses today.
Human hands were recently found in a French cave dated at 16,000
B.C.
But 50,000 years ago, skull, bone, and fossil evidence shows a
being, called humanoids for lack of a better term, overwhelmingly
different.
Bridging the gap of a mere 34,000 years by a miraculous series of
"mutations" is something even the most dedicated scientist
refuses to do. The best thing they can do to pose the question,
that a link is missing.
Newsweek reports on the "ape man" fossil record that, "You could
put all the fossils on top of a single desk' says Elwyn Simons of
Duke University." From The New York Times : "The known fossil
remains of mans ancestors would fit on a billiard table. That
makes a poor platform from which to peer into the mists of the
last few million years."
Newsweek : "The missing link between man and the apes... is
merely the most glamorous of a whole hierarchy of phantom
creatures. In the fossil record, missing links are the rule."
The answer, obviously, is in the hands of God.
Intelligent people have asked themselves many questions over the
millennia and continue to ask the same questions today. Two are
1) How did life begin? 2) How did the universe begin?
In the first book of the Hebrew Bible, which is accepted by Jews,
Christians and Muslims as authoritative, the first verse begins
with "In the beginning". It then goes on to sequence the crea-
tion of matter and life in two different ways.
Both are reasonably close to the sequence deduced by science,
particularly when one realizes that Genesis was written 4000
years ago, and modern scientific methods are only about 300 years
old.
The table below shows the similarities and differences:
Genesis 1:1-2:3 Genesis 2:4 Science
I. In the beginning God Heaven & earth Big bang,
created the heaven & Explosion.
the earth Universe still
expanding. Created
stars, light,
planets, moons.
Created "light", day ----
and night
II. Created "firmament", i.e. ----
"Heaven" between water
above "Heaven" and water
below "Heaven"
III. Land appears from Plants Land & vegetation
waters, vegetation
grows and reproduces
after its own kind
IV. Made stars, sun and ----
moon
V. Created fish, birds ---- Fish & birds
and "every living
creature that moveth"
VI. Created land based "living" Man Land based animals
creatures after his/her
kind, i.e. species Woman
Created man & woman Animals Man & woman
in His own image
VII. Ended His work
(We leave it to the inerrant scholars to reconcile the
differences in the two Biblical creation stories, and the
contradictions and duplications in the first.)
The defining difference between the Biblical narrative and the
scientific explanation is the belief in God the Creator in the
first, and the absence of any intelligent being guiding the
Creation process in the second.
For me, the complexity, the variety, the nature, the existence
of human beings, demands the acceptance of a creator God.
Note below the difficulty in accepting an atheistic, purely scien-
tific thesis of how life on earth began.
Malcolm W. Browne, reporter for the New York Times, writing on
April 30, 1993, describes science's latest thoughts on evolution
based upon the finding in Australia of fossil microorganisms
embedded in tiny mineral grains, which themselves were embedded
in rock that the scientists judged was formed 3.485 billion years
ago.
As scientists believe that the planet Earth solidified into its
present form about 4.6 billion years ago, and that the earth was
subject to meteorite bombardment until 3.9 billion years back,
thus preventing the start and continuation of life, this means
that the discovered life forms had only 400 million years to
evolve from the theorized soup of chemicals consisting of amino
acids and other carbon-based chemicals somewhere on the
primordial Earth from which scientists presume life began by some
yet-to-be explained mechanism.
Just how complex this process can be would be to consider the
mechanism of a single living cell, the building block of all
plant and animal life.
A cell is composed of a central nucleus and an outer region
called the cytoplasm, together constituting protoplasm.
The old puzzle of the chicken and the egg rears its head relative
to proteins and DNA. Hitching says: "Proteins depend on DNA for
their formation. But DNA cannot form without pre-existing
protein."
The instuctions within the DNA of a cell, "if written out, would
fill a thousand 600 page books," explains National Geographic.
The nucleus that contains the chromosonal threads is less than
four ten thousandths of an inch in diameter.
This cell is synthesizing 100 molecules per second of proteins in
a particular sequence of the amino acids under the catalytic
influence of enzymes, themselves a synthesis of proteins under
the direction of the sequences of bases in a molecule of RNA
(ribonucleic acid) transmitted from the nucleus to the cytoplasm
and produced by the nuclear DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), life's
genetic code with 1,000,000,000,000 different combinations per
cell, in a particular sequence of bases.
Put another way, the cell nucleus contains a trillion bits of
genetic information organized in 3 nucleotides per amino acid in
genes and chromosomes.
Although there are more than 100 amino acids. only twenty are
needed for life's proteins. They come in two shapes - the left-
handed and the right-handed. All of the twenty used in producing
life's proteins are left-handed.
Adding to the mysterious primordial formation of the amino acids the
question of how carbon, sulphur, nitrogen, hydrogen and oxygen
happened to come together to form amino acids in the first place.
Inorganic carbon is quite rare, occuring only in diamonds and
graphite deposits.
As for atmospheric carbon dioxide, this is another mystery.
Plants use carbon dioxide for photosynthesis and give off oxygen.
Animals take in oxygen and give off carbon dioxide.
But plant life came first?
Astronomers have not detected free carbon dioxide in the
atmospheres of other celestial bodies.
So where did the carbon come from incorporated in the first amino
acids?
A gene capable of producing a complete protein must be hundreds
of nucleotides long, as proteins are at least comprised of
hundreds of amino acids, each three nucleotides long.
A mutation is the change of one nucleotide in a gene.
Is it any wonder that scientists - or Darwin - make no attempt to
explain how these amino acids came into being as part of the
primordial "soup". Darwin refuses several times to speculate.
Getting back to Malcolm W. Browne and the New York Times,
complicating the riddle for the scientists, the single-celled
fossils resemble certain modern bacteria and cyano-bacteria which
are capable of photosynthesis. This would be a surprising
achievement for organisms that had so little time to evolve (from
the "soup").
Thus, most of the biochemical complexity of life was present
already at the time the oldest surface rocks of the Earth were
formed.
Single celled animals can catch food, digest, get rid of wastes,
move around, build houses, engage in sexual activity, and with no
tissues, no organs, no hearts and no minds - really have
everything that we have got.
Photosynthesis happens in cell bodies called chloroplasts, so
small that 400,000 can fit into the period at the end of this
sentence. There are 70 separate chemical reaction involved in
photosynthesis.
Diatoms... contain green chlorophyll. Their food value is in the
oil that diatoms make, which helps them bob on the surface where
their chlorophyll can bask in sunlight.
SPONTANEOUS GENERATION
It has never been possible to observe the spontaneous generation of
life.
Then again, because of the vast quantity of waters, how could
there be an accumulation of organic soup.... Wald believes
this to be "the most stubborn problem that confronts us
evolutionists."
Unable to explain this phenomenon, some scientists theorize that
life on Earth came from some other place in our galaxy, or the
universe (the Panspermia theory).
Some even go so far as to suggest that intelligent
extraterrestiral beings might have deliberately seeded the galaxy
with durable organisms such as spores or bacteria, known by them
to be capable of surviving eons of space travel in suspended
animation.
(Anything to avoid contemplation that "God" might be this
intelligent creator of life)
As even a single-celled living thing is comprised of many
molecules, is hard to see how polymerization (linking together
smaller molecules to form bigger ones) could have proceeded in
the aqueous environment of the primitive ocean, since the
presence of water favors depolymerization (breaking up big
molecules into simpler ones) rather than polymerization.
CHARLES DARWIN
Charles Darwin (1859-1872), writing in the 19th century, has had
an enormous impact on the thinking of secular biologists and
scientists.
In his book "Origin of the Species", he proves himself to
be a very fair-minded person and scientist.
In addition to advocating his theory of natural selection as an
explanation for (a) progressive improvement in the characteris-
tics of members of a species, and (b) that slight variations in
members of a species could lead to creation of a new species; he
also sets forth in detail the intellectual difficulties with his
theory.
He candidly states that he is unable to explain how life began,
and that this is outside the scope of his book; or the "Origin of
the Species" in the first place.
Darwin makes much of the variations people can achieve through
conscious manipulation and direction of the mating process of
domestic animals, and by implication posits that if variations
can be achieved by the conscious intervention of man, then varia-
tions will occur by the accidental randomness of nature.
But although he often alludes to the existence of God, he does
not advance the hypothesis that God could have used evolution in
the creation process.
(A personal observation on the idea of humans being descendents
of a lower form of life. In no other species is there such a
wide variation of characteristics, in size from dwarfs to giants,
in skin color, shape of facial features, body types, etc. as is
the case with Homo Sapiens.)
There are at least two striking physical differences between
all species of men and apes, one, the opposing thumb, and two,
the voice box.
And on the mental level, the creation and use of artifacts,
evolving into the industrialized civilization of today.
The window of evolutionary opportunity, too, is very, very short,
compared to the millions/billions of years given other evolution-
ary developments.
We are talking of 47,500 years between Homo Neanderthalensis and
early Mousterian Man (50,000 B.C.) and the statue of King Myceri-
nus and his queen (2,530 B.C.) revealing all the facial and body
features of modern man and woman.
That something dramatic occured about 4000-2500 B.C. is apparent.
The earliest historic evidence of modern man in Egypt is 3100
B.C. with the First Dynasty; the earliest evidence in India is
2500 B.C. with a well-preserved statue of a male torso from Har-
appa in the West Punjab; the earliest evidence in Mesopotamia
dates from circa 3000 B.C.
------------
We recommend to anyone trying to comprehend life in all its many
forms that they read Darwin's "Origin of the Species" from cover
to cover. 150 years after it was written, science has not been
able to shed any light on the difficulties to his theory that he
discusses.
We quote from his books, the "Origin of the Species" and "The
Descent or Origin of Man".
Chapter II "Generally the term (species) includes the unknown
element of a distant act of creation".
Chapter III "The causes which check the natural tendency of
each species to increase are most obscure". (Discussing natural
selection and survival of the fittest).
Interaction of plants and animals "Nearly all orchids absolutely
require the visits of insects to fertilize them".
"Visits of bees are necessary for the fertilization of some kinds
of clover".
Chapter IV. "(Man) can neither originate varieties, nor
prevent their occurrence; he can preserve and accommodate such as
do occur".
Chapter VI. Title "Difficulties of the Theory"
"First, why do we not everywhere see innumerable transitional
forms? Why is not all nature in confusion, instead of the
species being, as we see them, well defined?"
"Secondly, can we believe that natural selection could produce,
on the one hand, an organ of trifling importance, such as the
tail of a giraffe, which seems as a fly-flapper, and, on the
other hand, an organ so wonderful as the eye?"
"Thirdly, can instincts be acquired and modified through natural
selection?"
"To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for
adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting differ-
ent amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and
chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural select-
ion, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree".
"How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light, hardly concerns us
more than how life itself originated".
"Have we any right to assume that the Creator works by
intellectual powers like those of man?"
"If we are unable to account for the characteristic differences
of our several domestic breeds, which nevertheless are generally
admitted to have arisen though ordinary generation from one or a
few parent-stocks, we ought not to lay too much stress on our
ignorance of the precise cause of the slight analogous differ-
ences between true species".
"(Some naturalists) believe that many structures have been
created for the sake of beauty, to delight man".
"Can we consider the sting of the bee as perfect, which, when
used against many kinds of enemies, cannot be withdrawn, owing to
the backward serratures, and thus inevitably causes the death of
the insect by tearing out his viscera?"
Chapter VII
"Asserted that the weakest part of my theory is, that I consider
all organic beings as imperfect: what I have really said is,
that all are not as perfect as they might have been in relation
to their conditions".
"Longevity is a great advantage to all species, so that he who
believes in natural selection...that all the descendents have
longer lives than their progenitors!"
"Why have some animals had their mental powers more highly
developed than others, as such development would be advantageous
to all?"
Chapter VIII
"Many instincts are so wonderful that their development will
probably appear to the reader a difficulty sufficient to
overthrow my whole theory. I may here premise that I have
nothing to do with the origin of the mental powers, any more than
I have nothing to do with that of life itself."
Chapter X
On "innumerable intermediate links not now occurring everywhere
throughout nature."
"Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely-graduated
organic chain, and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and serious
objection which can be urged against the theory".
Chapter XI
"Scarcely any palaeontological discovery is more striking than
the fact that the forms of life change almost simultaneously
throughout the world".
THE FOSSIL RECORD
Describing the Fossil Record, Darwin said, "The living world is
not a single array.... connected by unbroken series of
intergrades." Darwin conceded that the "distinctness of
specific (living) forms and their not being blended together by
innumerable transitional links, is a very obvious difficulty."
Darwin: "Why then is not every geological formation and every
stratum full of such intermediate links?..... the most obvious
and serious objection which can be urged against the theory."
He admitted that "If numerous species.... have really started
into life at once, the fact would be fatal to the theory of
evolution."
Darwin: "The abrupt manner in which whole groups of species
suddenly appear in certain formations has been urged by several
paleontologists as a fatal objection to the belief in the
transmutation of a species..... I allude to the manner in which
species belonging to several of the main divisions of the animal
kingdom suddenly appear in the lowest known fossiliferous
rocks...."
It was assumed by Darwin that as time passed the missing fossil
links would surely be found.
(There are a hundred million fossils, all catalogued and
identified, in museums around the world, but the fossil record is
full of trends that paleontologists have been unable to explain.)
Swedish botanist Heribert Nilsson: "it is not even possible to
make a caricature of an evolution out of palaeobiological facts.
The fossil material is now so complete that... the lack of
transitional series cannot be explained as due to the scarcity of
material. The deficiencies are real, they will never be filled."
Geologists have discovered many unaltered Precambrian sediments,
and they contain no fossils of complex organisms.
In the layers above that Cambrian outburst of life, the
testimony of the fossil record is repeatedly the same: New kinds
of animals and new kinds of plants appear suddenly, with no
connection to anything that went before them. The record now
reveals that species typically survive for a hundred thousand
generations, or even a million or more, without evolving very
much.
But at the start of the Cambrian period, the fossil record takes an
unexplained dramatic turn. A great variety of fully developed,
complex sea creatures appear so suddenly that this time is often
called an "explosion" of living things.
beginning of Cambrian times. To the question why we do not find
rich fossiliferous deposits belonging to these assumed earliest
periods prior to the Cambrian system, Darwin could give no
satisfactory answer.
EVOLUTIONARY PROBLEMS
Even as late as February 23, 1995, in that staunch supporter
of the evolutionary theory, The New York Times, the doubts and
"mysteries" surrounding the origin of life on earth are clearly
expressed.
"It may at least be possible... might plausibly... chemicals
presumed to have existed... we cannot know... it looks like a
possibility... gases possibly duplicating... might have caused
them.. could have been... another possibilty... perhaps... the
riddle of life's origin is shrouded in a myriad of mysteries...
understanding how life might have arisen."
"Another possibility was proposed.. perhaps... in any case,
the riddle of life's origin is shrouded in a myriad of
mysteries... how life might have arisen."
And after expressing all these doubts, it definitely states
as fact "the prebiotic soup, the solution of chemicals from
which life spontaneously arose."
This spontaneous generation of life under conditions
"perfect" for its occurence is crucial to an atheistic
explanation of the origin of life.
An obvious objection to this spontaneous generation of life
is that this event occurred eons ago in the hoary past, and has
never been repeated, nor has man, with all his accumulated
knowledge and ability to reason, been ableto duplicate this in
his laboratories.
THE EVOLUTIONARY LADDER
Evolutionists assume that amphibians evolved from fish, but the
metaphoric gulf between fish and amphibian is formidable. The
backbone would have had to undergo major modifications.... a
pelvis added..... gills must change to lungs. Most toads and
frogs have eardrums, fish dont. Tongues would also have to
change.
The gulf between amphibian and reptile is equally formidable.
Creatures before reptiles had soft, jellylike eggs which were
fertilized externally.... shelled eggs require internal
fertilization.... has blood vessels that pick up oxygen that
passes through the shell and conduct it to the embryo.
Embryos in fish and amphibian eggs release their wastes in the
water as soluble urea. But the urea within the shelled eggs of
reptiles would kill the embryos.... so shelled eggs have
insoluble uric acid. The egg yolk is food for the growing
reptile, enabling it to develop fully before emerging from the
shell, unlike amphibians which do not hatch directly into adult
form.
Then there are the inconsistencies between reptiles and birds:
reptiles are cold blooded, birds are warm blooded. Birds must
incubate their eggs; reptiles lay them and leave them. Birds
defend their nests, deliberately exposing themselves to danger
for their young. Bird bones are thin and hollow; reptile bones
are solid. A system of air sacs provide internal air circulation
for birds, something totally unthinkable in reptiles.
Reptiles have a three chambered heart; a bird's heart has four.
It is reasonable to think that a bird's beak evolved by chance
from the nose of a reptile.
Finally, the unbridgeable gulf between reptile and mammal:
mammary glands that give milk for the young which are born alive
with the instincts and the muscles to suck the milk from the
mother. Mammals have a need to maintain a constant body
temperature.
When the amphibian supposedly evolved into a reptile, the wastes
eliminated changed from urea to uric acid. But when the reptile
evolved into a mammal there was a reversal. Mammals went back to
the amphibian way, eliminating wastes as urea.
INEXPLICABLE COMPLEXITIES
Many cases exist where two organisms appear designed to live
together. Algae and fungi team up and become lichens. only then
can they grow on bare rock to start turning rock into soil.
Consider termites How do millions of blind workers coordinate
their efforts to build their ingeniously designed structures?
They exhibit something like a collective intelligence.
The internal clocks of plants and animals. Diatoms come to the
wet beach sand when the tide is out. When the tide is in, they
burrow back into the sand. Even in sand in the laboratory where
there is no tidal ebb and flow, their clocks still make them come
up and go down in time with the tides.
How do homing pigeons, taken 625 miles away in any direction,
return to their home lofts in a single day.
Arguments against evolution are rarely permitted in schools.
Evolution as a theory.... but it is presented as a reality to
students.
Quotations from Charles Darwin's
The Descent or Origin of Man
Human characteristics: "erect, shape of skull, nakedness
(hairless except for head), absence of a tail, every individual
different except identical twins, an opposing thumb, speech,
smaller canine teeth, color of skin".
Humans have a capacity for altruism; anything that has evolved from
natural selection should be selfish without a moral sense.
Chapter II
"The Duke of Argyll, for instance, insists that, the human frame
has diverged from the structure of brutes, in the direction of
greater physical helplessness and weakness. That is to say, it
is a divergence which of all other is the most impossible to
ascribe to mere natural selection".
Chapter III
Universal belief in unseen or spirited agencies, or God.
Chapter IV
"I fully subscribe to the judgement of those writers who maintain
that of all the differences between man and the lower animals,
the moral sense of conscience is by far the most important".
Chapter VI
"The great break in the organic chain between man and his nearest
allies, which cannot be bridged over by any extinct or living
species, has often been advanced as a grave objection to the
belief that man is descended from some lower form".
(The famous "missing link")
Chapter XXI
"Many of the views which have been advanced are highly
speculative, and some no doubt will prove erroneous".
"The high standard of our intellectual power and moral
disposition is the greatest difficulty which presents itself".
"Man...has few or no special instincts."
"The idea of a universal and beneficient Creator does not seem to
arise in the mind of man, until he has been elevated by long-
continued culture".
"Man scans with scrupulous care the character and pedigree of his
horses, cattle and dogs before he matches them."
Man
The gulf between animals and man is enormous, like the extended 7
to 13 year period of growth and parental care....the power of
abstract thought and speech, the ability to record accumulated
knowledge, the conversion of natural materials into artifacts
formed by heat, chemical reactions, etc... Man also has moral and
spiritual values missing from animals.
Conclusion
The bottom line for me is that "God" is the Creator of the
universe and of life on Earth, and that science is unravelling
His methodology.
The founding fathers of the United States also found themselves
accepting this view, even as they laid the foundation of their
nation in a basically secular Declaration of Independence and
subsequent Constitution.
In the Declaration of Independence of July 4, 1776, mention is
made of "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God" and "Men are
endowed by their Creator". But when it came to the drafting
of the Constitution of the United States in September 17, 1787,
there is no mention of God in its Articles.
This is quite unusual because, although most of them (the
founding fathers) resisted the literal Biblical view of creation
almost to a man, they agreed that God had created man.
"Here is my creed. I believe in one God, Creator of the
Universe. That He governs it by His providence. That He ought
to be worshipped. That the most acceptable service we render Him
is doing good to His other children".
"The Divine Author of life."
Benjamin Franklin.
"The whole rational creation of God."
John Adams.
"Well aware that Almighty God both created the mind free."
Thomas Jefferson.
"The duty which we owe to our CREATOR."
James Madison.
"The Supreme Being gave existence to man".
Alexander Hamilton.
"Render to the Creator and Preserver those acknowledgements which
are due to Him for our being."
Samuel Adams.
"I consider myself in the Hands of my Creator."
Thomas Paine.
(from In God we Trust, Chapter 1, by Norman Cousins)
On the other hand, countless thousands of otherwise intelligent,
logical human beings deny the existence of God, and hence the
Creator.
To these people I can only say, if you and mankind are so
ingenious, so clever at the end of the 20th century, make me life
out of inorganic material.
Or as the poet Walt Whitman said in "Leaves of Grass", all
creation is summed up in a blade of grass. Make me a blade of
grass.
It boggles my mind that some rational people can profess to
believe that "life" began millions of years ago in a unique,
"perfect mix" of primeral soup with ideal temperature conditions
that have never been duplicated since, and has evolved "upwards"
in complexity all on its own, without any intelligence to guide
it, culminating in Homo Sapiens.
The natural law of nature is to retrogress. Gardens, farms,
domestic animals all revert to the "wild" when human influence is
withdrawn.
Any science student, any scientist will attest to the difficulty
of conducting inorganic experiments that produce results as they
should.
Any organic scientist will attest to the difficulty of preserving
simple bacteria cultures in the lab.
And life happened on its own? I don't think so; I think God did
it.
The human brain is easily the most mysterious part of the human
miracle. The key brain cells, the neurons, dont actually
touch one another. They are separated by synapses, tiny spaces
less than one millionth of an inch across. These gaps are
bridged by chemicals called neurotransmitters, 30 of which are
known. These chemical signals are received at one end of the
neuron by a maze of tiny filaments called dendrites. The signals
are then transmitted at the other end of the neuron bya nerve
fiber called an axon. In the neurons the signals are electrical,
but across the gaps they are chemical. Thus the transmission of
nerve signals is electrochemical in nature.
It is the cerebral cortex of the brain that sets man apart from
any animal. It is less than a quarter of an inch thick.
We must, by input from our surroundings, program the brain.
Without that immense infusion of experience, scarcely a trace of
intellect would appear. The human brain is genetically
programmed for language development.
It is estimated that the human brain could take any load of
learning and memory put on it now, and a billion times that.
This is the only example in existence where a species was
provided with an organ that it still has not learned how to fully
use. Said Carl Sagan: "the brain is a very big place in a very
small space."
A curious scientific conundrum is the question of the "missing
link", the inexplicable gap in the evolutionary process between
apes, the Neanderthal Man, etc. and modern man.
Egyptian drawings and sculptures dating 4,500 B.C. share the same
faces, the same bodies, hands and feet as man possesses today.
Human hands were recently found in a French cave dated at 16,000
B.C.
But 50,000 years ago, skull, bone, and fossil evidence shows a
being, called humanoids for lack of a better term, overwhelmingly
different.
Bridging the gap of a mere 34,000 years by a miraculous series of
"mutations" is something even the most dedicated scientist
refuses to do. The best thing they can do to pose the question,
that a link is missing.
Newsweek reports on the "ape man" fossil record that, "You could
put all the fossils on top of a single desk' says Elwyn Simons of
Duke University." From The New York Times : "The known fossil
remains of mans ancestors would fit on a billiard table. That
makes a poor platform from which to peer into the mists of the
last few million years."
Newsweek : "The missing link between man and the apes... is
merely the most glamorous of a whole hierarchy of phantom
creatures. In the fossil record, missing links are the rule."
The answer, obviously, is in the hands of God.
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