LIFE

There are only two possibilities for the existence of life: chance or design?

As we cannot scientifically replicate or revisit the origin of the Universe both Chance Evolution and Divine Creation are primarily matters of belief – not scientific fact. In the end it all comes down to what, from the evidence and your own life experience, you personally believe to be true.

Just like the word ‘love’ the term ‘evolve’ is often misused. According to most dictionary definitions, to ‘evolve’ means “to develop gradually, or to cause something or someone to develop gradually”

The term ‘evolve’ does not imply either the absence or presence of a creator or any kind of process of random chance. In all these respects it is neutral.

DNA however, is a different matter. Every cell of the human body contains DNA. Deoxyribonucleic acid is a molecule composed of two strands which coil around each other in the form of a double helix. This carries the genetic instructions for the development, functioning and reproduction of all known organisms on our planet. DNA contains the genes which are the blueprint for all living things. It is what makes you, you as opposed to someone else.

Contained within the DNA of each person are 46 chromosomes.

Each chromosome contains between 48 – 250 million letters. That is a total of over 3 billion letters long in one single copy of the human Genome. If we took the DNA of one single person laid out end to end it would stretch to the Sun and back!

Evolutionary biologists and teachers have often referred to DNA as “the instruction book for life”. It is a very big and complex book. Taking the book analogy – could a book create its self?

Would an explosion in a print factory result in a perfectly bound and printed copy of Encyclopaedia Britannica?

Of course not!

We are only intelligent because our DNA contains the blue print for intelligence. So where did that come from?

Is there any evidence at all that life arose by some chance accident?

No there isn’t.

Whether humanity evolved/developed from primates is based purely on an assumption, not on any conclusive objective evidence. Charles Darwin himself struggled with the sticky issue of evidence to support his theory of evolution.

His famous book is full of references to the lack of such evidence. “Firstly, why, if species have descended from other species by insensibly fine gradations, 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?” (Origin of Species page 143)

In ‘Evolution and the Fossil Record,’ Dr. David M. Raup comments: “In the years after Darwin, his advocates hoped to find predictable progressions. In general, these have not been found – yet the optimism has died hard, and some pure fantasy has crept into textbooks.” Science, Vol. 213 (July 17, 1981), page 289

This is unfortunately still true today.

Only recently a young student told us that in school he had learned that natural selection had been proved during the Industrial Revolution of the 19th Century by the work of British physician, Bernard Kettlewell.

In the 1950s Kettlewell wrote an article for Scientific American magazine about the changes in English Peppered Moth populations during the Industrial Revolution when lighter moths decreased due to predations by birds and the darker moths increased due to blending into the darker soot tinted bark of trees. Kettlewell’s article became, and still is, referred to in hundreds of school and university textbooks as evidence for evolution at work in nature.

But the fact is – Kettlewell’s study was a complete hoax.

English Peppered Moths are nocturnal. They do not fly around during the day and are not preyed on by birds but by bats, who do not need to see them visually to catch them. These moths do not live on the bark of trees but in the canopies of trees where they are well hidden. Even Kettlewell’s famous photographs of moths on trees in daylight had been faked by him gluing dead moths onto the bark of trees. The young student had been told a lie simply to guarantee the perpetuation of the unproven, but still more acceptable, idea of evolution.

That this is still happening in schools and universities in the 21st century is cause for real concern.

How can young people know what is true if text books print lies?

Are we being given the right ingredients for an unbiased coherent view of the origins of life on Earth? Just like the old doctrine of an Earth centred universe the idea of chance evolution is based on the acceptance of a narrative which assumes it is true. But if the basic ingredients are wrong to begin with it is hardly surprising that it doesn’t work.

What we have to realise is there is often a significant difference between what is written in school and university text books and what has been written in scientific papers. Because conservatism rules in education text books mostly promote the acceptable view of the times.

But as we know from recent past history what is promoted and taught as the commonly acceptable view of life is not always correct.

In a PBS documentary in 1990, Dr. Richard Leakey, discoverer of Skull 1470 (Homo habilis) and one of the most respected paleo-anthropologists made this thought provoking statement: “If pressed about man’s ancestry, I would have to unequivocally say that all we have is a huge question mark. To date, there has been nothing found to truthfully purport as a transitional specie to man, including Lucy, since 1470 was as old and probably older. If further pressed, I would have to state that there is more evidence to suggest an abrupt arrival of man rather than a gradual process of evolving.” In his book ‘The Blind Watchmaker ‘ Richard Dawkins wrote: “The only alternative explanation of the sudden appearance of so many complex animal types in the Cambrian era is divine creation and (we) both reject this alternative.”

Here we get a glimpse of the materialist agenda. They simply do not want to consider any other possibility. This has nothing to do with science; it seems more like an emotional/psychological aversion to even the possibility that there may be a creator.

This would account for why the narrative today is one of scientism, rather than objective science. It is ultimately why evidence that is deemed inconvenient is ignored, ridiculed or marginalised. This is why blatantly incorrect or faked evidence such as Kettlewell’s are still in the textbooks, whereas other evidence is not included.

This is because the materialist agenda which embraces Darwinian evolution requires the filtration of knowledge to retain its credibility.

For example: during the California gold rush of the 19th century miners dug many tunnels and found many human remains and domestic artefacts. Some of these remains were found in the Eocene rock strata which meant they were about 50 million years old. This was catalogued and reported in scientific papers by geologist Dr. J.D. Whitney, head of the California Geological Survey. But you won’t find much material on this today because all these discoveries were squashed by Anthropologist William B. Holmes of the Smithsonian Institution simply because Whitney’s findings did not support Darwinian evolution. Since then there has been a systematic process of knowledge filtration to suppress or marginalise anything that does conform to the accepted evolutionary view. This is not science – neither is it free and unbiased inquiry! The theory of evolution is deeply ingrained into the materialistic mindset and consequently scientism today is also concerned to suppress any hint that there may be a Creator.

In ‘Physics Bulletin’, 1980, Vol. 31, page 138 in ‘A physicist looks at evolution’, Physicist H. J. Lipson, commented: “If living matter is not, then, caused by the interplay of atoms, natural forces and radiation, how has it come into being?…we must … admit that the only acceptable explanation is creation. I know that this is anathema to physicists, as indeed it is to me, but we must not reject a theory that we do not like if the experimental evidence supports it.”

The author of Brave New World, Aldous Huxley, in ‘Ends and Means’ page 273, confessed: “I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption…”

Here is the crux of the matter: the argument is not scientific but emotional.

Chance evolution has become the acceptable default position of today’s scientism not because it is scientifically verifiable but simply because special creation is emotionally and politically unacceptable to a secular materialist mindset.

Just like those who once believed Earth was the centre of the universe, the materialist paradigm of today only teaches and propagates that which is considered to be acceptable. Science describes, categorises, quantifies and manipulates phenomenon that already exists. How and why we ourselves are part of the phenomena of existence is a matter of belief – not fact. But the fact that chance evolution is taught as a fact and unquestioningly accepted today is a matter for real concern.

No matter how free you may think you are, indoctrination is still alive and active in the 21st century, but now on a much more subtle and potentially dangerous level.

In his article ‘Adaptation’ in ‘Nature’, Vol. 123; page 233 (1929) D. M. S. Watson wrote: “Evolution itself is accepted by zoologists, not because it has been observed to occur … or can be proved by logical coherent evidence, but because the only alternative, special creation, is clearly incredible.”

Sir Arthur Keith in ’Did Man Just Happen?’ (page 73) comments: “Evolution is unproved and unprovable. We believe it only because the only alternative is special creation, and that is unthinkable.”

Sometimes to discover the truth we have to think the unthinkable.

Acknowledgements: All those quoted above and particularly Michael Cremo and Dr Colin Mitchell