Does the Broad Scientific Evidence Point to Creation and to God?

 by Laurence D Smart B.Sc.Agr., Dip.Ed., Grad.Dip.Ed

Email: laurence@unmaskingevolution.com

Webpage: www.unmaskingevolution.com

[Free to print and distribute. Copy must be in full.]

 An alternative to the question, "Is evolution fact or fiction?", is, "Does the scientific evidence point to creation and the existence of God?" After all, the main push towards the wholesale saturation of society with evolution is to get away from the notion of an all-powerful creator God.

It would be more acceptable if this second question was answered by an evolutionist who was also an atheist. In this way, any positive outcomes would not be seen as the result of Christian bias.

In their classic 1981 book on evolution, "Evolution from Space", Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe analysed the broad scientific evidence for evolution. They did this as scientists and evolutionists, in what they considered was an unbiased way - looking at the facts and ignoring the theories.

Their investigation led them to state that "there are so many flaws in Darwinism that one can wonder why it swept so completely through the scientific world, and why it is still endemic today." p:133

 

What did they find that caused them to make such a statement?

(1) It is sheer nonsense that life would inevitably evolve on a planet like Earth.

"The tactic is to argue that although the chance of arriving at the biochemical system of life as we know it is admitted to be utterly minuscule, there is in Nature such an enormous number of other chemical systems which could also support life that any old planet like the earth would inevitably arrive sooner or later at one or another of them. This argument is the veriest nonsense, and if it is to be imbibed at all it must be swallowed with a jorum of strong ale." p:28

(2) The very early environment of Earth was not favourable for life to evolve.

"The problem for those who believe life to have arisen by spontaneous generation on the Earth is now seen to be acute. The origin appears to be forced back beyond 3,800 million years ago, into an era of serious geological disturbance, which seems as if it must have been generally inimical to life." p:75

(3) It would have been impossible for life to start in a primordial soup.

"[T]here are about two thousand enzymes, and the chance of obtaining them all in a random trial is only one part in (1020)2000 = 1040,000, an outrageously small probability that could not be faced even if the whole universe consisted of organic soup." p:24

(4) The probability that the chemistry of living things formed by chance, random shuffling of simple organic molecules is equivalent to zero.

"Biochemical systems are exceedingly complex, so much so that the chance of their being formed through random shufflings of simple organic molecules is exceedingly minute, to a point indeed where it is insensibly different from zero" p:3

(5) Chance does not produce complex life.

"You could by no means leave the program changes needed to make more complex life-forms to mere chance. Every competent space-mathematician would assure you that such a Darwinian idea had no chance of working, nothing at all would happen." p:109

(6) Mutation and natural selection could not have created the first complex organic molecules.

"[M]utation and natural selection cannot produce complex biomolecules from a random association of atoms - i.e. from a disordered chemical situation." p:23

(7) The fossilized life found in the oldest rocks was already complex.

"Most of the biochemical complexity of life was present already at the time the oldest surface rocks of the Earth were formed." p:8

(8) There is no evidence that simple cells (procaryotes) evolved into more complex cells (eukaryotes).

"Nor do recent discoveries in microbiology support the idea that eukaryotes evolved from procaryotes." p:71-72

(9) It is debatable whether the information stored inside cells could have evolved from simple chemicals.

"But then how could the physical environment, containing what seems to be only a low level of information, succeed in building biological systems with exceedingly high levels of information? ... Whether it does so or not has always been a matter of debate." p:6

(10) The amount of genetic material doesn't directly increase with the complexity of the organism.

"It came as a great surprise in biology that a handful of fungal cells contain as much DNA as a man, and that the salamander contains a great deal more." p:87

(11) Natural selection only improves adaptation, it does not create organisms in the first place.

"Getting the adaption there in the first place remained a problem ... [A]lthough the scientific world has been persuaded into thinking that exhaustive proofs were given in The Origin of Species (1859). What we are actually given in Darwin's book are very many changes of adaptation by already adapted species ..." p:96

(12) The rate of mutation is so slow that there isn't enough time for Darwinian evolution to work.

"The chance of a copying error is ... about one in twenty to thirty million per generation. This is a very slow rate. Yet it is only this very slow mutation rate that Darwinism has to work with. It is not only inadequate to explain the evolutionary changes that have occurred, sometimes over quite short intervals for both plants and animals, it is woefully inadequate." p:18-19

(13) Genetic miscopying is more likely to lead to devolution (ie the decline of species) than evolution.

"[T]he variations on which natural selection operates arise from the miscopying of genetic messages. Miscopying commonly loses information and gains it only rarely. The variations on which natural selection operates are therefore strongly biased towards decline." p:7

(14) The fossil record is not 'very incomplete' - it is complete.

"It used to be said that the fossil record is patchy, and therefore very incomplete ... Yet by consulting geologists one learns otherwise." p:80

(15) The fossil record does not support Darwinian evolution.

"The fossil record is highly imperfect from a Darwinian point of view, not because of the inadequacies of geologists, but because the slow evolutionary connections required by the theory did not happen." p:147

(16) The fossil record shows stasis - living things did not evolve.

"Wherever one would like evidence of major changes and linkages, such as [the first vertebrates, fish, amphibians, reptiles and mammals], ... the evidence is conspicuously missing from the fossil record." p:89

(17) There never were any evolutionary intermediates.

"We saw there that intermediate forms are missing from the fossil record. Now we see why, essentially because there were no intermediate forms." p:111

(18) The geologic time-scale is used to defend evolution even though it can't be demonstrated to be accurate.

"[T]he evolutionist simply pointed to the long time-scales of geology and there was then no way to demonstrate that it would need a time-scale 1040,000 times as long to produce the effects that were being claimed." p:133

 

They also found that ...

(1) Drawings of evolutionary trees are purely hypothetical.

"One should not be deceived, however, by the elegance of this result into thinking figure 6.3 [The Evolutionary Tree of Living Things] proves the existence of an evolutionary tree. What is shown is that if a tree existed then it was like this." p:84

(2) Scientific authors draw intermediates on their evolutionary trees even though they don't exist.

"Authors of texts in biology are often so convinced that such connections existed that they cannot refrain from drawing an evolutionary tree with all the life-forms ... derived by a system of branches from a single ancestral trunk." p:80

(3) Most scientists take Darwinism and its supporting theories to be true at face value.

"Most scientists took the correctness of Darwinism to be axiomatic, and they simply argued that any hypothesis needed to make Darwinism work had to be true." p:15

(4) Because of prejudice, scientists pay more attention to the myths of evolution than to the facts.

"We in our turn have been disturbed to discover how little attention is generally paid to fact and how much to myths and prejudice." p:147

(5) Scientists accept weak explanations that support evolution because they totally believe Darwinism.

"If one believes in Darwinism there has to be some other such process, and because scientists believe in Darwinism there is a strong social tendency in this kind of situation for everybody to become satisfied with a weak explanation." p:22

(6) Scientists seem reluctant to abandon Darwinism even when the evidence against it is convincing, because the change would cause them too much turmoil.

They make remarks like this - " 'I admit that your views are consistent with the facts, and that they even have a certain driving logical quality which normal theory lacks, but I just cannot bring myself to face the upheaval in my thinking that would follow if I agreed with anything you say'." p:137

(7) 'Scientific' explanations of how Darwinian evolution has worked are based on theories.

"There had to be an explanation of the facts, therefore there had to be a 'principle', so no matter how great the imperfections of one's theory, it had to turn out to be correct in the long run, much the same bootstrap as is still used for Darwinism." p:132 (emphasis mine)

(8) Darwinism was automatically accepted as truth when Lamarck failed to prove his theory.

"The failure of Lamarckism to prove itself has been taken, not just as a disproof of Lamarckism, but as a proof of Darwinism." p:137

(9) Evolutionists try to evade the reality of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

"As the enormity of the supposition [of the primordial soup] was slowly revealed in the present century, there was an attempt to evade this difficulty through the invention of pseudo-science. The pseudo-science had its origin in the second 'law' of thermodynamics ... [But], there is no such thing as a closed box isolated from the rest of the universe ... As mathematicians would say, the second law must be a global law. Without the advantage of this perception, some scientists began to hunt around for what they felt to be a new deep principle applicable to the behaviour of material systems inside closed boxes which would decide the entropy issue from within ... The argument was of the variety which a later generation of physicists came to describe as 'pulling oneself up by one's bootstraps'." p:131 & 132

(10) 'Ockham's razor' condemns Darwinism.

"The disposition is to argue: 'Darwinism is correct. Therefore any hypothesis essential to its support must also be correct.' This, in our view, is what Ockham's razor enjoins one not to do." p:135

 

What were their deductions?

As a consequences of their investigation, Hoyle and Wickramasinghe made the following deductions:-

(1) There was a creation.

"... by 'creation' we now mean incidence from space." p:114

(2) The various kinds of living things were separately created.

"[T]here is no reason why some of the categories shown in figure 6.2 [The Evolutionary Tree of Living Things] should not always have been separate." p:114

"[W]ithin each of these kingdoms there could well also be separate lines of 'creation'." p:114

(3) The physical laws that life depends on were deliberately made.

"[I]t becomes sensible to think that the favourable properties of physics on which life depends are in every respect deliberate." p:141

(4) The physical laws of the universe were deliberately made by a higher intelligence.

"[T]here is another still higher level of intelligence that controlled the coupling constants of physics." p:143

(5) There must be an intelligence greater than our own.

"The revulsion which biologists feel to the thought that purpose might have a place in the structure of biology is therefore revulsion to the concept that biology might have a connection to an intelligence higher than our own ... Yet surely there must be such intelligences. It would be ridiculous to suppose otherwise." p:33

(6) Life was created by an intelligence.

"[T]here is a term in the sequence, an intelligence, which designed the biochemicals and gave rise to the origin of carboniferous life." p:143

(7) God exists.

"God º universe." p:143

 

What was their conclusion?

After an unbiased examination of the facts behind evolution, Hoyle and Wickramasinghe concluded that an extremely high intelligence created life on Earth. However, they rejected God as the origin of life, and opted instead for a creative celestial intelligence. "Although our point of view is anti-Darwinian and is in a sense a return to the concept of special creation, it is not the old concept of special creation." p:147

 

What can be deduced from this study?

The broad evidence arising from this study of evolution, therefore, points to a creator. Christians identify this creator as Almighty God. So, contrary to being mythology, Christian creation is supported by scientific evidence. Therefore, there is no need for Christians to abandon their faith and embrace any form of evolution.

 

Is this study still valid today?

Since this review was conducted, only point 16 is in question. Today, Punctuated Equilibrium explains how evolution could have occurred without the fossil record displaying gradual change. However, Punctuated Equilibrium is classified by the world's leading experts on the subject as an hypothesis, not a fact, as revealed in the book "The Dynamics of Evolution: The Punctuated Equilibrium Debate in the Natural and Social Sciences" (S. Albert & S.A. Peterson eds., 1989, Cornell University Press: Ithaca, USA). In this book it is described by: Ernst Mayr as a theory (p:27) and a model (p:47); by Steven M. Stanley as a model (p:85) and an hypothesis (p:85); by Stephen J. Gould as an hypothesis (p:71) and as a theory (p:72); and by Niles Eldredge as a theory (p:104). Steven J. Gould also admits that "Punctuated equilibrium is testable but unsupported" (p:74).

As Hoyle and Wickramasinghe rejected all theory, and included only facts in their analysis, Punctuated Equilibrium must also be rejected. Therefore, their conclusion still stands.

 

  

SOURCE: F. Hoyle & C. Wickramasinghe (1981), "Evolution From Space", J.M. Dent & Sons: London