What’s The Connection Between Faith And Science? Series

What’s the Connection between Faith And Science?

"Didn't evolution put God out of a job? Why rely on religion in an age of science and knowledge?"

as anti-God evangelist Richard Dawkins, who boldly declares, "Today the theory of evolution is about as much open to doubt as the theory that the earth goes round the sun."15 He also says, "It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I'd rather not consider that)."16

Charles Darwin, and the evolutionary theory that flowed from his work, doesn't even try to answer the question of where life came from. His book is called The Origin of Species--referring to the successive origins of each new species as it gradually grew out of other previous, more primitive, ones.

A. Concession #1:

Darwin was right at least in this: living things do change and adapt over time--everyone agrees that's true to some degree. That is, virtually no one denies that microevolution occurs--meaning the adaptations that happen over time within the assorted species.

B. Concession #2:

We do not have an answer for everything (they don't).

C. Assertion #1

The question of whether examples of microevolution really provide evidence for Darwin's grand scheme of macroevolution--species gradually growing into other species, all beginning with one common ancestor--requires a leap of faith.

D. Assertion #2

With Similarities between two species may mean common descent, but in reality it could be the work of a common designer.

I. What evolution cannot explain.

A. The origin of matter.

Where did the stuff come from. The existence of matter was obviously implied, but never really explained.

One day a group of scientists got together and decided that humankind had come a long way and no longer needed God. So they picked one scientist to go and tell Him that they were done with Him. The scientist walked up to God and said, "God, we've decided that we no longer need you. We're to the point where we can clone people and do many miraculous things, so why don't you just go on and mind your own business?" God listened very patiently to the man. After the scientist was done talking, God said, "Very well, how about this? Let's say we have a people-making contest," to which the scientist replied, "Okay, we can handle that!" "But," God added, "we're going to do this just like I did back in the old days with Adam." The scientist said, "Sure, no problem," and bent down and grabbed himself a handful of dirt. God looked at him and said, "No, no, no. You go get your own dirt!"

B. The origin of the first life on the planet.

The second prerequisite for Darwin's Origin of the Species model to get started, as mentioned earlier, is the origin of the original species--the very first life on the planet--which purportedly then evolved into all the varieties of living beings. But Darwin never even gave serious treatment to the question of how that first life began.

Many other scientists over the decades have proposed a variety of theories about the original inception of life--from sheer chance, to the (later disproved) inherent attraction between the building blocks of living matter, to life "riding in on the backs of crystals," to a theory known as panspermia, which says that life was planted here by beings from outer space.

BUT MOST EVOLUTIONISTS SIMPLE ACCEPT THE FACT THAT LIFE IS AND DO NOT OFFER AN EXPLANATION FOR WHY OR HOW IT BEGAN.

C. The development of life on the planet.

Evolution argues that life slowly evolves and changes. It emerges slowly. Scientists reject the idea because according to their understanding of the the earth's history, life suddenly appears.

Mathematician William Dembski, writing with Sean McDowell, discusses the fossil record and sums up the evidence like this: The first life form emerges suddenly. According to standard dating, this first emergence of life was around 4 billion years ago. For the first 500 million years, the earth was too hot and turbulent for any life form to exist. And then, shortly after the earth was cool enough, certain types of bacteria appear suddenly and abundantly.31

D. The complexity in even the simplest forms of life.

Overwhelming odds against those coming together by chance.

Biochemist Michael Denton, in his book Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, poses the problem like this: "Is it really credible that random processes could have constructed a reality, the smallest element of which--a functional protein or gene--is complex beyond our own creative capacities, a reality which is the very antithesis of chance, which excels in every sense anything produced by the intelligence of man?"

Consider what you'd need for a protein molecule to form by chance. First, you need the right bonds between the amino acids. Second, amino acids come in right-handed and left-handed versions, and you've got to get only left-handed ones. Third, the amino acids must link up in a specified sequence, like letters in a sentence. Run the odds of these things falling into place on their own and you find that the probabilities of forming a rather short functional protein at random would be one chance in a hundred thousand trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion. That's a ten with 125 zeroes after it! And that would only be one protein molecule--a minimally complex cell would need between three hundred and five hundred protein molecules. . . . To suggest chance against those odds is really to invoke a naturalistic miracle.33