Wednesday, March 24, 2004

If you want real science, consider some of evolution’s many contradictions

Creationists are often challenged to “present the evidence” for intelligent design, but where is the evidence for evolution? Mr. Duran in his Feb. 18 letter asserted, “Evolution theory is just as proven as the atomic theory.” But, is it really?

Evolution requires that life happens by itself, by chance. The mathematics of probability can be used to demonstrate that spontaneous generation (life arising from non-living materials in a “primordial soup”) is impossible.

In fact, all efforts to demonstrate spontaneous generation have failed since Louis Pasteur first disproved it almost 150 years ago.

For life to originate in this way, evolutionary scientists have to make many assumptions, such as the following:

They must assume that just the right chemicals were in just the right proportions at the just right time under just the right conditions so that amino acids could form. (That seems to me like very little was left to chance!)

They must assume that the lightning required to zap the chemicals to produce amino acids (the building blocks of proteins, which are the components of cells) would not destroy the amino acids and the cells.

Observe what lightning does to a tree. What would it do to a fragile cell? It is not a creator, unless you believe those “Frankenstein” movies,

The temperature of the oceans would have needed to be about 0 degrees Celsius (the freezing point) because of the instability of organic compounds. That condition definitely conflicts with the hot molten earth that scientists theorize existed.

In fact, according to the authority that Mr. Duran quotes, the temperature of “the early environment on Earth” would have been “near or above the normal boiling point of water.”

They must assume the existence of an oxygen-free earth because oxygen destroys amino acids. However, much data point to an oxygen-rich environment “billions” of years ago.

They must assume that the amino acids would by some means survive long enough to somehow combine to form cells that would someway survive long enough to develop into more complex organisms.

But the problem with these assumptions is that an oxygen-free atmosphere means that there would be no ozone layer. Ozone is needed to protect organisms from the sun’s ultraviolet rays that would emit a lethal dose of radiation in just 0.3 of a second (per Carl Sagan, an evolutionist). How would they survive?

Of course, the biggest problem with this theory is that it is based on experiments performed under precise conditions in a controlled environment by scientists. (This looks like intelligent design to me!)

But remember, evolutionists deny that life had a designer! It seems to me that evolutionists have to use intelligent design (experiments) to disprove intelligent design and to try to prove chance!

All of these problems are just the tip of the iceberg. The amino acids, if somehow formed, would have to somehow be able to form proteins and enzymes before cells could form. Then, of course, the cells would have to form into organisms, or organs and organ systems. (How can you have a “system” without an organizer?)

Scientific advances show that even the most “simple” organisms are much more complex than previously believed. For example, a “simple” bacterium contains thousands of different proteins.

Carl Sagan has noted, “The information content of a simple cell has been established as ... comparable to about a hundred million pages of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.”

Astronomer Sir Bernard Lovell said, “The organic molecules in the primordial seas might have to undergo 10 to the 130th trial assemblies in order to hit upon the correct sequence. The possibility of such a chance occurrence leading to the formation of one of the smallest protein molecules is unimaginably small ... It [is] effectively zero.” Mathematicians say that odds greater than one in 10 to the 50th are considered effectively impossible.

Francis Crick, a Nobel prize winner and the co-discoverer of DNA (who is also a devout evolutionist), pointed out that the impossibility of “a particular amino acid sequence [being] selected by chance” would be “approximately equal to 10 to the 260th, that is, a one followed by 260 zeros. This number is quite beyond our everyday comprehension ... The great majority of sequences can never have been synthesized at all, at any time.”

“The chances for producing the necessary molecules, amino acids, proteins, et cetera, for a cell one-tenth the size of the smallest known to man ... is less than one in 10 to the 340,000,000th or 10 with 340 million zeros after it,” said Harold J. Morowitz, professor of Biophysics at Yale University

Sir Fred Hoyle, an eminent astronomer: “The notion ... that a living cell could be arrived by chance in a primordial organic soup here on Earth is evidently nonsense of a high order.”

He used the following analogy: “Anyone with even a nodding acquaintance with the Rubik cube will concede the near-impossibility of a solution being obtained by a blind person moving the cube faces at random.” It would be like “10 to the 50th blind persons each with a scrambled Rubik cube” who simultaneously arrive at the solution.

He also noted that the probability of higher life forms emerging by chance is comparable to the odds that “a tornado sweeping through a junk-yard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein.”

The more scientists understand about DNA and other scientific fields, the more mathematically impossible evolution becomes. Who might be better than Crick, who determined DNA’s molecular structure, to assess the possibility of evolution?

He concluded, “An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going.”

Notice that there are many scientific facts and theories that conflict with evolution. I agree with the scientist quoted by Mr. Duran that particles-to-people evolution is a “problem” and that there are “specific instructions in the genome.” (Doesn’t “specific instructions” support intelligent design?)

How were the “beneficial” mutations caused in the experiment that he referenced, by chance or by human interaction? Where are the transitional forms? Are these forms able to reproduce? The most basic question is this: Where did the “specific instructions in the genome” come from originally?

“The major dogmas of biology” is an appropriate quote by Mr. Duran. “Dogma” is defined as “an arrogant assertion of opinion” and has a theological (religious) meaning. A dogmatic opinion is one “asserted a priori or without proof.”

Evolution is an unsubstantiated hypothesis or conjecture, not a proven fact, and therefore should not be promoted dogmatically and its weaknesses not acknowledged or even hidden.

Scientists often disagree with how to interpret the data. Are these logical flaws with evolution presented to students? They are seldom admitted on TV programs or in most books.

The prominent evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin has admitted, “We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs ... in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories [an allusion to the humorous stories by Rudyard Kipling], because we have a priori commitment, a commitment to materialism [that there is no God].”

Mr. Duran criticizes me for using the Bible, but I was simply challenging his statement that the Bible makes erroneous claims. I simply quoted the Bible’s accurate descriptions of the physical world.

When he not so subtly equated the Bible with a comic strip, he showed his antagonism toward Christianity. The Bible does not contradict the physical evidence that Eratosthenes observed. In fact, it supports it.

Should one “get immediately angry” with sincere questions and opinions and call them “nonsense”? Mr. Duran fails to explain how the facts presented by scientists at “various creationism Web sites” are “misinformation.”

I don’t find that they are “designed to confuse” but are rather very informative. I encourage readers to judge for themselves.

Jeremy Conley

Peachtree City, Ga.