Evolution & the “Big Bang Theory.” Is it Fact or Fiction?? (Part two of three)
Answers to Bible Questions
Scriptures are from the KJV of the Bible
(Q) Evolution & the “Big Bang Theory.” Is it Fact or Fiction??
**PART TWO OF THREE**
(A) WHAT IF
It’s easy to imagine a few simple changes that would make life on Earth impossible or very difficult. For instance, Earth spins as it circles the sun. This gives us day and night. Earth also is tilted 23° from upright as it spins. It is the spin and the tilt that give us our seasons. What if Earth were not tilted? The poles would be much colder, and the equator much hotter. Without the tilt, only half as much land could be lived on, and many kinds of plants and animals would die.
Earth is not a large planet. Yet its size is exact and essential. If it were too small, Earth’s weakened gravity could not hold either our air or water. And thinner air would provide no protection from the 20,000 or so meteorites that rush toward Earth daily. With thinner air, temperatures would drop, and life could not exist.
If Earth were twice as large, the atmosphere would be pulled closer to its surface. Everything would weigh eight times as much, and that weight could crush most living things.
If Earth were twice as far from the sun, it would receive only one-fourth the amount of heat we now receive. Living things would freeze during winters twice as long as now. If Earth were half as far from the sun, its surface would get four times the heat and would become a burning desert.
If Earth did not have a large moon revolving around it, there would be no tides in the sea. Waters of the oceans might grow stagnant, unable to provide the oxygen that fish need to live.
Any of these changes would make life on Earth impossible. Our world had to be just the way it is, placed just where it is in the solar system to be in a zone of life.
Those who study our universe have discovered and described “laws” that operate in nature. One of the most fundamental is the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The Second Law, often called the law of entropy, says that any physical system left to itself will decay. Instead of being highly organized, like our Earth’s systems, everything will break down. Chemical processes will reach equilibrium, that dead state found on Mars and Venus.
But the processes that operate on Earth remain highly organized. These processes are not breaking down! The atmosphere, the oceans, the relationship between plants and animals, all seem designed to take energy from the sun and use it in an organized way! Instead of breaking down, these processes even seem to adjust constantly to maintain that delicate and perfect balance without which all life would end.
The Russian scientist Dr. Boris P. Dotsenko was once head of the nuclear physics department in the Institute of Physics in Kiev, Russia. Although he was taught not to believe in God, he began to think about what it means for Earth to be the way it is in spite of the Second Law. Later he wrote, as I thought about all of that, it suddenly dawned on me that there must be a very powerful organizing force counteracting this disorganizing tendency within nature, keeping the universe controlled and in order.This force must not be material; otherwise, it too would become disordered. I concluded that this power must be both omnipotent [all-powerful] and omniscient [all-wise and all-knowing]. There must be a God-one God-controlling everything!’
Later, in Canada for further studies, Dr. Dotsenko found a Bible. Reading the Bible this Russian scientist met the God who he had become sure must exist. Now a Christian, Boris Dotsenko has stayed in Canada and teaches physics at several schools and universities.
Not every person who studies science will reach the same conclusion as this Russian who was brought up as an atheist. But the evidence is there. Everything around us, including the delicate balance in nature that makes life on Earth possible, makes it clear. Our world didn’t “just happen.” Our world was designed, and even today Earth is guided and protected by God.
Scientists who believe the Theory of Evolution of life know it could not happen unless Earth was once very different than it is now. They picture early Earth as molten rock, giving off volcanic gases like methane, carbon dioxide, ammonia and water vapor. Some think thousands of meteorites struck Earth from space, bringing millions of tons of carbon. Perhaps water vapor was formed by gases from volcanoes.
However, after hundreds of millions of years they suppose that Earth cooled. Rain fell on the black, jumbled, empty rocks of Earth. Finally water lay in shallow seas and in millions of pools and streams.
Because there was no free oxygen in the air then, and therefore no ozone layer, powerful rays of ultraviolet light from the sun struck the water and the chemicals that were dissolved in it and caused change.
No scientist can say just how it is supposed to have happened, but evolutionists think that carbon and ammonia and other atoms began to link up, to form the chemical combinations necessary for living cells. Then, somehow, these chemicals formed more complex structures. Finally, somehow, just the right chemicals were all together in the right place, and a living cell formed! This living cell reproduced itself from the chemicals in the water around it and, from this beginning-a single cell- all the plants and animals on Earth developed.
WHAT IS A SINGLE CELL MADE OF
How complex is a single cell? One scientist who believes in Evolution, J. Keosian, says that the simplest cell “is an intricate … unit of harmoniously coordinated parts and chemical pathways. Its spontaneous assembly out of the environment, granting the unlikely simultaneous presence together of all the parts is not a believable possibility.”?
Even so, Keosian and other evolutionists believe that somehow that single cell did form spontaneously. But why is the forming of a single cell so unbelievable? It’s unbelievable partly because there are so many different kinds of chemicals in living cells.
Amino acids. Some 20 different kinds of amino acids are needed for the protein in living cells. Even after thirty years of experiments, three key amino acids have not been made chemically even in experiments especially designed to produce them!
Also, the way some amino acids must be made in the test tube (using heat, gases, electricity or ultraviolet rays) will destroy other amino acids. Many are destroyed by heat. Others are broken down by oxygen or by other acids. Even if Earth had ever been as evolutionists imagine, the amino acids that might have formed then would quickly have been destroyed. Without the protection provided by being in a living cell, amino acids could never have come together to evolve further!
Lipids. These fatty materials make up about 10 of the simplest cells. No one has been able to make lipids chemically. They are only produced by life.
Porphyrin. This is an important molecule in hemoglobin, the element in red blood cells that carries oxygen. Evolutionists realize that there must have been porphyrins for life to survive. Without porphyrins, oxygen breaks down the other chemicals in a cell. But porphyrinlike chemicals can only be made when there is free oxygen available.
If amino acids can only be made when there is no free oxygen in the atmosphere, and porphyrins can only be made when there is free oxygen, then these things needed by every cell could not have existed together to form the first cell! What’s more, many of these compounds are antagonistic. They will combine and destroy each other-anywhere except within a living cell.
Polynucleotides. These complex chemicals are found in DNA and RNA, linked together in groups of as many as 4,500 units. DNA is the “code” that cells use to reproduce the proteins of which cells are composed. That “code” also tells the cells how to make more DNA.
What does this mean? Simply that to make DNA, you have to have DNA in the first place! You have to have the DNA code within the cell before you can make more DNA code. Without the complete code in the first place, there is no way to make the code necessary for every living cell!
There are many more elements found in living cells that we could look at. But we really don’t need to list them. The more scientists learn about cells, the more complex and special they appear to be.
No one who studies the living cell can explain how life could begin from non-living things. In fact, the more scientists learn, the clearer it is that life from non-living chemicals simply could not just happen.
Richard Dawkins (the famous atheist evolutionist) has calculated himself that one cell’s DNA contains about 4,000 books of 500 pages each of information. I don’t know what that would be in GBs.
I will tell you up front that I as well as many, many scientists reject Darwinian evolution. When Darwin was coming up with his evolutionary theory, he thought the cell was a simple sac of protoplasm. Because the theory was assumed correct since that time, every discovery in science has to be made in light of it. This is what led Dr. Francis Crick to say, “Biologists must constantly keep in mind what they see was not designed, but rather evolved.”
The information in DNA contains the instructions for building the most complex machinery ever known to man. One cell is more complex than the most sophisticated space shuttle ever designed. In the natural world we do not see even 5 bits of information forming ever— anywhere. This is partly due to the fact that in a randomly changing system, any information you even remotely started would be destroyed long before you could continue to create it. So, if you wanted to create a functional change by increasing the complexity of the gene code, you would have to somehow keep affecting the needed areas of the gene code in the correct way, over and over again without destroying the billions of other needed parts. This could never happen. Any random change will destroy the other parts long before it will ever help any part. Many times evolutionists try to tease a creationist by showing the “God of the Gaps” cartoon. If you are not familiar with this it is a cartoon showing a bunch of calculations but in the middle there is the phrase “Then a miracle happened” and the one scientists is pointing this out and saying “I think you need to be more specific with this step.” I say that it is actually the other way around. I call it, “The evolution of the gaps.”
With all of the recent discoveries in molecular biology and all of the complexities of life you would not imagine the amount of gross oversimplification that goes on in evolutionary explanation. Basically every step is assumed to just have evolved. They can describe a complex bio machine or system but there is not one shred of evidence of where it evolved from or how is evolved.
So, certain steps are just assumed to have evolved by random single point mutations. Let me show you what the odds are of achieving even a small amount of complexity by random means.
Here is a demonstration.
By randomly pulling letters out of a bag, what would be the odds of pulling out the correct letters in the proper order to form the following question, “Is evolution even possible?” For this, each letter is numbered so even the repeating letters have to be in the correct order including the 3 spaces and the question mark. What would be the odds of achieving this by random chance without seeing the letters you are pulling out of the bag? This is important because there are many super complex proteins and systems that are assumed by the “Evolution of the Gaps.” In many explanations by evolutionist, they are presented with the disclaimer that given enough time it is possible. Well, the odds for achieving the 27 data bit phrase by random changes is almost 11,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (11 octillion – if I typed it correctly) That’s just a simple 27 data bit jump in complexity. Most proteins are hundreds of amino acids long and they have to be rolled or constructed in the correct shape to function properly. Some proteins are over a thousand amino acids long and most systems take many hundreds of these complex proteins to even have a chance of beginning. So, in my example if you had 1 trillion people trying this every second 24 hours a day, how long would it take to achieve the desired data jump results?
About 345 million years. That is using 142 times the amount of people on the entire earth. So, in assuming evolutionary progression is it safe to assume that a small population reproducing in a much longer cycle than once every second for much shorter than 345 million years could ever achieve a jump in complexity, organs, or systems? The answer is no. Now if we compare this to the 4,000 books of 500 pages each of information contained in one cell and used to build the most complex machines known to man what does that tell us? Well not much if you ask an evolutionist. But, if you ask me, it shows us that this system was designed by God. Couple that with the fact that NO INFORMATION is ever seen producing itself ever.
What experiments show
Today evolutionists have realized that evolution is limited by a creature’s genetic makeup. The genetic codes of most plants and animals contain a great storehouse of variation and over many generations can produce the kinds of change that Darwin observed. But these changes are simply different combinations of traits that already exist in the creature’s genes. A fish cannot suddenly develop the ability to live out of water for the simple reason that this ability is not in its genes.
But evolutionists have not abandoned their theory. They have proposed that mutations do explain how one kind of creature can change into another.
A mutation is an error in the genetic code of a particular creature. Mutations are very rare, and when they do occur, they almost always damage the creature. Yet evolutionists argue that once in a great while a change might occur which would be helpful. They argue that something like this must have happened and that gradually creatures did change to make the many different forms of life on Earth today.
Yet scientists who hold the “Theory ‘Of Evolution” have experimented for many years with changes in animal features. For sixty years they have worked with a fruit fly called Drosophila. There have been thousands of generations of this fruit fly, and experiments have produced many different mutations. Yet scientist Francis Hitching summed up the results. “Fruit flies refuse to become anything but fruit flies under any circumstances yet devised.”! Even mutation produces only evolution (small “e”) and never the kind of changes required by the “Theory of Evolution.”
Scientists have also experimented with bacteria. Hundreds of thousands of bacteria generations have been studied and their variations examined. Yet never has bacteria been seen to develop into a multicelled form. French evolutionist Pierre-Paul Grasse concluded, “They do not change.'”
Many scientists now realize that Darwin’s idea of how evolution takes place was wrong. And there is no evidence to support the Neo-Darwinians’ idea that major changes in living creatures can take place through small mutations plus natural selection. In fact, even though scientists have tried, they cannot even make one kind of animal change into another.
WERE THERE “HOPEFUL MONSTERS”?
Many evolutionists have now decided that changes from one type of animal to another could not have happened slowly, either by natural selection or by the gradual buildup of mutations. They agree that a reptile could not change slowly into a bird, as Darwin and his modern followers think. During the millions of years it would take while scales turned to feathers and legs became wings, the small, gradual change Darwinism relies on would make it harder for the changing reptile-bird to survive.
Does this mean they have abandoned the Theory of Evolution? Not at all. They simply claim that massive changes must have taken place all at once! One argument for this theory is that the fossil record shows that new kinds of creatures appeared suddenly and then continued basically unchanged over geologic eras.
But what must happen for this kind of change to take place? Well, it must be something like a reptile turning into a bird suddenly-all at once. It is as if a dinosaur were watching its egg hatch and out came a fully developed bird! The animals that evolutionists say must have developed sudden changes have been nicknamed “hopeful monsters.” The new creature must at first have seemed a monster, but it had hope for surviving as a totally new form of life. But is this idea of hopeful monsters at all reasonable as a mechanism for explaining how Evolution might have happened? Hardly.
First, there is no evidence at all that anything like a hopeful monster could be born. No one has even been able to guess how such a change could take place, since it requires the creation of completely new genetic material. In fact, the more we learn of genetics, the more impossible this kind of sudden change seems. The genetic material that every living creature has is coded to reproduce only its own kind. There is no way for new genetic codes to develop!
Next, even if a hopeful monster were born, there would have to be another monster of the opposite sex, born in the same place at the same time, for it to reproduce. If appearance of one monster seems impossible, how likely is the appearance of two?
How hard this must be for people who insist on believing the Theory of Evolution. They have no way at all ‘to explain how the kind of changes they believe in could possibly have happened!
The old idea, that changes took place gradually through the selection of helpful variations, has been shown to be wrong. Gene alleles rather than mutation explain the kind of changes we can observe. All that is left is imagination and the blind conviction that if evolution did not happen slowly, it must have happened in jumps.
What does the Bible say?
In the creation account, the Bible says that God created plants, fish, animals and birds. Carefully read what the Bible says and you will find a very special statement that science has shown to be true!
Then God said, “Let the land produce vegetation: seed-bearing plants and trees on the land that bear fruit with seed in it, according to their various kinds,” Genesis 1:11. So God created the great creatures of the sea and every living and moving thing with which the water teems, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind, Genesis 1 :21.
And God said, “Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: livestock, creatures that move along the ground, and wild animals, each according to its kind,” Genesis 1:24
Do you see the special saying that is repeated again and again? God created different kinds of sea creatures, of birds and animals. And God said, “Let each produce more of its own kind.” The Hebrew word translated “kind” (min) is a general word. It does not fit any current term used by biologists. But in the Bible it refers to genus, family, order and species. And in Genesis min identifies the original genetic stock of plants and animals. All the plants and animals on Earth now have come from
these original plants and animals.
There are different breeds of dogs, but dogs produce their own kind! A dog and a cat cannot mate and produce a new kind of animal. To mate, a pair must both be dogs, and their offspring will always be dogs-never cats.
Some scientists have made fun of the Bible and the word “kinds.” But if we understand “kind” as plants or animals which contained the original code for the many breeds and varieties now on Earth, we can see just how trustworthy the Bible is. There is the kind of evolutionary change that Darwin noted so many years ago. But those variations were already built into the genes God gave the first plants or animals of that kind when he created all living things.
THE WONDERS OF DESIGN
The woodpecker
One of the common birds that you may have seen is the woodpecker. You’ve seen him gripping the trunk of a tree, pounding away with his beak. How can this bird hold onto the tree trunk, while other birds must perch on a branch? And how can this bird pound its beak against a tree again and again without at least getting a headache?
When we look closely, we find that there are many systems found only in the woodpecker that make him a most unusual bird. The feet of woodpeckers are not like the feet of other birds. Woodpeckers have two toes pointing backward and two forward, to hook into a tree trunk. Their tail feathers are short and stiff, so the woodpecker can prop itself against the trunk.
But two things are most amazing about the woodpecker. First, just behind its pointed bill is a pad of spongy tissue that acts as a shock absorber. In other birds, the skull and bill are fused together. But because of this built-in shock absorber, far better than anything developed by man, woodpeckers can pound on hard wood for five or six hours a day. Some great spotted woodpeckers have actually pounded their way into “woodpecker proof” concrete boxes!
The woodpecker drills holes in order to reach wood-boring insects. But the bird seldom drills right to its prey. Instead it reaches one of the tunnels the insect has made within the wood. How can it reach the insect? Well, the woodpecker has an amazing tongue. The tongue is often longer than the bird. It is not attached to the back of the mouth, as are other birds’ tongues, but circles around inside the skull to attach to the top of the woodpecker’s head! Without a long tongue to probe insect tunnels, the woodpecker could not survive.
Every one of these special features-the unusual arrangement of the woodpecker’s toes, the stiff and stubby tail, the shock absorber behind the bill, and the long tongue that lets it probe tunnels for insects-sets the woodpecker apart from other birds.
Yet each feature fits together to enable the woodpecker to live his specialized life. If any of these features were different, the woodpecker could not survive! Yet the Theory of Evolution would require each of these special systems to have just happened and to have developed by chance at the same time! How much more reasonable to see in the woodpecker’s special design the mind of God, who created the woodpecker for his unusual life. Of all birds, only the woodpecker has a spongellke pad between its head and bill to absorb the shock of striking a tree. And only the woodpecker has a tongue long enough to probe tunnels for Insects. The woodpecker Is carefully designed to fit its way of life.
**END OF PART TWO —-PART THREE COMING SOON**