I was assigned to read four chapters of my Biology textbook by tomorrow and so I began doing some of it on the bus ride home today. First off, this is one mother of a book. Ask me to see it in person if you get a chance and I’ll show you just how huge this book is. Secondly and more importantly, there happens to be–even just within the first few pages–lots of logic and thinking that points towards something other than Darwin’s purest forms of evolution (i.e. from absolutely nothing and sans directed impetus), which is important. It’s common to hear that Christian beliefs on the world’s origin are being assaulted by the scientific community, and yet if you look closely enough (and know some of the most commonly cited arguments of/conditions for evolution) it’s not so bad, really.
On the very first page, for example, it says, “Life is highly organized into a hierarchy of structural levels [...] Life itself is associated with a set of properties that depend on structural order” (p. 1) as an introductory line to the rest of the chapter (“Introduction: Themes in the Study of Life”). The obvious (or maybe not so for those unfamiliar with the general premises of the theory of evolution) implications of a highly organized hierarchy of living things is that there had to be something/someone to do the organization.
If the immense variation of life on Earth were to have come from an infinitely long and trying process of random events/beneficial mutations accumulating to its final (yet ongoing) result we see today, then how is it that life would end up so easily organized? Given a bag of many coloured blocks of Lego, even a small child would be able to find and sort bricks according to size, colour, or shape into neat piles if he so wished. This would not at all be possible if we were to use a coin toss or the rolling of a die to determine where each brick ought to be placed.
Furthermore, evolution in its purest forms demands the minutest deviation from generation to generation. This ought to result in a huge number of different species and organisms (as found abundantly on Earth) but also a great number of what I would like to call “mud-bloods” which are animals/organisms that play roles in between the more well defined species (which are scarce at best on Earth). These would be found as the “links” between well established groups. For instance, we’ve got reptiles and mammals,but where are the lizard-lions? The snake-skunks? What about even within mammals? Where are all the horse-pigs? Elephant-mice? If the changes taking place to morph fish into amphibians into reptiles into mammals were so small, where is the evidence for the countless generations of in-betweens? These in-betweens would also fudge up the “highly organized” nature of life as it’d be immensely hard to classify the mud-bloods into species. Thankfully, we usually (~99% of the time) don’t have to deal with classifying these links since they don’t exist.
Another quote comes in the form of a very good counter-argument against the “primordial soup” theory for life’s origins. “A molecule such as a protein has attributes not exhibited by any of its component atoms, and a cell is certainly much more than a bag of molecules.” (p. 4). Amen to that. Now, given that a cell is much more than a bag of molecules, how would you argue for the idea that life started from a soup of all the nutrients required for life that somehow decided, by its own abiotic self, to form a cell?
Returning to our bag of Legos, if we were to take all the pieces of a retailed set (like my 400 piece pirate ship) and put them all in the same bag, would I get a final product of a fully constructed and operational anything at the end of the day? Certainly not. What if we shook it up? Nope. Left there for a million years to “randomly congregate”? Not a chance! Pieces are more likely to break and stay apart than to connect and “grow” in a meaningful way if left to their own abiotic devices. You and I both know it takes an intelligent mind (as opposed to random processes) to put something even many times less complicated than a 400 piece pirating vessel (no, not BitTorrent) together. How much more for all the varied and wonderful living things on Earth?! We, supposedly the pinnacles of evolution, don’t even know how we ourselves work, and yet we would willingly trust our design to the workings of random shakings and settlings for millions of years.
It’s definitely encouraging to find that, although the theory of evolution is mostly wrongly toted as being the most likely “scientific” hypothesis for life so far, even the writers of my biology textbook happen to hold more creationist views. It’s one thing to say, “Evolution did this.” and quite another to actually write and think as if that were really true. I like my dad’s answer to evolutionist thinking the best: If you want to go call that monkey “Father” that badly, then be my guest.