If Evolution Can't Solve These 3 Puzzles, How Can They Say It's Factual?
Three Puzzles Evolution Can’t Solve
For more than a century Christians have looked for the scientific silver bullet that would destroy Darwinian evolution and prove biblical creation to be true. We already know from God’s revealed, infallible Word how the universe, the earth, and all life came into being: He spoke them into existence (Genesis 1; Exodus 20:11; Hebrews 11:3). This fact alone refutes Darwinian evolution. Yet in a world where secular researchers reject the supernatural and divine revelation, many Christians still feel compelled to provide empirical (observable and repeatable) evidence to confirm the Bible’s claim.
The problem is that neither creation nor evolution is observable or repeatable. Empirical science alone can’t prove a miraculous, onetime historical event any more than it can prove evolution. Instead, we must make assumptions, and our conclusions are only as good as our starting assumptions.
The issue is not the evidence, but how we interpret the evidence through our worldview. Does our worldview make sense of the world we observe today?
Evolution is based on a faulty initial assumption, while belief in creation is based on facts revealed by the only eyewitness, the Creator Himself.
God’s Word says we should always be ready “to give a defense to everyone who asks” (1 Peter 3:15). When witnessing to unbelievers, we should challenge their worldview and show how the biblical worldview makes better sense of our world.
Three biological puzzles continue to stump evolution but make sense within the biblical worldview:
Life from Non-life
Information of Life
Irreducible Complexity
Life from Non-life
“Life comes from life” is a fundamental law of biology, and yet formation of the first living thing must violate this law. How this could happen still stumps scientists.
by Kevin Anderson
At the beginning of my first college biology course, we studied the evidence refuting spontaneous generation—the idea that an atmospheric “vital force” can spontaneously organize inanimate organic material into living creatures. Maggots could form from rotting meat. Mice could fabricate from a pile of clothing.
Aristotle proposed an early version of spontaneous generation, and it remained popular until the nineteenth century. At that time, experiments by Louis Pasteur and others proved the fundamental law of modern biology, bio-genesis (life only comes from life). Support for spontaneous generation gradually lost popularity. Well, sort of lost popularity.
Interestingly, toward the end of that same biology course we were taught that life may have originally arisen by spontaneous generation. Confused? Supposedly, life could have arisen in the distant past under unique conditions, unlike those found on earth today. In other words, life will not spontaneously form today, but it must have under unknown conditions earlier in earth’s history.
The only real evidence given for this claim is the simple fact that life exists. It must have come from somewhere, and the possibility of a creator is completely unacceptable to the secular mind. So, life must have originated by a natural, spontaneous event. And this is a scientific solution?
Researchers around the world have been pursuing virtually every conceivable possibility. They have spent billions of dollars searching for water on Mars, apparently assuming that water also means there will be life. Creative experiments have produced a few organic molecules and some strangely structured strings of amino acids. A recent paper in the journal Nature Chemistry proposes that a wide variety of organic molecules could form from a single basic reaction. The popular science website Phys.org even heralds this assumed achievement as having “solved the riddle of how life began.”
Yet, a simple fact remains—the scientific community is clinging to trivial results. Sticking together a few amino acids, finding water on Mars or “organic” material in meteorites, or even making numerous molecules from one reaction is still not creating life. It is not even getting close. Life is an extraordinarily complex and sophisticated functioning system, not just an assemblage of miscellaneous organic molecules.1 Despite decades of speculation, creative imagination, and untold millions of dollars spent on research, the spontaneous origin of life from natural processes seems just as impossible as ever.
To make a point, I offer this challenge. I will let researchers use all the necessary molecules they want; all the molecules found in living systems (such as sugars, amino acids, and lipids). I will even grant them all the biologically correct structures of these molecules and the absence of any chemicals that might inhibit key reactions.2 None of these conditions is actually realistic in a natural setting, but that further demonstrates my point. Even granting the unrealistic, life will still not spontaneously form.
Perhaps early investigators (even Darwin) might be forgiven for imagining a simple origin of living organisms. When the universe was seen as a fertile matrix that enables flies to spontaneously emerge from spoiled meat, it was natural to assume that forming life was not a big deal. In fact, the spontaneous origin of life was considered virtually inevitable.
While Darwinian evolution does not claim to answer questions of life’s origin, its goal is to offer a natural explanation for the diversity of all life on earth (after it began). As Darwinism gained popularity during the nineteenth and early twentieth century, people simply assumed that the same natural forces that produced diversity could also have fabricated the first living organisms.
Early investigators considered cells as simple “bags of enzymes,” and they understood only a few basic reactions within a cell. Life was little more than the correct mix of ingredients. Get the mixture right and life was inevitable. Within their vacuum of understanding, many things seemed plausible. The gap between the living and nonliving worlds did not seem too large.
Yet, bridging this gap not only has remained elusive but has slipped completely from view. Findings in the past few decades have moved the expanse of the “bridge” far beyond the horizon. Rather than offering greater insight into life’s origin, recent discoveries have further detailed the daunting size of the gap. The “bags of enzymes” have proven to be an extraordinarily sophisticated system with no counterpart in mankind’s most advanced technology.
The findings of contemporary genetics, cell biology, epigenetics, molecular biology, and biochemistry render life beyond the reach of mere natural processes. While much speculation is still offered and millions of dollars continue to be spent in this fruitless quest, a natural mechanism for life’s origins is as elusive as ever. The mechanism exists only in the imagination of the “true believer”—hardly a scientific solution.
A spontaneous origin of life has failed to meet the most basic of scientific tests. It has never been observed. On the other hand, we consistently observe that life comes only from life. After repeated verification, there has never been an exception. This is why biogenesis is a scientific law. So, how is it unscientific to say that life originally arose from other life (which happens all the time)? God, who is life, produced the first life.
If researchers ever do construct life in the laboratory from more elemental components, it will still not achieve their goal. Their accomplishment will use already preexisting components, and will be based upon decades of research and scientific understanding. It will not be a spontaneous event, but rather a carefully controlled and designed process. The achievement will be less a synthesis of life and more a semi-synthetic reassembly of life.
Nonetheless, in the wake of such an accomplishment, subsequent media headlines will likely proclaim the achievement as proof that no creator was needed to form life originally. Actually, such an event would demonstrate the opposite—the formation of life requires intelligence and an extensive amount of knowledge. By studying and understanding life, secular scientists are merely attempting to copy it.
These researchers would simply have plagiarized the life systems that already exist. But as is often the case with plagiarists, they will attempt to deny the original author. Inadvertently, though, any such success will give honor to the original Creator, whose handiwork is worthy of copying.
We'll continue with the second of the three puzzles that evolution can't solve.
by Dr. Kevin Anderson, Brian Catalucci, and Dr. Nathaniel T. Jeanson
Featured in Answers Magazine
For more than a century Christians have looked for the scientific silver bullet that would destroy Darwinian evolution and prove biblical creation to be true. We already know from God’s revealed, infallible Word how the universe, the earth, and all life came into being: He spoke them into existence (Genesis 1; Exodus 20:11; Hebrews 11:3). This fact alone refutes Darwinian evolution. Yet in a world where secular researchers reject the supernatural and divine revelation, many Christians still feel compelled to provide empirical (observable and repeatable) evidence to confirm the Bible’s claim.
The problem is that neither creation nor evolution is observable or repeatable. Empirical science alone can’t prove a miraculous, onetime historical event any more than it can prove evolution. Instead, we must make assumptions, and our conclusions are only as good as our starting assumptions.
The issue is not the evidence, but how we interpret the evidence through our worldview. Does our worldview make sense of the world we observe today?
Evolution is based on a faulty initial assumption, while belief in creation is based on facts revealed by the only eyewitness, the Creator Himself.
God’s Word says we should always be ready “to give a defense to everyone who asks” (1 Peter 3:15). When witnessing to unbelievers, we should challenge their worldview and show how the biblical worldview makes better sense of our world.
Three biological puzzles continue to stump evolution but make sense within the biblical worldview:
Life from Non-life
Information of Life
Irreducible Complexity
Life from Non-life
“Life comes from life” is a fundamental law of biology, and yet formation of the first living thing must violate this law. How this could happen still stumps scientists.
by Kevin Anderson
At the beginning of my first college biology course, we studied the evidence refuting spontaneous generation—the idea that an atmospheric “vital force” can spontaneously organize inanimate organic material into living creatures. Maggots could form from rotting meat. Mice could fabricate from a pile of clothing.
Aristotle proposed an early version of spontaneous generation, and it remained popular until the nineteenth century. At that time, experiments by Louis Pasteur and others proved the fundamental law of modern biology, bio-genesis (life only comes from life). Support for spontaneous generation gradually lost popularity. Well, sort of lost popularity.
Interestingly, toward the end of that same biology course we were taught that life may have originally arisen by spontaneous generation. Confused? Supposedly, life could have arisen in the distant past under unique conditions, unlike those found on earth today. In other words, life will not spontaneously form today, but it must have under unknown conditions earlier in earth’s history.
The only real evidence given for this claim is the simple fact that life exists. It must have come from somewhere, and the possibility of a creator is completely unacceptable to the secular mind. So, life must have originated by a natural, spontaneous event. And this is a scientific solution?
Researchers around the world have been pursuing virtually every conceivable possibility. They have spent billions of dollars searching for water on Mars, apparently assuming that water also means there will be life. Creative experiments have produced a few organic molecules and some strangely structured strings of amino acids. A recent paper in the journal Nature Chemistry proposes that a wide variety of organic molecules could form from a single basic reaction. The popular science website Phys.org even heralds this assumed achievement as having “solved the riddle of how life began.”
Yet, a simple fact remains—the scientific community is clinging to trivial results. Sticking together a few amino acids, finding water on Mars or “organic” material in meteorites, or even making numerous molecules from one reaction is still not creating life. It is not even getting close. Life is an extraordinarily complex and sophisticated functioning system, not just an assemblage of miscellaneous organic molecules.1 Despite decades of speculation, creative imagination, and untold millions of dollars spent on research, the spontaneous origin of life from natural processes seems just as impossible as ever.
To make a point, I offer this challenge. I will let researchers use all the necessary molecules they want; all the molecules found in living systems (such as sugars, amino acids, and lipids). I will even grant them all the biologically correct structures of these molecules and the absence of any chemicals that might inhibit key reactions.2 None of these conditions is actually realistic in a natural setting, but that further demonstrates my point. Even granting the unrealistic, life will still not spontaneously form.
Perhaps early investigators (even Darwin) might be forgiven for imagining a simple origin of living organisms. When the universe was seen as a fertile matrix that enables flies to spontaneously emerge from spoiled meat, it was natural to assume that forming life was not a big deal. In fact, the spontaneous origin of life was considered virtually inevitable.
While Darwinian evolution does not claim to answer questions of life’s origin, its goal is to offer a natural explanation for the diversity of all life on earth (after it began). As Darwinism gained popularity during the nineteenth and early twentieth century, people simply assumed that the same natural forces that produced diversity could also have fabricated the first living organisms.
Early investigators considered cells as simple “bags of enzymes,” and they understood only a few basic reactions within a cell. Life was little more than the correct mix of ingredients. Get the mixture right and life was inevitable. Within their vacuum of understanding, many things seemed plausible. The gap between the living and nonliving worlds did not seem too large.
Yet, bridging this gap not only has remained elusive but has slipped completely from view. Findings in the past few decades have moved the expanse of the “bridge” far beyond the horizon. Rather than offering greater insight into life’s origin, recent discoveries have further detailed the daunting size of the gap. The “bags of enzymes” have proven to be an extraordinarily sophisticated system with no counterpart in mankind’s most advanced technology.
The findings of contemporary genetics, cell biology, epigenetics, molecular biology, and biochemistry render life beyond the reach of mere natural processes. While much speculation is still offered and millions of dollars continue to be spent in this fruitless quest, a natural mechanism for life’s origins is as elusive as ever. The mechanism exists only in the imagination of the “true believer”—hardly a scientific solution.
A spontaneous origin of life has failed to meet the most basic of scientific tests. It has never been observed. On the other hand, we consistently observe that life comes only from life. After repeated verification, there has never been an exception. This is why biogenesis is a scientific law. So, how is it unscientific to say that life originally arose from other life (which happens all the time)? God, who is life, produced the first life.
If researchers ever do construct life in the laboratory from more elemental components, it will still not achieve their goal. Their accomplishment will use already preexisting components, and will be based upon decades of research and scientific understanding. It will not be a spontaneous event, but rather a carefully controlled and designed process. The achievement will be less a synthesis of life and more a semi-synthetic reassembly of life.
Nonetheless, in the wake of such an accomplishment, subsequent media headlines will likely proclaim the achievement as proof that no creator was needed to form life originally. Actually, such an event would demonstrate the opposite—the formation of life requires intelligence and an extensive amount of knowledge. By studying and understanding life, secular scientists are merely attempting to copy it.
These researchers would simply have plagiarized the life systems that already exist. But as is often the case with plagiarists, they will attempt to deny the original author. Inadvertently, though, any such success will give honor to the original Creator, whose handiwork is worthy of copying.
We'll continue with the second of the three puzzles that evolution can't solve.
by Dr. Kevin Anderson, Brian Catalucci, and Dr. Nathaniel T. Jeanson
Featured in Answers Magazine
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