The first thing that I will say is that yes, I am a Christian and yes I do believe that God created the earth and everything in it. This, however, does stop me from taking all evidence into account so if that fact stops you from reading this then I hope it's because you already have all of the evidence on both sides.
So lets start with the bottom line on Intelligent Design:
- The flagellum motor is an example of a complex organism that has a practically impossible chance of forming spontaneously.
- The basic building block of life, DNA, has no known origin.
- There is no actual evidence of macro evolution ever actually happening.
OK, so now lets address each item one at a time.
1. Now the first thing to point out is that even Charles Darwin knew that his theories were just that, theories. He stated in Chapter 6 of "The Origin of Species" that,"If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down." The bacterial flagellum shows just that complexity that Darwin himself said would make his theory break down. Now granted, Darwin was talking specifically about organs in this passage, but I believe that this statement if true for organs, is still true for all other parts of the body.
Aside from Darwin, lets look at some more scientific evidences. I am going to talk about the mathematics behind Evolution, but before I do that it's important that we discuss the cell and how it works. The building block of life is of course, DNA. Now, no evolutionary scientist can tell you definitely where DNA came from initially because they don't know. I'll go into more detail on this later. Next are amino acids, which are the building blocks for proteins which are what make every element of cells. Now, what happens is that the DNA tells how, and in what order, the amino acids need to be lined up in order to be molded to the correct shape for the specific protein needed in order to piece together each part of the cell. Each protein needs to have specific amino acids, organized in a specific way, in order to become part of a cell.
Now lets talk about the mathematics of this. A chemist calculated exactly what the odds are that just one protein could be created spontaneously without DNA to guide it. "He estimated the probability to be more than 10 to the 67th to 1 against even a small protein forming by time and chance, in an ideal mixture of chemicals, in an ideal atmosphere, and given up to 100 billion years (an age 10 to 20 times greater than the supposed age of the Earth)." An important note is that, "mathematicians generally agree that, statistically, any odds beyond 1 in 10 to the 50th have a zero probability of ever happening."
2. I talked about this a little in the first point, but I will go into it in more detail here. Most evolutionary scientists can give an explanation of where all the elements of the cell came from(primordial soup), but there is no real evidence of where DNA originated. This is all circumstantial in the overall debate, but it's very good to note.
3. There are two types of evolution, Micro evolution and Macro evolution. Macro evolution is the kind of evolution where something evolves into something completely different. Micro evolution is when something evolves to be different, but still the same class and species. Because we have no real proof of Macro evolution ever actually happening, and so much evidence to show that things have a practically impossible chance to evolve in the first place, you can say that not only is Macro evolution unprovable, it's almost impossible. Many scientists will say that we will never see Macro evolution happen and just because we don't see it doesn't mean that it doesn't happen. This sounds a lot like something a religious person might say, and based on the actual evidence, I tend to disagree with that argument for Macro evolution.
So, those are some major points on Intelligent Design and the science that behind it. I think that if you look at it purely scientifically you can see that Intelligent Design is very scientific and easily holds water as a scientific answer to the origin of life, and in my opinion, is a better explanation that evolution.
There is another belief that God used evolution in order to create life. Dr. Kent Hovind talks about that in his series about Creationism and I agree with his assessment. I'm not going to go into it here as I have done less research into it, and Dr. Hovind is much more knowledgable on the subject than I.
I hope you found my information here eye opening, or if nothing else informing on one level or another and encourage you to continue to look for more information on the topic.
Thanks for reading!
- Rich Inman
References and Links
- http://www.nanonet.go.jp/english/mailmag/2004/011a.html
- http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aso/tryit/dna/
- http://www.christiananswers.net/q-eden/origin-of-life.html
- http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/origin.html
- http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/macroevolution.html
- http://www.drdino.com/
- http://www.illustramedia.com/wdtelinfo.htm
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