Why Evolution Makes No Sense
Posted by Steve on July 5th, 2011
So if you’ve been here before you’ll know that I generally blog about IT Stuff that requires some kind of fix. I try to make my blog articles useful in some way to the people that come here to read them. But you may have also noticed there’s a Christian category on the site and it may leave you wondering how a technical, reasonably scientific mind can come to the conclusion that Christianity makes sense and evolution doesn’t. I hope to explain in this article why evolution makes no sense and give you some pointers if you’re looking for yourself.
It’s fair to say though that this is one of those subjects that for the Unbeliever, no proof is possible. Equally for the believer, no proof is necessary. I’m not here to give you proof of God – for me, He does that every day. For you, perhaps you need a little more.
My journey to discovering God through the Lord Jesus Christ has been perhaps a little topsy turvy. I’ve always believed in a Creator – God. But it wasn’t until I believed that Jesus Christ was actually the Son of God that things began to start making sense. Taking that a step further, it wasn’t until I started to believe in the 7 days of creation that things really made sense. You see, there’s a number of Christians who believe in Creation, but believe the 7 days of Creation are a metaphor and that creation actually took place over millions of years. I will dismantle this theory, based on various sources of evidence, in this article. And I believe the 7 days of Creation should be fundamental to our belief in God and Jesus.
If God is all powerful and created Heaven and Earth by the very words He uttered that leaves me with a question. Why did it take Him so long?
7 days is actually a long time for an all powerful Creator! Millions of years is just utterly unlikely for an all powerful Creator!
OK – let’s skip ahead a bit. We know from our bible that Jesus existed and it’s written that He came to save us. Save us from what though? If evolution is the answer then we have nothing to require saving from. And that’s the biggest trick right there. We now live in a world where we don’t believe that we require saving because the idea of Genesis being a true and accurate account has been seriously undermined – and if Genesis can be undermined then there’s no need for a saviour because there’s no original sin.
So before we examine whether Genesis might be a true and accurate account of Creation, let’s first investigate whether we can trust who Jesus said He was. Because if we can trust who Jesus said he was (or not) then that gives us a bit more of a clue as to whether the account of Creation is the truth. So just who did Jesus say He was? Jesus claimed to be God!
That’s a pretty spectacular claim isn’t it? Did he really claim to be God? I mean, really? Or is that just interpretation? Well, certainly he never actually used the words ‘I am God’. However, he did imply it on a number of occasions (‘I and the Father are One’ John 10:30; ‘When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, “Son, your sins are forgiven.”‘ Mark 2:5 (the implication here is in fact explained in Mark 2:7 and beyond); Luke Chapter 5 iterates the story of the paralytic also; etc.). The best book I have found that goes into detail about the various claims, often quite veiled, that Jesus made to imply he was God is ‘More than a Carpenter’ by Josh McDowell. Originally a sceptic, Josh actually became a believer as a result of trying to debunk Jesus! It offers far more insight into why we should believe the claims of Jesus than I can hope to achieve here. So I shall leave it at that for now.
However, let’s assume we can believe and trust that Jesus himself claimed to be God. Well, that surely puts him in the category of either a liar, a madman or actually God. It’s generally agreed by many other religions even that Jesus was a good teacher. Some say a great prophet. Even Mohammed, the founder of Islam agrees that Jesus existed and was a great prophet (though he does not believe he was God Himself). Let’s deconstruct that a little. Can a liar be a great teacher? Can a madman be considered a great prophet? I’d venture to suggest not in either case. A good teacher – the use of the word good or great certainly suggests that he speaks the truth. If he was a liar there’s an extremely high chance that his disciples would have known he was a liar, making themselves in turn, liars. But all but one of them died horrible martyrs deaths claiming that Jesus was who he said he was. Would they have died for a sham? It seems unlikely that 12 men would go to their grave for a lie. One of them would surely have broken down and said ‘OK, I admit, we made the whole thing up’. So 12 men, who knew Jesus personally, vouched that he wasn’t a liar.
Let’s stop there and assume Jesus really was who he said he was – there’s countless books that can go much further in depth than I can here and I’ve read some of them – the Josh McDowell one is probably the best. But what does that have to do with Genesis and it’s account of creation? Well firstly, Jesus affirms the Genesis account in Matthew 19:4 where he says Haven’t you read,” he replied, “that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female and we’ve established that Jesus is God, so he was there when it happened. Are there any eye witnesses to confirm the theory of evolution?
Reading through some other entries on this blog you’ll notice that I’m at University now, studying to be a paramedic. I believe it was God that asked me to become a paramedic through a vision He gave me after many questions of what it was that I should really be doing with my life. The story for that is for another day, but as part of my University course I have to study a subject called BioScience for Paramedics. They don’t discuss whether things evolved or were created, they simply show the biology ‘as is’. But the more I study about the human body, the more I am CONVINCED that we did not evolve from inert chemicals in a pool of sludge one day.
The biology seems to me to be far too complicated, and rely on far too many pre-conditions to be met even to create a simple bacteria. Even the plasma membrane of a single cell is more complicated than the average family car, and would we consider that a car could randomly spring into existence just by chance? In fact, would consider that the road, on which the car travels, could be laid down by chance? The composition of the road is significantly simpler than the composition of a plasma membrane with all it’s highly specialised proteins and collagens in the right place.
It is therefore, my conclusion that believing in evolution actually requires significantly more faith to believe than creation does! Creation has some documented evidence (the existence of Jesus is documented OUTSIDE of the bible as well as in the bible) as we’ve seen above. Evolution has so many missing pieces and assumptions that it takes a good deal of faith to believe. And the complexities and redundancies built into human biology speak to me of an orchestrated and deliberate design, not a random set of copying errors. Speaking of copying errors (which is what evolution boils down to), the idea behind evolution is that strands of DNA mutate and various points throughout history, to produce changes which turn out to be beneficial to the new organism. These beneficial changes are then propogated down the ancestral line and further mutations occur leading to whole new species. But to me, that’s like placing a sheet from a Shakespeare book onto a photocopier and copying it. Take the copy and now place that on the copier instead of the original. Take another copy, and replace the 1st copy on the copying glass with the new copy. Repeat this process several million times.
What will you come up with? Evolution teaches that we should expect to get a page from the Bible from this page of Shakespeare if we keep copying it enough.
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You write an interesting article Steve.
I am an atheist, but it is nice to see a well formed argument on the other side of the fence. You likened the process of evolution to repeatedly photocopying a work of shakespeare and expecting to get a page from the bible at the end.
I think this is an unfair comparison. To rework it, I would suggest the act of photocopying is effectly the paper’s way of reproducing. The piece of paper can be copied multiple times, producing several offspring – each having mutated genes, or, random changes to the piece of paper. Now, your final (though nothing is final in evolution) piece of paper was a page from the bible. This represents a human in the evolution space – a being fit for its surroundings. That means that any mutation of the paper along the way that did not fit it’s surroundings would perish, never itself reaching the age of reproduction. So do not photocopy bits of paper which look less like the bible than the original, instead throw them in the bin. Now, any surviving children can now themselves reproduce/be photocopied. Finally, repeat this process for a million years straight.
Given these conditions and enough time (evolution did not occur overnight), your bible page would appear.
In evolution, fully formed beings don’t pop into existence just by chance. Evolution is a scientific theory, and science lives to be disproven – that’s how it grows, so keep it up!
This was written and posted from my phone, so please excuse any errors.