Isn't the God Hypothesis Unnecessary Now That We Have Evolution to Explain Life?

When I was teaching Sunday school, I did a series of classes using Lee Strobel's works. The following is from The Case for Faith. While there may be the stray original item from me, I deserve no credit for what is written in this particular article. It is properly attributed to Lee Strobel in its entirety.

Molecular biologist Micheal Denton: “As far as Christianity was concerned, the advent of the theory of evolution… was catastrophic… The decline in religious belief can probably be attributed more to the propagation and advocacy by the intellectual and scientific community of the Darwinian version of evolution than to any other single factor.”

So why isn’t the church doing more to teach its shortcomings? To counter false belief?

If Darwinism is true:

1. There’s no evidence for God

2. There’s no life after death

3. There’s no absolute foundation for right and wrong

4. There’s no ultimate meaning for life

5. People don’t really have free will

But more and more biologists, biochemists and other researchers have raised serious objections to evolutionary theory in recent years, claiming that its broad inferences are sometimes based on flimsy, incomplete, or flawed data.

Everyone concedes evolution is true to some extent; there are variations within species of animals and plants (microevolution). There are more than 200 different varieties of dogs. Cows can be bred for improved milk production. Bacteria can adapt and develop immunity to antibiotics.

But Darwin proposed the macroevolution we are familiar with, and he felt the lack of transitions between species in the fossil record would be vindicated with future discoveries. But David Raup, curator of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago said in 1979, "We are now 120 years after Darwin and the knowledge of the fossil record has been greatly expanded. We now have a quarter of a million fossil species, but the situation hasn’t changed much… We have even fewer examples of evolutionary transition than we had in Darwin’s time."

The fossil record does, however, support the Cambrian explosion, the sudden appearance of nearly all the animal phyla, fully formed, and without a trace of the evolutionary ancestors Darwinism requires. This points more readily to a Creator than Darwinism.

And we’ve looked at “irreducible complexity,” something Darwin himself said would cause his theory to break down. But where did life begin in the first place? Evolution needs something upon which to act. One needs a credible theory for the beginning of life even before one begins to look at possible evolutionary explanations for various lifeforms.

It was not until after his publication of On the Origin of Species that microscopes advanced enough to peer inside the cell were developed. Darwin would have considered a single-cell organism to be rather simple. And at the time, life arising from non-life seemed plausible. Maggots appeared on raw meat left exposed seemingly from out of thin air. Thus, there seemed to exist empirical evidence that life just popped into existence, and we had no reason to believe that simple organisms were in fact very complex.

But this is not the case at all. Professor of materials science and engineering Dr. Walter Bradley observed: "One person very creatively - but quite accurately - described a single-cell organism as a high-tech factory, complete with artificial lang-uages and decoding systems; central memory banks that store and retrieve impressive amounts of information; precision control systems that regulate the automatic assembly of components; proofreading and quality control mechanisms that safe-guard against errors; assembly systems that use principles of pre-fabrication and modular construction; and a complete replication system that allows the organism to duplicate itself at bewildering speeds."

But what if one-celled organisms are more complex today due to evolution? What if the first cells produced on earth were much more basic and therefore easier to create? Even if we accept that theory, a minimal living cell is not simple at all.

We start with amino acids. There are 80 types, only 20 of which are found in living organisms. The trick is to isolate only the correct amino acids. The right amino acids have to be linked together in the right sequence to produce protein molecules. Other molecules tend to react more readily with amino acids than amino acids do with one another. Now you have the problem of how to eliminate those extraneous molecules. There are right- and left-handed amino acids, and only left-handed ones work in living matter.

Then we have to get only these correct ones to link together in the right sequence with the right kind of chemical bonds - namely peptide bonds - in the correct places for the protein to be able to fold in a specific three-dimensional way; otherwise, it won’t function.

Perhaps 100 amino acids have to be put together in just the right manner to make a protein molecule, and that’s just the first step! One protein molecule doesn’t mean you’ve created life. You’d need to bring together a collection of perhaps 200 protein molecules with just the right functions to get a typical living cell.

In living systems, DNA provides the guidance that’s needed to assemble everything and works with RNA to direct the correct sequencing of amino acids. Making DNA and RNA would be an even greater problem than creating protein! They are much more complex. Klaus Dose of the Institute for Biochemistry in Mainz, Germany says the difficulties in synthesizing DNA and RNA “are at present beyond our imagination.”

So what are the creative theories scientists propose to try to explain how biopolymers (such as proteins) became assembled with only the right building blocks (amino acids) and only the correct isomers (left-handed amino acids) joined with only the correct peptide bonds in only the correct sequence?

Theory #1: Random Chance

Believe it or not, even if we accept a 14 billion year old universe and a 5 billion year old earth, there’s still not nearly enough time. Scientists used to believe that with an infinitely old universe/earth, it was possible.

But setting aside the time issue, the mathematical odds of assembling a living organism are so astronomical that nobody still believes random chance accounts for the origin of life. If you placed all the carbon in the universe on Earth, allowed it to react at the most rapid rate possible, and left it for a billion years, the odds of creating just one functional protein molecule would be 1 in 10 with 60 zeroes after it. That's the same odds as a blindfolded man finding one marked grain of sand in the Sahara Desert not just once, but three times. Sir Frederick Hoyle put it more colorfully when he said it's "as likely as a tornado whirling through a junkyard and accidentally assembling a fully functional Boeing 747.” While lay people and students may still believe it, scientists simply don’t believe it anymore.

Theory #2: Chemical Affinity

Scientists theorized there may be some inherent attraction that would cause amino acids to spontaneously link up in the right sequence to create the protein molecules that make up living cells. This hypothesis was soundly refuted in 1986 when all 250 proteins in The Atlas of Protein Sequence and Structure were analyzed, providing conclusive proof that the sequences had nothing to do with chemical preferences.

Theory #3: Self-Ordering Tendencies

Basically, the concept says that under certain circumstances, if energy is passed through a system at a fairly high rate, the system becomes unstable and will actually rearrange itself into an alternate and somewhat more complicated form, not unlike water draining out of a bathtub. Some scientists have suggested this tendency for molecules to become more orderly could be an analogy for how nature spontaneously organizes itself under certain circumstances. The problem is the level of organization we’re talking about here is quite low. There’s a significant difference between the “order” found in some nonliving things and the “specified complexity” of living cells.

Theory #4: Seeding from Space

Perhaps the building blocks of life came from somewhere else in space. Francis Crick (co-discoverer of DNA) has even gone so far as to suggest that life spores may have been intentionally sent to earth by an advanced civilization. To this, Phillip Johnson responded, “When a scientist of Crick’s caliber feels he has to invoke undetectable spacemen, it is time to consider whether the field of pre-biological evolution has come to a dead end.” It's biggest flaw is that it doesn’t solve the origin of life problem, just moves it to another location.

While it's true that amino acids have been found on meteorites, still, we have to ask how do they get assembled into living matter. It was said of a July 1999 international conference of origin-of-life scientists that “before the end of the conference’s second day, researchers had to agree that extraterrestrial delivery could not have supplied all the prebiotic materials.”

Theory #5: Vents in the Ocean

There are hydrothermal vents at dozens of locations on the sea floor. Tube worms, clams and bacteria, whose primary source of energy is sulfur compounds from the vents, flourish there. Some theorize these vents might have provided an environment where the beginning of life might have been nurtured. Scientists thought they might provide an unusual energy source for some chemicals to become reactive, but it never addresses the assembly problem. It does nothing to solve the problem of how to put the building blocks of life together in the right sequence and with the right connections.

Furthermore, experiments have suggested that the high temperatures of these superheated vents would destroy rather than create complex organic compounds. The time scale for chemical evolution would be shrunk dramatically since it is now thought that all the water in the ocean is periodically recirculated through these vents.

Theory #6: Life from Clay

Others have proposed that perhaps life somehow arose on clays whose crystalline structure had enough complexity to somehow encourage prebiotic chemicals to assemble together. But how would the clay be able to impart the information needed to sequence the chemicals together in the right way? The best crystalline clay can do is provide very, very low-grade sequencing information, and it’s going to be very repetitive, like a book filled with only “I love you” over and over again. Is it orderly? Yes. Does it have much information? No. That’s what crystal is - nothing more than redundant information. It’s far, far short of the specified complexity that living matter needs.

Klaus Dose summarizes the failure of naturalistic theories for the origin of life this way: "More than thirty years of experimentation on the origin of life in the fields of chemical and molecular evolution have led to a better perception of the immensity of the problem of the origin of life on Earth rather than to its solution. At present all discussions on principle theories and experiments in the field either end in stalemate or in a confession of ignorance."