One of the arguments apologists make is called the teleological argument, or simply stated, the argument from design. The old adage goes, if I were to come upon a pocket watch laying on a beach, I would quickly observe the dials, the polished metal, the small bits of assembly required to make it run. It would be clear to me that it had a designer. In much the same way, we can observe the infinitely more complex information, and organization of nature and confidently say it has a designer as well. DNA language, irreducible complexity, biodiversity. These are things we instinctively realize are not accidental, though some may hope them to be. As Romans 1:20 says,
For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse.
But since Sir Charles Lyell’s book, the Principles of Geology, where he imagined the geologic column, and perpetuated the idea that the world was much older than the bible chronology reported, we have been adding great amounts of time to the theory of molecules-to-man evolution. Sir Charles Lyell who wished to “save the sciences from Moses”, and was a contemporary and major influence on Darwin, proposed that the world was at least 35,000 years old after his trip to Niagara Falls in 1841.
The story goes that upon his visit, with the firm desire to “prove” the world was older than the bible said, he visited the falls to test the erosion rate. Rather than wait and measure, he asked the locals their opinion on how quickly the falls eroded per year. A collection of reports from locals that had lived near the falls for years stated that the erosion rate was probably about 3 feet per year. Measuring back to Lake Ontario at this rate only gave him a date of around 12,000-15,000 years. Lyell, needing the dates to be much older, assumed this was an exaggeration, and when he ended up back in England to write down his “research”, he felt the more likely rate of erosion was 1 foot per year. The seven miles from its beginning therefore allowed him to assume it had taken the falls 35,000 years to reach its present position.
As it turns out, the actual median erosion rate of the falls is 5 feet per year, which by that measure would have brought the date to only about 9000 years old, or even younger when you figure the beginnings of that erosion were caused by the fast moving drainage of Noah’s flood. But Lyell had a uniformitarian view to prop up, and it was his hatred of the bible that motivated it. Incidentally, by the end of his career, Lyell presumed the beginning of life was 200 million years.
This idea of long time didn’t start with Lyell, though he was the one that popularized it. James Hutton, who was died the year Lyell was born, suggested a long time frame and wrote that the present was the key to the past, which of course led to uniformitarian viewpoints. Before him was Comte de Buffon, 1707-1788, who first proposed broad scale mutability of species. In Epoques de la Nature, he suggested the Earth was torn from the sun 75,000 years ago.
As we know now, the assumed time for the age of the earth is around 4.5 billion years. The more fossils that were found, and the slower it seemed evolution took place, so slow in fact that evidence for it was non-existent, the dates of life’s beginning moved from Lyell’s 35,000 years to 2.1 billion years. This is the time frame that evolutionists believe is necessary to evolve humans from a one celled organism. So slow in fact, that evidence for it is completely un-observable. Sounds a lot like faith, doesn’t it?
Dr. George Wald, a Professor of Biology at Harvard University, and Nobel Laureate wrote “The origin of life”, and article in Scientific American, August 1954. In it he states, “However improbable we regard this event [origin of life], or any of the steps which it involves, given enough time it will almost certainly happen at-least-once. And for life as we know it, with its capacity for growth and reproduction, once may be enough.” He goes on to say, “Time is in fact the hero of the plot. The time with which we have to deal is of the order of two billion years. What we regard as impossible on the basis of human experience is meaningless here. Given so much time, the “impossible” becomes possible, the possible probable, and the probable virtually certain. One has only to wait: time itself performs the miracles.”
Sound like faith?
You see, time itself is the miracle worker in evolutionary theory, not God. Time can do the impossible. Time fixes all the issues, the lack of evidence, the problem of entropy. Time, with no purpose, intelligence, or reason, has somehow created all we see, and done so opposite of the laws we observe today. If you add enough of it, that shouldn’t matter, as long as we have replaced faith in God with faith in something else.
Why? I will let Dr. Richard Charles Lewontin, from Columbia University, an American evolutionary biologist, geneticist, academic and social commentator answer that question:
“Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.”
Or perhaps Nagel, Thomas could give you extra insight as to why:
“I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself: I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that. My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition and that it is responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism of our time. One of the tendencies it supports is the ludicrous overuse of evolutionary biology to explain everything about human life, including everything about the human mind …. This is a somewhat ridiculous situation …. [I]t is just as irrational to be influenced in one’s beliefs by the hope that God does not exist as by the hope that God does exist.” – The Last Word, pp. 130–131, Oxford University Press, 1997. Dr Nagel (1937– ) is Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University.
So the premise maintained by the goo-to-you believers is that given enough time, disorder, without any intelligence guiding it, will become order, opposite the Laws of Thermodynamics, Motion, etc. The opposite of entropy.
To conclude, I will give you the example Dr. Ron Carlson gave during one of his lectures. He says, go up in a plane to 5000 ft above the Space Center Complex, take some neatly stacked index cards and toss them out. You must do this over and over until they land in the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex parking lot so that they spell out “Welcome to the Kennedy Space Center”. (This simple phrase of only 30 letters should be easy, as compared with the perfectly ordered 3 billion letters of our genetic code).
We observe at 5000 ft that these cards are not organizing, but instead ending up all over the place. So in order to produce more of a chance to organize in a way that makes sense, we will now follow the theory of evolution’s assertion and give these cards MORE TIME.
We will now take the plane up to 25,000 ft, so they have more time to fall, take our neatly stacked cards, and toss them out. With all this extra time to fall, we must conclude that eventually they will organize into a proper sentence, or word, or even one letter. We have added the magic of time like evolutionists!
But wait – the cards are now spreading out in an even more disorganized radius of chaos, some landing even 10’s of miles from where the plane dropped them!
How then, my friends, do we explain the beauty and exactitude of nature with this process? The answer is, we cannot. It is impossible.
I submit to you that this scientific experiment will provide us with more truth about our reality than any of the postulating, question-begging, circular reasoning, and assumption of our evolutionist friends, who like Dr. Nagel, hopes there is no God.
J.R. Cooper - Author 