Why Creation And Not Evolution Has Better Explanatory Power

In age of scientific enlightenment, does the Bible story of Creation have any credibility? After all, it is now claimed that, science has explained nearly all of the mysteries of life from a naturalistic point of view by showing how life began, how life evolved and how the universe came into existence.

This idea is so entrenched in academia that anyone who dares to suggest that the Creation story of Genesis 1 and 2 is anything other than mythical is regarded with contempt. Or to put it more directly-

If you meet someone who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid, or insane (or wicked, but I would rather not consider that.)

Supposedly free-thinking, rational people no longer take seriously the Bible stories of creation- especially the story of Adam and Eve, according to Dawkins. At best, they claim, the Biblical creation story and the story of Adam and Eve are just primitive myths. Therefore, religion deals with myths and legends, but science deals with facts and truth. Yet in recent years this debate between Creationists and Evolutionists has been fought with scientific data and has stepped up and been waged in schools, courts and the media.

Are Science and the Bible at odds? Is there a contradiction between Science and Scripture?

Before we look at the differences between what Science and Scripture says bout how the world came into existence, we need to define some terms. The first word we need to define is: “Myth”. A myth is a story that is not true. If the Bible’s stories, especially about creation, are not true then it is merely a collection of myths and should not be taken too seriously. In fact, if the first chapters of Genesis are nothing more than a myth, then the Bible is without any moral, spiritual or scientific authority! If Genesis 1 and 2 are a myth, then it and the other 10 creation passages in Scripture are wrong. And if they are wrong the Bible’s repeated claim that God is the Creator and therefore the Arbiter of Morality is without foundation. But a myth is different to a Legend.

A LEGEND

But perhaps we could consider that the Scriptures contain parts of the truth. If this is the case, then it is a collection of legends. This is because a Legend is a story that was partly true. But science is not concerned with myths and legends. What science is concerned with is proposing how things work, how things interact, and what can be demonstrated and observed. This scientific process begins with the formulation of a “Theory”.

A THEORY

A Theory proposes how things should work, should interact and should behave. It is different to a ‘hypothesis’, which is a suppositional statement that attempts to explain something in a way that can be scientifically tested. Ultimately, the scientific method is pursuing facts.

A FACT

Facts are the currency of science. A fact is a thing that is indisputably the case but may not be the complete picture of the truth (because facts can change). For example, in 1968 it was a fact that man could not walk on the moon, but it was not the truth (because in 1969 Neil Armstrong did.)

TRUTH

Physical science is geared toward achieving facts while Philosophy is geared toward achieving the Truth. Truth is a statement that conforms to reality and is verifiable and its implications are testable. But some things promoted as scientific are actually myths in just the same way that some things promoted by Christians as being in Scripture are actually not factual. For example…

Charles Darwin had started medical studies at Edinburgh University but changed to Cambridge University where he was to study geology but pursued studies of invertebrate sea life. In 1831 he joined an expedition to South America on board the HMS Beagle. This expedition lasted 5 years. When Darwin arrived at Punta Alta in South America he discovered and documented a find of large fossils. To Darwin these fossils were so unusual that he presumed they must be trans-mutational species. This laid the foundation in Darwin’s thinking for his concept of evolution of the species by the survival of the fittest. By the time The Beagle reached the Galapagos Islands, Darwin’s observations of the wildlife on these isolated islands (particularly the Galapagos finches and how they had adapted to their surroundings) seemed to confirm this concept in Darwin’s mind.

From this Darwin postulated a concept of “common ancestry” or “common decent” for all life. This led him to propose what he called “A tree of life” or “The Pedigree of Man”.

It is a myth that Darwin has shown how all life began

Darwinian evolution notes that the progression of life forms has been made possible by the survival of the fittest. This approach, they claim, best accommodates what we observe in our world that there has been a continual series of extinction of species and out of this has arisen speciation (the rise of new species). After all, if an all-intelligent Creator had created each species, Darwinists argue, He wouldn’t have created species that only had a 4% chance of survival. To this, the Creationist responds by stating that the Creator creates optimally for a specific season and therefore extinction of certain species is accommodated within a universe being fine-tuned by its Creator.

Darwin only proposed a theory without a testable hypothesis. In order for his theory to at least be viable, Darwin had to make some assumptions about life in order for his theory to be viable.

This is why many biologists who hold to Darwin’s theory of evolution distinguish between MICRO evolution (where Darwin’s theory seems to hold true in a limited fashion) and MACRO evolution - which is the claim that Evolution explains how everything, including life, began. Those who hold to Darwinist Evolution at the MACRO level appeal to “abio-genesis” (all life originating from non-life). In another letter subsequent to his book, Darwin told a friend that abio-genesis may have begun when earth was largely a primordial soup and the necessary acids and proteins were randomly charged somehow into life. This idea was later tested by Miller and Urey.

In 1952, Stanley Miller and Harold Urey of the University of Chicago conducted an experiment to test whether chemical evolution was able to produce life. They proposed that the original conditions of early earth contained H2O (water), CH4 (methane), NH3 (ammonia), and H2 (hydrogen). They charged these compounds with a simulated lightning strike and found that the chemicals formed 11 out of the 20 necessary amino acids necessary for the production of proteins which are necessary for life. They concluded that random chemical evolution was therefore possible. This work was published in 1953 and appeared in many High School Science textbooks as a validation for Darwin’s theory of evolution of life. But when the Miller-Urey experiment was scrutinised, it was found to be flawed. Research into the conditions of early earth have also revealed that Stanley Miller was in error regarding his assumptions of the chemical and climatic conditions present on the early earth, thus making their experiment irrelevant to the study of how life began.

Ernst Haekel, who was a contemporary of Charles Darwin, produced a series of embryo drawings, which compared the embryos of various animals to human embryos. He contended that the development of a human embryo paralleled that of all animals and thus showed all life forms share common decent (that is, they all descended from the same original single cell. But these drawings by Haekel have been shown to be forgeries. That is, he faked the drawings of human embryos to make them look like other embryos.

One of the fundamental assumptions made by Charles Darwin was that single cell organisms are only simple life forms. This is how they appeared to be under the best microscopes available in Darwin’s day. But this is another MYTH: Single cell organisms are phenomenally complex! This complexity has only in recent years become evident with the advent of advanced electron-microscopes.

Another myth is that there are no credible scientists who believe in an Originating Creator. There are many credible biologists who acknowledge the God of the Bible as the Creator of the Universe including all life, matter, time, space and energy. Most notably is Dr Francis Collins who was the Head of the Human Genome Project. After leading the project which unravelled this amazingly sophisticated code, it was introduced to the world as “the language of the Creator”. Dr Collins went on to write a book called: The Language of God.

When it comes to understanding how life began, we have to begin with cosmology (how the universe itself came into existence). Around the turn of the 20th century, Albert Einstein proposed that the universe had always existed. He suggested that the universe had been infinitely expanding then contracting. This is called “The Steady State Universe”. But in the 1930s with the development of more sophisticated telescopes, Edwin Hubble (pictured left) discovered that the red-shift in galaxies outside of our own Milky Way could be measured to determine speed and distance of an object. This led to the conclusive findings that the universe is expanding.

This irrefutable evidence caused Albert Einstein to acknowledge that he was wrong. This is now known as “Einstein’s Great Embarrassment”. The implications of Hubble’s work proved beyond reasonable doubt that the universe had a beginning. But Cambridge Astronomer, Sir Fredrick Hoyle ridiculed this notion because of its obvious theological implications. He mocked Hubble’s idea with the expression that according to Hubble, the universe had started suddenly - with a “BIG BANG!” While many cosmologists, who had tried to extrapolate Darwinian evolution into cosmology, were slow to acknowledge the evidence for Big Bang Cosmology, they are relatively rare now. So widely acknowledged is it that the universe had a beginning, it has now become unquestioned in the cosmological community.

Since the Big Bang was the beginning of all space, time, energy and matter, whatever caused it must have been outside of those dimensions. The Big Banger therefore must be omni-present, eternal not created, omnipotent, and immaterial or immutable.

The Universe displays what has now been referred to as “Fine-Tuning” to such precision that makes its existence by mere chance mathematically improbable. Regarded as one of the world leading Physicists and Mathematicians today, Professor Paul Davies, recently won the Templeton Prize for his work in cosmology. He has said- “If almost any of the basic features of the universe, form the properties of atoms, to the distribution of galaxies were different, life would very probably be impossible”. Cosmologist and Astronomer Dr Hugh Ross says, “The amount of fine-tuning in the universe leaves us with no other possible explanation than the God of the Bible.”

The Earth exists in a spectrum of light one trillionth of one trillion of the light spectrum which is coincidentally the only place on the spectrum that life is possible]. The odds of life being possible by random chance are the same as firing a bullet 20 billion light years (one side of the universe to the other) and hitting a 20cent piece - and doing it 10 to the power 60 times without ever missing! (Source: Prof. John Polkinghorn, Cambridge University Professor)

Some of the Fine-Tuning elements necessary for life in our universe include some cosmological constants such as -

THE ANTHROPIC PRINCIPLE

The Anthropic Principle is an expression used by Darwinian Evolutionists to state the obvious link between mankind’s evolution and mankind’s curiosity about his origins. But there is another usage of the term Anthropic Principle that says that our planet seems to be uniquely designed for human life to flourish. Our Planet (Earth) displays Unique Habitability -- There are over 400 “at-the-same-time” parameters necessary for life on earth.

The beginning of the universe must have been supernatural because whatever caused the universe to be created must have been outside of this universe and its dimensions of space, time, matter and energy. This immediately rules out certain ideas of the Creator like~ pantheism, materialism, aliens, or multiverses.

While attempts have been made to find intermediate fossils, which confirm Darwin’s Tree of Life, none that are conclusive have been found. Furthermore, the Cambrian Explosion in the Fossil record (about 550 million years ago) completely contradicts Darwin’s notion of progressive evolution over time. On the contrary, the Cambrian Explosion in the fossil record shows a relatively sudden appearance of more advanced life forms.

Therefore, according to this view, there is no spiritual or metaphysical realm, no life after death, and no purpose for your life at all. It then follows that life has no rules - either moral or ethical. Thus, Darwinian Evolution later gave rise to another theory called Social Evolution or Social Darwinism, which claims that religious ideas evolved over time and that moral values similarly developed when those who socially dominated imposed rules of behaviour upon a society.

There are implications for accepting that the universe has been created rather than the notion that all matter, time, space and energy just sprang into existence uncaused from nothing. If there is a Creator:

We now know that the essence of life is not a particular chemical, but information. This information is contained within the living organism’s DNA code and genome. These codes are so sophisticated that it is simply beyond reasonableness that they are the result of random undirected processes. Indeed, so sophisticated are these codes they are better understood as a set of instructions written in a language that we can now comprehend. This is why the work of Dr Francis Collins (Head of the Human Genome Project) and his team was introduced to the world by the then President, Bill Clinton, as the language of the Creator. This discovery is exactly what you would expect if life was designed and created by a Creator.

From the field of cosmology we now know the universe is not eternal- it had a beginning. This is precisely what the Creation story says. It is perfectly in harmony with the Biblical account of Creation. It demands that whatever agent caused all space, time, energy and matter to come into existence, it itself must have been outside of these parameters. Therefore, scientifically speaking, the Creation Agent must be omni-present, eternal, omnipotent, and immaterial (a spirit).

If you were to arrive unannounced at a motel and randomly book a room, which upon opening it you hear your favourite CD playing your favourite song, and smell your favourite scent in the air of the room, and notice your favourite chocolates on your pillow and open the mini-bar to see a complimentary bottle of your favourite drink and look on the wall to see an original oil painting of your favourite artist and notice that the décor of the room incorporates your favourite colours – would you think something is going on? Would the thought cross your mind that someone knew you were coming? This mythical room would contain just 7 design-parameters to make your stay more pleasurable. Then what do we do with an earth that contains not a mere 7 parameters for our habitability, but over 400 at-the-same-time-all-necessary parameters that makes human existence not just possible, but enjoyable? The story of the Creation is an appeal to the best explanation of this world’s extraordinary complexity and beauty.

All cultures over every period of time has generally had either a creation story or acknowledged that the world is the work of a Creator.

We have a sense that life is ordered. We refer to it as destiny or fate. When tragedy strikes, how many have uttered words like- Why me? – As if we know that there is indeed an objective standard of justice in this world of injustice. Rather than viewing suffering and tragedy as a world without a Creator, those who have been reconciled to the Creator find that these are the times when we draw closer to our Creator for Comfort. CS Lewis said that suffering was God’s megaphone to a deaf world.

If there is no Creator, there is no real purpose to life; no ultimate justice where all wrongs will be righted; and nothing beyond this meagre life where two thirds of the world are afflicted with abject poverty and sickness, yet in the life to come those who are reconciled to their Creator are promised rest, bliss, wholeness and ultimate satisfaction.

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