Avery Foley
Those who don’t buy into evolutionary dogma are often laughed out of scholarly circles or accused of being anti-science or even anti-intellectual. Secularists often claim that evolution is a proven fact and those who don’t accept evolution are ignorantly covering their eyes to the scientific facts. But is this really so? Does rejecting evolution mean that you have to check your brain at the door? Not at all!
Evolution has some major scientific problems. Honest evolutionists recognize this. For example, Michael Denton wrote a book called “Evolution: A Theory in Crisis” that expressed some of the problems with evolutionary biology. And Denton was no creationist! He just recognized that evolution has its problems and major flaws. For evolutionists to claim that creationists are anti-science for rejecting an idea that has major scientific problems highlights that this is ultimately not a scientific question. It is a philosophical question that hits at the core of who we are and what we believe; where did we come from? The evidence must be interpreted and what you believe about the past determines how you interpret the observational evidence as it relates to origins. Historical science is not a case of the evidence speaking for itself! It must be interpreted and the worldview of the interpreter will determine how the evidence is interpreted.
Last week I wrote about one of the major problems with evolutionary biology; the origin of life. We saw that there is no known mechanism that can produce life from non-life. Indeed, this goes completely against the law of biogenesis, a well-established scientific law. But, for the sake of argument, let’s say that somehow non-living chemicals did come together to form a living cell so that life can begin evolving. Can evolution happen now? Actually, it can’t! You see, in order for something to evolve you have to add new information for brand-new traits into the genetic make-up, the DNA, of the organism. You can’t change an amoeba into a man without adding a lot of additional information! These traits are supposed to arrive slowly over millions of years of mutation and natural selection. But there is absolutely no known mechanism that can add new amounts of functional DNA into the genome. But evolution requires the addition of vast amounts of new information! But we cannot demonstrate a naturalistic mechanism that will give rise to even a small piece of brand-new functional information.
If you can’t add information into the genome, the organism cannot evolve because you cannot create brand new features without the information to make those features. But there is no known mechanism to create new features! So even if life did somehow come from non-life, it still isn’t going to go any where because it cannot evolve new traits. Evolution is dead even before it begins. Evolution is impossible!
Life did not evolve. It was specially created by God in the beginning, fully formed and functioning, just like it says in Genesis. And our Creator, Jesus Christ, wants to have a relationship with us. We can have that relationship by confessing Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour and by repenting of our sin and asking His forgiveness.
The author claims, “…there is absolutely no known mechanism that can add new amounts of functional DNA into the genome.” There are several known mechanisms as she would know if she had been a biology major in a secular university instead of a religion major at Liberty University. One of these is gene duplication which is a well verified phenomenon and which accounts for part of the difference between our brains and those of a chimp. It is also responsible for “families” of genes and pseudogenes. Another is hybridization followed by chromosome duplication (allopolyploidization) which is responsible for the evolution of wheat, corn, potatoes and a large number of other plants. Still another is new genes made from “junk” DNA that scientists have been finding. That should be enough to show she does not know what she’s talking about.