Evident Creation

How likely is it for chemical processes to build the molecules used by life and then change them into all the different forms we see?  Do you think that enough time, 4 billion years perhaps, makes it probable, even inevitable?  Is such a possibility based on an examination of the probabilities involved or is it just a feeling?

Wouldn’t someone who wanted to prove that natural origins were probable within a 4 billion-year time span want to demonstrate it by looking closely at the capabilities and limits of the actual chemical processes? 

You might think that would be the case. But the typical responses to the question of the extremely low probability of natural origins are more like excuses than answers based on science. They claim that the timescale involved is so vast that probability is irrelevant.  “Nature had millions of years.” So there is no need to investigate.  Or they brush away the problem by noting that it’s just something chemicals do, without an examination of how the chemicals actually interact.

The basic reasoning seems to go like this; since evolution is true and nature doesn’t violate laws of chemistry, the odds must not be prohibitive. If they were, the organism couldn’t have evolved. But, there was lots of time and the organism exists, so any low probability must have been counteracted by the amount of time available.  As one evolutionist put it “Time is the hero of the plot.”

But how much time do you really need? The types of answers they offer have nothing to do with any real calculations.  They actually reveal that there is something seriously wrong with how believers in natural origins address the probability problem. One thing for certain is they are being educated to think this way. In one biology textbook in a very brief section titled “Objections to Evolution” the writers attempt to dismiss the problem.

First, they set up a strawman, presenting the question as only the probability of a protein existing.  They start by quoting someone about the likelihood of a hemoglobin molecule. 

“Hemoglobin has 141 amino acids. The probability that the first one would be leucine is 1/20, and that all 141 would be the ones that they are by chance is (1/20)^141, an impossibly rare event.”

Then they present the knockout punch. They say,

This argument illustrates a lack of understanding of probability and statistics  −you cannot use probability backwards.  The probability that a student in a classroom has a particular birthday is 1/365, arguing this way, the probability that everyone in a class of 50 would have the birthdays they do is (1/365)^50, and yet there the class sits.

Biology, 7th Edition, McGraw Hill, Peter H. Raven…[et all], 2005 pg. 468

This was all they offered. The goal must be to make the students feel stupid if they question the odds of a protein forming by natural processes. “You don’t want to be backwards thinkers, do you?” But they don’t actually address the problem at all.  Their comparison is incorrect, the hemoglobin example and the birthday example have different data parameters.    

The student’s birthdays example has two elements:
• The number of students
• The number of birthdates

The final birthday calculation is simply the number of variations, that is, the number of possible outcomes.

The Hemoglobin example however, has three elements:
• The length of the protein
• The number of amino acids
• The sequence of the protein. 

The hemoglobin example calculates the number of possible variations, but then sets it against a correct outcome. 

When the number of possibilities is not measured against the number of viable solutions, as in the birthdays example, probability is meaningless. In the student’s birthdays example there is no unlikely, or impossible state. If any order of birthdays is possible the odds are 1 to 1 no matter how many students there are.  This can be done with any sets of data in the universe.  But all proteins must have a specific amino acid sequence.  So how did such a poor argument like this get into a textbook?  Perhaps this was the same argument the writers and editors learned when they were in school.

Many people seem to dismiss the probability problem in this way, so here is an extremely simple example to illustrate what happens statistically if there is only one correct answer.

The first three letters of the alphabet are in order A,B,C. There is no other way that sequence of letters can be correct.  There are 27 different combinations of those letters.  The odds of having any one of the 27 combinations are 1 to 1 (comparable to the Students birthdays). The odds of randomly starting the sequence with an “A” are 1 in 3, but the odds of getting the correctly ordered sequence are 1 in 27 (Comparable to hemoglobin).  Its 27 times less likely to randomly get ABC as any of the possible combinations.  With 4 letters the odds are 1 in 256, with 5, 1 in 3,125 and so on.  With each added letter in the sequence the odds of getting the right sequence grows exponentially.  The average protein sequence between 200 and 300 amino acids long.

Some people dismiss the odds by noting that winning the lottery is also improbable.  If the odds are 10 billion to one that a winning ticket exists, then it seems improbable that there could be a winner. But the chance of a winner decreases with every ticket in play. Therefore, if thousands of people play, the odds that someone will win become realistic. So, in the supposed 4.5-billion-year history of the earth not only has there been lots of time, but also lots of organisms playing the genetic lottery. It seems to make sense and so they don’t examine it any further and are satisfied with the nebulous idea of lots of time and lots of players.

Rather than looking into the ratio of viable sequences to those that are non-viable, they present this idea,

“…because any of the different amino acids might appear in any position, a protein containing 100 amino acids could form  any of 20^100 different amino acid sequences (that’s the same as 10^130, or 1 followed by 130 zeros -more than the number of atoms in the known universe). This is an important property of proteins because it permits great diversity.”

Biology, 7th Edition, McGraw Hill, Peter H. Raven…[et all], 2005 pg. 43

But this passage is presenting a falsehood. They claim that a protein could be made from “any” of the 20^100 amino acid sequences available, but the fact is that only a very small fraction of the combinations would produce a sequence that is functional.  And the ones that don’t work couldn’t contribute to the diversity found in life, they work against it.

So why present poor arguments and falsehoods in a science textbook?  If the odds really were favorable to proteins forming naturally, then why not just present the probabilities properly?  I suspect that their desire to reason soundly is compromised by their faith in materialism.

Considering that the average protein is not 5 or 10 amino acids long, but between 200 and 300 amino acids long, it increases the possible arrangements exponentially, but it also exponentially decreases the odds of getting a working sequence.

Since most of us understand sentences better than amino acid sequences it’s easier to view the problem by looking at a sentence. We can see that the number of combinations, the “important property” of proteins, is also an important property of language. Consider, as a comparison, a passage that tells us who the designing intelligence is:  

For thus says the LORD that created the heavens; God himself that formed the earth and made it; he has established it, he didn’t create it in vain, he formed it to be inhabited. -Isaiah

There are 138 total letters in the passage above made of 17 different letters, not counting the spaces and punctuation.  There are probably a few dozen ways you could arrange those letters into other meaningful sentences but compared to the number of meaningless combinations this is a highly unlikely organization. Both proteins and sentences also have a context, an environment where they work or make sense.  The letters in the sentence above may be able to be re-arranged to a sentence that makes sense, but they would no longer work in the context. Even here, the passage above would not work, were it not for the preceding and following sentences.  Here is just one example of what a rearrangement of the letters might look like. The string below was created by a set of formulas that randomly drew from a pool using the 17 different letters in the sentence above.

h vad rsa lttedei e  te ieash rneathFheet edtiedrh hL  ssdst mss  eeu  heitrhe cve mf det lhtaetthth feidd tndtoodh ri   r esheD  nheh nnnvasdll D tFese rele   isr t

Now I could be mistaken and that might actually make sense to someone.  Oddly it does make sense in this context, but only because it has a purpose for being there.

You could repeat this exercise a hundred million times and produce nonsense every time, but never get another working sentence. The same thing is true of proteins. Only a tiny fraction of the possible combinations will be usable in life. This is not at all like what the biology textbook declares.

Like the working sentence above, all proteins work with other proteins and within complex systems. A protein expressed in the wrong system is just as useless or harmful as a non-functional protein. But life has several additional layers of genetic programing that direct which proteins will be expressed, where and when, and factors that regulate the number of proteins that are made.   The likelihood of random changes to a string of letters making a readable sentence that also work within the context of a book which is also in the proper place in a library is comparable to the likelihood of viable proteins that work together arising through mutations.

What then is the ratio of proteins that can have a function to those that don’t? Scientists have worked out this ratio to be about 1 in 10^74. That is the average number of tries that nature would need to make to get just one working protein.

But, we must remember that there has been several billion years and billions upon billions of organisms for random mutations to come across those lucky combinations.  Just like the lottery, the more organisms that have lived the more chances there are to get a lucky mutation.  But how many tries has nature had in the assumed history of the earth?  It’s estimated that the number of organisms that could have existed on a 4.5 billion-year-old earth is around 10^40.  So, if each organism that ever lived experimented with a mutation it still falls short of the average number of tries needed to reach just one functional protein by trillions upon trillions of times.  In fact, each organism would have had to have hundreds of mutations to even get close to the chance of a single protein arising through natural processes.

So, statistically, there hasn’t been enough time to expect a single protein to have arisen by chance. The problem for natural origins is that there are tens of thousands of proteins used by life. It’s far beyond just being lucky.  And proteins don’t work alone, so even if one lucky protein did arise it would be long gone before one it can work with might appear.

It shouldn’t be hard to see that life cannot get started or evolve new functions and systems using natural forces.  Meaning that anyone who believes that it could is exercising blind faith. 

But what about natural selection, doesn’t that solve the probability problem? For one, natural selection doesn’t increase the odds of a functional sequence occurring, it will still be 1 in 10^74.  Secondly, natural selection doesn’t work until you have a living reproducing organism, which requires multiple working sequences. And thirdly, natural selection only helps when new proteins have a function, but function doesn’t occur until you have multiple proteins.

Since it would take many mutations to build a new functional protein and many more to build the other proteins that would work with it, natural selection is out of the picture for 99.999% of the developmental period of any new protein or subsequent functional system. But natural selection can select for protein that is degrading and still functional or for a protein that has lost its function if the loss of function confers a benefit or hasn’t caused reproduction to significantly decrease. What it can’t do is select for a sequence that is on its way to acquiring a function.  That is, natural selection is far more likely to select for genetic loss than genetic gain. This exactly matches the scientific observations of the last half century.

The Biology Behind the Odds

The code for each protein is actually much longer than the protein. Each amino acid in the protein sequence is represented by a three nucleotide code on the DNA, which means a 200 amino acid protein would require at least 600 nucleotides.  That means the odds are actually far worse than what we’ve been looking at.

Another thing to keep in mind that further reduces the chances of a success is that mutations affect functioning genes. And there are more functioning genes than non-functioning ones. Most non-functioning genes are the result of a mutation to a gene that once had a function, they are not future proteins being built.  There is no evidence that shows any partially built proteins waiting for more mutations, but all new proteins would have to start out that way.

The chemical compounds used in life are not the main factor that makes life possible, it’s the organization and the language that is infused into their arrangement. And that is what nature can’t do because all it has available is random changes.

The gap between non-living chemicals and the basic functioning components in life is massive. There have been many experiments trying to find a way for normal chemical interactions to somehow produce the arrangements we see in life.  But even at the very basic level nature is unable to organize the chemicals in a useful manner.  The reason why things work in life is because the machinery in the cell reorganizes the molecules to work within those systems.

This is evident in the fact that once an organism dies, the delicate balance that keep the components organized is lost and the components begin breaking down and returning to a less organized state.  The hurdle from unorganized to organized is enormous but going from organized to disorganized is like a rock succumbing to gravity.  Disorganization is the natural state, organization is not.

Yet, in spite of all the evidence against natural origins of any protein or system, naturalists,  like those at NASA and the NAS, believe by faith that finding the right ingredients is enough to prove life could arise through natural processes. This is how so many of them are able to promote the idea that finding water or organic compounds is enough to suggest life might be possible on other planets.

MULTIPLYING UNLIKELIHOOD

For origins there are two levels to the story, there is the origin of life problem, then there is the creation of new proteins in a living organism problem, i.e. evolution resulting in new organisms.   Let’s also keep in mind the increasing improbability that occurs with multiplying unlikely states and events. If, by faith, someone limits themselves to natural causes and cannot allow themselves to consider that there is a directing intelligence, then they are left with physics, chemistry and blind chance.

It’s more than just a single factor that affects probability. While it’s probably true that all of the amino acids used in life can form naturally, it’s a scientifically verified falsehood that they could self-assemble into anything that we would consider life.

Unlikelihood #1: In any natural setting, half of the amino acids will form a mirror version, right or left, but all of them will attach to each other in a chain no matter what direction they are.  Life uses chains that are all left or all right.  Any disruption will cause the chain to malform and be unusable.  Since an average protein chain is over 100 amino acids long, it would be like flipping a coin 100 times and having all of them come up heads.  Combining this with a usable sequence makes the idea of getting a large chain of all right-handed or left-handed amino acids nearly impossible.

Unlikelihood #2: Long chains of amino acids are very unstable in the environments where they occur naturally. The same forces that create them also break them up. So even if you’ve got 99 heads in a row the likelihood that the chain will have already broken apart in several places is very high.   Evolutionist envision chains assembling in bubbles where they can be protected from the environment where they arose.  But you still have the problems of the direction and sequence of the amino acids. The bubbles, unlike cells do not regulate what comes into or goes out of the bubble. Here’s the scenario, a bubble with the right properties would have to spontaneously form and trap a chain of amino acids that by chance happened to be all left or right handed and also just happened to have a sequence that caused it to take a shape that gave it a function that maintained the bubble in some way.

Unlikelihood #3:  The shape of the protein is based on its sequence and location of the chemical bonds in that sequence. The attractions of the amino acids to one another cause proteins to fold and maintain their shape.  Some proteins will automatically fold into a shape because of their sequence, others need additional help. Special proteins in living systems help to fold these proteins to their correct shape.  This also creates an irreducibly complex situation.

Unlikelihood #4: The origin of life would need a very specific set of proteins.  Since all proteins work with other proteins and within structures and systems, the likelihood that even a properly sequenced and formed protein would be useful is very small.  Also, apart from a living system it wouldn’t be selectable, because selection happens to an organism not its components. 

Unlikelihood #5: There is the problem of timing. Imagine that you have a protein that has got past the first four unlikely conditions, but, as with all proteins, it needs other proteins or existing structures to perform a function.  Then half a million years later on the other side of the planet in a completely different environment the protein that works with it to perform a function accidently assembles. The first protein would be long gone at this point. 

Unlikelihood #6: Just like sentences are defined by a capital at the beginning and a period at the end, so proteins sequences on the DNA have a specific place where the RNA polymerase is to start reading and a specific place to stop reading the code.  A sequence that might produce a working protein won’t do anything unless it can be transferred to mRNA.  Without the start and stop sequences the RNA polymerase will not read the code.  This means that two very specific mutations would need to occur with each emerging protein. These changes would be near impossible if mutation was the only way they could come about.

Unlikelihood #7:  The number of proteins in a cell needs to be regulated.  Without the regulation your cells would not have the correct proportions of the proteins they need to function. To accomplish this there are numerous other proteins that either attach or detach from the DNA to prevent or facilitate the code being read.  Many of the regulators are gene specific and most require an assembly of several proteins.  So, the proteins and the regulators associated with them need to arise at the same time, they can’t wait a thousand generations for the regulatory factors to get created by chance because by then mutation would certainly have destroyed them.

The odd thing is that materialists maintain that life not only arose by natural processes but went through thousands of evolutionary changes as well. This is not because the data is favorable to their position, but their faith can’t allow them to accept any other conclusion.  They are aware of all of the above problems but prefer to believe that somehow the odds were overcome.  They claim that the solution is out there somewhere.  This is nothing more than pure blind faith.

THE IRREDUCIBLE COMPLEXITY PROBLEM

One of the things about life is that all of it uses the same basic information and building system.  Evolutionists and Creationists alike believe that this is evidence that all life had a common origin. 

Apart from the impossibility of the building blocks of life spontaneously assembling into the first cell there is the question of how the inner workings of the cell came about, specifically the process of building proteins, RNA and DNA, all of which work together in the irreducibly complex system that is universal to all life.

Materialists will claim that there must have been a simpler system that existed before what we see now. But this claim is driven by their faith in materialism, not by any science.  When they make this claim they are simply making a faith statement. They believe that over time molecules can advance from unorganized to organized, from simple to more complex.  So, when they say “there must have been a simpler system” it’s a statement of faith.

You can start at any point in the process and reach the same conclusion. Proteins and RNA are needed to read the DNA and DNA contains the codes for the proteins and RNA that read it.  It’s an irreducibly complex process.

Irreducible Complexity #1: RNA Polymerase

RNA polymerase is made of 5 subunits that when assembled have the specific function of splitting the DNA code and making an RNA copy.  The code that is used to make RNA polymerase is on the DNA.  If the DNA code arose first, there would be nothing to make a copy of the code, therefore RNA polymerase could not be constructed.  If RNA polymerase came first then there would be no code for it to make more of itself.

Unlikelihood #8 Because the polymerase is made up of 5 sub-units, each one of these would have needed to arise by pure chance and accidently assemble to read a code that also accidently assembled. An incredible improbability within an impossibility.

Irreducible Complexity #2: The Spliceosome

The DNA code is divided up by many sections that do not code for proteins called introns.  After the RNA polymerase creates the mRNA the introns need to be edited out.  The spliceosome cuts out the introns and reassembles the mRNA into a usable code.  Scientists who believe in evolution are uncertain exactly when introns entered the scene or how they came into being.  Here is the basic problem; if the spliceosome wasn’t present when the introns entered the code then the introns would have disrupted the code. But the fact that the introns allow for some amount of data compression fits well with the idea that introns and the spliceosome were created at the same time. And it also looks like something a programmer might do.    

Irreducible Complexity #3: The Ribosome

The ribosome is made of two subunits that together are composed of over 50 proteins.  The Ribosome is the factory that creates proteins from the mRNA that was read from the DNA and spliced by the spliceosome.  The problem is that without the ribosome, there would be no proteins to make the ribosome.

Unlikelihood #9: As I mentioned, the ribosome consists of 2 subunits that together need over 50 proteins. These would all need stable codes within a living reproducing organism in order to produce a ribosome. The odds of this occurring in a single organism are vanishingly small.

Irreducible Complexity #4:  Anticodons

For each codon (the three amino acid sequence) on the mRNA which was read from the DNA, there is an anticodon on the tRNA (transfer RNA).  At least 45 anticodons must exist for the ribosome to create protein chains from the code, one for each codon.  The tRNA is shaped so that on one end, the anticodon, matches a specific codon on the RNA. The other end attracts the amino acid that is associated with that three-letter code.  That association is not random, the arrangements are clearly keyed to the three-letter language.  To have this relationship arise by chance is an impossibility.

The end that accepts the amino acid must correspond to the end that matches the codon or translation doesn’t work.  There is no way that this could have happened gradually, where each anticodon to amino acid relationship happened by chance by many unlikely combinations.

Irreducible Complexity #5: The DNA to Protein System

The DNA, RNA, protein relationship forms an irreducibly complex system.  The code on DNA is useless unless the RNA polymerase copies it.  The mRNA that is produced by the RNA polymerase is useless without both the tRNA and the Ribosome that assembles the protein. None of the components would exist without the code and the code is meaningless without all the components that read, copy, translate and assemble the products.  This system, comprised of hundreds of components, is central to all life. All of it needs to be in place at the same time in a single organism.  The first organism could not have come about without this system arising spontaneously.  To have all the components arise in the same precise location all in the same time period is beyond possibility.

OPERATIONAL SYSTEMS AND STRUCTURES IN LIFE

Materialists, in spite of the scientific evidence, believe by faith that life can arise spontaneously in the right natural conditions. They justify the hundreds of improbably right conditions and lucky accidents by blindly invoking natural selection to act as the magical force that pushes things in the right direction.

But do the problems go away once you have a living system?  The fact remains that new proteins still need to come about by a series of accidents, the level of improbability is not impacted, and natural selection will not select a new protein until it’s reached a stage where it’s having an effect. The first effect that a series of genetic accidents will have is invariably harmful, therefore, selection would tend to eliminate them.  There is also the fact that mutations don’t target specific genes, they wouldn’t happen only to potentially new protein sequences, but would be damaging functional genes many times over before a mutation would happen to an inactive, incomplete gene.

But this raises the question what about proteins that are variations on existing ones, surely the odds are better for those. Maybe so, but it’s irrelevant to the basic problem. The original protein would still defy the odds and something that doesn’t exist can’t be modified. The real issue is the origin of the original protein.  The number of chance combinations needed for nature to stumble upon one working protein exceeds the number of tries available to nature by trillions upon trillions of times and the most basic organism needs well over 100 just to get started.  The existence and variety of life is evidence that nature is not responsible.

The Mystery of Junk DNA

One of the discoveries of recent years is that pretty much all of the genome is functional.  The reason this took so long to discover is that we still don’t know what some of the functional portions do, only that when they are removed, cells don’t survive.  Evolutionists reasoned in the past that millions of years of mutations would produce a lot of junk and that is a reasonable assumption. The evidence in the late 20^th century seemed to back this up.   In the late 1970s the estimate was that 80% of the genome was junk. Ironically its exactly the opposite of what is now known to have function.  That is, they were completely wrong.

Like the vestigial organs list, that estimate was actually the measure of the ignorance of the scientists who were telling us that so much of it was junk.

But that raises the question, the evolutionists expected junk because the process of evolution should have created junk. Lots of it.  In fact, the difference between us and apes should be mostly junk, but it isn’t.  The genomes of all the organisms on the earth demonstrate functional precision. And while degradation is evident, many creatures thrive without the full complement of functional genes that they once had. This suggests that the genomes we now see were at one point more advanced than they are now, the opposite of supposed evolutionary progress. This is a clue that true evolution is downward, descent with modification that degrades the genome.

Beyond Proteins, the control genes

Everything in an organism is defined by another set of genetic instructions that tells each feature where to be built and another set of instructions that define its construction. For instance, the PAX6 gene controls eye placement, but other genes control an eye’s structure.  That is how PAX 6 can position both a mouse and fruit fly eye but not control their structure.  Because of this, evolutionists believe that PAX6 evolved in a common ancestor that must have existed before the paths of these organisms diverged. But this conclusion ignores the statistical unlikelihood of the changes. This line of reasoning is more to reduce cognitive dissonance, than it is a result of an examination of how the process could coordinate the multiple mutations needed. 

Unlikelihood #10: Control genes.

Control genes, like PAX6, require a collection of many proteins and other control genes to work with.  When evolutionists imagine new functions arising from genes, they posit a genetic “toolkit.” Control genes are what accesses the toolkit.  They focus on the “tools” (proteins and enzymes) they believe were already available in the kit.  But what this allows to slip by is questioning the likelihood of both the development of the genes that control the use of the toolkit and the origin of the tools themselves.

Control genes, like anything else in biology, have a specified sequence. When those genes get moved or disrupted the consequences are usually far more drastic than a mutation disabling a protein.  A control gene without a suite of proteins to control is just junk. A suite of proteins without direction on how to use them are also junk.  It’s problematic enough to explain how a control gene might arise using existing proteins, but random mutations causing new control genes to coordinate with a new set of genes to control is clearly a fantasy.

Unlikelihood #11: The necessity of gene duplication.

Evolutionists envision scenarios where numerous gene duplications interspersed with lucky mutations might explain new genes.  Gene duplication is not unusual, but it’s those impossibly lucky mutations that are also needed.

Invoking gene duplications may seem to deflect the problem because it seems like a necessary step in getting more genetic material to for nature to play with. But gene duplications, like any other mutation, are not a benign solution to getting more genetic material to work with. Gene duplication is often harmful. It can however be beneficial in some cases or neutral up to a point. But those would be exceptions. And it still doesn’t address the origin of any original genetic sequence.

The fact is that these types of arrangements are very similar to how an intelligent programmer would create different sub-routines in a program.

Unlikelihood #12: The nature of developmental control

The developmental stages of every organisms are very complex and very precise. The cells that perform these actions are known as stem cells, but the cells themselves are really running a very complex genetic program.  Some Evolutionists incorrectly look at these stages to try to replay evolutionary events. But developmental control doesn’t create cells from scratch, it directs the development of cells that are dividing from the single first cell of an organism and changes the nature of each one, while directing the positioning of those cells at the same time. Think of directing the positions of thousands of cells meanwhile directing the nature of each of those cells to the specified types needed for that location.  Not only that but the genetic programs have triggers that activate at precisely timed intervals, sometimes years after the first cell divided.  There is still no way to quantify the genetic change needed for such programing, because we don’t understand it yet. There is also no reason to expect that mutations would happen in such a specific order as to leave a history that it replays in development.  There should also be no doubt that the origins of these genes add exponentially to the level of improbability at every stage of life.

Unlikelihood #14 The observed degradation of genomes.

Mutations are ubiquitous. No organism is free from changing. But there are many organisms that are believed to have been around for more than a half billion years. Evolutionists look at them as if they represented half billion year old genetic sequences when they try to construct evolutionary storylines.

Representatives of almost all of earths supposed evolutionary history are alive today and their genetic makeup is assumed to have remained stable enough to use as data for reconstructing evolutionary histories. But why didn’t their genomes change?  Evolutionists excuse this problem by using terms like “evolutionary conservation” and “evolutionary stasis”. Meaning that they haven’t changed because they can’t change. This essentially means that any changes would result in catastrophic failure for that organism.  But this runs counter to the process by which evolutionists believe new proteins are created and new functions are gained. What it really indicates that including the term “evolutionary” in an explanation makes it easier to swallow.  But the stability of the genome is really an illusion created by faith in evolution.

If evolution were true, we would expect to see a few things. The first, would be junk DNA. The other thing would be a stable genome in real time.  But we observe neither. The reality is that mutations are accumulating in the genomes of organisms at an alarming rate for evolutionary time scales.   If it were even possible for evolutionary advancements to take place the genetic loss and damage far outpaces even what the evolutionary stories have us imagine.  The belief that incredibly lucky mutations can create thousands of innovations and new working genetic sequences doesn’t fit what we observe. It is believed that in the past mutations were slow and gradual and ultimately upward. But why now, when we are observing them, do they show a fast and constant degradation?  This makes the belief that mutation could be the cause for new functioning genetic sequences that much more unreasonable.

The evidence from the process is overwhelmingly against natural origins and upwards evolution of life.

For those who want there to be a purely materialistic origin of life and all the various forms of life the evidence comes from imagining unprovable paths and events. They can’t consider the reality of how genetics function in the present and the actual likelihoods of the changes.  They present stories about the path as evidence, rather than appealing to the process. 

The stories, based on fossils, rocks and genetic sequences don’t fit together as neatly as they would like you to believe. There are missing stages for each line of organisms, many appear out of nowhere, like bats and flowering plants, where no gradual intermediaries exist.  Some are unsolvable riddles and evolutionary showstoppers, such as metamorphosis in insects or the origins of the multiple forms of reproduction.  Evolutionists are still baffled by the origins of sex and are unable to explain why it originated so many times. For insects that undergo metamorphosis there is often massive pre-programmed cell death with the purpose of rebuilding the organism in a new form. This is an irreducibly complex stage.  Then there are the many organisms that have the innate ability to do advance calculations for navigating three dimensional spaces. How many mutations does that take? Did the ability to do calculus arise in a single ancestor or did it happen many times?

Most common ancestors are mere suggestions, where no fossil or living organism exists. Yet these imaginary ancestors are usually what contain the bulk of the imaginary evidence. And speaking of the ability to use imagination, how many brain mutations the ability to use imagination take?

Evolutionary lineages are composed by the most likely imagined path, not the most likely outcome of the process. The most likely path is determined by the least amount of perceived change. This of course creates many conflicts and disagreements.  They believe that when consensus is reached on the path we have reached the truth. While they insist that “truth” is not a word we should use in science, if you dare to disagree with them their reactions tell you that they believe in truth.

They willingly admit that there are major gaps in their understanding, but they attribute that to lack of data. Yet the data we have points in the completely opposite direction from natural origins.

The probability is so low it is realistic to say it is impossible.  Their claims that natural processes could create and evolve the various forms of life are on the same level as claiming that you can run a city on the power generated from a single potato.

The evolutionary claim is that life could arise and diversify in under 4.5 billion years, but the measured pace of change and observed direction of change does not fit the claim. The time scale is far too small on orders of magnitude and the observed change is in the wrong direction.

Can they excuse themselves by saying “We’re still working on it,” when the bulk of evidence we now have falsifies their ideas?  The stories about the path using fossils and sequences are not evidence, their fictional accounts that don’t fit the evidence from real time science.  Using these types of evidences is also inherently circular, because you have to believe in evolution for them to be evolutionary evidence.

Evolution is true, but evolutionary origins are not.

“Maybe aliens did it” says the Materialist.  But where did the aliens come from? They certainly couldn’t have arisen within this universe, because the same natural laws exclude that from happening.  The fact that natural forces could not create life is evidence that the intelligence that created life could not be part of this universe, which is evidence that supports the Biblical view that life and the universe was created by God.  This is not just a “God did it” cop out. It’s a reasonable conclusion based on the fact that the evidence clearly does not support a natural origin.

“That is an either/or fallacy” claims the Materialist.  But this claim looks like another way to try to avoid the obvious. If there is a third choice what is it? There is nature, then there is intelligence, what is the mysterious third cause that makes the claim that intelligence is the correct answer an either/or fallacy? 

Many think that the arguments presented here are to utterly falsify the theory of Evolution. That’s not the case. Evolution is true, but the scale at which it works is very small. Observed changes and processes do not account for the origins of life and the basic varieties of living organisms.  Evolution can explain changes in beak size but not beaks, anti-biotic resistance, but not bacteria, feather color, but not feathers, bone size, but not bones, coloration patterns, but not skin or hair or eyes.

Once you’ve come to grips with the evidence, it’s not unreasonable to reject the idea that the features in life could have resulted from natural processes, or to reject the idea natural processes could produce even one major evolutionary transition.  The storytelling method of evidence for natural origins was the result of the 19^th century understanding of life and also a desire to exclude God. The reasoning and logic behind evolution for the mainstream scientist has not progressed with scientific discovery.

An examination of the biological process should leave only one reasonable conclusion. Evolution didn’t create life or any of the major forms of life on this planet. Macro evolutionary transformation never happened. This means that the evolutionary interpretation of the fossil record is wrong. This means that the evolutionary stories are false. This means that the timelines and ancestral connections are false. It also means that the genetic similarities and many cases of convergent forms and processes are evidence of a common designer!

The fact is that the universe looks like it was designed so life could exist on this planet. Life is not here by accident; it can only be the result of a very powerful intelligence that could not have originated in this universe.  The evidence from science should leave no question that this type of intelligence is needed.  

While science can’t determine what the intelligence might be, nor can it determine the method that intelligence might use, God has let us know in His word who that Creator is. 

For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him: And he is before all things, and by him all things consist. Colossians 1:16-17