Evident Creation

What kind of scientific experiment would you do to determine if something were created by intelligence or formed through natural processes?  Would testing something chemically prove it was designed?  Only if you knew that the chemicals were unable to produce that combination or arrangement without intelligence. You would not only have to set up experiments to test the natural properties of the chemicals involved but you would have to be reasonably sure that the chemicals would not normally produce the structure or arrangement you are examining.

Of course all intelligently designed things rely on the properties of the natural elements that make them up.  But, if we limit ourselves to the conclusion that natural properties and processes are all that is responsible, how would we conclude something was intelligently designed?  How does maintaining the idea that intelligence cannot be considered, no matter how unlikely the natural processes, affect any conclusions that are made?

Using the scientific method you can determine all the ingredients in a jar of peanut butter, but what science cannot do is repeat the process that produced the recipe, that’s a part of history. Using science you could make your own recipe that produced a similar jar of peanut butter, but that would be intelligent design. The problem with searching for natural origins of intelligently designed things is of course that, while the gathering of the data and analysis may be scientific, the interpretation of the facts would obviously be incorrect.

So how would we tell, using science restricted to natural origins, that the jar of peanut butter was intelligently designed?  Could it come about through a series of purely natural steps?  Of course, likelihood plays a role.  But more importantly a jar of peanut butter has something in common with life, and it’s not protein. Life and all things designed by intelligence have instructions either written or in the form of an idea.  The instructions to make a jar of peanut butter are independent of the product they define. The instructions in DNA are also independent of the product they define. The code in the DNA does not need to know what it codes for. The separation of the code from the actual design would normally be evidence of intelligent intent, were it not for the restriction to natural causes imposed by materialists. So origins remain a mystery to them, not because the question can’t be answered, but the obvious conclusion has been forbidden.

So how does that relate to creation? If you want to understand or study the creation of something, you need to be there at the creation event. You need to observe the steps. Yet that would only be the start. In order to understand the process you would have to repeat the steps yourself. The problem with studying life’s origins is that the creation event or events are part of history. They can’t be examined by observing the process. One of the biggest mistakes modern science has made is to try to reconstruct history using science alone. But it can’t be done. Since science cannot examine historical events, fictional stories are created about what they think happened. When you use science to tell a fictional story its called science fiction.

Science is limited to the present, and to the material world; science can only help confirm past events, but it cannot prove them. We cannot know who really shot JFK apart from history or who wrote Shakespeare. We only know Newton’s and Einstein’s discoveries are valid because they can be tested fully today. We cannot reproduce the event that created the first living cell, but we can examine the processes within a living cell today. We cannot reproduce the events that created man, but we can examine biological changes today. But if the creation of man was not an evolutionary biological event, science will never find the answer.

Every scientific “fact” we rely on has to be provable today, otherwise it is faith based fiction.  We tend to confuse the fact that the science that helps us in our daily lives. The science that gives us medicines, computers, cars, TV dinners and took us to the moon is not the same science that tells us fish turned into birds, and chance can turn a monkey into a mathematician.

What if the instructions to your microwave said “When you press the START button the microwave might start.”

The forces and chemical properties that allow computers and medicines to work are natural and operate the same way every day. Your appliances and medicines never have to be recalled because the physics or chemical properties that science understood when they were created have changed. The properties of chemicals and physics are assumed to be absolutes. And we all, consciously or unconsciously, accept these absolutes. We can design a computer, build it and expect it to work because the natural forces that make it work don’t change. They are absolutes. What theoretical scientists are often not careful about is placing their inference, deductive and inductive reasoning in place of data and real world physics and chemistry. This is in effect what evolutionism has taught us to do. If we ignore the possibility of intelligence or assume that it was not involved in a process, our conclusions will be greatly skewed no matter how good the data is.

Both creationists and evolutionists believe that life had a beginning, but neither can observe that beginning. If the beginning was natural, then we should be able to reproduce those steps, not just theoretically, but in actuality, without using an intelligently based process or mechanism to bridge any gaps.  If life has a Creator, then science will not be able to reproduce the steps that lead up to life without using intelligence.

We already have more than a centuries worth of data from studying natural processes to see if they are capable of assembling life. Not a single step has been confirmed without using intelligence to bridge the gaps.  Science has proved that the natural formation of life is highly unlikely. And, if you are willing to accept the data, the natural formation of life is impossible. What science is producing in the lab is equivalent to a random scribble when a blueprint is required. The assumed evolutionary processes to get from the scribble to the blueprint are known to be inadequate.

If we can’t study the event of the creation directly, then what can a study designed to reproduce the event tell us? First we have to decide what event we are trying to reproduce. Since no man was there to observe or record the creation event anything we decide on will be fictional. We have no way of confirming its accuracy. We can assume however, that if we do find a way that works, it may be the right one. But in reality, in order to reproduce an historical event we have to have some record of that event.

Evolutionists like to use fossils as the main evidence of creation events. But ask yourself; what kind of record is a fossil buried in a rock? Is it a record of an organism’s creation or its destruction?  Fossils can tell us nothing about the creation of any organism. Fossils are a record of catastrophic destruction events.

So where do we get our information on the creation event or events? Science alone cannot reach back in time to confirm any event. The stories of the first cell presented by evolutionists are made up, a fictional story with a scientific basis. Again fictional stories with a scientific basis are “science fiction.” No one was there to observe it, it’s pretend. So they believe by faith that life assembled itself and they wait in faith for future evidence to confirm a missing and unknown process. On the other hand God and the angels were witnesses to the creation event.  Meaning we have eyewitnesses. So with the Bible we start with historical verification and we can use science to confirm some aspects of that event.

The problem with both views, a purely natural origin as opposed to an intelligently designed origin, is the same in regards to scientific confirmation. If you believe life had a natural origin, you have a fictional first event that science cannot confirm. So by faith you must believe it could happen, based on a process science has yet to confirm. If you believe in creation you have the intervention of an intelligent being, God, which science is also unable to confirm. The point is that no matter what view you believe, verification on the origin of life is not going to be scientific. It is going to be based on faith. The foundation of that faith therefore is a very important issue.

So, scientific confirmation for natural origins boils down to attempting to show that the laws of chemistry and physics make it inevitable. It must now rely on the idea that similarities are evidence of the evolutionary process, in spite of what chemistry and physics are showing us. On the other hand we have millions of examples of creation by intelligent design, from the simple writing of a letter, to the building of a satellite and everything in between. While these are not examples of the creation of life, we can use these as examples of those types of systems that require intelligence as opposed to those that do not.

Sometimes we can examine an intelligent design by reverse engineering the products produced by it. We do this by disassembling a machine or design or program to see how it works and then we attempt to make one based on what we’ve discovered. And that process uses science. We can even make improvements to the design to suit our needs and desires. This is essentially what they are doing with genetic engineering. Right now, using techniques developed by science they are pulling DNA apart, observing to see how it works, and in some cases rebuilding it to suit their fancy, such as with genetically engineered foods. It is interesting that we call this “genetic engineering”, when in reality we have only engineered a tiny fraction and rely on the bulk of the existing design. It should be called reverse engineering, because scientists didn’t design the system they only learned a small part of it then re-engineered it.

The fact is that the origin of life, whether by natural chemical processes or by supernatural intervention is not available for scientific study. So the creation of life is a mystery to science and will remain that way. Many cannot accept this, because its confirmation is needed to verify their philosophical precepts.

Where did the information contained in DNA come from? It had to come from somewhere. It either arose from the natural properties of atoms and molecules or some intelligent being put it there. And if intelligent design is the cause there are more important questions to ask than how it happened. Not to say that “how it happened” questions are not important, but that these questions are not enough. Why did it happen and who did it?  The Bible, not science provides the answer to these questions. The best way to study the creation of anything is to seek out the Creator.