Origins - Evolution and information

Origins
“For since the creation of the world His
invisible attributes, His eternal power and
divine nature, have been clearly seen, being
understood through what has been made, so
that they are without excuse. ”
(Romans 1:20)

Evolution and Information

“Some would claim the answer to these
questions is that there is a God who
chose to create the universe that way. It is
reasonable to ask who or what created
the universe, but if the answer is God,
then the question has merely been
deflected to that of who created God. In
this view it is accepted that some entity
exists that needs no creator, and that
entity is called God. This is known as the
first-cause argument for the existence of
God. We claim, however, that it is
possible to answer these questions purely
within the realm of science, and without
invoking any divine beings.”
– Stephen Hawking
The Grand Design

A Quick Overview of Evolution

1. For this discussion, we’ll use the following definition: Biological evolution
attempts to explain the change in existing biological entities and their
progression over time
2. Micro-evolution describes the changes within a specific type/species
3. Macro-evolution is a major evolutionary transition from one type of organism
to another occurring at the level of the species
4. Survival of the fittest (coined by Herbert Spencer) is argued as to its
definition, but is normally understood to be 'natural selection', or the
preservation of favored races/species in the struggle for life.

“In grammar school they taught me
that a frog turning into a prince was a
fairy tale. In the university they taught
me that a frog turning into a prince
was a fact!”
- Ron Carlson

A Quick Overview of Evolution

“Large evolutionary innovations are not well understood. None has
ever been observed, and we have no idea whether any may be in
progress. There is no good fossil record of any.”

- Paul Wesson

By contrast, micro-evolutionary variations due to mutation and natural selection
have been and are observed. Postulating an unobserved designer is no more
unscientific than postulating unobserved macro-evolutionary steps.

Naturalistic Philosophy’s Assertions

1. Biological evolution is incompatible with the existence of a
Creator
2. Biological evolution accounts for the existence of all of life’s
complexities
3. Natural selection is a blind, automatic process with no purpose
4. Natural selection is the explanation for the existence of all life

Is Evolution the Answer?

Does evolution answer
the critical question of
existence – why we
have something rather
than nothing? And
does it explain the
specific complexity
found in life?

“An atheist before Darwin could have
said, following Hume: "I have no
explanation for complex biological
design. All I know is that God isn't a
good explanation, so we must wait and
hope that somebody comes up with a
better one." I can't help feeling that
such a position, though logically sound,
would have left one feeling pretty
unsatisfied, and that although atheism
might have been logically tenable
before Darwin, Darwin made it
possible to be an intellectually fulfilled
atheist.”
- Richard Dawkins


“It seems to me that Richard Dawkins
constantly overlooks the fact that Darwin
himself, in the fourteenth chapter of The
Origin of Species, pointed out that his whole
argument began with a being which already
possessed reproductive powers. This is the
creature the evolution of which a truly
comprehensive theory of evolution must give
some account. Darwin himself was well aware
that he had not produced such an account. It
now seems to me that the findings of more than
fifty years of DNA research have provided
materials for a new and enormously powerful
argument to design.”
- Anthony Flew, philosopher and former
atheist

Does Evolution Mean No Creator?

No.
First, we have seen that evolution only deals with existing beings. Second,
evolution purports to be a biological mechanism. God is regarded to be a personal
Agent who, among other things, designs and creates mechanisms. And there is no
reason randomness cannot be part of a mechanism – for example, software uses
random number generators and such all the time. Just as you would not conclude
that a robotic car factory did not evolve, but was designed, in life, perhaps the
intelligence is one step removed as well…

Does Evolution Mean No Creator?

“Either half of my colleagues
are enormously stupid, or else
the science of Darwinism is
fully compatible with
conventional religious beliefs. . .
Science simply cannot
adjudicate the issue of God’s
possible existence. We neither
affirm it nor deny it; we simply
can’t comment on it as
scientists.”
- Stephen Jay Gould

Does The Fossil Record Help?
“The number of intermediate
varieties which have formerly existed
on the earth [should] be truly
enormous. Why then is not every
geological formation and every
stratum full of such intermediate
links. Geology assuredly does not
reveal any such graduated organic
chain; and this, perhaps is the most
obvious and gravest objection which
can be urged against my theory.”
- Charles Darwin

“I will lay it on the line – there is not one such fossil for which one could make a
watertight argument [for macro-evolution]”
- Colin Patterson

The Fossil Cover Up

In 1889, Charles Doolittle Walcott made a major fossil discovery in
the Canadian Rocky mountains. In rocks too old to contain fully
formed, complex biological entities, Walcott found some 60,000
fossils of that type. Walcott knew that there was not enough time for
evolution to produce such entities from square one – all had appeared
simultaneously and fully formed.

Such a finding challenged Darwinian gradual evolution, so Dr.
Walcott hid all the findings in his lab in 1909. At the time, Walcott
was the Director of the Smithsonian Institute.

The Fossil Cover Up
When Walcott’s fossils were re-
discovered in the mid-1980’s, the
effect was very dramatic. In 1992,
Scientific American was moved
years later to print a story about it
and ask the question “Has the
mechanism of evolution altered?”

National Geographic, the New
York Times, and Time all printed
stories speaking of “Evolution’s Big
Bang.”

Yet today, high school biology
textbooks mostly ignore this data
and its implications.

Does The Fossil Record Help?

“The history of most fossil species includes two features particularly
inconsistent with the idea that they gradually evolved:
1. Stasis – most species exhibit no directional change during their
tenure on earth. They appear in the fossil record looking pretty
much the same as when they disappear, morphological change is
usually limited and directionless.
2. Sudden appearance. In any local area a species does not arise
gradually by the steady transformation of its ancestors; it appears
all at once and ‘fully formed’”
- Stephen Jay Gould

“The most thorough study of
species formation in the fossil
record confirms that new
species appear with a most un-
Darwinian abruptness.”
Dr. Richard Kerr
"Did Darwin Get It All Right?"
Science, 267:1421, 1995

Comment on article: (1) The reality of
sudden saltations in the fossil record or
"punctuated equilibrium" implies that those
unfound transitional fossils beloved by the
gradualists are truly missing. (2) The higher
the taxonomic level, the more silent the fossil
record. There are few clues as to how the
major divisions of life (the phylla) originated.

What about the Archaeopteryx?
The archaeopteryx is held up as the
perfect example of a transitional
species – feathers on wings speak of
the bird, but it had jaws and teeth, not a
beak, so it seems to also be a reptile.
However, many scientists now believe it
was simply a bird.

Interestingly, in Leviticus 11:18, birds
are listed and one of them is the
tinshemet. Then in Leviticus, reptiles
are listed, and the tinshemet appears
again. Evidently, the Scripture felt the
animal fell into both categories and was
a single animal, not a macro-
evolutionary entity.

“The fossil evidence that challenges this
classic concept of evolution has been found
worldwide. . . . All body plans represented in
the thirty-four animal phyla extant today
appear as a single burst in the fossil record.
And it happened 530 million years ago.
Those are the data. No one disputes them. . . .
One of the great mysteries of animal evolution
is why no new phyla have appeared since that
Cambrian explosion of life.”
- Dr. Gerald Schroeder

Evolution’s Main Argument

“The reason we know for certain we are all related, including bacteria, is the
universality of the genetic code and other biological fundamentals.”
– Richard Dawkins

This doesn’t rule out a Creator at all. Perhaps everything has similarity because it
has a common designer and source vs. a common ancestor. Similarity and
progression does not automatically imply common ancestry. While some studies
show that humans and chimps have DNA similarities approaching 90-95%, the
similarities between humans and mice is 90%. All humans DNA are 99.9% identical.

Similarity vs. Progression

Does the similarity between these items mean that one evolved from the other?
Did the pot evolve from the spatula or spoon?

The DNA code – ATCG – implies similarity but does not mean they evolved
from each other. For example the following letters in the two sentences are
identical, but a slight difference yields opposite meanings:

Charles Darwin was a scientific god
Charles Darwin was a scientific dog

A Common Source for Life

“Then God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures after
their kind: cattle and creeping things and beasts of the earth after
their kind”; and it was so. ” (Genesis 1:24)

“Out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field
and every bird of the sky, and brought them to the man to see what
he would call them; and whatever the man called a living creature,
that was its name. ”
(Genesis 2:19)

“Then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and
breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living
being. ”
(Genesis 2:7)

Look Designed?

“Living objects . . . look
designed, they look
overwhelmingly as though
they’re designed. Biology is
the study of complicated
things which give the
impression of having been
designed for a purpose.”
- Richard Dawkins

A Quick Correction on ‘Intelligent Design’

“Intelligent Design” may strike you as a curious expression
– don’t we always think of ‘design’ as the result of
intelligence? Therefore the adjective “intelligent” is
redundant.

The Difference in Data & Information

DNA Is Information like software

“At first approximation, one
can therefore think of
DNA as an instructional
script, a software program,
sitting in the nucleus of the
cell. Its coding language has
only for letters (or two bits,
in computer terms). A
particular instruction known
as a gene, is made up of
hundreds or thousands of
letters of code.”
Dr. Francis Collins

Randomness in Software…?

If there is one thing a software developer does not want, it is
randomness in their code. One misplaced semi-colon or
letter can cause a program that consists of ten thousand
lines to not work.

DNA Is the Result of Intelligence
“It is important to understand
that we are not reasoning by
analogy. The sequence
hypothesis applies directly to the
protein and the genetic text as
well as to written language and
therefore the treatment is
mathematically identical.”
Dr. Herbert P. Yockey,
Biologist

“DNA did not create life; life
created DNA”
- Barry Commoner, Biologist

DNA – Genetic Code

“Investigations of many
organisms, from bacteria to
humans, revealed that this
‘genetic code’, by which
information in DNA and
RNA is translated into
protein, is universal in all
known organisms. No tower
of Babel was to be allowed
in the language of life. . . .
How deeply satisfying is the
digital elegance of DNA!”
Dr. Francis Collins

“If you’re trying to explain an event in the remote past you
should rely on our knowledge of the cause/effect structure
of the world and you should be looking for a cause that has
the capability or power to produce the known effect in
question. It is the principle of sufficient or adequate reason.
Darwin’s mentor Charles Lyell gave this to him. Lyell put it
this way: ‘In investigating the past we should be looking for
causes now in operation’. Now as to Information and
intelligence: What is the cause now in operation of digital
information? That is intelligence. By using Darwin’s own
principle of reasoning, we can use an inference to the best
explanation: intelligence produces information.”
- Dr. Stephen Meyer

Evolutionists Admit Information

“What lies at the heart of
every living thing is not a fire,
warn breath, nor a ‘spark of
life’. It is information, words,
instructions. . . . Think of a
billion discrete digital
characters. . . . If you want to
understand life think about
information technology.”
- Richard Dawkins

Evolutionists Admit Information

Darwinist Richard Dawkins admits that the message found in just
the cell nucleus of an amoeba is more than all thirty volumes of the
Encyclopedia Britannica, with the entire amoeba itself having as
much information in its DNA as 1,000 complete sets of the
Encyclopedia Britannica. The important thing to understand is
that the makeup of these entities is not random, but instead the
information is highly organized.

“In no way can the concept of
‘information’, the concept of conveying a
message, be articulated in terms of the
concepts of physics and chemistry, even
though the latter can be shown to explain
how the molecular machinery (DNA,
RNA, and protein) operates to carry
information.”
- Arthur Peacocke, Theologian and Scientist

Confusing ‘basis’ and ‘implication’

“What the media wants to do is say if
you believe that the intelligence we see
in life is God then you are doing
religion and not science. Not true.
Scientific reasoning and evidence are
being used in Intelligent Design.
These have implications that go past
the mere scientific. The media
confuses the basis for intelligent design
with the implications of the theory in
order to stigmatize it.”
- Dr. Stephen Meyer

Design or Chance?

One Design

One by Chance?

Pushing Out the Problem Doesn’t Help
There are two possibilities for
intelligence: it is either transcendent or
immanent. You see design in the fabric
of the universe; not the result of a
creature in the universe but something
beyond it. Dawkins proposes space
aliens for the reason we see intelligence
here but he also says that the alien
would have had to have evolved as well.
The problem is if you can’t get the
evolutionary process to solve the
information process here on earth, why
think it could happen elsewhere?
Kicking it to outer space doesn’t help.
- Dr. Stephen Meyer

With all the evidence
pointing to intelligence
behind the information
we see in life, why don’t
atheistic evolutionists
admit what is really
there?

A Battle of Worldviews – Theism vs. Naturalism

“I am not an agnostic. I am an atheist. My attitude is not
based on science, but rather on faith. . . . The absence of a
Creator, the non-existence of God is my childhood faith,
my adult belief, unshakable and holy.”
- George Klein, Immunologist

A Battle of Worldviews – Theism vs. Naturalism

“In China we can criticize Darwin, but not the government;
in America you can criticize the government, but not
Darwin.”
- Jun-Yuan Chen, Palaeontologist

“The world needs to wake up from
the long nightmare of religion. . .
Anything we scientists can do to
weaken the hold of religion should be
done, and may in fact be our greatest
contribution to civilization.”
- Steven Weinberg, Nobel Laureate

No Design but Intelligence?

“Biologists must constantly keep
in mind that what they see was not
designed, but rather evolved.”
- Francis Crick

“Given the weaknesses of all
theories of terrestrial genesis,
directed panspermia [the
deliberate planting of life on
Earth by aliens] should still be
considered a serious possibility.”
- Francis Crick

Atheists Know Intelligence When they See it
‘Contact’ was a movie based on a novel by atheist Carl
Sagan. It was about scientists searching for intelligent life in
space. Before long, the project does, indeed, discover the
first confirmed communication from extraterrestrial beings, a
repeating series of the first 261 prime numbers (a sequence
of prime numbers is a commonly predicted first message from
alien intelligence, since mathematics is considered a
"universal language," and it is conjectured that algorithms
that produce successive prime numbers are sufficiently
complicated so as to require intelligence to implement them).

“Incidentally, is it not to be wondered at that our
archaeologist immediately infers intelligent origin when faced
with a few simple scratches whereas some scientists, when
faced with the 3.5 billion letter sequence of the human
genome, inform us that it is to be explained solely in terms of
chance and necessity?”
John Lennox, PhD, Mathematics, Philosophy

Scientists Know Intelligence When they See it

“If science is based on experience, then science tells us that the
message encoded in DNA must have originated from an intelligent
cause. What kind of intelligent agent was it? On its own, science
cannot answer this question; it must leave it to religion and philosophy.
But that should not prevent science from acknowledging evidences
for an intelligent cause origin wherever they may exist.”
- Dean Kenyon, Biophysicist

God or Evolution of the Gaps?

“Your protein defies the laws
of mass action – evolution did
it! Your complicated mess of
chemical reactions turns into
a chicken – evolution! The
human brain works on logical
principles no computer can
emulate? Evolution is the
cause!”
– Dr. John Lennox

The Teleological Argument

The teleological (telos, from the Greek word which means
“design” ) argument says that the universe and mankind
exhibit marks of intelligence and design.

•Behind every complex design is a designer
•The universe has a complex design
•Therefore, the universe has a designer

“I think the origins of the laws
of nature and of life and the
Universe point clearly to an
intelligent Source. The
burden of proof is on those
who argue to the contrary.”
– Anthony Flew, former
outspoken atheist

Origins - Evolution and information

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