For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.
Romans 1:20 NIV
When Paul wrote that, not many would have disagreed. Living things were made from mysterious parts that miraculously worked together. Even when it wasn’t apparent what all the parts did, they all were there for a purpose. For most of history, common sense and intuition convinced people that living things were “fearfully and wonderfully made”, the outcome of wisdom and foresight, not chance.
For most of history, people looked at the world and knew it wasn’t an accident. But by 1800, William Paley needed to defend the idea that we have a creator. In his book Natural Theology, he proposed that if you found a watch lying in a field, you wouldn’t assume it had been created by the forces of nature. Somebody made that watch. So why shouldn’t we recognize that living organisms, brilliant pieces of biological machinery, must have been designed and constructed too?
In 1859 Darwin published Origin of Species. He offered the world a simple theory that claimed to explain the appearance of design, but without a Designer. His idea caught on quickly and spread from biology into related fields.
Darwin didn’t address life’s beginnings in Origin. He left that corner of science reserved for a Creator. But evolution would never take over as life’s designer and creator until it could explain life’s beginning in naturalistic terms.
Russian biochemist Alexander Oparin took up the challenge in his 1924 book The Origin of Life on Earth. Oparin was convinced that when all the right chemicals came together, in the right conditions, the laws of physics and chemistry would go to work and life would result. Therefore:
“Life is not characterized by any special properties, but by a definite specific combination of these properties.”
He proposed:
“… that life developed through gradual chemical evolution that began when simple chemicals combined to form organic compounds in what he termed Earth’s ‘primordial soup’.”
These in turn combined to form larger, more complex molecules, such as proteins. And from that point, proteins and amino acids came together to form cells… or so scientists at the time imagined.
In 1953, Stanley Miller and his Ph.D. advisor Harold Urey conducted an experiment modeled on the idea that a pond filled with ‘primordial soup’ was struck by lightning and the building blocks for life were created by accident. They passed electricity through a gas mixture simulating the earth’s early atmosphere, and trace amounts of two amino acids formed. Their experiment generated tremendous excitement. If it was that easy to make the building blocks for living organisms, how hard could it be to get from building blocks to living cells?
When the structure of DNA was discovered, Darwinists were convinced that mutations in DNA could explain the beneficial variations Darwin’s theory needed, and Neo-Darwinism became firmly established. By 1959, one hundred years after Origin, Darwinists were confident they had explained evolution, and now there were just some details left to fill in.
At the Darwin Centennial celebration in 1959, Harvard astronomer Harlow Shapley, referring to the Miller-Urey experiment, told a television audience that:
“…the most difficult test of all has been met.”
Shapley went on to tell the audience that this experiment had supplied proof of what scientists had long suspected:
“…the appearance of life is essentially an automatic biochemical development that comes along naturally when physical conditions are right.”
In 1959, it would have been impossible to present a valid, science based argument for the existence of our Creator. Most of the scientific facts required hadn’t been discovered yet. But in the 1960s, the tides began to turn.
Today, even though Darwinian evolution is still solidly established as our culture’s reigning creation myth, it’s support from science has evaporated. It’s coasting on cultural inertia. So believers need to be ready to defend their faith against the claim that a Creator is unnecessary, and we’re only an accident of nature. Good news! Now it’s possible.
When astronomers discovered the red-shift in light from distant galaxies, it suggested the possibility that our universe is expanding. In the mid-1960s, cosmic background radiation was detected and confirmed, and Big Bang cosmology was born. Up to that time, scientists had assumed that the universe had always existed. There was no reason to propose a creator for something that had no beginning. But that’s all changed now; most scientists today believe our universe had a beginning.
During the 1950s and 60s, the structure and function of DNA came to light. DNA didn’t behave like other molecules; it acted as information, exactly like a written language. The chemistry involved was only incidental. And we all know that information that fits a pattern could only come from an intelligent source. You can’t build it any other way.
If the foundation of life is specific information, and not chemistry, then bringing all the right chemicals together will never create life in a test tube. Building a living cell is no longer just around the corner.
The study of molecular biology really picked up momentum starting in the 1960s with new imaging technologies. When scientists could finally peer into a cell, they were stunned. They could see that the things that animated cells were almost entirely “machines”. Tiny molecular machines drive nearly every chemical reaction that takes place inside cells. Those reactions never occur in nature, apart from inside living cells.
Philosopher Michael Polanyi once pondered this question: “If mankind disappeared from the earth, what would change?” He decided the biggest change would be that the production of machines would immediately end. No new machines would be made until intelligent beings returned. Machines are always the products of human activity. Nature can’t do it. But if machines are always products of intelligent activity, then who made the machines we find in cells?
Within the last twenty years or so, scientists have been able to use fast and affordable gene sequencing to look into and compare DNA. It’s turned out that mutations can’t build the new genes Darwinism requires, they can only disable or degrade existing genes.
It also revealed that there’s no such thing as Junk DNA, which the theory of evolution has pinned its hopes to for a long time. Scientists now know that all, or nearly all, of our DNA is needed and used. This deprived evolution of a place to experiment with mutations without breaking anything.
That’s only scratching the surface – get ready to look at dozens more showstoppers for unguided evolution…