Design or Chance—You Decide

Yesterday I began a series of blogs to alert  you to the ongoing debate between scientists and philosophers who believe in the process of evolution known as natural selection and those who believe in intelligent design. Before going further, it is vital that we distinguish between micro-evolution and macro-evolution. Basically micro means small and macro means large. Scientists suggest that change beyond the species level is a result of a series of small changes within the species. The idea is that birds with feathers are related to a type of dinosaurs who changed gradually over millennia.


In his book Evolution, Mark Ridley defines the terms thus:

Macroevolution means evolution on the grand scale, and it is mainly studied in the fossil record. It is contrasted with microevolution, the study of evolution over short time periods, such as that of a human lifetime or less. Microevolution therefore refers to changes in gene frequency within a population .... Macroevolutionary events are much more likely to take millions of years. Macroevolution refers to things like the trends in horse evolution ... or the origin of major groups, or mass extinctions, or the Cambrian explosion .... Speciation is the traditional dividing line between micro- and macroevolution. (2004: 227)

It is not my intent to explain in detail why Christians have difficulty with macroevolution, especially when talking about the origin of humans. I simply point to two books, one that says we Christians have no problem with evolution and another that says Christianity and evolution are incompatible, because they represent two conflicting world views.

We've all seen charts in textbooks and museums like the following. The operating assumption is that the line of descent between ape and man is a proven scientific fact.

This is what Francisco J. Ayala, an ordained Roman Catholic priest and professor of biology, states in his book Am I A Monkey - Six Big Questions About Evolution,

The "missing link" is no longer missing. The fossil from Java was the first one, but hundreds of fossil remains belonging to hundreds of individual hominids have been discovered in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in Africa, Asia, and Europe and continue to be discovered at an accelerated rate. (Kindle location 92)

...a large amount of genetic material—about 3 percent, or some 90 million DNA letters—has been inserted or deleted since humans and chimps initiated their separate evolutionary ways, 6 to 7 million years ago. (Kindle location 152)

For Ayala there is no conflict between evolution and the Christian faith. He quotes Pope John Paul II in an address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences on Oct. 22, 1996: "New scientific knowledge has led us to realize that the theory of evolution is no longer a mere hypothesis" (Kindle location 655-62). Evolutionary science explains how things happened. Religion leads us to praise the Creator who has put the process of evolution into place. The two operate in distinct fields of knowledge. They do not conflict with one another. Read his book for a more complete statement of his beliefs.

Now back to William Demski and Jonathan Witt in Intelligent Design Uncensored. I referred to them in my blog just prior to this one. They demonstrate that macroevolution simply cannot and does not happen. For humans to evolve from monkeys, genes must have mutated to build significant amounts of new functional information. As Ayala says, "some 90 million DNA letters have been inserted or deleted since humans and chimps" went their separate evolutionary ways—or did they? Demski and Witt point out that this kind of thing does not happen on the cellular level. They point to recent studies of the common bacterium E. coli, found in human stomachs. These experiments indicate that it is "easier for evolution to break things than make things" (Kindle location 707). Mutations generally do not work. The new information needed to make a new species (monkeys become man) cannot come from mutated genes. Mutations bring changes, but add no new needed information.

Their point: if the creation of new DNA information does not happen at the micro level of the cell, it certainly cannot happen on the macro level so that one species becomes an entirely new species, even allowing for millions of years to pass. For the development of new DNA information on the cellular level there had to be an Intelligent Designer at work. Therefore monkeys did not turn into humans, regardless of how many millions of years you give them and their DNA randomly to change. That 3 percent difference says it all.

Think about the implications. The science is not there. Macroevolution faces some huge difficulties. The old assumptions do not work, in spite of what Professor Ayala, Pope John Paul II and many others say. It's time to take another look at Intelligent Design. It's time to realize that our Creator is intimately at work in everything that is. The Apostle John puts it this way as he speaks about Christ,

For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities--all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together (Colossians 1:16-17).