Summary: Modern science confidently declares that man evolved over millions of years from a single cell living organism through a purely natural and explainable process rather than as a result of the intervention by some kind of intelligent being. However, as certain as scientists are of their theory concerning the origin of man, there are five things that they have not been able to explain that are crucial to maintaining their theory of evolution. This article examines what they are.
As Christians we believe that about 6,000 years ago “God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” (Genesis 1:27). And the process by which he did this was by “form[ing] man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul” (Genesis 2:7), and when he had done this, “the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed” (Genesis 2:8).
However, modern science confidently declares that the creature we call man actually evolved over millions of years from a single cell living organism through the natural process of gene mutation, gene drift, and natural selection. Besides understanding how living organisms evolve, science has been able to design a diagram showing which specific species branched off from which lower forms of life.
It is widely accepted as fact, that modern man directly evolved from a primate (most say chimpanzees) about 315,000 years ago in the plains of Africa, which cannot be described as a “garden” by any stretch of the imagination. For these and other reasons, many scientists categorically deny the process of creation as taught by Christians, and even reject the idea that evolution came about as the result of a design by some intelligent entity or force, whatever name we call it.
However, as certain as scientists are of their theory concerning the origin of man, there are a number of scientific facts that they have not been able to explain, let alone verify through scientific means, and those questions are crucial to justifying their claims about evolution.
To better appreciate why these facts are so important, we must first understand the foundation upon which all science is based.
Science is the study of the physical and natural world through observation and experimentation. If it can’t be observed or be subjected to experimentation then scientists won’t accept it as being true. There are five steps that are required to any scientific discovery. The first is by asking a question. As man looks at the world around him he sees many things that he doesn’t understand, and wonders about them. This then forms the basis for his questions. For example, what is the sun and why does it move in the sky, or what causes plants to grow or rain to fall?
The second step is to observe the phenomenon in question. This provides some information on which we can then move onto the third step which is to make a hypothesis. A hypothesis is nothing more than an educated guess as to what we think the answer to our question might be. For example, we observe that whenever it rains, we notice that there are clouds in the sky. That then leads us to guess or hypothesize that rain comes from the clouds.
The fourth step is to perform some kind of an experiment that is designed to either prove or disprove our hypothesis which requires the collecting of data. For example, making a record of every time it rains, and noting if there are clouds in the sky. These notes might also include whether the clouds are fluffy white, thin white, or thick and dark.
After making quite a few of these kinds of experiments and examining the data, we then arrive at the fifth step which is to make a conclusion based on the date collected. This will tell us whether our original hypothesis was correct or not.
However, before the conclusion can be considered valid, and therefore factual, other people must also be able to perform the same experiment and come to the same conclusion. In the science community, this is known as peer review. Therefore, the basis on which all scientific theory is based is on the concept that the experiment must be repeatable and produce the same result.
With this understanding, there are five things that evolutionists must be able to conclude scientifically that are crucial to their theory but which they haven’t actually been able to determine through repeatable experimentation, and unless, and until they do, then their conclusions are unscientific at best.
The first question that is important to their theory is how did life on earth begin?
What is most commonly believed by the great majority of evolutionists is that life on earth came about when an inanimate source suddenly became a living organism. An inanimate object is one that has no life to it, such as rocks and dirt. In addition to this, although everything in the entire universe is made up of atoms that can bind to other atoms to form molecules, all scientists agree that atoms and molecules are not living things.
Atoms are inanimate objects that move according to strict, unchanging, and predictable laws of nature. For example, every time you combine two atoms of hydrogen with one atom of oxygen, you always get water, without fail. It’s as predictable as saying that one plus one equals two. And it’s this predictability that allows us to not only understand nature but to make use of it. On the other hand, living organisms move in unpredictable ways, even when subjected to the same conditions.
So the big mystery that science hasn’t been able to solve is, how did something that was originally inanimate become a living organism? There are a lot of scientific ideas that attempt to provide a “plausible” answer to this question, but no one has ever been able to demonstrate through repeatable experimentation that any of these proposed solutions are even possible. Unless an idea can be tested through means of experimentation, any answer to the question of how life started on earth cannot be scientific and is nothing more science fiction.
This lack of experimentation isn’t because no one has tried to artificially create life from an inorganic source because there has been an intense effort made to do just that, but so far no one has ever created life out of inert or inanimate material. In fact, it is the standard theory of science that all life must come from something that is already alive.
One possible explanation that has been put forth to answer this question is that millions of years ago an asteroid struck the earth that had a microscopic living organism on it that had remained in a state of frozen suspended animation for thousands of years as it traveled through the frigid temperature of outer space, but when it hit the warmth of the earth, this living organism came to life, and then began to divide and multiply, eventually creating all the various forms of life we see today.
There are several problems with this explanation. The first is that with all of our modern technology, including probes that have been sent to the distant reaches of our solar system, we have not found any form of life. For decades we have been scanning the universe looking for signals that would indicate there are intelligent beings somewhere in the universe, but so far we have not found any sign that could account for life existing on an asteroid.
The second problem is that if there was a microscopic living organism that came here to earth on an asteroid then it certainly had to come from a place where it could survive, and if that is true, then it would have eventually evolved into something more than a microbe, since that’s what evolutionists say it did when it landed on earth. But so far we’ve not found any evidence of thriving life forms anywhere in our solar system.
And the third, and more important problem is, what caused that living organism to come into existence in the first place? If life only comes from something that is already alive, then what gave life to this extraterrestrial life form? So, the asteroid explanation doesn’t really answer the question of how life began, but merely moves the question to a different planet.
The theory of evolution rests on the idea that somehow something inanimate came to life, multiplied, and evolved into hundreds of thousands of life forms that now cover our world. But if no one knows how life came to be, then it calls into question the idea that the creation of life is caused through a natural, fully explainable process. And if that is not so, then it leads to the next problem.
The second dilemma that evolutionists haven’t been able to answer is defining exactly what is life?
Because all living things are composed of atoms, combined into a vast variety of molecules that all operate according to the strict laws of nature, some have said that humans are nothing more than the natural interaction of all the atoms that make up our body. But if atoms are not a living substance, and we’re made up of nothing but atoms, then what makes us alive? Since life can only come from something that is already alive, and atoms are not alive, then it’s obvious that life has to consist of something more than a large mass of atoms working together according to the physical laws of nature. For this very reason, scientists have been seeking to discover what exactly it is that makes something alive, and so far they’ve not been able to find an answer to that question.
We know how to recognize something that is alive as opposed to something that isn’t because all living things have certain characteristics that are not found in inanimate objects. For example, all living things have the ability to grow, to reproduce, and perform certain biological activities. Atoms and molecules don’t grow, neither do they reproduce themselves and neither do they perform any real function.
In addition to this, all living things must take in nutrients in order to remain alive, whereas atoms and molecules don’t need nourishment to exist. The nutrients that a living organism takes in are needed for the cell to perform all the functions necessary to remain alive. As a result, all living things produce waste, in one form or another, that needs to be expelled. Since atoms and molecules don’t need nourishment, therefore they don’t produce waste as a result of their interactions, at least not in the same sense that all living creatures do.
Since evolutionists have no answer to what caused life to appear on earth in the first place, or even to define what life itself is, undermines the idea that living organisms evolving from one form to another can be explained as just the result of the natural laws of physics. In that case, there is the hypothesis that there may be another force at work that is causing life to even exist. But evolutionists don’t want to take into account such an unnatural force that might explain the creation of life. Without understanding what life is and the process by which it can cause inanimate objects to come alive, then we can’t know how it affects the process of evolution.
On the other hand, Christians claim that God is the creator and giver of life. Of course, many scientists scoff at this idea, but try as hard as they can, they haven’t been able to disprove this claim. Instead, they simply dismiss the idea by saying that since such a hypothesis can’t be observed nor can it be subjected to repeatable experimentation then they refuse to accept it as a scientific explanation. But, despite their best efforts, they’ve never been able to come up with a better scientific explanation for how life began, or even to define what is life.
The Third dilemma that evolutionists face is even more puzzling. Every living organism, no matter how small or how large, is made up of cells, and at the center of each and every cell is a string of chemicals known as DNA. We can think of this as the brains of a cell because this string of chemicals are arranged in such a way that produces a code that tells the cell how to perform each and every function that is needed for the cell to survive, grow, and, reproduce.
Science has been able to decipher this code that is made up of only four chemicals, yet it’s their precise arrangement that creates a set of instructions that, if it were printed out, would fill volumes. But where did this code come from?
A common explanation evolutionists give is that before life ever existed here on earth, our planet was covered in a sea that was much different than the ones we have today, and it is said that this sea contained the four chemicals found in DNA. It is said that one day, in an event that we haven’t been able to discover, these chemicals somehow came together through the natural laws of physics to form the first primitive string of DNA.
Once again, this is an idea that cannot be produced by experimentation, although it has been intensely tried. There are around three billion pairs of these four chemicals that make up the human DNA, all arraigned in a very specific pattern to spell out exactly a very complicated but precise set of instructions To say that this just happened by chance is like saying that a one-day old child could write the instruction manual to build the Empire State building.
If a scientist were asked if the writing of information was a sign of intelligence, they would most readily agree, and according to evolutionists, the very first living organism was a single-cell bacteria that had DNA in it. Therefore, by their own admission, DNA could not exist in that first microscopic life form without some source of intelligence to create the instruction code found in it, yet evolutionists still insist that it must have come together somehow by natural means, when everything in science demonstrates that this is not possible. In fact, many failed experiments to artificially create DNA seems to prove that this is the case.
The problem this creates for evolutionists is that if information is a sign of intelligence, and there is clear evidence of information in every living cell, then this invalidates their claim that evolution only happens through the natural process of physical laws and not because of the influence of some intelligent force. More than this, scientific observations seem to raise the real possibility that there is some unknown force involved in directing the process of evolution.
This then leads to the fourth dilemma because the prior problem only scratches the surface. It’s one thing to argue that a set of chemicals came together to create a single particular structure, but it’s an entirely different argument to say that several structures also came together at the very same time and they all depend on each other for their survival.
As stated before, all living organisms are made up of cells and every cell contains many, highly complex structures with each one performing a different function. These include not only DNA, but a cell wall, cell membrane, cytoplasm, RNA, tRNA, ribosomes, amino acids, and many different kinds of organelles. More than this, each of these different structures must all work together to ensure the survival of the cell. If just one of these many structures is missing, the cell can’t continue to exist.
It is far beyond the realm of possibility that all of these structures not only came into existence at the same time, but that they all had to do so in a way that they formed themselves into a highly complex and intricate machine that is capable of performing a vast number of tasks that are critical to the cell’s survival..
Once more, science has no answer for how such an improbable yet very real event happened. But without knowing the answer to this question, it casts serious doubt on the conclusion that evolutionists have come to believe because obviously there’s a force at work that scientists are not aware of and which they are not factoring into their observations and experimentation.
But there is yet a fifth dilemma. Evolutionists want us to believe that our cells and the systems in our body work according to known physical laws and they cite as evidence their ability to explain the chemical laws by which everything in our body works. Since our cells need nourishment to remain alive, when they are deprived of them, they die. But bacteria swimming in a nutrient rich solution will eventually die, even though they have a continual supply of food, so obviously there are other reasons for why death happens.
As everyone knows, all living things grow old, and when that happens their ability to function slows down. This process is known as degeneration, and one of the common reasons for death in humans is simply called “old age.” From the time we are born, the cells in our body are constantly dying. Science tells us that every second 50 million cells in our body die and are replaced by new cells. In fact, science tells us that every seven years every cell in our entire body has been replaced by newer ones.
When we are born, more cells are being produced than die, which is what causes us to grow, but at a certain point, this process begins to reverse itself, and the older we get the less cells are being made than are dying. The question is, why?
To better appreciate the implications of this question, we need to review the laws of nature. When we put two atoms of hydrogen with one atom of oxygen, we always get water, and these atoms never get tired of doing this no matter how many times it happens. And once water is formed, these three atoms will remain together as water forever unless acted upon by something that causes them to separate. In other words, they never get tired of bonding together. The same is true of gravity. It is just as strong today as it was 6,000 years ago because gravity doesn’t get weaker over time or because of use, or because of the number of people on it.
The first law of motion states that an object at rest tends to stay at rest, and an object in motion tends to stay in motion unless acted upon by an external force. If all living things are alive simply because of the predictable chemical laws of nature, then there should be no reason for cells to die of old age, because, according to the laws of physics, they should never get tired or wear out, and yet we know that our cells do. Therefore, it’s clear that some kind of force is being exerted upon the cells of all living things that is causing them to slow down, wear out, and stop working. But without knowing what that force is, we have no way of knowing what effects it has on evolution.
Scientific conclusions are based on data gathered from repeatable experiments, but those experiments must include all possibilities. If that doesn’t happen, then any conclusions reached cannot be reliable. In the same way, if evolutionists conclude that all life on earth evolved from natural changes in the genetic codes found in DNA, but fail to account for the effects of other factors that could influence those changes, then their conclusion can be erroneous.
Scientists will argue that they can’t experiment with something they don’t know exists, can’t see, touch, or feel. However, no one has ever seen an actual atom, nor can we feel it, and no one even knew such a thing existed until the idea was first proposed in 1897. Even so, we have been performing experiments continually since then and keep discovering more and more things about this invisible force of nature. Scientists have also discovered that there must be something called dark matter and dark energy that seems to fill all of outer space, but no one can see it or even observe its properties, yet they know that it exerts tremendous force upon the entire universe.
In like manner, we know there is a force that gives life to inanimate things, and is also able to exert a power that counteracts the first law of motion, causing cells to degenerate and stop working. We also see intelligent design everywhere we look in nature. But until this mysterious energy is taken into account when searching for answers to how the various forms of life came to exist on earth, then, at best, the theory of evolution is unscientific.