For as long as I can remember, the Christian church has had a problem with young adults. A huge percentage of men and women who went to every retreat and camp, served on short-term mission teams and never missed a Sunday while in high school gradually drift away from the church when they go to college. Theories abound as to the specific reasons for phenomenon, but one thing seems clear. The Church has done a terrible job of preparing teens for the questions, philosophies, and arguments university education brings.
Over 40 years have passed since I transferred to the University of California, Irvine to pursue a bachelor’s degree in biology, but I vividly remember the trepidation I felt as I was about to begin. I was certain my Christian beliefs would be challenged by my professors and worried I would struggle to mount a defense. I had been taught that God had created the world in 6 days but had learned nothing about the Theory of Evolution or how to refute it.
The little scientific education I had was limited to a year of high school biology, (taught by a Christian man who sped through the chapter on evolution with the disclaimer that he “had to teach it”), and semesters of introductory chemistry and anatomy and physiology in community college. I expected my future science professors to be more learned, more intelligent, and more persuasive than those I had previously encountered. Adding to my fears was the order of the university’s biology courses. Biology 101 was entitled “Ecology and Evolutionary Biology” which my worldview would be challenged immediately.
I quickly learned that I need not have worried, for the evidence put forth in support of evolution was surprisingly weak. It has been over 40 years, but I vividly remember one of the prime examples, the tale of light and dark peppered moths in England. Prior to the late 1800’s, peppered moths in England were almost exclusively white with scattered grey spots. When the Industrial Revolution arrived, powered primarily by coal burning power plants, a new variant of black moths emerged. The explanation- black moths blended in with the darkened bark of soot-covered trees, making them invisible to predators. In just a few years, over 95% of moths were the darker color. To my professor, this was evidence of Natural Selection and Evolution in action.
Only it wasn’t actually evolution. The changes in moth coloration (which reversed when environmental concerns led to cleaner fuels) were an example of variations within a species, not the creation of a new species. Other examples, such as “Darwin’s finches,” a diverse group of birds found on the Galápagos Islands, were similarly narrow in scope. The more difficult question of how the massive amount of genetic information needed to create a new species could suddenly appear in a genome was never explained.
The strongest assertions with regard to new species were made about the evolution of birds. My professor confidently taught that birds had descended directly from small reptiles. The evidence presented in support of this argument were fossils discovered in Germany in the 1800’s. Named Archaeopteryx by scientists, the fossils appeared to have feathers and contained many of the skeletal features of modern-day birds. Evolutionary biologists declared Archaeopteryx a transitional animal, evidence of a mid-point in evolution between dinosaurs and birds.
Never addressed in any of my lectures were the massive changes in DNA required for such a transition, nor how the mutations required before and after Archaeopteryx could confer the needed survival advantage. Flight requires multiple anatomical and physiologic changes beyond merely growing wings. The wings would need to be the right shape and size to create lift, would require muscles to power them, motor nerves to trigger contraction of the muscles, and a central nervous system to coordinate their movements. All of these changes would be useless if the creature was too heavy to get of the ground, so a lightweight skeleton would be essential, along with a digestive tract that eliminated waste quickly.
Each of these individual adaptations would require the insertion of an incredibly long sequences of DNA. Making the theory even more unlikely is the reality that these changes would convey no survival or reproductive advantage if they occurred one at a time. (A flightless winged lizard would be far more likely to become prey than its wingless relatives, as it could not hide under a rock) Factoring in the additional requirement that every new gene would have to be autosomally dominant to ensure inheritance increases the already astronomically great odds. It did not require a degree in mathematics to know that evolution as proposed was statistically impossible. By the end of the course, the Theory of Evolution seemed comically absurd.
The absurdity increased when it came to explaining the origins of life itself, for even the simplest of one-called organisms is remarkably complex. The common bacteria E. Coli, for example, has a DNA strand 4 million base pairs long. The odds against even one DNA molecule happening by chance are absurdly high, the odds of such an event happening 4 million times are just silly. Even if such a miracle were to happen, the end product would still not be “alive.” Something else would have to happen. (Consider this fact- a dead cell contains all the molecules needed for life, yet is not alive.)
Scientists have no real explanation as to what that something else is or how it could come about. A quick Google search reveals that there are currently two schools of thought. The first is that it “just happened” as a result of energy from lightning interacting with nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen and carbon molecules of primordial earth. This low probability explanation has led some scientists, including Francis Crick, the Nobel Prize winner who first described the helical structure of DNA, to suggest that life on earth was instead the result of some intelligent alien life-form utilizing space travel to “seed” the earth with bacteria. Other advocates of life somehow being “seeded” include Evolutionary biologist and famous atheist Richard Dawkins, and famed cosmologist Stephen Hawking. Notably absent from their postulations are explanations as to how the early life forms came into being somewhere else.
My failing confidence in science’s ability to explain the origin of life and the creation of new species dropped even lower when I took my first course in molecular biology. As I learned about the incredible complexity of dna, rna, and protein synthesis, it was increasingly difficult to believe random chance was responsible. (Dna is a chain of four different “nucleic acid” molecules, and each cell contains a dna strand millions of molecules long. In a remarkable process, specific sequences of three nucleic acids code for one of the 20 different amino acids found in human cells. Proteins consist of multiple amino acids strung together in just the right order.)
The final nails in the evolution coffin came in medical school when I learned about a remarkable protein called retinal. The protein, which is the product of a DNA sequence over eleven thousand base pairs long, changes shape when exposed to light, somehow morphing from a “right-handed” and biologically inert molecule into the left-handed biologically active molecule that activates rhodopsin, a complex protein programmed for by a DNA strand another thousand base pairs long.
From my course in molecular biology, I had learned how changing just one base pair of the eleven thousand could result in a dysfunctional or non-functional protein or abort protein synthesis altogether. (Sickle cell anemia, the hereditary disease characterized by abnormal hemoglobin molecules, is an example of the impact of swapping out just one nucleic acid molecule in a gene.)
Just as I had with the purported evolution of birds, I wondered how random chance could account for these complex proteins. The odds of the eleven thousand dna molecules of retinal assembling in just the right order at the exact same time that the five hundred dna molecules of rhodopsin lined up inside the cell membranes of the same organism, an organism that had also developed a rhodopsin receptor and a nervous system that could interpret the signal and act on it in a way that conferred a survival advantage were impossibly high. The age-old assertion that “anything can happen if given enough time,” rang hollow. There is a point where things simply aren’t possible.
The more I thought about it, the less sense the Theory of Evolution and Natural Selection made. I could understand how Charles Darwin, who lived before modern advances in genetics and molecular biology, could believe in the theories, but it seemed the height of intellectual dishonesty and denial to think it random chance could explain the complexities of life. I was left to wonder- “Why would so many intelligent and educated people confidently teach such a dubious theory?”
The answer seems clear. People are unwilling to face the implications of the alternative explanation. If Evolution and Natural Selection are not the answer, if interstellar seeding of life did not happen, we must consider the existence of a Creator. Admitting the existence of a Creator opens the door to the possibility that the Creator created the world and humankind for a purpose, and that people will be accountable for whether they live in alignment with that purpose.
It turned out that my initial worries about my faith being challenged were unfounded. By the time I finished my studies I was more confident in my theistic worldview than when I began. Based on what I had learned, believing in evolution required more faith than believing in a Creator.
Most importantly, I walked away convinced of an important truth. There is not greater endeavor than to search out the answer to the question, “How did life happen?” The answer has profound ramifications.
If life is the result of random chance, humankind is free to decide for itself what is right and what is wrong, what is moral and what is not, when life begins and when and how should it end. If life comes from a Creator, it behooves us to search for that Creator, and to discover His plan.
As important as this pursuit is, I have met very few people who have engaged in it.
Bart
PS: There are a great many scientists who share my conviction that nature declares the evidence for a creator. Those interested in learning more on the subject are encouraged to visit www.reasons.org. For those who prefer books, I recommend “Total Truth: by Nancy Pearce