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Thursday, September 18, 2014

The nine impossible miracles of evolution

Before I talk about the nine impossible miracles of evolution, I need to explain a few things first.
The first is what I mean by an impossible miracle. 
We use the word ‘impossible’ in several different ways.  We can use it to describer something that just isn’t going to happen, like the Cubs winning the World Series.  Or often we talk of something being physically impossible, like lifting a car over your head or being able to jump over a house.
But with regard to evolution, we run into something else.  Say I flip a coin.  I can get heads, I can get tails.  The odds are 50/50, or 1 in 2.  But if I flip it again, the odds of getting the same thing is half, or 1 in 4.  If I try for 3 heads in a row, the odds become 1 in 8. 
But what if I wanted to get heads, say, a thousand times in a row.  The calculator I used just used the word infinity.  That would be like painting a grain of sand black, dropping it on a beach anywhere in the world and asking a blind man to pick it up on the first try.
But every time I flip that coin, the odds of getting a heads or a tail is always 50/50, so theoretically it is possible to get heads a thousand times in a row.
Now evolution does something just like this. 
Evolution, or science, assumes that everything that exists came about through natural causes.  It then tries to figure out what would need to happen for the world and life as we know it to happen.  And then they conclude that it happened just as they said, because, well, we are here, the world is here, and that’s the only way it could have happened.   
So evolution depends on millions of chance events to take place in a certain order on the order of getting heads a thousand times in a row.  Don’t forget, evolution doesn’t work with a blank screen.  It doesn’t get to erase mistakes.  They stay there.

But, again, they assume from the start that all these events happened on their own, without the action of a God, so their account of what happened is considered proven true, because there is no other way that they would acknowledge that it did happen.

The second matter that I need to mention is that I do something here that evolutionists strongly object to.  They make a distinction between the origin of life and the development of life after that.  I have considered them together under the word ‘evolution’ for two reasons. 

One, I am not sure there is a consensus on what the minimum criteria are for what constitutes life.  So I believe what some scientists call an origin of life issue, another would consider as evolution.  And, secondly, I believe that any non-scientist would see both issues as really one: did a God create and shape all of life, or did it all just happen on its own.

So I ask any evolutionist to bear with me as I try to look at the bigger picture of how we got to where we are.

The first impossible miracle is how life started in the first place.  The human body, for example, is made up of things like carbon, water, which is hydrogen and oxygen, (put the three together and you get sugar), nitrogen, calcium, phosphorus, potassium, sulfur, chlorine, sodium, and magnesium.  The simplest life forms would need at least the carbon and the water. 
Carbon is perhaps the easiest atom to bind with other atoms, but the carbon molecules found in living cells are really unusual, actually unique.  They are joined together in ways that they would not join if left to themselves.  It’s like somebody made them fit. 

Frankly, I don’t see how life could have formed by itself in the first place.  How did carbon and water and whatever else join together to form life?  And is life just certain molecular formations?  What would animate carbon and water molecules to move and reproduce itself?

But let’s suppose lightning struck a piece of wet dirt, and it came to life (the first miracle).   There would need to be a second miracle immediately after.  Unless this living thing were able to metabolize energy, it would die within seconds.  So this lighting would have to strike again immediately and form a metabolic system.

But another miracle is needed very soon after.  Unless this thing could replicate itself, it would disappear from history, and life would end.  We know today that this requires things like DNA or RNA, a written code that makes up the blueprint for the current and future life forms.  We know that these things are not as simple as flipping a switch. 

According to the principles of evolution, these would have to evolve through random, small changes, but you need a complete reproductive system very, very quickly.  How long

The models I have read of what these earliest life forms must have been like just don’t seem like actual living things.  They divide like raindrops and acquire bulk by osmosis rather than assimilation. 

The fourth miracle is again DNA.  The third miracle is the fact of having DNA developing so quickly, but think for a minute what DNA actually is. 

First it is like an artist’s rendering describing what this living thing is going to look like.  Then it is like the blueprints of your house, giving the dimensions of every room and the location and sizes of all the doors and windows.  And thirdly, DNA is like the instruction manual telling you to first insert part A into part B, guiding the entire growth process so everything takes place in the right order at the right time.   Like a general contractor who who builds the frame of the house before he calls in the electricians and plumbers.

And this was all supposed to have happened without outside intervention, strictly on its own.

There is another impossible miracle with regard to reproduction.  You can go anywhere in the world and this reproduction system works with any other human being.  The existence of races shows how long these different branches of humans developed separately from each other, yet they have all ‘developed’ like they were all from the same playbook.

Then the sixth impossible miracle, which to me is the ‘most impossible.’  Sex.  Up to this point, every living thing could reproduce itself by itself.  Now we are asked to believe that these living things, strictly by accident, random mutations, essentially divided themselves into two camps, each developing a complementary reproductive system over maybe a million years, a system that was not needed, and which eventually replaced the system of self-reproduction. 

So which is it?  Did all the living things in the world through random mutations develop these complementary reproductive systems or was it just one line of them, like an Adam and Eve of evolution, two individual organisms that randomly developed these systems.

And think what these systems had to encompass.  Not only were these physically complementary systems, they had to divide up the reproductive functions, creating eggs and sperm that would unite to form the DNA of the new being.  Not only that, after these organisms developed these complementary systems over thousands, millions of years, they had to create something that would prompt these separate organisms to join together to create new life.

When the time came for all this to take place, these organisms had to be in close enough proximity to each other to engage in a new act, and, again, all the necessary codes of information to an offspring were written, again separately yet forming one coherent new code when joined.  Again, by chance, random actions.

The seventh impossible miracle is the human body.  The human body is the most complex, sophisticated thing in the world, and we are supposed to believe that this is the result of random, chance changes.  We are supposed to believe that eyes, brains, a neurological system are all the products of mindless events, which is contrary to everything we know about life.  If you went to the moon and found a computer there, or even something as simple as a table and chair, you would say that someone had been there.  You would not say that these things evolved by chance over millions of years.  Yet this is the essential premise of evolution.  Like finding a Michaelangelo painting in the ground and asserting that this formed naturally by nature without any human involvement.

I can understand the idea of design with regard to the world not being evident to everyone, so I suggest intelligence as the more fitting word.   

Scientists who have been studying DNA have been paying attention to these mutations.  Most mutations are either neutral or harmful, harmful enough that the accumulation of them has enabled scientists to determine an upper limit on how long the human species could have been in existence.  And it is a lot shorter than the time frame commonly accepted by evolutionists.

Evolution is about the survival of the fittest.  Those organisms or attributes that are best suited to the environment survive, while those less fit do not.  Yet evolution says that organisms spend millions (?) of years developing organs and things they didn’t need, like eyes, brains, hearts, lungs.  These wouldn’t have spontaneously appeared in a generation but would have taken thousands of generations to gradually form, yet these would all have been useless features until they were fully developed, so why would these traits have survived until they were?

The eighth impossible miracle.  As evolution would have it, it would seem to me that humans are a product of chemical reactions, and these would govern the actions of the being.  But humans have thoughts.  Are thoughts just a response to a chemical reaction?  How would my thoughts in response to your thoughts be caused by chemicals?  There is no physical interaction.  I hear or see words, and my mind chooses how to respond.  It is not instinctive; it’s deliberate.  It can go either way.  I can choose how to respond. 
There is a self that can think and choose a course of action based on reason and not on chemical impulses, and this is separate from any physical processes.  So a human being is not simply the sum of all the chemical parts.  There is something more that nature can neither explain nor provide: a soul.

The ninth impossible miracle of evolution is that after millions of years and billions of people, animals (is there a difference?), everything looks like it’s done.  You don’t evolve hearts and brains and lungs in one generation through one mutation.  It takes thousands of mutations over thousands of generations, yet you look around the world and every thing looks finished.  You don’t see any living thing in the middle of developing a new organ or limb or body part. 

Evolution is based on the idea that there is nobody overlooking this process.  Change happens by accident, and those organisms that live long enough to reproduce reproduce what they have. 

Evolutionists act as if every living thing is living in some small room, so that the gene pool keeps mixing evenly.  But that’s not what we see in the world.  You have life on different continents that would be on separate evolutionary programs, yet you can go to the remotest parts of the world and find human beings with the exact features, abilities and compatible reproduction.  Sure, people have always traveled, but there is not and never has been the kind of interaction that would put everybody in the world on the same page evolutionally.

If you want to believe in evolution, go ahead, but please, just don’t call it science.  It may be science as science is commonly understood by scientists, but that is not the way everybody else thinks of it. 
Everybody else thinks that when you say science says something, that means that it has been proven.  But you didn’t prove evolution.  You assumed it.

You assumed it because you didn’t like the alternative.

Either God created the world and life as we know it, or everything came about on its own.  You didn’t want to think that God created all this, so you chose to believe it all happened on its own.  You figured out a step by step process that would have achieved the same results, and then you say that is what happened, because that is the only way it could have happened, apart from a God which you reject.

So because of these nine impossible miracles, I cannot accept the idea that all of life and the world as we know it is the result of mindless, random events.  There is a God who made all this. 
Evolution is about a lot more than just trying to explain how we all got here.   It figures a lot in the question of whether there is a God. Our society has been trying to act like God is unimportant or just trying to keep everybody busy enough that they don’t even think to ask the question.
But if evolution is based less on fact and more on wishing it were true, then people are confronted with the idea that there might really be a God, and that would change everything.
When I realized that I believed in God, I realized also that the most important thing in life is to know this God and to serve Him.  Everything else is just temporary.


  1. Hello again Larry.

    Firstly, EVOLUTION IS NOT RANDOM. Mutations have an element of randomness, but natural selection is an explicitly non-random process. You say: "Don’t forget, evolution doesn’t work with a blank screen. It doesn’t get to erase mistakes. They stay there." That is not true. If a mutation occurs that causes a mammal's fetus to not develop lungs, then that fetus will die and be unable to reproduce, effectively erasing the 'mistake' from the gene pool. Neutral mutations may stay there and drift through the population more or less randomly. Any positive mutations that come along will eventually give their organisms an edge and start to dominate the gene pool. Documented scientific publication of this in action here.

    That you haven't grasped this speaks volumes against your comprehension of the very thing you claim to understand well enough to declare it unscientific... However, all of that is a sidebar. There's a deeper problem with your argument that would still be fatal even if evolution actually was as random as you think it is.

    Your argument boils down to dismissing an explanation for an outcome after it has already happened on grounds that it would have been (allegedly) highly improbable.

    That isn't valid (as you've presented here). Here's why.

    We've got a well shuffled deck of cards (no jokers) and I draw five cards, the odds of me drawing a royal flush of spades in sequence from Ace down to 10 would be one in (52x51x50x49x48), or one in 311,875,200.

    So if I were to go this excercise 312 million times, I could expect that, statistically speaking, one of those operations would come up with the royal flush of spades in sequence.

    Practically impossible, right?

    I'll do this now... And I got the two of spades, five of diamonds, five of clubs, nine of spades, and six of hearts.

    Exactly as we probably expected, this is not a royal flush of spades in decreasing order.

    But if we're curious, we need to ask... What were the odds of drawing that particular sequence of cards?

    The first card, the two of spades? Only one of them in a deck of 52. Followed by a five of diamonds, only one of them left over in a deck of 51 (because the previous card has been removed)... 52x51x50x49x48. Turns out that my random draw of cards is exactly as improbable as getting a royal flush of spades in decreasing order.

    In fact, every possible hand of cards is equally improbable.

    1. Hi Daniel
      Thank you for taking the time to respond. I am planning to write a part 2 to this article that will address all your thoughts. I'm just not sure how soon I will be able to do this. I have so much planned that I want to do and not enough time or energy to do them. Thanks again.

  2. If I were to lay out every card in a well shuffled deck in order, the odds against that particular arrangement would be 52x51x50x49.....x4x3x2x1, or 52!. At this calculator that shows up as 8.0658175 x 10^67.

    But it gets worse. Lets say I have two decks of cards. One has a red back and the other has a blue back, so there's a red two of diamonds and a blue two of diamonds - the cards remain unique. I shuffle them well, and then draw all 104 cards in order. The odds against that particular sequence? 104!, which is 1.029902 x 10^166.

    If I were to do four decks, that would be 208!, which is beyond the capacity of the google search page calculator to determine. The Windows 7 calc.exe app gives me 2.4111100545052760032871789529129 x10^393.

    If I did this in front of you with four well shuffled decks of cards, I could draw for you a set of cards that had an odds against it of one in 2.4111100545052760032871789529129 x10^393. That's a vanishingly small chance of that particular sequence coming up.

    However, the odds of some kind of sequence coming up remains exactly 1.

    This has implications for any kind of probabilistic argument such as the one you have made here: That something can be treated as impossible so long as it is sufficiently improbable.

    You haven't given any numbers. However: No matter what number you could place on how improbable you think evolution is, I will be able to find a sufficiently large enough set of decks that, when well shuffled and drawn one after the other, would certainly produce a sequence that is even more improbable than whatever number you came up.

    This is why you cannot use probability of something after it has happened as a reason to dismiss something as being 'too improbable'. Because something had to happen, and whatever it was going to turn out to be would have been just as improbable as anything else.