We began this mini-series of articles two months ago by pointing out (among other things) that certain aspects of the evolutionary story sometimes seem quite plausible on the surface. The example I gave was that of a fish slowly turning into an amphibian, with the fins slowly getting stronger and turning into legs, allowing it to begin to crawl up onto land occasionally and then gaining the ability to somehow breathe air. However, when you “take a peek under the hood” and look at what would actually have to happen on a genetic level, it reveals insurmountable problems that render the concept unbelievable.
Evolutionists envision that even though mutations (random copying errors made when replicating and passing on DNA – the primary factor in providing “change”) are nearly all “bad” (and some even lethal), once in a great, great while, there are beneficial mutations that accumulate over time, allowing for evolution to progress as postulated. Again, on the surface, this makes sense to many people, scientists and laypeople alike.
This month we will elucidate one additional factor that renders this scenario virtually impossible.
We noted last month that because DNA contains messages going forwards and backwards, even if we somehow were able to randomly improve a set of complex instructions in one direction, it would inevitably mess-up the instructions going the other way. In addition to this challenge, there’s a whole slew of other factors that make the typical evolutionary scenario implausible.
Imagine the following two phrases overlapping: “I like chocolate” and “later that evening.” Since the first phrase ends in “late” and the second phrase starts with those letters, an overlap would look as follows: “I like chocolater that evening” (with the overlap portion in bold). When joined together this way, these two sensible phrases become non-sensible. However, if the reader knew that this strange phrase actually contained two separate messages and knew where to start and stop when deciphering each one, they could then properly extract the original information.
Now imagine making a random change to this non-sensible phrase, with the hope of improving the information. If you make the change somewhere in the overlapping section, even if you accidentally did manage to somehow make a slight improvement to one of the phrases, it is virtually certain that you will be messing up the second message!
Why am I sharing this literary conundrum? Because scientists have discovered that the messages on our DNA also overlap, but we’re not simply talking about an overlap of a few letters… it’s more like entire chapters! Absolutely incredible! First of all, imagine the challenge of trying to write something in English in such a way that entire sentences or paragraphs overlap. Now try it with entire chapters overlapping. Add to this the fact that when mutations occur, they often occur in the stretches of DNA that do overlap, so even if we could imagine some kind of an improvement in the first set of instructions, we would be damaging the information in the second set that overlaps the first!
Now add this that fact that you would also be damaging the information that is going in the other direction, as mentioned earlier. Are you starting to get a feel for how much of a challenge genetics poses to the sometimes seemingly plausible story of evolution? It’s at this point that I have a confession to make. My faith is not strong enough to believe this all happened by accident! Yes, I truly believe it takes faith to believe in evolution, a lot of faith, an almost infinite amount of faith. In light of this, it is interesting to note that many people believe that evolution is science and can be or has been proven, but creation is just a religious belief not at all supported by science (and in fact “anti-science”).
When we observe things in nature that are far beyond what our most brilliant scientists and engineers could possibly construct or even conceive, why are so many willing to say, “It was just an accident. Natural, undirected forces of nature could produce such things.”? We have no problem detecting design in other things, such as jet engines, cell phones and x-ray machines, why is it such a stretch to say that things in the biological world also exhibit evidence of design? I think the main reason is because the whole issue of origins is not really an academic debate, but a spiritual issue, as outlined very powerfully in Romans chapter 1, which says in part (starting in verse 21) “For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. 22 Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools.”
Next month we will look an additional layer of complexity, further compounding the challenges to evolution.
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