Rational Faith |
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In the first installment of this series, I stated that Darwinian Evolution and its modern counterpart Neo-Darwinism, (the theory whose supporters want you to believe that non-living particles can become living people by undirected natural processes and large amounts of time), is an irrational belief kept alive by those unwilling to accept the truth. In support of that statement I proffered 15 reasons why evolution is not and could never be true. Since it could never be true, it follows it has never happened. In part one, I gave the first five reasons. Here are the next five reasons.
Neo-Darwinian theory posits that all species - all of them - are the result of natural selection acting on random mutations from an original common ancestor - often called the "last universal common ancestor" or LUCA. But even a cursory examination of the theory shows it to be fatally flawed in its conception.
Mayr said it succinctly: natural selection is an elimination process. It does not add anything. It takes things away. And it does so with no goal and no plan. That's yet another problem for evolutionary natural selection. Even if there were an original reproducing pair (which only occurs in the Biblical account of Adam and Eve), natural selection can only remove information, generally making the creature overall less fit (though it may be beneficial in certain environments) . It cannot add information to make the creature change forms, or change the kind of creature. 7. Limitations of "Random Mutations" As stated above, Neo-Darwinian theory posits that
natural selection acting on "random mutations", given enough time will
produce all the species alive today. All of them. From the lowly amoeba,
to the king of the jungle, to the pinnacle of creation: man. But the dirty little secret that evolutionists would prefer you not know
is that mutations are not random - and thus cannot do what it is
supposed that they do. There is only one known source of information: an intelligent mind. But evolutionists posit that the needed changes (and thus the needed information) come from natural selection acting on random mutations. We're not talking about copy errors like illustrated immediately above. We're talking uniquely different information as in the "mutation" graphic at the top. The increase in information is supposed to come from such random mutations. There are two problems with that:
So neither natural selection nor mutations - the
supposed mechanism that makes Darwinian evolution work - can fulfill the
roles evolutionists assign to them. It's clearly as Price concludes in
his article: evolution has no mechanism. These first seven reasons have dealt mostly with the material world - why it is physically impossible for Darwinian evolution to occur. But the physical impossibilities are not the only problems evolution runs into. There are a number of non-material core components of human existence that is impossible for a material process to create or manipulate. That's obvious: the physical cannot manipulate the non-physical. Which means it.s impossible for evolution to create these next three items. 8. Evolution cannot explain the origin of consciousness Is your toaster conscious? I'm concerned for you if you think it is. But there is a theory in science that suggests that if you keeping adding intelligence to machines, they will eventually become conscious. That is the subtext of movies like "I Robot", "The Terminator" and "2001 A Space Odyssey". But merely adding processing power and additional lines of code in your program does not equate to consciousness. Your computer is multiple times more complex than a simple mechanical machine that adds and subtracts whole numbers. But that increase in complexity does not amount to a computer that's conscious. Philosopher David Chalmers explains the root of the problem:
Indeed there is a gap - a huge gap. Knowing more about the physical processes of the brain (or the body for that matter) does not get you any closer to consciousness. It's like trying to use your bicycle to make a jump into extra-dimensional space. It's not a matter of adding more processing power (with regards to computers) or going further or faster (with regards to a bicycle). Consciousness is qualitatively different from the ways that matter behaves - and we have no idea of how to produce it, any more than we have an idea of how your bicycle could take you to a higher dimension than the ones we live in. For more, including definitions of consciousness, see The complex science that explains consciousness: Faith. For a clip of David Chalmer's on the gap to consciousness from the "Closer To Truth" series see here. 9. Evolution cannot explain the origin of language The fundamental problem with the origin of language is that language is at root, coded information. Whenever you deal with coded information, immediately you are confronted with questions of:
The main problem here should be immediately apparent: Evolution deals with the physical world. It cannot operate on abstract objects like "ideas" and "codes." How could something as complex as language then, ever evolve if evolution can't even influence it? In my article on language (Can Evolution Explain the Origin of Language?) I suggest a question: What would it take to make C3PO, the golden droid of Star Wars fame, talk? By that, I don't mean to merely enunciate words (that they've been programmed to say) like computer interfaces such as Alexa or "Hey Google" might do. Such interfaces do not "understand" language as a human does - they merely provide a different means of input to a computer other than typing. You don't suppose your keyboard understands what you're typing, do you? Neither do Alexa and Google. And even if they did understand, what would that prove? It would prove that it takes years of intelligent design and programming to come up with an interface that "understands" and "speaks" spoken language. Surely no one will argue that the non-physical ideas like those that power the interfaces of Alexa and "Hey Google" would evolve by random forces acting on physical objects given enough time. Yet that is precisely what evolutionists would have you believe when it comes to language. When you consider what must happen (material objects creating non-material objects that represent other non-material objects) and how it must happen (by random forces with no design or purpose behind it) to make a coherent, intelligible system, the whole idea is ludicrous. 10. Evolution cannot explain the origin of Morality In a world run supposedly only on "survival of the fittest," how does one explain the origin of morality? Let's be clear here - I'm not speaking merely of people acting in a moral fashion because it's in their best interest to do so to keep from being thrown in jail, or have harm come to them because of harm they've done to others. That's mere pragmatism. With pragmatism, you don't avoid murder and steal because it's morally wrong. No the reason you don't do it is because other people might catch you and kill you or jail you - and you'd prefer that not happen. With pragmatism, you appear moral not because things such as murder and stealing are actually objectively wrong. No, you don't consider them wrong, you simply don't do them because you don't want to suffer the consequences others might impose on you for having done them. And even if you act morally but don't recognize the objective morality that murder and stealing is wrong, pragmatism fails in the evolutionary scheme. Because why should a collection of molecules, bound together in a world without right or wrong, good or bad, without purpose or meaning, without heaven or hell, care if it wantonly and intentionally takes the life of another? And how does a collection of physical particles in a meaningless universe with no good or bad, get a non-physical idea? And not just any idea, but an idea that something that doesn't exist, namely "bad", applies to an action called "murder" which is applied to another collection of molecules? Remember - there is no "bad" or "wrong" in an evolution driven world. Chief atheist cheerleader Richard Dawkins said so himself:
And for that matter what does it matter to any collection of molecules if any life is taken, including its own. That would not be "wrong" if there is no right and wrong. With no good or bad, there is also no "better." In such a worldview it's irrational to say it's "better" for the creature itself to stay alive because there is no "better." And from where does the consciousness rise from among the molecules to care whether it lives or dies? (Back to problem eight.) It is, after all, just a collection of molecules in a meaningless, purposeless world without right or wrong, good or bad, and no "better." You see an evolutionist cannot live consistently in a world where evolution is true in a "civil" manner without denying the very theory they claim to believe. For every day they live as if there are moral laws - they're denying that everything - including humans - are merely a collection of molecules. Thus, as I argue in my article - the Moral Argument - Revealer of Hypocrites - that the moral argument for the existence of God is a revealer hypocrites. For every day the evolutionist lives according to a moral code he denies exists, he's living the life of a hypocrite - denying the tenets he professes to believe. To be Continued
Notes 1. Ernst Mayr, What
Evolution Is, New York: Basic Books, 2001, p. 121 2. Couce, A. et al., Mutator genomes decay, despite sustained fitness gains, in a long-term experiment with bacteria, PNAS 114 (43) E9026–E9035, 24 October 2017. doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1705887114.and Hildebrand, F., Meyer, A., and Eyre-Walker, A., Evidence of Selection upon Genomic GC-Content in Bacteria, PLoS Genet 6(9): e1001107, 2010. doi: 10.1371/journal.pgen.1001107. Referenced from:
3. Paul Price, Evolution's well-kept secret: Mutations
are not random!, Creation.com, 7 July 2020,
https://creation.com/mutations-not-random 4.
David Chalmers (Professor of Philosophy, Australian National University; 5.Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian
View of Life
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