I’ve tackled some fairly complex issues over several of the previous chapters, but behind each of those issues, there are really just two simple ideas competing with each other.
Life was designed. This is a fact. The real issue is: how was it designed? Was it done from the bottom up, primarily by natural selection and mutations over vast periods of time? Or was it built in a top-down manner, by an intelligent designer?
I have presented evidence that mutations and natural selection can’t account for the ingenuity of design we see at all levels of life, and that intelligent design is a far better explanation. I have also given evidence to show that the designer was YHWH.
In this chapter I would like to address more general questions such as: does this mean evolution isn’t true? If it isn’t, why do so many scientists believe this is how life came about? And how do we know aliens didn’t create us?
The debate between evolutionists and creationists often gets reduced to a simple black and white question: “Is evolution true or not?” However, the answer isn’t quite as straightforward as a simple yes or no.
Most of the tools in the evolutionary toolkit are real to some extent. Natural selection is true in the sense that organisms better equipped for survival and reproduction are more likely to pass their genomes on to the next generation.
Mutations also happen, as a result of radiation, decay or copying errors. The question is whether mutations and natural selection together are really capable of building all of the upward, downward and parallel complexity we see today, from proton pumps and nuclear pore complexes, to frogs and princesses.
Evolutionary theory says that a continual sequence of mutations keep getting fixed in a population of organisms until it leads to some useful new function or sequence. This is mostly just an assumption. Theorists don’t actually know how new functions begin to work. They just assume the right proteins evolve, and then they get drafted in to work together by some magical recruitment process.
They also assume most of the steps along the path to evolving a new protein or function somehow give the organism an advantage. In the case of a new protein that supposedly evolves from the duplication of an older one, dozens of useful cumulative steps may be needed, but these are rarely if ever tested out in the real world.
The situation is far worse for a new species such as humans. In our case, tens of millions of mutations needed to come about, to separate us from chimps, and many of those mutations need to be beneficial to become fixed in a population. This is a purely theoretical assumption, since there is no practical way to trace each small cumulative step in the supposed evolution of humans from an apelike ancestor. Indeed, the very notion that the differences are mutations is also just an assumption.
Horizontal gene transfer is true, in the sense that bacteria have the equipment to share DNA sequences. However, this term is often applied when genes move from one place to another even without a clear reason or mechanism. Words and concepts become confused with mechanisms. In evolutionary stories, some things seem to translocate to just the right place as if by magic, which is more like storytelling than science. This is why I called translocation a serendipity wand.
There are also specific mechanisms that allow for genetic variety. If there weren’t, we would all look almost exactly the same. But these mechanisms don’t seem to allow frogs to become princes, no matter how hard they try.
This is why many creationists and some evolutionists like to make a distinction between “microevolution” and “macroevolution.” The variations in Darwin’s finches would be an example of microevolution. The different species are adapting to varying circumstances, but the genetic evidence indicates they are mostly shuffling genes between each other.
Something similar may be true of the dark British peppered moth, except instead of genes being shuffled, a genetic element may have switched on their ability to go dark. Whatever the case, these finches and moths remain finches and moths.
In many creation models, an original “kind” of animal may have been designed to later give rise to many species, perhaps through built-in genetic mechanisms similar to the ones used by the finches and moths. Darwin’s finches are almost certainly related in a family tree by common descent, but they remain within their “kind.” This would be microevolution.
Macroevolution, on the other hand, is a broader form of evolution, where entirely new creatures can evolve, in a universal tree of life. This is the form of evolution that is disputed by creationists.
However, evolution, as presented to the public, mixes up real processes with elaborate storytelling and elegant but flawed theory and inferences, so that the general public aren’t able to distinguish between these things. It is a blend of science, stories and speculation.
Now, if the evidence for top-down design is as strong as I have claimed, and the evidence for bottom-up design so weak, why do so many scientists believe that mutations and natural selection are capable of producing all the life we see on Earth today?
I would suggest the primary reason is that modern science, and biology in particular, adheres to the principle of naturalism, which is that the natural world must be explained without resorting to supernatural causes.
This became an assumption, and then eventually an ideology or even a dogma, where anyone challenging it is accused of being against science or at least unscientific. When your career and income depends on accepting this dogma, and the peers who review your work buy into the assumption too, it’s not surprising that scientists may be reluctant to express their doubts in these areas. Besides, if it appears that other scientists have more solid evidence for evolution than you, you may feel at ease treating naturalism not merely as an assumption but as a fact.
Furthermore, I think this is an example of the metaphorical serpent eating its own tail. Since biologists tend to treat evolution and naturalism as real rather than just working assumptions, this often leads to atheism, because if everything appears to be explainable in natural terms, then there isn’t any need for God. He becomes redundant. And once the scientist is an atheist, they will interpret the evidence through this lens, because people don’t usually go out of their way to disprove their own worldview, but rather they seek to reinforce it.
I also suspect that quite a few scientists feel they don’t have much choice but to accept naturalism. After all, the alternative is supernaturalism, the idea that a supernatural agency may have had a hand in creation. Many scientists see this as a problem, because saying “God did it!” doesn’t really explain anything, which they see as the role of science. Furthermore, they claim this doesn’t promote scientific inquiry, and therefore restricts science.
However, I don’t think this is true. As an analogy, suppose I were to put a vehicle in front of you and I said, “The Ford Motor Company built this.” Does my statement restrict science? Of course not. You could still take the vehicle apart to find out why each part is where it is, how each part works on its own and how they all work together. There is an immense amount of science you could do, unhindered by your knowledge that Ford manufactured the vehicle.
What you couldn’t do is make up just-so stories, telling people that each moving part gradually evolved by the shuffling of letters in the user manual, or by the gobbling up of a Chevy, with parts being recruited by natural selection to form the engine. This would be an insult to the scientists and engineers who worked hard to design the vehicle. True, companies can take one another over, sell brands to each other, and re-use blueprints from other cars, but they do these things by design and planning, not by evolution.
Claiming that the shuffling of letters somehow built the vehicle would hinder you from doing real science. It would stop you from getting to the actual truth of how it was made, and the real purpose of each part. You would have to explain, say, the built-in music system, in terms of sex and survival. It would also prevent you from going to the manufacturers to learn more. Maybe they could teach you other useful things as well, or at least sell you a warranty.
As a more relevant example, take the discovery of ribosomes, the genetic code, and the information stored in DNA molecules. If scientists knew God designed these things, how would this hold back science? They could still find exactly the same things they have already discovered, because humans are intensely curious creatures. At the same time, they wouldn’t be burdened with ideas like junk DNA, or jumping genes as genetic parasites, which for many decades held back science from discovering the real purpose of those aspects of the genome.
Origin of life research also has its use. Even if researchers were to accept that God was the source of life, their research is helping to highlight the immense difficulty in creating even a basic self-replicating protocell needed to get the evolutionary show started, and the sheer ingenuity required to create anything close to what we would call “life.” I expect them to always be tantalizingly close to creating life from scratch, as long as their salaries continue to be paid and the research funds continue to flow.
I think naturalism is what really holds back science, because such a philosophy doesn’t inspire us to look for meaning beyond the basics of survival, selection and reproduction. If we looked at the world in the way naturalistic scientists do, we would have to say that Leonardo da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa mainly to get laid.
Now, maybe he did. This would perhaps explain the glint in her eyes. But maybe there are also other explanations. Maybe he liked the aesthetics of her face. Belief in an intelligent designer invites us to look for all kinds of purposes, which in turn encourages curiosity and inspires us to look deeper.
Either way, the “God did it!” objection is a red herring. Just because something may have been designed by God, this doesn’t prevent us from taking it apart and looking into it more deeply. This is what we do as humans anyway, and I think this is probably what God wants us to do, as long as we are respectful, and with the possible exception of the Ark of the Covenant. After all, what inventor doesn’t want to show off their inventions? And even the Ark, once hidden behind the curtain of the Most Holy in the Hebrew Tabernacle, has now been revealed to us, because it was designed to correspond to the DNA molecule hidden within the inner compartment of the eukaryotic cell, the tabernacle of our own bodies.
Besides, saying “evolution did it” isn’t all that different from saying “God did it,” except it is usually accompanied by elaborate storytelling and sweeping generalizations; and once an evolutionary story becomes widely accepted, it can hinder scientists from looking into other causes, including intelligent ones.
I think another problem is, biologists don’t actually know how to detect intelligent design. If a cosmic prankster had come along a thousand years ago and thrown in a particular feature into an organism that had otherwise supposedly evolved, how would biologists know the difference? If the feature was designed to be passed on to future generations, it would have to be built out of proteins or other genetic sequences. But without prior knowledge of what the prankster had done, biologists would simply invent a story to explain how the feature evolved.
Another big reason why evolution has been accepted so widely is because, I freely admit, it is an elegant idea. It is fairly simple to grasp, at least in the form presented to the public.
I suppose there is also elegance in the idea that all living things are related in a universal family tree of descent. This is why I can’t really fault Darwin for coming up with it. After all, we are all familiar with the idea of descent, because humans are related in family trees. Darwin simply extended the idea and asked: what if every living thing is related in an enormous family tree? This wasn’t an unreasonable question. In fact, it was a pretty good one.
The problem is, by the time we entered the era of genetics, biologists had adopted Darwin’s idea as the truth, and so they quickly became accustomed to looking at genetic sequences through purely Darwinian lenses.
However, as genetics has progressed, the universal tree of life has gradually been uprooted, and has become a complex web of genes supposedly transferring themselves all over the place, sometimes by known and verified mechanisms as in the case of bacteria, but quite often by serendipity wands where genes appear, disappear or move as if by magic, under the cover of scientific words such as “translocation.” This is what happens when you increasingly try to fit a square peg into a round hole.
Tall stories also had to be invented to explain some things. For example, why is there circular DNA in the mitochondria, the cell powerhouses of eukaryotic cells? If you had a mouse-shaped organ in your body, and your child’s science teacher taught that it got there because one day a girl swallowed a mouse, and then her great, great grandchildren had mice organs that could make cheese in their bellies, you would probably be outraged that they were teaching such nonsense in school.
But this is basically what many biologists say happened with mitochondria. One bacterium was engulfed by or invaded a cell, and then the offspring of the bacterium fired off bits of their DNA that magically assembled into a cell battery within the host, with just the right address labels and control sequences to put all the parts together in the right order.
Few biologists dare to ask an obvious but forbidden question here: might circular DNA simply be a common design element used for both bacteria and certain organelles, in the same way that manufacturers sometimes use wheels in things other than cars? Is the idea of intelligent design here really inferior to saying, in effect, that a girl swallowed a mouse which turned into a mouse-shaped cheese factory inside her great great grandchildren?
No wonder some scientists have challenged the traditional view of evolution, and argued that cells must somehow engineer themselves. They see something like intelligence at work, but since they subscribe to the principle of naturalism, they are only willing to move the source of the engineering feats up to the level of the cell.
But if cells can be engineers, and they don’t even have a brain, why is it unscientific to suggest that something bigger than the cell can also be an engineer? We already know this is true, because humans are bigger than cells and can be engineers. But then, why should the buck stop at humans?
What I have shown so far in the second part of this letter is, life as we know it on Earth can’t arise from non-life without a medium in which to store information, a language in which to read and write information, meaningful blueprints that can be consistently converted into useful machinery by something like a ribosome, and a way of preserving those blueprints from the ravages of mutations and decay. These all present a challenge that only an intelligent designer could overcome.
Of course, a skeptic could say, “unguided life could obviously overcome these things, because we’re here now!” But this assumes life was unguided. An alternative explanation also exists, namely design. An intelligent designer could overcome the challenges I just listed, but we don’t know that unguided forces and chemicals can, without a lot of help from scientists, which by definition makes it guided. Therefore, the existence of life itself is evidence of intelligent design.
Furthermore, life at the cellular level is the equivalent of complex nanotechnology. Each and every moment in your body, tiny protein chains are manipulating protons and electrons on your behalf to produce energy. These subatomic particles are thousands of times smaller than one full atom, which is many times smaller than one nucleotide that stores a unit of your genetic information.
Over three billion units of information making up your genome are stored in an incredibly compact manner in the nucleus of the cell, and arranged in such a way that the information can be accessed when needed.
Every moment of every day, microscopic machines are copying and pasting information in each of your cells and turning coded sequences into little machines or parts for bigger machines, some of them made up of hundreds of complex parts.
If we were to see all of these things in any other context, we would readily acknowledge this to be the product of extraordinary intelligence. And when we remove the evolutionary lens we have been conditioned to look through, we can see that life has all the hallmarks of intricate, incredible and ingenious design. It wasn’t the product of nucleotides shuffling and machines stuttering and making errors every now and then.
I have chosen not to explore the many wonderful features of multi-celled organisms ranging from frogs to princesses, because if the complexity of life couldn’t have evolved by itself at the atomic, molecular and cellular level, then neither could it do so at the level of bigger creatures. In other words, if nature can’t put together an electron transport chain or a nuclear pore complex without outside design, neither can it put together a frog, no matter how long it is given.
But some might ask, in a slightly desperate “please God, anything but God!” tone of voice: what about aliens? After all, if life is the equivalent of nanotechnology, then maybe advanced aliens designed life.
If they did, how did the aliens come about? Were they created? If so, who created them? We could end up with an infinite regress of creator aliens. But if they say they evolved, how do they know this, given that many humans thought they evolved even though aliens apparently created us?
If aliens show up, making the claim to be our creators, hopefully skeptics would be just as skeptical and ask, “Where’s your actual proof you evolved, but that you created us?” Maybe they would claim to be behind the Bible, the formation of Israel, the resurrection of Jesus and so on. This would mean they were claiming to be God.
Assuming YHWH exists and is actually God, and the aliens are impostors, I think sincere prayer to YHWH would reveal the truth about their claims. In fact, this is how you can establish the truth of the matter about anyone or anything claiming to represent YHWH. He says, “Call to me and I will answer you, and I will tell you great and hidden things that you do not know.” 1 You just need to know how to ask, and how to listen.
God has already explained how he intends to reveal himself to all humans, by means of the return of his Son. I suppose this is another reason why the Son needed to be human – so he wouldn’t be alien to us. God gave the prophet Daniel a glimpse of what this return would be like, in a vision of the sign of the son of man in heaven:
“I was watching in the visions of the night, and look! one like a son of man was coming with the clouds of the heavens; and to the Ancient of Days he approached, and they brought him before him. And to him were given dominion, glory and kingdom; and all the peoples, nations and language groups will serve him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away, and his kingdom one that will not be destroyed.” 2
Jesus Christ called himself the “son of man,” and he further described the events that had already been seen by Daniel in vision: “Immediately after the tribulation of those days the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens will be shaken. And then the sign of the son of man in heaven will appear, and then all the tribes of the earth will grieve, and they will see the son of man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory.” 3
Therefore, if there is to be any “alien” deception before this astonishing event, its purpose will be to obscure the nature of the “son of man” and “son of God,” Jesus Christ, who has been appointed in advance by God for “dominion, glory and kingdom.”
In any case, the idea that aliens created us would mean we were designed after all, but I would suggest that evoking aliens really just takes the problem to a different planet, galaxy or dimension. It is just a last, desperate attempt to avoid the idea that YHWH is, in fact, the Designer of life.
If we wanted to play word games, I suppose we could say that YHWH is alien, at least in the sense that he is extraterrestrial. He certainly didn’t originate from Earth. The big difference is, YHWH created all things. Also, he is not really alien to us, because he designed us and therefore knows us deeply. He is “the First,” and no gods or aliens were formed before him. He is the author of the genetic blueprints found within DNA molecules; and to confirm this, he put his signature in the story of Jacob. But he is not made of the same blueprints, any more than Mozart’s body was made up of the notes his symphonies were written in. YHWH is the composer and conductor of the grand symphony of life.
1 Jeremiah 33:3. 2 Daniel 7:13,14. 3 Matthew 24:29,30.