I recently read a fascinating book about Intelligent Design. I wanted to make sure not to forget its content and main arguments so I wrote a review of it that I am now pasting below. A week later, I found out that the author had just made a presentation of the book at a church in Texas. So I watched the recording. If you do want to spend the time to read the book, but this subject interest you, take an hour to watch his presentation.
I hope to write more about this again, as it is a subject I want to learn more about. Maybe it is because I am getting older. :)
Book-review:
What will Heaven be like? Will there still be room for learning or will we grasp and know everything instantly, the very moment we wonder about things? Learning is such a part of who I am that it is difficult for me to imagine living without it. I have so many questions for God and for the people I want to meet once I get to Heaven. One of those questions surfaced again recently after reading a new book about Intelligent Design (ID). Despite the criticism it received from darwinistic, evolutionary websites that ID is dead and that the arguments made by Douglas Axe, the author of “Undeniable, how biology confirms our intuition that life is designed” are old and unscientific, I found the book fascinating. Mr. Axe’s book claims that random, accidental evolution is fantastically impossible and it also cannot explain how life came to be in the first place, even before it started to evolve, if it ever did. I think it is sad that the attacks I read made toward Mr. Axe, a microbiologist Ph.D. and to his book are so emotionally charged, full of angry words but themselves lack scientific evidence. Engineers (as I am), physicists and scientists always need to prove their discoveries and their theories with facts. We thrive in the satisfaction of testing a hypothesis and finding that we were right. And, we all enjoy the challenge and energy that is needed to defend such discoveries from being disproven. Yet, it seems to me, that, when it comes to the origin and the presence of life on this earth, our scientific approach often goes out the window and Darwinism becomes a religion that cannot be challenged even though it is not proven and actually relies on very many assumptions. Douglas Axe tries to point out exactly that in his book relying on his scientific experience working with proteins, on statistics and on common sense. After all, aren’t experience, statistics and common sense \well-respected tools in the intellectual world?
So what are his main points? I summarize them below, mostly for my own benefit. I don’t claim to be exhaustive in my summary nor that these short bullets can be a substitute for reading the book, but I hope they may encourage you to pick it up.
· Our experience tells us that “anything genius can only exist because of a genius mind”.
None of us has ever experienced food ingredients randomly mixing together to create an appetizing meal. None of the inventions that exist today have been created by pure chance of random parts getting together to make something function. Yes, sometimes ideas and discovery happen by what we call “accident”, but they are no accident really and they still need our human mind to give them form and bring them to life. The discovery of penicillin on a petri dish left by mistake in a laboratory is a good example of that. No bestselling book has ever been created by the random typing of pages and pages of words. Books, sculptures, paintings, music, all require painstaking hours of work, revision and touch-up. Even scientific articles do (yes, peer-reviews).
· All life forms present an incredible level of what Douglas Axe calls “functional coherence”. They are not just made of a blob of matter that somehow exists. They are all made of several layers of perfectly shaped, positioned, highly sophisticated and inter-correlated functioning parts. Can all of these parts truly have come to be by accident? Could they have come to be, not independently of one another, but all together and coordinately to form each and every single existing organism? If evolution is truly random as Darwin claimed, then each part should not know about the other parts developing concurrently and coherently. Mr. Axe points out that if, sitting at a dinner table, we were presented with an alphabet soup showing words rightly formed and positioned, our common sense would tell us that somebody has arranged such letters. Even scientists would. Yet, evolutionists do not question complicated organs and parts getting formed and organized into highly efficient organisms. Simply Google cyanobacteria to see how intricate unicellular organisms are.
· Even if evolution were able to create more complicated organisms from simpler organisms, there would still be no explanation for how simple organisms came to be in the first place. And what does “simple organisms” refer to anyway? As mentioned above even unicellular organisms are made of innumerable parts working seamlessly together.
· Mutations are permanent changes that affect an organism or one of its part (macro mutation) or a molecule inside an organism (micro mutation). For example, the change in length in the beak of a bird can be considered a macro mutation, while the change in how a cell can defend itself from a certain bacteria can be considered a micro mutation. Mr. Axe acknowledges that mutations are indeed possible, but points out that the following points about mutations are usually overlooked. In fact, the fact that a mutation might happen does not mean it will survive or “evolve the population”, in fact, for that to happen:
· The mutation needs to happen independently in enough individuals of the population to be able to be transmitted to the next generation.
· It needs to become dominant to the point of taking over within the existing population.
· In order to improve a species, it also needs to represent an advancement with respect to the existing characteristic(s) it is replacing (after all if mutations are random, then a mutation does not necessarily have to be an advancement. It could also be a regression, which would move the species in the wrong direction).
· The advancement needs to be significant enough to cause a change in the population. A mutation could be so small and insignificant as to promote no change. For example, a protein within a cell could mutate how a cell perform a certain cellular process without actually affecting the outcome of the process.
And all of these things, of course, need to happen…. Not just one of them.
· Mr. Axe is a protein biologist. Proteins are large molecules that can be considered the basis of life, as they perform many (or most) of the basic functions that happen inside living cells. Proteins are made of long chains consisting of hundreds to thousands of smaller molecules called amino-acids. Break or change one of the links or one of the amino-acids in the chain and the protein will not work properly. Only estimates exist for the number of different proteins existing inside a human body. Those estimates range from tens of thousands to millions. Douglas Axe and other scientists with him have tried to mutate a protein in a non-intelligent way, trying millions of different random mutations without success. This work has been published in scientific journals and, according to Mr. Axe, it is not usually questioned by evolutionary biologists. Apparently, this is because many of these people claim that proteins have now evolved to their most perfect state and so we are no longer able to mutate existing proteins into new and better working ones. (I’ll have to do some more research on this subject to see if this what many affirm)
· Based on the possible combinations of amino-acids, the likelihood of accidentally generating just one good protein sequence was estimated by Axe to be 1 in 1074, or 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. Any experiment, which has such a likelihood of success would be considered by any world scientist statistically impossible. In comparison, the likelihood of randomly dropping a pin from space exactly over any random place on the earth surface, for example over the Four Corners (the exact intersection of Colorado, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico) is 1 in 1020, or 100,000,000,000,000,000,000. You can try to do that yourself here: www.geomidpoint.com/random. Good luck!
· For any macroscopic level mutation to happen, very many coordinated microscopic level mutations need to happen. How can significant evolution at a macroscopic level even be considered feasible when the likelihood of a protein level mutation is biologically impossible?
· Human life consists of more than just the cells that make up our bodies. Our brain is the interface between the material world and thoughts, feelings and desires. These are all non-material realities, but the materialistic view of the world wants to reduce humans to “clump of cells”. Yet it is not able to explain how the brain can, among other things, store memories and provide emotions.
· And finally here is a basic calculation I came up with. It is not meant to prove anything, but simply to present another numerical consideration about the arguments surrounding evolution. Estimates for the number of cells in the human body range between 10 and 1000 trillions. On the other hand the age of the earth is estimated at 5 billion years. This means that at least 2000 changes a year (10 trillion ÷ 5 billion) each adding one cell would have needed to happen to evolve a single cell organism into a human over that period of time. Of course, this does not take into account any cell specialization or functional coherence and microscopic mutations. Nor does it account the huge number of animal life forms that exists, all of which would have to also have evolved during the same time period.
It seems that many people feel that evolution and faith in God are completely irreconcilable. Or maybe it is that evolution supporters are concerned about moral limitations on their freedom of research that an acceptance of God would impose. Or, are we humans too proud to admit that we cannot explain and control everything?
To me, the existence of God, science and evolution are not necessarily incompatible. If God exists, then science is just God’s tool. God could have created the creatures we now know as they are, without a need for evolution. Or maybe evolution did actually happen to some degree, but it was not random and accidental. Instead, God could have created creatures over a long period of time, starting from unicellular life forms and moving toward more complicated life forms. He could have decided to promote microscopic and macroscopic mutations at specific time points. See the Cambrian explosion of species for example… A touch of humility is helpful in so many aspects of our life. It may actually even help us to become better scientists. To be continued...