Evolutionists are missing a step

I was listening to a debate on Modern-Day Debate between Kent Hovind and Professor Dave.  I don’t necessarily agree with everything Ken Ham espouses but I do agree with most of it.  I certainly appreciate that he fearlessly defends divine creation and will agree to debate pretty much anyone anytime.  I also believe that he’s been treated unfairly by our justice system and now his critics leverage his misfortunes to dismiss his points - that is, “Why should anyone believe a convicted felon?” (see ad homenim).  I don’t mean to be talking about Hovind, though.  I mean to address a point that was brought up in his debate.

Sometimes creationists will use man made objects as an analogy to describe evidence of design in living things.  Often, when we do this, evolutionists will cry foul, saying that man made things don’t reproduce so they aren’t analogous to living things and, so, aren’t an argument against evolution.  I’ve written about this before: it’s because they’re created that makes it a good analogy! Created things can be similar to other created things for a variety of reasons. They might be built using similar materials. They might be built for similar purposes. They might be built by the same person who added his own particular style. But any similarity between created things is certainly not the result of evolution! In like manner, then, the similarities between a dinosaur and a bird could just as easily be explained by design.  Get it?

Hovind brought up this same point in his debate with Professor Dave.  In his example, he used a coffee cup.  He pointed out that natural materials can be dug out of the earth but it was by design that they are formed into a cup.  Professor Dave had continuously been denying that evolutionists think humans are descended from rocks.  Nevermind that he acknowledged believing that the earth was initially molten rock, that rains fell on the rocks and made the ocean, that minerals from the rocks dissolved into the oceans, amino acids formed in this “prebiotic soup,” and eventually the amino acids organized into the first living thing - he still insisted that he doesn’t believe we evolved from rocks!!  Excuse me for a moment while I laugh my head off!!

When Hovind brought up the coffee cup, Professor Dave immediately shot back with the usual, “that’s not a living thing” response.  But instead of expounding on how the cup not being alive was relevant, he tried to turn the tables and said the only people that believed humans evolved from rocks are Christians!  He was obviously referring to the account in Genesis where God formed man from the dust of the earth and made him a living soul.  

The irony of the situation was stark.  I believe that the first man was made from the dust of the earth; Professor Dave also believes that people are ultimately made from non-living matter.  The difference is, he’s missing a step. He’s going from the dirt to the person without a Creator in between!

It’s not difficult to understand how a person can take raw materials and turn them into something that is useful.  To illustrate this, I’ve used the example of a log cabin.  Pretend, for a moment, that you're walking through a forest and you happen upon a log cabin. It's crude and has only a dirt floor. It has no electricity, plumbing, or glass windows. It's just basically logs, notched and stacked, with openings cut out for the door and windows. There's not a stick of furniture inside nor any other sign of anyone having lived in it recently. What questions might you ask yourself? I would think your first thoughts would be, I wonder who built this? Does someone live here? Where is he now?  I'm fairly certain no one would ask, “That's incredible! I wonder how these logs fell into the shape of a cabin?”

You see, logs organized into the shape of a cabin show design. Sections having been cut out to allow light and access show purpose. Design and purpose are the characteristics of created things and created things are the proof of a creator. The cabin obviously had a creator. Withholding judgment about the existence of a builder of the cabin is not the sign of a rational, thinking person. It's the stubborn refusal of a fool to acknowledge the obvious!

Life is not about the material - it’s about organization.  Understanding that trees can be cut down, shaped, and stacked to make a cabin is reasonable.  There’s nothing “miraculous” about it.  A true miracle would be if the trees fell, broke into the exact required lengths, and accidentally piled on top of each other in the shape of a cabin.

For me to believe a cabin had no creator, someone would have to first convince me that nothing could create something.  He next would have to convince me that nothing creating the cabin was more reasonable than believing someone built the cabin.  Atheists expect us to believe that nothing created everything!  You’ll have to pardon me if my incredulity is showing.

A potter can take a lump of clay and make a cup.  God, the Master Creator, took the dust of the earth and made Adam.  It’s reasonable.  The contempt Professor Dave had for Christians believing in the creation of Adam is laughable.  You need a creator to turn clay into a cup, yet people like Professor Dave want us to believe it’s somehow “scientific” to say rocks became people without any creator at all!  

The same but different? That doesn’t make any sense.

I’ve seen the chart below so many times that it’s more a joke than instruction.  It’s become a cliche within high school biology textbooks similar to the peppered moth photos or the Miller Urey experiment.  An observation commonly used by evolutionists to support their theory is that the similar structure of the forelimbs of different animals is evidence that they are all descended from a common ancestor.  But don’t take my word for it, according to Biologyonline.com, 

[H]omologous structures are physical features found in different organisms that share a common ancestor. This similarity is due to shared ancestry between a pair of structures or genes in different taxa.

I’m not putting words in their mouth.  Evolutionists claim that the similar traits in different animals are evidence that the animals are related… unless they’re not related.  

Confused yet?

You see, similar traits in different animals could be the result of having a common ancestor.  For example, cousins sometimes look like each other because they have grandparents in common.  But what about similar traits in creatures that aren’t supposed to be closely related (according to evolutionary assumptions)?  In that case, evolutionists don’t describe the features as homologous; rather, they are analogous and are the result of convergent evolution.  

Biologyonline.com describes convergent evolution this way:

Convergent evolution is a kind of evolution wherein organisms evolve structures that have similar (analogous) structures or functions in spite of their evolutionary ancestors being very dissimilar or unrelated. Thus, analogous structures of unrelated species would have similar or corresponding functions although they evolved from different evolutionary origins.

One example of analogous structures are the eyes of mammals and the eyes of cephalopods (like octopuses).  Human eyes are remarkably similar to the eyes of an octopus in spite of the fact that evolutionists claim that vertebrates and invertebrates diverged on the evolutionary tree some 540 million years ago.  In this case, the similarity cannot be the result of having a common ancestor.  Instead, our eyes just happened to evolve independently, in order to serve similar functions.

So let me get this straight: our forelimbs are similar to a bird’s wing because we share a recent common ancestor but our eyes are similar to octopus eyes by sheer coincidence.  Do I have that right?  Scientific theories are supposed to be useful in explaining things.  When observing similar structures in different animals, they could be explained by those animals having a recent, common ancestor… or not. 

A theory that could explain anything really explains nothing.  If similar features aren’t necessarily the result of having a recent common ancestor then they cannot be evidence of having a common ancestor.  Never!  Evolutionists have to resort to different explanations of how similar features evolved in different species, yet they still claim both observations support their theory.  It’s laughable.  No, seriously, it’s a total joke.  Read this from the same Biologyonline.com article:

In order to determine if a structure is analogous to that of another species, one could look at their common lineage. Analogous structures, as pointed out earlier, are structures having a similar or corresponding function but the two species under probe should not share the same evolutionary origin.

Isn’t that a hoot?  In a blatant display of circular reasoning, they claim the distinction between analogous and homologous structures is determined by where the creatures appear on the imaginary “Tree of life.”

Here’s a thought: maybe the similarities in structures on different animals are the result of design!  Think about how remarkable an Engineer that God must be.  First, He took a similar design - the radius, ulna, and wrist of different species - and used it to perform different functions like walking, flying, grasping, and swimming.  He also took a particular feature - like a wing - and designed it differently among birds, mammals (bats), reptiles (pterosaurs), insects, fish (Exocoetidae), and even plants (maple seeds).  

Having different explanations for the same features when they appear in the animal kingdom doesn’t make any sense according to the theory of evolution.  They make perfect sense when we realize they were designed by the Creator!

Most evolutionists really don’t believe in evidence!

I’ve heard it 1,000 times.  I know you’ve heard it too.  There are those evolutionists who insist they won’t believe anything until they see the evidence!  Am I right?  It’s like a mantra to them, “Show me the evidence. Show me the evidence.”  But I’m going to let you in on a little secret: most of the people who say this have never seen any evidence for evolution!

Let me explain.  The fact of the matter is that most people aren’t scientists.  They’ve never conducted research, they’ve never worked in a lab, they’ve never been at a fossil dig site, nor have they ever written a “peer-reviewed,” scientific paper.  To be honest, I doubt most evolutionists have even read a peer-reviewed, technical paper.  Thus I say, they’ve not seen any evidence for their theory.

But I’m going to go further than that.  Even among practicing scientists, there are only a handful of people in the world who have actually laid eyes on the fossil of an alleged human ancestor.  Most of those fossils are sequestered, leaving only plaster copies made from other plaster copies available for examination.  What’s more, most sciences have nothing to do with evolution - chemistry, physics, astronomy, meteorology engineering, mathematics, etc., seldom ever do any research on evolution.  So a tiny, tiny fraction of people have actually done any research in the theory believed by millions of people - yet the millions claim they don’t believe anything unless they see the evidence for themselves.   //RKBentley rolls his eyes//

The question becomes, “Why do people who claim to need evidence, believe in a theory for which they’ve never seen any evidence?”  I have said in the past that many believe by faith.  Yet, even though I’ve said that many times, maybe I’m not being precise enough.  

There is no evidence for evolution.  Let’s just get that out of the way first.  “Evidence” for evolution is like evidence for the tooth fairy; it may seem to explain what we observe but it still isn’t true.  How can there be evidence for something that’s not even true?  So evolutionists don’t believe the evidence for evolution.  Instead, they believe what they’ve been told about evolution.  They’ve read it in textbooks, heard it from teachers, and listened to arguments made by secular apologists and they’ve decided to believe them instead of believing in a Creator.

Now, I know what some critics are going to say.  The textbooks were written by scientists! OK.  So what?  We could talk about what the scientists have said about the evidence but, in the meanwhile, the teachers are teaching what has been written in the textbooks by scientists they’ve never met and the online atheists who defend evolution are simply parroting the claims made by scientists while they themselves haven’t seen the evidence either.

Believing in evolution is a faith statement.  Lay people are putting their faith in unidentified scientists who claim to have seen the evidence for evolution.  You could say they’ve fallen for the argument from authority fallacy; that is, someone they believe is an expert has said the evidence supports evolution, and people who have never seen this evidence have chosen to believe the scientists.  

But who are these experts?  Who writes the textbooks that teach evolution?  What are their qualifications?  I could google the names and backgrounds of the textbook authors but how many people who claim to only believe evidence already know their names?  If you ask any evolutionist who wrote the textbook he learned from in high school, I wonder how many would know.  If you ask the average biology teacher who wrote the textbook, I wonder if he could tell you.  

Most evolutionists really don’t believe in evidence.  They’ve never seen any evidence for evolution.  They only believe what other people have told them about the evidence.  Yet, even that is a blind faith because they don’t even know the people who have studied the evidence.  They may be very zealous about their belief in evolution, but, at the end of the day, they literally have nothing to show for it!

Eternal universe? I’m still not convinced!

I seem to have struck a nerve with a few unbelievers on X.com with my last post (here).  I had given five problems in believing the universe is eternally old and some critics tried to explain why I was wrong.  One skeptic in particular made a brief rebuttal to each point.  Other skeptics chimed in with similar thoughts.  

I don’t normally engage skeptics too much on social media.  It seems like once it starts, it’s hard to end the conversation and it ends up consuming all my time.  Instead, I thought I’d take some of their comments and address them here, in a new post.  Maybe they’ll leave future comments on my blog.

Before getting into their comments, one thing that struck me is that, by criticizing my arguments against an infinitely old universe, I can only assume they are tacitly admitting that the universe is infinitely old.  Once upon a time, some people believed in the Steady State Theory of the universe.  Explainingscience.org describes the theory this way:

[F]or a while the Steady State theory was very popular. This theory was developed in 1948 by Fred Hoyle (1915-2001), Herman Bondi (1919-2005) and Thomas Gold (1920-2004) as an alternative to the Big Bang to explain the origin and expansion of the Universe. At the heart of the Steady State theory is the Perfect Cosmological Principle. This states that the Universe is infinite in extent, infinitely old and, taken as a whole, it is the same in all directions and at all times in the past and at all times in the future.  In other words, the Universe doesn’t evolve or change over time.

We see that the Steady State Theory is an alternative to the Big Bang.  It’s not especially popular anymore and the Big Bang Theory is now the most widely accepted origin story in the secular science community.  Holders to the Steady State Theory are definitely the minority and could be described as fringe.  So, as I read the comments attempting to rebut my five points, I had to ask myself, do these people really believe in an infinitely old universe?  I doubt the critics commenting on my X thread really endorse the Steady State Theory.  I think, instead, they were simply disagreeing with a creationist without realizing they essentially agree with all my points.  Oh the irony!!

The primary critic posting on my thread goes by the handle God Fodder (@PeteAlonSoCrazy).  In his bio is the hash tag, #Atheism, which leads me to believe maybe there’s a bias there.  No worries; I have a bias too.  It’s just nice to know his frame of mind as I read his arguments.  I’m using his points to outline my rebuttal.  

To be fair, due to character limits on X, God Fodder had to keep his rebuttals to a few sentences.  I think he made his points fairly well and I think it’s obvious what he was getting at with all of them.  However, if had been able to write longer responses, he might have made better arguments.  But, these are all I have so they are what I have to work with.

Are we ready, then?  Let’s look at some of the comments.  I will note my points with RKB and his response with GF:

RKB: 1. It's not scientific.

GF: Yes because the origin of the universe is UNKNOWN. God is in the same boat. Not an argument against it.

OK, so on point #1 we are in agreement.  Claiming the universe is eternally old is a faith statement not unlike a religious dogma.  I’ve written before about how some things in science rely on faith and how scientism is a danger to science.  

My pointing out the faith-like assumptions behind believing the universe is infinitely old is meant to disqualify it from being scientific.  People only cling to it because they don’t want to believe in an Eternal Creator.  In a real sense, they are merely using their faith to attack my faith.

By the way, GF also has contradicted an oft used criticism of creationism.  Creationists are often told that creation can’t be true because it’s not scientific!!  So I agree with GF -  just because something isn’t scientific isn’t sufficient to prove it’s not true.

RKB: Entropy

GF: Without knowing the cause of the Big Bang causes this is complete guesswork.  Let me guess, entropy magically does not apply to god? Why?

GF is employing a sort of “you too” response as though it excuses him from explaining why the universe isn’t already in total entropy.  It seems, to me, a tacit admission that an enterally old universe should have reached entropy already but, since God hasn’t reached entropy, then it doesn’t matter.  //RKBentley scratches his head// 

There is nothing in this response - not one thing - that attempts to explain how energy could be eternally old without having reached heat death.  Let me remind the readers, too, that claiming the universe is infinitely old yet still has usable energy is to admit that perpetual motion exists!

Concerning God, entropy is a property of the universe.  It’s an observed part of nature.  God, by definition, is supernatural so I don’t expect the things of nature to apply to Him.  This is like saying, “How could Jesus walk on water?  Does gravity or buoyancy magically not apply to Him?”  

RKB: Time

GF: How does an eternal consciousness experience time?  Eternal god has just as many issues if not more.

More “you too.”  Sigh.  God does not experience time.  Psalm 90:4 tells us of the Lord, “For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night.”  

Time is a property of the universe.  We experience time.  Since God is transcendent and supernatural, therefore, there’s no reason to believe He experiences time like us.  

Again, there’s no rebuttal here.  The inescapable conclusion of the Steady State Theory is that we have arrived here after infinity has already passed!

RKB: Universe is expanding.

GF: So what? It could be in a cycle or big bangs could be repeated.  Why would a god make an expanding universe?  What’s the point?

I see a lot of things wrong with GF’s response.  First, a cycle of bang-crunch-bang-crunch universes is another faith statement (see point #1).  There is no scientific evidence to support it.

Next, this flies in the face of entropy (see point #2).  Imagine a spring that continuously springs out, then contracts again - infinitely!  What, it never runs out of energy?  It’s perpetual motion all over again.

Finally, what about Aristotle’s “First Cause” argument?  GF is simply invoking an infinite regress of bang-crunch events with nothing to start the chain.  It’s turtles all the way down to him!

RKB: Bible

GF: Who care what an ancient story book says?  

Really bad reasoning here.

There are billions of people in the world who care very much about what the Bible says.  Why do you think the Bible is still so popular after more than 2,000 years?  

I believe the Bible for the same reasons I believe anything - I’m convinced that it’s true.  There are myriad reasons I believe it’s true but I’ll have to save that discussion for another time.  To ignore the Bible in favor of a theory that makes literally no sense would indeed be “really bad reasoning”!

Five problems with an infinitely old universe

One of the many problems faced by unbelievers is the ultimate origin of everything.  Atheists really have no good answer to obvious questions like, what caused the Big Bang?  Where did matter or energy come from?  How could “nothing” have created everything?  

The reason atheists struggle with questions like this is because they know that if the universe began to exist, then it had a cause.  This idea has been around since Aristotle, who discussed the uncaused “first cause” or “The unmoved mover.”  I found a decent summary of Aristotle’s argument here:

Aristotle’s theology is based on his perception that there must be something above and beyond the chains of cause and effect for those chains to exist at all…. Everything is subject to change and motion, but nothing changes or moves without cause. Tracing how things cause one another to change and move is the source of many of Aristotle’s most fundamental insights…. [A]ll causes must themselves be caused and all motion must be caused by something that is already in motion. The trouble with this belief is that it leads to an infinite regress: if all causes have antecedent causes, there is no first cause that causes motion and change to exist in the first place. Why is there change and motion rather than stillness? Aristotle answers that there must be a first cause, an unmoved mover, that is the source of all change and motion while being itself unchanging and unmoving.

An uncreated being that caused the entire universe sounds an awful lot like God.  Of course, unbelievers reject that possibility so they’re faced with a dilemma: how can they claim the universe began to exist without appealing to a Prime Mover?  One way is to assert that time and energy are themselves eternal and uncaused!  

I see at least five problems with believing the universe is eternal.  

IT’S NOT SCIENTIFIC

The first problem with believing in an eternal universe is that it really isn’t a scientific claim.  How is saying that the universe is infinitely old significantly different from saying it was created by an eternal God?  To me, it merely seems to ascribe divine-like qualities to nature.  Nature becomes the god of unbelievers and “Nature just is” is a faith statement similar to saying “God did it.”   

Now, the lost are welcome to believe whatever they want to believe - just please don’t pretend this belief is enlightened, thought out, and it's certainly not scientific!

ENTROPY

It’s an accepted Law in science that systems degrade over time.  No system is perfectly efficient so some energy is lost.  Over time, all systems fail and will no longer produce energy.  This is why we know that something like perpetual motion is impossible.  Any system that produces work will always start with more energy (useful energy) and end with entropy (useless energy).  

Sometimes, people will argue that entropy only applies to closed or isolated systems.  They love to point out, for example, that earth isn’t a closed system because it receives energy from the sun.  But the stubborn truth of entropy is that it applies to all systems.  My car, for example, is an open system.  I have to add gas, change the oil, replace worn out parts, and continuously maintain the vehicle but - eventually - it will succumb to entropy and become scrap.  

Besides, the universe is a closed system.  No new energy is being added.  Over time, all the stars will burn out, all motion will stop, and everything will have reached total entropy.  This has been called “the heat death” and would be the eventual fate of the universe if Christ were to not return.  

If the universe were infinitely old, it should have reached total entropy already - there should be no useful energy left.  To claim that useful energy has remained constant over the infinite amount of time that has supposedly already passed, is to claim that something like perpetual motion is possible after all!  

Since the universe hasn’t reached total entropy already is de facto evidence that the universe cannot be infinitely old.  

TIME

This point may seem more philosophical but, I think, it’s one of the most stubborn problems with claiming the universe has been here for an eternity.

There’s an old joke that goes like this: “Chuck Norris has counted to infinity…. Twice!”  What makes the joke funny is that it would be impossible to count to infinity - even for Chuck Norris //rkbentley chuckles//.  I could count for the rest of my life time and merely reach bigger and bigger numbers.  In a thousand lifetimes, I could never reach infinity.  I wouldn’t even reach “half” of infinity.  And are you ready to have your mind blown?  Even after a million life times of counting, I would never be any closer to reaching infinity than when I’d first started counting!!  

Infinite or eternal are terms our finite minds struggle to grasp.  Infinite means it has no end.  We could count until we run out of names for the numbers and there would still be an infinite amount of numbers left to be counted.  Get it?  

Here’s the problem, then, for the unbelievers.  To say the universe is infinitely old is to say we have arrived at this time after an infinite amount of time has already passed.  That’s nonsense.  It’s funnier than the Chuck Norris joke; at least the joke is meant to be funny.

THE UNIVERSE IS EXPANDING

As we look around in the universe, we observe about the same number of stars no matter which direction we look. It would be very reasonable to conclude from this observation that we are somewhere near the center of the universe. Of course, the universe is very, very large and since we cannot see the edge of it in any direction, it makes it hard to be sure that we're in the center.  It would be like being in the ocean with no land in sight; you would really have no idea if you're in the middle of the ocean or just outside sight of the shore. To really know we're in the center, we'd have to have more information.

In the mid-19th century, Dutch physicist, Christian Doppler noticed that sound waves changed frequency relative to the observer when the source was in motion. He dubbed this phenomenon, “the Doppler Effect” and believed it would apply to all waves including light and radiometric waves. In the beginning of the 20th century, we were able to observe this phenomenon in the light from distant stars. The light from the stars was “redshifted” indicating that the light wave was being stretched and that the star was moving away from us. As we began to survey more and more stars, we realized that the stars uniformly seemed to be moving away from us at a constant speed.

The implications of what was being observed was huge. Obviously it meant the universe was expanding but more than that, the general movement of the stars directly away from us further seemed to confirm our position near the center of the universe. In this enormous universe, the odds of us coincidentally being in the center are mind numbingly small. If God had intended us to be in the center of the universe, then the remote odds of it happening randomly don't matter.

The fact that we seem to be at the center of the universe isn’t really my point right now.  Instead, I want to draw attention to this simple fact: if the universe is expanding, we can extrapolate backward only so far until all the matter would be at a single point.  In other words, the universe had to begin expanding at some point in the past, but it cannot have been expanding forever.  

I don’t believe in the Big Bang, of course, but it wouldn’t matter if I did.  Whether the universe began to expand 14 billion years ago or 6,000 years ago, both preclude an infinitely old universe.

THE BIBLE SAYS THE UNIVERSE BEGAN

Genesis 1:1, In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

People seldom stop to think about it but what does this verse mean when it says, “In the beginning”?  In case it isn’t obvious, it’s talking about the beginning of time.  Time is a property of the universe, a property which was created simultaneously with space and matter (i.e., “the heaven and the earth”).  

Time hasn’t always existed.  The clock began ticking at one time and it was here, in the beginning.  If the universe has existed forever, then the clock never started ticking - it has always ticked!  Such a ridiculous claim directly contradicts the clear meaning of the very first verse in the Bible.  

Call me simple, call me dogmatic, call me any name you want but I will choose the clear meaning of the words of the Bible over the fanciful theories invented by men with corrupt minds and deceitful hearts.