The Case for a Creator - Lee Strobel [150]
POSSIBILITY #1: THE DARWINISM HYPOTHESIS
To start with, I considered how the facts fit the hypothesis that all of life can be explained by the undirected, purely naturalistic processes of evolution. “Like all other scientific theories, Darwinian evolution must be continually compared with the evidence,” said biologist Jonathan Wells. “If it does not fit the evidence, it must be reevaluated or abandoned—otherwise it is not science, but myth.” 4
Looking at the doctrine of Darwinism, which undergirded my atheism for so many years, it didn’t take me long to conclude that it was simply too far-fetched to be credible. I realized that if I were to embrace Darwinism and its underlying premise of naturalism, I would have to believe that:
• Nothing produces everything
• Non-life produces life
• Randomness produces fine-tuning
• Chaos produces information
• Unconsciousness produces consciousness
• Non-reason produces reason
Based on this, I was forced to conclude that Darwinism would require a blind leap of faith that I was not willing to make. Simply put, the central pillars of evolutionary theory quickly rotted away when exposed to scrutiny.
For example, naturalistic processes have utterly failed to explain how non-living chemicals could somehow self-assemble into the first living cell. Not only are there no viable theories, but none are on the horizon. Biochemist Klaus Dose, one of the leading origin-of-life experts, conceded: “At present all discussions on principle theories and experiments in the field either end in stalemate or in a confession of ignorance.” 5
Science writer Robert Roy Britt cast the problem more colorfully: “Have you ever had one of those dreams where you try to run from a monster and your legs go round and round but you don’t get anywhere? The quest to understand the origin of life isn’t much different.” 6
Stephen C. Meyer pointed out in my interview that there are insurmountable hurdles involving the origin of biological information that simply cannot be resolved by more research and effort. In other words, origin-of-life scientists are not going to wake up from their nightmare. To me, this constitutes the Achilles’ heel of evolutionary theory. As biochemist Michael Denton observed, the idea that undirected processes could somehow turn dead chemicals into all the extraordinary complexity of living things is surely “no more nor less than the great cosmogenic myth” of our times. 7
In addition, the overall fossil record has stubbornly refused to confirm the grand claims of Darwinian transitions. Despite innumerable discoveries since Darwin’s day, “the intermediates have remained as elusive as ever,” said Denton. 8 Rather than harmonize into a consistent case for Darwin’s theory, the fossils are a discordant cacophony that cannot reasonably account for the monumental leaps Darwinism must make, for example, between fish and amphibians or amphibians and reptiles.
The most glaring deficiency of the fossil record is biology’s Big Bang, the Cambrian explosion. The majority—or, according to some experts, all—of the world’s forty phyla, the highest category in the animal kingdom, virtually sprang forth with unique body plans more than five hundred million years ago. The sudden appearance of these radically new life forms, devoid of prior transitions, has turned Darwin’s Tree of Life on its head.
Like the overconfident prosecutor in the Pinto case, Darwin predicted that new discoveries would explain away this quantum leap in biological complexity. In reality, they have only made matters worse. The excuse that the transitionary creatures were too soft or small to be fossilized withers under examination. Alternate theories, like Stephen Jay Gould’s “punctuated equilibrium,” dash themselves on the rocks of reason. Darwin’s assessment is still accurate more than a century and a half later: the Cambrian explosion is “inexplicable” under his hypothesis. This remains, in my