"'In the Beginning': Intelligent Design Makes Sense"

June 2/02 Gen.1:1-2:3 Rom.1:19-22

The Clue

There it was -- again. Jerry couldn't figure this strange phenomenon out. Every Friday night after work he would go out to supper with his friend to celebrate the end of the work week. And every Friday night when he got home, he'd find this strange package on the porch. Was it a sign? A supernatural miracle? What was the meaning of it? What baffled him most was the package's origins. Was it a meteorite from heaven? Did an airplane fly overhead each week and bombard it onto his porch with laser-pinpointed accuracy? What if the package spontaneously materialized out of thin air? Were invisible aliens dropping it out of a space ship? Other questions dogged Jerry's limited reasoning ability: How was the packet manufactured? Moreover, what was the meaning of it all? What was the purpose behind the strange occurrence? Every Friday the same package, the same clue appeared, but Jerry couldn't solve the mystery...

             Maybe you've spotted a boy on a bicycle, with dozens of Focus packets hanging on the handlebars, who comes up to your door each week and drops off the week's circulars. For you, the mystery's been solved. Most of us would figure it out quicker than Jerry did. We know it didn't appear by itself, it wasn't aliens dropping it off, just a local service from merchants to consumers. The purpose was to communicate their "specials" to us so we'd be attracted to their store. As well as bringing us some local news.

             Too many people, though, scientists included, are puzzled by the clue UNDER their porch. They see the planet, plants, animals, the sun moon and stars, and don't get the clue of the whole created order. Without the Bible and the Spirit of Christ, they're left wondering: How did this get here? What's the meaning of life? What am I here for? To believers, the indications all around us are as obvious as the Focus parcel, but too many don't or won't make sense of the clue. They may even prefer to leave it as a mystery rather than accept the true origins.

             Creation is a big clue that a divine Person or intelligence is ordering our lives and environment for a purpose: God's trying to tell us something, if we'll only understand. Psalm 19(1) says, "The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands." At Mars Hill in Athens Paul said, "God made the world and everything in it...From one man He made every nation of men...God did this so that men would seek Him and perhaps reach out to Him and find Him." (Ac.17:24-27) Paul wrote to the Romans(1:19f), "...what may be known about God is plain to [people], because God has made it plain to them.For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities— his eternal power and divine nature— have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse." The clue is there. But many don't figure out what the clue of creation is all about.

Spiritual Reasons for Believing in Creation

Why does it matter whether we believe in creation? It's not a requirement in order to become a Christian. Often people will come to faith in Christ first, and over time find they leave behind evolutionary teaching as creationism makes more sense in light of the cross, the resurrection, and the Holy Spirit's prompting. Yet although Christ's lordship doesn't require us to immediately switch our view on the origin of the world, the doctrine of creation is an important one to accept for several reasons, spiritually speaking.

             One reason is that the Bible teaches it. We can hardly claim to be "Bible believing" if we balk at the Genesis account; it casts doubt on the rest if we start cutting out the first couple of chapters of the Bible. As protestants, we hold that Scripture is infallible, given by the Lord as our authoritative reference. "Your Word is truth," Jesus said -- the truth that sanctifies us (Jn.17:17). 2Tim.3:16 tells us "all Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching" etc. If God were going to breathe out a book, would He not take care to get the first 2 chapters right?

             "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." (Genesis 1:1) This is echoed throughout scripture. Jesus and the apostles vouched for it: Jesus said in Matt.19:4, "Haven’t you read...that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female...’" Paul holds in Eph.3:9 that God "created all things".

             The doctrine of creation is important because it ascribes glory to Jesus as a chief instrument in the whole process. John's gospel states, "In the beginning was the Word...through Him all things were made; the world was made through Him..." (Jn.1:1,3,10) Paul writes in Colossians 1(16), "all things were created by Him and for Him...in Him all things hold together." Hebrews 1(2) says that through the Son, God made the universe. So Jesus is honoured by the teaching of creation; consequently, if you say it came into being through chance or sheer time, you make those the heroes. (Not to mention a monkey your uncle!)

             This doctrine highlights the significance of faith over against materialism. There's more to life than meets the eye, we live in a spiritual as well as physical realm. And those spiritual factors (perceived by faith) ultimately determine the fate of things in the world of matter. Hebrews 11(3) says, "By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible." There's more that matters than matter. Our Lord Jesus Himself pointed out, "Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away." (Matthew 24:35) His power and plan transcend the universe. And believing in creation makes more understandable the truth about things to come. A few verses after saying "God made the world and everything in it," Paul adds, "For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed.He has given proof of this to all men by raising him from the dead." (Acts 17:31) Teaching God's power in creation fits hand-in-glove with the doctrine of the Resurrection and the New Creation after Judgment. What God made, He has rights to evaluate!

             Another spiritually-based reason to believe in creation comes from facing the alternative. John Ankerberg & John Weldon note, "In terms of its philosophical implications, evolution has major and almost entirely negative spiritual, moral, social, and sometimes even political ramifications." Nazism and Marxism would be examples.

             The Bible also makes a close connection between the doctrines of creation and salvation. Without Adam or his sinful act of disobedience resulting in death regarding God, there's no "gift of righteousness" and eternal life through Jesus Christ. Study carefully Romans 5(12-21) and you'll see how Paul constantly parallels Adam and Jesus, "just as / so also": Jesus' positives offset Adam's negatives. Because there was a tree of knowledge of good and evil, we know what moral chaos is and can be saved from it rather than blindly accepting it as all there is.

             As well, accepting the truth about creation develops confidence in us to rely on God's strength for our daily lives. If He's big enough to have "the whole world in His hands", He can certainly look after me. Jeremiah prayed, "Ah, Sovereign LORD, you have made the heavens and the earth by your great power and outstretched arm. Nothing is too hard for you." (Jeremiah 32:17) And listen to the early church believers in Acts 4(24,29f). First they pray, "Sovereign Lord...you made the heaven and the earth and the sea, and everything in them." That's why they can close their prayer, "Now, Lord,...enable your servants to speak your word with great boldness.Stretch out your hand to heal and perform miraculous signs and wonders through the name of your holy servant Jesus." When we see all around us evidence of God's supernatural greatness, wisdom, and power through what He made, we're encouraged to come to Him for help with our little problems. Especially when our requests are for the furtherance of His plan.

Common Sense Reasons for Believing in Creation

The spiritual reasons alone would be enough warrant to hold to a creationist worldview. But in recent decades, many compelling common-sense reasons have been uncovered that bolster from a scientific view what the Bible says. We live in a marvelous time, an age of opportunity: the stranglehold of Darwinism is cracking, as more and more evolutionists realize their view doesn't fit the facts. It now takes more pure "faith" or credulity to adhere to evolution than to believe in a Creator who exercises what's called "intelligent design".

The Gene Pool and Limits to Change: the "Mule Rule"

Let's call the first area that supports creation from a common sense point of view "the Mule Rule". Every farmer who's had livestock bred knows there are certain limits in breeding beyond which it is impossible to go. You can breed a horse and a donkey together and get a mule; but you can't breed two mules, they're infertile. You've run up against a genetic boundary. These limits exist for every species. Genesis says God created each type of plant or animal life "according to their kinds" (Gen.1:11f,21,24f). There's a certain range of variation within each "kind" of plant or animal life, and you can select for extremes, but you can only go so far. And over succeeding generations the tendency will be back towards an "average" critter. Thus the hybrids between species imagined for macroevolution simply don't occur.

             Pierre Grasse studied mutations in bacteria and viruses. He concludes, "In sum, the mutations of bacteria and viruses are merely hereditary fluctuations around a median position; a swing to the right, a swing to the left, but no final evolutionary effect." Michael Denton writes: "Breeding experiments...revealed distinct limits in nearly every case beyond which no further change could ever be produced.Here then was a very well established fact, known for centuries, which seemed to run counter to [Darwin's] whole case, threatening not only his special theory -- that one species could evolve into another-- but also the plausibility of the extrapolation from micro to macroevolution..." Edward Deevey remains an evolutionist, while acknowledging "wheat is still wheat, and not, for instance, grapefruit; and we can no more grow wings on pigs than hens can make cylindrical eggs."

Fossil Gaps and Intermediate Forms: Evolution "off the record"

The fossil record (I am NOT talking about my birth certificate!) condemns evolutionary theory because many complex life forms appear in the very earliest rocks without any indication of forms from which they could have evolved. Walter Brown says that the lowest layers that show multicellular life "contain representatives of all plant and animal phyla, including flowering plants, vascular plants, and animals with back bones. Insects, a class comprising 4/5 of all known animals (living and extinct), have no evolutionary ancestors. The fossil record does not support evolution."

             It makes sense that there are no transitional forms because half-developed limbs would be handicaps rather than an advantage. Brown notes, "All species appear perfectly developed, not half-developed. They show design. There are no examples of half-developed feathers, eyes, skin, tubes (arteries, veins, intestines, etc.), or any of thousands of other vital organs. For example, if a limb were to evolve into a wing, it would become a bad limb long before it became a good wing." Even Gould, an ardent evolutionist, recognizes this flaw in the theory. He says, "Of what possible use are the imperfect incipient stages of useful structures? What good is half a jaw or half a wing?"

The Second Law of Thermodynamics: the Eveready Bunny Myth

The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that, although the total energy in the cosmos remains constant, the amount of energy available to do useful work is always getting less. Water flows down the mountain; we make it turn turbines to generate electricity; but once the water arrives at sea level, there's no more energy available to develop current. "Entropy" (the amount of random, un-usable energy) is always increasing; you can't drive it backwards. Despite what the commercials say, Eveready batteries will eventually run down. Wilder-Smith says, "Order is improbable and order tends to disintegrate into disorder...Order descends to chaos, just as a city with no cleaning, repair and disposal services descends to chaos with the passage of time." (Any rooms in your house come to mind?!)

             That's a law. By contrast, evolutionary theory calls for life to become more complex (from amoeba to humans) as time progresses. Supposedly nonliving atoms have slowly ordered and organized themselves into more complex, more energy-rich, less chaotic forms. This is in flat contradiction to the second law of thermodynamics: nature just doesn't work that way.

             Incidentally, this law by logic also suggests the universe had a beginning, and began as a highly ordered system - "with a considerable stock of negative entropy". Not only is evolution bankrupt; the facts of science, including the second law of thermodynamics, better fit the creationist model.

Biochemistry and Spontaneous Generation: A Fly in the Soup

Back in the 70's when I was taking biology in high school, the Urey-Millar Hypothesis was all the rage. My biology teacher (whom we looked up to and respected) taught that lightning in combination with a primeval "soup" produced organic compounds and the building blocks of life. Today, that's been debunked. Thaxton / Bradley / Olsen write, "It is becoming clear that however life began on earth, the usually conceived notion that life emerged from an oceanic soup of organic chemicals is a most implausible hypothesis. We may therefore with fairness call the scenario 'the myth of the prebiotic soup'." Brown notes, "Life only comes from life.This has been so consistently observed that it is called the Law of Biogenesis." Christian and non-Christian scientists alike deny the scientific nature of spontaneous generation. Wilder-Smith declares, "the chance formation of stable amino acids is good, the chances of polypeptide formation less good, while the chances of the random formation of a protein molecule complicated enough to function as an enzyme and bear life are, at our present state of knowledge of mathematical thermodynamics, negligible."

             The chance that life could evolve from non-life is statistically zero no matter how old the universe. Many evolutionists have conceded that if the odds of evolution occurring are just 1 in 10exp250 (the figure 1 followed by 250 zeroes), then in the words of Henry Quastler, "it is virtually impossible that life has originated by a random association of molecules." Borel's single law of chance tells us that when the chance is less than 1 in 10exp50, absolutely no chance remains for an event to occur. Ankerberg/Weldon note, "Materialists who would never bet their life savings on odds of just 1 in 100 are gambling their convictions about reality on odds infinitely smaller."

DNA Info Overload: Too Much for the New "Rocket Science"

Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) forms strands of twisted microscopic ribbons by which our body stores information to manufacture vital proteins. It's absolutely crucial to life, yet evolutionary theory can't explain how it came into existence or shows such phenomenal design. Charles Thaxton believes DNA is the most powerful indicator of intelligent design, because of the analogy between the base sequences in DNA and alphabetical letter sequences in a book. We can assume DNA is the product of intelligence because it's analogous to human languages, which are the products of intelligent minds.

             Pause to ponder for a minute. Brown notes, "If all the DNA in your body were placed end-to-end, it would stretch from here to the moon over 100,000 times! If all this very densely coded information were placed in typewritten form, it would completely fill the Grand Canyon 40 times! And yet, all of your DNA would not fill 2 teaspoons. The discovery and understanding of DNA is just one small reason for believing that you are 'fearfully and wonderfully made' (Ps.139:14)." DNA is not now capable of evolution, nor does it show signs of ever having evolved. Molecular biologist Denton maintains that it is "an affront to reason" to believe that "a thousand million bits of information containing countless thousands of intricate algorithms controlling, specifying and ordering the growth and development of billions of cells into the form of a complex organism were composed by a purely random process." (Whew! I'm glad he said that! And to think DNA is much more complicated than that sentence!)

             You may recall the name of Francis Crick, a Nobel Prize winner and evolutionist (hence the Watson-Crick hypothesis about DNA). He admits that "the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going." But he's unwilling to accept the miraculous as an explanation; instead he suggests the theory of "Directed Panspermia" - that the first living cell must have been transported by rocketship on a 10,000 year voyage from some other planet outside our solar system. Give me a break, Superman! Talk about dodging the issue!

Design (teleology): Behind every Timex, a Manufacturer

William Paley gave classic expression to the teleological argument: that design in nature argues for the existence of God, just as a watch implies a watchmaker. Philosopher David Hume claimed Paley's analogy between living things and machines was unfounded and unrealistic and therefore life does not need an intelligent designer as machines do. But science has recently discovered that life really IS analogous to the most complex of machines, thereby reinforcing Paley's argument. Denton states, "It has only been over the past 20 years with the molecular biological revolution and with the advances in cybernetic and computer technology that Hume's criticism has been finally invalidated and the analogy between organisms and machines has at last become convincing...Paley was not only right in asserting the existence of an analogy between life and machines, but was also remarkably prophetic in guessing that the technological ingenuity realized in living systems is vastly in excess of anything yet accomplishes by man."

             PA Moody is impressed with the design of the world and universe, which suggests a designer. He says, "The greatest aspect of design visible to us is in the ordered movement of the stars and planets in this solar system and in other solar systems extending on and on through space - a design almost incomprehensibly large. At the other extreme we find all matter composed of invisible atoms, each of which in turn is a solar system almost inconceivably small, with electrons swinging in orbits around the atomic nuclei somewhat as planets circle about the sun...And so it goes-- everywhere there is design."

             Recall the dirty water villain, the E Coli bacterium? It uses a little outboard motor to get around, called a flagellum. It comes equipped with a reversible engine, drive shaft, u-joint, and long whip-like propeller. It hums along at 17,000 rpm. It's enormously complex: you need about 50 genes to create a working flagellum. Each of those genes is as complex as a sentence with hundreds of letters. For it to work, the specs are pretty tight: there can't be any mutations, which knock out or diminish function. So there are no intermediate steps.

             Or, take the bombardier beetle (no, it's not bright yellow with skids on the front!). It defends itself by a miniature flamethrower on its tail end. This is made up of explosive chemicals (hydroquinone and hydrogen peroxide), separate glands, storage tank areas (to keep the two chemicals apart until they're ejected, lest the beetle blow itself up), and a perfect detonator. (And we find it a challenge to light a barbecue!) Hayward concludes, "Natural forces alone could never have produced a bombardier beetle...there must be Somebody behind nature who designed and built the strange weaponry."

             Charles Darwin himself became suspicious that teleology might prove to be his theory's downfall. He said, "I remember well the time when the thought of the eye made me cold all over, but I have got over this stage of the complaint, and now small trifling particulars of structure often make me very uncomfortable. The sight of a feather in a peacock's tail, whenever I gaze at it, makes me sick!"

Wrapping Up: God's Reminder to Job

It was the argument from design that God used in Job chapters 38 to 41 to bring the complaining sufferer to acknowledge God's greatness. God referred to the stars and wild beasts to point out the marvel of creation and evoke renewed wonder and praise in Job for his Master. On these beautiful spring days we can be asking the Lord to open our eyes and show us afresh the wonders that surround us, pointing to His beautiful design and awesome power.

             Paul said that God's invisible qualities - His eternal power and divine nature - have been clearly seen in what has been made. Romans 1:21 leaves us with a challenge. There's only one choice by way of responding to creation: we can glorify God and give thanks to Him; or, if we refuse, we'll become foolish, with futile thinking and darkened hearts. Praise God, honest scientific discovery is now echoing what faith has maintained all along: "In the beginning, GOD created the heavens and the earth." Let's pray.