Creationist Apologetics, part 1

Last week I responded to Scientific American’s criticism of the movie Expelled…No Intelligence Allowed. Now I will talk more about creationist apologetics by responding to Scientific American’s 15 Answer’s to Creationist Nonsense.

Below are some of the creationist arguments which Scientific American says are false. I have not listed most of the arguments because most of them are indeed erroneous, made by some creationists who are not knowledgeable in science. Just because they have a misunderstanding about science, doesn’t necessarily mean they are wrong about the truth of how God created the world and all living things (each after its own kind) in six literal days. But you won’t find these erroneous arguments in any Creation Museum exhibit or any publications of Answers in Genesis, the Institute for Creation Research, or the Creation Evidence Museum. Some well-meaning, but less knowledgeable creationists tend to make “straw man” arguments when they don’t need to. But I have also seen creationists trip up evolution-believing college students and biology professors with very simple questions to which they could only make responses like, “Well…I’m not an expert.” The apostle Paul said, “For I determined not to know any thing among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified.” and “…Knowledge puffeth up, but charity edifieth.” (1 Corinthians 2:2, 8:1) So you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to know Jesus as your Savior, nor do need to be one to reach someone (even a tenured professor in biology) for Christ.

So I’ll leave it at that and only respond to these answers …

Mathematically, it is inconceivable that anything as complex as a protein, let alone a living cell or a human, could spring up by chance.

Chance plays a part in evolution (for example, in the random mutations that can give rise to new traits), but evolution does not depend on chance to create organisms, proteins or other entities. Quite the opposite: natural selection, the principal known mechanism of evolution, harnesses nonrandom change by preserving "desirable" (adaptive) features and eliminating "undesirable" (nonadaptive) ones. As long as the forces of selection stay constant, natural selection can push evolution in one direction and produce sophisticated structures in surprisingly short times. As an analogy, consider the 13-letter sequence "TOBEORNOTTOBE." Those hypothetical million monkeys, each pecking out one phrase a second, could take as long as 78,800 years to find it among the 2613 sequences of that length. But in the 1980s Richard Hardison of Glendale College wrote a computer program that generated phrases randomly while preserving the positions of individual letters that happened to be correctly placed (in effect, selecting for phrases more like Hamlet's). On average, the program re-created the phrase in just 336 iterations, less than 90 seconds. Even more amazing, it could reconstruct Shakespeare's entire play in just four and a half days.

Some creationists say that they can calculate the probability that a very simple protein or DNA molecule could have formed spontaneously. These figures are astronomically low probabilities. There are assumptions which go into these calculations and I don’t know exactly what they are. The problem with this approach is that these figures are for only one particular molecule. But what are the odds that any protein, DNA, RNA or other self-replicating molecule could arise from some primordial soup? I don’t know the answer to the question, but it sure seems like the evolutionist has much more faith than the creationist, and both believe in what they can’t see.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics says that systems must become more disordered over time. Living cells therefore could not have evolved from inanimate chemicals, and multicellular life could not have evolved from protozoa.

This argument derives from a misunderstanding of the Second Law. If it were valid, mineral crystals and snowflakes would also be impossible, because they, too, are complex structures that form spontaneously from disordered parts.

The Second Law actually states that the total entropy of a closed system (one that no energy or matter leaves or enters) cannot decrease. Entropy is a physical concept often casually described as disorder, but it differs significantly from the conversational use of the word.
More important, however, the Second Law permits parts of a system to decrease in entropy as long as other parts experience an offsetting increase. Thus, our planet as a whole can grow more complex because the sun pours heat and light onto it, and the greater entropy associated with the sun's nuclear fusion more than rebalances the scales. Simple organisms can fuel their rise toward complexity by consuming other forms of life and nonliving materials.

Entropy isn’t the issue here and the evolutionists know it. It is not even complexity, though it is inconceivable that anything much more complex than a snowflake could arise spontaneously and even snowflakes show intelligent design in round about way, but the evolutionists refuse to see it. The weighty evidence against evolution is the concept of information. Biologists talk about molecules that “send messages” or “tell” the cell or structure within the cell what to do. No one has ever observed such information arising out of molecules which had no information in them. Information requires statistics, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and apobetics. You can read more about this topic in a book called In the Beginning Was Information by Werner Gitt.

Mutations are essential to evolution theory, but mutations can only eliminate traits. They cannot produce new features.

On the contrary, biology has catalogued many traits produced by point mutations (changes at precise positions in an organism's DNA)--bacterial resistance to antibiotics, for example.

Mutations that arise in the homeobox (Hox) family of development-regulating genes in animals can also have complex effects. Hox genes direct where legs, wings, antennae and body segments should grow. In fruit flies, for instance, the mutation called Antennapedia causes legs to sprout where antennae should grow. These abnormal limbs are not functional, but their existence demonstrates that genetic mistakes can produce complex structures, which natural selection can then test for possible uses.
Moreover, molecular biology has discovered mechanisms for genetic change that go beyond point mutations, and these expand the ways in which new traits can appear. Functional modules within genes can be spliced together in novel ways. Whole genes can be accidentally duplicated in an organism's DNA, and the duplicates are free to mutate into genes for new, complex features. Comparisons of the DNA from a wide variety of organisms indicate that this is how the globin family of blood proteins evolved over millions of years.

This is a nice try, but no. In some cases, a mutation can cause a gene to cease functioning, which in turn causes it to be resistant to antibiotics. These mutations only eliminate genetic information, and do not create it. In other cases, bacteria acquire resistance from other bacteria via plasmid DNA transfer. Some, but not all, bacteria have this plasmid DNA which is different than the chromosomal DNA, because it exists out in the cytoplasm and a single cell can contain many copies of it. Portions of the DNA within the plasmids can become incorporated into the cell’s chromosomal DNA. But this is not properly called a “mutation”. There is no proof that this process was not designed by God and that all such bacteria that can make this DNA exchange are not within one “Genesis kind”.

As for the fly mutations, they say, “These abnormal limbs are not functional”. Of course there are a lot of mutations which can produce features which are not useful. Enough said.

Of course, I recognize that there are mutations which can duplicate genes. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that these mutations can lead to useful, new features. Similarities in the DNA of different organisms do not prove that they had a common ancestor. It could just as easily be that they had common Designer.

Natural selection might explain microevolution, but it cannot explain the origin of new species and higher orders of life.

Evolutionary biologists have written extensively about how natural selection could produce new species. For instance, in the model called allopatry, developed by Ernst Mayr of Harvard University, if a population of organisms were isolated from the rest of its species by geographical boundaries, it might be subjected to different selective pressures. Changes would accumulate in the isolated population. If those changes became so significant that the splinter group could not or routinely would not breed with the original stock, then the splinter group would be reproductively isolated and on its way toward becoming a new species.

Natural selection is the best studied of the evolutionary mechanisms, but biologists are open to other possibilities as well. Biologists are constantly assessing the potential of unusual genetic mechanisms for causing speciation or for producing complex features in organisms. Lynn Margulis of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and others have persuasively argued that some cellular organelles, such as the energy-generating mitochondria, evolved through the symbiotic merger of ancient organisms. Thus, science welcomes the possibility of evolution resulting from forces beyond natural selection. Yet those forces must be natural; they cannot be attributed to the actions of mysterious creative intelligences whose existence, in scientific terms, is unproved.

Of course, speciation does occur, but this is genetic variation within “Genesis kinds”. I challenge any evolutionist to offer real proof that there aren’t some genetic boundaries that just can’t be crossed. The issue of “higher orders of life” is discussed in my previous answers. Scientists’ classification of organisms into species is a useful concept, but it is not necessarily the way God classifies living things in Genesis 1. Taxonomy is a somewhat subjective science, especially when it comes to things that are extinct. (I believe that Neanderthal man should be classified as Homo sapiens.)

Next week, Lord willing, I will respond to more of their comments.