"Det tragiska med vanligt
sunt förnuft är att det
inte är så vanligt."
(Albert Einstein)

"Halv kristendom tolereras
men föraktas.
Hel kristendom respekteras
men förföljs."
(Okänd)

"Den som gifter sig med
tidsandan blir snabbt änka."
(Goethe)

"För att komma till flodens
källa måste man simma
mot strömmen."
(Stanislaw Jerzy Lec)

Science and Evolution

What is science?

Natural science is a methodology formulated by people, to objectively investigate and draw conclusions about the physical world, and then communicate the results of this as flawlessly and objectively as possible to other researchers and thus accumulate more and more knowledge.

Scientific laws are not absolute truths, but represent knowledge in development. Truths regarding faith are no less accurate than scientific truths. They are just of another nature.

Science is not opposed to religion since it studies reality from a different viewpoint than religion. Science primarily studies the physical mechanisms of reality while religion deals with life's meaning and moral issues. Science and religion are complementary. Together the two give a truer picture of reality than when viewed separately.

In order to function fully, science requires that observations can be repeated an unlimited number of times. Science cannot comment on miracles since they are not repeatable, but are one-time phenomena. The scientific method is also unreliable in the study of other non-repeatable events, such as the origins of the universe and life itself.

Scientific theories are not facts but interpretations of facts. There are always several ways to interpret the same facts. There is no guarantee that what is currently considered the most reasonable interpretation necessarily corresponds with absolute truth.

Science is not opposed to Christian faith. On the contrary, there are many philosophers who believe that Christianity is the mother of science. The belief in a rational Creator, who created a rational universe, which can be studied with the help of reason, has been a direct corollary to the emergence of modern science. The occasions when science has appeared to challenge the Bible have either been due to the misuse of science or misinterpretations of the Bible.

 

The universe, life and man — coincidence or intent?

In 1687 Isaac Newton published his famous work, Principia Mathematica. He showed there how the physical universe to a large extent can be explained and predicted with the help of mathematics and logic. Approximately one hundred years later the philosophers of the Enlightenment, inspired by Newton’s theories, claimed that not only the physical reality, but all general phenomena — the origins of life and the universe, politics, morals, beauty, emotions, love, etc — could be understood with the help of reason. Anything that could not be explained by human logic did not exist at all, they said. Man’s logic was thereby elevated to where it was regarded as the highest norm in the universe, on the basis of which everything was to be measured and interpreted.

Today’s theories regarding the origins of the universe, life itself and the species, all have their roots in the Age of Enlightenment with its emphasis on human reasoning. In spite of the unlikely scenario, that a universe comes into being by itself, from nothing, and that this universe “happens to” be furnished with the unique properties that are essential for sustaining life, they insist on this explanation. And despite the lack of any conclusive evidence that life has appeared spontaneously, as a result of coincidence and natural laws, they still claim that this is the case. And even though the evidence they use to support the idea that the species have evolved is extremely weak, they stubbornly present the evolution theory as a fact. Why? Because according to the materialistic enlightenment philosophy there is simply no other option. It must have happened this way! Not because our scientific observations tell us that this is undoubtedly the case, but because the doctrines of materialistic philosophy dictate it.

The theories for how the universe, life and the species have come into being are at best possible scenarios for how it happened, but in no way do they exclude the existence of a Creator. Furthermore, there are good grounds for asking whether these possible theories are really plausible. Without exaggeration, it could be said that the materialistic stance demands considerably more faith in the miraculous than faith in a Creator does. If a combination of coincidence and natural laws has managed to produce such tremendously complex structures as the universe with all its living organisms, and even some beings that have the ability to ponder over their own origin, then it would be a far greater miracle than if everything has been created by an intelligent, purposeful Creator.

The Biblical creation story paints a sweeping picture of how God has created everything. The purpose is not to describe the physical mechanisms of creation, but rather to give an account of its meaning. The creation narrative provides answers to all the important questions that man since the dawn of time has been trying to answer with the help of reason, but without success. “Who is man?” “Where does man come from?” “What’s the meaning of life?” “Where does evil come from?” “Is there any solution to the problem of evil?” etc. Simply put, you could say that The Bible answers the question “Why?”, whilst science attempts to answer the question “How?”. The answers derived from these two categories do not necessarily have to contradict each other. They can be viewed as complementary descriptions from two different perspectives on reality.

Exactly how God formed the universe, life and the species, how long it took and when it happened, is from the Biblical perspective less important, and there is room for different interpretation. There is nothing that would exclude the possibility that God might partly have used natural mechanisms to create new species. The overall order of the Creation narrative fits well with the facts. The plants were created first, then the aquatic animals and after that the terrestrial animals. Man was created last of all. The Bible does not contest the possibility that species can change due to natural, biological processes, which is sometimes claimed.

The Bible speaks of a world full of meaning and purpose. Man, created in the Creator’s image, with a free will and a capacity for love and responsibility, has a purpose for his life. He is not merely a result of some meaningless coincidence, or as the Swedish film producer, Harry Schein once expressed it, “an annoying parenthesis between two trivialities”. Even though man is a biological being, from this perspective he is also much more than that. Man can never be reduced to being nothing more than an animal — a slave to its cravings and instincts — but has the ability to make his own decisions, differentiate between good and evil, choose between various alternatives and to understand creation and the universe in a way that no animal can.

Albert Einstein, one of the leading scientists of all time, on one occasion wrote the following:

One thing is certain: that it is a conviction, akin to a religious sense of the world being structured rationally and intelligently, that lies behind all advanced scientific work. This strong belief, a belief born out of a deep feeling, in a superior intellect — revealed in nature — represents my concept of God.

Instinctively, one might expect the world to be chaotic and impossible to analyse. Science does, however, base its work on the expectation of a world full of order, which is something we do not really have any reason to expect. Therein, lies the miracle which becomes more and more apparent as we acquire more knowledge….and here lies the weakness in the position held by atheists and positivists, who find their happiness in thinking that they have succeeded in emptying the world of the divine and the miraculous.
(Einstein, Albert, Lettres a Maurice Solovine, Gautier-Villars, Paris, 1956, pg 114-115)

The existence of a Creator explains, much better than coincidence, materia or blind natural laws ever could, the beauty of the physical world, man’s moral conscience as well as his yearning for the eternal and his absolutely unique position in all of creation.

 

A more detailed discussion of creation/evolution

The question of the origin of all things can be divided into three mutually independent sub-queries, the universe, life and the different species. The first question is of a physical nature, the second of a biochemical and the third of a biological nature. In the case of the universe and the origin of life, we do not really know anything. We have no conclusive evidence that the universe and life came into being spontaneously, without any purpose. The theories of the universe and the origin of life is pure speculation, based on a philosophical belief that everything must have arisen by itself.

Regarding the origin of the species, which Darwinism claims to explain, there is strong evidence that species can change and that new species can be formed. In all observed cases we are talking about relatively small changes in colour, organs becoming more extreme or being reduced, the emergence of resistance to bacteria, etc. Such minor changes are sometimes called micro-evolution. The two mechanisms behind this, originally postulated by Darwin, are variation and natural selection. According to evolutionary biology the major changes, including the emergence of new organs, and which gradually have gone from a one-cell organism to a human being, is nothing more than the result of a number of small micro-evolutionary steps, occurring over a long period of time. This usually goes by the name macro-evolution.

The mechanisms behind micro-evolution are precisely the same as those responsible for all animal- and plant-breeding. The only difference is that in breeding it is man — not nature — who selects the characteristics to be preferred (human selection rather than natural selection). Cognizant breeding, aiming toward a specific goal, ought to be able to produce significantly faster results than nature’s blind trial and error. Anyone involved in breeding, however, knows that there is a limit to how much change can be achieved, before problems arise in the form of genetic defects etc. This alone speaks against it being as simple as the notion of macro-evolution being only a succession of small micro-evolutionary steps.

Evolutionary theory claims that only those genes which immediately increase the likelihood of survival predominate. This results in great difficulty explaining the occurrence of so-called irreducibly complex systems. Such systems consist of several sub-components, which are all necessary for the survival of the system. The chances that all the necessary sub-systems should simultaneously arise through random mutation must be virtually none. Although small probabilities may occasionally occur, this cannot explain how such complex systems would spontaneously arise time and time again. It is very difficult to understand how irreducibly complex systems, by mere coincidence in combination with natural selection, would gradually emerge by tiny, small steps. Natural selection can hardly work here, since this only prefers the genes which increase an individual’s ability to survive and produce offspring. The irreducible system does not give any survival advantage until all the pieces are in place.

One example of an irreducibly complex system is the eye. Perhaps one could imagine that a light-sensitive cell is formed by a mutation. But, to have a functioning sense of sight, which increases the likelihood of an individual’s survival, requires more than that. It requires a nerve connection from the newly formed “eye” to the brain. It requires a centre in the brain that can receive and interpret in-coming information. Furthermore, the individual’s behaviour must be modified so that there is an adequate response to the information carried by the new sense. That all this would occur simultaneously, by (mutually independent) random mutations is to leave too much to chance.

A working sense of sight, which can increase the likelihood of survival, requires that all the parts of the system are functioning. To overcome this difficulty, it is customary to assume that a primitive, light-sensitive cell may initially have had a completely different function, for example, using light to produce vitamin D. Or perhaps an extremely unlikely macro-mutation did occur, after all, which instantly gave rise to the entire system. In and of itself, all this is theoretically possible. The problem is, that if you routinely refer to such speculative hypotheses to help save your theory, the theory eventually becomes immune against falsification. It will no longer participate in the game of science.

Something that further reduces the likelihood of improbable mutations spreading amongst a population, is that such mutations must take place in germ cells or maternal germ cells. A mutation that occurs in a skin cell might give rise to a mole, but does not spread it to the offspring. The whole thing does not become more believable when you consider that at the moment of conception there might be a hundred million sperms involved. Only one of these fertilizes the egg, passing on its hereditary characteristics. A mutation in a male must therefore be stored in the chromosomes of this particular sperm, if there is to be any possibility of it spreading through the population.

We might therefore question whether natural selection can be used to explain the emergence of irreducibly complex systems. The only mechanism that remains is that of random processes. The problem with this is that random processes can only create relatively simple structures, as demonstrated by the following example: A supercomputer, which randomly produces 1 trillion character strings of 100 characters per second, needs about 10⁹⁰ (i.e. a one followed by 90 zeros) years in order to form one single correct sentence of 100 characters — as a comparison it is worth mentioning that 10⁹⁰ approximately equals the total number of atoms in the known universe. According to current models in the world of physics, the age of the universe is estimated to be over 10 billion years (10¹⁰ years).

That it is hardly self-evident that chance and natural selection are sufficient mechanisms to explain the emergence of complex biological systems, is demonstrated by the fact that certain researchers, amongst others the American biologist Stuart Kauffman, have postulated some kind of evolution — regulated by another law — driven by “antichaos”. But then, the question that immediately arises is, why there are natural laws set in place in a randomly generated universe that by necessity must result in living organisms.

Regarding the origins of life we encounter similar problems as those in the case of irreducible complexity. The first cell cannot have been assembled in small, small steps. This presupposes the existence of memory mechanisms (eg DNA), which can store previous changes and pass them on to the next generation. The first primitive “cell” must therefore have arisen through a giant leap by chance. We must then be talking about probabilities that are infinitesimally smaller than the probability of generating a sentence of 100 characters. The Nobel Prize winner Francis Crick — one of the two bio-chemists who in the 50’s discovered the helical structure of DNA — which was one of the greatest biological discoveries of the 20th century, writes in his book Life itself:

An honest person, armed with all knowledge currently available to us, can only say that in one sense the origins of life seem almost like a miracle, so many are the conditions that must have had to be satisfied in order to get it all started.

It is, in other words, not self-evident that life arose by itself.

Evolution presupposes a very old universe. If chance by itself is to “create” anything, it takes a very long time (if it is at all possible). The Almighty Creator, who is revealed in the Bible, would undoubtedly have been able to create everything in a few days, less than 10,000 years ago. The Bible, however, is not a science text-book. It can be hazardous to draw from the Bible text absolutely firm conclusions about how old the universe, life and man are. The generally accepted dating methods seem to speak for an old universe (currently around 14 trillion years) and an old earth. But all dating methods have weaknesses and uncertainties. So it is not possible to draw any firm conclusions. Dating methods are based on assumptions that cannot be proven in any absolute sense. For example, if the speed of light has diminished (a theory asserted by some physicists today), then the radioactive decay in the young universe could have happened much faster than today, which means that the radiometric dating methods indicate ages that are far too high. Therefore, one cannot exclude the possibility that everything is much younger than what is generally considered to be the case. There is much more to say about this, but we can basically state that the time aspect is not a fundamental Christian issue. The main purpose of the Biblical Creation narrative is not to tell us the age of the universe. Its main intent is to convey that life is not the result of chance, but that man was deliberately created in the Creator’s image and therefore reflects the Creator’s characteristics.

There is absolutely no conclusive evidence that anything occurred by itself, without some guiding intelligence. The reason that so many people are still absolutely convinced that this is the case, is that they cannot imagine that it happened in any other way. Sir Arthur Keith, possibly the leading expert on the theories of human origins in the 1920’s, once expressed it like this:

Evolution is unproven and not possible to prove. We believe in it because the only alternative is creation, which is unthinkable.

So, despite the fact that no person has ever seen anything arise out of nothing, without cause, they are totally convinced that the universe originated that way. And this despite the absence of any conclusive evidence! And even though we have never seen complex structures, such as machinery, appear spontaneously, without the help of a guiding intelligence, they are fully satisfied that life and the different species occurred exactly like that. Why? Well, because the general opinion is that there is no other possibility! Since our intellect cannot explain the deeds of a supernatural Creator, creation must be an impossibility. And thus we make man’s intellect the norm for what can be true and possible. What the human intellect does not understand cannot possibly exist, is the argument. There is, however, only one cause for such a claim — man’s own arrogance.

The materialist’s enormous faith in human reason and the possibilities of logic is extremely contradictory, when you think about it. Especially for the materialists who assert that logic is something created by man himself. The basis for materialism is the theory of evolution, according to which we have developed through a struggle where the genes that give immediate survival benefits are rewarded. Why should a blind evolution, which does not have the capacity to plan ahead, but only spreads genes that increase the likelihood of an individual having offspring, give rise to beings with an ability to understand the innermost secrets of the universe? How can we, from an evolutionary perspective, be so sure that our conclusions about the universe are correct? Or that our brains are at all capable of understanding the universe and its origin? On the other hand, if man is created by an intelligent Creator, in His image, which means that we have many of His characteristics, then there is every reason to expect that our mind would be able to grasp a great deal about Creation. Our ability to understand as much as we obviously do, speaks for creation rather than evolution.

As regards the universe, it has been discovered that many natural constants are extremely sensitive. Only one percent change in the electron charge, the strength of gravity etc, would have the effect of there being no chemical compound, and so on. If the so-called “strong force” (the force that holds together the atomic nucleus) were to be 5% stronger than it is, the stars would not be able to burn, and if it were 2% weaker, the universe would consist solely of hydrogen and nothing else. Etc, etc. That all the constants of nature by pure chance have been given just the right values necessary for the sustaining of life seems highly unlikely. Lee Smolin, one of the leading researchers within theoretical cosmology, has written a book called Three Roads to Quantum Gravity. There, he estimates the likelihood that the natural constants in a randomly generated universe would get the characteristics necessary for “organic chemistry” to be one to 10²³⁰, which is such an infinitesimal probability that it can be considered as zero. The physicist Paul Davies writes, in his book The Mind of God:

I belong to the group of scientists who do not adhere to any conventional religion, but nonetheless deny that the universe is an accidental coincidence. Through my scientific work I have become more and more convinced, that our physical universe is put together with an ingenuity so astonishing that I cannot accept it as a pure fact. It seems to me that there must be an underlying explanation.

For a materialist, who believes that the universe arose by chance, the above is of course an unpleasant reminder that materialism is a faith, just as much as theism (faith in a God of Creation). The only difference is that materialism requires much more faith in the miraculous than theism does! That chance would have accidentally brought about exactly the right values of all natural constants, seems to require a great deal more faith in the “incredible” than for example Christianity does. At least Christianity presupposes the existence of an intelligent Creator behind it all.

The perfect and extremely delicate balance that exists between the various fundamental constants and also the laws of nature can be likened to the balance that exists between the various components of a complex machine, such as a sophisticated car engine, a computer or a living cell. The slightest change in any part of such a machine — if this change was not very carefully calculated — would either lead to a less well-functioning machine, or one that does not work at all. When we ask ourselves why a car engine or a supercomputer displays such a perfect balance and harmony among its various parts the obvious answer is "the designer has made it that way so it will function optimally." Perhaps the answer to similar questions about the universe is the same, "Because the Creator has made it like that, so that life can exist."

 

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© Krister Renard