By Allen Epling, The Christian Post
July 10, 2009
If you want to get a Fundamentalist Christian riled up, just mention that you believe in Evolution. Immediately he will assume that: 1. you're not a Christian, 2. you don't' believe in God, and 3. you believe that all life is an accident of nature. How is it then that many faithful, believing Christians do believe in Evolution? To answer that, we have to first define what Evolution is.
It is a theory that was advanced 150 years ago by Charles Darwin in a book entitled "On the Origin of Species". Strangely enough, you will not find any reference in it to life happening by "accident", and you will not find that he states that man descended from monkeys. It seems that the "theory" of evolution has "evolved" into something different from the original concept as advanced by Darwin.
Though he confessed he was agnostic, Charles Darwin maintained to his death, his belief "that God was the ultimate lawgiver". The theories about how organic molecules in a soupy mixture of the early seas of Earth accidentally came together to form cells and DNA strands, are more a product of an overworked modern day imagination than the original Darwinian theory of Evolution. Such statements are based entirely on speculation and guesswork.
It is an idea that has never been achieved in the laboratory in any way except to create a few non-living organic chemicals, and is dependent strongly on the laws of probability. Even that argument is weak in mathematical circles.
Unfortunately, congregations are sometimes told from the pulpit that, "If you believe in evolution, you can't believe in God". Ask those pastors if they have read Darwin's "On the Origin of Species", and they most likely will say "no". They are certainly referring to the idea that life began by accident on Earth. This is an idea that they have either read in the newspaper or heard on the media.
So, what is the Theory of Evolution about anyway? The main idea behind the theory is that in order for an animal to survive it must have some quality that helps it to survive. By surviving, that quality is passed on to future generations. If an animal doesn't have that quality it is more likely to die early, and as a result, its genes die with it. The next generation will then have more of the quality that aided survival than the last. It's a simple idea that we see performed every day manually by horse and cattle breeders through selective breeding. It is true that some changes will occur given enough time, in a species that will aid it to survive. We have seen that happen with Gypsy Moths in England and the effect pollution had on that species. It's the part about life itself that bothers me.
I can understand how humans in isolation can change through adaptation. That's why we have different races. What is a mystery to me is the underlying complexity at the simplest level of life itself, the cell. I can believe that skin pigment can change due to sunlight changes, what I can't comprehend is how a single cell can have so much going on inside it by accident.
When geneticists examine life at that level the complexity climbs asymptotically. Every single cell is a miniature city of factories that produce hundreds of compounds that the body needs to stay alive. This is a different level of complexity from the normal argument of atheists and scientists that wings developed because some animals jumped from tree to tree and survived.
We are on the threshold of constructing machines so tiny as to be molecular in size. The technology of a cell is light years beyond that. If we can't even understand it, how can we dare to pretend to explain it?
The standard argument is that time is the factor here, that given the billion or so years life has been on this planet, things just came together. Most people accept that because they can't comprehend how much a billion years is anyway. I have a mathematics background and I know very well how long it is. I also studied probability in college, and I still find it hard to believe that the level of complexity that I see in the DNA code, the mechanism in the cell to "read" it, and the extreme ability of a cell to go in hundreds of different directions according to the code embedded in it, could happen by chance, even in 10 billion years. We can't even determine why stem cells work.
As a computer knowledgeable person I also know firsthand how complex computer "machine" code can be, and I don't accept that raw elements could produce anything resembling a computer in a trillion years. If we go to Mars and find computers lying on the ground everywhere, I may change my mind. An analogy I like to use is, what are the odds of going to another planet and finding a computer chip "made by Intel" just lying on the surface. Will someone say that in the 4 billion years of development, the elements just came together to produce it?
Any geneticist can confirm that making a single cell that lives and reproduces, is 99 percent of the work of making a complex animal. The DNA of the simplest organism on the planet is very similar to our own. Everything else is just "cosmetic".
After the first cell, the rest was adaptation. It is that first part, the part that scientists say happened about a billion years ago when the first cell formed, that is hardest to understand. It had to have DNA almost as complex as ours is today, to live and reproduce. The mechanism to read it and produce enzymes had to already be formed.
If it takes several billion dollars and tens of years of study for humans to just begin to understand a single strand of DNA, how long will it take us to understand fully how it all works together? Understanding is the easy part compared to "designing" the cell. How could nature do it by accident without help? Anyone who has seen computer code, understands the complexity involved, just in the code, let alone the process of "interpreting" of the code.
These are the arguments that allow me to accept that Evolution is a real process in nature, but that it could not have begun by accident without some form of design or blueprint. There are other arguments, such as the development of complex body parts, but I find sufficient evidence in the supposedly "simplest" form of life, to convince me that there is intelligence and design at work, helping nature to do its job. As a person with a mathematics and probability background, I cannot see how something so complex as a 'simple' cell could develop by accident in a hundred billion years.
The answer to the first question posed in this paper is "yes, you can be a Christian and believe in Evolution", but to do so you must know what you mean by "Evolution". Evolution to me is just another of God's processes by which he created all that we see today. To believe in Evolution doesn't necessarily mean "life by accident". In other words, study the process and know what you are talking about instead of accepting what "the media" thinks it is.
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