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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Lee Strobel
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April 12 - December 18, 2024
if the origin of life can be explained solely through natural processes, then God was out of a job! After all, there was no need for a deity if living organisms could emerge by themselves out of the primordial soup and then develop naturally over the eons into more and more complex creatures —
By juxtaposing drawings of an embryonic fish, salamander, tortoise, chick, hog, calf, rabbit, and human, Haeckel graphically established that they all appeared strikingly similar in their earliest stages of development. It was only later that they became distinctly different.
The fossil is so astounding that one paleontologist called it “a holy relic of the past that has become a powerful symbol of the evolutionary process itself.”7 It’s the most famous fossil in the world: the archaeopteryx, or “ancient wing,” a creature dating back 150 million years. With the wings, feathers, and wishbone of a bird, but with a lizard-like tail and claws on its wings, it was hailed as the missing link between reptiles and modern birds.
Law professor Phillip Johnson, author of the breakthrough critique of evolution Darwin On Trial, agrees that “the whole point of Darwinism is to show that there is no need for a supernatural creator, because nature can do the creating by itself.”26
My assessment was that you didn’t need a Creator if life can emerge unassisted from the primordial slime of the primitive earth, and you don’t need God to create human beings in his image if we are merely the product of the impersonal forces of natural selection. In short, you don’t need the Bible if you’ve got The Origin of Species.
Rather than facing this “unyielding despair” that’s implicit in a world without God, I reveled in my newly achieved freedom from God’s moral strictures. For me, living without God meant living one hundred percent for myself. Freed from someday being held accountable for my actions, I felt unleashed to pursue personal happiness and pleasure at all costs.
As a high school and university student studying evolution, I was never told that there were credible scientists who harbored significant skepticism toward Darwinian theory. I had been under the impression that it was only know-nothing pastors who objected to evolution on the grounds that it contradicted the Bible’s claims. I wasn’t aware that, according to historian Peter Bowler, substantive scientific critiques of natural selection started so early that by 1900 “its opponents were convinced it would never recover.”4
Icons of Evolution, which was published in 2000, takes a clearheaded, scientific look at the very same visual images that had convinced me of the truth of Darwinian evolution. The Miller experiment, Darwin’s tree of life, Haeckel’s embryos, the archaeopteryx missing link — they were all there, along with several other symbols of evolution. The book’s subtitle especially piqued my curiosity: Why Much of What We Teach about Evolution Is Wrong.8 Here was my chance to put these images — and the broader question of Darwinism’s overall reliability — to the test.
“You included all four of those symbols in your book, along with several others,” I said, “and you called them ‘icons of evolution.’ Why did you use that term?” Wells leaned forward, putting his elbows on the desk. “Because if you ask almost any scientist to describe the evidence for Darwinism, time after time they give these same examples,” he said.
Others define evolution as just being ‘descent with modification.’ But again, everyone agrees that all organisms within a single species are related through descent with modification. This occurs in the ordinary course of biological reproduction. “Darwinism claims much more than that — it’s the theory that all living creatures are modified descendents of a common ancestor that lived long ago.
“If these icons are the illustrations most cited as evidence of evolution, then I can see why they’re important,” I said. “What did you find as you examined them one by one?” Wells didn’t hesitate. “That they’re either false or misleading,” he replied.
But the end result is the same — much of what science teachers have been telling students is simply wrong. A lot of what you personally were told about the icons, for instance, is probably false.” I considered the implications for a moment. “Okay, let me follow your logic,” I said. “If these icons are cited by scientists so often because they’re among the best evidence for Darwinism —” “— And if they’re either false or misleading,” he said, picking up my thought, “then what does that tell us about evolutionary theory? That’s the point. The question I’m raising is whether all of this is really
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Stanley Miller’s 1953 experiment in which he shot electricity through an atmosphere like the one on the primitive earth, creating amino acids — the building blocks of life. The clear implication — that life could be created naturalistically, without the intervention of a Creator — had been largely responsible for untethering me from my need for God.
“Exactly! In my illustration, the cell is dead, and you can’t put Humpty-Dumpty back together again. So even if you could accomplish the thousands of steps between the amino acids in the Miller tar — which probably didn’t exist in the real world anyway — and the components you need for a living cell — all the enzymes, the DNA, and so forth — you’re still immeasurably far from life.”
In fact, he said: “I think people who believe that life emerged naturalistically need to have a great deal more faith than people who reasonably infer that there’s an Intelligent Designer.”19
“His theory predicts a long history of gradual divergence from a common ancestor, with the differences slowly becoming bigger and bigger until you get the major differences we have now. The fossil evidence, even in his day, showed the opposite: the rapid appearance of phylum-level differences in what’s called the ‘Cambrian explosion.’
“imagine yourself on one goal line of a football field. That line represents the first fossil, a microscopic, single-celled organism. Now start marching down the field. You pass the twenty-yard line, the forty-yard line, you pass midfield, and you’re approaching the other goal line. All you’ve seen this entire time are these microscopic, single-celled organisms. “You come to the sixteen-yard line on the far end of the field, and now you see these sponges and maybe some jellyfish and worms. Then — boom! — in the space of a single stride, all these other forms of animals suddenly appear.
“Of course, descent from a common ancestor is true at some levels,” he continued. “Nobody denies that. For example, we can trace generations of fruit flies to a common ancestor. Within a single species, common ancestry has been observed directly. And it’s possible that all the cats — tigers, lions, and so on — descended from a common ancestor.
“So as we go up these different levels in the taxonomic hierarchy —species, genus, family, order, class —common ancestry is certainly true at the species level, but is it true at higher levels? It becomes an increasingly uncertain inference the higher we go in the taxonomic hierarchy.
“If you consider all of the evidence, Darwin’s tree is false as a description of the history of life. I’ll even go further than that: it’s not even a good hypothesis at this point.”
“Apparently in some cases Haeckel actually used the same woodcut to print embryos from different classes because he was so confident of his theory that he figured he didn’t have to draw them separately. In other cases he doctored the drawings to make them look more similar than they really are. At any rate, his drawings misrepresent the embryos.”
I had bought into Darwinism — and subsequently atheism—partially on the basis of drawings that scientists had known for a century were doctored.
“Then at the midpoint —which is what Haeckel claimed in his drawings was the early stage — the embryos become more similar, though nowhere near as much as Haeckel claimed. Then they become very different again.”
“Isn’t homology good evidence for Darwinism?” I asked. “Actually, these homologies were described and named by Darwin’s predecessors —and they were not evolutionists,” he replied. “Richard Owen, who was the most famous anatomist of Darwin’s time, said they pointed toward a common archetype or design, not toward descent with modification.”
“In fact, it’s so similar that you can put the mouse gene into a fruit fly that’s missing that gene and you can get the fruit fly to develop its eyes as it normally would. The genes are that similar. So neither the developmental pathway explanation nor the similar gene explanation really accounts for homology.”
he universal experience of paleontology . . . [is that] while the rocks have continually yielded new and exciting and even bizarre forms of life . . . what they have never yielded is any of Darwin’s myriads of transitional forms. Despite the tremendous increase in geological activity in every corner of the globe and despite the discovery of many strange and hitherto unknown forms, the infinitude of connecting links has still not been discovered and the fossil record is about as discontinuous as it was when Darwin was writing the Origin.
“What is not so well known is that Java man consists of nothing more than a skullcap, a femur (thigh bone), three teeth, and a great deal of imagination,”
For example, when National Geographic hired four artists to reconstruct a female figure from seven fossil bones found in Kenya, they came up with quite different interpretations. One looked like a modern African-American woman; another like a werewolf; another had a heavy, gorilla-like brow; and another had a missing forehead and jaws that looked a bit like a beaked dinosaur.
“Instead, Darwinists assume the story of human life is an evolutionary one, and then they plug the fossils into a preexisting narrative where they seem to fit.
The Cambrian explosion — the sudden appearance of complex life, with no evidence of ancestors — is more consistent with design than evolution. Homology, in my opinion, is more compatible with design. The origin of life certainly cries out for a designer. None of these things make as much sense from a Darwinian perspective as they do from a design perspective.”
Science and religion . . . are friends, not foes, in the common quest for knowledge. Some people may find this surprising, for there’s a feeling throughout our society that religious belief is outmoded, or downright impossible, in a scientific age. I don’t agree. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that if people in this so-called “scientific age” knew a bit more about science than many of them actually do, they’d find it easier to share my view. Physicist and theologian John Polkinghorne2
The Big Bang, he told the rapt audience, was a supernatural event that cannot be explained within the realm of physics as we know it. Science had taken us to the First Event, but it can’t take us further to the First Cause. The sudden emergence of matter, space, time, and energy pointed to the need for some kind of transcendence.
“if it’s true there’s a beginning to the universe, as modern cosmologists now agree, then this implies a cause that transcends the universe. If the laws of physics are fine-tuned to permit life, as contemporary physicists are discovering, then perhaps there’s a designer who fine-tuned them. If there’s information in the cell, as molecular biology shows, then this suggests intelligent design. To get life going in the first place would have required biological information; the implications point beyond the material realm to a prior intelligent cause.
“You see, NOMA says science is the realm of facts, and religion is the realm of morality and faith. The essential problem is that biblical religion makes very specific claims about facts. It makes claims about the universe having a beginning, about God playing a role in creation, about humans having a certain kind of nature, and about historical events that are purported to have happened in time and space.
He paused momentarily, then punched his conclusion: “Science, done right, points toward God.”
“Take the expansion rate of the universe, which is fine-tuned to one part in a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion,” he said. “That is, if it were changed by one part in either direction — a little faster, a little slower — we could not have a universe that would be capable of supporting life.
“The problem with irreducibly complex systems is that they perform no function until all the parts are present and working together in close coordination with one another. So natural selection cannot help you build such systems; it can only preserve them once they’ve been built. And it’s virtually impossible for evolution to take such a huge leap by mere chance to create the whole system at once.
“You have between twenty and thirty-five completely novel body plans that come online in the Cambrian. You have a huge jump in complexity, it’s sudden, and you have no transitional intermediates.
“I’d say human consciousness certainly supports a theistic view of human nature,” he said. “Judaism and Christianity clearly teach that we are more than just matter — we’re not a ‘computer made of meat,’ in the words of Marvin Minsky, but we’re made in God’s image. “We have the capacity for self-reflection, for representational art, for language, for creativity. Science can’t account for this kind of consciousness merely from the interaction of physical matter in the brain. Where did it come from? Again, I think theism provides the best explanation.”
“Science and faith are not at war. When scientific evidence and biblical teaching are correctly interpreted, they can and do support each other. I’d say to anyone who doubts that: investigate the evidence yourself.”
The Bible says there has been decay or deterioration because evil entered the world and disrupted the original design. We’re not given all of the specifics on how this happened, but the biblical book of Romans affirms the natural world is groaning for its redemption, because something has gone wrong with the original creation.26 Based on the biblical account, we would expect to see both evidence of design in nature as well as evidence of deterioration or decay — which we do.”
And here’s what the scientific evidence for God does for me: it realigns me. It helps me recognize that despite my natural tendency toward self-focus and self-absorption, I can’t ignore what God has accomplished in this world to let everyone know that he is real, that he is the Creator, and that we need to get right with him.
“I look at the stars in the night sky or reflect on the structure and information-bearing properties of the DNA molecule, and these are occasions for me to worship the Creator who brought them into existence.
“Looking at the evidence — in nature and in Scripture — reminds me over and over again of who he is. And it reminds me of who I am too — someone in need of him.”
“But if the past really were infinite, then that would mean we have managed to traverse an infinite past to arrive at today. It would be as if someone had managed to count down all of the negative numbers and to arrive at zero at the present moment. Such a task is intuitively nonsense. For that reason as well, we can conclude there must have been a beginning to the universe.”
Time and space are creations of God that began at the Big Bang. If you go back beyond the beginning of time itself, there is simply eternity. By that, I mean eternity in the sense of timelessness. God, the eternal, is timeless in his being. God did not endure through an infinite amount of time up to the moment of creation; that would be absurd. God transcends time. He’s beyond time. Once God creates the universe, he could enter time, but that’s a different topic altogether.”
“You see, the Big Bang was not a chaotic, disorderly event. Instead, it appears to have been fine-tuned for the existence of intelligent life with a complexity and precision that literally defies human comprehension. In other words, the universe we see today — and our very existence — depends upon a set of highly special initial conditions. This phenomenon is strong evidence that the Big Bang was not an accident, but that it was designed.
For instance, Jesus of Nazareth proclaimed the truth of monotheism, and he was vindicated by his resurrection from the dead, for which we have convincing historical evidence.28 Consequently, we have good grounds for believing that what he said was true.”
“Back then, Christians had to maintain by faith in the Bible that despite all appearances to the contrary, the universe was not eternal but was created out of nothing a finite time ago. Now, the situation is exactly the opposite. “It is the atheist who has to maintain, by faith, despite all of the evidence to the contrary, that the universe did not have a beginning a finite time ago but is in some inexplicable way eternal after all. So the shoe is on the other foot. The Christian can stand confidently within biblical truth, knowing it’s in line with mainstream astrophysics and cosmology. It’s
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Would it not be strange if a universe without purpose accidentally created humans who are so obsessed with purpose? Sir John Templeton2
