Creation Science Winter 2008

Exodus 3:13-15 (NKJV)

Then Moses said to God, "Indeed, when I come to the children of Israel and say to them, 'The God of your fathers has sent me to you,' and they say to me, 'What is His name?' what shall I say to them?"

And God said to Moses, "I AM WHO I AM." And He said, "Thus you shall say to the children of Israel, 'I AM has sent me to you.' " Moreover God said to Moses, "Thus you shall say to the children of Israel: 'The Lord God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you. This is My name forever, and this is My memorial to all generations.'

"I AM" is a strange name isn't it? It is the name we transliterate into Yahweh or anglicize into Jehovah. Why would God pick a name such as "I AM"? I am glad he did not say that His name is "I WAS" or even "I WILL BE." You get a glimpse of the idea that God is timeless. It is as if He is saying "I always was, I always am, I always will be...I AM". Eternity is always in the present. I have thought a lot about the physics of Eternity if such a thing can even be comprehended.

I heard one preacher say that we can think of God's name as I AM _________ where you fill in the blank for whatever you need right now. That is certainly true because God can supply all of our needs. But I think this name must be far more profound. It not only speaks of His timelessness but also of his supreme power in the sense that everything derives from Him. Nothing exists without Him.

Jesus replied to the soldiers who were looking to arrest him saying, "I am He." In my Bible, the He is italicized meaning that that word is not in the original Greek. He was speaking his eternal name. The Jesus of the New Testament is the I AM of the Old Testament. By the way, notice what happened to the soldiers when Jesus spoke his name, they fell backward to the ground. The force of that name spoken by God Himself must be awesome!

John 18:4-6 (NKJV)

Jesus therefore, knowing all things that would come upon Him, went forward and said to them, "Whom are you seeking?" They answered Him, "Jesus of Nazareth." Jesus said to them, "I am He" And Judas, who betrayed Him, also stood with them. Now when He said to them, "I am He, " they drew back and fell to the ground.

Not to be found. That does not mean they aren't looking...desperately. In his book, The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin said:

“The number of intermediate varieties, which have formerly existed on the earth, must be truly enormous. Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graded organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory.”

Darwin knew about this problem but assumed things were still early in the search for such evidence. He assumed that they would indeed find them as the hunt progressed. Well, it's been 150 years since he wrote these words and they still haven't found any.

This problem is so well known that in 1972, Stephen Jay Gould co-authored a paper called "Punctuated equilibria: an alternative to phyletic gradualism". In this paper, Gould appealed to the idea that evolution must not have progressed gradually but rather in a pattern of punctuated spurts of large scale changes. This idea explains the lack of transitional forms in the fossil record by suggesting there was not enough time for such a fossil layer to be produced given such a short period of time during which the species was changing. There were long periods of time in which few changes occurred and then you have these relativity short periods of time in which large scale changes occur. Evolutionists coined the term "hopeful monster" to describe what Gould called "major structural transitions [which] can occur rapidly without a smooth series of intermediate stages."

So what is the primary evidence for Gould's idea of punctuated equilibrium?

Well, his evidence is...are you ready?...the lack of evidence.

Natural selection does not produce any new information, it only allows for beneficial information that already exists in a species to survive or to be preserved. So the question is, can natural selection working on mutations produce new complex structures.

Evolutionists believe that reptiles evolved into birds. According to Darwinism, the forelimbs of some ancient reptiles gradually evolved into the wing of a bird. The process took millions and millions of years. Allow me to illustrate the process with a story.

Once upon a time, hundreds of millions of years ago, there was a reptile running around that had some mutations which caused it to have offspring to have scales which were elongated on the forelimbs. Those reptiles in turn had baby reptiles which had more mutations that caused the scales to get longer and longer. Those scales were beginning to evolve into early feathers. Over a period of millions of years and tens of thousands of generations this kept occurring further lengthening these scales and eventually becoming a wing.

There is a problem with this story. Can you see it? As these scales were gradually getting longer and longer within a population, pretty soon you've got these scales hanging down several inches off the forearm of the lizard. It cannot yet fly, but now it has a problem because it can't run very well either. So natural selection now prefers the ones without the longer scales and these long scale guys get wiped out. The lizard is not a more fit organism because it has no advantages like flying but it does have many disadvantages. Because it cannot run, it cannot compete against the other animals for food and other resources. Furthermore, it cannot successfully evade its predators.

The wing fails to evolve because its transitional forms were non-viable. A transitional stage is not more fit that what it came from.

It is not just wings and feathers that have to form for flight either. The dense bones of a reptile must reform themselves into lightweight versions for flight too. All these changes are not trivial. Vast amounts of new information in the DNA must come from somewhere.

W.E. Swinton, in Biology and Comparative Physiology of Birds said:

"The origin of birds is largely a matter of deduction. There is no fossil evidence of the stages through which the remarkable change from reptile to bird was achieved."

Some deduction, with no fossil evidence to show for it. Remarkable change indeed. No, make that remarkable God!

Next time you meet an evolutionist ask this question:

Would you please explain how random mutations over a long period of time could produce the visual system when the mutations that are supposed to give rise to it do not increase the survivability of the organism?

If you came to my garage when I was a teenager and found that I was rebuilding the engine on my car with the parts all over the floor, you might ask "let's take it out for a spin." I would have to say that I was not finished yet. Until everything was put together, the car is useless as are the individual parts. Lying all over the garage floor, they just get in my way. The only benefit they serve is that I know what purpose they will eventually serve once I get it all put back together. But in evolution, they cannot possibly know what direction they are heading. The random chance mutations have no direction or design. It is impossible for a transitional form on its way to being part of an irreducibly complex system to be of any benefit in an unguided, purposeless, material process.

This is what is know as the non-viability of transitional forms.

Perhaps you have used digital cameras and have had the wherewithal to use a photo editing program to remove red eye or change the color cast in a photo. It is amazing what you can do with programs like Photoshop. If fact it has become part of the news in the last few years how can you trust what is printed in the media since it is so convenient to be able to "photoshop" a picture. Such image processing tools are very sophisticated and have taken engineers years to understand how images are interpreted by the viewer and how colors and pixels work together to give us the illusion of seeing an image that looks so real.

What is really fascinating is that our brains and the eye must do similar things in real time! We know that the eye sends signals to the brain from each rod or cone which are the individual pixels of the image we see in our brain. And the cones have the ability to detect red, green or blue wavelengths of light. This is the exact same thing a digital camera does! But furthermore our brains must then take millions of these signals and put them together into an integrated image and then do pattern recognition so that we know what it is we are seeing and can compare it with our image memory. Once you see an image it becomes a permanent part of our memory. Perhaps a bit fuzzy as time goes on, but we still can immediately recognize the house we grew up in after many years away, or of a friend's face we haven't seen in years.

The significance of this is that not only must there be a way to capture photons of light, focus them, detect them, and then send an electrical signal down the optic nerve to the brain, but there must also be a way to process that information to form a mental picture. Furthermore do this so fast that a baseball player can see the stitches on a fast ball coming at him at 90+ miles an hour and coordinate all this information into a split second muscular response strike the ball with a bat.

Praise God for the miracle of our eyesight!

The eye's retina is located in the back of the eye and is responsible for receiving the focused light and generating signals to send to the brain. The rods and cones are packed side by side and have their nerve endings exiting out the front of the retina. These individual nerves are then routed to a central location where nerves exit out the back of the eye forming the optical nerve, a thick cord which carries the signals to the brain. (that's where your blind spot is). This means the light has to pass through this web of nerves before it reaches the light sensing rods and cones. Well the evolutionists say this represents a bad design and point to this as evidence for their theory since no good creator would ever use such a poor design. Such a creator would obviously turn the rods and cones around so that the nerve endings exited through the rear of the eye. This way, the light would not have any interference in reaching the light sensitive cells.

But is it really bad design? Turns out, the rods and cones are attached to the Retinal Pigment Epithelium (RPE), a blood engorged membrane which is responsible for delivering nutrients to the rods and cones. What benefits are their to having the rods attached in a reverse orientation to the RPE?

1. The light sensitive end of the rod which is closest to to the RPE at the rear has a huge demand for nutrients since these cells are so active. Furthermore, their is much damage to these cells from the light which strikes them. Have you ever noticed how a car's paint begins to fade and peel if left outside in the sun for long periods of time? It is the energetic rays of the sun which does this damage. Same thing with the eye. So not only do these cells need nutrients to supply the energy needed for their activity, but also for the constant rebuilding necessary due to damage. The rods are place in an inverted position so that the most needed area of the cell is closed to the blood supply.
   
2. Also you know how light can warm things up, even your skin can get hot and needs to sweat to carry away the excess heat build up. Same thing again with the rods of the eye which are cooled by the blood flow away from the RPE which acts as a radiator.
   
3. Finally, the RPE is very dark in color. If it were to be placed on the inside of the eye in front of the rods so the they could be turned in the "right" direction, no light could pass through at all since the RPE is opaque. This dark color at the back of the eye serves a good purpose too. It acts as a light absorber so that no stray photons of light bounce around like they would off a lighter surface. Our camera lenses are all painted flat black on the inside surfaces to accomplish the same thing.

So it turns out that this is not such a bad design after all. In fact the so called "good design" the scientists argue for would indeed be a very poor design. Of course the final point is that this so called "bad design" works marvelously well!

We are indeed fearfully and wonderfully made, and that we should know very well. [Psalm 139]

Darwin said:

“If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely breakdown"

Darwin thought about the eye a lot. He came up with a scenario illustrating how the eye socket could have formed. The diagram shows on the left side a light sensitive spot (purple) on the skin of an animal. You can see that as oblique light rays shine on the spot, all areas of the spot are struck equally consequently the spot has no way to determine the direction of the light. But suppose the animal's light sensitive spot began to mutate into a cavity. Then the angled light would not strike all parts of the light sensitive spot. One side would be in shadow. This way the spot could deliver enough information to the animal's brain such that it could interpolate which direction the light is coming from. While the light sensitive spot capable of sensing light and darkness is beneficial, this directional capability would be even more so. Darwin then imagined the cavity getting larger, forming into a socket, eventually capturing a gel like substance which eventually becomes an eyeball complete with a lens. Now I know I went fast on that last one but that was left up to our imagination to figure how that happened.

Also notice how Darwin started with a light sensitive spot. Easy to say but would it be easy to do with random mutations and natural selection? Take a look at the five minute video of how a photon of light is captured by a rod in the retina of the eye and turned into a nerve signal to the brain.

Some light sensitive spot, huh? Have we sufficiently demonstrated such a complex organ for Darwin's challenge? Well of course Darwin did know know what we know today but he did say:

“To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.”

If we stopped there, you might think that Darwin was stumped. But he is really just setting up a strawman to knock down so that he can praise his own theory. So Darwin does not admit he is stumped; he goes on to say:

“In living bodies, variations will cause the slight modifications, generation will multiply them almost infinitely, and natural selection will pick out with unerring skill each improvement. Let this process go on for millions of years; and during each year on millions of individuals of many kinds; and may we not believe that a living optical instrument might thus be formed as superior to one of glass as the works of the Creator are to those of man?"

"May we not believe...", that's pretty bold. If only he could see how the eye really works. Oh yeah, that's right, now he knows the truth.