August 2, 2015. Could Evolutionary Theory Provide the Strongest Scientific Evidence for a Creator?
Scientific evidence for the evolutionary history of life strengthens the case for a creator. Let me explain how.
Was the universe created, or does it just exist? For as long as people have walked the earth, they’ve been asking this question and coming to the conclusion that some creative power must have made everything because it’s too orderly to have just randomly come into existence on its own. The natural human response to this conclusion is to worship that creator, try to please him, and ask for favors. People create religious practices in an effort to please their creator, or to try manipulating him, or even use him to manipulate people and gain power over them.
Then there’s always a handful of people who decide not to believe in the creator. They want to make their own decisions without worrying about pleasing some mysterious god, or they’re unhappy with life and don’t want to believe some powerful being made it this way on purpose, or they don’t like the religions people have invented, etc. People who refuse to accept the notion of a creator have the difficulty of explaining where everything came from. They usually just say it exists on its own. There’s no need for a creator.
So, we’re left with these opposing viewpoints, neither of which can be proven wrong scientifically. Both sides try to use reason to make their view appear to be the only rational option. One says a creator must have made everything because it’s too organized to have just come randomly into existence on its own, and the other says, no, we don’t need a creator, everything just exists on its own.
That’s where we turn to evidence to try resolving these differing opinions. In modern history, scientists have cataloged enormous amounts of evidence that seems to disprove all the detailed creation accounts of the various religions of the world. This trend has increased the proportion of atheists who reject the notion of a creator, but they are still a small minority. People seem to have a natural desire to believe in a creator—an intuitive notion that recognizes the existence of something beyond our physical universe.
People cite all kinds of evidence to support this belief: fulfilled prophecy, visions, miracles, out-of-body experiences, answered prayers, near death experiences, etc. Science hasn’t been able to settle the argument because most of this evidence is beyond scientific testing. Scientifically it still boils down to, “How likely is it that the orderly universe we live in just came into existence without some intelligent controlling influence?”
The list of unlikely circumstances is endless! In order for our universe to exist the initial conditions for the big bang needed to be so precisely tuned that atheist astronomers speculate that there must be a nearly infinite number of universes. Even if there were hundreds of trillions of universes, the mathematical probability of one forming that can produce galaxies and stars and planets like ours is nearly zero. Then consider our planet. The probability of randomly producing a planet just the right size and distance from a star with the right chemical composition to support life as we know it is nearly zero, even with 200 billion galaxies in the universe. Then consider the probability of a chemical soup randomly producing a self-replicating molecule that can evolve to life. It’s practically impossible. All these events are so improbable that the fact we are here seems to be a series of miracles! But that’s just the beginning.
If you believe life evolved from a self-replicating molecule, it requires millions of miraculous mutations to produce the life forms we have today. The fossil record seems to indicate that life evolved over time, but it is so full of miraculous leaps from one life form to another that atheistic scientists have to admit there’s something mysterious happening that they’re at a loss to explain. For decades biologists have struggled for an explanation of how DNA can make the leaps found in the fossil records without the controlling influence of an intelligent, powerful, god-like designer.
So, if you believe Darwin’s theory of evolution where life changes over long periods of time through mutations in DNA molecules, you’re still faced with the same questions that drove primitive humans to a belief in a creator-god. Only now you can perform a statistical analysis to quantify how impossible our existence is without a creator. Objective analysis of the evidence makes the case for a creator stronger that it has ever been.
In summary:
The time line is way too short for random mutations to produce changes recorded in the fossil records.
There are way too many huge leaps in capabilities. It’s unfathomable that small, random mutations could ever produce many features found in life forms today.
There must have been a creative force to get that first replicating molecule started, to guide mutations, and create leaps in DNA programming. It’s the most logical explanation.
As I write this, I can envision atheist readers rolling their eyes and thinking, “There goes another irrational theist claiming God exists because there’s something in nature that he doesn’t understand.” Atheists use that line of reasoning to discredit theists a lot, but their logic is self-defeating.
The implication is that ancient people made up gods to explain stuff they didn’t understand. They had no idea what lightning was, so they assumed some God must make it. Now that we understand how thunderstorms create the electric charge that results in lightning, we can give up on the silly notion of God. But belief in God isn’t just based on lightning. In order to prove God doesn’t exist, science needs to answer a lot of questions. Well, science has answered a lot of questions. We now understand an enormous quantity of physical phenomenon that used to be attributed to God. Atheists want us to accept that science has proven that we don’t need God to explain anything.
The problem with that line of reasoning is that science has created more questions than it’s answered and proven that we really shouldn’t exist in a quantifiable way. The more we learn, the more we see how improbably our existence is. Darwinian evolution shows this more than anything. There are more seemingly impossible leaps in the Darwinian theory of life than anything we’ve discovered in the universe.
Scientific evidence for the cosmological history of the universe and the evolutionary history of life may give strong reason to doubt the literal interpretation of many creation stories, but they strengthen the case for a creator. The first few chapters in Genesis may not be literal, but there’s very good reason to study them as a story given by the creator of the universe, with metaphorical meaning that applies to our lives.