No Designer Needed?

Then in high school I was told that no designer was needed: ‘It all just happened. Chemicals in earth’s primitive atmosphere were shattered by lightning and ultraviolet rays, their atoms recombined to form ever-more-complex molecules, finally a living cell appeared. As it multiplied, random changes occurred, and thousands of millions of years later life in its myriads of forms covered the earth. Man is its latest production.’

They made evolution sound so simple. Maybe too simple. I clung to my belief in creation, but I didn’t want to be gullible. I wanted to be logical, to keep my mind open, to know the truth. I began to read science. I learned many things. My eyes were opened wider than ever to the wonders of nature. The more I learned the more I marveled. But the more design I saw, the more my mind balked at believing that random change and blind chance could create what brilliant men in their laboratories could not duplicate​—not even the tiniest bacterium, much less the flowers, the bluebirds, the V’s of geese.

During my years of study at both high school and university, I exposed myself to all the science I could get​—chemistry, physics, biology, mathematics. Thereafter I continued to read books and magazine articles by evolutionists. It was still unconvincing. The evolutionary statements flowed so glibly, too glibly in view of the assertions that accompanied them.

That was years ago. This is the 1980’s. Maybe now there is more proof and less assertion. Maybe it’s time for another look. I focused on one aspect​—how life got started on the earth. After all, if evolution cannot make a case for the first living cell, how can it sustain its claim to produce living creatures with trillions of cells​—and you and me with our one hundred trillion each?

For my investigation I selected recent books by scientists with impeccable credentials​—all evolutionists. I would adopt Jesus’ way of dealing with the false religionists: “By your words you will be declared righteous, and by your words you will be condemned.” (Matthew 12:37) My research limited itself to evolution’s major steps en route to life: (1) a primitive atmosphere, (2) an organic soup, (3) proteins, (4) nucleotides, (5) nucleic acids called DNA, and (6) a membrane.

Assumptions About Early Atmosphere

First needed, an atmosphere on early earth that, when bombarded with lightning or ultraviolet rays or other energy sources, would produce simple molecules necessary for life. In 1953 Stanley Miller reported on just such an experiment. He selected a hydrogen-rich atmosphere for early earth, passed an electric spark through it, and produced 2 simpler amino acids of the 20 required to make proteins.⁠¹ No one knows, however, what the early earth atmosphere was like.⁠² Why did Miller choose this one? He admitted prejudice in favor of it because it was the only one wherein “the synthesis of compounds of biological interest takes place.”⁠³

I discovered that experiments are often rigged to give the desired results. Many scientists acknowledge that the experimenter can ‘manipulate the outcome profoundly,’ and ‘his intelligence can be involved so as to prejudice the experiment.’⁠⁴ Miller’s atmosphere was used in most of the experiments that followed his, not because it was logical or even probable, but because “it was conducive to evolutionary experiments,” and “the success of the laboratory experiments recommends it.”⁠⁵

Nevertheless, evolutionists hailed Miller’s feat as a great breakthrough. Many experiments followed, using various energy sources and different raw materials. Through much manipulation and doctoring, and ignoring the conditions existing in a natural environment, scientists in their rigidly controlled laboratory experiments obtained additional organic chemicals relevant to life. They made a Mount Everest out of Miller’s molehill. It opened the way for an organic soup of life’s building blocks to accumulate in the ocean. Or did it?

The Organic Soup Is a Myth

Miller’s molehill was flawed, and with its demise their Mount Everest collapsed. Miller used a spark to break up the simple chemicals in his atmosphere to allow amino acids to form. But this spark would even more quickly have shattered the amino acids! So again Miller rigged his experiment: He built a trap in his apparatus to store the acids as soon as they formed, to save them from the spark. Scientists claim, however, that in the early earth the amino acids would have escaped the lightning or ultraviolet rays by plunging into the ocean. Thus evolutionists seek to save the soup.

But for several reasons, to no avail. Amino acids are not stable in water and in the ancient ocean would exist in only negligible quantities. If the organic soup had ever existed, some of its compounds would have been trapped in sedimentary rocks, but in spite of 20 years of searching, “the earliest rocks have failed to yield any evidence of a prebiotic soup.” Yet “the existence of a prebiotic soup is crucial.” So “it comes as . . . a shock to realize that there is absolutely no positive evidence for its existence.”⁠⁶

The Chances of a Protein Forming

Allow the soup that nature disallows. Millions of amino acids in the soup, hundreds of different kinds, roughly half of them in a left-handed form and half right-handed. Would the amino acids now connect up in long chains to make proteins? Would only the 20 kinds needed be selected by chance out of the hundreds of kinds in the soup? And from these 20 kinds, would chance select only the left-handed forms found in living organisms? And then line them up in the right order for each distinctive protein and in the exact shape required for each one?⁠⁷ Only by a miracle.

A typical protein has about one hundred amino acids and contains many thousands of atoms. In its life processes a living cell uses some 200,000 proteins. Two thousand of them are enzymes, special proteins without which the cell cannot survive. What are the chances of these enzymes forming at random in the soup​—if you had the soup? One chance in 10^40,000. This is 1 followed by 40,000 zeros. Written out in full, it would fill 14 pages of this magazine. Or, stated differently, the chance is the same as rolling dice and getting 50,000 sixes in a row. And that is for only 2,000 of the 200,000 needed for a living cell.⁠⁸ So to get them all, roll 5,000,000 more sixes in a row!

By now I felt that I was beating a dead horse. But I continued. Assuming that the soup did give us proteins, what about nucleotides? Leslie Orgel of Salk Institute in California has indicated nucleotides to be “one of the major problems in prebiotic synthesis.”⁠⁹ They are needed to make the nucleic acids (DNA, RNA), also called an overwhelming difficulty. Incidentally, proteins cannot be assembled without the nucleic acids, nor can nucleic acids form without proteins.⁠¹⁰ It’s the old riddle in chemical garb: Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

But let’s set that mountain aside and have evolutionist Robert Shapiro, professor of chemistry at New York University and a specialist in DNA research, dispose of the chance formation of nucleotides and nucleic acids in early earth’s environment:

“Whenever two amino acids unite, a water molecule is released. Two molecules of water must be set free in assembling a nucleotide from its components, and additional water is released in combining nucleotides to form nucleic acids. Unfortunately, the formation of water in an environment that is full of it is the chemical equivalent of bringing sand to the Sahara. It is unfavorable, and requires the expenditure of energy. Such processes do not readily take place on their own. In fact, the reverse reactions are the ones that occur spontaneously. Water happily attacks large biological molecules. It pries nucleotides apart from each other, breaks sugar-to-phosphate bonds, and severs bases from sugars.”⁠¹¹

The final step of the six listed at the outset: a membrane. Without it the cell could not exist. It must be protected from water, and it is the water-repellent fats of the membrane that do this.⁠¹² But to form the membrane a “protein synthetic apparatus” is needed, and this “protein synthetic apparatus” can function only if it is held together by a membrane.⁠¹³ That chicken-and-egg problem all over again!

Molecular Biology Sounds Its Death Knell

The evolutionists’ dream was discovery of a supersimple first living cell. Molecular biology has turned their dream into a nightmare. Michael Denton, specialist in molecular biology, sounded its death knell:

“Molecular biology has shown that even the simplest of all living systems on earth today, bacterial cells, are exceedingly complex objects. Although the tiniest bacterial cells are incredibly small, weighing less than 10⁻¹²gms, each is in effect a veritable micro-miniaturized factory containing thousands of exquisitely designed pieces of intricate molecular machinery, made up altogether of one hundred thousand million atoms, far more complicated than any machine built by man and absolutely without parallel in the nonliving world.

“Molecular biology has also shown that the basic design of the cell system is essentially the same in all living systems on earth from bacteria to mammals. In all organisms the roles of DNA, mRNA and protein are identical. The meaning of the genetic code is also virtually identical in all cells. The size, structure and component design of the protein synthetic machinery is practically the same in all cells. In terms of their basic biochemical design, therefore no living system can be thought of as being primitive or ancestral with respect to any other system, nor is there the slightest empirical hint of an evolutionary sequence among all the incredibly diverse cells on earth.”⁠¹⁴

Not surprising, then, that Harold Morowitz, a Yale University physicist, has calculated that the chances of getting the simplest living bacterium by random changes is 1 in 1 followed by 100,000,000,000 zeros. “This number is so large,” Shapiro said, “that to write it in conventional form we would require several hundred thousand blank books.” He charges that scientists committed to the chemical evolution of life ignore the increasing evidence and “have chosen to hold it as a truth beyond question, thereby enshrining it as mythology.”⁠¹⁵

My conclusion after all of this: Without the right atmosphere, no organic soup. Without the organic soup, no amino acids. Without amino acids, no proteins. Without proteins, no nucleotides. Without nucleotides, no DNA. Without DNA, no cell that reproduces itself. Without a covering membrane, no living cell. And without intelligent design and direction, no life on earth.