The Delusion of Evolution

The design revolution

The Delusion of

EVOLUTION Latest scientific evidence supports the theory of Intelligent Design

INSIDE • What your biology teacher never told you p7 • Nature’s nanotechnology shows every sign of design p10

• Fine tuning of universe demonstrates astounding design p35

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• New research shows mutations don’t cause evolution p33

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• So-called ‘apemen’ skulls found to be ‘modern’ humans p22

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• Richard Dawkins confesses he can’t prove evolution p21

ED an I d T ex I pa O nd N

• Why Cambrian Explosion fossils rock Darwin’s theory p16

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The Design Revolution | House of cards

Evolution A house of cards

There is a war brewing in academic circles – and it affects everyone from the roadsweeper in Rotherham to the systems analyst in Seattle. It’s a battle for control of the minds of everyone in the world. And the fact is – we are all being led astray.

The academic establishment is blindly pro-evolution – the theory that life arose by chance – but it is fighting a losing battle to maintain the crumbling facade.

Time after time evolutionists answer questions about their evidence with outdated, highly improbable, intelligence-insulting school textbook examples. Or they hide behind an arrogant, patronising “we know the world looks designed, but only intellectual pygmies or religious fanatics believe it really is.”

Tell that to the PhD-level scientists who are developing ‘Intelligent Design Theory’ ‘Even the greatest professors of Darwinism cannot prove that evolution has actually happened.’ because they have long ago seen the impossibility of explaining the mind-boggling complexity of life through ‘chance’. Not only that, they have looked into the code for life, DNA, and realised that only an intelligence could have written that code. It’s made up of information – 2

and information can only be created by intelligence.

Now the new researchers have asked evolutionists to provide a logical explanation for how their theory could actually work – and ‘If evolution were to be subjected to the same rigour of investigation, it would be rejected .’ exposed the fact that even the greatest professors of Darwinism cannot prove that evolution has actually happened. They just assume it has and then impose that theory upon the evidence, rather than letting the evidence speak for itself. For if even the simplest organic cell could speak, it would shout ‘I’m designed!’

If evolution were allowed to be subjected to the same rigour of investigation that other sciences have to endure, it would be rejected. It could not survive in any other sphere of science. It does not have enough scientific basis to even qualify as a theory – in reality the most it can be described as, under normal

scientific rules, is a hypothesis. And a flimsy one at that.

But for a century‑and‑ a‑half evolution has been paraded as a ‘fact’ of earth’s history by the Media and biologists. And in a sinister suppression of the truth, evolutionists refuse to allow any informed debate on the issue. Almost all academic journals are a totally closed door to anyone – no matter how highly qualified – who dares to question the theory.

It’s time for evolutionists to ‘put up or shut up’. Einstein said that the harmony of natural law reveals an incredible intelligence behind the universe, and hundreds of scientists around the world now agree.

In this booklet we give just a taste of the revolution taking place. It’s a battle for freedom of thought. And for the right to search for a proper scientific method of discovering the truth about life’s origin – rather than settling for the pretence of the atheistic philosophy of evolution.

It’s all a big con. But the house of cards is falling. And it may happen sooner than you think.

Andrew Halloway Editor

Thinking outside the box | The Design Revolution

Thinking outside the box Don’t believe everything you see on TV! Just about any David Attenborough programme and many other series on nature are hugely popular, tapping our curiosity both about the natural world around us and where we came from. But in this country, until recently, they have been saturated with evolution – allowing no other view on origins a look-in. Yet the case for evolution is far from established – whatever the TV tries to brainwash us into believing. ‘Evolutionism’ is as much a ‘faith’ as any religion, says author and lecturer Joe Boot.

I WELL remember my school days and the content of my ‘scientific education’. Certainly the overriding impression was that macro-evolution (grand scale evolution) was the epitome of good science.

In fact, evolution from my geology teacher was synonymous with science itself. No alternative theory was ever put to us and any other suggestion was met with scorn.

I have spoken to many people – from teenagers upwards – and discovered that my own experience in this is commonplace.

Even in many academic circles where we congratulate ourselves on our educational freedom, evolution is all too often assumed to be true and people are consistently kept in ignorance by a biased scientific establishment. Yet Darwinian evolution in all its current modes is only a hypothesis and one which is in considerable scientific trouble.

All scientific theories by definition must be tentative and always open to change as new evidence comes to light.

If the scientific community makes a theory into a self-

Too often evolution on TV is fantasy dressed up as fact

evident ‘truth’ it then becomes anti-science and a fixed box into which all evidence must be fitted.

Was my geology teacher right? Is evolution basically synonymous with pure science?

Now some scientists will argue that as a scientific hypothesis, evolution is conceivable, but the idea that it is one of the established truths of science

(if there is such a thing) is simply not true.

Science itself operates in two broad categories – operational science and historical science. The first concerns our present technological progress, where we increase our understanding of how to manipulate certain material elements for our own use – e.g. silicon chips.

However, historical science. which hypothesises about the past, is a different thing altogether. The two types of science cannot be regarded in the same way.

As an example, we do not blast people into space based on a ‘strained hypothesis’ that the rockets will work properly.

The technology is rigorously tested and proven. But how 3

The Design Revolution | Thinking outside the box

“We take the side of science (naturalistic) in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs... in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated ‘just so’ stories, because we have an a priori commitment to materialism… and that materialism is an absolute for we cannot allow a divine foot in the door.”

Professor Richard Lewontin Leading geneticist

the universe began, the origin of our space-time continuum and how people came to be on the planet earth is not testable in the same way.

We cannot experimentally test or observe the mechanism, or the power that brought the universe into existence. Much of the popular confusion with regard to ‘science’ lies in confusing these two areas of investigation and giving them the same weight.

My mobile phone ‘works’ brilliantly we say, as does my email and palmtop (most of the time!). So when the BBC screen ‘Walking With Dinosaurs’ and talk as though it’s a known fact that the earth is billions of years old, during which time life spontaneously evolved from a primordial soup, we assume that these assertions must ‘work’ equally well scientifically – but they don’t!

As these assumptions are so frequently heard they appear to be authoritative. Add to that the deep voice of the narrator 4

and the impressive computer graphics and we are convinced.

Yet the evidence simply does not establish these claims.

Scientific knowledge has very real limits. The things we state with confidence because they are accepted today, may not be tomorrow.

Science is essentially a tool for acquiring knowledge about realities. It seeks to investigate, as best it can, what exists and arrive at objective facts based on observation.

Every theory in science requires basic assumptions that cannot be proved and all investigation proceeds from these assumptions. These are metaphysical (beyond physics) assumptions – or ‘beliefs’ – and we must all ‘believe’ certain things before we can speak of science. For example, the ‘belief’ that the universe can be understood.

All of our ‘science’ proceeds from assumptions that seem plausible to us. Empirical science therefore, has nothing ‘absolute’ about it and we would do well to remember that. In the light of this my well-meaning schoolteacher who equated evolution with science itself profoundly misunderstood the nature of scientific knowledge.

‘Darwinian evolution is only a hypothesis and one which is in considerable scientific trouble.’

The idea that physical evidence speaks for itself is a fallacy. It must be interpreted according to a framework or worldview. Within this framework we theorise about the past and seek to gather evidence that will support a given theory.

The evolutionist’s worldview assumes that everything in the universe can be explained through a closed system of material causes and effects, without reference to

Thinking outside the box | The Design Revolution

any creator or intelligence.

The data collected through scientific enquiry is therefore filtered through this lens. But someone else may analyse the observational evidence and conclude that it is most logical to see a creator behind the universe – because there has to be a first cause. Nothing can ‘create itself’. So there must be a creator.

So we see that underlying this question of random evolution is a philosophical ‘belief’ that must be acknowledged. Is the evidence being assessed reliably to test these two frameworks? Are nonevolutionary models given a fair hearing?

Science writer Boyce Rensberger admits, “The fact is that scientists are not really as objective and dispassionate in their work as they would like to think. Most scientists get their idea about how the world works not through a rigorously logical process but through hunches and wild guesses.”

This is to be expected.

Scientists are only human after all – and sometimes a hunch pays off. But are ‘hunches’ admitted to by the scientific community when questioned about their guarded theory of

“Virtually all the fundamentals of the orthodox evolutionary faith have shown themselves to be either of extremely doubtful validity or simply contrary to fact... so basic are these erroneous assumptions that the whole theory is now largely maintained in spite of, rather than because of, the evidence...”

Dr C Custance Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute and Member of the New York Academy of Sciences

evolution? Generally speaking, absolutely not!

Evolution is often assumed as self-evident without so much as a footnote concerning its flaws. But in a refreshing moment of intellectual honesty, geneticist Professor Richard Lewontin wrote the following: “We take the side of science (naturalistic) in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfil many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated ‘just so’ stories, because we have an a priori commitment to materialism.

“It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but on the contrary, that we are forced to by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce

material explanations, no matter how counter intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is an absolute for we cannot allow a divine foot in the door.”1 This is an astonishing admission. But from a leading evolutionary scientist it makes absolutely clear what many philosophers, scientists and lay persons have been saying for years – evolution is an entrenched dogma that has been so jealousy guarded that it is practically immune to all criticism, scientific or otherwise.

The supposed scientific key to the origin of man and the universe has become itself anti-science. Consider the words of the late anthropologist Dr C Custance, author of the ten-volumed ‘The Doorway Papers’, Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute and Member of the New York Academy of Sciences: “Virtually all the fundamentals of the orthodox

evolutionary faith have shown themselves to be either of extremely doubtful validity or simply contrary to fact... so basic are these erroneous assumptions that the whole theory is now largely maintained in spite of rather than because of the evidence...

“As a consequence for a great majority of students, and for ‘the public’, it has ceased to be a subject of debate. Because it is both incapable of proof and yet may not be questioned, it is virtually untouched by data which challenge it in any way.

It has become in the strictest sense irrational...

“Information or concepts which challenge the theory are almost never given a fair hearing. Evolutionary philosophy has indeed become a state of mind – one might almost say a kind of mental prison – rather than a scientific attitude... To equate one particular interpretation of the data with the data itself is evidence of mental confusion.”2 ‘Evolutionary philosophy has become a state of mind rather than a scientific attitude.’

Anyone taking the time to look into this matter in any detail will quickly discover that at the very least ‘evolutionism’ is as much ‘faith’ as any so-called religious position.

The main difference being that evolutionism puts a blind faith in chance, granting creative power to time itself, while others look at the evidence and see design behind the universe. Reason is surely not on the side of blind faith.

1 ‘Billions and Billions of Demons’, NY Times Book Reviews, 9/1/1997 2 ‘Evolution: An Irrational Faith’, in Evolution or Creation? Vol.4 – The Doorway Papers, Zondervan, 1976

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The Design Revolution | Intelligent Design

A new theory of ‘Intelligent Design’ pulls the rug from under evolution Research proves organisms are a product of design – not blind chance

Before Evolution was a twinkle in the eye of Darwin, most scientists believed that the world was created. After Darwin’s rise to success, those who still believed in a Designer were pushed to the margins.

Billions of pounds have been spent to try to find evidence for evolution in the 150 years since – yet nothing solid has shown up. In fact, modern evolution theory is far removed from Darwin’s original idea because it has had to be revised so many times to try to get around the sheer lack of evidence.

But once so many people’s careers and reputations rested upon the theory, vested interests meant that few scientists were prepared to risk losing their livelihoods by considering alternatives. Then, advances in technology began to show biologists in more and more detail just how complex and beautifully arranged even the so-called ‘simplest’ of organisms were. By the 1990s, some who had seen this amazing complexity began to break their silence and speak again of design, at risk of ridicule from the evolutionary authorities.

In the last ten or fifteen years, those same scientists have developed a theory that is much more logically satisfying than evolution and explains the evidence much better – Intelligent Design theory (ID). As a result, it is gaining ground – and the establishment is rocking. But, due to the stranglehold over the 6

media that evolutionists maintain, few people in this country have ever heard of it.

One of the key players in the development of ID is Dr Willam Dembski. William is an Associate Research Professor at Baylor University, has done postdoctoral work in mathematics at MIT, in physics at the University of Chicago, and in computer science at Princeton University. He also holds a BA in psychology, an MS in statistics, a PhD in philosophy, a doctorate in mathematics and a Master of Divinity.

Dembski describes the new theory: “What Intelligent Design does is identify signs of intelligence or design behind biology, using precise criteria.

It is an ambitious scientific programme. But we want to do more than just identify the effects of intelligence in biology, we want to see if we can get biological insights through ID that we couldn’t get otherwise.”

Scientists use such criteria in SETI – the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence.

They use statistical methods of determining whether a pattern of signals from space, picked up by radio telescopes, is the product of random chance or if it comes from intelligent organisation. But when similar criteria are used to identify intelligence behind highly complex animal or plant structures, suddenly it is controversial!

Dembski, as a statistician, is better placed to understand the signs of intelligence than evolutionists. He says, “Now, with ID, you can look at

“I think it’s only a matter of time.

I think there will be a Berlin Wall collapse [of evolution].

It could happen fast.”

Dr William Dembski

certain biological structures in a new way. The most popular one that’s been investigated is the bacterial flagellum. It’s a little bi-directional motordriven propeller on the backs of certain bacteria, a marvel of nano-engineering, and so we’ve started to analyse systems like that and argue for their intelligent design.

“For Darwinists to disprove ID, they would have to get a detailed testable stepby-step scenario of how these systems could have formed according to some Darwinian trajectory or pathway, and if they did that for a number

of such systems, I think ID would crumble.

“But the fact is that none of these systems has been amenable to Darwinian explanation. Yet this is constantly hailed as the theory without which nothing in biology is supposed to make sense!

“Evolutionists are willing to believe anything about natural selection and not give ID a chance. The issue is to look fairly at both sides of the question and try to form a reasonable conclusion, and not just one that fulfils your pre-existing views.

“We have the better argument, so I think increasingly people are going to realise that. But another thing which is going to work for us—and I think this is why I have a sense of inevitability that we will succeed with this—is that people’s intuitions start with design, they don’t start out as Darwinists. You have to be educated out of design.

Even Richard Dawkins admits that ‘biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.’

“So we’ve got a younger generation that is now going through the educational process. Darwinism is totally status quo, whereas youth thrives on rebellion. I think it’s only a matter of time. I think there will be a Berlin Wall collapse.

It could happen fast.”

Biology in schools | The Design Revolution

Things that your biology teacher never told you School textbooks contain a series of ‘proofs’ for evolution that have all been debunked – yet they continue to be published as fact

Did You know that the evidence for evolution that is still taught in biology classes today is based on out-of-date science, and even hoaxes?

The study of evolution has been compulsory in GCSE and ‘A’ level studies for many years, and so most people with a scientific secondary education or above are familiar with the more popular ‘proofs’ of evolution.

They’ve occupied textbooks for decades. They include: the Miller-Urey attempt to

recreate the chemicals for life; the tree of life with its implied common ancestor for all life forms; similar structures (homology); ‘gill slits’ in human embryos; the peppered moth story of natural selection; and the ‘dinosaur-bird’ Archaeopteryx. But they’re all discredited. Some are actually fraudulent while others are, at best, misleading. And evolutionists know it. Yet they are apparently quite happy for text books to continue promoting such deception.

Tree of life The tree of life is ubiquitous in evolutionary literature. The idea that all of life is descended from a single common ancestor billions of years ago is how many would define evolution.

But the actual evidence argues strongly against any such single common ancestor, and most animal life forms appear suddenly without ancestors in what is known as the Cambrian explosion of nearly 543 million years ago, according to evolutionary dating. The

Cambrian rocks contain such a huge variety of fossils that evolution would need hundreds of millions of years to create such diversity. But evolutionists’ own estimates suggest all this change took place in less than 5-10 million years – and they are at a loss to explain it. Yet the tree of life, showing slow gradual changes, remains.

Homology Another critical evidence for evolution is homologous or similar structures.

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The Design Revolution | Biology in schools

For example, the forelimbs of all mammals, from bats to whales to horses to humans, possess the same basic bone structure. This is routinely hailed as evidence that these structures descended from a common ancestor. The differences between bats and whales simply demonstrates different adaptive stories, but the limb structures are basically the same.

But there is a circular argument going on here. Homology is the theory used to explain why some structures have the same design - they all arose from a common ancestor. It’s an assumption with no proof. But then homology itself is used as an evidence of evolution. How can an unproven theory be used as evidence?!

Yet textbooks continue to perpetuate this myth that has been exposed for decades.

Haeckel’s embryos Perhaps the most inexcusable ‘proof’ of all is the idea that the development of embryos reveals the history of their evolution. Originally pointed out

by Ernst Haeckel in the 19th century, and used by Darwin in ‘On the Origin of Species’, it seemed like a powerful argument. Haeckel believed that vertebrate embryos pass through a remarkably similar

stage early in development and only later diverge to the specific form. This was seen as evidence for a common ancestor. And human embryos were said to show how we have evolved from fish because of so-called ‘gill slits’ in our embryos. The only problem is that Haeckel’s embryo drawings were a hoax. And this has been known for over a hundred years!

Embryologists have long admitted that Haeckel ‘adapted’ the evidence. Vertebrate embryos never pass through a similar stage, and human embryos don’t have ‘gills’. What’s more, Haeckel left out the fact that embryos pass through remarkably different pathways to arrive at the supposedly similar intermediate stage. The fraud was only ‘rediscovered’ and acknowledged by the wider scientific community in1997, though embryologists had known about it for years. This shows the lengths to which supposedly impartial scientists are prepared to go to defend evolution.

The Miller-Urey experiment This purports to show that molecules necessary for life could have arisen by simple chemical reactions on an early earth. The Miller-Urey experi-

Illustration of a DNA double helix

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Stanley L. Miller – creator of a famous attempt to reproduce the ‘building blocks’ of life

ment uses an atmosphere of reduced gases: ammonia, methane, water vapour and hydrogen. Then it adds some energy in the form of sparks, and produces, as Carl Sagan once said, “the stuff of life”.

This experiment dates back to 1953, but for the last 20 or 30 years origin of life researchers have realised that this atmosphere does not reflect that of the early earth. Many textbooks will begrudgingly admit this, but include the experiment anyway. The reason: no other simulated atmosphere works. It seems that the textbook writers believe that since they ‘know’ evolution happened somehow, they don’t have to represent the facts accurately!

In any case, the experiment ends up with both ‘righthanded’ and ‘left-handed’ amino acids, whereas life forms only have the ‘left-handed’ variety.

The peppered moth In 1840s industrial England, a dark or melanic form of the peppered moth was increasing in numbers. By 1900, the dark form comprised as much as 90% of some groups of the moth. In the 1950s, experiments by Bernard Kettlewell

showed that this change from the light, spotted or ‘peppered’ variety to the dark moth was due to environmental factors.

The surface of tree trunks had changed from a splotchy, lichen-covered bark to a mostly dark colour due to pollution. Deposits from smog and smoke had killed the lichens and covered the bark with soot. So the lighter moths, resting on the trees, were more easily spotted by birds hunting for their breakfast, and declined. The trees now provided better camouflage for the darker moths, so they grew in number.

This story was hailed a legendary example of evolution.

But within 20 years of Kettlewell’s work, cracks began to appear. As stricter air quality standards returned in later years, the lichens returned and the peppered variety began to dominate again. But the theory really unravelled when it was observed that moths of both varieties never rest on tree trunks in normal life! Moths are not active during daylight, so how could birds find them on tree trunks?

All the photographs of moths on trees had been staged by Kettlewell. He released his moths near to trees in daylight hours, when the moths are naturally inactive.

They simply found the nearest resting place to go back to sleep and the birds gobbled up the non-camouflaged moths.

Yet many biologists continue to insist that it shows evolution in action. “To explain the complexities would only confuse students,” they say! The truth is that even schoolkids would see the holes in the theory.

Archaeopteryx The reptile-like bird, Archaeopteryx, is probably the most famous ‘missing link’. This German fossil is of a reptilian skeleton with wings and feath-

Biology in schools | The Design Revolution

The claim that evolution is ‘happening today’ is just wishful thinking

The famous Archaeopteryx fossil – the first evidence used to claim that dinosaurs evolved into birds. But it is now known to be simply an unusual bird – not a ‘missing link’

ers – a link between dinosaurs and birds – an evolutionist’s dream! But as happens with so many missing links or transitionary fossils, later research undermines the concept. It is now universally viewed as just an extinct bird, but still evolutionists claim it was an early offshoot of the real ancestor.

And what of more recent bird-like dinosaur finds? Curiously, many come from much later geologic periods than ‘Archy’ yet are still hailed as ancestors! This is based on structural similarities, despite their existence after Archaeopteryx. Never mind that the child exists before the parent.

But anyone who objects is just accused of oversimplifying things.

In 1999, ‘National Geographic’ was embarrassed to find that a Chinese dinosaur/ bird fossil they publicised turned out to be a fake – it

was two fossils glued together!

Yet the magazine had asked evolutionists to verify it before they went into print. But those same evolutionists had the cheek to claim that the two halves still represented evolutionary progression. Such is the power of wanting to believe your theory is true!

And we could go on: Darwin’s finches… horse evolution… mutant four-winged fruit flies… and the classic diagram showing ape-like creatures evolving into full human beings. All these ‘proofs’ turn out to be far less than what the textbooks suggest.

Textbook writers are either ignorant of the later research, which makes you sceptical of the accuracy of the rest of the book, or they are intentionally misrepresenting the evidence to pretend that there is a water-tight case for evolution.

The primary mechanism of evolution is supposed to be mutations. And so modern-day mutations are often given as examples of ‘evolution in action’. But all mutations ever observed are actually destructive to the genetic diversity within an organism – they involve either loss or damage to information within the genes. These changes can give a temporary ability to survive in a new environment, but because the animal or plant is left with less useful genetic material it means that in the long term it is less likely to survive. This is the opposite of evolution – it’s actually degeneration!

For example, a fish that loses its eyes can survive better than sighted fish if it lives in the dark. A fish with eyes can’t see anything anyway and so would bash into things and damage its eyes, which can lead to death either by infection or by the blood attracting predators. So the eyeless fish succeed and multiply, and those with eyes die out. A change has occurred – but it’s not an improvement. For evolution to occur, there has to be a forward step, not a backward one. If in the future light enters this fish’s world, other species with eyes are going to be at an advantage again.

Some ‘superbugs’ that ‘appear’ because they are resistant to current means of eradication are called ‘new’ and are said to have ‘evolved’. The truth is that the characteristics that have helped them survive were already dormant within their genes, but have been brought out by the artificial selection resulting from human interference – the use of antibiotics or detergents. In a similar way, some people mistakenly believe that dog breeding is evolution – just speeded up by human selection. Dog breeders create new types of dog by breeding for long hair or short legs, etc. – but they couldn’t produce new breeds unless the genetic information was already available within the genes. No evolution is happening. Often the breeds are weak or disadvantaged in some way. In a natural environment, most artificial breeds would die out in competition with natural breeds.

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The Design Revolution | Designed for life

Nature’s nanotechnology shows every sign of design Intelligent Design theorist Dr Stephen C Meyer explains why complex information in DNA and cellular mechanics can only be explained by intelligence

Dr Stephen C Meyer

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In the book The Mystery of Life’s Origin, Thaxton and his colleagues first developed the idea that the informationbearing properties of DNA provided strong evidence of

a prior but unspecified designing intelligence. The book was published in 1984 by a prestigious New York publisher, three years before the 1987 legal decision.

Schematic diagram of the flagellar motor Bacteria such as Salmonella and E. coli, which have a body size of only 1 to 2 microns, are propelled by a rapidly rotating helical propeller – the flagellum – a thin filament that grows up to about 15 microns. This diagram is of the rotary motor at the base of the flagellum, which drives it. The motor is a macromolecular assembly made of approximately 20 different proteins. It consists of various components, such as a rotor, stators, a drive shaft, a bushing, a rotation-switch regulator, etc. The motor’s diameter is just 30 nm. It rotates at around 20,000 rpm (though some can reach an incredible 100,000 rpm) at an energy consumption of only around 10-16 W, and with energy conversion efficiency close to 100%. This highly efficient machine is far beyond the capabilities of artificial motors, and is clear evidence of design.

www.nanonet.go.jp

“Over the last 25 years, biologists have discovered an exquisite world of nanotechnology within living cells – hardly the simple ‘globules of plasm’ envisioned

by Darwin’s contemporaries.”

When BBC2’s flagship science series ‘Horizon’ broadcast their investigation into Intelligent Design theory (ID), it was given the rather misleading title of ‘A War on Science’.

Before that programme, in January 2006, the UK public had learned about ID mainly from media reports about United States court battles over the legality of teaching it. Again, it was almost always portrayed as a ‘faith v science’ battle.

But is this accurate? As one of the architects of the theory, I know it isn’t. ID has implications for faith, but it is not a religious-based idea. It is an evidence-based scientific theory about life’s origins.

Media reports have tended to play the faith v science card, but in reality ID arose not from a religious background but from scientific observations.

The modern theory of ID was not developed in response to a legal setback for creationists in 1987, as has sometimes been proposed.

It was first formulated in the late 1970s and early 1980s by a group of scientists – Charles Thaxton, Walter Bradley, Roger Olson, and Dean Kenyon – who were trying to account for an enduring mystery of modern biology: the origin of the digital information encoded along the spine of the DNA molecule.

Designed for life | The Design Revolution

Even as early as the 1960s and 70s, physicists had begun to reconsider the design hypothesis. Many were impressed by the discovery that the laws and constants of physics are improbably “finelytuned” to make life possible.

As British astrophysicist Fred Hoyle put it, the fine-tuning of numerous physical parameters in the universe suggested that “a superintellect had monkeyed with physics” for our benefit.

According to neo-Darwinism, natural selection can mimic the powers of a designing intelligence without itself being directed by an intelligence.

By contrast, ID holds that there are tell-tale features of living systems and the universe that are best explained by a designing intelligence. What signs of intelligence do design advocates see?

Over the last 25 years, biologists have discovered an exquisite world of nanotechnology within living cells

– complex circuits, sliding clamps, energy-generating turbines and miniature machines – hardly the simple “globules of plasm” envisioned by Darwin’s contemporaries.

Moreover, most of these circuits and machines depend on the coordinated function of many separate parts.

“As Bill Gates has noted, ‘DNA is like a computer programme, but far more advanced than any software we’ve ever created’.”

For example, scientists have discovered that bacterial cells are propelled by miniature rotary engines called flagellar motors that rotate at speeds up to 100,000 rpm. These engines look for all-the world as if they were designed by the Mazda corporation, with many distinct mechanical parts (made of proteins) including rotors, stators, Orings, bushings, U-joints and drive shafts.

Could natural selection have produced this appearance in a neo-Darwinian fashion, one tiny incremental mutation at a time? Biochemist Michael Behe argues ‘no’.

He points out that the flagellar motor depends upon the coordinated function of 30 protein parts. Yet the absence of any one of these parts results in the complete loss of motor function. Remove one of the necessary proteins (as scientists can do experimentally) and the rotary motor simply doesn’t work. The motor is, in Behe’s words, “irreducibly complex.”

This creates a problem for the Darwinian mechanism.

Natural selection preserves or ‘selects’ functional advantages.

If a random mutation helps an organism survive, it can be preserved and passed on to the next generation. Yet the flagellar motor has no function until after all of its 30 parts have been assembled. The 29 and 28-part versions of this

motor do not work. Thus, natural selection can ‘select’ the motor once it has arisen as a functioning whole, but it can do nothing to help build the motor in the first place.

This leaves the origin of molecular machines like the flagellar motor unexplained by the mechanism – natural selection – that Darwin specifically proposed to replace the design hypothesis.

Is there a better alternative? Based upon our uniform and repeated experience, we know of only one type of cause that produces irreducibly complex systems, namely, intelligence. Indeed, whenever we encounter irreducibly complex systems, such as an integrated circuit or an internal combustion engine, and we know how they arose, invariably a designing engineer played a role.

So Behe concludes molecular machines appear designed because they were designed.

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The Design Revolution | Designed for life

The strength of Behe’s design argument can be judged in part by the response of his critics. In the years since his book, ‘Darwin’s Black Box’, they have mustered only a vague just-so story about the flagellar motor arising from a simpler subsystem of the motor – a tiny syringe that is sometimes found in bacteria without the other parts of the flagellar motor present.

However, recent genetic studies show that the syringe arose after the flagellar motor. So, if anything, Darwinists would have to say that the syringe evolved from the motor, not the motor from the syringe.

But consider an even more fundamental argument for design. In 1953 when Watson and Crick discovered the double-helix of the DNA molecule, they were startled to find that the structure of DNA allows it to store information in the form of a four-character digital code.

Strings of precisely sequenced chemicals called nucleotide bases store and transmit the assembly instructions – the information – for building the crucial protein molecules and machines the cell needs to survive.

Crick later developed this idea with his famous ‘sequence hypothesis’ according to which the chemical constituents in

DNA function like letters in a written language or symbols in a computer code. Just as English letters may convey a particular message depending on their arrangement, so too do certain sequences of chemical bases along the spine of a DNA molecule convey precise instructions for building proteins. The arrangement of the chemical characters determines the function of the sequence as a whole. So the DNA molecule has the same property of ‘sequence specificity’ that charac“ID is not based on religion, but on scientific discoveries and our experience of cause and effect.” terises codes and language.

As Richard Dawkins has acknowledged, “the machine code of the genes is uncannily computer-like.” As Bill Gates has noted, “DNA is like a computer programme, but far, far more advanced than any software we’ve ever created.”

Where did the digital information in the cell come from? And how did the cell’s complex information processing system arise? Today these questions lie at the heart of origin-of-life research. To date, no theory of undirected chemical evolution has explained the origin of the digital information

needed to build the first living cell. Why? There is simply too much information in the cell to be explained by chance alone.

And the information in DNA has also been shown to defy explanation by reference to the laws of chemistry. Saying otherwise would be like saying that a newspaper headline might arise as the result of the chemical attraction between ink and paper. Clearly ‘something else’ is at work.

But ID scientists don’t just argue that natural processes have failed to explain the origin of the information and information processing systems in cells. They also argue for design because we know from experience that systems possessing these features invariably arise from intelligent causes.

The information on a computer screen can be traced back to a user or programmer. The information in a newspaper ultimately came from a writer.

As the pioneering information theorist Henry Quastler observed, “Information habitually arises from conscious activity.”

This connection between information and prior intelligence enables us to detect or infer intelligent activity. Archaeologists infer ancient scribes from hieroglyphic inscriptions. The Search for Extraterrrestrial Intelligence (SETI)

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programme presupposes that information imbedded in electromagnetic signals from space would indicate an intelligent source. As yet, radio astronomers have not found information-bearing signals from distant star systems. But closer to home, molecular biologists have discovered information in the cell, suggesting – by the same logic that underwrites the SETI programme and ordinary scientific reasoning about other informational artifacts – an intelligent source for the information in DNA. So ID is not based on religion, but on scientific discoveries and our experience of cause and effect, the basis of all scientific reasoning about the past. ID is an inference from biological data.

ID may provide support for theistic belief, but that is not grounds for dismissing it.

Those who do so confuse the evidence for the theory with its possible implications.

This new theory must also be evaluated on the basis of the evidence, not philosophical preferences. As Professor Anthony Flew advised: “We must follow the evidence, wherever it leads.”

Stephen C Meyer is the author of ‘Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design’ (HarperOne, 2009). He has a PhD in philosophy of science from Cambridge University and is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute in Seattle.

Reproduced with permission of the Discovery Institute, www.discovery.org

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Demonstration of a DNA mutation. Two DNA sequences are compared. Mutated sites are marked by arrows. Mutations are claimed as the driving force of evolution, even though no mutation has ever been shown to create new genetic information. On the contrary, nearly every mutation is damaging to an organism’s genetic diversity.

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Information overload | The Design Revolution

Complex + specified = designed The complexity of information within living cells is mind-blowing, but it is also incredibly specified. It’s this combination that makes the evolutionary explanation for life, based only on chance, time and necessity (laws of the universe), inferior to intelligent design (ID) as an explanation.

In his book ‘In the Beginning was Information’1, Dr Werner Gitt (former Professor and Director at the German Federal Institute of Physics and Technology), wrote: “DNA molecules contain the highest known packing density of information. This exceedingly brilliant storage method reaches the limit of the physically possible, namely down to the level of single molecules.

At this level, the information density is more than 1021 bits per cm3.”

But it’s not just the complexity of DNA informa-

“Where does it [the information in cells] come from?

This is a problem which concerns both biologists and philosophers and, at present, science seems incapable of solving it.”

Pierre-Paul Grass

tion that points to design, but the fact that it is specified, i.e. it is specific to a separate biological purpose or function. For this reason, it carries real meaning. The closest comparison is with language or a computer code – and the source of both of these is intelligence.

In all our experience, messages, languages and coded information never come from anything else but intelligence.

Languages and codes can be carried by matter or energy but they are not matter or energy. For example, music can be carried by a CD but it is not a CD; writing can be carried on paper and ink but it is not paper or ink. Information is not ‘physical’.

The physical universe can create fascinating patterns – snowflakes, crystals, cloud formations, etc., but it cannot create language and codes. So when it became obvious that DNA contained the ‘language of God’, as Human Genome Project leader Francis Collins put it in the title of his 2006 book, here was something biological that clearly did not originate from matter or energy, or by chance or physical laws.

As far back as 1977, French zoologist Pierre-Paul Grass (Chair of evolutionary biology

at Sorbonne University for 30 years and ex-president of the French Academy of Sciences) was honest enough

to ask this about information in cells: “Where does it come from? This is a problem which concerns both biologists and

DNA double helix The information on the double helix of DNA is not a linear, onedimensional code, like letters in a sentence. It’s far more complex!

DNA information is overlapping, multi-layered and multidimensional; it reads both backwards and forwards. In fact, the vast majority is meta-information – information about how to use information. Meta-information cannot arise by chance because it only makes sense in the context of the information it relates to.

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The Design Revolution | Information overload

philosophers and, at present, science seems incapable of solving it.”2 In the years since, evolutionary science is no nearer to solving the problem. ID theory has the answer. Information always comes from intelligence.

In 1984, when ID was just embryonic, some scientists saw that DNA was evidence of design: “An intelligible communication via radio signal from some distant galaxy would be widely hailed as evidence of an intelligent source. Why then doesn’t the

message sequence on the DNA molecule also constitute prima facie evidence for an intelligent source? After all, DNA information is not just analogous to a message sequence such as Morse code, it is such a message sequence” (Charles B. Thaxton, Walter L. Bradley, and Robert L. Olsen in The Mystery of Life’s Origin: Reassessing Current Theories’3).

Evolutionists claim that although creatures appear to be designed, they aren’t really. In the 1990s ID theorist Dr Wil-

liam Dembski overturned that when he laid down a scientific way to identify real design in nature. Based on information theory, he called it the design filter. Basically, the filter demonstrates that if information is both complex and specified, it is designed.

Historical priority and information theory If some doubt that information theory can be applied to biology, scientists before Dembski had already done it. In 1992 Hubert P. Yockey

wrote a tome called ‘Information Theory and Molecular Biology’, published by Cambridge University Press. In it he compared “the genetic system” with “communication systems designed by communications engineers”, adding: “As a matter of fact, genetical systems have historical priority since organisms have been using the principles of information theory and coding theory for at least 3.8 x 109 years!” (p.7).

The term ‘specified complexity’ was not invented

Why Dawkins’ algorithms fail to convince Evolutionists attempt to explain away complex specified information (CSI) in living things by use of evolutionary algorithms (step-by-step procedures for calculations).

These algorithms aim to generate an outcome by use of a chance process and sifting with a law-like process. But evolutionary algorithms fall at the first hurdle, because none of them can account for the origin of life, nor how it first self-replicated. But that aside, once life started and somehow multiplied itself, evolutionary algorithms are then given as the explanation for CSI. But even in this they fail.

Richard Dawkins’ famous algorithm in ‘The Blind Watchmaker’ (pp. 47-48) demonstrates the problem. He claims to show how a cumulative selection process acting on chance can produce CSI. He starts with the following complex and specified target sequence: METHINKS-IT-IS-LIKE-A-WEASEL The probability of getting this right by complete chance on the first try, e.g. by monkeys typing randomly on a keyboard, would be around 10 -40, and so to stand a better than even chance of getting it would take about 1040 tries (10 with 40 zeroes after it!).

Elsewhere Dawkins claims that, because we have millions of years of history, such large numbers don’t matter – evolution will get there in the end. But he conveniently ignores the fact that, in the real world, over such long periods of time the conditions and environment would change or even be destroyed. For example, our monkeys would die before getting it right (or give up due to boredom, hunger or RSI!) and the keyboard would no doubt have broken much earlier than that. This reduces the chances of getting the sequence right even further, to the point of impossibility.

Aware of the problem, Dawkins replaces chance by using the following evolutionary algorithm, using a randomly

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selected sequence of 28 capital letters and spaces: WDL-MNLT-DTJBKWIRZREZLMQCO-P This just happens to comprise the same number of characters as Dawkins’ target sequence (28), so he is loading the dice in the first place.

Then Dawkins allows all the letters and spaces to be altered in a randomly-generated sequence, and whenever a change happens to match a letter in the target sequence, he preserves it and continues the random selection with only the remaining letters. This continues until he hits the target in only 43 steps, and on average it takes only about 40 tries via an evolutionary algorithm.

So, problem solved, he concludes. But the reality is far from it. First of all, what are the chances, in nature, of each changed letter actually being preserved? To be specific to evolution, what are the chances of a useful mutation being preserved by natural selection? They can only be selected if they give an organism a survival advantage, and the vast majority of mutations don’t. Quite the opposite – they are nearly always disadvantageous, even if they might be useful in a different environment.

Also, because of the way Dawkins designed the algorithm, it’s always going to end up with the target sequence, with absolute certainty or ‘maximum probability’. It therefore has minimal complexity, because in real life complexity and probability vary inversely: the greater the complexity, the smaller the probability. So if evolutionary algorithms cannot generate real complexity, they can’t generate specified complexity either.

Finally, Dawkins designed his algorithm to get his required outcome, whereas evolution does not have a target sequence, so all he has done is demonstrate the necessity of intelligent design!

Information overload | The Design Revolution

by ID theorists. It was first used by an evolutionist, Leslie Orgel, one of the fathers of the ‘RNA world’ theory of the origin of life. He used specified complexity to distinguish living organisms from non-living things. But whereas Orgel used the term for biological features which he considered to have arisen through evolution, in his 1998 monograph ‘The Design Inference’ Dembski showed that specified complexity can only describe features which are the product of intelligent design.

Dembski explains: “A single letter of the alphabet is specified without being complex.

A long sentence of random letters is complex without being specified. A Shakespearean sonnet is both complex and specified.” And who would doubt that a Shakespearean sonnet was the product of intelligent design?!

Dembski asserts that complex, specified information (CSI) cannot be generated by chance or by physical laws (often called ‘necessity’), or by their combination – which evolution theory relies on.

This is because laws can only re-arrange existing information or cause it to be lost.

They cannot create it. On the other hand, chance can “CSI is best explained as being due to intelligence, it is therefore a reliable indicator of design.” produce complex unspecified information, or simple specified information, but not a combination of both complex and specified. And because CSI is best explained as being due to intelligence, it is therefore a reliable indicator of design.

Although he would not claim to be a supporter of ID theory, astrophysicist Prof Paul

Davies agrees with Dembski that physical laws and chance cannot produce CSI. In his book ‘The Fifth Miracle’4, Davies writes that the laws of chemistry and physics are not up to explaining the key feature of life – specified complexity: “Can [specified complexity] be the guaranteed product of a deterministic, mechanical, law–like process, like a primordial soup left to the mercy of familiar laws of physics and chemistry? No, it couldn’t. No known law of nature could achieve this.”

Laws cannot produce the CSI combination Davies explains that the laws can produce complexity but not specification. For example, the precise time sequence of radioactive emissions from uranium is complex, but not specified.

Laws can also result in specification but not complexity. For example, the formation of a salt crystal is dictated by known laws that create a repetitive pattern, and is therefore specified; but that pattern will also be simple, not complex (where complex is defined as a very low probability). Yet in living creatures we find genetic information that is both complex and specified. As Davies puts it: “Living organisms are mysterious not for their complexity per se, but for their tightly specified complexity” (p.

112).

Dembski says: “In determining whether biological organisms exhibit specified complexity, design theorists focus on identifiable systems, such as individual enzymes, metabolic pathways, molecular machines, and the like.

These systems are specified by their independent functional requirements, and they exhibit a high degree of com-

Reliable marker “Specified complexity is a reliable empirical marker of intelligence in the same way that fingerprints are a reliable empirical marker of an individual’s presence at the scene of a crime.”

Dr William Dembski

plexity. Of course, once an essential part of an organism exhibits specified complexity, then any design attributable to that part carries over to the organism as a whole. One need not demonstrate that every aspect of the organism was designed…

“Specified complexity is a reliable empirical marker of intelligence in the same way that fingerprints are a reliable empirical marker of an individual’s presence at the scene of a crime… ID is more than simply the latest in a long line of design arguments. The related concepts of irreducible

complexity [see page 11] and specified complexity render intelligent causes empirically detectable and make ID a fully-fledged scientific theory, distinguishing it from the design arguments of philosophers and theologians.”5

1. Published by Hänssler, Neuhausen-Stuttgart, Germany (1994) 2. ‘Evolution of Living Organisms: Evidence for a New Theory of Transformation’, Academic Press, New York, NY (1977), p.2 3. Philosophical Library, Dallas, Texas (1984), 4th edition, p.211-212 4. Simon and Schuster, New York, NY (1999) 5. ‘Intelligent Design: A Brief Introduction’ in Evidence for God, Baker Books, Grand Rapids, Michigan (2010), pp.106-107

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The Design Revolution | Cambrian Explosion

Darwin’s dilemma Fossils from the Cambrian era rock the foundations of Darwinism

“While the fossil record of the well-skeletonised animal phyla is pretty good, we have virtually no fossils that are unambiguously assignable to the most basal stem groups.”

Ken Doud

Prof Charles Marshall

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Charles Darwin was baffled as to why the fossil record contradicted the predictions of his theory.

In his classic book ‘On the Origin of Species’, Darwin wrote that if evolution were true “it is indisputable that before the lowest Cambrian stratum was deposited… the world swarmed with living creatures”. Yet he admitted that the rocks below the Cambrian layers were almost devoid of fossils.

Instead, in the Cambrian strata, “species belonging to several of the main divisions of the animal kingdom suddenly appear in the lowest known fossiliferous rocks” – without

any evidence of earlier ancestral organisms. Darwin frankly acknowledged that this lack of ancestral forms was “a valid argument” against his theory1.

But he hoped that future research would discover the missing evidence.

Explosive evidence Almost 150 years later, ‘Darwin’s dilemma’ has only got worse – much worse. It is now known that 40 major animal groups (phyla) appear out of nowhere in the Cambrian strata; that’s 50–80 per cent of the animal phyla that have ever existed. This dramatic flurry of creation is called the Cambrian Explosion.

Even in Darwin’s time geologists knew that the oldest fossils appeared abruptly in what were beginning to be called the Cambrian rocks, with empty rock layers below.

So why is the Cambrian Explosion the equivalent of putting dynamite under the theory of evolution?

Neo-Darwinian evolution postulates that species give rise to other species in small, gradual steps over huge swathes of time. The more different two organisms are, the more evolutionary steps and the more time is required to connect them.

The problem with the Cambrian Explosion (around

Cambrian Explosion | The Design Revolution

540 million years ago according to radiometric dating) is that a huge range of creatures appear in a very short period – around ten million years – with no gradual evolutionary steps visible before them. Ten million years is a blink of an eye in geological time, and far too short for even the most ardent evolutionist to believe that 40 major phyla could develop.

Darwin proposed that the ancestor fossils once existed, but had eroded away. It is true that in most places there are no rocks between the Cambrian and Precambrian layers, so Darwin’s suggestion seemed credible. However, the test would be to find the places in the world where the vital rocks did still exist, and see what fossils they held.

Growing problem After 150 years of searching, what is the result? Some other Precambrian rocks have been found, some with a few fossils in them. But it’s not good news for Darwin. The strange

fossils bear no relation to those of the Cambrian, and so cannot be their precursors.

Some argued that perhaps the evolutionary ancestors of the Cambrian creatures hadn’t been preserved for some reason. But then palaeontologists found fossils as tiny as those of bacteria and microscopic animals in the Precambrian layers.

This suggested that the conditions for fossilisation were ideal before the Cambrian, so any animals that existed could and should have been fossilised.

“Even in Darwin’s time geologists knew that the oldest fossils appeared abruptly.”

To make things worse for Darwin, as more fossils have been discovered, the Cambrian Explosion has just got bigger! Besides the famous trilobites and brachiopods, fossil hunters have found echinoderms and even some vertebrates. In fact, they have found fossils from all the major

‘Let the water teem with living creatures…’

This is an artist’s impression of what the sea might have looked like in the Cambrian age. The biggest creature is Anomalocaris, a now extinct predator, similar to a crustacean. The creatures in the foreground are trilobites, and the tube-like creatures are sponges – which are some of the oldest living things on earth. If a sponge is dissected, its cells will reorganise themselves to form a new sponge, every cell finding its proper place. Such complexity – 500 hundred million years ago in geological time! In between the sponges, what look like sea urchins are Wiwaxia, about which we know very little. Those who see the Designer as the God of the Bible would expect life to appear very suddenly, with complexity from the beginning.

That’s exactly what we see in the Cambrian Explosion, which is reminiscent of the fifth day of creation when God commanded the waters to teem with life.

animal phyla (groups) alive today! This suggests that all the main branches of the entire evolutionary tree of animals originated before the Cambrian era, yet they are absent from the fossil record.

And a new problem emerged. Above the Cambrian strata, the fossils are as different from the Cambrian creatures as the Cambrian organisms are from each other – again with hardly any evidence of change in between.

All this more than strains evolutionary theory to the limit. It is difficult enough to find supporting evidence for gradual evolution, so incredibly rapid evolution in a very short space of geological time like the Cambrian is even harder to believe.

The Cambrian strata show that most of the major phyla of animal we know today just appeared – fully formed.

Leading palaeontologist Prof Charles Marshall laments: “While the fossil record of the well-skeletonised animal phyla is pretty good, we have virtually no fossils that are unambiguously assignable to the most basal stem groups of these phyla, those first branches that lie between the last common ancestor of all bilaterians and the last common ancestor of the living representatives of each of the phyla… their absence is striking. Where are they?”2 Of course, if anyone suggests that this inconvenient evidence is proof that evolution didn’t happen, evolutionists froth at the mouth. But the fact is that the Cambrian Explosion makes a mockery of the slow, gradual process of minute changes on which the whole theory is based.

Do Hox genes solve the dilemma?

There have been attempts

“Above the Cambrian strata, the fossils are as different from the Cambrian creatures as the Cambrian organisms are from each other – again with hardly any evidence of change in between.” to explain the Explosion, of course, but none very convincing.

One idea is that the genes controlling development, most notably Hox genes, explain how new body plans evolved in sudden leaps. If change takes place at such a fundamental stage of development, then new body plans can emerge – or so the theory goes.

“The Cambrian evidence makes a mockery of the slow changes on which the whole theory of evolution is based.”

However, changing a body plan is a huge step.

How would a half-way house, intermediate form survive to pass on such a change? For example, consider the difference between an exo-skeleton (external) and an internal skeleton (the chordates). An organism with a skeleton half-in and half-out is not only difficult to imagine but far more likely to be eradicated by natural selection than preserved.

Not only that, but new

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The Design Revolution | Cambrian Explosion

But if an organism with some sort of intermediate body plan change is born, its chances of survival are severely limited. A half-evolved body is almost certain to be “Changes would have to be pretty much right first time in order to work well.” a hindrance rather than an advantage. Large-scale changes that are only half-way to something else are likely to be crippling. Even if it stays alive long enough to reach adulthood, it may be unable to

reproduce or attract a mate to propagate such a change.

Changes would have to be pretty much right first time in order to work well.

For example, long-running fruit fly experiments produced the famous Antennapedia mutant, which had legs where its antennae should be. In the wild, natural selection would soon eliminate such mutants.

Do the eyes have it?

Another idea is that the atmosphere cleared for the first time, and sunlight shone in the seas.

Suddenly those creatures that developed eyesight were at a

Hugh Ross

body plans require huge amounts of highly complex and specified information (CSI) encrypted in non-protein coding DNA, and CSI is an indicator of design – not random variation.

All the research so far indicates that Hox genes alone are insufficient to create new body plans, but even if they could produce such radical changes, there’s still a problem. Mutations to body plans are not tolerated in the development of animals. Body plan mutants are known as ‘embryonic lethals’ because they usually die before birth.

Trilobite fossil This trilobite fossil was found in the Burgess Shale in British Columbia – one of the greatest sources of Cambrian fossils. Even the earliest trilobites had complex eyes, which turns evolution on its head, as earlier organisms should have more primitive eyes than later ones – if evolution is correct.

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“The first eyes that appear in the Cambrian layers are very sophisticated... more complex than some in existence today.” fantastic advantage, and eyes popped up all over the place.

This drove a massive increase in predation – the trigger for the Cambrian Explosion.

Mutations that gave better defence or attack capabilities were at a premium, and evolution was forced into overdrive. It’s called the Light Switch Theory, devised by biologist Prof Andrew Parker.

One problem. You’d expect the first eyes to be very primitive, later evolving into sophisticated eyes.

Unfortunately for evolutionists, the first eyes that appear in the Cambrian layers are very sophisticated. They belonged to trilobites, and trilobites appear first in the Early Cambrian rocks, not the later ones.

Trilobite eyes are incredibly complex – more complex than some in existence today. The advantage their compound eyes gave them might explain why trilobites were so successful, but their eyes don’t fit with an evolutionary progression from simple to complex.

Secondly, if there was this huge increase in evolutionary activity in the Cambrian period, you’d expect the Cambrian rocks to be loaded with transitional fossils. Instead, there are very few fossils that could be viewed as showing changes from one creature into another.

Cambrian Explosion | The Design Revolution

Evolutionists are having to revert to Darwin’s idea that the missing links are simply missing – just as they are for the vast majority of the fossil record. They refuse to contemplate that the links might have never existed.

Evolutionary palaeontologist James Valentine writes: “Many of the branches, large as well as small, are cryptogenetic [lacking ancestors]. Some of these gaps are surely caused by the incompleteness of the fossil record…”3 Bad science In addition, evolutionary assumptions about Precambrian fossils have led some scientists into bad science. For example, Chuaria, a single celled alga, was originally wrongly thought to be a shelly invertebrate because Charles Doolittle Walcott was looking for Precambrian ancestors of Cambrian creatures.

The famous Ediacaran fauna, weird organisms found at Ediacara in Australia and other places around the world, were once seized upon as the answer to Darwin’s dilemma.

But after further discoveries of these strange fossils, evolution-

“The famous Ediacaran fauna, weird organisms found at Ediacara in Australia and other places, were once seized upon as the answer to Darwin’s dilemma.”

Ediacaran fossil This is a typical example of the Ediacaran fossils that are found in the later Precambrian rocks, just underneath the Cambrian. The Ediacaran creatures were extremely diverse, and it is thought they appeared after the Earth defrosted from a worldwide glaciation. They have been hailed as the evolutionary ancestors of some Cambrian creatures, but they are so different from any in the Cambrian that this is hotly contested. Certainly they resemble nothing that is alive today.

ists are not so sure. They have struggled to imagine evolutionary relationships among these organisms. So different are they to anything before or since that one palaeontologist proposed that they should be classified as a completely separate kingdom, and it’s not even certain whether they were animals or plants or some kind of intermediate.

Evolutionary palaeontologist Peter Ward admits: “Later study cast doubt on the affinity between these ancient remains preserved in sandstones and living creatures of today; the great German palaeontologist A. Seilacher, of Tübingen University, has even gone so far as to suggest that

the Ediacaran fauna has no relationship whatsoever with any currently living creatures.

In this view, the Ediacaran “Later study cast doubt on the affinity between these ancient remains and living creatures.” fauna was completely annihilated before the start of the Cambrian fauna.”4 In fact, so desperate are evolutionists to find the missing progenitors of the Cambrian fossils that even inorganic objects have been mistaken for fossils. For example, Eozoon Canadense turned out not to be a fossil but a metamorphic rock.

In contrast, an ID model might predict a sudden injection of genetic information into biological systems at various stages in the fossil record, especially at the beginning of major phases like the creation of plants or animals. The Cambrian evidence is entirely consistent with this view of history.

1. Fifth edition (1869), Chapter IX, ‘On the Imperfection of the Geological Record’, pp. 378-381 2. ‘Explaining the Cambrian “Explosion” of Animals’, Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences 34, pp. 362-3 (2006) 3. ‘On the Origin of Phyla’, University of Chicago Press (2004), p. 35 4. ‘On Methuselah’s Trail: Living Fossils and the Great Extinctions’, W. H. Freeman (1992), p. 36

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The Design Revolution | Metamorphosis

Transformers!

Metamorphosis: stunning evidence of design Ever since the study of butterflies and moths began, their metamorphosis from caterpillar to chrysalis or cocoon to adult insect has defied explanation.

When Darwin’s theory arrived, it asked us to believe that random variation and natural selection did the trick, in small gradual steps. ‘Trick’ might be the right word, as even evolutionary biologists have called metamorphosis ‘butterfly magic’.

But metamorphosis defies neoDarwinian evolution. If the caterpillar dies in this process, which essentially it does, how does that fit with ‘survival of the fittest’?

Inside the chrysalis, the caterpillar breaks down into a chemical soup, then new cells somehow form in the soup. In just a few days, these cells assemble into a beautiful butterfly that has virtually no resemblance to a caterpillar.

For example, the Monarch butterfly caterpillar covers itself with a liquid which oozes from its own body. In only two minutes it transforms from caterpillar to chrysalis. Then, inside the chrysalis, it releases chemicals that dissolve itself into a liquidy mush. It seems to have committed suicide.

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But no. Out of this slop, in only eight days, the butterfly emerges.

How does the chemical soup organise itself into the incredible complexity of a butterfly? A genetic template must somehow be preserved in the soup, but after the caterpillar dissolves, there is no brain to direct this process. After centuries of study, entomologists are still mystified.

A simple analogy would be a car that builds a garage around itself, then dissolves itself in acid, yet spontaneously “Intelligence is the only force in Nature that could plan a desired outcome in advance, guiding and protecting the development.” rebuilds itself into a helicopter that breaks out of the garage and flies away.

But this isn’t an argument from incredulity – nor a ‘God of the gaps’ argument, which says that because we can’t explain it, God must have done it.

No, the metamorphosis from caterpillar to butterfly is a spectacular example of ‘irreducible complexity’ – a classic argument for ID. Charles Darwin conceded, “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 break down” (‘On the

Origin of Species’, 1859, p. 158). The first proponent of irreducible complexity, biochemist Michael Behe, argues that certain biological systems are too complex to have evolved by “successive, slight modifications”. If one component of these systems is absent (i.e. hasn’t evolved yet) then the whole system would be useless, or even detrimental to the creature owning it.

In the case of the butterfly, if one element in the process of metamorphosis is absent, it simply wouldn’t happen.

But more than that, the most incredible element of the process is the self-obliteration of the caterpillar. How could that ever be an evolutionary advantage if the complex system for turning into a butterfly wasn’t already in place?

Unless the butterfly design was created in advance (and remember, evolution has no advance planning capability), no butterfly would come out of the soup, and the chrysalis would be a coffin for the caterpillar. There is no evolutionary advantage in committing suicide before you can reproduce!

Intelligence is the only force in Nature that could plan a desired outcome in advance, guiding and protecting the development through all the intermediate stages without the relevant species dying out. Such genetic engineering is done in the lab by intelligent human beings.

In the butterfly’s case, there is no room for tinkering with a slow, step-bystep process of natural selection. It all has to work perfectly at the first go, or there is no butterfly, and only the butterfly can reproduce the species.

Obviously, a purposeful and intelligent mind makes far more sense in explaining metamorphosis than the unguided process of neo-Darwinian evolution. The life cycle and metamorphosis of the butterfly requires foresight, planning and engineering. These are all positive indicators of ID. On top of that, there is artistry! The extravagant, needless beauty of butterflies defies the work of blind, natural forces. Design and beauty imply a Designer who is not only intelligent but appreciative of beauty.

Christians see another analogy in the life cycle of the butterfly – perhaps even a prophetic one. The miracle of a selfgiving death and then resurrection into a transformed body is a perfect symbol of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Dawkins’ admission | The Design Revolution

Science’s leading evolutionist admits he can’t prove evolution Prof Richard Dawkins has spent his career attacking Christians for their ‘blind faith’, yet he confesses he believes all life is the result of Darwinism even though he cannot prove it

“I believe, but I cannot prove, that all life, all intelligence, all creativity and all ‘design’ anywhere in the universe is the direct or indirect product of Darwinian natural selection.”

Prof Richard Dawkins

The World’s Best known evolutionist and atheist, the scourge of those who believe in God, has declared that he holds a belief that isn’t proved.

Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins has sold millions of books promoting evolution as a fact, and toured universities ridiculing those who believe in a Creator because he says they have no proof of their belief. Yet a few years ago he admitted that he holds a belief that cannot be proved – evolution.

Responding to the question, “What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?” posed by a science website in January 2005, Dawkins’ answer was: “I believe, but I cannot prove, that all life, all intelligence, all creativity and all ‘design’ anywhere in the universe is the direct or indirect product of Darwinian natural selection.”* In an open letter to his daughter Juliet on her tenth birthday (published in his book ‘A Devil’s Chaplain’), Dawkins advises her to only accept beliefs supported by evidence: “Have you ever wondered how we know the things that we know?” asks Dawkins. The answer, he says, is evidence.

Dawkins advises Juliet: “Next time somebody tells you something that sounds important, think to yourself: ‘Is this the kind of thing that peo-

ple probably know because of evidence? Or is it the kind of thing that people only believe because of tradition, authority or revelation?’ And next time somebody tells you that something is true, why not say to them: ‘What kind of evidence is there for that?’ And if they can’t give you a good answer, I hope you’ll think very carefully before you believe a word they say.”

So if he asked himself his own question, “What kind of evidence is there for that?”, his answer when it comes to evolution as an explanation for all life is – there isn’t enough evidence, I just believe it!

Because of Dawkins’ atheism, he is inevitably blinded to the full possibilities of science.

Because he begins by assuming that God doesn’t exist, the only question he can ask when he begins his research is, “How must creation have occurred if we assume that God had nothing to do with it?” This is not the same as asking, ‘How did creation occur?’” Anyone who asks that question can follow wherever the evidence leads, like a true scientist.

Someone, like Dawkins, who has already determined the answer before he begins to look at the evidence, inevitably can’t consider the facts in a scientific, non-biased way.

And so he has to explain away any evidence that disagrees

with his pre-determined belief – like his absurd argument that things aren’t designed even though he admits they look like they are.

So we find Dawkins, who regularly uses evolution as a stick to beat belief in God, admitting that his stick is pure speculation – the same kind of faith without evidence that he mocks in religious believers.

For example, during a lecture at the Edinburgh International Science Festival Dawkins said, “If you ask people why they are convinced of the truth of their religion, they don’t appeal to evidence… I will respect your views if you can justify them. But if you justify your views only by saying you have faith in them, I shall not respect them.”

Would he say the same about his own ‘faith’ in evolution? But even in this quote he misrepresents believers by saying they don’t appeal to evidence. They do. Christians believe in Christ not just on the basis of faith but also because of their personal experience of God, logical argument, and evidence from the Bible, history, archaeology, cosmology and other sciences.

* www.edge.org . Also published in ‘What We Believe But Cannot Prove’, John Brockman (Editor), Free Press, 2005

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The Design Revolution | Evolutionary dating exposed

Evolutionary dating exposed False age discovery consigns European ‘ape man’ to scrapheap

Not so primitive This is an unusual picture of Neanderthals because it is honestly drawn. Usually, artists render Neanderthals as half-ape savages to give the impression that they are a missing link with apes, but this modern NASA illustration is much more accurate – showing them as clearly human. As NASA’s own description says, “Neanderthals looked very similar to modern humans” – perhaps because they were very similar to modern humans! They had slightly more pronounced foreheads, wider noses and larger jaws than the average today – but so what? Some Australian aborigines today have similar features, but we wouldn’t call them missing links (though evolutionists were guilty of regarding them as sub-human in the past!). See pages 1920 for more about the fully human status of Neanderthals.

In An article titled “Neanderthal Man ‘never walked in northern Europe’” the Sunday Telegraph* revealed a telling example of the “dating disaster” that is undermining the theory of human evolution.

Many Neanderthal skulls are far younger than evolutionists previously claimed, completely removing them as evidence for human evolution in Europe. One of the skulls is only 250 years old!

This discovery is part of a long history of false dating – never 22

mind mistaken dating – by evolutionists that has been observed.

Historians of the Stone Age have had to rip up their theories about Neanderthal Man in Europe, as he is a recent human being. The dodgy dating by leading anthropologist Professor Reiner Protsch von Zieten was exposed by research at Oxford University’s carbon-dating laboratory. Prof von Zieten had stated that Neanderthal skeletal remains found at Hahnofersand, near

Hamburg, were 36,000 years old. But the Oxford dating has now reduced that to just 7,500 years. By that time, according to evolutionists’ own theories, ‘The entire human evolution story in Europe and to some extent in Africa is now in doubt.’ modern man (homo sapiens) was already well-established and the Neanderthals were extinct. But that is only one example. Important remains

that Oxford scientists no longer believe are prehistoric include the female ‘Bischof-Speyer’ skeleton, found near the German town of Speyer. She is just 3,300 years old, not 21,300. And another skull discovered near Paderborn in 1976 and considered the oldest human remain ever found in the region, was dated by Prof von Zieten at 27,400 years old.

The latest research, however, indicates that it belonged to an elderly man who died around 1750 AD!

Evolutionary dating exposed | The Design Revolution

Germany’s Herne anthropological museum, which owns the Paderborn skull, ran its own tests. “We had the skull cut open and it still smelt,” the museum’s director, Barbara Ruschoff-Thale, says.

“We are naturally very disappointed.”

The Oxford dating was a routine examination by evolutionary scientists Thomas Terberger and Martin Street, not an attempt to discredit Prof von Zieten. Yet, in their report, both anthropologists described the discoveries as a “dating disaster”.

In an article in The Guardian (21 February 2005) titled, ‘History of modern man unravels as German scholar is exposed as fraud’, Terberger added: “Anthropology is going to have to completely revise its picture of modern man between 40,000 and 10,000 years ago.”

Prof von Zieten conceded that “wrong measurements

are made in all laboratories” – something you don’t often hear evolutionists admit. But Von Zieten had been considered an expert in carbondating techniques since the 1970s. He has tested hundreds of prehistoric bone finds from Europe and Africa over the past 30 years.

As a result, the entire human evolution story in Europe and to some extent in Africa – the ‘home’ of human evolution – is now in doubt. How many other so-called evolutionary ‘experts’ are guilty of fantasy dating or fraudulent research?

American law professor Phillip Johnson is no longer surprised by the debacles of evolution. The author of ‘Darwin on Trial’, a groundbreaking exposé of evolution, believes that evolutionists are out on such a limb that when pressed for evidence the response of many is verbal abuse, or they have to come up with ludicrous arguments.

A ‘living fossil’ The coelecanth is outstanding proof that evolution has not taken place, at least among this species. This fish was once thought to have died out 65 million years ago. Its fossils had been dated as old as 340 million years before present. But living examples were found swimming happily about in the Indian Ocean off South Africa in 1938, totally unchanged from the supposedly ancient fossils. Either no evolution took place over many millions of years, or the fossils are not 340 – 65 million years old. Either way, the coelecanth defies evolution.

“Anthropology is going to have to completely revise its picture of modern man between 40,000 and 10,000 years ago.”

Prof Dr Thomas Terberger Anthropologist at the University of Greifswald, Germany

Johnson gives several examples of evolution guru Richard Dawkins’ clever twists of language to avoid the glaring absence of evidence.

Johnson says that what Dawkins and others present to the world is their interpretation of the evidence, and because they are perceived to be the experts, their word is law.

In fact, Dawkins and others even argue that evidence is no longer needed, because their case is already proven.

And when they come across ‘inconvenient’ evidence, they either ignore it or force it to support evolution, rather than rejecting the theory because it doesn’t fit the evidence.

Johnson says, “Evolution is pseudo-science – an ideological campaign paraded as scientific fact.”

Meanwhile, Australian geologist Dr Andrew Snelling is on a campaign to expose the full extent of false dating in evolutionary circles. He has demonstrated the complete unreliability of modern rock dating methods. He has discovered rocks that can be dated as both

millions of years old and a few hundred days, depending on which of two methods you use!

Yet it’s the same rock, formed at the same time, in the same place, and both radioactive dating methods are frequently used in today’s geology. This huge inconsistency is characteristic of different methods and casts doubt on the whole process.

The evidence Snelling presents could on its own blow apart the theory of evolution, because it shows that the long time periods, that are believed to be essential for evolution, never existed.

Snelling gives a typical example of false dating: the lava flows from Mt St Helens, the volcano that erupted in 1980 in south-west Washington.

Samples of these rocks were sent for dating – when they were only ten years old – to a top laboratory used by geologists in America. When the results came back, they gave dates of millions of years!

Much of Dr Snelling’s research has focused on another tourist attraction, the world famous Grand Canyon.

He has sent samples of both the oldest and youngest rocks of the Canyon to be dated in ‘Dr Snelling discovered rocks that can be dated as both millions of years and a few hundred days old.’ the best labs, and the dates came back as almost identical!

Where did all the millions of years of gradual rock formation in-between go? He concludes that they simply never existed.

Another fascinating fact he reveals is that radioactive carbon has been found in almost the entire fossil-bearing geological column – all the rock layers that are meant to represent millions of years of geological time. Why is this significant? Because radioactive carbon decays out of existence in less than 23

The Design Revolution | Evolutionary dating exposed

The Grand Canyon

Dr Andrew Snelling has demonstrated that evolutionary dating methods are at best faulty and at worst fraudulent. His discovery that rocks are not as old as claimed undermines the whole theory of evolution.

250,000 years – so it shouldn’t be possible to find it in rocks that are hundreds of millions of years old, unless of course the rocks really aren’t that old.

Prof Johnson believes that in the future evolution will be rejected by mainstream science. He concludes, “The Darwinist scientific establish-

ment has become so reckless in what they announce and so careless in their facts and checking, that they are eventually going to produce the kind

of catastrophe that cannot be covered up or ignored.”

* Tony Paterson, Sunday Telegraph 22/08/2004

T-Rex flesh discovered in ‘70-million-year-old’ rock One of the most unusual finds to challenge the vast ages of geological time in recent years was the discovery of well-preserved soft tissue – of a Tyrannosaurus Rex! The flesh, including blood vessels, was found inside the fossilised thigh bone of a T-Rex buried in 1,000 cubic metres of sandstone in Montana, USA, in 2005.

Reported in the science journal Nature,* it astonished Montana State University’s Dr Mary Schweitzer: “This

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Soft tissue fragments from the T-Rex femur – still flexible enough to return to its original shape when stretched (at the arrow). Picture: AP

is certainly not something I ever dreamed I’d see.” Why

the shock? Because flesh is not supposed to be able to avoid decay for 70 million years! The report admitted that the scientists “still don’t know how this dinosaur tissue has remained preserved for so long”.

Since the Montana discovery, soft tissue has been found in several other dinosaur specimens too.

The obvious conclusion is that the fossil is far younger than evolutionary estimates.

But to admit that the ‘millions

of years’ dating systems might be vastly overestimating the age of rocks and fossils is too much for evolutionists to bear. It would destroy evolution, which is inconceivable without hundreds of millions of years within which to work. If dinosaurs walked the earth with humans and life is thousands rather than millions of years old, the only explanation can be an Intelligent Designer – and a powerful Creator at that. * Nature, 24th March 2005

Science fiction | The Design Revolution

Science fiction Evolution is just a myth, shows top law professor Professor Phillip Johnson is a leading light in the Intelligent Design movement.

Here he explains why Darwinism has survived so long despite a complete lack of proof. It’s a highly speculative idea, yet the ‘blind faith’ of the academic establishment has raised evolution to the level of unquestionable fact.

British Newspaper readers know that evolutionist Richard Dawkins, with his allies in the press, has often attacked Christian-led schools sponsored by the Vardy Foundation. No one disputes that those schools are successful with youngsters whom other schools have failed, but that does not matter to the more fanatical Darwinists.

They accuse the schools of exposing pupils to dissent from Darwinism, and demand that this heresy be stopped, no matter how good a job the schools are doing in other respects.

So why are the Darwinists, who dominate the press and educational institutions, so worried? Why aren’t they confident that they can easily counteract the effects of any scepticism that might be encouraged at a few schools?

The root of the problem is that if evolution was subjected to the same rigorous testing routinely carried out in other scientific disciplines it would be exposed as a sham. The claim that some combination of chance and physical law is sufficient to cause life to emerge spontaneously from non-living chemicals is mere speculation. And so is the claim that the Darwinist mechanism of random genetic variation and natural selection is capable of designing complex organs, such as the brain and the eye.

There is no proof that natural selection – or any law/chance combination – has any of the creative power Darwinists claim for it. Dawkins concedes that even the simplest living organisms contain immense amounts of genetic information, and that natural selection has no demonstrated

information-creating power.

That lack of proof should be enough to discredit Darwinism, except that today’s evolutionists have infected the whole of science with a methodology that dispenses with the need for proof! Science itself has become identified with an atheistic philosophy known as materialism, or naturalism. This philosophy insists that nature is all there is. It follows that matter had to do its own creating, and that the means of creation must not have included a role for anything outside of nature, such as God. So scientists, guided by this definition, are not permitted to approach materialism with open minds or sceptical questions, but must believe it on faith and consider no objections. If materialism is true, then something at least

roughly like Darwinism must also be true as a matter of logic, because materialist science has no viable alternative.

Scientific inquiry is limited to the details, because the fundamental points are all decided by defining ‘science’ as applied materialist philosophy.

The reason the theory of evolution is so important to society is that it is the main scientific prop for the belief that there is no God. Or at least, it confines belief in God to the marginal realm of subjective personal experience that has no standing as public knowledge.

Students first learn to recite that ‘evolution is a fact’, and then they gradually learn more and more about what that ‘fact’ means.

Consequently, all living things are the product of mindless material forces such as

Deep sea desperation Evolutionists create a smokescreen to cover up the lack of credible evidence. Look out for the give-away word ‘could have’ in their ‘proofs’ for evolution. For example, because of the lack of proof that life spontaneously arose by chance from a primeval slime, evolutionists now point to ‘black smokers’ on the deep ocean floor as evidence that life ‘could have’ evolved. ‘Smokers’ are volcanic towers of rock that spew out torrents of black scalding water, around which some organisms manage to exist, despite the intense heat, pressure and darkness. This gives evolutionists a slim hope that life might have arisen by chance – because if life could survive in this harsh environment, then perhaps it could have arisen in the impossible-for-life conditions of the early earth. But ‘perhaps’ is as good as they’ve got.

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The Design Revolution | Science fiction

Life on Mars?

In 1996, NASA scientists stunned the world by announcing that they had detected fossil remains of Martian life in this meteorite from Mars, designated ALH 84001. Evolutionists jumped on the announcement as evidence that life can evolve anywhere. But since that time scientists have disputed the idea that the structures are fossils. Encyclopaedia Britannica concludes that “the hypothesis that ALH84001 contains evidence for extraterrestrial life has not found wide acceptance.” This fact has not been so widely publicised.

chemical laws, natural selection and random variation.

That means that God is out of the picture, and humans (like everything else) are the accidental product of a purposeless universe.

All the most prominent Darwinists proclaim atheism.

The late Carl Sagan had nothing but contempt for any who deny that humans and all other species “arose by blind physical and chemical forces over eons from slime.” Richard Dawkins believes that Darwin “made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist,” and Richard Lewontin has written that scientists must stick to philosophical materialism regardless of the evidence, because “we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.”

Stephen Jay Gould condescendingly offered to allow religious people to express their subjective opinions about morals, provided they don’t interfere with the authority of scientists to determine the ‘facts’ – one of the facts being that God is merely a comforting myth.

There are a lot of dissenters, and there would be many more if people were not

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intimidated by the mystique of ‘science’ and by the bullying of Darwinists like Richard Dawkins. Sagan deplored the fact that “only 9% of the American public accepts the central finding of biology that human beings (and all the other species) have slowly evolved from more ancient beings with no divine intervention along the way.”

One reason the Darwinist educators panic at the first sign of public rebellion is that they fear it being known that what they are teaching is just a philosophy – not science.

An even more compelling reason for keeping the lid on public discussion is that the official neo-Darwinian theory is having serious trouble with the evidence. This is covered over with the vague claim that all scientists agree that “evolution has occurred.”

Since the Darwinists sometimes define evolution merely as ‘change’, and lump minor variation together with the whole creation story as ‘evolution’, a few trivial or misleading examples like dogbreeding or fruit fly variation allow them to claim proof for

the whole system. The really important claim of the theory – that the Darwinian mechanism does away with the need to presuppose a creator – is protected by a semantic defence-in-depth that conceals the lack of genuine supporting evidence.

Here is one example of how real science is replaced by flim-flam. The standard textbook example of natural selection involves a species of finches in the Galapagos, whose beaks have been measured over many years. In 1977 a drought killed most of the finches, and the survivors had beaks slightly larger than the previous average. The probable explanation was that larger-beaked birds had an advantage in eating the last tough seeds that remained.

A few years later there was a flood, and after that the average beak size went back to normal. Nothing new had appeared, and there was no directional change of any kind.

Nonetheless, that is the most impressive example of natural selection at work that the Darwinists have been able to find after nearly a century and a half of searching.

‘Darwinist educators fear it being known that what they teach is just philosophy, not science.’

To make the story look better, the US National Academy of Sciences removed some facts in its 1998 book on how to teach evolution. This version omits the flood year return-to-normal and encourages teachers to tell their pupils that a “new species of finch” might arise in 200 years if the initial trend towards increased beak size continued indefinitely. When leading scientists have to resort to the sort of distortion that would

“Lack of proof should be enough to discredit Darwinism, except that today’s evolutionists have infected the whole of science with a methodology that dispenses with the need for proof!”

Prof Phillip Johnson land a salesman in prison, you know there must be something wrong with their science.

If the Darwinists wanted to teach scientific investigation, rather than to indoctrinate, they would encourage students to think about why the observed examples of natural selection involve only very limited back-and-forth variation that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. They also would acknowledge that the fossil record is difficult to reconcile with the steady process of gradual transformation predicted by evolution.

Given these evidentiary problems and others, how impressive would the evidence for Darwinism look if we did not assume at the start that nature had to do its own creating? That is the kind of question the Darwinists don’t want to encourage students to ask, so they impose rules that make it effectively impossible to challenge their theory and hope the public never learns to see through the smoke screen.

The cracks begin to widen | The Design Revolution

The cracks begin to widen The Delusion of Evolution’s editor Andrew Halloway reveals the erosion of some of evolution’s best known icons, as the edifice of evolution begins to collapse

Over recent decades every single tenet of evolution has been challenged, and many aspects of the theory have been rejected and replaced with new, even less convincing, ideas.

Today, almost on a monthly basis, science reports expose the cracks in the façade. While evolution’s vocal supporters pretend to the public that no scientific theory is more reliable, they themselves argue over almost every aspect of Darwin’s legacy.

For example, in a single issue of New Scientist magazine in 20071, three previous ‘certainties’ of evolution were turned on their heads.

Neanderthals declared fully human at last First, the New Scientist admitted that Neanderthals were not the ape-like missing links in human evolution they were once hailed to be. In previous years, evolutionists had “In a single issue of New Scientist magazine in 2007, three previous ‘certainties’ of evolution were turned on their heads.” already conceded that Neanderthals were not so primitive, but the New Scientist declared: ‘Neanderthals bid for human status’.

The article explained that our “sister species” had human

capabilities “such as abstract art, the use of grindstones and elongated stone blades, and big game hunting” and “incorporated different forms of tool construction into a single technique”. Other research has shown that Neanderthals

had religious rites. Although the New Scientist, inevitably, attributed their cultural and technological abilities to evolution, the closing paragraph said, “Neanderthals have typically been thought of as incapable of innovation, as it

was assumed to be something unique to Homo sapiens…

‘With this evidence of innovation it becomes difficult to exclude Neanderthals from the concept of humanity’.”

Since then, a draft sequence of the Neanderthal

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The Design Revolution | The cracks begin to widen

Moth explodes myth A large Lower Cretaceous Lepidoptera (moth) fossil from Liaoning Province of China. The similarity to modern-day moths is startling, considering that the Lower Cretaceous period was, by evolutionary dating, 146–112 million years ago. This is a good example of the amazing stasis (no change) of the fossil record, which contradicts the whole idea of evolution.

genome has been published and the old image of a half man/ half ape creature living in a cave has been finally put to rest. According to research completed in 2010 by the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, the Neanderthal genome was incredibly similar to today’s human genome.

In fact, Neanderthals are related to present-day people living in Eurasia! Svante Pääbo, the palaeogeneticist whose team sequenced the genome, said: “I would see them as a form of humans that are a bit more different than humans are today, but not much.”

‘Junk DNA’ not rubbish after all One of the most commonly touted ‘evidences’ for evolution used to be ‘junk DNA’ in cells. The claim was that this material is a useless hangover from the evolutionary past.

Geneticist Susumu Ohno coined the phrase ‘junk DNA’ in 1972. Four years later, Richard Dawkins proposed that any DNA that was not actively trying to get to the next generation – junk DNA – was

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slowly decaying away through mutation.2 Anti-evolutionists have always argued that time would gradually show that this socalled junk has a purpose. And if it has a purpose in organisms today, then it is not an evolutionary ‘leftover’ at all. They have now been proved right.

A study of the human genome by 35 teams of researchers from 80 organisations in 11 countries has shown that what were assumed to be useless stretches of DNA “may rewrite the book on evolution and causes of some diseases”.3 The New Scientist article, ‘Junk DNA “The results support ID’s prediction that junk DNA sequences aren’t random, but important genetic material.” makes compulsive reading’, reported that the ENCODE project has discovered that some junk DNA gets transcribed into RNA. Transcription turns DNA into something useful – like a protein.

The National Human

Genome Research Institute said: “This broad pattern of transcription challenges the long-standing view that the human genome consists of… a vast amount of so-called junk DNA that is not biologically active. The new data indicate the genome contains very little unused sequences and, in fact, is a complex, interwoven network. In this network, genes are just one of many types of DNA sequences that have a functional impact.”4 ENCODE published further results in 2012 which were the last nail in the coffin of ‘junk DNA’. It stated that at least 80 per cent of our genome has functionality.

With more research “it’s likely that 80 per cent will go to 100 per cent”, according to the project’s leader, Dr Ewan Birney of the European Bioinformatics Institute in Cambridge.

He concludes: “The term ‘junk DNA’ must now be junked.”

Leading ID theorist Stephen Meyer said the results support ID’s prediction that junk DNA sequences aren’t random, but important genetic material: “It is a confirmation of

a natural empirical prediction or expectation of the theory of ID, and it disconfirms the neoDarwinian hypothesis.”

ID theorist William Dembski predicted as far back as 1998 that supposed ‘junk DNA’ would be debunked – long before the ENCODE project began.

But what has been conspicuous by its absence is any admission by evolutionists that another plank in their argument has disappeared. As usual, the silence is deafening.

Life has devolved, ‘but it’s still evolution’ A third major report in the New Scientist was front covered as Evolution spelt backwards, to indicate a discovery that is turning evolution back to front – simple descendants of complex creatures.

For 150 years evolution has been promoted as the theory that explains how complex creatures could have developed from simple organisms, due to mutations and genetic adaptation. Opponents of the theory have long argued that the evidence

The cracks begin to widen | The Design Revolution

Tide of opinion rises in UK and across the world Less than half of the UK public believe evolution can explain life without the intervention of God, according to a BBC survey.

A UK-wide Ipsos Mori poll for the BBC in January 2006 found that, despite more than a century of indoctrination in evolution, only 48% accept that evolution could happen without God. In addition, 22% said they believed in creationism and 17% in ID – remarkable for such a new theory – which taken together means that 39% of the public think that life was designed.

Atheist evolutionist Prof Richard Dawkins’ response was to insult the intelligence of the UK public: “If somebody professes disbelief in evolution, it is highly probable that they know nothing about it.

These ignorant people would probably welcome enlightenment.”

The survey also showed that 41% of the UK public believe Intelligent Design should be taught as part of science education. Although current government guidelines suggest Intelligent Design should be debated in RE lessons, not science lessons, this policy is coming under increasing pressure.

In December 2006, twelve senior academics wrote to the Prime Minister and Education Secretary in support of Truth in Science, an organisation promoting the teaching of

shows the opposite: that complex creatures have been gradually devolving over time, since their creation. Genetic diseases are just one evidence of this decay.

The article, ‘Back to their roots’, said, “… there has

Intelligent Design in school science lessons.

The group included no less a figure than Norman Nevin OBE, Professor Emeritus of Medical Genetics at Queen’s University of Belfast.

Professor Nevin has authored over 300 peer-reviewed publications on genetics, and received his OBE for services to gene therapy. The group of academics also included

so choose, you ensure an open and honest approach to this subject under the National Curriculum.”

The other signatories were: David Back, Professor of Pharmacology at the University of Liverpool; Steve Fuller, Professor of Sociology at Warwick University; Mart de Groot, Director, Retired, Armagh Astronomical Observatory; Terry Hamblin,

A sea change is taking place in the study of origins Antony Flew, former Professor of Philosophy at Reading University.

“We write to applaud the Truth in Science initiative,” the letter said. Empirical science has “severe limitations concerning origins” and Darwinism is not necessarily “the best scientific model to fit the data that we observe”.

They concluded: “We ask therefore that, where schools

Professor of Immunohaematology, University of Southampton; Colin Reeves, Professor of Operational Research at Coventry University and John Walton, Professor of Chemistry, St Andrews University, as well as three University Professors who are members of the Truth in Science Board and Council.

In June 2007, the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA)

been one rule that evolutionary biologists thought they could cling to: the amount of complexity in the living world has always been on the increase. Now even that is in doubt… recent findings suggest that some of our

“Classical phylogeny has been built on rotten foundations, and tinkering with it will not put it right.”

considered provision for ID theory as part of a review of the science course curriculum (Scottish Sunday Herald, 17th June). In the same month, the Church of England’s head of education, Jan Ainsworth, suggested that schools should teach ID in science lessons.

The international spread of ID has evolutionists worried. The Economist confirmed that “the debate over creation and evolution is fast going global”. After debating whether or not the Pope supported ID, it stated, “Not that the advocates of Intelligent Design or outright creationists are in need of anyone’s endorsement… their ideas are flourishing and their numbers growing” (19th April 2007).

Over 800 scientists have now signed a ‘Dissent from Darwinism’ statement launched by the Discovery Institute in America in 2001.

The list of signatories includes members of the National Academies of Science in Russia, Czech Republic, Hungary, India (Hindustan), Nigeria, Poland and the United States.

Many on the list are professors or researchers at major universities and international research institutions such as Cambridge University, Moscow State University, Chitose Institute of Science & Technology in Japan, BenGurion University in Israel, MIT, The Smithsonian and Princeton.

very early ancestors were far more sophisticated than we have given them credit for.”

This is a significant admission, because one of the main arguments against evolution is that complex creatures appear very early in the fossil record,

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Pic: Answers in Genesis

The Design Revolution | The cracks begin to widen

Creationists open major museum A $27 million Creation Museum (pictured above) opened to capacity crowds and a large international media presence on 30th May 2007, in Kentucky, USA. This photo shows one of the dinosaur exhibits in the entrance hall. The high-tech, 60,000-square-foot facility includes 55 animatronic and static figures, a 200-seat special-effects theatre, a state-of-the-art planetarium and a 30-foot-tall depiction of Noah’s Ark. The Museum is a walk through the Bible, using geology, biology, astronomy and anthropology to confirm the accuracy of biblical history. An ABC News poll revealed that 60% of Americans believe in the Bible’s account of creation.

fully formed, with no apparent primitive ancestors. It is as if they were created out of thin air.

While evolutionists have always allowed for some losses of genetic complexity and anatomical structures along the general upward path of evolution, the article admits that “the latest evidence suggests that the extent of loss [of complexity] might have been seriously underestimated.”

This, and other large chunks of

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the article, could almost have been written by ID scientists, so close are they to what antievolutionists have been saying for years.

For example, whilst clinging resolutely to the evolution myth, the article contained statements that confirm the ‘tree of life’, a standard feature of biology textbooks for decades, is not worth the paper it is printed on! The ‘tree of life’ (see page 7) is a visual representation of the evolu-

tionary descent of modern creatures from previous ones, going right back to a common ‘primitive’ ancestor. It shows how closely some organisms are thought to be related to each other, by placing them on the same ‘branches’.

But commenting on this ‘icon’ of evolution, the New Scientist article said, “If you want to know how all living things are related, don’t bother looking in any textbook that’s more than a few years

old. Chances are that the tree of life you find there will be wrong.” It continued, “Classical phylogeny [the theoretical evolutionary relationships between species] has been built on rotten foundations, and tinkering with it will not put it right. Instead, some evolutionary biologists say, we need to rethink the process of evolution itself.”

And rethink it they are – to make it explain even the evidence that contradicts itself…

The cracks begin to widen | The Design Revolution

‘Black is really white’, say evolutionists Look at this statement in the New Scientist ‘Back to their roots’ article: “Only now, with the ability to explore at the molecular level… is the true extent of evolutionary loss coming to light” (emphasis mine). They call even the loss of genes and anatomical features evolutionary! Yet all loss will ever do is decrease complexity and, ultimately, lead to the extinction of a species.

“A great deal of evidence has been paraded in support of evolution and then brushed under the carpet when it is exposed.”

So ‘loss’ has got nothing to do with evolution at all. Remember, evolution is supposed to be about how new species are created and complexity is increased, not lost!

This New Scientist article shows that evolutionists will even argue that the lack of evidence for evolution is actually evidence for evolution! This willingness to see evolution in anything and everything, when it plainly isn’t there, is a frightening obsession of most modern-day biologists.

Yet it is nothing new. When evolutionists have been tackled, over the years, about the many so-called proofs for evolution that have been debunked, it is striking how they have played, and still play, a game of selfdeception.

A great deal of evidence has been paraded in support of evolution as ‘indisputable’, and then brushed under the carpet when it is exposed as mistaken, misleading or even fake.

Evolutionists’ stock answer is, “That just shows the scientific strength of evolution, that it can easily take such knocks, adapt the theory to a new reality, and move on. This is

unlike religious explanations, tied to inflexible creeds, which are unable to follow where new evidence leads.” This conveniently overlooks the fact that the new evidence in question is always in favour of religious and design explanations, and always undermines evolution.

It seems that no matter how much evidence is presented against evolution, they just move the goalposts.

Never do they once consider that evolution itself might be inadequate to explain the evidence, which is the real reason why it constantly needs revising and re-imagining.

Imaginary missing links A classic example of the fragility of evolution was unquestionably exposed by evolutionists themselves back in the 1970s, when the paucity of fossil evidence for evolutionary transitions was recognised. It was considered so obvious, even among the theory’s most ardent supporters, that some were determined to find a new explanation for the lack of intermediate fossils or ‘missing links’. The resulting theory, ‘punctuated equilibrium’, was so close to creationism that it was acclaimed by creationists as proof that Darwinism was bankrupt.

The landmark paper on the idea was published in 1972 by leading palaeontologists Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould. They admitted that the gradual change predicted

by Darwin was almost completely absent from the fossil record, and that stasis – lack of change – dominates the history of most species. This 1982 quote from Eldredge5 makes it absolutely clear: “That individual kinds of fossils remain recognisably the same throughout the length of

their occurrence in the fossil record had been known to palaeontologists long before Darwin published his Origin.

Darwin himself... prophesied that future generations of palaeontologists would fill in these gaps by diligent search...

120 years of palaeontological research later, it has become abundantly clear that the fossil record will not confirm this part of Darwin’s predictions.

Nor is the problem a miserably poor record. The fossil record simply shows that this prediction is wrong...

“The observation that species are amazingly conservative and static entities throughout long periods of time has all the qualities of the emperor’s new clothes: everyone knew it but preferred to ignore it. Palaeontologists, faced with a recalcitrant record obstinately refusing to yield Darwin’s predicted pattern, simply looked the other way.”

Punctuated equilibrium proposed that the major events in evolution didn’t happen gradually, as in traditional Darwinism, but in sudden leaps. This was an honest

“Palaeontologists, faced with a recalcitrant record obstinately refusing to yield Darwin’s predicted pattern, simply looked the other way.”

Niles Eldredge Evolutionary palaeontologist

“Individual kinds of fossils remain recognisably the same throughout the length of their ­occurrence in the fossil record.” attempt to relate evolution to the evidence. However, as the theory’s proponents had no credible explanation for how these leaps of change could take place, punctuated equilibrium was thoroughly unconvincing. In fact, all it did was draw attention to the fact that there are too many holes in the fossil record for evolution to be taken seriously. The theory is still a matter of dispute among evolutionists today.

1. New Scientist, 16th June 2007, pp.12, 20, 48-51 2. ‘The Selfish Gene’, OUP, 1976 3. China View online, 14th June 2007 4. NHGRI press release, 13th June 2007 5. Eldredge, N. and Tattersall, I., ‘The Myths of Human Evolution’, 1982, pp.45-46

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The Design Revolution | Evolution fails physics test

Evolution fails physics test Andy McIntosh, Professor of Thermodynamics at Leeds University, responds to claims by evolutionists that the Second Law of Thermodynamics is no problem for evolution, because the earth is an ‘open system’. In their eyes, all you need to do is add the sun’s energy and the fairytale of evolution will come true. McIntosh shows that sunlight is no help at all, because biological machines would have been needed to harness the energy… in order to create biological machines!

Scientists like me who believe in intelligent design have no problem with natural selection. It is simply the natural equivalent of artificial selection. But natural selection has no power to create new functional structures.

It does not increase genetic information and cannot build machines which are not there already (either as sub machines or in embryonic form). The principles of thermodynamics even in open systems do not allow a new functional biological structure to be achieved without new machinery already being in place.

The laws of thermodynamics have one law in particular – the 2nd law – which says that in a closed system the amount of energy that is no longer available for useful work is increasing. This is energy ‘lost’ to the system per unit degree of temperature, and it is called the entropy of the system. The principle of energy loss for useful work still applies in an open system, since unless there is a machine to use the energy added, there is no benefit. Boeing 777s cannot be made in a car factory by adding loads of sunlight or electricity unless the machinery is available to use that energy to build Boeing 777s. Similarly the human brain cannot be formed from simpler machines just by adding energy if there is no 32

machinery available to do this.

Spontaneous forming of such machinery will not happen.

A machine is a device for using energy to do work of some kind. Energy without machines just dissipates (the sun’s energy would be typical).

But a machine harnesses energy to advantage: a solar cell turns the sun’s rays into electricity; a Rolls Royce Trent gas turbine turns chemical energy into thrust to power aircraft; the chlorophyll reaction in a plant leaf uses sunlight to enable the plant to grow and absorb carbon dioxide while emitting oxygen; the adenosine triphosphate (ATP) motor in living organisms transfers energy from food and respiration into usable energy to drive the cell machinery of DNA, ribosomes, amino acids and protein building, etc. In this sense, all machines are entropy lowering devices.

But unlike macro machines, chemical machinery at the molecular level involves setting up proteins of hundreds and usually thousands of polypeptide bonds linking a string of amino acids. And each of these bonds is in a raised energy state such that left to itself, it would break down and not stay in that state.

To suggest that the raised energy state would be maintained while natural selection favoured, over many generations, single random muta-

“The principles of thermodynamics even in open systems do not allow a new functional biological structure to be achieved without new machinery already being in place.”

Prof Andy McIntosh tions – one by one – to finally bring together the full complement of necessary amino acids is frankly thermodynamically absurd. This is never observed experimentally and is contrary to all thermodynamic princi-

ples of energy transfer.

And new machines are not made by simply adding energy to existing machines.

Intelligence is needed. And this thesis is falsifiable. If anyone was to take an existing chemical machine and produce a different chemical machine which was not there before (either as a sub part or latently coded for in the DNA template) then this argument would have been falsified. No one has ever achieved this.

In his excellent book ‘The Natural Sciences Know Nothing of Evolution’, the late Dr A.E. Wilder Smith (former Professor of Pharmacology at the University of Illinois) summarises the argument from thermodynamics: “Today it is simply unscientific to claim that the fantastically reduced entropy of the human brain, of the dolphin’s sound lens, and of the eye of a fossilised trilobite simply ‘happened’, for experimental experience has shown that such miracles just do not ‘happen’.”

My position is to side with experimental science and not with ‘just so’ attempts to get round the clear evidence of design in nature.

Adapted from an article that first appeared at www.apologetics.org.

Random mutations are no ‘magic wand’ | The Design Revolution

Experiments prove random mutations are not a ‘magic wand’ for evolution It has long been thought that mutations are the driving force of evolution.

But leading ID proponent Prof Michael Behe’s book ‘The Edge of Evolution’ exposes the solid evidence that random mutations cannot do the trick and provide the variation needed for biological complexity.

Random mutations have always been seen as the magic solution to the problem of how evolution occurs, but Behe’s evidence shows the power of mutations is just an illusion.

Advocates of design have no problem accepting that Darwin’s theory of random mutation and natural selection explains some of the variation and adaptation in living things.

This is often called ‘microevolution’. But evolution theory itself extrapolates this process

to explain everything about life in our universe. This is ‘macroevolution’. It goes way beyond the available evidence, yet is commonly claimed by evolutionists as ‘fact’.

Evolutionists claim this micro/macro distinction is bogus. But the truth is that

microevolution is based on observation; macroevolution is just an assumption. And leading ID scientist Michael Behe has the evidence to prove that macroevolution is a mistaken assumption. His recent book, ‘The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Dar-

winism’, attempts to find the dividing line between microand macroevolution: between fact and fiction.

Random mutations, combined with natural selection, are crucial to Darwin’s theory.

But Behe, Professor of Biochemistry at Lehigh University

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The Design Revolution | Random mutations are no ‘magic wand’

in Pennsylvania, shows that they do not result in macroevolution. He presents the empirical evidence of the genetics revolution – the first direct evidence of nature’s mutational capabilities. How much of life does Darwin’s theory explain?

Very little.

The power of random mutation and natural selection to create biological structures was always a matter of conjecture, even faith, deduced from what is, at best, circumstantial evidence. It was a theory awaiting confirmation from direct evidence. The direct evidence is now available, but it does not confirm the theory.

To the anger of evolutionists, Behe shows from the latest evidence we have from experimentation with microbial parasites (malaria, HIV, E. coli) that Darwinism achieves little of genetic importance.

He concludes that design is necessary for the creation of biological forms. Darwinism just tinkers around the edges.

The genomes of many organisms have been sequenced, and the machinery of the cell has been analysed in great detail. The ‘evolutionary’ responses of micro-organisms to antibiotics have been traced over tens of thousands of generations. The adaptation of these ‘bugs’ to overcome antibiotics has, until now, been described as evolution in action. But for the first time in history, we can test whether Darwin was wrong or right, and the results are catastrophic for Darwinism.

Behe says, “How much can random processes explain? The book brings out observational evidence from scientific results from the past ten years showing that Darwinian processes don’t do much of anything. They make small changes in pre-existing systems and so the conclusion is that design is required to

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“The most essential prediction of Darwinism is that, given an astronomical number of chances, unintelligent processes can make seemingly designed systems, ones of the complexity of those found in the cell. ID specifically denies this, predicting that in the absence of intelligent input no such systems would develop.

So Darwinism and ID make clear, opposite predictions of what we should find when we examine genetic results

The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), that leads to AIDS. Behe says that the best evidence from the most detailed studies of mutations in organisms like the HIV virus demonstrate that random processes simply can’t explain the complexity of life. Picture: Bryan Brandenburg

“Observational evidence from scientific results from the past ten years show that Darwinian processes don’t do much of anything.”

Prof Michael Behe

* www.idthefuture.com

get almost all of the complexity of life.

“A lot of Darwinian resistance to insecticides, to antibiotics and so on is the result of destructive processes, breaking sophisticated machinery… The changes that did build sophisticated systems in life must have been nonrandom, i.e. guided, set up or intelligently arranged because random changes are known not to be able to do such things. Detailed genetic studies of parasitic diseases of humans and others, for example, show that random processes can’t do the job.

“Our best evidence from our most detailed studies, on organisms that have the most astronomical populations in this word – the malarial parasite, the HIV virus, etc.

– demonstrate that random processes simply can’t do much more than put scratches or dents in pre-existing cellular machinery. They can’t explain the complexity of life. This is demonstrable data.

“Random processes simply can’t do much more than put scratches or dents in pre-existing cellular machinery.” from a stupendous number of organisms that are under relentless pressure from natural selection. The recent genetic results are a stringent test. The results: 1) Darwinism’s prediction is falsified; 2) Design’s prediction is confirmed.”* Pioneering geneticist Dr John Sanford has also written a book explaining that random mutations do not produce evolution. In fact, ‘Genetic Entropy and the Mystery of the Genome’ (2005) rejects evolution because, he says, “when subjected to natural forces, the human genome must irrevocably degenerate over time”. Inventor of the ‘gene gun’ and a research scientist at Cornell University for 25 years, Sanford believes evolution is “indefensible” and advocates Intelligent Design,

by God. The former associate professor says, “Every form of objective analysis I have performed has convinced me that the axiom [modern Darwinism] is clearly false.”

These findings in biology fit a general pattern of discoveries in other branches of science in recent years. Physics, astronomy and chemistry also point to a clear conclusion: the universe was designed for life.

What a wonderful world | The Design Revolution

What a wonderful world!

Just as there is extravagant beauty and amazing complexity in the biological world, so there is also in the vast expanse of space. But what points even more obviously to a master design behind the universe is its incredible fine-tuning to make life possible

FOR SOME people, the enormity of space which dwarfs our miniscule planet makes them feel tiny, insignificant and very vulnerable – and many conclude that we humans are just a cosmic accident, with no purpose or meaning. Life is short, soon to flicker out and make no difference in the eternal scheme of things.

But they’re wrong.

The more scientists discover about earth and its place in space, the more they are seeing that the

entire world appears to be intricately designed – and designed specifically for us.

We may have discovered that the earth is not at the centre of our solar system, but apparently we human beings are, after all, the focus of the entire universe.

Just as biologists have peered into the amazing world of ‘inner space’ – the workings of the cell and DNA – and found incredible complexity, astronomers are peering ever further

into outer space and find an equally complex set of interrelationships. The universe is finely balanced to produce the right conditions for life – and even for human beings to investigate space.

Over the next few pages, we explore what physicists call the ‘Goldilocks’ enigma – the way in which, like Goldilocks’ porridge, the physical properties of the universe and our planet are ‘just right’ for life.

But first let’s go back to the beginning…

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The Design Revolution | In the beginning

I thought science had it had all wrapped up – about how the world began?

There’s an old joke: “I used to be uncertain, but now I’m not so sure!” If there’s one thing we can be certain of, it’s that what is certain in science today will not be certain tomorrow.

Scientists are now debating whether some of the greatest and previously most unassailable theories about the universe are correct.

For example, the Big Bang does not provide all the neat answers it was once thought to, and even the constancy of the speed of light has been questioned.

For example, in 2001 the Sunday Times’ science editor reported that “scientists have discovered that light may once have travelled many thousands of times faster than now, posing new questions about Einstein’s theory of relativity, which forms the basis for much of our understanding of the universe. If the new hypothesis is right, the implications would challenge many modern ‘laws’ of physics” (9 September, 2001) – and the estimated age of the universe.

We know that even Einstein didn’t get everything right, and Darwin was no less human. So it is demonstrably anti-scientific for evolutionists to portray evolution as unquestionable ‘fact’.

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In the be However long it took for the creation of the universe and our earth, and however it came about – one thing nearly all scientists agree on is that the universe had a beginning.

Believe it or not, right up to the 1950s, most scientists believed that the universe had no beginning or end – it just was, and always has been.

But soon the evidence mounted and a theory to account for it was formed – ‘the Big Bang’. Many atheist scientists hated the idea, because having a beginning implied that there was a ‘beginner’ – or Creator. And if there was a beginning, it also implies that there was nothing before the beginning – another conclusion that irked atheists, because it sounds too close to the Bible’s description of God creating the world out of nothing. But that’s exactly where the evidence points.

Funny, because to hear

I won’t believe in Any kid who studies physics at school soon finds out that this is a crazy statement. There are many things invisible to the naked eye, things that we take for granted every day, like the wind – which we know exists from its effects.

One of the pioneers of research into invisible X-ray radiation, Sir Robert Boyd, says: “In 1959 I proposed a search

some scientists talk today, you’d think having an explanation for the universe like the Big Bang means that you don’t need God to explain it any more. In fact, the reverse is true. Accepting that the universe had a beginning is agreeing with the Bible book of Genesis, which means simply ‘Beginning’. Even the

In the beginning | The Design Revolution

Explosive stuff...

Bright knots of glowing gas light up the arms of spiral galaxy M74, which is slightly smaller than our Milky Way. Taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. Pic: NASA

ginning... what I can’t see for the totally unknown… I studied the invisible electrified layers in the upper atmosphere. I devised techniques to investigate these layers…

As a Christian, I worship an unseen God, knowable only from his dramatic effect in Christ, in history and human lives… getting to know him has changed my whole world-view.”

famous physicist Professor Stephen Hawking, who dislikes the idea of a personal God involved in his creation, credits the existence of the universe to “the mind of God” (‘A Brief History of Time’, 1988).

A beginning also implies more than just ‘pantheism’ – pantheists believe in an endless,

recycling universe and that God and the universe are one (very like ‘The Force’ in Star Wars).

But theists – believers in one God like Judaism, Christianity and Islam – believe God is separate from the universe, that it has not always existed, and at some distinct point he created it. It looks as though the universe is telling us that the Bible was right all along: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth…”

(Genesis 1:1).

As NASA astronomer and cosmologist Robert Jastrow put it: “For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries” (‘God and the Astronomers’, 1978).

The Big Bang is not what it first appears to be.

Explosions, as we know, are destructive. Anyone who doesn’t believe that wouldn’t last long in a minefield. But the Big Bang wasn’t – it was creative!

Or so the theory goes.

From an infinitely small point of energy the whole gigantic universe came into being – with all its laws and fine-tuned balances, and even time itself began.

This is hardly the chaos and damage that results from the type of explosions we are used to.

Surely this makes no sense – unless there was a guiding, organising hand behind it all. And if you accept that, then perhaps also it didn’t need to take the billions of years to happen that scientists guesstimate from today’s processes.

Relativity theory proposes that both speed and gravity can distort time, and at an ‘event horizon’ time actually stops. If time is so flexible, and a God who exists outside of time created space and time itself (as the Bible teaches), then our perception of time is unlikely to be the same as an eternal God’s.

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The Design Revolution | The world was waiting for us

When the universe was created it had to be incredibly precisely ‘fine-tuned’ if life on earth was ever to exist.

If the forces in the universe had been set up just a tiny bit wrong, there would be no ‘life as we know it’.

There are four fundamental forces throughout the universe that affect all physical objects: strong nuclear force, weak nuclear force, electromagnetic force and gravitational force. According to the latest science: • If the strong nuclear force were stronger or weaker by more than about one per cent, the universe would be either full of hydrogen or have no hydrogen at all. Either would be a disaster.

• If the weak nuclear force were marginally stronger or weaker, no planets would ever have formed.

• The electromagnetic force keeps electrons whizzing round the nuclei of atoms. If it was just slightly weaker, they’d fly off; if slightly stronger, atoms could not share electrons. Either way, molecules could not form – and so no life.

• Finally, gravity just happens to be set at exactly the right level to allow for habitable planets to exist.

The list of physical constants that are finely balanced

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Pic Tom Story/Arizona State University

The world was waiting for us

“Even if you dismiss man as a chance happening, the fact remains that the universe seems unreasonably suited to the existence of life – almost contrived – you might say a ‘put-up job.’”

Prof Paul Davies Theoretical physicist like these is as long as your arm. As physicist Stephen Hawking says in his famous book ‘A Brief History of Time’: “The remarkable fact is that the values of these numbers seem to have been very finely adjusted to make possible the development of life.”

Leading theoretical physics professor Paul Davies

writes: “The really amazing thing is not that life on Earth is balanced on a knife-edge, but that the entire universe is balanced on a knife-edge, and would be total chaos if any of the natural ‘constants’ were off even slightly. You see, even if you dismiss man as a chance happening, the fact remains that the universe seems unreasonably suited to the existence of life – almost contrived – you might say a ‘put-up job’.”

Michael Turner, astrophysicist at the University of Chicago and Fermilab, describes the fine-tuning of the universe like this: “The precision is as if one could throw a dart across the entire universe and hit a bullseye one millimetre in diameter on the other side.”

An expanding waistline – no diet needed!

As far as we can tell, the universe is expanding, and has been since the beginning. But obesity isn’t a problem for the universe, whereas if it were slimming – contracting – the end would be nigh! However, if the rate of expansion was a tiny bit slower, gravity would have long ago caught up with it and there would have been a ‘Big Crunch’. And if it was expanding any faster, gravity would not have been able to gather things together into gases, planets, etc.

Not only that, but the

expansion seems to have been a very even one – the distribution of matter and radiation is pretty smoothed out. This is crucial, apparently, to the survival of the universe.

English mathematical physicist Roger Penrose estimates that the margin for error in this distribution is 1 in 1010123.

This is a mind-numbingly big number – more than all the

The world was waiting for us | The Design Revolution

The Carina Nebula – a large bright nebula that surrounds several open clusters of stars. It lies at an estimated distance of between 6,500 and 10,000 light years from Earth. Pic: NASA

subatomic particles in the entire universe! So the evenness of the universe can only be described as unbelievably perfect – for our existence.

Is life likely to spring up just anywhere?

Emphatically not. As the search for life on other planets hots up, some scientists have made brash statements

about life being inevitable elsewhere in the universe.

But the question is, where?

The number of places where life could exist is infinitesimally small.

You can’t have just any old galaxy: it can’t be too big or too hot, can’t be too close to another galaxy, and must be the right shape – a spiral like ours. So, if you do have

a spiral galaxy, what about the stars within it? Out of the billions of stars, most are not in the right place. Our star (the Sun) is in just the right place – on the edge of a spiral arm. Then it has to be the right size of star – most are too big or too small. You literally need that one-in-abillion star.

And once you have the

right star, then you need the right sort of solar system.

And within that solar system, you need a planet of the right size, made out of the right stuff, and placed perfectly among other planets, with the right orbits. So our beautiful Earth is in fact extremely rare.

And that’s what we look at next…

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The Design Revolution | A perfect planet

Mother Earth – a perfect parent It’s only in the last 40 years or so that scientists have realised how unique our home planet is

Earth and our solar system Earth is at just the right distance from the Sun to sustain life – any closer and we’d burn up like Venus, any further away and we’d freeze up like Mars. We need to be between 90 and 100 million miles away – and in fact we are positioned 93 million miles from our ball of fire.

This doesn’t sound too impressive until you look at the width of our solar system – and see that the 90-100 million mark is an incredibly small target in the whole distance from the Sun to the outer edges of the solar system. It’s precision engineering. The Earth is also just the right distance from the Sun so that water can exist in its liquid state, which is vital for carbonbased life. The giant planets Jupiter and Saturn are also positioned so that they can protect Earth from cataclysmic destruction by space debris entering our solar system.

Earth and the Moon The Moon works in intricate harmony with Earth to sustain life. We are the only planet in our system to have such a large satellite. And it’s exactly the right size and distance away to stay in orbit and yet also stabilise the Earth’s own

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orbit and axis, thereby giving us the seasons which are vital to life. The Moon also produces just the right strength of tidal effect on the seas that has many advantages – any stronger and it would be destructive.

Earth itself The planet itself must rotate, and at the right speed – so that the heat from the Sun is distributed evenly rather than burning up one side and freezing the other. It also must be just the right size and have the right strength of gravity – otherwise we’d either be flattened or bounce off into space. And if the Earth were any smaller or lighter, it wouldn’t be able to hold water in the atmosphere – the water that’s so vital to life (which is then kept circulating around the planet for the benefit of all, by the hydrological cycle).

Our atmosphere and Van-Allen radiation shield (produced by Earth’s magnetic field) also block radiation like gamma rays, UV rays and x-rays that would destroy life, yet the light that does penetrate is just what is needed for life. And our atmosphere has to have not only oxygen but also exactly the right balance of gases – so we can breathe, and so that it doesn’t explode.

Then there is the immensely complex ecosystem, where all of life is intricately linked and plants and animals are dependent on each other in a food chain that provides, ultimately, a support system for humans.

The list goes on. A huge number of factors have been discovered. It all adds up to this – the chances of the right planet for life being created and surviving, in all the universe, are incredibly small.

Is it all an unbelievable coincidence – or was it planned?

Just luck?

Atheists respond by saying – well, we’re just lucky. But astronomer Dr Hugh Ross has gathered all the fine-tuning factors together and estimated the probability of a life-friendly planet existing by chance at one in one thousand quintillion quintillion quintillion quintillion quintillion quintillion quintillion! (A quintillion, by the way, is a million million million). In other words, we can’t be here by chance – it has to be by design.

Another idea invented to get round the impossibility of such fine-tuning of the world for our existence is that this universe might be just one among millions of other universes that didn’t have the

right formula for life. Eventually, the right universe would come along. This is called the multi-verse theory. But there is simply no evidence that other universes exist or have existed. It’s just speculation.

So it is hard to escape the conclusion that the lottery of life is a fix! Someone made sure the balls came out in the right order.

Atheist Richard Dawkins argues that suggesting that a designer like God is responsible for the universe doesn’t help explain it, because you would then have something even more complex than the universe to explain – God. But being more complex than your creation does not mean you can’t exist. Richard Dawkins is more complicated than any book he has written, but no one says he is not a good explanation for those books because he is more complicated than them! The fact is, you need an Intelligent Designer to explain something that is evidently designed.

Designed for science?

But there’s another, even more intriguing fact about our unique planet: the same rare conditions that have produced an Earth capable of supporting the existence of complex observers like ourselves, also

A perfect planet | The Design Revolution

‘Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?’

God, speaking to Job (Job 38:4, The Bible)

provide the best conditions for observing the universe.

Is this correlation merely coincidence? Perhaps Earth is not just designed for life, but also for scientific discovery.

Albert Einstein remarked that the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible. It is not a chaotic mess with no laws to predict its behaviour, but a rational, orderly universe that can be studied by rational minds. But even more remarkable is the fact that we live in just the right place in the universe to be able to study it.

Astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez and philosopher Jay W Richards have shown that the Earth is precisely positioned in the Milky Way so

that we have the best view of the universe. And we can only study the stars and planets because, helpfully, we have a transparent atmosphere.

Also, the Moon is the right size and perfectly positioned so that scientists can study eclipses. In an incredible coincidence, total eclipses only happen because the Sun is 400 times larger than the Moon and yet is also precisely 400 times further away!

Eclipse observations led to the discovery of helium and verified Einstein’s theory that the Sun’s gravity would bend light passing by it.

Quantum mystery Finally, quantum theory indicates that there is more to our

world than the physical realm.

For example, some scientists say that, at the sub-atomic level, observers actually affect the nature of what they are observing. It’s a bizarre discovery that suggests there is something beyond the laws of physics.

Prize-winning quantum physicist Bernard d’Espagnat concludes from his work that a spiritual world is veiled from us, and science can offer only a glimpse behind that veil.

D’Espagnat, Professor Emeritus of Theoretical Physics at Paris-Sud University, says there is “a mysterious ‘ultimate reality’, not embedded in space and (presumably) not in time either… this ultimate reality is beyond any concept

that we can construct.”

That description comes pretty close to the Bible’s teaching that a spiritual dimension exists outside of space and time.

Another ‘great’ in modern science, Oxford physicist Roger Penrose, believes that mathematics also indicates that there is a world beyond the physical one.

Former quantum physicist John Polkinghorne, now an Anglican minister, believes the ordered universe that science has revealed is only what you’d expect if it were made by an orderly God. D’Espagnat agrees: “I believe we ultimately come from a superior entity to which awe and respect is due.”

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The Design Revolution | A beautiful problem

Beauty – more than skin deep Why does beauty exist in the universe, when it can only be enjoyed by humans?

AT FIRST glance beauty might seem an accidental property of the cosmos, earth and living creatures. But if that’s so, why do we also ‘accidentally’ have eyes that can take in that beauty and an aesthetic sense to appreciate it? Appreciating beauty doesn’t give us an evolutionary advantage!

Beauty seems to exist primarily to give pleasure to an observer. It’s as if the universe, plants and animals were designed to be enjoyed – by us.

Is that an illusion? Stuart Burgess, Professor of Engineering Design at Bristol University, doesn’t think so. He distinguishes between ‘inherent beauty’ and ‘added beauty’. Inherent beauty is a byproduct of mechanical design, but added beauty has the sole purpose of creating a beautiful display.

Evolutionists claim that the need to attract a mate

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explains the existence of added beauty in animals. But animals don’t have a sense of aesthetic pleasure like humans do. So why would beauty be an aid to survival?

Beauty can actually be a disadvantage.

For example, the large tail feathers of the peacock are a cumbersome hazard and make it easier for predators to catch them. Yet the evolutionary explanation for the extravagant beauty of the peacock’s tail feathers is ‘sexual selection’ – the need to attract peahens. But for peahens to be attracted by the best tail feathers, they need to have a genetic predisposition to be attracted to them.

And if genetic change is random, as evolution proposes, then ugliness could be attractive to a peahen! Or merely size or strength.

In addition, the ‘eyes’ of the feathers are arranged in a remarkably precise pattern – and patterns are usually a sign of intelligent design, not random processes.

Also, recent research shows that peacock mutations lead to the loss of beauty, and to a breakdown in the pattern of the feathers – the opposite of the trend expected by evolution. In fact, evolutionist Dr Helena Cronin says the peacock tail “flies in the face of natural selection”.1 Yet there are thousands of other examples of added beauty in the animal world.

The beauty of flowering plants is also said to be in order to attract pollinating insects. But do insects have aesthetic appreciation? No, so they must be designed to be attracted to beauty. But why should they, unless a Designer wanted flowers to exist so that we can appreciate them? And why is it that

the universe we have only just been able to discover with powerful telescopes is so – unnecessarily – beautiful to our eyes, when that beauty can only be appreciated by humans? The late evolutionist John Maynard Smith said: “No topic in evolutionary biology has presented more difficulties for theorists than beauty.”2 There is also a mathematical beauty or precision about the human body.

Since the ancient Greeks, mathematicians have realised that human beings seem designed to a mathematical pattern. One example is the Golden Ratio – 1.618 to 1. Even though people vary in shape and size, many features of the body stick stubbornly close to the Golden Ratio.

For example, a man’s height divided by the distance from the navel to the soles of his feet equals the Golden Ratio.

Many measurements of features of the face also match the Ratio, and the ratio of the height to the width of the whole face averages around the Ratio. Some plastic surgeons use the Ratio when trying to improve facial beauty. It has also been discovered that most people find objects more beautiful when they contain the Golden Ratio, even though they may not be aware of the Ratio.

Leonardo da Vinci’s famous drawing, the Vitruvian Man, shows that the human body fits neatly inside a circle and a square. The Man is drawn with his legs and arms in two positions. In the ‘star jump’ position he fits exactly inside a circle, with the navel precisely at the centre. With the legs straight and arms outstretched, he fits exactly in a square.

Many features of plants and animals also exhibit mathematical patterns and relationships. For example, fractals (selfsimilar structures whose geometrical features are recapitulated in miniature on finer and finer scales) are very common in nature, e.g. snowflakes, crystals, lightning, cauliflower, broccoli, systems of blood vessels and pulmonary vessels.

Trees and ferns can be modelled on a computer by using a recursive algorithm.

Perhaps all this geometrical beauty reflects the original blueprint of the Great Mathematician who designed us. Evolution certainly can’t explain it.

1. Cronin, H., ‘The Ant and the Peacock’, Cambridge University Press (1991), p.3 2. Maynard Smith, J., ‘Theories of Sexual Selection’, TREE, 6 (1991), pp. 146-151

Reaching a verdict | The Design Revolution

World famous atheist switched to God because of new scientific evidence Professor Antony Flew was a leading atheist for 50 years – teaching at Oxford, Aberdeen, Keele and Reading universities.

But Flew was to fly the nest of atheism, and not because, as a man in his eighties, he was facing his own mortality.

Flew turned his back on five decades of arguments against God because of the overwhelming scientific evidence for an Intelligence behind the universe. He still didn’t believe in an afterlife, so it wasn’t an attempt to hedge his bets when death was approaching. Flew said he simply “had to go where the evidence leads.” The case for a God “... who has the characteristics of power and intelligence, is now much stronger than it ever was before.”

Science “has shown, by the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce (life), that intelligence must have been involved,” Flew said.

“The argument to Intelligent Design is enormously stronger than it was when I first met it… It now seems to me that the findings of more than 50 years of DNA research have provided materials for a new and enormously powerful argument to design.”

If life is designed, then it can’t have arisen by the chance processes of evolution, credits

‘The Delusion of Evolution’, fifth edition © copyright New Life Publishing, Nottingham 2012.

Fourth edition 2010. Third edition 2007. Second edition 2006. First edition 2005. No part of this publication may be reproduced without prior permission.

All articles by Andrew Halloway

The ABC of how to discover your Designer and Flew acknowledged this: “Einstein felt that there must be intelligence behind the integrated complexity of the physical world... the integrated complexity of the organic world is just inordinately greater – all the creatures are complicated pieces of design.”

As far as we know, Flew never became a Christian, so he wasn’t trying to bend the facts to meet his faith. It was the sheer weight of evidence for God that persuaded him, like the incredible fine-tuning of the universe to the needs of human beings on this planet – without which we couldn’t exist.

Although a Methodist minister’s son, Flew became an atheist at 15. It’s a pity he didn’t follow through the evidence to its logical conclusion: if the universe and life point to a Creator, then why were we created?

The Bible says we were designed for a relationship with God. The box on the right explains how we can begin that relationship.

God created us for a purpose – to know him and live with him.

But our disobedience of him has broken that relationship and it needs repairing. Our Creator lives outside of space and time, but has made it possible for us to know him personally. He broke into our world and history in the person of Jesus Christ, and Christ’s death opens up the way back to God. It’s up to us if we want to take up God’s offer. The actual steps are as easy as ABC – though we have to admit that we have rebelled against God’s design for life and we must begin to follow the Maker’s instructions. Follow these three steps, talking to God in your own words…

A dmit that you have done wrong.

The Bible says, “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23).

B

elieve that Jesus died so that you can be forgiven, and ask God to forgive you.

“God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16); “If we confess our sins, he is faithful… and will forgive us our sins and purify us” (1 John 1:9).

C ommit yourself to living God’s way from now on.

Jesus said, “Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life” (John 8:12).

If you have done this and truly meant it, you can be sure that God will enter your life by his Holy Spirit.

If you would like to know more: About Intelligent Design – see www.discovery.org/csc About Christian faith – Contact a Bible-believing church, the details of one near you may be printed below. Useful websites: www.rejesus.co.uk www.lookingforgod.com www.newlifepublishing.co.uk www.newlife.co.uk

Local contact information

except where otherwise indicated.

‘Thinking outside the box’ is taken from ‘A Time to Search’ by Joe Boot, 2002. Used by permission of Kingsway Publications, Lottbridge Drove, Eastbourne.

Published by New Life Publishing.

Printed by Buxton Press, Palace Road, Buxton.

43

The Delusion of

EVOLUTION A delusion is a belief that is false, sometimes caused by deception. This is a big accusation to make about an idea that has dominated biology for over a century.

But recently discovered evidence demands it.

Before Darwin, design was the prevailing view in science.

In fact, historians tell us that modern science itself only began because of Christian beliefs about the world that were prevalent in 17th century Europe.

In the last 20 years or so, evidence has come to light that wasn’t available to Darwin. And it contradicts his ideas. So a new explanation for the origins of life and the universe, called Intelligent Design, has arisen on the basis of that evidence.

This booklet explains why Intelligent Design theory makes better sense of the amazing discoveries science is making every day.

44

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