Dr. David
Menton holds a PhD in biology from Brown University and served as an
award-winning professor at Washington University School of Medicine in St.
Louis for 34 years. He retired as an Associate Professor Emeritus and now
serves with Answers in Genesis as a
speaker, writer, and researcher.
Perhaps the reason so many people
continue to reject the notion of evolution is that it seems contrary to
ordinary experience. Things left to chance just don't get done. Random changes
in anything simply do not produce higher levels of organization and complexity.
Rather, all complex machines and devices with which we are familiar are the
result of intelligent design and manufacture. Random changes can only destroy
them.
None the less, the essential claim
of evolution is that random change and natural selection do make simple things
spontaneously transform into more complex things without recourse to
intelligent purpose or design. The famous evolutionist Julian Huxley has
defined evolution as a "directional and essentially irreversible process
occurring in time, which in its course gives rise to an increase of variety and
an increasingly high level of organization in its products." In his book
Evolution in Action, Huxley says that nowhere in the process of evolution
"is there any trace of purpose, or even of prospective significance."
Huxley says that evolution is driven solely by "blind physical
forces" engaged in what he calls a great "chaotic jazz dance of
particles and radiations."
Incredibly, Huxley concludes that
evolution is a process in which "the only over-all tendency we have so far
been able to detect is that summarized by the second law of thermodynamics -
the tendency to run down." Now think about this - one of the most highly
respected spokesman for evolution tells us that evolution produces an
increasingly high level of organization in things by means of a chance process whose
only over-all tendency is to cause things to break down!
The whole notion that random change
over a long period of time can transform simple systems into ever more complex
systems runs precisely contrary to one of the most fundamental laws of nature -
the second law of thermodynamics. The Second Law states that with time,
everything in the universe tends to undergo progressive degradation. With the passing
of time, things do not naturally increase in order and complexity - they
decrease. Think of what spontaneous change over say a thousand years will do to
an automobile, or your own body. Scientists tell us that with enough time, this
natural degradation process will lead to the "heat death" of the
whole universe when virtually everything in nature will run down to the point
that even molecular motion will cease!
Evolutionists have tried to get
around this formidable obstacle by arguing that the Second Law only applies to
closed systems that do not receive energy from the outside. The earth, they
remind us, is an open system that receives energy from the sun. Evolutionists
believe that as long as energy flows into such a system, simple things will just
naturally transform into more complex things. They believe that the immense
complexity we see in all the living things here on earth has occurred at the
expense of our sun. While the sun is burning up, and thus decreasing its free
energy and complexity in accordance with the Second Law, the sun's energy
promotes a local increase in complexity here on earth.
To illustrate how all this is
supposed to work, evolutionists often give simple examples such as the earth's
water cycle. The Second Law predicts that in a closed system, water will
naturally flow downhill and will not flow up hill. But the earth being an open
system, receives energy from the sun which can in effect make water flow "uphill."
Specifically, the sun's energy can evaporate water which has accumulated on the
earth causing water vapor to rise up again into the atmosphere. Having made
such a small investment in fact, evolutionists hope to gain a wholesale return
by huge extrapolation. They would have us believe that just as a little energy
from the sun can cause water to evaporate and go "uphill," so a lot
of energy impacting on the earth over 4.5 billion years can cause a mixture of
the gasses methane and ammonia to transform into people.
The evolutionist cannot get around
the Second Law, as it applies to evolution, with such trivial examples. All
observed cases in which complex things are derived from less complex things
demand an already existing machine that is at least as complex as that which it
produces. While this machine requires energy to do its work, energy by itself
is not enough. Energy and raw materials, for example, are used in an automobile
factory to make complex automobiles, but nothing would come of these resources were
it not for the even more complex machines, designs, and intelligent workers
associated with the factory.
Like factories, living animals and
their cells are comprised of extraordinarily complex machines that use energy
and raw material in the form of food to do work, produce complex products, and
even make identical copies of themselves. The food that sustains life is
ultimately a product of living green plants. Such plants use energy from the
sun to convert water and carbon dioxide into sugar and starch. This process,
known as photosynthesis, involves still other complex machines called
chloroplasts in the cells of green plants.
It is important to emphasize that
the different kinds of energy consuming machinery in living cells are not the
chance products of mere energy and raw material but are constructed according
to extraordinarily complex and precise "blueprints" in the genes of
each cell. Copies of these "blueprints" are read and implemented by
still other complex machines in the cell called ribosomes. When all of this genetic
information and machinery is present and working properly in say an acorn, it
has everything it needs to use sunlight and simple raw material to grow into an
oak tree. But if the same sunlight shines on a dead oak tree, it will
eventually break it down into dust.
Creationists are convinced then that
there is a law against the theory of evolution - the second law of thermodynamics.
Evolutionists, on the other hand, continue to reject the idea that
thermodynamics is in any way incompatible with evolutionary theory. They insist
that creationists simply don't understand thermodynamics. But the great
physical scientist Lord Kelvin, who was the very founder of the second law of
thermodynamics, was a Bible-believing Christian and a creationist! Kelvin, a
contemporary of Charles Darwin, was convinced that the science of dynamics was
incompatible with evolution. In one of his published lectures, Kelvin said: "I
need scarcely say that the beginning and maintenance of life on earth is
absolutely and infinitely beyond the range of all sound speculation in
dynamical science. The only contribution of dynamics to theoretical biology is
absolute negation of automatic commencement or automatic maintenance of
life."
The Bible tells us that "every
house is built by someone, but God is the builder of everything" (Heb. 3:4).
It requires less faith to believe this eminently reasonable statement about the
origin of complex things as revealed in the sure Word of God than it does to
believe in the unreasonable speculations of men.
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