Leading scientists find fatal flaws in rationalist ideas on evolution

In 1969, Dean Kenyon and Gary Steinman thought they had found how life may have emerged from non-living chemicals, so they co-authored the book “Biochemical Predestination.”  They argued that chemical bonds may have attracted the right chemicals in the right order to form a simple protein as a basis for life on earth.  It made them heroes of the rationalist battle to ‘prove’ evolution.

By 1974 however, advances in molecular biology – particularly in understanding DNA – convinced Kenyon that his book’s thesis was wrong.  Instead, he came to the view that the most scientific inference to be made from the latest evidence is that the universe was intelligently designed.

Rationalists and atheists have a burning desire to prove that life came from materialistic, mechanistic processes that did not involve God.  Yet in all the time since Darwin, no scientist has provided a plausible explanation.

Evolutionists never will, according to leading scientists like Sir Fred Hoyle and the ANU’s Dr Paul Davies.  Hoyle was a Cambridge physicist, astronomer, mathematician and cosmologist and Fellow of the Royal Society.  Arguably, he was the pre-eminent scientist in his field in the 20^th century.

Hoyle was the doyen of cosmology and hero of evolutionists for most of the last half of the 20th century.  That is, until he came to the scientific conclusion that all life, and the whole universe, is a product of “a superintellect.”

To overcome rationalism’s blind faith in evolution, Hoyle resorted to irony:

• He felt that the random emergence of even the simplest cell is less likely than the fanciful idea that: “a tornado sweeping through a junk-yard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein.” [1]
• Elsewhere he said: “the chance of obtaining even a single functioning protein by chance combination of amino acids might be compared to a solar system full of blind men solving Rubik’s Cube simultaneously.” [2]

In dealing with the nonsense that in some “primordial soup” non-living chemicals miraculously changed into living organisms Hoyle calculated that:

“The chance of obtaining the required set of enzymes for even the simplest living cell is one in 10^40,000.  He then argued that since the number of atoms in the known universe (10⁸⁰) is infinitesimally tiny by comparison, even a whole universe full of primordial soup would grant little chance to evolutionary processes and consequently, the notion that not only the biopolymer but the operating program of a living cell could be arrived at by chance in a primordial organic soup here on the Earth “is evidently nonsense of a high order.” [3]

(Note: 10^40,000 is the same as a 10 with 40,000 zeros after it.  A one in 10^40,000 chance is about the same chance of one getting all Tattslotto numbers right every week for 110 years!   Nonsense of a high order indeed!)

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Sir Fred Hoyle discovered that an incredible fine tuning of the nuclear ground state energies for helium, beryllium, carbon, and oxygen was necessary for any kind of life to exist.  The ground state energies for these elements cannot be higher or lower with respect to each other by more than 4% without yielding a universe with insufficient oxygen or carbon for life.

On the basis of that quadruple fine tuning Hoyle, who had written extensively against theism and Christianity, nevertheless concluded:

“A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature.  The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.”[4]

Dr Paul Davies, in his book “The Fifth Miracle” wrote:

“Darwin’s celebrated tome On the Origin of Species, which had been published just three years before Pasteur’s experiments, sought to discredit the need for God to create the species by showing how one species can transmute into another.  But Darwin’s account left open the problem of how the first living thing came to exist.  Unless life had always existed, at least one species – the first – cannot have come to exist by transmutation from another species, only by transmutation from nonliving matter.  Darwin himself wrote, some years later:  ‘I have met with no evidence that seems in the least trustworthy, in favour of so-called Spontaneous Generation.’  Yet, in the absence of a miracle, life could have originated only by some sort of spontaneous generation. Darwin’s theory of evolution and Pasteur’s theory that only life begets life cannot both have been completely right.[5]

“Life is a phenomenon associated with a whole society of specialized molecules, millions of them, cooperating in surprising and novel ways.  No single molecule carries the spark of life, no chain of atoms alone constitutes an organism.  Even DNA, the biological supermolecule, is not alive.  Pluck the DNA from a living cell and it would be stranded, unable to carry out its familiar role.  Only within the context of a highly specific molecular milieu will a given molecule play its role in life.  To function properly, DNA must be part of a large team, with each molecule executing its assigned task alongside the others in a cooperative manner.

“Acknowledging the interdependability of the component molecules within a living organism immediately presents us with a stark philosophical puzzle. If everything needs everything else, how did the community of molecules ever arise in the first place?”[6]

It is “a stark philosophical puzzle” because it contradicts the predictions of evolutionary theory.  Davies exposes the fact that for life to exist at all requires complex interdependencies.  Evolutionists ignore that and persist in imagining that life was crudely simple at first and became more complex very gradually.

Life exhibits what Biochemist Michael Behe called “irreducible complexity” in his book “Darwin’s Black Box.”  Behe was a witness in a US case where slick court room tactics gave rationalists hope that his ideas had been refuted, but no less an authority than Paul Davies has broadened and generalised those ideas.

In an article for The Guardian, 26 June 2007,[7] Davies wrote:

“Scientists are slowly waking up to an inconvenient truth — the universe looks suspiciously like a fix.  The issue concerns the very laws of nature themselves.  For 40 years, physicists and cosmologists have been quietly collecting examples of all too convenient ‘coincidences’ and special features in the underlying laws of the universe that seem to be necessary in order for life, and hence conscious beings, to exist.  Change any one of them and the consequences would be lethal.  Fred Hoyle, the distinguished cosmologist, once said it was as if ‘a super- intellect has monkeyed with physics.’

“To see the problem, imagine playing God with the cosmos.  Before you is a designer machine that lets you tinker with the basics of physics.  Twiddle this knob and you make all electrons a bit lighter, twiddle that one and you make gravity a bit stronger, and so on.  It happens that you need to set thirty-something knobs to fully describe the world about us.  The crucial point is that some of those metaphorical knobs must be tuned very precisely, or the universe would be sterile.

“Example: neutrons are just a tad heavier than protons.  If it were the other way around, atoms couldn’t exist, because all the protons in the universe would have decayed into neutrons shortly after the big bang.  No protons, then no atomic nucleuses and no atoms.  No atoms, no chemistry, no life.  Like Baby Bear’s porridge in the story of Goldilocks, the universe seems to be just right for life.”

The lid has now been lifted on the flaws in the rationalistic religion that has held too many scientists captive for too long.  Yet, rationalistic hosts of TV ‘science’ shows act as if it hasn’t happened.  Apparently, they believe the old saying that if a big enough lie is told often enough – in this case the lie that life evolved – people will believe it.

In like manner, without any evidence that stars ‘evolved’ by random mutations and natural selection, rationalist astronomers often refer to ‘stellar evolution.’  Are they confused, or is this deliberate misinformation to deceive the masses?