Theory, Law, or Hypothesis?
Evolution has been a hotly contested subject for many years, especially in the public schools. Even the phrase “the theory of evolution” can mislead. Some speak as though evolution were as certain as a law of nature, but scientific laws describe simple, observable regularities such as gravity, which can be tested and measured every day.
Evolution, by contrast, tries to explain a vast array of complex past events, and it often does so by stacking one assumption upon another. The modern form of it, often called “Neo-Darwinism,” is better described as a large research program built on a philosophy than as a tested law. On the question of origins, it remains a hypothesis.
Darwin himself wrote that “a fair result can be obtained only by fully balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question.” Yet today many of evolution’s most zealous promoters insist it must be taught as unquestionable — with a dogmatism they would never tolerate from a Christian.
Pattern Recognition: Seeing the Designer’s Hand
Creation science does not merely point to “gaps” in evolutionary explanations. A better approach is pattern recognition: identifying the marks of deliberate design in what God has made. The “watchmaker” analogy, made famous by William Paley, is a classic example — and in our own day it has become more than an analogy. Bacteria have been found to keep time with a true molecular clock made of three proteins (KaiA, KaiB and KaiC). Researchers studying its structure described “a ratcheting mechanism by which the KaiABC oscillator ticks unidirectionally” — a clock that ticks in one direction, just like a watch.
A precisely fine-tuned universe is another such pattern. Complex life requires an environment prepared for it in advance; it cannot be reached by endless trial and error. We will return to the scientific evidence later. First, let us look at what evolution actually claims.
How Darwin’s Idea Developed
Charles Darwin greatly admired William Paley (1743–1805), whose book Natural Theology set out the “watchmaker argument.” Darwin wrote, “I do not think I hardly ever admired a book more than Paley’s Natural Theology. I could almost formerly have said it by heart.” That admiration did not make him a believer in design. Instead he set out to replace the Creator with natural causes.
Darwin studied at Cambridge with a view to becoming a clergyman and took his degree in 1831. Through his teacher John Henslow he was offered a place as naturalist aboard HMS Beagle under Captain Robert FitzRoy, on a voyage that lasted nearly five years. Along the way he noted the variety within kinds of animals — most famously the finches of the Galápagos Islands, of which there are about thirteen varieties.
After returning home Darwin formed his own view of the origin of living things. He saw a struggle for survival in nature, in which the varieties best suited to their surroundings left the most offspring. He pictured intelligent design as something like a factory, in which every part comes out the same; seeing so much variety in the wild, he concluded that living things were not made but had come about by undirected chance.
Darwin’s Idea Was Not Original
It is a common misconception that Darwin invented evolution. The idea of life arising by itself — “spontaneous generation” — goes back at least to the fourth century B.C. The Flemish physician Jan Baptist van Helmont (1579–1644) even published a recipe for producing mice: place a soiled shirt and some wheat in an open jar, and in about 21 days mice would appear. The notion that maggots arise from spoiled meat was likewise believed for centuries until it was disproved.
What Darwin did was organize the idea into a persuasive system, and within about fifty years most of the scientific world had accepted it — a remarkable feat for a man with no scientific degree, whose proposal was never put through the kind of testing other scientific claims receive. The reason for its quick acceptance is not hard to find. If the world was created by God, man is accountable to his Maker. If it all came about by accident, there is no one to answer to for sin, and man sets himself in God’s place.
The Evolutionary Framework
“Science” means knowledge — a search for truth. In recent times that meaning has been bent, so that data is forced to fit a framework decided in advance. Evolutionary biology has one governing rule of interpretation that overrides all others: only natural causes are allowed. Dr. Scott Todd of Kansas State University put it plainly in the journal Nature (1999): “Even if all the data point to an intelligent designer, such an hypothesis is excluded from science because it is not naturalistic.”
The evolutionary model of life rests on four main pillars: spontaneous generation, random mutation, natural selection, and vast amounts of time.
1. Spontaneous generation
Life is said to have arisen from non-living chemicals. Over long ages, water, minerals and energy from the sun supposedly produced the building blocks of life — and then, by accident, the coded information, membranes and energy-producing machinery of a working cell came together, and the first cell began to copy itself. There is still no explanation of how this happened. Physicist and astrobiologist Paul Davies admits, “Nobody knows how a mixture of lifeless chemicals spontaneously organized themselves into the first living cell.” Niels Bohr said much the same: “The existence of life must be considered as an elementary fact that cannot be explained, but must be taken as a starting point in biology.”
2. Random mutation
Mutations are copying errors in DNA. Evolution needs these accidents not merely to alter existing genes but to add new information, producing organs, limbs and abilities that earlier generations never had — like a computer program upgrading itself by random typing errors. Radiation and chemicals are thought to help the process along.
3. Natural selection
Darwin observed that some animals survive better than others in a given environment. Natural selection weeds out the weak and preserves the strong, and creationists agree that it happens. But selection can only choose among what already exists; it cannot create new information.
4. Time
Since most mutations are harmful, the model needs enormous spans of time for the rare useful ones to add up. Note what evolution really claims: not merely variation within a kind, which we observe, but one kind of creature changing into an entirely different kind with its own genetic code — often called “macro-evolution.”
The Tree of Life Under Strain
The “evolutionary tree,” which pictures simple life forms branching into more complex ones, has been a central image of evolution for over 150 years. When researchers compared hundreds of animal genomes to see how clearly that tree shows up in the DNA, the results were disappointing to them. Only a small minority of genes gave clear support for the expected branching pattern, and at the higher levels of classification the support was weaker still.
A study of a virus evolving under controlled conditions (“Exceptional convergent evolution in a virus,” 1997) found something similar: “Phylogenetic reconstruction using the complete genome sequence not only failed to recover the correct evolutionary history because of these convergent changes, but the true history was rejected as being a significantly inferior fit to the data.” In other words, the method used to build evolutionary trees picked the wrong history even when the true one was known.
In 2009 the magazine New Scientist ran the cover headline “Darwin Was Wrong” over an article on the collapse of the tree of life. Daniel Dennett and others quickly wrote to protest, insisting that “nothing in the article showed that the concept of the tree of life is unsound; only that it is more complicated than was realized before the advent of molecular genetics.” The concern was clearly about public perception. Meanwhile the genetic evidence continues to cut against the single common ancestor that evolution requires.
Neanderthal Man
Neanderthals have often been presented as a link between apes and man. Yet the evidence shows they were fully human: they made tools and weapons, hunted, made music, buried their dead with ritual — all uniquely human behavior. Genetic studies have since shown that many people living today carry Neanderthal DNA, which means Neanderthals and other humans married and had children together. They were simply people, descendants of Adam, with somewhat different physical features.
A Universe in Crisis
Evolutionary astronomy, which tries to explain the universe without a Creator, faces crises of its own. In 1998 astronomers studying distant exploding stars (supernovae) found them fainter than expected. To explain this they proposed an unseen “dark energy” that is speeding up the expansion of the universe — something no one has ever detected directly. Cosmology also depends on invisible “dark matter” to make galaxies behave as the models require. As one report on Phys.org admitted, “much effort has gone into the detection of this mysterious substance in the last two decades, yet no direct proof could be found that it actually exists.”
Since 2022 the James Webb Space Telescope has added to the difficulty by finding large, bright, mature-looking galaxies far earlier in the supposed history of the universe than the big bang model allowed. For more on this, see Star Formations Challenge Evolution.
Weaknesses of the Evolutionary Model
- Its central claim — that one kind of creature becomes another — cannot be observed or tested by experiment.
- It lacks specifics. “Variation” of what, exactly, into what? A theory that can explain any outcome explains nothing.
- It has no tested explanation for the origin of life itself, on which everything else depends.
As David Berlinski, author of The Devil’s Delusion, has observed, every gap evolutionists claim to fill seems to open new ones. One researcher quoted in Science Daily said cheerfully, “Evolution is a lot of fun. You answer one question, and five others pop up.”
“Time Is the Hero of the Plot”
Much of the evolutionary model rests on unproven assumptions, and its models are constantly revised. That fact ought to be taught in the schools along with everything else. Dr. George Wald of Harvard, who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1967, was unusually candid. Writing in Scientific American (“The Origin of Life,” August 1954), he admitted:
And how did he overcome the impossible? By faith in time:
Creationism: Science in Agreement with God’s Word
Creationism holds that all things were made by God, as the Bible declares. Its evidence comes from many fields of science, and it does not hide where it begins: with the Word of God. (How this differs from the “Intelligent Design” movement is discussed near the end of this article.)
The laws of nature are those “ordinances of heaven and earth.” God appointed them; they did not arise out of chaos by chance. Nature cannot break them, and it is entirely subject to them.
The law of biogenesis
Life comes only from life, and living things reproduce after their own kind. The French scientist Louis Pasteur (1822–1895), with his famous swan-neck flask experiments of the 1860s, showed that even microbes do not arise spontaneously. No experiment before or since has ever produced life from non-living matter, and nothing of the kind is observed in nature.
The first law of thermodynamics
Energy (and mass, which is a form of energy, as Einstein’s E=mc² shows) can be changed from one form to another, but the total amount neither increases nor decreases. Nature cannot create matter and energy out of nothing. The universe must have had a cause outside itself.
The second law of thermodynamics
Left to themselves, things run down. A hot bowl of soup cools to the temperature of the room; the room never heats the soup. Energy spreads out and order decays — never the reverse, unless intelligence and outside energy are put to work. Einstein called classical thermodynamics the one physical theory of universal content that he was convinced “will never be overthrown.”
Yet evolutionary cosmology asks us to believe that a nearly smooth, uniform early universe organized itself, by unguided processes, into galaxies, stars, planets and finally living creatures — an ever-rising tide of order. A universe that is running down points back to a beginning when it was “wound up” by its Creator.
Cause and effect
Newton’s first law of motion states that matter stays at rest, or keeps moving in a straight line, unless an outside force acts upon it. Nothing in nature acts without a cause. The big bang theory places the beginning of everything in an event with no natural cause at all. The Bible gives the only sufficient cause: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” (Genesis 1:1).
The Heavens Declare His Glory
The Hubble Space Telescope opened vast regions of space to view. In December 1995 it was pointed at an apparently empty patch of sky for about ten days. The resulting “Hubble Deep Field” revealed thousands of galaxies, many of them well-formed at enormous distances where the evolutionary model expected only primitive beginnings. The James Webb Space Telescope has since found the same thing even farther out. Such findings are no problem for a Creator who made the stars “by number” (Isaiah 40:26).
A flight past some 5,000 galaxies photographed by the James Webb Space Telescope (NASA, 2023).
The original fly-through of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field.
A Young Solar System
Space probes have also returned evidence that fits a young solar system. NASA’s Cassini spacecraft found that Saturn’s small moon Enceladus is pouring out heat — about 15.8 gigawatts according to a 2011 measurement — and spraying geysers of ice into space. A moon so small and so far from the sun should have frozen solid long ago if it were billions of years old. Even secular scientists describe its surface as geologically “young.”
Cassini also found the thin F ring of Saturn being reshaped by collisions, sometimes from day to day, leaving spurs, grooves and fan-shaped features. One evolutionary scientist admitted, “It is difficult to understand how the observed 1 km-wide ring component seen in some of the highest resolution images can survive in such a chaotic environment.” Measurements from Cassini’s final orbits in 2017 showed the rings to be so bright and clean that many secular scientists now say the rings themselves are “young” — far younger than the 4.5 billion years claimed for the solar system.
On Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, sunlight breaks down methane in the atmosphere to form ethane. If Titan were billions of years old, scientists expected it to be covered by a global ocean of ethane hundreds of meters deep. Cassini found no such ocean — only scattered lakes and seas near the poles. The missing ethane is another clue that the solar system is not as old as claimed.
Magnetic fields in distant galaxies
In 2008 astronomers reported that very distant galaxies — which evolutionists regard as very young — already had magnetic fields as strong as those of nearby galaxies. The popular “dynamo” idea said magnetic fields should grow stronger slowly over billions of years. Instead, near and far galaxies look alike, as we would expect if God made them together.
The Language of Life: DNA
In Darwin’s day the cell was thought to be a simple blob of “protoplasm.” Today we know it is a city of astonishing complexity. DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) carries the instructions for building and running every cell. Its “alphabet” has four letters (the bases A, T, G and C), arranged in base pairs. Long stretches of these letters form genes — about 20,000 protein-coding genes in man — and the genes are packed into chromosomes, which move during cell division in an orderly dance.
DNA is the most compact information storage known. Scientists have estimated that a single gram of DNA could store about 215 million gigabytes — enough to fill hundreds of millions of CDs. Its information directs which proteins are made, when, and where. Proteins are built in the cell’s ribosome “factories” as long chains, which must then be folded into precise three-dimensional shapes to work. Special helper molecules called chaperonins assist the folding, and misfolded proteins are linked to serious diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. The machinery is as necessary as the proteins it makes — neither can exist without the other. This is exactly what we would expect from a Creator, and exactly what chance cannot explain.
A computer simulation of a protein folding into its working shape.
DNA copying: two machines, one Designer
The late Stephen Jay Gould, in Wonderful Life, wrote that if the “tape of life” were replayed, history would never take the same path twice: “No finale can be specified at the start, none would ever occur a second time in the same way, because any pathway proceeds through thousands of improbable stages.” Yet researchers at the National Institutes of Health reported in 1999 that the core machinery bacteria use to copy their DNA is largely unrelated to the machinery used by archaea and by plants and animals. If all life shares one ancestor, how did the essential machinery of DNA copying arise not once but twice? Evolution must suppose an unlikely event happened twice; the creationist sees the same Designer providing for each kind of life.
Similar DNA, common Designer
It is no secret that apes and humans have similar DNA, and evolutionists say this proves common descent. But similarity is just as well explained by a common Designer who used similar plans for creatures with similar needs. And many similarities do not fit the evolutionary tree at all. Hemoglobin, which carries oxygen in our blood, is found not only in vertebrates but also in earthworms, starfish and even some microbes. Camels and nurse sharks both make an unusual kind of antibody, built from heavy chains only, which is found in almost no other animals — yet evolutionists regard them as distantly related. Patterns like these show up across the living world.
DNA also has built-in “quality control.” When its information is used, many enzymes check one another for errors. For example, the enzymes that attach amino acids to transfer RNA use a “double sieve”: one site rejects amino acids that are too large, another removes those that are too small. Errors are kept extremely rare.
Mitochondrial “Eve”
Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) is passed down only from mothers. Evolutionists named the woman from whom all living people received their mtDNA “Mitochondrial Eve,” and using assumed slow mutation rates they placed her well over 100,000 years ago.
But when researchers actually measured mutation rates in families of known descent, they were surprised. A study published in Nature Genetics in 1997 found about one mutation every 40 generations — roughly twenty times faster than the rate assumed. The journal Science (1998) reported that, using the measured rate, “Mitochondrial Eve” would have lived only about 6,000 years ago. Evolutionists have answered that certain “hot spots” in mtDNA mutate faster than the rest, but the observed data remains striking. It agrees with what the Bible says of the real Eve, “the mother of all living” (Genesis 3:20).
The Cell’s Machines: God’s Craftsmanship
The specified complexity of a single cell is one of the most staggering subjects in science. The bacterial flagellum is a true rotary motor, driven by a flow of charged particles, that can spin at speeds reported as high as 100,000 rpm. It has a rotor, a stator, a drive shaft, bushings, a universal joint and a propeller; it assembles itself, can switch between forward and reverse, and was even found to have a molecular “clutch.” Such machines are far more advanced than anything man has built. (See also The Car in the Cell.)
Another surprise came from a single-celled creature called Monosiga brevicollis, supposedly close to the root of the animal family tree. Its genome contains 128 tyrosine kinase genes, used in cell signaling — 38 more than are found in humans. A creature placed near the bottom of the evolutionary tree turns out to have a highly advanced signaling network, which is a great problem for the idea of simple-to-complex development.
The Minimum Requirements for Life
How much genetic information is the bare minimum for life? In 1996 Eugene Koonin and Arcady Mushegian estimated about 256 genes, while doubting such a cell could survive outside a perfect environment, since it could not repair its DNA or digest complex foods. In 2016 scientists at the J. Craig Venter Institute built a stripped-down synthetic cell with 473 genes — and even that cell needed a rich laboratory diet, and its makers did not know the purpose of about a third of its genes. Hundreds of genes, all present at once, are the starting point — not the end product — of life.
The Odds Against Chance
Spontaneous generation requires that chemicals, by unthinking chance, built a self-copying cell complete with rotary motors and coded information. Many have tried to calculate the odds. The British astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle, no friend of creationism, estimated the chance of producing the enzymes of a simple cell by chance at 1 in 1040,000 and concluded it was impossible. Carl Sagan is often quoted as estimating the odds of life such as ours evolving at 1 in 102,000,000,000.
The French mathematician Émile Borel argued that events with odds smaller than 1 in 1050 can be regarded as never happening on a cosmic scale. However much time is allowed, odds like those above put chance out of the question. As scientists learn more about the cell, the odds only grow worse. Evolution, in truth, is a matter of faith — the very thing its defenders accuse creationists of.
“Junk DNA”?
For years, DNA that did not code for proteins was dismissed as useless “junk,” left over from evolution. As research advances, that label keeps shrinking. MicroRNAs, once overlooked, are now known to regulate most of our genes and to help prevent birth defects. In 2012 the large ENCODE project reported biochemical activity in about 80 percent of the human genome. The more we learn, the less “junk” we find — just as we would expect of a Creator who made everything “very good” (Genesis 1:31).
Intelligent Design and Creationism: What Is the Difference?
Some critics, Richard Dawkins among them, claim that the Intelligent Design (ID) movement is simply creationism in disguise. In the 2008 documentary Expelled, Dawkins suggested that anyone who raises design is really an “old-school creationist.” That is not accurate.
The ID movement limits itself to scientific evidence. It argues that certain features of nature show “complex specified information” — information that is both highly improbable and matches an independent pattern — and that such information comes only from intelligence. It does not, however, identify the designer from Scripture, and many in the movement leave the question open. A Bible-believing creationist cannot leave that door open: the Designer is the God of the Bible, who created all things in six days.
One well-known example concerns Richard Lenski’s long-term experiment with E. coli bacteria, begun in 1988 and now past 80,000 generations. After about 30,000 generations one population gained the ability to feed on citrate in the presence of oxygen, and this was hailed as a new function produced by mutation. Biochemist Michael Behe, a leading ID scientist and a Roman Catholic, pointed out that E. coli already had the machinery to use citrate; the mutations switched on an existing transport gene under new conditions rather than creating anything new.
How should Christians view ID? Its scientific work is often valuable and complements the creationist case, but it is no replacement for creationism, and it should not be treated as the same thing. Our confidence rests on God’s Word, which science, rightly understood, confirms.