George Will’s next column

George Will tells us in his latest column that evolution is a fact. To substantiate such a claim, I’m hoping he’ll use his next column to put the matter to rest once and for all by going beyond a simple declarative sentence and answering some important questions.

For starters, there is the question of the origin of life. Pasteur proved about a century ago that life cannot arise from non-living materials (biogenesis), so how exactly does a materialist like Mr. Will explain the emergence of life? And what evidence can he present to support his explanation?

Next, there’s his assertion of natural selection being the driving force of evolution. In his book “Darwin’s Black Box,” Dr. Michael Behe demonstrates how even at the cellular level we find irreducible complexity – systems which, like a mouse trap, cannot function unless all of the different parts of that system are functioning simultaneously from the start.

Darwin couldn’t see this in his day (the middle of the 19th century) because man didn’t have the ability to look inside the cell back then. Nevertheless, he did acknowledge that if it were ever shown that any part of the human body could not have developed in small successive steps over time (i.e., evolved by natural selection), then his theory would utterly break down. And now that has been shown. So, how does Mr. Will justify his ostensibly faith-based belief in natural selection?

This leads inexorably to a series of “chicken or the egg?” conundrums for devout evolutionists. For instance, DNA is what makes protein, yet DNA itself is made of protein. So which came first, the DNA that makes protein or the protein out of which DNA is made? Another example (among many which could be cited): DNA cannot function without at least 75 pre-existing proteins, but only DNA can produce these 75 proteins. And so on.

Then there’s the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This foundational law of science tells us that everything in the universe is breaking down, including all life forms. Simply put, nothing in this world moves upward (evolves) to higher and higher levels of complexity, it all moves downward (devolves) into greater chaos and disorder. So whereas the pseudoscience of evolution says everything developed upward over billions of years, becoming more orderly and more complex, true science tells us quite the opposite – that everything disintegrates over time and eventually falls apart.

How does Mr. Will defend evolution’s reliance upon physical laws and atoms organizing themselves into increasingly complex and beneficial, ordered arrangements in light of what science actually reveals?

A few other questions (again, among many) I’d like to see Mr. Will tackle in his next column:

• How do you explain human consciousness from a purely materialistic perspective? The noted materialist Daniel Dennett, for one, has posited that consciousness is just an illusion – an idea that Mr. Will seems to advance in his new column. Makes me wonder if he was conscious when he wrote it.
• How do you explain human conscience, the innate understanding of right and wrong, using only evolution/natural selection? The brilliant academic and Christian apologist C.S. Lewis observed that when he was an atheist earlier in life he denied God’s existence because of all the injustice in the world; then he realized he couldn’t even know there was injustice in the world without knowing what is just.
• How do you explain a universe governed by so many laws that, if any one of them were to be tweaked even slightly, it would make life on Earth unsustainable? The Bible declared thousands of years ago that this planet was created “to be inhabited” (Isaiah 45:18), and this has been proven in our time to be scientifically true. Science even has a term for it. It’s called the Anthropic Principle. As Isaac Newton declared: “I see the sun at the right distance from Earth to give us the proper amounts of heat and light. This did not happen by chance!”
• While he’s on the subject, Mr. Will can answer this one as well: Who wrote the laws of nature? Einstein pointed out: “Everyone who is seriously engaged in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that the laws of nature manifest the existence of a spirit vastly superior to men, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble.” Thus, Stephen Hawking asks of these laws: “What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?” Noting that “the more we discover about the universe, the more we find that it is governed by rational laws,” Hawking went on to wonder, “Why does the universe bother to exist? If you like, you can define God to be the answer to that question.” What is Mr. Will’s answer, and where is his scientific evidence to back it up?

Rather than answering even one of the big questions that undermine macroevolution as a viable theory in his latest column, Mr. Will uses the slimmest of reeds to “prove” his point. The only evidence he offers in the entire column is this: “Creatures with variations especially suited to their environmental situation have more descendants than do less well-adapted creatures.”

Well, that settles it.

Or so he foolishly seems to think.

 

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