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The Incoherence of Evolutionary Origins © 2014 Paul Henebury The Incoherence of Evolutionary Origins © 2014 Paul Henebury [This article was originally posted on Dr. way through high school. And when I Henebury’s BLOG.1] attended college I was taught it there too, When I look at your heavens, the even though it wasn’t really part of the business degree that I was doing. work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in I wasn’t a Christian until I was 25, and was place, what is man that you are not from a particularly religious household, mindful of him, and the son of man so I believed more or less in evolution, that you care for him? Yet you have although always in the back of my mind I made him a little lower than the could not quite understand how life came heavenly beings and crowned him from non-life. Neither could I grasp how with glory and honor. You have the marvelous beauty and order that we given him dominion over the works see in life could be accounted for by of your hands; you have put all random unguided particles banging things under his feet. – Psalm 8:3-6 together. Neither could I quite understand how the theory of evolution could account According to the Bible, man, here meaning for the significance that we find in our own male and female (Gen. 1:27), is a very lives. We write poetry, we write love special part of God’s creation. According songs, we listen to music of one sort or to the scientific establishment we are another that expresses our inner emotions, nothing more than advanced animals, and what we feel about ourselves, and newly arrived upon the scene of earth how important we think certain things are history, without any more significance than to the world and to life itself. We do this a trilobite or a sea-horse. all the time; it’s natural for the human Most of us are familiar with naturalistic being to do it, and I just could not evolution. This is what I was taught from a understand how this sense of significance young child growing up in England all the could be part of an evolutionary process. Why did we evolve to see our own significance and reflect upon it? Why try 1 to better it, critique it, and eulogize it? So http://drreluctant.wordpress.com/2014/07/21 there were these things that the ‘science’ /the-incoherence-of-evolutionary-origins-1/ did not fully explain to me. This is taken from an introductory lecture in I have listened to and read many the TELOS Course “The Doctrine of Man evolutionists. I believe that at a and Sin” The Incoherence of Evolutionary Origins fundamental level, Evolution is the creation either going to just freeze, as entropy myth of the secularist, of the unbeliever. completely disintegrates, or we’re going to fry as the whole thing burns up. They don’t want to believe in the In between the Big Bang and the big Creator. They don’t want to believe that there is a God whom they have to freeze there is no significance or meaning face. Therefore, as theologian Millard other than what we can find in and of ourselves. We make it all up. There is no Erickson tells us in his Christian Theology, great explanation, there is no providential (2nd ed. 501f.), they have a group of plan. Life came from non-life by lightning processes into which they pour their faith, hitting a “pre-biotic” (‘prior to life’) which, superficially at least, produce and pond. Scientific laws weren’t laws until explain everything that is, including all the after these things conveniently came diversity of life. All that is needed is ‘a together. We should not see ourselves as combination of atoms, motion, time, and anything more significant than temporary chance.’ As Erickson says, no attempt is cosmic accidents. made to account for these givens; they are simply there, the basis of everything else. Seven Basic (Silly) Assumptions Now this is certainly true. Anybody who Someone has said that, “The basic believes in evolution will not even try to assumptions of evolution are: think behind the ramifications of what 1. Inorganic chemicals gave rise to life they’re saying, and will not try to give an (belief in spontaneous generation – in explanation for the processes that they say modern garb). delivered up to us “reality” (which they can 2. Spontaneous generation only scarcely define), as we presently happened once. (They believe it only experience it. It is just therethey say. It happened once because it is such an all could have been any other way, but it astronomically absurdly impossible just happened to be this way. One famous thing to even postulate. Though some scientist said that the reason that the think it happened many times). world is the way it is, is because it was the 3. All living organisms are therefore way that it is. In other words, just things related (IF the first two statements are are the way that they are and there’s no true) real reason behind it; no personality, no 4. Single celled organisms [protozoa] Creator to guide it or to give it any further gave rise to multi-celled organisms significance than just accidental [metazoa] occurrences. All of the matter and energy 5. Invertebrates are all related in the universe, and all of the different 6. Invertebrates gave rise to vertebrates combinations of it came from a Big Bang, 7. From fish we get amphibians, reptiles, and the far future scenarios for the birds, and mammals.” universe are either freeze or fry. We’re www.SpiritAndTruth.org © 2014 Paul Henebury 2 of 22 The Incoherence of Evolutionary Origins These are taken from a book by G.A. of logic and number “evolved.” The Big Kerkut called Implications of Bang is the most popular notion of the Evolution. One wonders if he really origin of the universe at the present time, although there is a significant lobby of thought through the “implications”! dissidents. The Big Bang is an Those are of the seven basic assumptions explosion. All explosions are chaotic, that evolutionists make about disorderly things. (The Big Bang exploded evolution. Other assumptions are made flat – not in all directions). In other ways about reality. For example, that morals, or it would have been like every other the laws of thought are culturally- explosion: confused and irrational. conditioned; that there is a correlation But from this chaos the vast complexity of between what is in man’s mind and what the first life sprang: not, it is true, is outside of man’s mind, and that correlation can be studied, analyzed, and overnight, but over billions of years. From mathematically predicted in terms of art, this incoherence the coherent came. Do architecture, technology, and of course, we ever see coherence, in the form the “science of evolution.” of sequenced “specified” complexity, arise out of chaos and disorder? No we do But why and how did the amazing fine- not. Nothing self-orders in complex and tuning in the universe evolve? A fine- specific ways without a code. And a code tuning whereby the universe itself seems needs someone to write it. But to be particularly the way it is so that life evolutionary naturalism requires just the can exist upon this planet. Well, if it didn’t, opposite. we wouldn’t be here asking about it!” And that’s an answer? These and other Furthermore, as we, the observers, presuppositions evolutionists have. They recognize and analyze the coherence in don’t really try to see the convenience of it the world, our standing (or existence) as all; let alone the significance. They just try observers must be accounted for. This to ignore the coincidences and ignore the was one of the questions asked by signals of design and purpose all around Richards and Gonzalez in their book The them while believing an incredible and oft- Privileged Planet. It is a good disproved theory. question. Why is the world comprehensible? Why can we do science? The Fusion of Confusion This question must be addressed by Evolutionists, except the rather small creationists and evolutionists. It cannot be coterie of Theistic ones, believe every ducked on the pretext that evolution does complex and meticulously ordered thing not concern itself with such got here through mechanisms which we matters. Biological evolution does neither see now nor can see in the evidence left in the past. Even our cognitive faculties and the immaterial laws www.SpiritAndTruth.org © 2014 Paul Henebury 3 of 22 The Incoherence of Evolutionary Origins not. But there is such a thing as “chemical have resulted in disorganized evolution”. There is even a Center2 for it! matter. In order to provide an appropriate framework for life, a One prominent evolutionist puts the matter machinist would still be necessary, clearly: one who could construct several One has only to contemplate the thousand specific proteins, nucleic magnitude of this task, to concede acids, carbohydrates, vitamins, and that the spontaneous generation of lipids in their exact configurations, a living organism is impossible. Yet, all the while maintaining the here we are as a result, I believe, of integrity of each molecule in the 3 spontaneous generation.” collection.5 We must not link this use of “spontaneous Also, as Meyer explains, generation” with the old idea that new life arises from rotting meat. Once this is kept Every choice the investigator makes to actualize one condition and in mind there is nothing wrong with Wald’s use of the term.
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