Legacy of Truth | Questions

Questions

How do we explain Life and the Universe?
A guide to examining the evidence and conclusions

Most of us accept, and science verifies, that we have 3 Billion DNA pairs in every cell in our body. We also inhabit a small planet perfectly placed in our solar system to support life carefully placed in the outer arm of the Milky Way Galaxy. What is intensely disputed is how this all came to be.

Logic provides us universally accepted tools to rationally examine evidence: the Basic Scientific Method and the Forensic Scientific Method.

1. The Basic Scientific Method consists of observable, repeatable experiments, such as “when water freezes it turns into ice”. This is an observable, repeatable experiment. Everywhere in the world we try this, the results are always the same. A second example is “butter melts at a certain temperature”. Once again, so many people in so many places have repeated this that it is considered a highly probable scientific conclusion.

2. The Forensic Scientific Method is used when we cannot reproduce an event because it is not repeatable (like the Ice Age) and it is very large and complex. As its name implies, the Forensic process is also used for examining a crime scene for Evidence to decide if it is reasonable to Believe it was an accident or murder. The first principle of forensic science is the principle of uniformity: The key to past causes is found in the present. If you stand inside a house and break a window most of the glass falls outside, so if you find glass outside a broken window you can expect that it was broken from the inside.

Since there were no eyewitnesses to the formation of life, we can only draw our Conclusions (Beliefs) based on our Objective examination of the evidence using Forensic science and the principle of uniformity. As we have seen in many court cases, objectively examining the evidence guards against our natural tendencies and ensures that our Conclusions (Beliefs) are supported by facts and “only the facts.”

Current Beliefs:
Scientists around the world have carefully examined the evidence of the formation for life. There are two major Conclusions (Beliefs); Evolution and Intelligent Design. Each belief has two major sub-beliefs.

Macroevolution or Microevolution: adaptation or microevolution is the process by which bacteria becoming resistant to new antibiotics or the beaks of birds changing to meet new environments. These adaptations are limited by preexisting genetic information, which has programmed the life form to adapt to the changing environment; no new information was created to make the adaptation possible. Hence, the limited genetic information merely causes limited variations within the species (microevolution). The real question is can Evolutionists Extrapolate Microevolution (limited adaptation) to Macroevolution (unlimited adaptation—creation of new species (while accounting for the origin of new genetic information) without violating the Basic and Forensic scientific methods, laws and principles (specifically the principle of uniformity).

Thousands of smart evolutionary Scientists have spent millions of dollars trying to get the fruit fly (who only lives 30 days) to evolve into a spider or a bee or even another kind of fly with NO success. Why, because a new species requires more than just gene modification. It needs NEW genetic information and a lot of it (thousand of pages). If scientists’ with intelligent forethought can’t force Macroevolution to occur on even a small scale then how, while maintaining the Principle of Uniformity can we believe that it happened by random chance on a global scale?

Evolution believes that:
Non-living chemicals got together (on their own) and formed the first living cell. The late Carl Sagan accounted for the origin of life by saying that the “basic chemical compounds of the earth’s early chemistry dissolved in the oceans forming a kind of organic soup of gradually increasing complexity. Until one day, quite by accident, a molecule arose which was able to make crude copies of itself using as building blocks the other molecules in the soup. This was the ancestor of DNA—the master molecule of life on earth.” After millions of years of random chance mutations (Gradual or Punctuated) these first cells created increasingly specific and complex new information and used it to evolve themselves into all living things on the planet Earth.

Intelligent Design believes that:
Species were designed and infused with the information (DNA / RNA) needed to function and reproduce. Species can adapt to new environments, but only experience preprogrammed limited changes (microevolution). Since this information is limited in nature, new species cannot evolve from earlier ones.

The popular media and many people accuse Intelligent Design of being a religious belief, while saying that Evolution is based on “real” science. But evolution is a belief, based on the idea that everything happened by chance. What is the founding principle of this theory? Richard Dawkins put it quite aptly when he said, “If there was any way in which the necessary conditions for cumulative selection [macroevolution] could have been set up by the blind forces of nature, strange and wonderful might have been the consequences. As a matter of fact, that is exactly what happened on this planet. How did he go from “if there is any way” to “as a matter of fact”? The only way is to do it is to just assume it! Their unjustified assumption is significant because Naturalists, Atheists, and Secular Humanists require a way to explain the creation of life without an Intelligent Designer (Creator). If Evolution fails to explain the origin of life, then their whole belief system collapses.

In the end both Intelligent Design and Evolution are beliefs and conclusions. All scientific beliefs should be judged by their adherence to the scientific principles and laws in explaining the evidence. Teachers should focus on critical thinking skills and the process of the application of these principals and laws to past events. Let the students decide for themselves which model best explains the origin of life.