Creation or Evolution: A Letter to Emily, Part 1

So a few days ago, my daughter posted a question on her Facebook page asking, “Evolution or creation?” I swelled with pride at the thought of my offspring openly considering both sides of an important question, rather than blindly accepting one conclusion or another. I therefore offered the ever helpful “neither.” She responded with the exasperated, monosyllabic request for clarification: “DAD?!” I promised her a more detailed explanation of my noncommittal answer. In this, part 1, I’ll explain why neither creationism nor evolution stands up scientifically.



Dear Emily,
As with most debates, the truth often lies somewhere in between the extremes. I am only going to concern myself with the extremes at this point: literal, biblical creation and neo-Darwinian evolution. Some of my arguments can be extrapolated to the less extreme versions of the theoretical continuum.

I’ll deal first with the creation side. This side includes a belief that the Earth is a few thousand years old, and that it appeared ex nihilo (out of nothing) essentially as we see it today. The variety of living things in the world are all the results of special creative acts of God. A catastrophic flood, which covered the Earth and destroyed all life except that taking refuge aboard Noah’s ark, is cited as an explanation for mass extinctions and geological oddities such as marine fossils in the Himalaya.

There is abundant laboratory evidence that the Earth has been around for a few billion years. Well-constrained measurements of the ratios of various radioactive isotopes in rocks confirm that rocks at the Earth’s surface range from very young to a few billion years old. Some creationists might argue that God created the world too look very old. There is no scientific way to test this hypothesis, and no real theological basis for it, so I’ll not say more about it.

So given that the geological record shows a range of ages from very old to very young, and that different living species appear and disappear throughout that record, we cannot really accept the hypothesis that all species came into being in the first seven days of the world’s existence.

Finally, the flood. There is no consistent marker in the geological record to indicate a truly global flood. I’m not sure that there is enough water on the Earth to completely cover all of the continents anyway, especially if the tallest mountain ranges have always been as tall as they are today (as is the implication in creationist hypotheses). I haven’t done the actual calculations, but the possibility that the Earth has enough water to raise sea levels above even moderately high mountain peaks seems remote.

So how about neo-Darwinism? This theory contends that random genetic mutations—typographical errors in the DNA of some organism—acted upon by natural selection, are responsible for the biologic diversity in the world today. So, the theory goes, suppose some poor little blind worm was wriggling about in the dark trying to survive. Eventually it had a little baby worm that was born with a sort of “birth defect:” a light-sensitive patch—not really vision like we have, but able to sense light and dark. You might imagine that this ability might give this particular worm an edge over others. It can find food a little more easily, and more importantly, mate more effectively (assuming this is a worm that mates…it’s just an illustration after all). Natural selection is just the principle that mutant features that allow the individual to reproduce and pass on the mutation to another generation are perpetuated, or selected. Eventually, over many generations, the mutation becomes a normal characteristic, simply because it allows its owner to reproduce more than others.

There are lots of problems with this idea as well. First is that random mutations are far more likely to result in a fatal error in the genetic code than it is to come up with something useful for natural selection to select. Most useful biologic innovations, like the development of sight, for example, require a number of separate parts, none of which are useful on their own. This then requires a number of fortuitous mutations to appear simultaneously. So the light sensitive cells need changes to the organism’s nervous system in order to interpret the signals from the cells. So the probability that a single useful modification could come about by this mechanism are pretty small. But evolutionists assert that every part of the progression from a single self-replicating chain of DNA to fish to lizards to chimps to evolutionists came about by just such astronomically improbable events.

Furthermore, while it is admittedly a pretty clever idea that Darwin came up with, the real problem is that there is no actual evidence to suggest that random mutations and natural selection have really done anything. No one has demonstrated that one species can actually develop from another. Most of the theory is based on conjecture and speculation, which in any other scientific field would never qualify as theory.

In the end, both sides start with their preferred conclusion, and pick out the evidence that supports it and comes up with stories to explain away the rest. Neither side really explains anything except their proponents’ religious views. And this is what makes the question a very important one to understand. Creationism sees God everywhere, while evolution demands he is nowhere. The ramifications of this distinction are enormous. More on that in part 2.