In the Beginning: Science and Genesis 1-11

Class Eight - Day 5, Starlight & Time, DNA

We’ve touched on dating methods and we’ll further discuss that and the fossil record later, but how about the lights from the stars? PP

Do stars that are billions of light years away prove that the universe is billions of years old? So let’s address that stumbling block, where the Bible says the universe is just thousands of years old, and yet we can see stars that are billions of light-years away PP (Starlight and Time – 24 minutes).

What’s important to remember from the DVD is this statement from the related book by Humphries of the same name: PP

“The mathematics of this new theory shows that while God makes the universe in six days in the earth’s reference frame, the light has ample time in the extra-terrestrial reference frame to travel the required distances.” And the mechanism for that is PP

the large amount of gravity at the beginning of the universe. Watching the video one time is not going to give most of us an understanding of what Humphries is postulating. But as lay people we really don’t need to. We simply need to remember that all scientific evidence rightly viewed will confirm Scripture and that any scientific theory that appears to contradict Scripture is either flawed or misunderstood or both!

Let’s come back to earth. Genesis 1:20-25 states PP:

“Then God said, “Let the waters teem with swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth and the open expanse of the heavens.” And God created the great sea monsters, and every living creature that moves, with which the waters swarmed after their kind, and every winged bird after its kind; and God saw that it was good. PP

And God blessed them, saying, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth.” And there was evening and there was morning, a fifth day. Then God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures after their kind: cattle and creeping things and beasts of the earth after their kind”; and it was so. PP

And God made the beasts of the earth after their kind, and the cattle after their kind, and everything that creeps on the ground after its kind; and God saw that it was good.”

So going back to our visual contrast PP

between the Biblical and evolutionary creation stories, we see we have entered into day 6 of creation. Verses 20 through 22 cover that day, which describes the creation of everything in the sea and in the air.

Let’s revisit the creation of vegetation in verse 12 PP:

“And the earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed after their kind, and trees bearing fruit, with seed in them, after their kind; and God saw that it was good." Here God simply “brings forth” the various kinds of vegetation from grass to fruit trees from what he had already created. That activity on day three is an important distinction from what is now happening in day five. In between these acts is the further preparation for life that occurs in day four, as we’ve seen, when God said “let the be” lights, that is the sun and the moon, and the stars. These all came from what he had already created in the beginning on day one.

Yet verse 21 states PP:

“And God created the great sea monsters, and every living creature that moves, with which the waters swarmed after their kind, and every winged bird after its kind; and God saw that it was good.” The distinction is the word PP

“living”, which is used here for the first time in the Bible. It is the Hebrew word PP

nephesh, which is elsewhere in scripture translated “soul” or “breathes”, but when used for the first time here is translated “life” as it relates to conscious animals. So while vegetation “lives’ in a sense, they do not have a nephesh life. That is, they do not have a consciousness. So here we have the second act of creation PP

by God, with the same word for created, bara, that He used in verse one : ”In the beginning God created…” We’ll address His final act of creation in a later class.

So in verses 20 to 25 we have every living thing except man, whether in the seas, in the air, or on the land, created. Those under the sea and in the air were created on day five and those on the land were created on day six.

Here we again have a clear contradiction between the two stories, with the Biblical story having every living creature being created in less than 48 hours versus millions of years in the evolution creation story. For example, we have evolution stating, amazingly, that PP

birds evolved from reptiles (dinosaurs), PP which evolved millions of years earlier, whereas the Biblical account clearly has birds created on day five before reptiles on day six. I say amazingly because of the utter impossibility physically for a bird to have evolved from a reptile. Birds fly and dinosaurs don’t. Birds are warm blooded, reptiles are cold blooded. We all know what a dinosaur bone looks like, which is nothing like the bones of a bird, which are very light weight and hollow, PP

and contain PPx2

an intricate bracing structure within them that screams design. Furthermore, for any reptile in-out lung with its bellows-like arrangement PP

to change into a PP

flow-through bird lung by small steps, while remaining functional throughout and providing a greater advantage at each step, defies imagination. Such very efficient lungs help birds to handle the energy demands of flight, especially at high altitudes. A bird will land after flying great distances without being winded, whereas we, with bellows type lungs, are gasping for air after a short run. Relative to archaeopteryx, PPx2

for years it was, and by some still is, claimed as a transitional link between dinosaurs and birds. One of the biggest dilemmas for those who want to believe that dinosaurs evolved into birds is that the so-called feathered dinosaurs found thus far are dated to be about 20 million years more recent than Archaeopteryx. This is a problem for evolution because Archaeopteryx is now generally recognized to be a true bird. Some specimens of this bird are so perfectly fossilized that even the microscopic detail of its feathers is clearly visible. So, having alleged missing links of dinosaurs changing into birds when birds already exist doesn’t help the case for evolution.

It’s important that we all understand the following point emphasized by Pierre-Paul Grasse, Chair of Evolution at the Sorbonne PP:

“Naturalists must remember that the process of evolution is revealed only through fossil forms. A knowledge of paleontology is, therefore, a prerequisite; only paleontology can provide them with the evidence and reveal its course or mechanisms.” We’ll look at that evidence, which is damning to the evolution theory, when we deal with the results of the Great Flood in Genesis 7:21-24, which created those fossils.

I have mentioned previously that evolutionists have no idea how life came from non-life. They simply accept it as a matter of faith. Of course it happened as we are here. Actually, to believe that takes much greater faith than to believe that God did it. The following video clip clearly demonstrates that PP.

This is the home-school version of Unlocking the Mystery of Life, which breaks Unlocking into six 10 minute segments. I highly recommend it. This particular segment includes information not included in Unlocking. (Where Does the Evidence Lead? – How Did Life Begin segment - ~ 10 minutes)

Beyond the origin of life, evolution has other insurmountable obstacles in its path from goo to you via the zoo. The evolution story presupposes that the transition from the simplest life form to man can happen through natural processes, yet that transition involves an astronomical increase in information as well as natural selection acting on random mutations over eons of time, which is contrary to the evidence. In looking at that evidence we’ll start with PP

Darwin’s concern voiced in Origin of Species: “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.”

Darwin included a chapter in Origin of Species on the difficulties with his hypothesis. He felt the fossil record presented the greatest problem, but as significant a problem as that is as we shall see, this comment is correct as what we are about to address, irreducible complexity, is fatal to Neo-Darwinism.

To demonstrate irreducible complexity we’ll use the bacterial flagellum PP.

What you are viewing here, and on Unlocking the Mystery of Life if you viewed it, has been called the most efficient motor in existence. It is an accurate drawing of what is viewed PP

of the flagellum when magnified 50,000 times via an electron microscope. It propels the bacteria by rotating at up to 100,000 revolutions a minute. It can stop and reverse itself in ¼ of a turn! The bacterial flagellum has 30-40 parts and could not function with fewer parts. There is no Darwinian explanation for irreducible complexity as its theory requires each interim step to have functionality or natural selection would eliminate it. Yet the flagellar motor has no function without all its parts. Darwin called the cell the “simple cell” because in his time of minor magnification it looked like a simple blob of protoplasm. Had the tools scientists have today been available then, he would have written an entirelydifferent book, perhaps titled The Wonder of God’s Creation! By the way, modern editions of Origin of Species leave off its subtitle PP

– The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life. Why do you suppose that is? While we won’t delve into it in this class, Darwin’s theory is racist and was clearly embraced by both Stalin and Hitler. To pursue this further, see Ken Ham’s book

Darwin’s Plantation or view PP

Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, where in addition to documenting viewpoint discrimination in academia, Stein touches on this subject.

Back to the flagellum; Dr. Michael Behe of LeHigh University documented the flagellum in his powerful book Darwin’s Black Box. I highly recommend it. I recall several years ago Mike made a presentation in the Tampa Bay area and subsequently visited the biology department at USF. After presenting his arguments to the biology staff there, their response was that given enough time they would find the naturalist solution to this seemingly insurmountable problem! Recall what I said the trump card of the evolutionist is? Time! Here you see it at work. Mike responded PP

that while he publicly documented the flagellum in his book, the scientific community had been aware of it for 40 years, with zero articles providing such an explanation.

Yet if you read current literature you will hear that scientists have in fact discovered a naturalistic answer to irreducible complexity and that the bacterial flagellum is not irreducibly complex after all. That’s because it evolved from PP

the type three secretory system in a process called co-option. The TTSS is a bad dude, being the injector used by the plague virus to spread that horrible disease. Evolutionists say the flagellum co-opted the TTSS, adding parts to become what it now is. That’s simply another “just so” story that the evolutionists throw out to cover up difficult problems with their theory. First of all, even if it was true, which it isn’t, it doesn’t explain the numerous transitional phases between the TTSS and the flagellum which would not be functional and therefore would be selected out by natural selection. Secondly, research demonstrates that the TTSS is in fact a mutation of the flagellum, not the other way around.

Let’s quickly look PP

at the cell that Darwin called simple. It is anything but simple. Evolutionist Bruce Alberts, then president of the National Academy of Sciences, said this PP

about the cell in 1988: “The entire cell can be viewed as a factory that contains an elaborate network of interlocking assembly lines, each of which is composed of large protein machines.”

Your body is comprised of PP

100 trillion of these complex cells! And relative to the “protein machines” Alberts refers to, each of those cells has PP

about 60,000 proteins in it. Isn’t it interesting that the evolutionists deny design in biology yet use design terms and engineering knowledge is often required in their research!

Proteins are called the building blocks of life, and Unlocking the Mystery of Life does an excellent job of explaining how DNA is transcribed into messenger RNA which links together amino acids in just the right order to form the needed protein, which is then escorted to where it is needed in the cell. PP

There is no scientific evidence for any process in nature that can arrange letters in a precise sequence, yet PP

humans can do it easily.

Proteins PP

are like sentences. They are made up of dozens of precisely ordered letters–“chemical letters” called “amino acids.” So the amino acids I referred to could be thought of as letters in an alphabet, but the words they form are much more complex than any of our largest words. Proteins PP

can be thought of as macro-words. We think of macro-words such PP

as antidisestablishmentarianism or PP

supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, but they are small when compared to the smallest proteins, which contain at least 150 letters. So we see that PP

DNA is an information-packed library and PP it is also a “macromolecule.” And, PP as an “informational macromolecule,” it carries the blueprints for proteins. And so PP

our message in the sand of “John loves Mary” is only 15 letters but an intelligent agent is obvious. PP Yet bacterial DNA contains 2,000,000 letters and PP human DNA contains 3,000,000,000 letters! So, PP Darwin’s paradigm springs a huge leak: it can’t explain the origin of information.

Yet Bill Gates of Microsoft fame PP

has stated: “Human DNA is like a computer program but far, far more advanced than any we’ve ever created.” DNA is the abbreviation for PP

Deoxyribonucleic Acid, but just remember Definitely No Accident. DNA has amazing information storage capability. For example, the amount of DNA that can be held on the head of a needle contains the informational PP

equivalent of a stack of books reaching from the earth to the moon 240 times! Recall that the moon is 214,000 miles from the earth. Converting those books into CDs PP

would result in a stack of CDs 68 miles high. Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, while never admitting it publicly told his son PP

in a letter that DNA was like a code! We’ll see the implications of that shortly.