In the Beginning:
Science and Genesis 1-11
Class Nine - Information and Day 6
Let’s
look at that information PP
we are referring to. Does this DVD PP
contain more information than was required to make it? Of course not, yet that is what evolution
posits. PP
To go
from an amoeba to man requires PP an astronomical (inconceivably great)
increase in information! Yet evolution
by definition is a materialistic (matter is all there is), mechanistic
process. Yet information is an
intangible and intangibles cannot be addressed by a materialistic, mechanistic
process.
Here PP
we have depicted two discs, one a blank CD and the other containing an
hour-long video. What is the difference
in the weight of these two discs? Zero! Because the video is made of information,
which is an intangible!
So let’s
take a look PP
at information theory, specifically 10 scientific laws about
information. For more information on
what we are about to view I refer you to PP
In the
Beginning Was Information by Dr. Werner Gitt. You saw Dr. Gitt on
a video last week.
Scientific
laws about information: PP
1. Anything material,
such as physical/chemical processes, cannot create something non-material. PP
2. Information is a non-material
fundamental entity and NOT a property of matter (remember our disc
comparison). PP
3. Information
requires a material medium for storage and transmission. PP
4.
Information cannot originate in statistical processes (random
chance). Since we’ve mentioned chance, Let’s take a couple of minutes to look at chance, the third
part of the evolution trinity of matter, time and chance. Pierre-Paul Grasse, a noted French zoologist,
says, PP
“Directed
by all-powerful selection (there’s that term again), chance becomes a sort of
providence (the care exercised by God over the universe), which, under the
cover of atheism, is not named but which is secretly worshiped.”
I want to quote directly from R. C. Sproul’s
book Not A Chance: PP
‘As long as chance rules, God is an
anachronism. ... It is true that if
chance rules, God cannot. We can go fur- ther...it is not
necessary for chance to rule in order to sup plant
God. All it needs to do the job is to
exist. PP
The
mere existence of chance is enough to rip God from his cosmic throne. If chance existed, it would destroy God’s
sovereignty. If God is not sovereign, he
is not God. If he is not God, he simply
is not. PP
If
chance is, God is not. If God is, chance
is not. The two cannot coexist by reason
of the impossibility of the contrary (the law of non-contradiction).’
Sproul’s whole book is obviously about chance, but let me give an
example that hopefully will illustrate what he is saying. Use the coin toss example. Mathematicians can figure the odds of a coin
turning up heads in a given number of tosses.
The simplest is one toss. What
are the odds there? That’s right,
50-50. How much influence does chance
have on the result? Absolutely
nothing! It is simply a term used to
describe what may happen. It certainly
has no power to do anything. There is no possibility that chance can have any
influence on that or anything else! Yet
evolutionists give chance great power by adding a simple word in front of
it. Can you guess what it is? PP
“By”! Suddenly chance takes on magical powers of
creation! PP
Evolutionists
posit that we can have effects without causes.
Uncaused effects represent a contradiction in terms, as by definition an
effect is something produced by an antecedent cause. No effect is ever quantitatively greater or
qualitatively superior to its cause. An
effect can be lower than its cause but never higher. Yet the theory of evolution attempts to make
effects such as organized complexity, life, and personality greater than their
causes, which are disorder, non-life, and impersonal forces. That is an impossibility!
We’ve
seen two references to logic, and specifically the law of non-contradiction. Evolutionists and secular humanists
continually violate the laws of logic, and sadly, for the most part they get
away with it. We should be alert to
someone violating the laws of logic and challenge them when they do it. To help you in this regard, I recommend PP 
Unshakeable Foundations by Norman Geisler and Peter
Bocchino. It’s
first chapter is titled Questions About Logic.
Let’s
return to the scientific laws of information.
PP 
5. There can be no information without a
code. PP
6. All codes result from an intentional choice
and agreement between sender and recipient.
PP
7. Allocating meaning to a set of symbols by a
sender, and determining meaning from a set of symbols by a recipient, are mental processes requiring intelligence. PP
8. There can be no new information
without an intelligent, purposeful sender.
PP
9. Any given chain of information can be traced
backward to an intelligent source. PP
10. Information comprises the nonmaterial
foundation for all such as PP biological systems, technological systems
and works of art.
Based on the
scientific laws of information, we can make some logical deductions: PP
1)
The laws of information refute the assumption of scientific materialism and the
theories of chemical and biological evolution.
2) They establish the existence
of an eternal, all- knowing, all-powerful Creator who has described His acts of
creation in Genesis.
We have discussed the
first two of God’s three acts of creation.
The first occurred in Genesis 1:1 regarding the creation (bara) of the heavens and
the earth. The second act of creation by
God was the creation of living creatures (bara
and nephesh) in Genesis 1:21. These creatures have a consciousness of the
things around them and an ability to react to them. God’s third and final act of creation is
addressed in our next section, Genesis 1:26-31 PP:
“Then God said, ‘Let
Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness;
and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and
over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that
creeps on the earth.’ And God created
man in His own image, in the image of God He created him, male and female He
created them. PP
And God blessed them;
and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue
it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky, and over
every living thing that moves on the earth.’
PP
Then God said,
‘Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the surface of
all the earth, and every tree which has fruit yielding seed; it shall be food
for you; and to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the sky and to
every thing that moves on the earth which has life, I have given every green
plant for food’; and it was so. PP
And God saw all that
He had made, and behold, it was very good.
And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.”
In
verse 26 we again see a reference to the Trinity PP:
“Then God said, ‘Let Us
make man in Our image, according to Our
likeness…” Man was made in the same
manner as the other animals, that is, from pre-existing matter, and he was nephesh as the animals, that is, living or with
consciousness. But there the similarity
ends, for man was made in the image of God.
I don’t think anyone can fully grasp what that means, which is a good
time to be reminded of Isaiah 55:8&9 PP:
“For my thoughts are not
your thoughts, Neither are your ways My ways, declares
the Lord. For as the heavens are higher
than the earth, So are My ways higher than your ways,
And My thoughts than your thoughts.”
Although God does not have
a physical body, we know from Scripture that PP
God can PP see (Gen
16:13),PP hear (Ps 94:9), PP smell (Gen
8:21), PP touch (Gen 32:32) and PP speak (2nd Pet.
1:18). Also, whenever He has appeared to
man He has done so in the form of a human body.
So, unlike all the other
animals, man was created to be able to physically interact with God; an erect
posture, upward gazing countenance, facial expressions varying with emotional
feelings, and a brain and tongue designed for articulate symbolic speech.
The spirit of an animal
ceases to exist when the body dies as Ecclesiastes 3:21 teaches. PP
Spirit is the Hebrew word ruach, which is 3commonly translated “wind” or
“breath.” Both animals and man have a
spirit, or living “essence.” But only
man is made in the image of God and has an eternal soul, capable of communion
and fellowship with God. Mentally only
man has a moral consciousness, the ability to think abstractly, an
understanding of beauty and emotion, and the capacity for worshiping and loving
God.
Relative to the science
involved in the creation of man, we’ve already seen the evidence relative to
the inability of evolution to evolve the complexity necessary for life at the
animal and human level to exist. It’s
important that we remember the illogical position that the evolutionist takes,
particularly as it relates to man.
Recall that they believe that as you sit there PP
you are the product of random, natural processes that did
not have you in mind. As part of that,
they argue that your thoughts are simply the product of chemical reactions in
your brain. We have already seen that
information is an intangible and also that the source of information can
without exception be traced back to an intelligent source. The evolution position regarding thought
violates the laws of science.
The creation story we see
in these verses is certainly supportable from the evidence in biology we have
seen and will see. But there is
something else of interest in the verses.
Verses 29 and 30 state PP:
“Then God said, ‘Behold, I
have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the surface of all the
earth, and every tree which has fruit yielding seed; it shall be food for you;
and to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the sky and to every thing
that moves on the earth which has life, I have given every green plant for
food’; and it was so.”
This clearly implies that
the entire earth was covered with vegetation unlike today and that every living
thing was vegetarian. When, for example,
you think of PP
Tyrannosaurus Rex with
those big teeth, do you think of a vegetarian?
The reality is that the size of teeth have
nothing to do with whether something is vegetarian or a meat eater, or
both. Genesis 9:2 states PP:
“And the fear of you and the terror of you
shall be on every beast of the earth and on every bird of the sky, with
everything that creeps on the ground, and all the fish of the sea, into your
hand they are given.”
That
verse, which in context is immediately after Noah and his family exit the ark, clearly
indicates that before that time man and the beasts of the earth lived in
harmony and that therefore everything was in fact vegetarian. Relative to T. Rex, what do you see in this
depiction PP
that is unusual? No
one can be dogmatic about this, but I don’t think those wimpy arms would be
helpful for a voracious meat-eater.
So man is not given the
meat of animals to eat until after the Great Flood. The following post-Flood verse in Genesis 9
states PP: 
“Every moving thing that is
alive shall be food for you, I give all to you, as I
gave the green plant.” The latter part of
that verse is clearly referring back to PP
Genesis 1:29-30 where all
living things are only give plants to eat.
So after the Flood man’s menu is expanded to include all living
things. The beginning of the verse also
expands on verse two. Not only will the
beasts fear man, but for the first time they will be hunted by man, making that
fear justified.
The molecules
to man creation story of Neo-Darwinism fails the evidence test. That story states that natural selection
acting on beneficial mutations over eons of time created the diversity of life
on earth. Yet irreducible complexity and
information both contradict key parts of that story, as does the evidence
regarding the age of the earth. Let’s
move to our next section to address another key aspect of Neo-Darwinism,
beneficial mutations. Without the engine
of beneficial mutations, Neo-Darwinism collapses.
Before
we begin the section on beneficial mutations, let’s go to the work of a group
of evolutionary developmental biologists.
In PP
Origination of Organismal Form
by Miller and Newman, which documents the findings of a group of biologists in 
“The neo-Darwinian
paradigm still represents the central explanatory framework of evolution...
This refined and canonical theory concerns the variational
dynamics and adaptation of existing forms. It is a gene-centered, gradualistic, and externalistic
theory, according to which all evolutionary modification is a result of
external selection acting on incremental genetic variation. The resulting
adaptations lead to successive replacement of phenotypes and hence to
evolution.”
PP
“Although this theory can account for the
phenomena it concentrates on, namely, variation of traits in populations, it
leaves aside a number of other aspects of evolution, such as the roles of
developmental plasticity and epigenesis or of
nonstandard mechanisms such as assimilation. Most important, it completely
avoids the origination of phenotypic traits and of organismal
form. In other words, neo-Darwinism has no theory of the generative.”
That is a damning statement coming from evolutionists! PP
Neo-Darwinism has no theory of the
generative! In other words,
Neo-Darwinism can explain change within a species, which we term
micro-evolution and with which no one disagrees. However, it cannot explain how one species
supposedly begets another, which is known as macro-evolution and is a
modern-day fairy tale for adults. If it
cannot how one species beget another species, which we have all been told
decades that it does explain, then Neo-Darwinism is
false. Yet notice the homage that they
give in the beginning PP
to
a theory they then state has no engine to drive the train of evolution! That shows the deference given in academia to
the evolution dogma. To see what happens
to those that don’t show such deference I again refer you to PP
Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed
with Ben Stein.
In
February & March, 2008 I made presentations to the Florida Board of
Education (FBOE) and the Florida Senate Subcommittee on Education against the
new, evolution-as-dogma,
“Evolution is the fundamental
concept underlying all of biology and is supported by multiple forms of
scientific evidence.” There is a
critical error in that standard. The
fundamental concepts underlying all of biology would be cell theory and perhaps
Mendel’s theory of genetics. Cell theory
basically states that life comes from life; that all living cells come from
pre-existing living cells. We’ll examine
genetics in the next class.