Below is the online edition of In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood,
by Dr. Walt Brown. Copyright © Center for Scientific Creation. All rights reserved.
Click here to order the hardbound 8th edition (2008) and other materials.
a . “Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose. Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, p. 1.
Yet, after such acknowledgments, Dawkins, an avowed atheist and perhaps the world’s leading Darwinian, tries to show that life came about by natural processes, not intelligent design. Dawkins fails to grasp the complexity in life.
u We have seen that living things are too improbable and too beautifully ‘designed’ to have come into existence by chance.” Ibid, p. 43.
Here Dawkins states that natural selection, not chance, accounts for this “apparent” design. While natural selection accounts for microevolution, it certainly cannot produce macroevolution. [See "Natural Selection" on page 8.]
u “The complexity of the simplest known type of cell is so great that it is impossible to accept that such an object could have been thrown together suddenly by some kind of freakish, vastly improbable, event. Such an occurrence would be indistinguishable from a miracle.” Denton, p. 264.
“Is it really credible that random processes could have constructed a reality, the smallest element of which—a functional protein or gene—is complex beyond our own creative capacities, a reality which is the very antithesis of chance, which excels in every sense anything produced by the intelligence of man? Alongside the level of ingenuity and complexity exhibited by the molecular machinery of life, even our most advanced artefacts appear clumsy. We feel humbled, as neolithic man would in the presence of twentieth-century technology. It would be an illusion to think that what we are aware of at present is any more than a fraction of the full extent of biological design. In practically every field of fundamental biological research ever-increasing levels of design and complexity are being revealed at an ever-accelerating rate.” Ibid., p. 342.
u “We have seen that self-replicating systems capable of Darwinian evolution appear too complex to have arisen suddenly from a prebiotic soup. This conclusion applies both to nucleic acid systems and to hypothetical protein-based genetic systems.” Shapiro, p. 207.
“We do not understand how this gap in organization was closed, and this remains the most crucial unsolved problem concerning the origin of life.” Ibid., p. 299.
u “More than 30 years of experimentation on the origin of life in the fields of chemical and molecular evolution have led to a better perception of the immensity of the problem of the origin of life on Earth rather than to its solution. At present all discussions on principal theories and experiments in the field either end in stalemate or in a confession of ignorance.” Klaus Dose, “The Origin of Life: More Questions Than Answers,” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, Vol. 13, No. 4, 1988, p. 348.
b . “The events that gave rise to that first primordial cell are totally unknown, matters for guesswork and a standing challenge to scientific imagination.” Lewis Thomas, foreword to The Incredible Machine, editor Robert M. Pool (Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Book Service, 1986), p. 7.
u “No experimental system yet devised has provided the slightest clue as to how biologically meaningful sequences of subunits might have originated in prebiotic polynucleotides or polypeptides.” Kenyon, p. A-20.
u “If we can indeed come to understand how a living organism arises from the nonliving, we should be able to construct one—only of the simplest description, to be sure, but still recognizably alive. This is so remote a possibility now that one scarcely dares to acknowledge it; but it is there nevertheless.” George Wald, “The Origin of Life,” p. 45.
u Experts in this field hardly ever discuss publicly how the first cell could have evolved. However, the world’s leading evolutionists know the problems. For example, on 27 July 1979, Luther D. Sunderland taped an interview with Dr. David Raup, Dean of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. This interview was later transcribed and authenticated by both parties. Sunderland told Raup, “Neither Dr. Patterson [of the British Museum (Natural History)] nor Dr. Eldredge [of the American Museum of Natural History] could give me any explanation of the origination of the first cell.” Dr. Raup replied, “I can’t either.”
u “However, the macromolecule-to-cell transition is a jump of fantastic dimensions, which lies beyond the range of testable hypothesis. In this area all is conjecture. The available facts do not provide a basis for postulating that cells arose on this planet.” David E. Green and Robert F. Goldberger, Molecular Insights Into the Living Process (New York: Academic Press, 1967), pp. 406–407.
u “Every time I write a paper on the origins of life I swear I will never write another one, because there is too much speculation running after too few facts, though I must confess that in spite of this, the subject is so fascinating that I never seem to stick to my resolve.” Crick, p. 153.
This fascination explains why the “origin of life” topic frequently arises—despite so much evidence showing that it cannot happen by natural processes. Speculations abound.