Answer by Ed Neeland
Human Genome author Dr. Francis Collins’ did write defending Evolution and claiming God used evolution in an article entitled “Science, Ethics and Faith.’¹ I have good reason as a professional chemist, to question evolution’s version of origins. On occasion, several of my untenured colleagues have slipped into my office and said they too didn’t buy into it but were not about to make their opinions public. Fair enough. So why do I hold a diametrically opposed position to Dr. Collins’ about evolution?
I applaud Dr. Collins’ life story and how acts of selfless altruism in people led him to discover God but I must take issue with his statement about God and his “…individual acts of special creation, simply cannot be reconciled with the scientific evidence about the universe…” Dr. Collins’favours the evolutionary account and is on record as saying that the evidence is overwhelming. Perhaps underwhelming would be more like it.
My area of research is synthetic organic chemistry. What this means is that I make new compounds. They could be new medicines, plastics or explosives to name a few. Please understand that very exacting conditions of concentration, time, temperature, atmosphere and purification are needed to make these molecules. I have to work very hard to make even moderately sized compounds and the “simple” cell is replete with complicated compounds that, frankly, I couldn’t begin to synthesize. And yet, evolution demands that life began using unguided, uncontrolled chemical reactions under unexacting conditions. I don’t see it. At all. I am trying hard not to use the term nonsense. I have failed. Thousands of intelligently designed and carefully controlled experiments repeatedly cannot replicate the components of the cell nor explain, once made, how or why they would self assemble. To continue to believe that random uncontrolled chemical reactions somehow made a living cell is to step into the world of a badly supported faith; maybe even delusion.
But let’s be gracious and grant that a living cell did happen somehow through natural events. What process enabled the cell to ultimately begin building up information to make new complex organisms? Apparently mutations. Assuming this process happened by itself then surely intelligent scientists should be able to take a simple bacterium and through mutations create a multicellular organism like a worm or an ant. Our efforts are not even close. Something simpler? Take an organism and through mutations create a new macro-part. For example, a fruit fly with a stinger. We have been subjecting fruit flies to over a hundred years of mutagenesis experiments. Result? Fruit flies with different eye colours, wing styles, body types and even some fruit flies with legs growing out of their eyes. This is not generating new information or new parts; just scrambling the information that was already there and it’s not evolution.
I am forced to draw a conclusion. Repeated experiments disprove the very foundation of evolution so why trust its claims? I do not. You could just as well claim that an iPod happened by itself through a series of lucky combinations of oil deposits, minerals and lightning and that you will work out the details later. Good luck with that. On the plus side, all that complex information came from somewhere and again our experience shows that complex information always comes from intelligence. No exceptions I can think of. That well of complex information is the mind of God.
In about 15 years, I plan to retire from academia and I plan on going out into the world with the following message: “I am a published scientist, was a professor of chemistry, and I think that the theory of evolution has little evidence to support it. Instead, I support a biblical creation model and here’s why…”
So back to Dr. Collins’ quote above. May I respectfully suggest that experiments show that it is the evolution scenario which cannot be reconciled with the scientific evidence about the universe. I am not just poking holes in the theory…more like canyons. At least the “individual acts of special creation” theory doesn’t fly in the face of the data. We can see that intelligence and design were necessary in generating life. This Intelligence has told us so. To deny that is to be without excuse. He said that too.”
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