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Creation Or Evolution? Part 2

Winkie Pratney

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The Men Of Science Who Believed In Creation

The idea that "creation halts human inquiry," and that a picture of reality starting with God "finishes off any ideas of research," is a modern fiction. Once again, life-sciences have many Christian researchers like those in the past, such as Linnaeus, the great Swedish botanist, and his predecessor John Ray (whose book The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of Creation blocked evolutionary thought in science for 200 years). History is filled with the genius of men like Kepler, Galileo, Bacon, the brilliant Isaac Newton, Pascal, and Leibnitz, who (despite the strange silence on this aspect of their lives from the secular researcher) all outspokenly and unashamedly loved God and studied His world with joy. Darwin's time was no exception.¹

Faraday's Electricity

In 1831, when Darwin was a backslidden, twenty-two year old ministerial student starting out his five-year voyage on the "Beagle," Michael Faraday, then 40, began a series of experiments that demonstrated the principle of electromagnetic induction. "Very few men," said Sir William Bragg, "have changed the face of the world as Faraday has done. He was one of the greatest experimental philosophers that ever appeared in this country or indeed in all the world. The whole world of electricity started with a simple experiment carried out in the Royal Institute by one of the greatest scientists of all time."

Born the year John Wesley died (1791), at 44 recognized as the leading man of science and honored with a doctorate by Oxford University, he became an elder at 50 in the Chapel Meeting House in Pauls Alley, London, preaching there every Sunday, often to fellow scientists. Near his death in 1867, and holding no less than 97 unsought distinctions from international academies of science, he said, "My worldly faculties are slipping away day by day. Happy it is for all of us that the true good does not lie in them. As they ebb, may they leave us as little children trusting in the Father of Mercies and accepting His unspeakable gift. I bow before Him who is Lord of all." Significantly, the principal men to follow him in constructing the electrical age all owned the same Christ as their Lord - Lord Kelvin (William Thompson), James Clerk Maxwell, and Sir John Ambrose Fleming.

Lord Kelvin's Second Law

The Absolute Temperature Scale still bears Lord Kelvin 's name, but other exploits in his day, like the submarine cable, revolutionary ships compass and 69 other patented brainwaves, made him a household word. He died in 1907 with over 600 published scientific papers to his credit, 70 patented inventions and 21 honorary degrees. Elected unanimously at 22 as Glasgow University's youngest professor ever, he opened every lecture with prayer. "A firm believer in creation for his entire life... he often insisted that the power to analyze, to look for causes, was itself a creation of God. He never ceased to look for causes, causes of causes, and for causes of these in return. Seeking a cause for the escape of heat from the Earth, he became in the end a founder of geophysics and the joint discoverer of the Second Law of Thermodynamics." He was 35 in 1859, when Darwin published his "Origin of the Species."

Could he have dreamed then that the Law he helped co-discover would today be one of the biggest headaches to Darwin's theory? "The sheer venturesomeness of Kelvin's speculations were possible only because of his underlying certainty that behind everything lay the power of the Creator God. Science, in his view, could never lead a man to disbelieve in God." Kelvin wouldn't buy today's common objection that creation is somehow "unscientific." When his sister in later years read to him Darwin's early statement of disbelief in Divine revelation and evidence of creative design in the Universe," Lord Kelvin "unhesitatingly denounced it as utterly unscientific."

Darwin apparently published his theory with much apprehension, fearing the scorn of fellow scientists; in the first edition of his "Origin," he prepared a line of retreat along Lamark's ideas in case his theory of natural selection was found indefensible.² Professor C.D. Darlington was of the opinion that Darwinism began "as a theory that could be explained by natural selection; it ended as a theory that evolution could be explained just as you would like it to be explained."³

John Fleming's "Valve"

John Ambrose Fleming (inventor of the vacuum tube) was 11 when Darwin published "The Origin." Charles Williams' YMCA and William Booth of the soon-to-be-founded Salvation Army, had both been ministering in England 15 years; John's father was a pastor. A great spiritual awakening took place that year with many people in his father's church becoming Christians. Although his early life was financially difficult, John grew up to contribute some of the greatest discoveries of his day in physics and electrical engineering. "Busy though he was at scientific affairs, he had another loyalty to the Friend he had found as a young man. He began to be less quiet as a Christian believer and to use his remarkable powers as a lecturer in speaking about the Bible. He loved the Bible and studied it as the Word of God. 'It contains,' he said, 'the record of events quite out of line with normal human experience and predictions - some of which have already been remarkably fulfilled... it is, and always has been, revered as the communication to us from the Creator of the Universe, the Supreme and Everlasting God.'"

Few other men could equal his skill in completely enthralling an audience. He was a brilliant speaker, getting popular scientific lectures across to non-scientific audiences; copies of his published works kept in University College fill five volumes. He was an outspoken opponent of Evolution theory, and could not bear to look on quietly while an "unproven and unscientific theory was blatantly taught as fact to the ordinary public." From 1904, under the title Evidence of Things Not Seen, he lectured on the unadorned facts about Evolution.

When J. W. Swan of Newcastle made a carbon-filament lamp, it was further improved by Edison, who appointed Fleming to be his chief electrician. Fleming was later also called in by Marconi to help get his wireless telegraph to work; progress was held up without an essential technology that Fleming finally designed in 1904 - the "valve" as he called it, or the vacuum tube.

Son Of Darwin Meets Multiprocessor
(A Science-Fact Horror-Movie For An Old Theory)

Darwin had been dead 33 years. He had no idea that his theories could ever be practically tested. Charles Babbage's "analytical engine" had failed to get off the ground 70 years before, awaiting the very technology that Fleming launched. It was left to John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert in 1946 to build the first nail for the coffin of Darwin's time-protected theory in ENIAC, a clanking, hard-wired monstrosity weighing 30 tons that used 19,000 of these vacuum-tubes, prototypes of the modern microchip.

Some of us forget how long ago Darwin lived. Born the same year as Abe Lincoln (1809), nine years after Volta re-invented the electric battery, it would have really blown his circuits to see a home micro-computer, let alone to run a CRAY-1 or a S1 Mark IIA Multiprocessor with the capacity of eight BILLION operations a second. In Darwin's day, the great salvation of his theory was that no one could live long enough to disprove it. For over a century the standard argument ran like this: "Just because you can't see it working today doesn't mean it didn't; you haven't looked long enough, so there! Given enough time and chance, anything can happen - and probably did."

Enter digital logic, integrated circuitry, the programmable computer: and with it a whole new ball game. You see it is now possible to duplicate millions of years and billions of random variations, simulate original conditions, accelerate any possible spontaneous process - to practically shrink awesome numbers into time slots of months, weeks, sometimes days or hours. Darwin's theory can be tested, today, NOW.

And it has been. With embarrassing results. Put simply, it doesn't work. Put bluntly, nothing else outside of INTELLIGENT DIRECTED CONTROL does anything more than jam test programs into chaos. This has led to interesting shouting matches between the cyberneticists (those who ran the tests on the computers), and the neo-Darwinists, and some mad scrambles for some exotic new catalyst or concept to account for the disappointing facts. Leave a system to itself and all you have at the end of a long time is a bigger mess than you started with. And new discoveries on the complexity of molecules and the conditions necessary to create them only seem to make the problem worse.⁴

The Master-Law Of Nature - Entropy

Remember Lord Kelvin and his co-discovery of the Second Law of Thermodynamics?

The Second Law defines that all things run down, not up. Complex things break down; life becomes more disorganized (look at your desk or bed). Time and Chance make things WORSE, not better. A field, a room, a person, left alone and unattended, fall apart. "Entropy,"⁵ says Jeremy Rifkin, in applying the law in his radical book to both economics and politics, "is the universal master-law, an unbroken reality written all around you."

When you think about it, there are only two basic ways to get order out of disorder:

Chance and Time. These two factors form one alternative. Say we start with these, nothing and no one else. Does it help? Not a lot. A chance garden is called a jungle. Time passing makes things fall apart, not fall together. Both only tend to make things worse, so that really seems to rule them both out.
An Agent and a degradable Energy supply. That is to say: Someone deliberately acting on the disorder with the power to use in fixing it up. Of course, the Agent must pre-exist the system, and must be at least as complex as the order you want in the system.

Putting all this more simply, if you want to dig ditches, you have to BE THERE first - with the energy and the tools to do it. You also have to be smarter than the ditch!

Refrigerators make water (less complex) into ice (more complex) because an AGENT of GREATER WISDOM than the ice blocks (Frigidaire design team?) put together a MACHINE (on special at Sears) that uses DEGRADABLE ENERGY (your astonishing power bill!). The "randomness" was transferred out of the water into heating air behind your fridge, and you finally got something to put into your lemonade - paying only for a fridge, electricity, sales tax and commission, and your service contract when the whole thing succumbs to the Second Law again on Tuesday and breaks down.

That is why some have made an open challenge for anyone to prove that MACRO-evolution is scientifically possible. Like R.G. Elmendorf, who offers a $5,000 cash reward for anyone who can find a natural process in which available energy, structure, and information INCREASE with time - WITHOUT requiring PRIOR and HIGHER energy, structure, and information:

"Evolution is here defined as a real, natural, self-caused, continuing, uphill process - involving energy, structure, and information - which goes from disorganized to organized, from random to ordered, from lower to higher, from simple to complex, from atom to amoeba, from molecules to man. All uphill processes (photosynthesis, growth, etc.) are local and temporary, and all require a creative trio of prerequisites in order to operate:

ENERGY - an appropriate outside source of energy.
ENERGY CONVERSION MACHINE - a fit structure or mechanism to use and transform the above energy.
INTELLIGENCE - an intelligent information and control system to direct the machine (found only in life)."⁶

Are YOU "Breaking Down"?

Do not put off getting right with God. Do not say to yourself, "Give me time and I'll be okay." Entropy contradicts you. Time will never make you better; time only INCREASES disorder. Are you going to take the awful chance that you are right and the Word of God is wrong? Some things are not a gamble - they are suicide. The testimony of the Universe is against you. Chance offers no safety. Her deck is stacked in favor of the house. All that can bring order out of disorder is greater Power and higher Intelligence. Such is the Second Law - in physics or in life.

Footnotes:

1) R. E. D. Clark: Creator God or Cosmic Magician? Symposium on Creation vol. IV, pp. 117-118; Peter Masters: Men Of Purpose, pp. 9-20, 93-101, 114-121.
2) Life & Lectures of Charles Darwin - Ed. Francis Darwin, D. Appleton & Company, 1888, vol. 2 pp12-15.
3) Darlington: "The Origin Of Darwinism," Scientific American, 200, 4-60; May 1959, pp. 60-61.
4) Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretaion of Evolution - Ed. Moorhead & Kaplan, Philadelphia: Wister Institue, 1967; Murray Eden: Inadequacies of Neo-Darwinian Evolution as a Scientific Theory, p. 11; M. P. Shutzenberger, pp. 73-75; A. E. Wilder-Smith: The Creation Of Life - A Cybernetic Approach to Evolution, Baker; James F. Coppedge: Evolution - Possible or Impossible? Zondervan, 1973.
5) The tendecny of an energy system to run down - Webster's New World Dictionary.
6) R. G. Elmendorf - "$5,000 Reward," September 1, 1976; Bible-Science Association Western Penn., Bairdford, PA 15006.

Winkie Pratney, 2/21/2007