WHEN anthropologists dig in the earth and
find a triangular piece of sharp flint, they conclude that it must have been
designed by someone to be the tip of an arrow. Such things designed for a
purpose, scientists agree, could not be products of chance.
When
it comes to living things, however, the same logic is often abandoned. A
designer is not considered necessary. But the simplest single-celled organism,
or just the DNA of its genetic code, is far more complex than a shaped piece of
flint. Yet evolutionists insist that these had no designer but were shaped by a
series of chance events.
However, Darwin recognized the need for some
designing force and gave natural selection the job. “Natural selection,” he
said, “is daily and hourly scrutinising, throughout the world, the slightest
variations; rejecting those that are bad, preserving and adding up all that are
good.”1 That view, however, is now losing favor.
Stephen Gould reports that many contemporary
evolutionists now say that substantial change “may not be subject to natural
selection and may spread through populations at random.”2 Gordon
Taylor agrees: “Natural selection explains a small part of what occurs: the
bulk remains unexplained.”3 Geologist David Raup says: “A currently
important alternative to natural selection has to do with the effects of pure
chance.”4 But is “pure chance” a designer? Is it capable of
producing the complexities that are the fabric of life?
Evolutionist Richard Lewontin admitted that
organisms “appear to have been carefully and artfully designed,” so that some
scientists viewed them as “the chief evidence of a Supreme Designer.”5
It will be useful to consider some of this evidence.
Little Things
Let us start with the smallest of living
things: single-celled organisms. A biologist said that single-celled animals
can “catch food, digest it, get rid of wastes, move around, build houses,
engage in sexual activity” and “with no tissues, no organs, no hearts and no
minds—really have everything we’ve got.”6
Diatoms, one-celled organisms, take silicon
and oxygen from seawater and make glass, with which they construct tiny “pillboxes”
to contain their green chlorophyll. They are extolled by one scientist for both
their importance and their beauty: “These green leaves enclosed in jewel boxes
are pastures for nine tenths of the food of everything that lives in the seas.”
A large part of their food value is in the oil that diatoms make, which also
helps them bob buoyantly near the surface where their chlorophyll can bask in
sunlight.
Their beautiful glass-box coverings, this
same scientist tells us, come in a “bewildering variety of shapes—circles,
squares, shields, triangles, ovals, rectangles—always exquisitely ornamented
with geometric etchings. These are filigreed in pure glass with such fine skill
that a human hair would have to be sliced lengthwise into four hundred slices
to fit between the marks.”7
One
group of ocean-dwelling animals, called radiolarians, make glass and with it
build “glass sunbursts, with long thin transparent spikelets radiating from a
central crystal sphere.” Or “glass struts are built into hexagons and used to
make simple geodesic domes.” Of a certain microscopic builder it is said: “One
geodesic dome will not do for this superarchitect; it has to be three lacelike
fretted glass domes, one inside another.”8 Words fail to describe
these marvels of design—it takes pictures to do so.
Sponges are made up of millions of cells, but
only a few different kinds. A college textbook explains: “The cells are not
organized into tissues or organs, yet there is a form of recognition among the
cells that holds them together and organizes them.”9 If a sponge is
mashed through a cloth and separated into its millions of cells, those cells
will come together and rebuild the sponge. Sponges construct skeletons of glass
that are very beautiful. One of the most amazing is Venus’s-flower-basket.
Of it,
one scientist says: “When you look at a complex sponge skeleton such as that
made of silica spicules which is known as [Venus’s-flower-basket], the
imagination is baffled. How could quasi-independent microscopic cells
collaborate to secrete a million glassy splinters and construct such an
intricate and beautiful lattice? We do not know.”10 But one thing we
do know: Chance is not the likely designer.
Partnerships
Many
cases exist where two organisms appear designed to live together. Such
partnerships are examples of symbiosis (living together). Certain figs and
wasps need each other in order to reproduce. Termites eat wood but need the
protozoa in their bodies to digest it. Similarly, cattle, goats and camels
could not digest the cellulose in grass without the help of bacteria and
protozoa living inside them. A report says: “The part of a cow’s stomach where
that digestion takes place has a volume of about 100 quarts—and contains
10 billion microorganisms in each drop.”11 Algae and fungi team
up and become lichens. Only then can they grow on bare rock to start turning
rock into soil.
Stinging ants live in the hollow thorns of
acacia trees. They keep leaf-eating insects off the tree and they cut up and
kill vines that try to climb on the tree. In return, the tree secretes a sugary
fluid that the ants relish, and it also produces small false fruit, which
serves as food for the ants. Did the ant first protect the tree and then the
tree rewarded it with fruit? Or did the tree make fruit for the ant and the ant
then thanked it with protection? Or did it all chance to happen at once?
Many
cases of such cooperation exist between insects and flowers. Insects pollinate
flowers, and in return flowers feed insects pollen and nectar. Some flowers
produce two kinds of pollen. One fertilizes seeds, the other is sterile but
feeds insect visitors. Many flowers have special markings and smells to guide
insects to the nectar. En route the insects pollinate the flower. Some flowers
have trigger mechanisms. When insects touch the trigger they get swatted by the
pollen-containing anthers.
For
example, the Dutchman’s-pipe cannot pollinate itself but needs insects to bring
in pollen from another flower. The plant has a tubular leaf that envelops its
flower, and this leaf is coated with wax. Insects, attracted by the smell of
the flower, land on the leaf and plunge down the slippery slide to a chamber at
the bottom. There, ripe stigmas receive the pollen that the insects brought in,
and pollination takes place. But for three more days the insects are trapped
there by hairs and the waxed sides. After that, the flower’s own pollen ripens
and dusts the insects. Only then do the hairs wilt, and the waxed slide bends
over until it is level. The insects walk out and, with their new supply of
pollen, fly to another Dutchman’s-pipe to pollinate it. The insects do not mind
their three-day visit, since they feast on nectar stored there for them. Did
all of this happen by chance? Or did it happen by intelligent design?
Some
types of Ophrys orchids have on their petals a picture of a female wasp,
complete with eyes, antennae and wings. It even gives off the odor of a female
in mating condition! The male comes to mate, but only pollinates the flower.
Another orchid, the bucket orchid, has a fermented nectar that makes the bee
wobbly on its feet; it slips into a bucket of liquid and the only way out is to
wriggle under a rod that dusts the bee with pollen.
Nature’s “Factories”
Green
leaves of plants feed the world, directly or indirectly. But they cannot
function without the help of tiny roots. Millions of rootlets—each root tip
fitted with a protective cap, each cap lubricated with oil—push their way
through the soil. Root hairs behind the oily cap absorb water and minerals,
which travel up minute channels in the sapwood to the leaves. In the leaves
sugars and amino acids are made, and these nutrients are sent throughout the
tree and into the roots.
Certain features of the circulatory system of
trees and plants are so amazing that many scientists regard them as almost
miraculous. First, how is the water pumped two or three hundred feet above the
ground? Root pressure starts it on its way, but in the trunk another mechanism
takes over. Water molecules hold together by cohesion. Because of this
cohesion, as water evaporates from the leaves the tiny columns of water are pulled
up like ropes—ropes reaching from the roots to the leaves, and traveling at up
to 200 feet an hour. This system, it is said, could lift water in a tree
about two miles high! As excess water evaporates from the leaves (called
transpiration), billions of tons of water are recycled into the air, once again
to fall as rain—a perfectly designed system!
There
is more. The leaves need nitrates or nitrites from the ground to make vital
amino acids. Some amounts are put into the soil by lightning and by certain
free-living bacteria. Nitrogen compounds in adequate quantities are also formed
by legumes—plants such as peas, clover, beans and alfalfa. Certain bacteria
enter their roots, the roots provide the bacteria with carbohydrates, and the
bacteria change, or fix, nitrogen from the soil into usable nitrates and
nitrites, producing some 200 pounds per acre each year.
There is still more. Green leaves take energy
from the sun, carbon dioxide from the air and water from the plant’s roots to
make sugar and give off oxygen. The process is called photosynthesis, and it
happens in cell bodies called chloroplasts—so small that 400,000 can fit into
the period at the end of this sentence. Scientists do not understand the
process fully. “There are about seventy separate chemical reactions involved in
photosynthesis,” one biologist said. “It is truly a miraculous event.”12
Green plants have been called nature’s “factories”—beautiful, quiet,
nonpolluting, producing oxygen, recycling water and feeding the world. Did they
just happen by chance? Is that truly believable?
Some
of the world’s most famous scientists have found it hard to believe. They see
intelligence in the natural world. Nobel-prize-winning physicist Robert A. Millikan,
although a believer in evolution, did say at a meeting of the American Physical
Society: “There’s a Divinity that shapes our ends . . . A purely
materialistic philosophy is to me the height of unintelligence. Wise men in all
the ages have always seen enough to at least make them reverent.” In his speech
he quoted Albert Einstein’s notable words, wherein Einstein said that he did “try
humbly to comprehend even an infinitesimal part of the intelligence manifest in
nature.”13
Evidence of design surrounds us, in endless
variety and amazing intricacy, indicating a superior intelligence. This
conclusion is also voiced in the Bible, where design is attributed to a Creator
whose “invisible qualities are clearly seen from the world’s creation onward,
because they are perceived by the things made, even his eternal power and
Godship, so that they are inexcusable.”—Romans 1:20.
With
so much evidence of design in the life around us, it does seem “inexcusable” to
say that undirected chance is behind it. Hence, for the psalmist to credit an
intelligent Creator is certainly not unreasonable: “How many your works are, O Jehovah!
All of them in wisdom you have made. The earth is full of your productions. As
for this sea so great and wide, there there are moving things without number,
living creatures, small as well as great.”—Psalm 104:24, 25.
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