The Natural Sciences: The Collapse of Darwinism
and the Victory of "Intelligent Design"
One of the main supports for atheism's rise to its zenith in the nineteenth century was Darwin's theory of evolution. By asserting that the origin of human beings and all other living things lay in unconscious natural mechanisms, Darwinism gave atheists the scientific guise they had been seeking for centuries. That time's most passionate atheists adopted his theory, and such atheist thinkers as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels made its elucidation the basis of their philosophy. The relationship between Darwinism and atheism born at that point in time has continued until our own time.
But, at the same time, this core belief of atheism is the very one that has received the greatest blow from twentieth-century science. Discoveries in paleontology, biochemistry, anatomy, genetics, and other scientific fields have shattered the theory of evolution.
Paleontology: Darwin's theory rests on the assumptions that all species come from a single common ancestor and that they diverged from one another over a long period of time by means of small gradual changes. Supposedly, the required proofs will be discovered in the fossil record or the petrified remains of living things. But fossil research conducted during the twentieth century presents a totally different picture, for no fossil of a single undoubted intermediate species, one that would substantiate this theory of gradual evolution among species, has been found. Moreover, every taxon [an animal or plant group having natural relations] appears suddenly in the fossil record, and no trace has ever been found of any previous ancestors. The phenomenon known as the Cambrian Explosion, which scientists classify as a period of time that occurred 540 to 490 million years ago, is especially interesting. In that early geological period, nearly all of the animal kingdom's phyla (major groups with significantly different body structures) appeared suddenly. The sudden emergence of many different categories of living things with totally different body structures and extremely complex organs and systems (e.g., mollusks, arthropods, echinoderms, and, as recently discovered, even vertebrates) rendered the theory of evolution invalid and proved creation, for as evolutionists also agree, a taxon's sudden emergence implies purposeful design, and this means creation.
All of the fossil research conducted during the twentieth century proves that there is no gradual evolution between species. The fact that many different groups of living things appeared suddenly in the Cambrian Explosion is convincing proof that they were created.
Advances made in twentieth-century biology reveal the unscientific nature of the theory of evolution. The discovery of the structure of DNA alone gave one of the greatest blows to this theory.
Biological Observations: Darwin elaborated on his theory by relying upon examples of how animal breeders produced different dog or horse varieties. He extrapolated the limited changes he observed to the whole natural world, and proposed that every living thing could have come from a common ancestor. But Darwin made this claim in the nineteenth century, when the level of scientific sophistication was low. In the twentieth century, things changed greatly. Decades of observation and experimentation on various animal species have shown that variation in living things has never gone beyond a certain genetic boundary. Darwin's assertions, like: "I can see no difficulty in a race of bears being rendered, by natural selection, more and more aquatic in their habits, with larger and larger mouths, till a creature was produced as monstrous as a whale"22 actually demonstrates his great ignorance. On the other hand, observations and experiments show that mutations defined by Neo-Darwinism as an evolutionary mechanism add no new genetic information to living creatures.
The Origin of Life: Darwin spoke about a common ancestor, but never mentioned how this person came to be. His only conjecture was that the first cell could have formed as a result of random chemical reactions "in some small warm little pond."23 But those evolutionary biochemists who sought to close this hole in Darwinism were frustrated by the fact that all of their observations and experiments showed that no living cell could arise within inanimate matter by means of random chemical reactions. Even the English atheist astronomer Fred Hoyle expressed that such a scenario "is comparable with the chance that a tornado sweeping through a junk-yard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein."24
Intelligent Design: Scientists who study cells and their molecules, along with the cells' remarkable organization within the body, and the bodily organs' delicate order and plan are faced with proof that evolutionists strongly wish to reject: The world of living things is permeated by designs too complex to be found in any technological equipment. Intricate examples of design, including our eyes that are far superior to any camera, the wings of birds that have inspired flight technology, the complexly integrated system of the cells of living things, and the remarkable information stored in DNA have vitiated the theory of evolution, which regards living things as the product of blind chance.
By the end of the twentieth century, all of these facts had squeezed Darwinism into a corner. Today, in the United States and other Western countries, the theory of intelligent design is gaining ever-increasing acceptance among scientists. Those who defend it say that Darwinism has been a great error in the history of science, and that it came to be so by imposing materialist philosophy on the scientific paradigm. Scientific discoveries show that there is a design in living things, which proves creation. In short, science proves once more that God created all living things.