The Explanation for Everything Explains Nothing
When it comes to evolution, the classrooms of public schools today sing the same song. If it wasn’t for tiny variations in speed and pitch, they could harmonize together, like a barbershop quartet. And because they’ve had a lot of practice from singing it over and over for decades, they sing it well.
Normally, none of that would matter. The song of evolution, whether the lyrics are liked and believed or not, is rather meaningless on its own. Except it’s not sung on its own. It’s part of a much larger show. One that pushes the narrative that all the world’s complexity; from the molecular machines of the cell, to the designing mind of the rocket scientist; and from the existence of rock, to the stability of Earth’s many life supporting characteristics, is all explained by random, unguided processes.
Intuitively, that line of thinking doesn’t compute. We understand that random processes bring about randomness in their results. When we test this scientifically, we confirm our intuition. Chaos can produce some order and complexity at times, but to expect it to rise to the challenge of producing Earth’s level and quantity of complexity is just silliness.
How silly is it? Take something minuscule and mundane like laundry. Today, most of us machine wash and dry our clothes at home, usually using a tumble dryer to tackle at least a hundred loads of laundry a year. According to the theory, the random forces of tumbling clothes should result in at least one cycle ending with the laundry in the dryer folding itself. Open the door and there it is, ready to be put away. How many have heard of this actually happening? How many expect it to happen? None of us. Anyone trying to sell such a story would be met with the usual, well-deserved, skepticism and disbelief.
Ironically, that folding problem of the laundry in the dryer isn’t unique to our clothing. A similar problem also exists in materialists’ origins of life scenarios. In our bodies, and nearly every other living cell on this planet, proteins are built using precise sequences of amino acids that are transcribed and translated from the coded information in DNA. Once built, they are folded into a unique shape in order to make them functional. Without properly folded proteins, cells have serious problems. Diseases and disorders like Alzheimer’s stem from misfolded proteins.
Did you notice we are quite a bit beyond the laundry analogy? It almost doesn’t fit anymore. Instead of clothes, specially designed molecular machines, each with its own purpose and function, are intentionally folded into the shapes that facilitate those functions. The dryer has been replaced with a factory. When no rational person expects to open a dryer and find laundry that just happened to fall into a folded stack by chance, why should we expect a scenario that is much harder and more complex to not just happen once, but trillions of times in a proper sequence to produce life as we know it?
The answer the materialists give is telling. They say, not only can it happen regularly, it did happen regularly, and it should happen regularly because the laws allow it to happen regularly. All that is needed is time performing the required miracles. Randomness, coupled with the time to let it randomize, explains the proteins; their construction blueprints and folding abilities encoded in DNA; the existence of life; the complexity of living things and all their organs; the dryer; the laundry; and the concept of probability we use to analyze it all.
Basically, they’re just saying that in time anything can happen. Some find this is an acceptable argument, but a significant portion of the population does not. So some have taken on the task of painting the exceptionally improbable as plausible. Dawkins did this just over 30 years ago with his famous “weasel program.”
For those that don’t know, Dawkins and his associates set up a program that would sift through random characters to produce a target sentence from Hamlet, “Methinks it’s like a weasel.” The programs sift through random characters, and are saved at certain points throughout the simulation in order to produce that target sentence. This is of course a more macro-view of random mutations and natural selection. The random mutation portion of the equation has to stumble upon new protein makeups and new applicable methods of folding that are not only compatible, but beneficial to the organism. Something that has yet to be observed. If common ancestry and evolution is true, it should be commonplace.
Unfortunately, the only thing we see in this realm that is commonplace is genetic entropy. The vast majority of genetic mutations observed are neutral or harmful. And since we pass on 60-150 new mutations to our offspring every generation, the only thing natural selection can do is remove the most mutant. This is the opposite of what evolutionary theory requires.
Boil it all down and the answer is crystal clear. Randomness and chaos is not an explanation for how the world became the way it is. It defies intuition, it defies our observations, and it defies logic. If we had a clear picture through the fossil record, and observations in the lab were in line with the theory, the materialists would have a case. They don’t. The answer given is not an answer at all. It explains nothing.
