Anyone who majored in philosophy in college read the noted French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre. I (John Weldon) can still remember agonizing through Being and Nothingness and some of his other works. As an ardent promoter of atheism, Sartre was probably responsible for turning as many college students to atheism as anyone. Nevertheless, this famous atheist also made the following confession, just prior to his death, during an interview with his wife, published in Harper’s magazine for February, 1984 (p. 39):

Yet Sartre next proceeded to declare that his atheism had provided his life with strength and freedom and that he had no need of God whatever. For him, God was entirely irrelevant and therefore he noted he had paid no attention to God his entire life.

Sartre, of course, as the above quote tells us, could never escape the knowledge of God, and neither can modern science. Romans 1:18-22 tells us that all men intuitively know God exists through the evidence in creation. This evidence is "clearly seen" "because God has made it plain to them." Therefore, "men are without excuse" because they "suppress the truth" they already know.

Nowhere is this situation more clearly revealed than in the creation/evolution controversy. Most modern scientists are in general agreement that the materialistic theory of evolution is an established fact of science and cannot logically be questioned as a view of origins. However, what one concludes about human origins is one of the most crucial points for deciding a whole range of other issues, whether positively or negatively—from the nature of man and the purpose of life to the relevance of morality and religion to the future of humanity. Is man only the product of the impersonal forces of matter, time and chance with all this implies—or the purposeful creation of a good and loving God with all this implies?

As esteemed philosopher Mortimer Adler wrote in The Great Ideas (Vol. 1, p. 543), "More consequences for thought and action follow from the affirmation or denial of God than from answering any other basic question."

For example, the theological impact of materialistic evolution is beyond question. In our The Facts On Creation vs. Evolution we noted that Dr. Colin Brown received his doctorate degree for research in nineteenth-century theology. As far as the impact of evolution on Christianity, he pointed out, "By far the most potent single factor to undermine popular belief in the existence of God in modern times is the evolutionary theory of Charles Darwin." According to Martin Lings, "More cases of loss of religious faith are to be traced to the theory of evolution… than to anything else."¹

Again, scientists generally are convinced as to the truth of a purely materialistic chance origin of mankind. Many of these scientists (and most atheists) have even rejoiced at the supposed "overthrowing" of the biblical concept of creation.

An article by C. D. Darlington of Oxford University in Scientific American (May 1959, p. 66) noted, "We owe to The Origin of Species the overthrow of the myth of creation, especially the dramatic character of the overthrow."

The American Atheist for September 1978 also noted the following: "Evolution destroys utterly and finally the very reason Jesus’ earthly life was supposedly made necessary. Destroy Adam and Eve and the original sin, and in the rubble you find the sorry remains of the son of god…. If Jesus was not the redeemer… and this is what evolution means, then Christianity is nothing…."

Leading evolutionist Sir Julian Huxley claimed that "Darwinism removed the whole idea of God as the Creator of organisms from the sphere of rational discussion."²

Evolution, of course, continues to be set forth as an established fact by the scientific community, but principally because of the materialistic, naturalistic viewpoint that pervades the scientific world.

Pierre-Paul Grasse, the renowned French zoologist and past president of the French Academy of Sciences, states in his Evolution of Living Organisms: "Zoologists and botanists are nearly unanimous in considering evolution as a fact and not a hypothesis. I agree with this position and base it primarily on documents provided by paleontology, i.e., the [fossil] history of the living world."³

Theodosius Dobzhansky, who, according to another leading evolutionist, Stephen J. Gould of Harvard, is "the greatest evolutionist of our century,"⁴ asserts in his award-winning text, Mankind Evolving, "The proofs of evolution are now a matter of elementary biology…. In Lamark’s and Darwin’s times evolution was a hypothesis; in our day it is proven."⁵

World famous scientist George Gaylord Simpson, distinguished professor of vertebrate paleontology at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard, emphasizes in The Meaning of Evolution, "Ample proof has been repeatedly presented and is available to anyone who really wants to know the truth…. In the present study the factual truth of organic evolution is taken as established…."⁶

Carl Sagan, a distinguished Cornell University astronomer and Pulitzer prize-winning author, is perhaps best known as the host and co-writer of the Cosmos television series, seen in 60 countries by approximately three percent of all people on earth. The hardcover edition of Cosmos was on the New York Times best-seller list for 70 weeks and became the best-selling science book in the English language in the twentieth century. In this book, Sagan simply states, "Evolution is a fact, not a theory."⁷

But we have shown in The Facts On Creation vs. Evolution and elsewhere, these scientists are simply wrong.⁸

Indeed, the idea that all life has come from dead matter by pure chance is a bit difficult to swallow, even for many scientists. And, as modern science increasingly uncovers the indescribable complexity of the living world and simultaneously fails to explain the nature of abiogenesis (the idea that life can somehow originate from nonlife), the miraculous nature of all theories of origins seems to be made more apparent. In a sense, the term miracle is no longer properly restricted to only creationist belief.

Thus, although most scientists remain evolutionists by choice because they are materialists, the theory of the origin of life by natural means is increasingly challenged today even in scientific circles. Further, as Dr. R. L. Wysong points out in his survey of the evidence, The Creation Evolution Controversy, acceptance of organic evolution is hardly a proven scientific fact. Rather, it is a materialistic postulate requiring a great deal of faith:

There are also a host of other problems equally intractable in nature, such as the lack of a reducing atmosphere (the presence of free oxygen), which further complicates the alleged process of abiogenesis. Biochemists generally agree that the presence of free oxygen would, in the words of R. T. Brinkman of the California Institute of Technology, "preclude biological evolution as presently understood."¹⁰ Yet the evidence for an early oxidized atmosphere on earth is increasingly so compelling that Henderson-Sellers, Benlow, and Meadows concede that, despite the implications, it is "becoming the new orthodoxy."¹¹

Indeed, respectable, technical, scientific texts that, on the one hand, show the doubtful or even impossible nature of evolution, or, on the other hand, present strong scientific evidence for creation are now increasing in number. Among many titles that could be listed are: A. E. Wilder-Smith (who holds three earned doctorate degrees in science), The Natural Sciences Know Nothing of Evolution, and The Scientific Alternative to Neo-Darwinian Evolutionary Theory: Information Sources & Structures; molecular biologist Michael Denton, M.D., Evolution: A Theory in Crisis; Evan Shute, M.D., Flaws in the Theory of Evolution and noted University of California Berkeley Law Professor Phillip Johnson’s Darwin on Trial.

W. R. Bird is a summa cum laude graduate of Vanderbilt University and the Yale Law School who argued the major case on the origin issue before the U.S. Supreme Court. He is a member of the most prestigious legal organization, the American Law Institute, and has published articles on the origin’s topic in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy and the Yale Law Journal. He is also listed in the most selective directory, Who’s Who in the World, plus listings in several others. In The Origin of Species Revisited (2 vol., NY: Philosophical Library, 1993), he documents in exhausting detail how even evolutionary scientists are increasingly questioning the validity of standard evolutionary theory. In fact, this book was prepared utilizing the research amassed for the 1981 Supreme Court case over the issue of origins.¹² Attorneys for the defendant gathered thousands of pages of information from hundreds of evolutionary scientists who, collectively, had expressed reservations from most scientific fields, in most areas of evolutionary thinking.

And, in books like The Creation Hypothesis: Scientific Evidence for an Intelligent Designer, leading scientists have further shown why the scientific evidence for creation is actually more compelling than the evidence for evolution.¹³

For example, consider the following concluding statement in a critical review of the above text by Arthur N. Shapiro, with the Center for Population Biology at the University of California, Davis. Although a critic writing in Creation/Evolution, a journal with certainly no love lost for creationists or creationism, he nevertheless closes his review in the following words:

He also noted,

For a critical reviewer who is a respected scientist to write in a secular anti-creationist journal and yet take a book of this nature in serious fashion is certainly encouraging and indicates that, at least for open-minded scientists, the scientific case for creation cannot just be summarily dismissed out of hand.

However, the initial difficulties of evolutionary theory so clearly laid out in many books, pale to insignificance when faced with the heroic difficulty of finally evolving a man. The noted scientists Francis Crick, L. M. Murkhin, and Carl Sagan have estimated that the difficulty of evolving a man by chance processes alone is 1 in 10^{2,000,000,000}—which Borel’s law says is no chance at all.¹⁵ Indeed, a chance so small is not even conceivable. This is a figure with 2 billion zeroes after it and would require some ten thousand books, of one hundred and fifty pages just to write it out. Many eminent scientists have attempted to grapple with the huge difficulty of the chance origin of human life and the magnitude of the problem of explaining the complex information content in living things—with, in our view, little success.¹⁶

Few would argue that, despite its inherent complexities, the discussion of probability theory in reference to evolution is fascinating to contemplate for both layman and scientist.¹⁷ Of course, scientists who are committed evolutionists believe that despite the tremendous odds against evolution, the large amount of time involved (supposedly billions of years, an assumption that itself is scientifically questionable) somehow makes the impossible possible.

Unfortunately, the argument that time alone solves the difficulty of probability considerations, is not only intellectually unconvincing, it is, in the end, preposterous. For example, Borel’s "Single Law of Chance" declares that when the odds are beyond 10²⁰⁰ (on a cosmic scale) an event will never occur, no matter how much time is involved. Indeed, how could Nature do "in time" (i.e., create life) what it clearly had not done "with time" for all eternity? In other words, if matter is eternal, then how could it eternally exist without producing life and then at some point in time do what it had not done for all eternity?

In the end, time is merely the miracle or the "god of the gaps" that supposedly resolves the difficulty of life evolving solely by chance. Nevertheless, "Isn’t time not only the creator, but more efficiently the enemy of the freak event? Will time not surely destroy the order fortuitously created…? How then can time be actually cited as the very cause of the almost infinite complexity of life?"¹⁸ (For a good discussion of the impossibilities here see James F. Coppedge, Evolution: Possible or Impossible [Zondervan, 1973] and R. C. Sproul, Not a Chance [Baker 1994].)

Regardless, the weight of factual information underlying such discussions of probability which mitigate against evolution may be why Dr. Francis Crick, Nobel Prize winner, biochemist, and co-discoverer of the structure of the DNA molecule, once wrote: "An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going."¹⁹ Further, Sir Fred Hoyle, founder of the Cambridge Institute of Theoretical Astronomy and the originator of the Steady State theory of the origin of the universe, also seems to have problems with evolutionary theory. Citing Hoyle, Nature magazine commented, "The chance that higher life forms might have emerged in this way is comparable with the chance that ‘a tornado sweeping through a junk-yard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the material therein.’"²⁰

Hoyle and his research partner Chandra Wickramasinghe press the point in their Evolution From Space. They argue that the chance of life evolving randomly is too improbable. Thus, they speculate life had to have arisen from other intelligent life somewhere in space. After outlining the reasons why it is unlikely life could have originated by chance, they supply probability calculations to support the idea that life must have been assembled by some other form of intelligence:

In their chapter, "The Evolutionary Records Leak Like a Sieve," Hoyle and Wickramasinghe even credit the Natural Theology of Paley who cogently argued for creation by intelligent design: "The speculations of The Origin of Species turned out to be wrong, as we have seen in this chapter. It is ironic that the scientific facts throw Darwin out, but leave William Paley, a figure of fun to the scientific world for more than a century, still in the tournament with a chance of being the ultimate winner."²²

On April 25 and 26, 1962, a scientific symposium was held at the Wistar Institute of Anatomy and Biology in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in which some of the most distinguished evolutionary scientists were present.

At the beginning of this Symposium which was titled, "Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution," the Chairman, Sir Peter Medawar of the National Institute for Medical Research in London, England, stated the reasons why they had gathered:

In his symposium paper, "Inadequacies of Neo-Darwinian Evolution as a Scientific Theory," Dr. Murray Eden, Professor of Electrical Engineering at MIT, emphasized the following: "It is our contention that if ‘random’ [chance] is given a serious and crucial interpretation from a probabilistic point of view, the randomness postulate is highly implausible and that an adequate scientific theory of evolution must await the discovery and elucidation of new natural laws, physical, chemical and biological."²⁴

In "Algorithms and the Neo-Darwinian Theory of Evolution," Marcel P. Schutzenberger of the University of Paris, France, calculated the probability of evolution based on mutation and natural selection. Like many other noted scientists, he concluded that it was "not conceivable" because the probability of a chance process accomplishing this is zero: "…there is no chance (<10-¹⁰⁰⁰) to see this mechanism appear spontaneously and, if it did, even less for it to remain…. Thus, to conclude, we believe there is a considerable gap in the Neo-Darwinian Theory of evolution, and we believe this gap to be of such a nature that it cannot be bridged within the current conception of biology."²⁵

Evolutionary scientists have called just one chance in 1015 (one chance in a quadrillion) "a virtual impossibility."²⁶ So, how can scientists rationally believe in something that has only one chance in 10^1,000? After all, how small is one chance in 10^1,000? It’s infinitesimally small—one chance in 10¹² is only one chance in one trillion. On a practical level, if a horse at a horse race had only one chance in a trillion (let alone one chance in 10^1,000) of placing first, second or third, how much money would anyone place on a bet? So should anyone gamble convictions about God, reality and heaven and hell on the basis of one chance in 10^1,000?

Again, we ask, who can rationally believe in something whose odds are one chance in 10^1,000, let alone the much more accurate figure of one chance in 10^{2,000,000,000}, the "chance" that the esteemed Dr. Carl Sagan estimates is needed to evolve a man? Also, please note that in exponential notation, every time we add one number to the exponent, we multiply the number itself by a factor of ten. Thus, one chance in 10¹⁷¹ is ten times smaller than one chance in 10¹⁷². One chance in 10¹⁷¹ is one million times smaller than one chance in 10¹⁷⁷. And one chance in 10183 is one trillion times smaller than one chance in 10¹⁷¹. So where do you think we end up with odds like one chance in 10^{2,000,000,000}?

This kind of probability "progression into absurdity," is the very reason Borel devised his Single Law of Chance—to show that beyond a certain point, some things will never happen. For example, what are the odds that elephants will ever evolve into helicopters? There are none, no matter how much time we allow for the event to occur.

So what kind of logic deduces that the infinitely more complex things in nature resulted from chance when all the facts and evidence we possess concerning every single man-made object in existence around the world says these much simpler objects had to result from intelligence, plan and design? If the "simple" objects demand intelligence, how do the infinitely more complex objects arise solely by chance?

So, isn’t it also true that scientists require faith to believe in evolution? But can this even be considered faith? Faith in what? Doesn’t faith require some actual object or entity?

If, for the purposes of argument, there are only two possible answers to the question of origins, then the disproving of one option logically proves the other. If A or B are the only logically considered explanations of an event, and A is disproved, only B can be considered the actual explanation. If the chances of evolution occurring are, for example, one in 10^1,000, then the chance of creation occurring would be just its opposite—the odds being 99.9 (followed by 998 more 9s). The eminent evolutionist George Wald of Harvard University has stated that a 99.995 percent probability is "almost inevitable."²⁷ Then what of 99.99999999999999 percent (plus 985 more 9’s)—the "chance" that creation has occurred?

Even Charles Darwin, who believed his own theory was "grievously hypothetical,"²⁸ confessed the same, giving emotional content to his doubts when he said, e.g., "…the eye to this day gives me a cold shudder."²⁹ To think the eye had evolved by natural selection, Darwin said, "…seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree."³⁰ But he thought the same about something so simple as a peacock’s feather, which he claimed, "makes me sick."³¹ Of course, anyone who has knowledge of the intricacies of something like the human eye immediately realizes the problem Darwin sensed. How could an organ of such infinite magnificence have ever originated by random chance? Today, many modern biologists are even more acutely aware of the problems evolutionary theory faces when confronting something like the complexity of the human eye.

L. Harrison Matthews, the eminent biologist, wrote the following in his introduction to Darwin’s The Origin of Species. He noted that biology was in the position of being founded on an unproved theory that nearly placed it in the category of a "religious" faith:

Some scientists have postulated they may be able to find some evidence for life originating from non-life on some other planet. The reason for this is that it would give them circumstantial evidence that life could originate by evolutionary processes someplace else. (They have not found this evidence on Earth.) For example, I. S. Shklovskii and Carl Sagan in their book, Intelligent Life in the Universe, have written: "…the discovery of life on one other planet—e.g., Mars—can, in the words of the American Physicist Philip Morrison, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, ‘transform the origin of life from a miracle to a statistic.’"³⁴

Thus, Nobelist Francis Crick, (like Hoyle cited earlier) thoroughly aware of the awesome complexity of cellular life, and the extreme difficulty of explaining how such life could evolve in the short time scientists now realize was available on earth for evolution to take place, has advanced a theory he calls directed panspermia. His theory, outlined in the book Life Itself, advances the idea that an extraterrestrial civilization sent primitive life-forms to earth in a spaceship. Because there was enormous time required for interstellar travel, they sent primitive life capable of surviving the voyage and the conditions they would meet upon arriving on earth.

But this "solution" to the problem of origins only seems to push the issue back a notch. How did the advanced life that sent primitive life to our earth ever originate by chance processes? In fact, research indicates this scenario cannot resolve the problem. For example, in the October 1969 issue of Nature magazine, Dr. Frank Salisbury of Utah State University, then on leave at the Division of Biomedical and Environmental Research at the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, examined the chance of one of the most basic chemical reactions for the continuation of life taking place. This reaction involves the formation of a specific DNA molecule. (It is important to realize that Dr. Salisbury was assuming that life already existed. His calculations do not refer to the chance of the origin of life from dead matter—as we have seen, something infinitely more improbable—but to the continuance of life already existing.)

He calculated the chance of this molecule evolving on 10²⁰ hospitable planets (i.e., having favorable atmospheric and biologic conditions). These one hundred, thousand, million, billion planets constitute at least 1,000 times more hospitable planets than the number many scientists have estimated could exist. Dr. Salisbury allows 4 billion years for the chance coming into existence of this molecule on all these planets. But remember he is not speaking here of life as we know it—developed, intelligent living beings, or even of one single cell for that matter. He is only calculating the chance of this one appropriate DNA molecule.

He concluded that the chances of just this one tiny DNA molecule coming into existence over four billion years, with conditions just right, on just one of these extremely large number of hospitable planets, including the earth, as one chance in 10⁴¹⁵.³⁵ But this figure is also exceedingly beyond Borel’s law, which says that beyond a certain point, improbable events never happen, regardless of the time span involved. (Indeed, 10⁵⁰ planets would pack the known universe with planets [so that no space exists between them] and yet the chances that life could evolve from dead matter on any one of them are still beyond possibility.)³⁶

Further, the problems associated with human life evolving from microscopic forms are at least as difficult as those of primitive life evolving from dead matter. Again, most scientists assume that the great amounts of time involved will cause highly improbable events to become virtually inevitable and thus solve the problem. But even noted scientist A. I. Oparin concedes that, "No serious quantitative arguments, however, are given in support of such conclusions."³⁷

All this may explain why many scientists who have examined this theory critically consider the "directed panspermia" hypothesis untenable, and do not feel it is a solution to the problems we face. In Chance and Necessity, the outstanding French biochemist and Nobel Prize winner Jacques Monod makes his case all life evolves by random means, yet he also says this:

Although Monod believes that life arose by chance, he freely admits the chances of this happening before it occurred were virtually zero.³⁹ We can only be reminded of the statement by another Nobel Prize winning biologist, George Wald of Harvard University: "One only has to concede the magnitude of the task to concede the possibility of the spontaneous generation of a living organism is impossible. Yet here we are—as a result, I believe, of spontaneous generation."⁴⁰ Of course, Dr. Wald also thinks that time solves all problems: "Time is, in fact, the hero of the plot…. One only has to wait: time itself performs the miracles."⁴¹ Nevertheless, what this boils down to is a personal choice—faith if you will—to believe in what one freely admits is "impossible"—rather than to believe in creation by intelligent design. In considering all this, one is perhaps reminded of the quip of Mark Twain in his Life on the Mississippi, "There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact."

Nevertheless, Hoyle’s research partner, Chandra Wickramasinghe, has appropriately noted that it is not only creationism which relies on the supernatural. Evolution must also, since the probabilities of random formation of life are conceded to be so minuscule as to necessitate a miracle making belief in spontaneous generation "tantamount to a theological argument."⁴²

[Most of the material for this article was excerpted from John Ankerberg and John Weldon, "Rational Inquiry and the Force of Scientific Data: Are New Horizons Emerging?" Taken from The Creation Hypothesis edited by J. P. Moreland. ©1994 by J. P. Moreland. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press, P. O. Box 1400, Downers Grove, IL 60515, pp. 272-277, 291-292. Additional material from our The Facts on Creation vs. Evolution (Eugene, OR: Harvest House Publishers, 1993).]