Evolution

In October 2022 a bird with the code name B6 set a new world record. Over the course of 11 days, B6, a young Bar-tailed Godwit, flew from its hatching ground in Alaska to its wintering ground in Tasmania, covering 8,425 miles without taking a single break. For comparison, there is only one commercial aircraft that can fly that far nonstop, a Boeing 777 with a 213-foot wingspan and one of the most powerful jet engines in the world.

During its journey, B6—an animal that could perch comfortably on your shoulder—did not land, did not eat, did not drink, and did not stop flapping, sustaining an average ground speed of 30 miles per hour 24 hours a day as it winged its way to the other end of the world.

Many factors contributed to this astonishing feat of athleticism—muscle power, a high metabolic rate, and a physiological tolerance for elevated cortisol levels, among other things. B6’s odyssey is also a triumph of the remarkable mechanical properties of feathers. Feathers kept B6 warm overnight while it flew above the Pacific Ocean. Feathers repelled rain along the way. Feathers formed the flight surfaces of the wings that kept B6 aloft and drove the bird forward for nearly 250 hours without failing.

Research shows that feather shape is largely optimized to allow the feather to twist and bend in sophisticated ways that greatly enhance flight performance. Merely being anatomically asymmetrical doesn’t mean much. What matters is that the feather is aerodynamically asymmetrical. That is, the trailing blade needs to be three times wider than the leading one. Below this ratio, the feather twists in a destabilizing rather than stabilizing way during flight.

Editor’s Note: This small bird is one example of the creative wisdom of God. This article goes on to attribute the marvel of the flight in this bird to evolution. However, the Bible says that all of creation shows the glory of intelligent design by God for those who are willing to see it (Ps. 19:1-6; Rom. 1:18-25).

Most people believe that evolution provides an adequate account of human origins. But for substantial numbers around the world, that doesn’t preclude divine direction. A new survey spanning North America, South America, and Europe found that 13 to 29 percent of people believe in God-guided evolution.

People Who Say Humans Evolved in A Process Guided by God:

13% Germany

22% United Kingdom

25% Argentina

29% United States

Every person starts as one fertilized egg, which by adulthood has turned into roughly 37 trillion cells. But those cells have a formidable challenge. These cells must copy 3.2 billion base pairs of DNA perfectly, about once every 24 hours. To speed up the process, cells start replication in multiple spots with people having tens of thousands of them throughout their genomes.

However, this poses its own challenge: How to know where to start and how to time everything. Without precision control, some DNA might get copied twice, causing cellular pandemonium. Bad things can happen if replication doesn’t start correctly. For DNA to be copied, the DNA double helix must open up, and the resulting single strands are vulnerable to breakage or the process can get stuck.

It takes a tightly coordinated dance involving dozens of proteins for the DNA-copying machinery to start replication at the right point in the cell’s life cycle. Keeping tight reins on the kickoff of DNA replication is particularly important to avoid that pandemonium.

Today, researchers are making steps toward a full understanding of the molecular checks and balances that have evolved in order to ensure that each origin initiates DNA copying once and only once, to produce precisely one complete new genome.

Possible Preaching Angle:

3,000 years ago, King David exclaimed, “I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well” (Ps. 139:14). Scientific knowledge has increased exponentially since that time and we should be even more in awe of God’s creative genius on display.

Two Christian university professors had an unusual assignment for students over a long break. Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon told their students while they were on school break to take a long, good look at their belly button. Why? They explain:

Nothing is quite as revealing as our belly button ... by noting that we are creatures, creations of mothers and fathers, the Bible tells us that we have life as a gift. We are begotten, not manufactured. Someone even changed our diapers; our first hint of what grace must be like. No wonder some of us resent our parents, for they are a visible, ever-present reminder that we were created, that the significance of our lives is not exclusively self-derived.

In contrast, it is all too easy in today's Western culture for us to imagine that we are self-made people. But your belly button does not merely remind you of Mom and Dad, but of your Creator and Redeemer, from whom you have life, meaning, and purpose.

It is impossible to do justice to the wonder of the creation of the world and everything in it. You and I have to work hard to make anything. Even when you buy a piece of furniture from IKEA, with all the pieces properly designed and a booklet of instructions, you are driven to the edge of your sanity trying to follow the instructions and assemble what you bought.

All of our DIY projects require mental focus, physical dexterity, and perseverance. We struggle to make things, even though we always start with raw materials, are following instructions, and have collected the appropriate tools. But you and I have never created anything; we do not make something out of nothing. C. S. Lewis said it this way: "Creation, as it is for God, must always remain totally inconceivable to man. We only build. We always have materials to build from.”

The truth of creation should fill us with awe, humble us, and drop us to our knees. God, with nothing more than his will and his word literally spoke the universe into existence. Think of huge galaxies and little ants. Think of the body of an elephant and the translucent creatures that swim in the deep­est trenches of the sea. Think of huge towering trees and microscopic organisms. Think of the technology of the human eye and the intricate design of your hand. Genesis 1 and 2 are meant to put you in your place and insert God in his proper place in your heart and life.

Researchers reported recently that it is striking that water is the “least understood material on Earth.” In an article, researchers ask, “What could we not know about water? It’s wet! It’s clear. It comes from rain. It boils. It makes snow and it makes ice! Does our government actually spend taxpayer money to study water? Yes, water is common—in fact, it is the third most common molecule in the universe. But it is also deceptively complex.” From steam to ice, water continues to mystify. Here are several of the weird facts about water:

Why Does Ice Float?

Researchers tried to tease apart what makes water unique among liquids. It’s got anomalous properties, like expanding when cooled below 40 degrees Fahrenheit. (This) explains why lakes freeze downward, from top to bottom, rather than up. Normally frozen solids are denser than their liquid equivalents, which would mean that frozen chunks would fall to the bottom of a lake instead of staying on top. But when water freezes, it creates an open structure, mostly empty space and less dense than … liquid water, which is why water props ice up.

Why Can Insects Walk On It?

Water has an uncanny level of surface tension, allowing beings light enough, like insects, to walk or stand atop it. Since it’s these distinctive features among others that power our climate and ecosystems, water can appear to be “fine-tuned” for life according to the researchers.

How Does Water Evaporate?

The rate of evaporation of liquid water is one of the principal uncertainties in modern climate modeling. ... The addition of salts to water raises the surface tension … and so should reduce the evaporation rate. But experimental studies show little or no effect when salts are added. The exact mechanism for how water evaporates isn’t completely understood.

Possible Preaching Angle:

These researchers point out some of the weird anomalies of water, which covers 71% of the surface of our world. Although they do not acknowledge God in their research, they do admit that “water can appear to be ‘fine-tuned’ for life.” Christians would respond that without its God-given properties, lakes would freeze from the bottom up, killing all fish in them. And, although the salt in oceans should inhibit evaporation, the water in the oceans evaporates, producing rain over the land. These are some examples of “Intelligent Design” in which our wise creator fine-tuned the earth to sustain life and provide for our needs and enjoyment of life.

Physicist Sabine Hossenfelder is a research fellow at the Franklin Institute for Advanced Studies in Germany. Her YouTube channel has over 550,000 subscribers. She admits she cringes when scientists like the late Stephen Hawking, and many others, make numerous unsubstantiated pronouncements like “there is no possibility of a creator.” She is uncomfortable with “overconfident proclamations” like widely held beliefs on the origin of the universe, the existence of other universes, and other unverifiable beliefs.

Hossenfelder wants scientists to be:

… mindful of the limits of their discipline. Sometimes the only scientific answer we can give is “We don't know.” It therefore seems likely to me that, in our ongoing process of knowledge discovery, religion and science will continue to co-exist for a very long time. That's because science itself is limited, and where science ends, we seek other modes of explanation.

(Some) of these limits stem from the specific math we currently use (which, for example, requires initial conditions or indeterministic jumps), and they may be overcome as physics advances further. But some limits seem insurmountable to me. Eventually, I think, we will have to accept some facts about our universe without scientific explanation, if only because the scientific method can't justify itself. We may observe that the scientific method works, conclude that it's to our advantage to continue using it, but still never know why it works.

Once, when a little girl asked Albert Einstein if scientists pray, Einstein replied in part, “Everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifested in the laws of the universe—a spirit vastly superior to that a man, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble.”

Then in an interview before his 50th birthday, Einstein was asked if he believed in God. Einstein said,

I’m not an atheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must’ve written those books. He does not know how. He does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn’t know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly understand these laws.

For decades, scientist Sir Fred Hoyle pioneered research in astrophysics. He started his scientific career as a staunch atheist who saw no evidence of design in the universe. In his early years, he said, “Religion is but a desperate attempt to find an escape from the truly dreadful situation in which we find ourselves.”

But as his career went on, he discovered something that would rock his atheism—physicists call it “fine tuning.” Fine tuning refers to the discovery that many properties of the universe fall within extremely narrow and improbable ranges that turn out to be absolutely necessary for complex forms of life, or for any life at all. Hoyle’s contribution to the discovery of fine tuning began in the 1950s.

Eventually, Hoyle became convinced that some intelligence had orchestrated the precise balance of forces and factors in nature, to make the universe life permitting. He was overwhelmed by what he called “Cosmic coincidences.” As he put it in 1981:

A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super intellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces we're speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion, almost beyond question.”

Biochemist Sy Garte shares how he came out of a radical background to faith in Christ:

I had an unusual childhood for an American. Members of my extended family were left-wing radicals, and my parents had even been members of the American Communist Party. My indoctrination in the dogmas of communism and atheism was deep. At the same time, my father gave me a love of science and reason, and the importance of asking questions. These gifts, along with my training in scientific thought and research, eventually cracked open the prison cell that held my soul captive during those early years.

Breaking free was a slow process, akin to chipping away at a dungeon door with a dull spoon. I saw contradictions in some of what I had been taught. If humans were a blind product of evolutionary chance, with no special purpose or significance, then how could the stated goals of socialism—to advance human dignity and value—make sense?

I also began to contemplate other questions. Where did the universe come from? How did life begin? What does it mean to be a human being? What is the source of our creativity—of art, poetry, music, and humor? Perhaps, I thought, science cannot tell us everything.

Then I read the Gospels and had another shock: I found them beautiful and inspiring. So far as I could tell, they carried the ring of truth. ... The door to my prison cell was swinging open, and I stood there gazing out onto a new world, the world of faith. Yet I was afraid to fully leave. And then the Holy Spirit pulled me over the threshold.

It happened one day while I was traveling alone with a long way to go. Turning the radio on, I heard an evangelical Christian preacher, the kind I used to mock and avoid. But this preacher was really good. I listened for a few minutes before turning the radio off. Driving in silence for a while, I began wondering how I would sound if I ever tried preaching. The first thing that came to my mind was something about science—how, if there were a God, he might have used science to create the world.

And then something happened. I felt a chill up and down my spine and could hear myself preaching. I could see an audience in front of me. It was not a vision exactly, but it was intense. I talked about knowing that Jesus loves me. With a voice full of passionate emotion, I assured the crowd that whatever their sins might be, they were no worse than my own, and that because of Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross we could all be saved.

At some point during this experience, I had pulled over onto the shoulder of the road, where I sat behind the wheel crying for some time. The only explanation I could fathom was that the Holy Spirit had entered into my life in dramatic fashion. “Thank you, Lord,” I said out loud in between sobs. “I believe, and I am saved. Thank you, Lord Jesus Christ.”

When I recovered my composure, I was aware of a great feeling of joy and release. I had no more doubts, no trace of hesitation—I had crossed over, stepping over the ruins of my prison cell into my new life of faith. From that day onward, my life has been devoted to the joyful service of our Lord.

Along the way, I made many discoveries. I learned about the power of the Bible as a guide from God to the central questions of our existence. I learned that the true purpose of science is to describe how things are, not to engage in misplaced speculation about why the world is the way it is. Most importantly, I learned that nothing (has come) through my own merit, but only from the grace of our Lord, whose love and mercy are beyond understanding.

Editor’s Note: Sy Garte is a biochemist who has taught at New York University, the University of Pittsburgh, and Rutgers University. He is a fellow of the American Scientific Affiliation, the largest organization of Christians in the sciences, and the vice president of its metropolitan Washington, DC, chapter.

Many contemporary atheists give the impression that faith and science are completely incompatible. For instance, atheist Steven Pinker says, “The findings of science imply that the belief systems of all the world's traditional religions and cultures … are factually mistaken.” In his book, The Atheist Guide to Reality, Alex Rosenberg writes, “Atheism is a demanding, rigorous, breathtaking grip on reality, one that has been vindicated beyond reasonable doubt. It’s called Science.”

But there are many other voices that would disagree with this view. For instance:

MIT professor Jing Kong, who grew up in China and became a Christian, says, "My research is only a platform for me to do God's work. His creation, the way he made this world, is very interesting. It’s amazing, really.”

Andrew Goslar, Oxford professor of applied ethnobiology, claims, “My coming to faith in Christ did not rest on one single issue … It was holistic a redefining of perspectives that came together through every aspect of my life.”

Cambridge professor of experimental physics, Russell Cowburn, expresses what dozens of leading scientists agree with, “Understanding more of science didn't make God’s role smaller. It allows us to see his creative activity in more detail.”

The Pew Research Center regularly surveys Americans on human origins, but it recently re-examined its questions on evolution. When theistic evolution was presented as an option in a new single-question format, most religious groups answered about the same. But white evangelicals and Black Protestants (two of Pew’s standard categories) were twice as likely to say humans evolved in some way.

A) Humans have always existed in their present form

B) Humans have evolved; God had a role

C) Humans have evolved; God had no role

White Evangelicals: A) 38%, B) 58%, C) 4%

Black Protestants: A) 27%, B) 66%, C) 6%

Catholics: A) 13%, B) 56%, C) 30%

Unaffiliated: A) 11%, B) 24%, C) 64%

All US Adults: A) 18%, B) 48%, C) 33%

Launched in 2016, the $100 million search for intelligent extraterrestrial life, “Breakthrough Listen,” continues to come up empty, as do numerous other high-tech endeavors. Author Bryan Appleyard describes the daunting task. The universe contains “perhaps 2 trillion galaxies each containing hundreds of billions of stars and hundreds of billions of planets. And yet still we see and hear nothing. There seems to be only what the French mathematician and physicist Blaise Pascal called ‘the eternal silence of these infinite spaces.’”

The big question is, does it really matter if we make contact? True believers have been observed as needing it to be true. “An alien revelation would explain or heal the undefined unease they felt about the human condition. This unease could be expressed as suspicion of governments, apocalyptic anxieties, religious longing or simply a need for their lives to become less banal, less limited.”

In his distinguished book on the subject, Are We Alone? physicist Paul Davies writes that,

The most important upshot of the discovery of extraterrestrial life would be to restore to human beings something of the dignity of which science has robbed them. Far from exposing Homo sapiens as an inferior creature in the vast cosmos, the certain existence of alien beings would give us cause to believe that we, in our humble way, were a part of a larger, majestic process of cosmic self-knowledge.

Researchers calculate that about 530,000 fewer public school students are learning about intelligent design in 9th or 10th grade biology classes today, compared to 2007. The amount of class time science teachers spend on human evolution has also doubled in those 12 years, according to scholars at Penn State University and the National Center for Science Education. The changes come from a new generation of teachers, new textbooks, and updated education standards.

Science teachers who teach intelligent design is a valid alternative:

2007 – 8%

2019 – 5%

Science teachers who discuss intelligent design:

2007 – 23%

2019 – 14%

Science teachers who teach evolution is established science:

2007 – 51%

2019 – 67%

Every bird is covered with feathers, and almost every feather on an individual bird is different, specialized in length, shape and structure to match whatever function is needed at that position. Feathers around the head are all quite specialized, with tiny feathers around the eyes, feathers modified into bristles at the base of the bill, and longer feathers on the throat.

Among the most specialized are the feathers that cover the ear opening. These must allow sound to pass through but also protect against debris and create a streamlined surface over the ear for air to flow across as smoothly and quietly as possible.

Small songbirds generally have about two thousand feathers, fewer in summer and more in winter. Larger birds like crows mostly have larger feathers, not more.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Think of it, 2,000 feathers on a bird and nearly every feather designed by God with a purpose in mind. With such a display of purpose in a single bird feather, is there any doubt that God has a purpose in mind for his people.

In his book, The Sentient Machine, Amir Husain writes:

Today I find myself drawn to the important observation that the universe around us is clearly a consequence of computation. A seed, for example, encodes the information necessary to produce a tree. With DNA as the software and cells and proteins as the hardware, the biological process is a computational one. We find these types of algorithmic outcomes everywhere we look in the universe.

Patterns like the Fibonacci sequence, for example, unlock designs across our cosmos. Everything from flower petals to the curving shells of a mollusk, to spiral galaxies, to hurricanes, adheres to this mathematical formula. Is this by chance?

There seems to be a mathematical seed at the heart of the cosmos that through the power of computation, has been magnified into the universe as we know it, just as a tree is a magnified seed.

At some point in my early adolescence, I tried to imagine a future where all of science fused together. All the deductions completed and all the building blocks of science synthesized into a great pyramid of knowledge. At the very top of this pyramid however, I realized that I was still missing a block that tied it all together. That block is the ultimate question, “What is this all for?’”

He then concludes with a chilling realization, that even with all of our advancements, “we still don’t know the purpose for our existence."

Possible Preaching Angle:

As a Christian, we would argue, that just as a computer program begins in the mind of a computer scientist, the mathematical patterns that govern our universe are testimony to a Programmer. And just as a computer program must run on hardware, that is itself manufactured by an intelligent being, the universe itself bears witness to a supernatural Creator.

A recent survey polled people with an average age of 38. Eighty percent had college degrees. The results revealed a lot of ignorance about origin of life research and the success of life creating life from nonliving matter (also called abiogenesis).

More than 41 percent thought that researchers had created “complex life forms from scratch,” such as frogs, using simple chemicals and conditions that “approximate Earth’s early atmosphere.” Remarkably, more than 72 percent of respondents thought origin of life researchers had created “simple life forms from scratch,” such as bacteria.

To put it kindly, the respondents’ great expectations about the accomplishments of origin of life researchers are wrong. Wildly so.

Researchers have not created a frog or a bacterium from simple chemicals in the lab under early Earth conditions. They haven’t created a functional membrane, or flagella or cilia, or any of dozens of molecular machines, or the DNA required for even the simplest living bacterium.

Possible Preaching Angle:

The mystery of life is explained in the profound phrase “I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well” (Ps. 139:14). We can only understand the origin of life when we turn our minds to our Creator God who is the Source of life.

On December 6, 2020, astronomers awaited the return of Hayabusa2 (a toaster-sized capsule launch by the Japanese space agency). Onboard was a payload of 5 grams of material from asteroid Ryugu. While they were anxious for whatever made the 60,000-mile journey back to earth, what they were really hoping to see was chondrules.

Chondrules are small, seedlike rocks measuring up to just a few millimeters across, embedded inside larger rocks (called chondrites). They are essentially rocks within rocks and are thought to have formed shortly after the birth of our solar system. The majority of the roughly 60,000 meteorites that humans have discovered are chondrites.

Scientist believe that understanding how chondrites formed is key to unlocking how the solar system was formed. Science writer Jonathan O’Callaghan says, "In our understanding of how (planets) came to be, there may be nothing as important as the mystery of the chondrule."

But the secret has eluded astronomers. In fact, there is no consensus on how these objects formed. The joke goes that there are as many theories about chondrule formation as there are chondrule scientists themselves.

A few years ago, at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, a stunned audience watched as revered scientist John Wood appeared to admit frustrated defeat in understanding their origin. He said, “We still don’t understand what the meteorites are telling us, and sometimes I wonder if we ever will.” A few years later, he quit science cold turkey and turned his attentions to oil painting and spending time with his wife. And to anyone following in his footsteps Wood say, “I wish them good luck.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

Dr. Fred Ciesla, a planetary scientist from the University of Chicago, says: “We can build a story about how planets form … but it’s obvious that there’s a piece of the story that we’re missing." With all due respect to Dr. Ciesla and his fellow scientists, it's actually not missing. We read it in Genesis 1.

Evolutionists like to claim that our Sun is merely an average star, just one among billions. There’s no reason to believe our Sun is unusual … or so they say. After all, if our Sun were special, that might support the idea that a benevolent Creator made it for us! Nevertheless, our Sun is special indeed. Stars come in a variety of sizes, colors, and temperatures. As a single “Class G” star, our Sun is very well suited to support life on Earth. Most other stars are not.

For example, the most common stars (about 75 percent of all stars) are red dwarfs. These stars commonly emit flares: eruptions of superheated material, radiation, and charged particles blasted out into space. Large-enough flares can sterilize any planets orbiting these stars. Although our Sun occasionally releases small flares, they’re gentle compared to what we see elsewhere. We’ve seen other stars produce “superflares” up to 10 million times more energetic than those from our Sun.

Even among Sun-like stars, our Sun is unique. In a study of 83,000 solar-type stars, 148 erupted in just 120 days of observing. Extend this rate out, and each solar-type star would have more than a 50% chance of erupting every 100 years. Over thousands of years, a typical Sun-like star should have multiple massive eruptions. Yet there is no evidence that our Sun has ever emitted a superflare. As the study’s summary noted, “The flares on our Sun are thousands of times punier than those on similar stars.” But why?

Secular astronomers are scratching their heads over this. But creationary astronomers aren’t surprised by this. As Isaiah 45:18 says, the Lord created the heavens and Earth “not in vain … He formed it to be inhabited.” Since our Sun was designed by a masterful Creator to support life, we shouldn’t be surprised that it supports life very well. Our Earth, Sun, and Solar System are fearfully and wonderfully made to be our home--and to proclaim the glory of their Creator.

Science has come very far in understanding how the human body works. But scientists admit understanding the human brain is still in its pioneering stage. God’s marvelous creation is still a mystery. The ultimate question in neuroscience is: How does the brain work?

Neuroscientists have made considerable progress toward understanding brain architecture and aspects of brain function. We can identify brain regions that respond to the environment, activate our senses, generate movements and emotions. ... But we don’t understand how their interactions contribute to behavior, perception, or memory.

Stanford neurologist Charisse Lichtman, offers a picture to clarify the problem:

But if I asked, “Do you understand New York City?” you would probably respond, “What do you mean?” There’s all this complexity. If you can’t understand New York City, it’s not because you can’t get access to the data. It’s just there’s so much going on at the same time. That’s what a human brain is. It’s millions of things happening simultaneously among different types of cells, neuromodulators, genetic components, things from the outside. There’s no point when you can suddenly say, “I now understand the brain,” just as you wouldn’t say, “I now get New York City.”