Creation: True or False?

If I dropped a handful of coins, we all know that they would go in all directions, ending up as a random pattern on the floor. However, suppose you came into a room, saw a straight line of coins and were told ‘I just dropped these coins and, look, they all happened to end up in a line’ – would you believe it? No, you would rightly say that chance does not produce design. If I then insisted that this had happened not just once but many times, then you would probably think I was out of my mind.

Yet the evolutionist must believe that a beneficial mutation not only occurred by accident once but repeatedly. Further, most of them would have had to occur at about the same time, because frequently more than one mutation is involved in a given change.

A diagram of the tricarboxylic acid cycle, commonly called the Krebs Cycle after its discoverer. This is the basic chemical reaction in virtually all cells, by which glucose is broken down by a series of steps, each one achieved by a different enzyme, resulting in the release of energy.

If only one enzyme was missing or imperfectly formed, life in that cell would cease or be impaired. There are many other similarly essential processes in every cell. It is inconceivable that all these enzymes appeared simultaneously by accidental mutations.

Of this cycle one writer says: 'It is so elegant that it appears to have been designed by a systems analyst' (Life on Earth, page 165).

For example, the chemistry within the cell is a stage-by-stage process. As an illustration (an example from the hundreds that could be given), one of the most basic reactions in a living cell is the conversion of glucose to carbon dioxide and water, with the release of energy, called the tricarboxylic acid cycle. This does not happen in one go. Rather is it a series of step-wise reactions involving many intermediate stages. However, a different enzyme affects each of the steps. If only one of those enzymes was missing, then the process would stop and the cell die. Therefore, evolutionists must assume that all the mutations that produced the enzymes accidentally appeared at the same time. Or in terms of our analogy, not only did the coins form themselves into a straight line on one occasion, but did so repeatedly.

The same holds good for whole organs and creatures as well as what goes on in cells. The eye is a good example of many differing features that must all be present at the same time if it is to function. As you read this page, your brain is controlling tiny muscles around the transparent lens, altering its shape to accurately focus the image of the print on to the retina at the back of your eye.

The retina has nerve cells that are sensitive even to the smallest quantity of light and are able, by a sort of in-built computer, to convert the light pattern into a compressed series of nerve impulses. The retina also has special pigments that enable different colours to be identified. Within the brain is a particular area that converts the nerve impulses into a picture we can recognise.

Is it reasonable to suggest that all these interdependent features arose by accident and all at the same time? Does it not rather look like intelligent design? The evolutionist claims that the eye developed by a series of random changes over countless millions of years. But think what we are being asked to believe – that all this fine detail working together so perfectly has come about from a series of accidental mutations. Do not be deceived by the glib evolutionary explanation so common in books for children, that some primitive organism ‘decided’ to develop some new feature.

The concept of planning is ruled out in the current theory of evolution – all is the result of purposeless change. It is ludicrous to suggest that an eyeless creature would envisage the need for sight and so control its developments over the ages to eventually produce an eye. As Darwin himself said: ‘To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.’ 16 We may confidently say that chance does not produce design.

Look at the picture of a leaf insect. Here is an example of insects that mimic leaves so perfectly that given the right background they are perfectly camouflaged, as a protection from their predators. Can you see four leaf insects in the right hand picture? Does this look like chance mutations at work? If evolution were true, think of all the wrong designs that must have accidentally been produced by the original insect whilst this perfect disguise was at last fortuitously arrived at. Think of all the simultaneous accidental changes that were needed in the DNA that programmed this new shape. How did the poor insect survive whilst it was developing this disguise? We can be sure that the leaf-like shape was not the choice of the supposed original insect. It probably would not even recognise a leaf, let alone be able to alter its body to copy one.