Circular Reasoning Illustration

In 1979, Luther Sutherland, who had been an aerospace engineer with the General Electric company, conducted taped interviews in five natural history museums containing some of the largest fossil collections in the world. His interviews were with the following Paleontologists:

1. Dr. Colin Patterson in London;

2. Dr. Niles Eldredge in New York City;

3. Dr. David M. Raup in Chicago;

4. Dr. David Pilbearn in Boston;

5. and Dr. Donald Fisher, state paleontologist at the NewYork State natural history museum.

The results of these interviews are recorded in his book, Darwin’s Enigma,¹⁴⁹ a book I highly recommend reading for anyone looking for the truth about Evolution and the fossil records. What I share in the next few pages are highlights from this book.

Several years ago Miller-Orgel placed methane, ammonia, water vapor, and hydrogen into a closed container and then applied a spark of electricity to it (See Miller's Spark Chamber). The end result was a few weak amino acids. This resulted in their boasting of having practically produced life in a test tube.^149/53

What these scientists do not tell you is that these experiments where done in a closed container with the absence of oxygen, an agent which would have been highly destructive to this process, obstructing it all together. Since these experiments were done, scientists have discovered oxidized iron bands in Precambrian rocks showing the presence of oxygen during the period that evolutionist claim life begin. This destroys the possibility of spontaneous formation of life on earth based on evolutionist own data and discoveries.^149/53-54 The end result is that scientists are turning away from the theory of evolution and stating that the reason why life exists on earth is because it was placed here from outer space. For example: Francis Crick, Nobel prize-winner and co-discoverer of DNA, wrote in his book Life Itself,

"If it turns out that the early atmosphere was not reducing but contained a fair amount of oxygen, then the picture is more complicated. . . . If this were really true, it would support the idea of Directed Panspermia, because planets elsewhere in the universe may have had a more reducing atmosphere and thus have on them a more favorable prebiotic soup."^51/79

Carl Sagan said,

"If there were free oxygen in the early atmosphere of the Earth before the development of green plants, we would have a serious contradiction."^51/87-88

Astronomers and geophysicists, commenting in New Scientist, May 13, 1982, all agreed that the data was in and the evidence pointed toward oxygen in the early pre-life atmosphere of the earth. They also commented that the gases released in today’s volcanoes are dominated by water vapor and carbon dioxide and that it is unlikely that any earlier volcanic activity would have been substantially different.^149/54

The July 1980 New Scientist magazine wrote:

"Although biologists concerned with the origin of life often quote an early atmosphere consisting of reduced gases, this seems as much from ignorance of recent advances as from active opposition to them. . . . The time has come, it seems, to accept as the new orthodoxy the idea of early oxidized atmospheres on all three terrestrial planets, and the biological primers which still tell of life on Earth starting out from a methane/ammonia atmosphere energized by electric storms and solar ultraviolet need to be rewritten."¹⁰⁸¹¹²

The famous British mathematician and astronomer, Sir Fred Hoyle, who originated the steady-state theory of nucleogenesis (formation of the universe), published a book in 1981 titled, Evolution from Space. In this book he reverses his position on the origin of life. He along with his co-author Chandra Wickramasinghe stated that, although atheists all their lives, they had come to the conclusion that the high degree of order and specificity in the universe required pre-existing intelligence, even to the possibility of God. They wrote:

"Once we see, however, that the probability of life originating at random is so utterly minuscule as to make it absurd, it becomes sensible to think that the favourable properties of physics, on which life depends, are in every respect deliberate. . . . It is, therefore, almost inevitable that our own measure of intelligence must reflect higher intelligences. . . even to the limit of God."^92/141,144

What made them come to these conclusions? It was the result of their determination of the statistical improbabilities of a single cell originating in the primitive atmosphere in the short period of 4.6 billion years of Earth’s history. They calculated that the chance probability of life originating by random processes was one chance in 10^40,000.^92/28

To give you an idea of just how complex the single cell is consider the following: in the nucleus are 23 pairs of small chromosomes, threads of DNA. In each chromosome are 100,000 genes. This results in 3 billion subunits of information hooked into specialized DNA components. From this one cell a human being is created with the splitting and creating of other cells totaling 10¹⁴ cells. It would take a Cray Supercomputer a year to calculate the various possibilities of these genetic combinations.

The identification of all the genes in one individual person would require an encyclopedia of 500 volumes, each volume containing 1,000 pages and each page containing 1,000 words. Each volume side by side would stretch b the length of a football field. Evolving from chance is an absolute impossibility.^152/211-212

Nature magazine, November 12, 1981, said the following about Hoyle’s statements:

"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 materials therein. Of adherents of biological evolution, Hoyle said that he was at a loss to understand ‘biologists’ widespread compulsion to deny what seems to me to be obvious.’"^93/105

According to the late Carl Sagan, there are about a trillion letters in all of the books in the world’s largest library.^64/894 Not only is this an impossible amount of data to have originated by random shuffling processes, but the primordial Earth’s atmosphere simply was not conducive to any imagined scenario for the spontaneous formation of the first living, reproducing cell.^149/59

Fred Hoyle’s calculations, Regarding the chance formation of life on earth at the most basic level, showed that this simply could not be expected to happen in even 20 billion years, let alone 4.6 billion; and with oxygen present in the early atmosphere, it would have been an even greater impossibility. He wrote in the November 19, 1981 New Scientist that there are 2,000 complex enzymes required for a living organism but not a single one of these could have formed on Earth by random, shuffling processes in even 20 billion years:

It is one thing to talk in generalities about such matters, but still another to face the hard facts of the laws of probability. The reason that the origin of the first reproducing cell is such an important consideration when one evaluates theories of origins is that the supposed creative force called "natural selection" could not have played any part until there was reproduction.^149/60

Time definitely is not the hero of the plot. In reality, time destroys the assumptions of evolution theory — even the 20 billion years assumed since the big bang. If a single five-word sentence could not be formed by chance in more time than the Earth has existed, it is even less conceivable that the data contained in the genes of a single cell could have formed by random processes, because the genes of the simplest single-celled organism contain more data than there are letters in all of the volumes of the world’s largest library.^149/61-62

When evolutionary paleontologist Dr. Patterson was asked why he had not put a single photograph of a transitional fossil in his book, he gave the following reply:

". . . I fully agree with your comments on the lack of direct illustration of evolutionary transitions in my book. If I knew of any, fossil or living, I would certainly have included them. You suggest that an artist should be used to visualize such transformations, but where would he get the information from? I could not, honestly, provide it, and if I were to leave it to artistic license, would that not mislead the reader?"^149/89

Luther D. Sutherland, in a later interview of Dr. Patterson asked: "You stated in your letter that there are no transitions. Do you know of any good ones?" He replied: "No, I don’t, not that I would try to support. No." During the interview he was asked individually about every major group and the reply was the same that there are no transitions in evidence. He then said, "If you ask, ‘what is the evidence for continuity?’ you would have to say, ‘There isn’t any in the fossils of animals and man. The connection between them is in the mind.’"^149/90

When Dr. Patterson was asked what he saw as the biggest problem with the concept of evolution, he replied that it was a philosophical problem; that, "There are solutions to problems in science but I don’t think this is science we are talking about, I think it’s history." This means it is a historical problem, not a scientific one.^149/90

Dr. E.J.H. Corner of the Cambridge University Botany School made a candid evaluation of the knowledge about plant evolution:

"Much evidence can be adduced in favor of the theory of evolution — from biology, biogeography and paleontology, but I still think that to the unprejudiced, the fossil record of plants is in favor of special creation."^50/97

Where the fossil record had completely failed to show morphological progressions, perhaps the field of biochemistry would validate evolution. It was found that there were large morphological differences between organisms, there was also a great difference in their protein sequences. For example: hemoglobin sequences between man and other animals differed anywhere from 20 to 50 percent.

Dr. Denton stated that the evolutionists’ hopes for documenting evolution theory with microbiology are shattered:

"However, as more protein sequences began to accumulate during the 1960s, it became increasingly apparent that the molecules were not going to provide any evidence of sequential arrangements in nature but were going to reaffirm the traditional view that the system of nature conforms fundamentally to a highly ordered hierarchic scheme from which all direct evidence for evolution is emphatically absent. Moreover, the divisions turned out to be more mathematically perfect than even most die-hard typologists¹⁵³ would have predicted."^149/125-126

As a result of the digital computer, in 1966 biologist Dr. Martin Kaplan organized a symposium at Wistar called The Wistar Symposium in which biologists discussed mathematical doubts about Darwinian theory of evolution. Murray Eden, in a paper entitled, "Inadequacies of Neo-Darwinian Evolution as a Scientific Theory," showed that it would be unlikely for even a single ordered pair of genes to be produced by mutations in the DNA of the bacteria, E. coli, in five billion years. He concluded that the only way to overthrow this calculation was "by finding of a new determinate feature;," in other words, a new natural law.^109/9

Dr. Eden also calculated the maximum number of protein molecules that could have existed on Earth in ten billion years, and it is only an "infinitesimal number" when compared to the maximum number of possibilities in a polypeptide chain containing 250 links.

The French scientist, Lecomte du Nony, who examined the mathematical odds of life having evolved by chance from non-living matter, said regarding the formation of a single protein that the "time needed to form, on an average, one such molecule in a material volume equal to that of our terrestrial globe is about 10²⁴³ years." Thus he concluded that the odds against the chance formation of a single protein were so great that such an event could not have occurred.^58/34

Dr. Eden said,

"What I would like to find is the characterization of these constraints.... What I am claiming is simply that without some constraint on the notion of random variation, in either the properties of the organism or the sequence of the DNA, there is no particular reason to expect that we could have gotten any kind of viable form other than nonsense."^109/14

He was talking about the very heart of the question of plausibility in macro evolution. If the raw material of evolutionary change is supposed to be generated by random processes and random processes cannot be shown to produce even a fraction of the intelligence contained in the simplest DNA, then some nonrandom mechanism must be found. When no such mechanism can be found, the theory should be deposited in the rubbish heap.^149/138