Day 5-6: The Real Origin of Species

One of the enduring “icons of evolution” that was taught in schools for years was about the Miller-Urey experiment in 1953, in which boiling water containing amino acids and the gasses flowing upward were subjected to charges of electricity. A gooey substance collected containing more amino acids. The idea was to show how life could have originated from the “pre-biotic soup” that replicated the conditions on the primitive earth. There were several problems with the experiment and its results: first, there were faulty assumptions about the presence of oxygen in that original state; second, to control for oxygen would be precisely external control. In other words, the same basic problem exists as analogies that evolutionists have always made to animal husbandry. Where it operates, it is not an example of natural selection at all, but of artificial selection.

Today we will be looking at the whole of Day 5 and part of Day 6—that is, the whole of the animal kingdom.

• The origin of species was immediately witnessed.

• The origin of species was intelligently designed.

• The origin of species was irreducibly complex.

Doctrine. No species of life can ever originate unless by one with Life in Himself. This is true as a spiritual principle, but it is also the case about biological life. 

The origin of species was immediately witnessed.

By that I am not speaking of the mode of revelation from God to Moses. Here I mean the manner in which all of the species of animal life burst on to the scene, and the way that this is witnessed in the fossil record. So while we have one foot in the biblical text, we will have our other foot in the discipline of paleontology. In the text itself, we read that the method, again, is creation ex nihilo. He speaks and instantly—‘And God said, ‘Let the waters swarm … and let birds fly … And God said, ‘Let the earth bring forth living creatures’ (v. 20, 24). See, that emphasis stays the same: He speaks, and it becomes. So the theological reason—the ultimate reason—why it was immediate is because of the divine decree.

But what does the fossil record show us? Even on the old earth model, when we examine the different geological strata, which are supposed to represent the various ages of evolutionary time, advocates of that view recognize what is called The Cambrian Explosion. It is dated at roughly 550 million years ago; and in that layer one finds the sudden emergence of all of the forms of life that we see today, in all of their present complexity. Even evolutionist, Steven Jay Gould, said that the “rapid rate of appearance of new life forms demands a mechanism other than natural selection for its explanation.”1

So what is the problem for Darwinian evolution? It is simply this. Darwinism demands gradualism. That is, slight, successive modifications.

In fact, the expression “missing link” is a gross understatement, and I think we let this absurd theory off the hook in using it because, in simple terms, if Darwinian gradualism were true, you would expect to find not one or a few “missing links” at some equidistance between one ancestor and a later transition species. Remember the slight modifications over aeons of time. You would be finding just as many hybrids (and more) than you find present classifications.

The origin of species was intelligently designed.

What do we mean by “intelligent design”? The most famous expression of this was formulated by William Paley in his book called Natural Theology. There he asks his reader to imagine walking in the woods.

“suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there, I might possibly answer, that, for anything I knew to the contrary, it had lain there forever … But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be enquired how the watch happened to be in that place, I should hardly think of the answer which I had before given … Yet why should not this answer serve for the watch, as well as for the stone? … For this reason, and for no other, viz. that, when we come to inspect the watch, we perceive (what we could not discover in the stone) that its several parts are framed and put together for a purpose, e.g. that they are so formed and adjusted as to produce motion, and that motion so regulated as to point out the hour of the day; that, if the several parts had been differently shaped than what they are, of a different size than what they are, or places after any other manner, or in any other order, than that in which they are placed, either no motion at all would have been carried on in the machine, or none which would have answered the use, that is now served by it.”2

In case anyone thinks this is not a fitting analogy, even the leading evolutionists wind up disagreeing when they try to make the same point. For example, Richard Dawkins wrote that, “Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.”3 And the co-discoverer of DNA, Francis Crick, said “Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved.”4

There are the most basic purposes, such as ‘Let the waters swarm’ (v. 20) and ‘let birds fly above the earth’ (v. 21), so that fish are for swimming and birds are for flying—that is, birds have wings built for that environment; and fish have fins and gills that allow them to exist in theirs.

Other purposes are on the more grand scale:

“And God saw that it was good. And God blessed them, saying, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth’” (vv. 21b-22).

The blessing here is specifically “to be procreative.”5

I want to stress again that when the text of Genesis depicts a divine communication in the form of “Let there be [and] according to its kind,” this is the divine program code. Naturally the process of diversification exists within an eternal environment. The argument against evolution is not that natural selection does not exist. Of course it does. In any population, any number of disadvantages will lead to propagating less than another member of that population with the corresponding advantage. The question has always been twofold: (1) whether natural selection is a fitting candidate for the cause internal to the species—or the “mechanism” of diversity—and (2) whether such change can violate the fixity of the kind and become a different kind. What the science more up to date than Darwin shows is that the mechanism that dictates the diversity of life is not natural selection but information. Natural selection is not only the wrong answer to the mechanism question—it is not actually an answer at all. Especially when it is simply taken for granted, it becomes what we call in logic a tautology.

In his book Darwin on Trial, Philip Johnson explains:

“The theory predicts that the fittest organisms will produce the most offspring, and it defines the fittest organisms as the ones which produce the most offspring … [But] When I want to know how a fish can become a man, I am not enlightened by being told that the organisms that leave the most offspring are the ones that leave the most offspring.”6

This is what Darwin—and frankly too many of his followers down to the present day—are far behind on. Of course Darwin could not have imagined DNA; but even Dawkins and others in our day have still not factored in the science of information theory. The German scientist, Dr. Werner Gitt, in his book In the Beginning Was Information, has said that information is

“the third fundamental entity alongside matter and energy … [yet it] cannot be a property of matter, and its origin cannot be explained in terms of material processes.”7

The origin of species was irreducibly complex.

So in Day 5 with birds and fish, ‘God created … according to their kinds … according to its kind’ (v. 21); and then again in Day 6, ‘livestock and creeping things and beasts of the earth according to their kinds’ (v. 24).8 And here it actually repeats the expression five times. In our view into Day 3 we already saw that the Hebrew word מִין is best translated as “kind,” though technically can mean “species.” As already indicated, different kinds at the external level come from different kinds in the genetic coding. This brings us to another massive problem for the theory of evolution. At the biochemical level, it turns out that all living systems are made up of highly complex machines. Even these parts are programed by that DNA.

This is what Michael Behe has called irreducible complexity in his book Darwin’s Black Box.9 He uses the illustration of a mousetrap. It is a non-living system, but it has a basic function. Each part is necessary for the operation of the whole; and the simplest living system is incomparably more complex that this mousetrap.10 Now remember the claim of evolution. Natural selection selects for functional advantage. But with each trait, from corresponding mutation, there is no functional advantage to the change unless it already works together with those other parts. None of these could have arises piece by piece over periods of time, as none of the pieces would have operated without the others. The problem is only multiplied at the genetic level, as the assembly of parts of a single cell are themselves irreducibly complex.

So ‘according to its kind … their kinds’ (vv. 21, 24) also implies irreducibly diverse kinds of molecular mechanisms which are limited and designed for adaptability to environment designed for each distinct species.

“O LORD, how manifold are your works! In wisdom have you made them all; the earth is full of your creatures. Here is the sea, great and wide, which teems with creatures innumerable, living things both small and great. There go the ships, and Leviathan, which you formed to play in it” (Ps. 104:24-26).

Practical Use of this Doctrine

Use 1. Correction. Evolution should have been seen to be in violation of page 1 of any biology textbook. Of course it was; so often it is removed from that page 1. But here is that fundamental law. The law of biogenesis states that life cannot come from non-life. This is part of what Louis Pasteur’s experiments demonstrated. For a while, people believed in spontaneous generation. They even thought confirmation for this was found when meat was left out and maggots were later discovered. Further experimentation showed that the maggots were a result of the larvae left by flies. Yet the theory of evolution needs to account for an origin to the simplest living systems. So their hope of abiogenesis is that life may have sprung from inorganic matter. This chemical evolution has been a thorn in the side of evolutionary theory. It absolutely is their burden of prove. 

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1. Gould paraphrased in Michael Behe, Darwin’s Black Box (New York: Touchstone, 1996), 27-28.

2. William Paley, Natural Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 7.

3. Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (London: W. W. Norton, 1995), 1.

4. Francis Crick, What Mad Pursuit (New York: Basic Books, 1990), 138.

5. Waltke, Genesis: A Commentary, 63.

6. Phillip E. Johnson, Darwin on Trial (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1991), 19, 21.

7. Werner Gitt, In the Beginning Was Information (Bielefeld: Christliche Literatur-Verbreitung, 1997), 44, 47.

8. Waltke notes that there is an intentional classification by Moses between “domesticated and wild animals” (Genesis: A Commentary, 64).

9. Behe, Darwin’s Black Box, 39.

10. The example of the bombardier beetle discussed by Dawkins is an example of how there is little attempt by evolutionists to take on the relevant burden of proof — cf. The Blind Watchmaker, 86-87; Behe, Darwin’s Black Box, 33-34.