Genesis 1:20-23

Bible study with Dr. Chuck Missler of Koinonia Institute

DAY 5 (Genesis 1:20-23)

Genesis 1:20-23
Then God said, “Let the waters abound with an abundance of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the face of the firmament of the heavens.” So God created great sea creatures and every living thing that moves, with which the waters abounded, according to their kind, and every winged bird according to its kind. 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.” So the evening and the morning were the fifth day.


THE 5TH DAY SHEDS LIGHT ON THE FOLLOWING TOPICS
1. The Fallacy of Evolution
2. Evidence of Design
3. Fish and Fowl
4. Biodiversity


THE FALLACY OF EVOLUTION

Analogy: a watch and a wrist
A watch, no matter how complex, is a simple open loop system. A human wrist, on the other hand, is a complex, closed-loop system that adapts to ambient conditions, fights off microbe invaders, and is self-repairing!

Bishop William Paley, 1818
"The watch, with its gears, springs, and other mechanisms could never arise by the actions of random chance alone."

David Hume (from Thomas H. Huxley’s Commentary, 1894)
 “Living systems only have the appearance of machines. Unless it can be proven that living systems are indeed machines at the molecular level, then Paley’s watchmaker argument is irrelevant.”

Modern microbiology has revealed that even the simplest organisms are complex machines beyond our imagining. Science has refuted Hume and totally vindicated Paley!

Sir Fred Hoyle, 1981
“The speculation of The Origin of the Species turned out to be wrong. It is ironic that the scientific facts throw Darwin out, but leave Paley …the ultimate winner.”

Examples of Evolutionary Fallacies
1. Self-organization violates the Law of Entropy (2nd Law of Thermodynamics).

2. Complex system assemblies require all subsystems to be functional for system survival.
Could a camera happen by chance? Yet, we have eyes that are vastly more complicated than the camera, and we attribute that to chance?

3. DNA is a digital (or symbolic) language – Digital languages takes LOGIC to understand it!
For example, the word “man” has meaning only because we give it the meaning it has today. It takes logic to give it meaning, and it takes logic to understand its meaning. DNA works the same way. It uses 4 digits (A, T, G, C) to communicate how proteins are to be made. There is no way the rise of such an elegant language is a product of chance.

In sum, digital codes derive their meaning from arbitrary but consistent definitions (semantics). Such codes are dependent upon their context (syntax), and they are evidence design!

Hierarchy of Design
1. Open Loop Systems, e.g., thermometer
2. Closed Loop Systems, e.g., thermostat
3. Adaptive Systems, e.g., computer-controlled thermostat that can adjust temperature according to the time of the day, the season, etc.
4. Self-modifying Systems
5. Intelligent Machines

Each level of design requires additional information to be added.

Hierarchy of Intelligent Machines
1. Self-modifying Systems 
2. Self-programming Systems
3. Self-diagnostic Systems
4. Self-repairing Systems
5. Self-reproducing Systems

These are all found in nature, and the most advanced systems have yet to be fully achieved by human design. We have yet to make self-reproducing systems. Despite the advancements we have made, science still has yet to be able to make a system as “simple” as the cell! For us to stubbornly believe living organisms are nothing but the products of chance, we are essentially saying the combined efforts of our geniuses are far inferior to random chance!


EVIDENCE OF DESIGN

Molecules and Amino Acids
Individual atoms bond together to form molecules, such as oxygen and carbon. Molecules of carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen and oxygen bond together in unique ways to form different amino acids, such as Tyrosine, Glutamine, and Valine.

Pre-Biotic Soup Myth
In 1953, Stanley Miller produced some simple amino acids under carefully controlled conditions:
1. Primitive atmosphere of water, ammonia, and methane.
2. Source of energy: UV, lightning, etc.

Supporters of evolution use this to “prove” that evolution happens. What people fail to grasp was that Miller conducted his experiment WITHOUT any oxygen! Why is this important? Because without it, his experimental settings FAILED to replicate conditions that truly reflected primitive atmosphere (which itself is a theory that cannot be proven – since none of us were alive back then, no one can confirm or refute exactly how it really was). The presence of oxygen destroys organic compounds without a protecting cell wall. 

Furthermore…
1. Oxidation destroys the basic chemical building blocks of life.

2. Even with us assuming the primitive atmosphere was completely devoid of oxygen, without the ozone layer, UV radiation from the sun would destroy organic compounds anyway.

Forty years of subsequent attempts still have failed to provide any empirical validation of this Oarin-Haldane-Miller hypothesis. In fact, supporters of evolution nowadays don’t even mention it anymore, as it has pretty much been dismissed by most scientists.

The Cell Revealed
There are 1x10^13 cells in the human body. The cell wall protects the internal chemical processes (amino acids, proteins, etc.) from UV, oxidating agents, water, etc. Self-reproduction is the most fundamental characteristic of all living organisms. In living systems the building blocks of DNA and RNA exist exclusively in the right-handed form (dextrorotary). Amino acids in virtually all proteins in living systems occur only in the left-handed form (levorotary). 

If these molecules truly occurred by “accident,” there should be equal amounts of left-handed and right-handed molecules. However, as stated above, that is not the case. All the DNA molecules are right-handed, and amino acids are all left-handed! Just this fact alone suggests that there is someone (or at least recognize an ordered force) dictating the building of these molecules!

The “simple?” cell is really not as simple as people think. It is far more complex than anything humans have ever designed and built! It is unequalled in any factory on earth!

The Code of Life: DNA

Francis Crick 
“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.”

Michael Denton, 1986
“Although the tiniest bacterial cells are incredibly small, each is in effect a veritable micro-miniaturized factory containing thousands of exquisitely designed pieces of intricate molecular machinery, made up of 100,000,000,000 atoms, far more complicated than any machine built by man and absolutely without parallel in the non-living world.”

Digital Information Flow
DNA --> RNA --> Protein

There are exceptions, which is not the point here. Even with considering the exceptions, the point here is that proteins are made from digital codes dictated by nucleic acids.

Protein Manufacturing
The proteins that make up the many mechanisms within the living cell are manufactured in four steps: 

1. An enzyme docks to the chromosome and slides along the gene, transcribing the sequence on one strand of DNA into a single strand of RNA.

2. Any introns (the non-coding parts of the transcript) are snipped out, and the rest is spliced together to make a piece of “messenger RNA.” 

3. The RNA message then moves out of the nucleus to the main part of the cell, where molecular machines translate it into chains of amino acids, which become the proteins required. 

4. Each protein chain twists and folds into its intricate and unique three-dimensional shape to carry out its function.

Let’s not even consider the complexity of protein manufacturing within a cell. Just consider how the DNA is able to store all that information and appropriately dictate the right time to make the right proteins. And then consider the fact that the DNA is a self-replicating molecule, a self-replicating code. Every step is a major evolutionary hurdle – with all of our brain power, we humans can’t even begin to create anything as sophisticated, yet we readily claim chance has a better, well, chance?

But of course, why let the fun stop there. Let’s ask the chicken-or-the-egg question: Which came first? The protein or the DNA? You can’t make any protein without the DNA, and you can’t make the DNA without the protein. This isn’t just two simple processes interacting with each other but rather several complex systems relying on each one to be functional to exist. In other words, there is no way proteins came first to create DNA or vice versa. Both complex systems needed to be in place, organized, on Day 1!


FISH AND FOWL

Genesis 1:20-23
So God created great sea creatures and every living thing that moves, with which the waters abounded, according to their kind, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good.

Dolphin Sonar
Dolphins almost constantly emit either clicking sounds or whistles. The clicks are short pulses of about 300 sounds per second, emitted from a mechanism located just below the blowhole. These clicks are used for the echolocation of objects and are resonated forward by the so-called oily melon, which is located above the forehead and acts as an acoustic lens. Echoes received at the area of the rear of the lower jaw are transmitted by a fat organ in the lower jaw to the middle ear. 

This echolocation system, similar to that of a bat, enables the dolphin to navigate among its companions and larger objects and to detect fish, squid, and even small shrimp. The whistles are single-toned squeals that come from deeper in the larynx. They are used to communicate alarm and perhaps other emotional states. The bottle-nosed dolphin can detect sounds at frequencies more than seven times what a human can hear.

The dolphin’s sonar system involves sophisticated equations reconciling the velocities of sound through different media: sea water, skin, acoustic lens, etc. They are dependent upon sonar echoes to find food; thus, dolphins are dependent upon a fully functional system that is useless until fully functional.

The acoustic engineering of just this sonar system is astonishingly complex! The system must be able to account for how sound waves travel in different media: water, sand, melon. 

Question: How did dolphins survive BEFORE they had this system in place? They can’t – They’d starve to death! And here’s the thing about dead animals: They do not evolve!

Bombardier Beetle (Brachinus fumans)

From Dr. Wermann Schildknecht, a German chemist:

“The beetle makes his “explosive” by mixing together two very dangerous chemicals (hydroquinone and hydrogen peroxide). In addition, this clever little beetle adds another type of chemical known as an inhibitor. The inhibitor prevents the chemicals from blowing up and enables the beetle to store the chemicals indefinitely.

“The beetle can rotate the end of its abdomen 270 degrees in any direction, which allows for an impressive ‘firing range.’ In effect, the beetle can spray in whatever direction the predator comes from, a decided advantage.

“A mixture of these two chemicals in the presence of the two enzymes in a confined space is explosive. The beetle, on his way to becoming a bombardier beetle, would have to be smart enough to carefully store the chemicals in a storage chamber apart from the enzymes but in the presence of an inhibitor to prevent them from reacting prematurely with one another.

“He also would have to be smart enough to know which enzymes he needs to catalyze the chemical reactions involved, and he would have to be smart enough to secrete them into the combustion chamber. The combustion chamber itself must be very special, able to resist the corrosive effect of the hot, irritating chemicals and strong enough to contain the high pressure without rupturing. The combustion chamber must also be equipped with a highly efficient valve, and the appropriate muscles must exist to manipulate the combustion tube and point it in the right direction.

“Of course, all of this incredibly complex apparatus would be totally useless without a precisely designed and perfectly functional communication system to squirt the charge of chemicals into the combustion tube, secrete the enzymes into the combustion tube, activate the valve at the appropriate moment, and send the correct signals to all of the muscles involved, in order to point the combustion tube in the right direction.

“Evolutionists would have us believe that all of the hundreds, and most likely thousands, of genes required to direct the construction and operation of all of this arose through a series of copying errors. Furthermore, these complex genetic changes had to occur in just the right order, so that at every stage of development the beetle was not only able to survive but also was actually superior to the preceding stage. Creation scientists reject this notion as more than scientifically untenable; it is simply preposterous, a fairy tale!

“In twin storage chambers, he stores an aqueous solution of two chemicals: l0% hydroquinone (a reducing agent used in photographic developing fluids) and 23% hydrogen peroxide (a powerful oxidizing agent). Remarkably, these chemical agents do not react, the solution remaining as crystal clear as pure water due to the inhibitor, which prevents the chemicals from reacting. If these chemicals are mixed in the laboratory, the solution soon becomes discolored, as the hydrogen peroxide oxidizes the hydroquinones to quinones (in the bombardier beetle a mixture of hydroquinone and methylhydroquinone is used).

“When the bombardier beetle is ready to fire his defensive spray, he squirts a charge of the chemical solution into each of the combustion tubes. There an enzyme, catalase, catalyzes the extremely rapid decomposition of hydrogen peroxide into oxygen and water, and another enzyme, peroxidase, catalyzes the oxidation of the hydroquinones to quinonesnoxious, irritating chemicals. The chemical reaction generates sufficient heat to raise the temperature of the mixture to 212ºF, and the excess oxygen produced provides the high pressure, and valves in the ends of the combustion tubes are opened at the appropriate time.

“Scientists have discovered that a bombardier beetle could fire its defenses 20 times in a row before emptying its chemical supply.”

Questions: How can evolution account for the existence of this beetle? If he makes a mistake during evolution and mixes his chambers as chance would have it, he blows himself up! And here’s the thing about dead bugs: They do not evolve!

Birds are designed for flight
Birds that fly have lightweight skeletons in which many of the major bones are hollow. A unique feature of birds is the furculum, or wishbone, which is comparable to the collarbones of humans, although in birds the left and right portions are fused together. The furculum absorbs the shock of wing motion and acts as a spring to help birds breathe while they fly.

Several anatomical adaptations help to reduce weight and concentrate it near the center of gravity. For example, modern birds are toothless, which helps reduce the weight of their beaks, and food grinding is carried out in the muscular gizzard, a part of the stomach located near the body’s core. The egg-laying habit of birds enables young to develop outside the body of the female, significantly lightening her load. For further weight reduction, the reproductive organs of birds atrophy, or become greatly reduced in size, outside of the breeding season.

Their physiology is optimized for flight
Examples: 
1. Fast metabolism: high body temp (104F -108F); lungs open at each end
2. 450 breaths/min (vs. 30/min); larger hearts for altitude
3. 400-1000 beats/min (vs 160/min)
4. Feathers for aerodynamics and body
5. Feet and beaks are specially designed for different lifestyles of different types of birds

Example: The Woodpecker
• Has a strong beak for all the pecking that he does
• Has a special shock-absorbing cartilage between his beak and head – and when he pecks, he automatically closes his eyes, because otherwise they would pop out!
• Has resilient tail feathers to form a tripod with his feet to better cling to trees;
• Has 2+2 toes (vs. 3+1) for better gripping on the tree;
• Has an unusually long tongue with barbs and special glue (that sticks to the larva but not to the tongue itself): it exits the skull between the eyes and enters the beak through one of the nostrils

Migration is still a mystery
Despite our technological advances, we still cannot explain how birds can go 25,000 miles from birth to where they need to go.

Example: The Golden Plover
These birds fly from Alaska to Hawaii – with no rest stops! They weigh about 130 grams and put on about 70 grams to fuel their trip. This is an 88-hour trip, and a quick calculation will show that 70 grams can fuel only 70 hours of this trip, suggesting these birds would plummet into the ocean long before they make it to Hawaii! Yet, each year, these birds make the flight. How? By flying in formation, the ones that are not in the lead can save fuel, and they trade off lead throughout the trip! These birds draft – and by drafting, they reach Hawaii with 6.8 grams of margin! How would evolution even begin to explain this? If they don’t draft, they plummet into the ocean. If they don’t draft in perfect formation, they plummet into the ocean. They had once shot to get it right, and this was just by chance?

Like these birds, we can’t make survive in this world alone either! We all need each other. We all need to exercise our gifts to make the body of the church work!


BIODIVERSITY
Biologists stress that each species is needed by the rest.

The Sympathetic Miracles of Photosynthesis
Photosynthesis is a process involving two interdependent stages: the Light-Dependent Reaction (in two phases) and the Light-Independent Reaction.

Light contains many wavelengths. Certain red and blue wavelengths of light are the most effective in photosynthesis because they have exactly the right amount of energy to energize chlorophyll electrons and boost them out of their orbits to a higher energy level. Other accessory pigments enhance the light-absorption capacity of the leaf by capturing a broader spectrum of blue and red wavelengths, along with yellow and orange wavelengths. None of the photosynthetic pigments absorb green light; as a result, green wavelengths are reflected, which is why plants appear green.

A chloroplast traps light energy and converts it into chemical energy contained in two types of molecules:
1. Nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide phosphate (NADPH)
2. Adenosine triphosphate (ATP)
These are both used in the subsequent Light-Independent Reaction.

The Light-Independent Reaction takes the two chemicals produced in the Light-Dependent Reaction, along with CO2, to form glucose (sugar): the NADPH provides the hydrogen atoms that help form glucose, and the ATP provides the energy for this and other reactions used to synthesize glucose in the stroma.

There is a broader system design that is evident in the elegance of the total picture. Plants produce both the free oxygen as well as a surplus of sugar to provide food for the animals. Animals burn this energy, producing the CO2 needed by the plants.

The animals are essential for the plants, just as the plants are essential for the animals. Engineers who excel in designing complex systems will tell you that any two systems that operate in this way need each other and could not have possibly been developed by accident. They were designed, and they were designed to need each other! 

Last jabbing question for the evolutionists: If evolution occurs and is a force of nature, why be concerned or mortified about animals/plants/insects/etc. going extinct? Evolution would dictate that this is simply the norm!

Study Questions
1) What is the fallacy of “prebiotic soup” as the source of life?
2) What is “molecular chirality” and how does it refute randomness as a source of design?
3) How does a digital code refute randomness as a source of design?
4) List the major problems with “evolution” (biogenesis) as an explanation of our origin.
5) Discuss personal examples in which careful coordination is required among members of a design group. How does this impact the potential role of randomness as a process?
6) How does the complexity of even the “simplest” living cell refute the notion of it having occurred by random unaided processes?
7) How does the process of photosynthesis refute the theory of evolution?
8) How does your views regarding evolution impact your reading of the Bible?
9) Analyze a complex creature in terms of its design problems and the likelihood of it having occurred by unaided random chance.