God's Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (15 page)

S
PEAKING OF
G
APS:
W
HAT
D
O THE
F
OSSILS
S
AY?

The notion that fossils record the history of evolutionary
development
is grossly overstated. The lack of transitional forms, that is, one species changing into another, is so glaring that it prompted Stephen Jay Gould, a
Harvard
paleontologist, to propose the
theory
of
punctuated equilibrium
. This theory states that a species remains basically the same throughout time and then transforms so quickly that no evidence is left in the fossil record. However, this pattern in the fossils of no change and then sudden appearance of new, radically different creatures is exactly what one would expect from a design standpoint.

For instance, one of the oldest type of rock is from the Cambrian era. According to evolutionary theory, the oldest rocks should contain simple organisms. Then as life develops, the younger rocks should record life branching out and becoming more complex. Instead, you have what is called the
Cambrian explosion
. Complex life just appears. In fact, it appears suddenly, and then identified species never significantly change.
Time
’s cover story heralded, “Evolution’s Big Bang: New discoveries show that life as we know it began in an amazing biological frenzy that changed the planet almost overnight.” The story that life evolves slowly from simple to complex organisms doesn’t seem to be verified by the fossil record. The cover article explained, “In a burst of
creativity
like nothing before or since, nature appears to have sketched out the blueprints for virtually the whole of the animal kingdom. This explosion of biological diversity is described by scientists as biology’s Big Bang.”
³⁵
Time
went on to describe the fact that the development of life does not follow the
Darwinian
script.

Indeed, while most people cling to the notion that evolution works its magic over millions of years, scientists are realizing that biological change often occurs in sudden fits and starts. . . . All around the world . . . scientists have found the mineralized remains of organisms that represent the emergence of nearly every major branch in the zoological tree.
³⁶

Darwin himself was stumped by the reality of the
Cambrian explosion
. He simply assumed the missing transitional forms, or missing links, would be found. “These difficulties and objections may be classed under the following heads: First, why, if species have descended from other species by fine gradations, do we not everywhere see innumerable transitional forms? Why is not all nature in confusion, instead of the species being, as we see them, well defined?”
³⁷

The Cambrian explosion is not unique. New life forms typically appear suddenly in the fossil record and then don’t significantly change. However, the Cambrian period is the most dramatic. What it indicates is that life changed dramatically in a geological instant. This provides additional evidence for God intervening in the development of life throughout earth’s history. Recall that Darwin’s explanation was that changes happened so gradually that we should see series of fossils that vary only slightly from each other. He thought that there had not been enough digging yet, that more time was needed. After more than 150 years of excavation, transitional links remain elusive, except in the theoretical artists’ renditions in biology textbooks. “ ‘What Darwin described in the
Origin of Species
,’ observes
Queen’s University
paleontologist G. M. Narbonne, ‘was the steady background kind
of evolution. But there also seems to be a
non-Darwinian
kind of evolution that functions over extremely short time periods
—
and that’s where all the action is.’ ”
³⁸

When confronted with the implications of such evidence, evolutionists often respond by claiming that some “transitional” species have been identified. However, what they call transitions are not actually species that lie on a direct line of descent between two other identified species. They are simply fossils that share features of two groups, much like a toaster oven shares the features of a toaster and an oven. However, dramatic similarities between unrelated species are extremely common, such as the similarities between the eyes of octopuses and humans. Therefore, simply identifying similarities between fossils does not prove those similarities are the result of common ancestry. In fact, evolutionists typically argue for
evolution
where the fossil record is most ambiguous. Where it is most complete, the pattern of sudden appearance and then no change is overwhelming.
³⁹

S
UMMARY

The overwhelming evidence for design is seen in the complexity of life at the smallest level. Life appears to be not only designed but also undoubtedly engineered at the smallest scale. The probability of this happening by chance is so vanishingly small that atheists have to propose an infinite number of universes to explain it away. In other words, you can win this cosmic lottery if you have an infinite number of chances.

Furthermore, Darwinian evolution fails to account for all of the diversity and complexity of life. Though evolution is observed
on a small scale, it fails to account for all the diversity present in the world. The fact that certain functions of life are irreducibly complex, meaning that they can’t function without all the parts present at once, points to the presence of an intelligent Designer. Naturalistic models for the
origin of life
have been refuted by two recent breakthroughs. One is the discovery that life originated on earth in a geologic instant of time. The other is that life’s origin occurred without the benefit of any natural source of prebiotic molecules.

Finally, life appears in the fossil record suddenly (the
Cambrian explosion
) and then changes only slightly. The evolutionary
narrative
simply isn’t present. These gaps point to the fact that life in its major forms was designed with the
genetic
capacity to adjust and adapt to a changing environment but has limits as far as its capacity to change to a completely different genus. This leads to the definitive truth that life is no accident. Because life is no accident, human life can have real
meaning and purpose
.

6
LIFE HAS MEANING
AND PURPOSE

We now know that we are more insignificant than we ever imagined. If you get rid of everything we see, the universe is essentially the same. We constitute a 1 percent bit of pollution in a universe . . . we are completely irrelevant.

—L
AWRENCE
K
RAUSS
¹

Consequently Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning.

—C. S. L
EWIS
,
M
ERE
C
HRISTIANITY
²

ASTRONOMER CARL SAGAN WAS A PROLIFIC WRITER AND trustee of the SETI Institute (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) founded in 1984 to scan the universe for any signs of life beyond earth. Sagan’s best-selling work
Cosmos
also became an award-winning television series explaining
the wonders of the universe and exporting the belief not in an intelligent Creator but in potential intelligent aliens. He believed somehow that by knowing who they are, we would discover who we as humans really are. “The very thought of there being other beings different from all of us can have a very useful cohering role for the human species.”
³
Sagan’s reasoning? If aliens could have contacted us, knowing how impossible it is for us to reach them, they would be far more advanced than us as a species. Therefore, they would have the answers we seek to our ultimate questions. This thought process shows the desperate need we have as humans for answers to the great questions of our existence. Does life have any ultimate meaning and purpose? Do we as humans have any more value than the other animals? Is there a purpose to the universe, or more specifically, to our individual lives? These are the questions that grip our minds and potentially vex our souls.

The order of creation that we have studied in earlier chapters screams that everything was planned by an intelligent Designer. That’s true not just for stars, galaxies, and tiny organisms but for humans especially. Because God exists we can know we were made on purpose for a purpose. However, when that reality is obscured, the consequences are devastating.

William Lane Craig, an American philosopher and theologian who has had a profound impact on millions of people through his vigorous public defense of the Christian faith, has summed up man’s condition apart from God: “My claim is that if there is no God then meaning, value, and purpose are ultimately human illusions. They’re just in our heads. If atheism is true, then life is really objectively meaningless, valueless, and purposeless, despite our subjective beliefs to the contrary.”
⁴

M
AN
’
S
S
EARCH FOR
M
EANING

Viktor Frankl was imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp during World War II. There he experienced the horrors of the death camps and the accompanying emotional despair of watching friends, family, and completely innocent people executed because of their
ethnicity
. He witnessed firsthand what happens when a human is stripped of every dignity and
freedom
and subjected to torment and torture from which there is no foreseeable relief. In the midst of these unspeakable evils, Frankl began to realize man’s ultimate need is for meaning in his life. “Terrible as it was, his experience in
Auschwitz
reinforced what was already one of his key ideas: Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a quest for power, as Alfred Adler taught, but a quest for meaning. The greatest task for any person is to find meaning in his or her life.”
⁵

In his book
Man’s Search for Meaning
, Frankl described how those in captivity who clung to some sense of meaning in the midst of the madness were able to survive. Those who lost that meaning would inevitably die. He quoted Nietzsche: “He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how.”
⁶

The Western world is
suffering
from the backlash of the meaninglessness of atheism and unbelief. Suicide is increasing. Drug abuse, especially the respectable version of the abuse of prescription drugs, is choking the life out of a generation desperately self-medicating in hopes of not drowning in a sea of emotional pain. This isn’t surprising. When you tell people there is no God, that they are just animals that have evolved from lower life forms and are the product of random chance, you offer them little hope for deriving any sort of ultimate meaning out of that philosophy.
The atheist quickly denies that atheism leads to meaninglessness, but it can lead to no other place. Nietzsche would agree: “So to live that life no longer has any meaning: this is now the ‘meaning’ of life. . . .”
⁷
This despair gripped the
communist world
for decades. The attempt to eradicate God from the mind and soul of nations only produced a greater void and a greater hunger for spiritual
truth
.

In communist
China
, Western missionaries were expelled in the 1950s, and Chairman Mao replaced the Bible with
The Little Red Book
. Instead of Christianity disappearing as he had intended, it exploded. Millions of people worshiped in secret and spread the Word to others, risking imprisonment and even death. Today, the Chinese church is stronger than ever. Because following Christ is still very challenging in this environment, believers are more resolved to be faithful to the Lord. I have worked in China and have seen the happiness and peace that these believers possess. Think about it: if happiness came from material things, Americans and other Westerners should be the happiest people on earth. Instead, our souls long for something beyond merely material existence. We are desperate for relationships, for significance, and for a real reason to live.

In
The God Test
, a small booklet of questions that serve to promote dialogue between believers and unbelievers, the question is asked of atheists or agnostics, Does life have any ultimate meaning or purpose?
⁸
The answers to this question are revealing. Average people claiming to be an atheist or
agnostic
will be quick to say yes. They will cite their concern for education and for human rights as well as the pursuit of
knowledge
about the world we live in. But that isn’t what ultimate meaning and purpose is. They are citing their own subjective pursuits, which certainly don’t have an ultimate significance to them. The ultimate questions are easy
to ignore by just staying busy and distracting your mind, but sooner or later they cannot be avoided by a thoughtful person. Is there any ultimate plan or design to the world, or are we simply “lucky mud”? If there is a plan, then where did that purpose come from?

T
HE
D
ESPAIR OF
A
THEISM

As we mentioned in
chapter 3
, translating Darwinian evolution into a philosophy of life would be dangerous, according to Darwin himself. Richard Dawkins is the first to say that we should accept the truth of our situation regardless of how good or bad it is: “Nature is not cruel, only pitilessly indifferent. This is one of the hardest lessons for humans to learn. We cannot admit that things might be neither good nor evil, neither cruel nor kind, but simply callous—indifferent to all
suffering
, lacking all purpose.”
⁹
Bertrand Russell said we have no choice but to build our lives “on the firm foundation of unyielding despair.”
¹⁰
It’s supposed to be a world of cold, hard facts and ruthless truth. That’s because the universe doesn’t care.