How do you answer this question? Do you side with "science"? Do you side with the Bible? Do you try and marry the two so that you agree with everyone?Let's look at it. There's no denying that life itself is unfathomably complex and pretty mind-blowing when you actually begin to think about it. The human body is a walking, talking, thinking, problem-solving mystery. We have just the perfect amount of sensors so that we can interact with our environments. We see with our eyes because light is captured and lens-focused to our retinas that process the images of light and convert the images to electrical information that is passed to our brains through an optical nerve. The brain then interprets this information to produce an image in our mind. We don't see in our eyes. We see in our brain. Likewise, we don't feel in our hands, feet, elbows, or face. We feel in our brain. We don't taste in our tongue, we taste in our brain. I think you see the pattern here, but do you get the point? When our body gets injured, it heals itself. When it's attacked by bacteria, viruses, etc., it defends itself. It is constantly reproducing itself and metabolizing the old parts. It has an endless data bank of built-in safety features to protect itself in almost any situation whether it be falling into freezing water, getting a foreign particle in your eye, getting trapped in an oxygen-deprived place, or being exposed to cold temperatures for a long period of time. Regardless of the situation, our bodies have an emergency plan that they will follow to ensure the best chance of survival.
Humans are pretty awesome. But, we're not alone. Animals are pretty awesome, too. And, fish are amazing. And, birds. Let's not forget plants. My point is simple: Life is beautiful. We all know it. Since television was invented, shows have profited from displaying the beauty of the world's life and generations of people can't get enough of it. When it comes to the life in our world, there is an infinite sea of interesting information to discuss, from the electric eel to a porcupine's quills to the owl's neck bone structure.
The generally accepted standpoint in the scientific community is that all of this happened by pure happenstance. There was no intelligence directing any of it. But that isn't very sensible. What we observe in nature with an absence of intelligence interfering is destruction not construction. We see things break down, deteriorate, etc. Only with an intelligence present do we ever see the addition of information. It doesn't take too long on the Internet to find debates on the subject and what you will typically find is that the defenders of "science" will obfuscate their arguments discussing genetic variation and erroneously attempting to pass off genetic variation with genetic information addition. Variation does not equate to the addition of information. Nor does it account for the introduction of the initial information.
DNA is really interesting. It's where the biological information is stored that conducts your body's processes like a well-tuned orchestra. It's not hard for us to tune out when we start getting told about the vast amount of information in a single DNA strand. We can't wrap our minds around it. So, it's easy for people to tell us and for us to accept that this vast bank of information could mix with another's vast bank of information (reproduction) and create some new information. So, to dumb it down for us all, it's much easier to think about the commonly told origin of life. It says there was no information and then suddenly there was. What's more is that they postulate that from there more information just came about to produce more and more complexity. The vehicle that supposedly drove this was the production of random variation, the survival of the variations that had advantageous mutations, and the death of variations that were at a disadvantage. Since only the advantageous ones survived, they were the only ones that reproduced. Life gets more and more complex and eventually evolves into you. However, EVEN IF the first life, a very simple single-celled organism, were to have somehow happened into existence, it would have had information that makes it up. But, why would it have replicated itself. Or how? Not only that, but we're being told that it replicated itself randomly to create variation so that future generations could have a better chance of survival. Why would it do that? Why would it care to survive? Not to mention, how would information to produce something produce something different than the information it had to produce?
I wrote about it in my last blog so I'll only say it briefly here. The odds are insurmountable against anything coming to life even under perfect circumstances and with all the pieces readily available. That should be enough to doubt. Yet one can go further with it. Nothing is ever said about the insurmountable odds against this newly created life having the ability and will to replicate itself to continue living and reproducing offspring. Nor is anything ever postulated about why it would do such a thing. Darwinism speaks tons about survival but it doesn't even attempt to explain the purpose of survival. Why must all these things survive? Why is it our will to survive? Why is evolving into something else beneficial? For that matter, what is a benefit? Wouldn't it be logical to state that the benefit in death is that no more striving to survive is inherently gained? The premise that all life sprung from a random and unintelligent source is irrational because it would have died from the lack of intelligence to recreate itself. Perhaps only someone who knows nothing about the splitting of a cell or the splitting of DNA can say with any confidence that life could have recreated itself just because. Even just the recreation of a single DNA strand is complex and requires several biological tools to perform the function without a slightest error.Slightly off point, this reminds me of a movie I once watched, The Happening, written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan in the height of his success. Warning: The rest of this paragraph is a spoiler. The plot of the movie is that people start seemingly mindlessly killing themselves by any means they can quickly find. This epidemic spreads as fast as the wind blows. It started in multiple cities around the world and spread outwards. The movie follows a high school teacher who struggles to survive the ordeal while also trying to figure out the cause. The culprit winds up being the trees. This is Hollywood so bear with me, but the trees supposedly have an intelligence, a will to survive, a collective conscience, and the ability to produce a spore or something like it that can be made to go airborne that alters the chemistry of humans and causes their will to survive to be suppressed. This immediately makes the affected humans mindless, incoherent, suicide machines. I mentioned this because I like the illustration of what would happen if our will to survive was suppressed.
So, then, the real question is where did our will to survive originate? Interestingly enough, I can't seem to find any results on the Internet concerning the subject. The Bible provides an answer to the question in Genesis 1. After creating living creatures God said "Be fruitful and increase in number". There you have it. An intelligent designer that programmed in a will to survive. See? Whether you believe in God or not, the existence of a will to survive in all living creatures speaks volumes to the existence of an intelligence that both precedes life and is directly involved with the creation of said life.
God created the world. Furthermore, He told us how long it took Him to do it. He wasn't being poetic about the six days. It wasn't spoken in metaphors. He said six days and six days is what He meant.
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