David P. Barash, a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Washington, makes it a point at the beginning of each academic year to lecture his students on what he considers to be the basic premise underlying his biology course: that science and religion are totally incompatible. He wrote in an op-ed column in the New York Times (9-28-14): “Teaching biology without evolution would be like teaching chemistry without molecules, or physics without mass and energy.”
What an incredible statement. Biology is probably the one science where God’s creation is the most obvious and where evolutionary development makes the least sense. The idea that one-celled creatures arose out of the bubbly ooze which evolutionists believe is the source of living matter is easily demolished by the fact that one-celled creatures have not “evolved” into two and three-celled animals. After all these millennia, they still remain one-celled creatures.
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According to Darwin, evolution is supposed to have worked through natural selection and there should be fossils which show these different evolutionary stages of evolving man. But no such fossils have been found. New species arise fully developed out of nowhere. If this is not a sign of divine intervention, I don’t know what is. What about the incredible complexity of living matter: the ear with its tiny bones, the eye with its lens, our complicated digestive system that distributes nourishment to every cell in our bodies. Our bodies have six distinct fluids each with a different specific function, hardly the product of accident. Blood, tears, saliva, sweat, digestive acid, and urine each perform their own function. Indeed, each different species has its own awesome complexities. But Prof. Barash writes:
Since Darwin, however, we have come to understand that an entirely natural and undirected process, namely random variation plus natural selection, contains all that is needed to generate extraordinary levels of non-randomness.
Such utter nonsense passes for science in Prof. Barash’s mind. Random variation creates non-randomness. It takes a great deal of faith to believe in that kind of contradictory “truth.” It seems that the basic philosophical problem with the professor is that he may hate God because if God exists, He is the cause of life “filled with ethical horrors: predation, parasitism, fratricide, infanticide, disease, pain, old age and death.” That’s enough to turn anyone into an atheist. Thus, the professor concludes:
The more we know of evolution, the more unavoidable is the conclusion that living things, including human beings, are produced by a natural, totally amoral process, with no indication of a benevolent controlling creator.
Obviously, Prof. Barash, like so many other secular humanists, has a beef with the God of the Bible. Albert Einstein, the most famous scientist of the 20th century, has said: “Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind.” Einstein was a pantheist who recognized the need to acknowledge the existence of a supernatural force in the universe. He wrote:
My comprehension of God comes from the deeply felt conviction of a superior intelligence that reveals itself in the knowable world…. I assert that the cosmic religious experience is the strongest and the noblest driving force behind scientific research.
These quotes are from The Expanded Quotable Einstein, published by the Princeton University Press, 2000. Several students in Prof. Barash’s class may want to give their atheist teacher a life-changing gift so that he can begin to see living matter as God’s greatest creation. The fact that God created the human being with the most powerful organ in the entire universe, the human brain, ought to question the insane supposition that the human brain is the result of random forces. If the human brain is the result of random material forces, how come it is also the source of nonmaterial manifestations, such as ideas and dreams? The brain’s spiritual manifestations are another clear proof of the existence of a supernatural creator.
The reason why the human brain is the most powerful organic force in the universe is that its creator endowed human beings with the power of language. It is that power, unique only to the human specie, that has allowed us to build civilization. There is no possible way that our power of speech is the result of evolutionary development. And it was given to us for one special reason: so that we could know of the existence of God.
Genesis explains it all. When God created Adam, he gave Adam the means of speaking with his Creator. That initial relationship set the terms for Adam’s future life and the life of all humanity to come. It should also be noted that God made Adam into a scientist and lexicographer. He instructed Adam to name the animals, to observe nature, to take dominion and cultivate the earth. He instructed Adam and Eve to build civilization, which they did.
The 21st century has shown the unlimited possibilities of the human brain. Language is the vehicle of logic, reason, and science, and its origin is spiritual, in other words, divine. Neither logic nor reason can be the products of material randomness. They are just the opposite, based on principles of transcendent moral order. That is why moral relativism is such a preposterous, illogical idea.
Professor Barash might do well to read Antony Flew’s book, There is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind, published in 2007. Flew states that it was the complexity of the DNA that forced him to change his mind. He writes:
What I think the DNA material has done is that it has shown, by the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce (life), that intelligence must have been involved in getting these extraordinarily diverse elements to work together. It’s the enormous complexity of the number of elements and the enormous subtlety of the ways they work together…. It is all a matter of the enormous complexity by which the results were achieved, which looked to me like the work of intelligence. (p. 75).
Since the DNA is at the heart of every living being’s existence, the idea of evolutionary biology becomes totally untenable. It would be nice if Prof. Barash would undergo the same kind of epiphany that drove Antony Flew out of atheism into belief in intelligent design. He would have to apologize to all of those students he misled in the past.
