In my prior post, I showed the inconsistencies in the notion that all life evolved from one single point, notably out of the sea. For the sake of argument, let’s assume that it happened as the scientific explanation claims.
As time passes, things get bigger, and eventually we end up with dinosaurs. That is, until one meteor hits the Earth, drastically changes the climate, and kills them all. Or, so goes the common thinking.
Does this seem like more than just a coincidence to anyone else?
Think about it.
We start out with a very rocky planet, and what’s the best way to break up rocks if you’re not in a hurry? Plant growth. It’s even better than the freeze-thaw cycle. So giant, unencumbered vegetation growth does a great job making big rocks into small rocks. Add in decaying foliage (oh, and the fungi and bacteria to do the decaying), and (some time later) the digestive cycles of enormous herbivores (and their decomposing carcasses), and the system does a fine job of building up topsoil for more plant growth, advancing the cycle even further. Just when everything seems to be working wonderfully, a giant rock hurtling through space hits a relatively tiny (and fast-moving) planet. It makes its way through a dense, protective atmosphere to strike the surface. The impact is powerful enough to fill the atmosphere with enough dust to cool the planet to a temperature that will kill off all the massive cold-blooded creatures, but not so cold as to sterilized the ecosystem. Pretty lucky.
According to National Geographic, the meteor that offed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago was the eighth-largest impact on record. All the larger impacts occurred well-before this one (as early as 2 billion years prior). All the impacts following it were noticeably smaller. In fact, looking at the article above, it seems that about every 100 million years or so, there’s an asteroid impact large enough to completely upend the Earth’s climate. That seems to really compress the amount of time that Life has had to gain a foothold on this planet, doesn’t it?
Moving on… so when the world thaws out, furry little mammals creep their way out of the rocks and self-mutate in the “smarter” direct, growing into smarter and smarter animals until monkeys and eventually… humans.
Ah, now we get to the story of the ever-elusive Missing Link.
And herein lies another great example of faith for the atheists: “We haven’t seen it, no one has, but yet we know it exists. We believe it exists. Our identity necessitates its existence.” In this case, “it” refers to that Missing Link. I find it more than a little ironic that atheists are willing to believe in the existence of the Missing Link (“we just haven’t found it… yet”) but to them, believing in God is some sort of ridiculous superstition. (Has anyone ever prayed to the Missing Link? Were those prayers answered? If so, PLEASE message me… I want to hear about it.)
No one alive today has seen either of them (God or the Missing Link), so it’s not a matter of perception. To me, it sounds more like it’s a matter of consequence. After all, if we as a species could just find something that looks like a half-human and half-ape, the whole Bible would be discredited, the world would be liberated from religious “oppression”, the scientific community would replace the Vatican, and people would spend an hour each week begrudgingly worshiping at the direction of men (and women) who wear white lab coats and hold beakers instead of wearing white robes and holding chalices. And finally, scientists everywhere would get the social approval, respect, and recognition they deserve. (<- partial sarcasm. | ZERO sarcasm ->) But with that, of course, people would have moral license to do whatever they wanted. Because, as Dostoevsky rationalized, “if there is no God, everything is permissable.”
Sidebar:
For proof of Dostoevsky’s logic, look at the corruption levels in countries that have outlawed religion. When Man believes that he answers only to himself, even the most sacrosanct institutions of government abuse the people they were built to protect.
Here’s the other long shot that atheists inadvertently cling to: Scientists estimate that there have been around 5 billion species of living things on earth since its beginning. (Numbers vary widely, with some estimates at a trillion of current living species.) Of course, most of them are extinct, and for the climate change zealots, 99% of them were gone before humans even showed up.
Now I assume that human beings are the only intelligent species. Sure, monkeys and dolphins are considered smart for the animal kingdom. Monkeys can whack a banana out of a tree with a stick, and dolphins can learn to do tricks. But monkeys aren’t holding classes on smelting iron from ore, and dolphins aren’t training seabass to do tricks and charging other dolphins a fee in some made-up currency for the entertainment. Another way to look at this is that it takes 5 billion species (giving scientists the benefit of the doubt) to bring forth one intelligent species.
Can you think of anything else that was a 1 in 5 billion chance… and hit? In all my research, I can’t even find anything that is rated at a 1 in 5 billion chance. Even the worst lottery odds are only around 1 in 290,000,000. One-seventeenth of the way there.
Now, I know that my fellow dataphiles will point out that it’s not just a 1 in 5 billion shot, because it didn’t happen in one instance, it was an iterative process with the “weak” lifeforms being culled away. In that case, consider all of the unique individual animals that came to life with some type of mutation, that then (allegedly) brought about another species. Never mind 5 billion species bringing about one intelligent species, what you needed to make this happen was one specific mutation out of an unfathomably large number of individuals spread over 5 billion species. No respectable scientist, or sane person who understands math, would bet on those odds. And when faced with these types of numbers, even the most die-hard evolutionists will concede that there has to be “something” that guided the evolutionary process. Calling it “The Invisible Hand” is just a bad attempt to say anything other than the word “God.”
Conclusion
Now, you may dispute my argument on a point or two. I totally acknowledge that logic or premises could have been faulty at some point (or several points) along the way. But the challenge for the atheists’ view is that all of these long-shot gambles have to line up (or at least have a viable work-around) for humans to come into existence without divine influence. And for me, as a person who also believes in facts, science, and reason, I have a tough time accepting that probability.
Seven-hundred years ago, a Franciscan friar (and philosopher) named William of Ockham penned the wise theory that bears his name, Ockham’s Razor. Basically, it states that, “In the case of multiple explanations, the simplest explanation usually tends to be the right one.” In other words, the more assumptions you have to make, the more unlikely an explanation is to be correct.
The number (and types) of assumptions (or coincidences) that had to have happened for a God-less creation story to work is mind-boggling. And not just for someone with a simple mind.
To paraphrase the head of the Vatican Observatory, Jesuit Brother Guy Consolmagno, “The Bible tells us what God did. Our science tells us how He did it.”
+1 Bible Blog 