Does Naturalism Conflict with the Laws of Science?

Dwayne:
The very essence of modern science is a search for the truth, and the best definition of empirical science is the objective, systematic analysis of observable, repeatable processes. All beliefs about unobserved past events are heavily dependent on inference and indoctrination. Creationists and evolutionists all have the same facts to look at but come to diametrically opposite conclusions, and the fact that one group is much larger than the other doesn’t mean that they came to the correct conclusion. Centuries ago the consensus of scientists was that the Earth was the center of the solar system, and they silenced those who disagreed. Today, the consensus of science is that the universe, the Earth and man are the result of purely natural actions over vast expanses of time, and those who disagree are ridiculed and labeled as "anti-scientific". In the coming days I want to address some of the laws of science and see how well naturalism fares. If naturalism fails then the only alternative is “In the beginning God…”.


In the coming days I want to look at issues with physics, astronomy, molecular biology, genetics, mathematical probabilities, geology and radiometric dating. Today I would like to start with the origin of the universe.


There are a number of theories about the origin of the universe, and they can’t all be right. However, they can all be wrong. Hoyles’ Steady State theory never really gained wide acceptance, and the Big Bang theory claims an infinitely dense, spinning primordial seed that began to expand into our present universe, but doesn’t really explain where that seed came from. Quantum theory assumes the existence of a vacuum filled with energy but doesn’t explain where that came from. They all begin with matter/energy already existing and go from there. That is a belief system, a faith in the unknown.


The Big Bang theory, probably the most popular currently, claims that this sudden expansion of the primordial seed was capable of producing hydrogen, helium and lithium. The story goes that these elements condensed into self-gravitational masses and when they became big enough the heat and pressure inside started the stars production of photons and the nucleosynthesis of heavier elements. These stars are called first generation stars, and so far as I know astronomers have never found any. A bigger problem is that this theory suggests that Boyles’ Law is wrong. Gas particles in a vacuum repel one another with a force something like 100 times their mutual gravitational attraction. That being the case, how would the expanding clouds of hydrogen become condensed? Astronomers’ claim that today clouds of hydrogen can be compressed by the shock wave from a super nova, but that cannot explain the formation of first generation stars. No first generation stars means no stars at all – ever. No stars, no life. Martin Harwit, astronomer and one time director of the National Air and Space Museum, once said, “The silent embarrassment of modern astrophysics is that we do not know how even a single one of these stars managed to form”. And other weird theories floating around fare no better. The multiverse and cyclical universe theories are interesting ideas but are completely beyond the grasp of experimental science. So, Boyles’ Law stands as observable and factual, and the naturalistic theories of the origin of the universe do not. In addition, the Law of Causality is another hurdle that cannot be breached, as it declares that every effect that has a beginning had a cause, and the cause is always greater than the effect! The score so far: God – 1, evolutionism – 0.

 

Dwayne: Yes, indeed. The problem is much, much worse. This is why I referred to the law of Cause and Effect in the first post. Only the God of the Bible could be the "First Cause". Next we'll look at the laws of thermodynamics.

 

Now we need to move on to another area where evolutionism is at odds with scientific laws. This time we will consider the 1st and 2nd Laws of Thermodynamics. Many scientists consider these two laws to be the best proved of all the laws of physics.

When people like Dawkins and Gould (currently dead) label all YEC believers categorically as ignorant, or worse, I tend to take it a little bit personally. Granted, I am no scientist, never went to college. I barely graduated from high school with a B average. I may not have any university degrees, but they are/were atheists and Romans 1 says they have no excuse.

The First Law basically states that the total of mass/energy in the universe is always conserved – neither can be created or destroyed. Evolutionary scientists have absolutely no demonstrable evidence that either one can be created from “nothing”. So, all concepts of the origin of the universe, apart from that of divine Creation, are completely at odds with the First Law. And if we were to assume that the universe did create itself, would it make any sense that matter and energy can no longer be created? It makes no sense logically.

So, now we have a universe that, by law, could only exist because of Creation. But we must also consider the Second Law, as it raises questions about increasing order and complexity, “heat death”, quantity vs quality, necessity vs sufficiency and open systems as opposed to isolated systems.

The Second Law, written with respect to heat energy, states that the natural and consistent tendency is from high level heat to low level heat, from concentration to uniform distribution and from organization to randomness. At present, the vast majority of matter in the universe is sequestered in the interior of stars where its’ energy is dispersed into space in the form of light which then can be converted to heat which dissipates through out space seeking equilibrium. Eventually all energy will be converted to low level heat and the universe will be dead. This natural tendency from order to randomness is not only true with respect to energy, but to order in general. This is the opposite of evolution.

It is taught, that because the Earth is an open system, that the natural trend to disorder can be reversed and things can become more orderly and complex. So what kind of order results from the influx of energy to the Earth? Examples offered are the formation of snowflakes and the structure of storms. But these are extremely low-level organized structures that don’t progress to higher levels. With respect to living things the influx of high level energy is far more damaging then helpful. So, while this kind of order is necessary for the progression of evolution, it is not sufficient to support the doctrine. Too much heat or exposure to ultra-violet light destroys living things, especially at the molecular level. This means that the information that life depends on can be corrupted and destroyed by the influx of energy rather than being improved. Our consistent experience in the lab is that random changes to complex and highly ordered entities always makes them less useful, not more useful. It has not been demonstrated that the availability of raw energy can/did drive evolution from pond scum to people.

W.R. Thompson wrote: “This situation, where scientific men rally to the defense of a doctrine they are unable to define scientifically, much less demonstrate with scientific rigour, attempting to maintain its credit with the public by the suppression of criticism and the elimination of difficulties, is abnormal and undesirable in science”.

So, the origin of matter and energy is at odds with the Law of Causality and the First Law of Thermodynamics. The formation of stars is at odds with Boyles’ Law. The doctrine of order and complexity coming out of the chaos of the expanding universe is at odds with the Second Law of Thermodynamics. And yet chemical and biological evolutionism is taught as unquestionable facts, and those who are skeptical are branded as lunatics and fools. Well, we’re not done with the laws that evolutionism breaks. Stay tuned.

 

Dwayne:

I feel the need here to address an issue that has been challenged by some believers, mostly theistic evolutionists I suspect, and that is of a recent Creation with the appearance of age. The main argument seems to be that for God to create a universe complete with SNR’s and distant stars and galaxies in plain view, would make Him a deceiver. After all, everything we see “looks old”, but the Bible says that it isn’t.

Here are the problems I see in this line of thinking.

1. God can do whatever He pleases. If He wanted to create distant stars and galaxies with light waves extending all the way to the Earth on the third Creation Day (not age), then who are we to tell Him He can’t or that He was wrong to do it that way.

2. If He had chosen to create those stars but without the light waves, Adam and Eve would not have known about any of them for the first four years of their existence. If the earth is 6,000 years old, then to this day we would only be able to see stars within 6,000 light years distance: since the Milky Way is a spiral galaxy 100,000 light years from edge to edge, we would not see even our own galaxy completely, and it would be another 19,000 years before we got our first glimpse of another galaxy.

3. Since the Word of God says that the heavens declare His glory, how would we know what that means? The night sky to this day would be mostly empty. But, since we can see so much of His Creation in the sky, we can grasp better just how awesome He is.


4. Experience has shown us that most fruit trees do not bear fruit in their first two or three years. God planted the Garden of Eden on the sixth day and put Adam in it and told him that the fruit of the trees was to be his food – I don’t think that Adam had to wait for years before he had something to eat. Therefore the trees God planted were already mature and ready for Adam. Did God deceive Adam by putting him into a garden that “looked old”?

It doesn’t concern me that secularists view this issue as the simple faith of the simple-minded, but that God’s children would disavow the clear teaching of His Word in deference to the atheistic pronouncements of evolutionary science is disturbing. I'm not making any judgment about the salvation of people who hold this view, but I wonder how one can accept that God came to Earth in the form of a man, die on a cross and rise from the dead, but can't accept that He could create a universe that "looks old" even though it isn't.

 

Dwayne:

The secular explanations for the origin and current configuration of the universe in general, and our solar system in particular, seem to be at odds with the law of Conservation of Angular Momentum.

If, for example, the universe resulted from the expansion of a super-dense, rapidly spinning primordial seed, why is not the universe shaped like a disk? Why don’t all the galaxies spin in the same direction with an axis that is perpendicular to its direction of travel?

If the planets in our solar system came out of the sun, according to the nebular hypothesis, why is the ecliptic 6 degrees different from the axis of the sun? Why are the planets different from one another in composition and tilt? And, if the moon came out of the Earth and is slowly receding from it, why is the moon tidally locked to the Earth but not the Earth to the moon? If the moon was closer to the Earth in the past the tidal forces would have been significantly stronger. One would think that a billion years ago, when life was supposedly getting started on the Earth that the gravitational pull of the moon would have been strong enough to cause land mass tides, and to keep the oceans in a state of turbulence that would have made marine life of large animals impossible.

It seems to me that the only rational explanation for the universe as we see it today is that it was divinely Created, not evolved!

 

Dwayne: I suspect that they draw the line wherever they won't be criticized by anybody for being "religious". I consider it a great privilege to defend the Word of God as written, and without apology. I understand that portions of the Scripture are parabolic, others are poetry and some are symbolic. But unless there are clear and compelling reasons to not understand any particular passage in a literal sense is dangerous. Otherwise we become guilty of putting words in Gods' mouth.

 

Dwayne:
I have posted this argument before, but it bears repeating. Hawking said that all scientific concepts are provisional because you can never be sure, no matter how many times you test it, that it won’t be falsified the next time. And given that secular science allows no room for anything that cannot be tested, if there is a Divine component to the origin of life, they will never see the truth. The apostle Paul, in 2 Timothy 3:7, talks about people “Ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth”. A perfect description of modern secular scientists.

Darwin knew essentially nothing about the inner-workings of the cell, and concerned himself only with how living things supposedly changed over time. Now we know that every cell contains vast amounts of high level information and hundreds of different and highly specialized molecular machines. But until we have living cells capable of reproducing you can’t have random change and Natural Selection. So, until you can explain where such living cells came from, a discussion of evolution is premature. Well, numbers don’t lie so let’s look at the probability of a “simple” cell coming into existence without a designer and creator. By the way, in the copy I have of On the Origin Darwin includes a statement on the last page attributing the first life forms to God.

First of all, DNA is a huge library of coded information which includes, among other things, the instructions for the synthesis of proteins. The “Which came first” scenario is unavoidable – DNA is a library, and proteins are the readers. Neither one is useful without the other, so they had to appear at the same time and in the same place in order for a primordial cell to survive and replicate. Scientists performing minimal complexity experiments concluded that this imaginary primordial cell would require at least 250 different and highly specific proteins. (The simplest extant cell we know of, mycoplasma genitalium, requires 482 proteins). The first cell would also require primitive DNA that would have to have all the instructions for synthesizing all of them. So, to try to quantify the odds of this cell forming by chance, we’ll calculate the probabilities of just one small protein forming and then multiply that by the number of necessary proteins.

Proteins are strings of amino acids that are bonded together by peptide bonds, in specific sequences and fold into specific three-dimensional shapes. Shape is crucial to functionality, and sequence and bonding are crucial to shape. Human proteins vary in length from 44 amino acids to well over 30,000; the average being about 200. In his book Signature in the Cell, Stephen Meyer uses calculations for a short protein of 150 amino acids. Only 20 of the 500 or so naturally occurring amino acids can be used in protein synthesis; all the others are toxic. Of those that are useful biologically, 19 of the 20 exist in two forms that are mirror-image opposites, one being left-handed (L form) and the other right-handed (D form). While both isomers are chemically identical only the L-form can be used in proteins. If that ratio of chiral to non-chiral amino acids is typical, then random selection of amino acids for the formation of the original proteins would amount to selecting from a field of about 1,000 for each location in the sequence. But if “chance” only had access to the 20 useful amino acids in their L-form, there are 10 to the 195th ways to arrange that many items, and of that number only one is the correct sequence for any given protein. So if we are looking for the chance selection of a billion different specific sequences that would leave 10 to the 185th useless arrangements. Of course in reality chance would have to select the correct amino acids for each location in the sequence from 1,000 possible options, not just 20.

In addition to this, in nature, amino acids form peptide bonds only about 50% of the time. This means that the probability of 150 amino acids bonding only by peptide bonds is 1 in 10 to the 45th exponential power. Also, this polypeptide must fold into a specific three dimensional shape in order to be able to perform a useful function.

Given that about 98% of all the matter in the universe is hydrogen and helium, and not amino acids, and that there is a finite amount of time to experiment with sequences, the probability of 250 useful amino acid sequences forming on the Earth all at the same time is ridiculous. And while proteins are necessary for life, they are not sufficient for life. Also necessary is DNA, a variety of organelles and a semi-permeable cell wall capable of admitting nutrients, expelling wastes and knowing which is which. The only rational, logical and reasonable explanation for life is God. Chance is so unimaginably improbable that Romans Chapter 1 correctly states that there is no excuse for people not to understand the He and He alone Created life.

 

Dwayne: No, empirical science doesn't say "There is no God", but its insistence that everything must be explained only by natural processes leaves researchers with no alternative but to ignore evidence that can only be explained by supernatural causes. That results, inevitably, in drawing incorrect conclusions about such things as the origin of life. The Bible clearly says "In the beginning God created the heavens and the Earth...", and no amount of theorizing and experimenting will ever show us how He did it, and will only result in undermining the authority of His Word. God told us the truth, and science ruled by naturalism will never take us there.

 

Dwayne: If science is the all and end all, why do the pronouncements of science keep changing? Is it because new discoveries shed new light on old theories, or because the defenses of atheistic dogmas are forced to adapt to the undeniable?

Radiometric dating is a case study in how “science” is guided by evolutionary orthodoxy and not by demonstrable facts. For example, all radiometric methods, and there are many of them, are based on at least four assumption. Some methods make more than ten assumptions. Where assumptions are involved at the most basic steps in a test it is almost impossible to avoid institutional bias.

The essence of the concept is determining how long it would take for a specific “parent” product to degrade into the amount of “daughter” product found. Potassium 40, for example, degrades over time into argon 40 and calcium 40. So, knowing the half-life of potassium 40 you can calculate how long it would take to produce the amount of argon 40 that the specimen contains. Now what assumptions are to be made for the calculation to be meaningful?


1. The amount of “parent” product in the specimen at the time the rock crystallized.

2. The amount of “daughter” product contained at the time of crystallization is zero.

3. That the specimen was a “closed system” from the time of crystallization to present.

4. That the half-life time of the “parent” was constant during that entire time.

Since none of these issues can be determined with certainty the age determination is entirely speculation, and the conclusion says more about the evolutionary perspective of the researchers than it does about the actual age of the rock in question. The only way to test the effectiveness of an age-determination method is to test it on specimens whose true age is already known. This has been done on a number of specimens from lava flows that have been historically dated. Radiometric methods, in these cases, have been dramatically incorrect.

Geologist Steven Austin harvested dacite samples from the lava dome at Mt. St. Helens that could not have been more than six years old. When he presented them to a K/Ar lab for dating he was told that the tests would not be done unless he first told them how old he thought they were. He told them that he thought they were “not old”. The test results concluded that the samples were at least 350,000 years old, and possibly 2.5 million.

If age-determination tests cannot give accurate results when the true age is known, they cannot give accurate results in any situation, and scientists who continue to use them are wasting their time and money. So why do they continue to use them? They do because they can be manipulated to produce ages that are compatible with their evolutionary dogma. So much for a “search for the truth”.

 

Dwayne: You seem to have missed the point of Austin's test. It makes no difference whether he withheld the fact that he knew the age of the rocks, or if he had presented samples whose true age was completely unknown. The fact is that the test failed miserably, and if he had said something different and got a different result would only prove that the outcome was manipulated. There are many examples of radiometric dating being highly questionable, for example: 1. The KBS Tuff was dated at 212 myo, until a modern human skull was found underneath it. Then it was re-dated several more times and finally dated at something like 1.6 myo.
2. Samples from the same strata have been dated by four different methods, and all of them gave different results.
3. Different minerals isolated from a single rock have all given different ages using the same method, and all of them different from the whole rock results.

So, apparently, calculating the uncertainties doesn't accomplish anything because the outcomes are still grossly unreliable. For me, the bottom line is that God created the heavens and the Earth from nothing, about six to ten thousand years ago, and nothing science has "proven" contradicts that.

 

Dwayne: Are you defending the Gap Theory? Your response sounds like you are. If so, I would strongly suggest that you read Weston Fields Unformed and Unfilled, A Critique of the Gap Theory. There is no lexical justification for an interpretation of Genesis 1 that includes a Creation/chaos scenario in verses 1 and 2. Apart from the influence of evolutionary dogma no one would accept such an interpretation.