Many religious groups have lobbied at great expense to have Intelligent Design brought into schools, or at least have the theory of Evolution evaluated critically by students.
Too much time is spent attempting to debunk every single "breakthrough" made by paleontologists, who simply close ranks and ridicule any objective outsiders.
In the same vein I believe there is too much money and effort spent on trying to convince people of the literal truth of the bible, even with the best intentions we can lose sight of better arguments, the metaphorical "lower hanging fruits".
My view is that the whole evolution Vs Creation debate is a distraction from the bigger issue:
Genesis Vs Abiogenesis.
Specifically the genesis of life on Earth (the Creation of the Earth and the Heavens is a topic for another time).
We all know the the biblical text of the book of Genesis. Some believe it to be literally true, others believe it to be non-literal to varying degrees. But one thing religious people can agree on is that without God, there is no life.
"And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul. "
Genesis 2:7
God created a man from the materials and elements present in the crust of the Earth and breathed life into the body.
Lets look at the scientific side of the story.
A scientist would tell you that life on Earth is billions of years old. Some tube-like formations in rock might be evidence for the earliest microbial life, but the best evidence we have is that the first known life forms are something called cyanobacteria. A type of microorganism that is still in existence today.
These organisms are about 2 microns across. They have DNA, the complex double helix structure that is present in all known life. We can measure the complexity of a DNA strand by counting it's base-pairs. These are complimentary molecules which bind together two strands of the DNA's double helix. A far more complex life form such as a human being has billions of base pairs. How many would you expect the earliest form of life to have? 10? 50?
Wrong, cyanobacteria are known to have over a thousand base pairs.
If these are truly the earliest life forms, it should follow evolutionary theory that they are the simplest conceivable life.
The Darwinists tell us that nothing that small would leave evidence, which is a basic admission that this gap will NEVER be filled. I guess they are relying on "good faith" (irony anyone?) that these supposed, simpler organisms predate the cyanobacteria.
But this is just scratching the surface.
Darwinists have absolutely no idea about the origins of life. You see, evolution is the origin of species. It requires as a premise that life already exists.
Abiogenesis is the science of the origins of life.
How in a Godless world do we go from Earth and water to life? How does the first body get built, and who breathes the life into it?
This is where you really start to see a lot of hand-waving and stuttering. There are actually dozens of hypotheses, I use that word because they are too vague to be considered theories or even scientific models.
One of the more famous hypotheses, dating back to the 20s, is the primordial soup hypothesis, the idea that simply mixing all the ingredients for life together and stimulating it with an external energy source, life would organise itself by random chance. But even in this contrived environment, the only result were amino acids.
These acids are critical to life and occur in metabolic processes. But they are simple molecules, orders of magnitude more simple than the structure of DNA. Additionally, even if DNA were to be created by random processes, this is like creating the mind without a body. The DNA is instructions for the development of a living organism. It still needs to exist within an organic cell of some kind.
Other ideas range from the Clay "theory", to the RNA World "theory", or my personal favourite "panspermia" (or as I like to call it, the "alien-of-the-gaps theory"). Some of these are pretty whacky so I won't go into details, but if you are really interested I link to an article at the bottom.
While paleontologists and geneticists have bit into evolution like a dog with bone and refused to let it go, no one can agree on abiogenesis. Having a dozen or more hypotheses shows that they simply cannot provide any kind of evidence and are simply changing their ideas when one doesn't work out. Some of the same ideas from a hundred years ago, or the some newer ideas from the 70s still get bandied about as if they are solid scientific facts supported by evidence, but there is no a shred of paleontological, genetic, or experimental evidence for any of them.
The bottom line is that science has not discovered a means by which life can arise from non-living material.
But open a science text book and what do you see? References to the primordial soup! An outdated idea that is not even taken seriously by evolutionary biologists anymore. This is what needs to be removed from biology textbooks. It is NOT a scientific fact, it is NOT EVEN a theory! The text books should state the truth:
There is no scientific explanation for the origins of life on Earth.
(It's not even a controversial statement.)
Lobbyists take note.
additional reading:
