I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist (24 page)

Those are the words of Michael Behe, professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University, who wrote the revolutionary book
Darwin’s Black
Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution.
Behe’s research verifies that living things are literally filled with molecular machines that perform the numerous functions of life. These molecular machines are irreducibly complex, meaning that all the parts of each machine must be completely formed, in the right places, in the right sizes, in operating order, at the same time, for the machine to function.

A car engine is an example of an irreducibly complex system. If a change is made in the size of the pistons, this would require simultaneous changes in the cam shaft, block, cooling system, engine compartment, and other systems, or the new engine would not function.

Behe shows that living things are irreducibly complex, just like a car engine. With painstaking detail, he shows that numerous functions in the body—such as blood clotting, cilia (cell propulsion organisms), and vision—require irreducibly complex systems that could not have developed in the gradual Darwinian fashion. Why? Because intermediates would be nonfunctional. As with a car engine, all the right parts must be in place in the right size at the same time for there to be any function at all. You can build an engine part by part (and that takes intelligence), but you can’t drive to work with only a partial engine under the hood. Nor could you drive to work if one essential part of your engine were modified but others were not. In the same way, living systems quickly would become nonfunctional if they were modified piece by piece.

The degree of irreducible complexity in living things is mind-boggling. Recall that DNA’s genetic alphabet consists of four letters: A, T, C, and G. Well,
within each human cell
there are about 3,000
mil
lion
pairs of those letters.
⁸
Not only does your body have
trillions
of cells and make millions of new cells every second, but each cell is irreducibly complex and contains irreducibly complex subsystems!

Behe’s discoveries are fatal for Darwinism. Irreducible complexity means that new life cannot come into existence by the Darwinian method of slight, successive changes over a long period of time. Darwinism is akin to natural forces—without any intelligent help—producing a running car engine (i.e., an amoeba) and then modifying that irreducibly complex engine into successive intermediate engines until those natural forces finally produce the space shuttle (i.e., a human being). Darwinists can’t explain the source of the materials to make an engine, much less how any irreducibly complex engine came to be in the first place. Nor can they demonstrate the
unintelligent
process by which any engine has evolved into the space shuttle while providing propulsion at every intermediate step. This is evident from the complete absence of explanations from Darwinists for how irreducibly complex systems could arise gradually. Behe exposes the empty claims of Darwinists when he writes,

The idea of Darwinian molecular evolution is not based on science.
There is no publication in the scientific literature—in journals or books—that describes how molecular evolution of any real, complex, biochemical system either did occur or even might have occurred. There are assertions that such evolution occurred, but absolutely none are supported by pertinent experiments or calculations. Since there is no authority on which to base claims of knowledge,
it can truly be said
that the assertion of Darwinian molecular evolution is merely bluster.
⁹

The feeble attempts by Darwinists to deal with irreducible complexity reveal the magnitude of the problem for their theory. Darwinist Ken Miller has suggested that irreducible complexity isn’t true because he can show that Behe’s example of irreducible complexity—a mousetrap—isn’t really irreducibly complex. According to Behe, all five parts of a traditional mousetrap need to be in place at the same time, in working order, for the mouse trap to work. You can’t catch mice with just a platform and a spring, for example. But Miller thinks he can disprove Behe’s point by building a similar mousetrap with only four parts. (Miller actually brought this up during a televised debate on
PBS
in the late nineties.)

But Miller’s critique actually misses the mark. First, like a typical Darwinist, Miller ignores the fact that his mousetrap requires intelligence to build. Second, Behe is not saying you need five parts for
any
mousetrap—just for the traditional mousetrap. It turns out that Miller’s mousetrap is not a physical precursor to Behe’s traditional mousetrap. In other words, transforming Miller’s mousetrap into Behe’s would require more than one random (i.e., Darwinian) step—it would require the addition of another very specific part and several very specific adjustments to existing parts (and that requires intelligence). Third, even if those changes could somehow be made by mindless processes, the mousetrap would be nonfunctional during the transition period. But for Darwinism to be true, functionality must be maintained at all times because living things cannot survive if, say, their vital organs do not perform their usual function during slow, trial-and-error Darwinian transitions.
¹⁰
Finally, a mousetrap is only an illustration. Living systems are immeasurably more complex than a mousetrap. So Behe’s point clearly has not been refuted by Miller, nor has it been refuted by any other Darwinist.
¹¹

During an Intelligent Design conference in July 2002, at which both Behe and I (Frank) were speakers, one particular Darwinist was a bit militant during the question and answer period of the lectures. I wanted to turn the tables and ask him a few questions, so I made it a point to sit next to him during lunch.

“What do you do with Behe’s irreducible complexity argument?” I asked between pizza slices.

He rolled his eyes and said, “Oh, that’s no big deal. There are biochemical scaffolds that are built around the system to allow it to evolve gradually.”

When I saw Behe later that day, I told him about the Darwinist’s explanation. He rightly pointed out that: 1) there’s no evidence for such “scaffolds,” and 2) it actually complicates matters for Darwinists; namely, if these “scaffolds” do exist, then who keeps building them in just the right places? That would require intelligence.

Others have tried to find Darwinian paths around irreducible complexity, but all have failed. Behe confirms as much when he categorically states, “There is currently no experimental evidence to show that natural selection can get around irreducible complexity.”
¹²

Behe does not underestimate the implications of irreducible complexity and other discoveries regarding the complexity of life. He writes, “The result of these cumulative efforts to investigate the cell—to investigate life at the molecular level—is a loud, clear, piercing cry of ‘design!’ The result is so unambiguous and so significant that it must be ranked as one of the greatest achievements in the history of science. The discovery rivals those of Newton and Einstein.”
¹³

4. Nonviability of Transitional Forms—
Another problem that plagues the plausibility of natural selection creating new life forms is the fact that transitional forms could not survive. For example, consider the Darwinian assertion that birds evolved gradually from reptiles over long periods of time. This would necessitate a transition from scales to feathers. How could a creature survive that no longer has scales but does not quite have feathers? Feathers are irreducibly complex. A creature with the structure of half a feather has no ability to fly. It would be easy prey on land, in water, and from the air. And as a halfway house between reptiles and birds, it probably wouldn’t be adept at finding food for itself either. So the problem for Darwinists is twofold: first, they have no viable mechanism for getting from reptiles to birds; and second, even if a viable mechanism were discovered, the transitional forms would be unlikely to survive anyway.

5. Molecular Isolation—
Darwinists often say that evidence of common descent lies in the fact that all living things contain DNA. For example, Richard Dawkins states, “The reason we know for certain we are all related, including bacteria, is the universality of the genetic code and other biochemical fundamentals.”
¹⁴
Darwinists think the DNA similarity between apes and humans, for example, which some say is 85 to over 95 percent,
¹⁵
strongly implies an ancestral relationship.

But is this evidence for common
ancestry
or for a common
creator?
It could be interpreted either way. Perhaps the Darwinists are right—it is possible that we have a common genetic code because we’ve all descended from a common ancestor. But they could just as easily be wrong—
perhaps we a have a common genetic code because a common
creator has designed us to live in the same biosphere.
After all, if every living creature were distinct biochemically, a food chain probably could not exist. Perhaps life with a different biochemical makeup is not possible. And even if it is, perhaps it couldn’t survive in this biosphere.

Consider Fig. 6.3. Does similarity and progression prove that the kettle evolved from the teaspoon? No. Similarity and progression does not automatically imply common ancestry. In this case we know it means there is a common creator or designer. This is the same situation we have for real living things.

As we said before, the capacity of the DNA genetic alphabet to contain a message is equivalent to the capacity of the English alphabet to contain a message (the only difference is that the DNA alphabet has only four letters versus twenty-six for the English alphabet). Since all living things have DNA with its four nitrogen-containing bases (represented by the letters A, T, C, and G), we would expect a high degree of similarity in the information among creatures whether or not they are ancestrally related.

Let’s use an example from English to illustrate what we mean. Here are two sentences with exactly the same letters:

Charles Darwin was a scientific god.

Charles Darwin was a scientific dog.

While the letters in the two sentences are identical and the order is virtually the same (greater than 90 percent), the slight difference in order yields opposite meanings. In the same way, only a slight difference in the order of the letters (A, T, C, and G) in living things may yield creatures that are far apart on the hypothetical evolutionary tree. For example, while some studies show that the DNA similarity between humans and the most similar ape may be about 90 percent, other studies show the DNA similarity between humans and
mice
is also about 90 percent.
¹⁶
Such comparisons are controversial and are not completely understood. More research needs to be done in this field. But if mice genetically are as close to humans as apes, this would greatly complicate any Darwinian explanation.

But let’s suppose that further studies someday show that ape DNA is indeed closer to humans than the DNA of any other creature. This would not prove the Darwinists’ conclusion that there is an ancestral relationship. Again, the reason for the similarity could be a common creator rather than a common ancestor. We must find other evidence at the molecular level to help us discover whether the common genetic code is evidence of a common ancestor or of a common creator.

That other evidence
has
been found—by comparing protein sequences. Proteins are the building blocks of life. They are composed of long chains of chemical units called amino acids. Most proteins have in their structure more than 100 of these amino acids, which must be in a very specific order. It’s the DNA that contains the instructions for ordering the amino acids in the proteins, and the order is critical because any variation usually renders the protein dysfunctional.

Here’s where the problem arises for Darwinists. If all species share a common ancestor, we should expect to find protein sequences that are transitional from, say, fish to amphibian, or from reptile to mammal. But that’s not what we find at all. Instead, we find that the basic types are molecularly isolated from one another, which seems to preclude any type of ancestral relationship. Michael Denton observes,