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©2003 by Thomas F. Heinze
Redefining Science to Eliminate the Creator You are walking down the road with a friend and come to a wreck. You point to one of the fragments and ask your friend who knows cars, "Is that thing a piece of the car?" He explains: "It's one of the computer chips that control the motor. If it detects something in the exhaust it uses that information to adjust the fuel mixture or the timing to make the motor run more efficiently." What made the chip? You have two choices:
If you see four bricks stacked one on top of another you know someone stacked them that way; how much more the complex design of a chip? However, in cases where the designer would have to have been God, we are told not to reason like we do for everything else, but to believe that cells had no designer at all. Abiogenesis, the idea that the first life started with no intelligent designer, is contrary to real science because it contradicts:
As new information about the complexity and information content of cells is discovered, the evidence against life forming without a Creator mounts up, strengthening the case for an intelligent Creator. Something is being done about that! The very definition of science is being changed to get rid of the obvious conclusion that God created living things. The term "science" once meant "knowledge discovered by experimentation, observation and objective investigation." To be scientific, a thing had to be observable, testable, and repeatable. When one scientist did an experiment, others could repeat his experiment, and obtain the same results. If no one who repeated the experiment came up with the same results, those results had been "falsified" (shown not to be true). Science thrives on this definition. It helps us understand how things work, but it is a big problem for those who don't believe in the Creator. The claim that a first cell came together spontaneously from mindless chemicals is an opinion about ancient history. It cannot be observed, tested, or repeated so it is not science, and should not be taught as if it were. To make the elimination of the Creator appear scientific, many now insist that science must explain all that we observe by solely natural causes. In Kansas the state guidelines redefined science as, "The human activity of seeking natural explanations for what we observe in the world around us."1 The meaning of the term "natural" in this context is "naturalistic; without any input by an intelligent Creator." Redefining science makes it easier to believe in a theory that is obviously not true because it makes it sound scientific. Some atheists must understand that any naturalistic explanation for the origin of life is contrary to scientific evidence. If not, why would they try to manipulate the definition of science? If science is now the "activity of seeking natural explanations," then science now has a religious purpose. It is not to find the true explanations, fall where they may, but natural explanations, which means explanations which don't involve an intelligent designer. This is an atheistic religious goal, and it has determined the conclusion a scientist is to reach before he even starts his research! Fry, a philosopher of science, in her book which explains the work of each of the leading origin of life researchers makes this clear: "… origin of life research consists in looking for a naturalistic alternative to the idea of the creation of life by a designer."2 Irreducible complexity Fry also responds to the very influential book, Darwin's Black Box, written by Michael Behe, a professor of biochemistry. Behe makes the point that even the most simple cell could not function without a certain number of essential parts. He uses the common mouse trap, with a base and a wire that snaps down, as an illustration. If even one part of the trap is eliminated it will not catch mice. Behe calls this "irreducible complexity." Whether it is a mouse trap or a cell, things that are irreducibly complex could not have gradually built up one part at a time. They must have been designed because they will not work at all until a number of parts have been constructed and assembled to work together. Fry calls the search for a naturalistic explanation of life an attempt to "reduce the irreducibly complex." First life researchers are attempting to find some way in which a cell could have functioned without irreducible complexity which could only have come about by intelligent design. So far they have not succeeded. Why not? In order to live, a cell must at least have parts that will let it:
A first cell could not have lived to produce a second cell if it lacked the parts needed to make possible even one of these abilities! This is irreducible complexity, and it is evidence of design. Many dead cells, however, have the necessary parts. To be a living cell, it also needs life. My question to Fry and the first life researchers, each with his doctor's degrees, standing as it were on the shoulders of the scientists who came before him is: "If, after years of accumulating knowledge and ability, one of you should succeed in creating life in a test tube, will he have shown that life just popped up without an intelligent creator?" In the meantime, as more is known about cells, more and more evidence for the irreducible complexity of living things piles up. Is there a point at which we can say, "The idea that life began spontaneously without a Creator has been falsified?" If there is no test that will show a false idea to be false, that idea lies outside the realm of science-at least as science has been defined in the past. Put it to the test The new definition of science: "The human activity of seeking natural explanations for what we observe in the world around us," leads one to find that whatever it is applied to had a natural explanation, not design. A cell? Yes, but also an arrowhead or a computer. Why should a definition which obviously leads to a false conclusion about arrow heads, which we know were designed, be used on cells? Since it is so obviously false where it can be tested, why would anyone trust the new definition in an area in which it cannot be checked? Where did presidents come from? The heads of some of America's presidents have been carved out of the solid rock on the side of Mount Rushmore. A visitor who knew nothing about them could ask, "Did the wind and the rain do that?" No one asks that, however, because the heads of the presidents are so perfect that they are obviously the work of a sculptor. Ask a thousand science teachers. All of them will give you that kind of answer. However, many of these teachers will stand up in class the next day and teach their students that not only a first cell, but the very presidents themselves were formed by the blind forces of nature. "There is none so blind as he who will not see!"
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