PART FOUR: THE EVOLUTION MISCONCEPTION
Introduction
We have discussed some miracles of God's Book, which He sent to mankind as a guide and warning. With these miracles, God has given us many signs that the Qur'an is the Book of Truth, and invited people to reflect upon it. One of the most important subjects God points to in the Qur'an is man's recognition of the flawless signs of creation on the Earth and appreciation of His might through remembering them. Today, however, there are various ideologies which want to make people oblivious of the Fact of Creation and try to divorce them from religion with baseless ideas.
The most significant of these is materialism.
Darwinism, i.e., the theory of evolution, is the main theory that materialism adopts as a so-called scientific basis for its own ends. This theory, which claims that life originated from inanimate matter by chance, has actually collapsed with the confirmation of the fact that the universe was created by God.
It is God Who created the universe and Who designed it down to its smallest detail. Therefore, it is impossible for the theory of evolution, which holds that living beings are not created by God, but are products of coincidences, to be true.
Unsurprisingly, when we look at the theory of evolution, we see that this theory is denounced by scientific findings. The design in life is extremely complex and striking. In the inanimate world, for instance, we can explore how sensitive are the balances which atoms rest upon, and further, in the animate world, we can observe in what complex designs these atoms were brought together, and how extraordinary are the mechanisms and structures such as proteins, enzymes, and cells, which are manufactured with them.
This extraordinary design in life invalidated Darwinism at the end of the 20th century.
We have dealt with this subject in great detail in some of our other studies, and shall continue to do so. However, we think that, considering its importance, it will be helpful to make a short summary here as well.
The Scientific Collapse of Darwinism
Although a doctrine going back as far as ancient Greece, the theory of evolution was advanced extensively in the 19th century. The most important development that made the theory the top topic of the world of science was the book by Charles Darwin titled “The Origin of Species” published in 1859. In this book, Darwin denied that different living species on the earth were created separately by God. According to Darwin, all living beings had a common ancestor and they diversified over time through small changes.
Darwin's theory was not based on any concrete scientific finding; as he also accepted, it was just an “assumption.” Moreover, as Darwin confessed in the long chapter of his book titled “Difficulties of the Theory,” the theory was failing in the face of many critical questions.
Darwin invested all his hopes in new scientific discoveries, which he expected to solve the “Difficulties of the Theory.” However, contrary to his expectations, scientific findings expanded the dimensions of these difficulties.
The defeat of Darwinism against science can be reviewed under three basic topics:
1) The theory can by no means explain how life originated on the earth.
2) There is no scientific finding showing that the “evolutionary mechanisms” proposed by the theory have any power to evolve at all.
3) The fossil record proves completely the contrary of the suggestions of the theory of evolution.
In this section, we will examine these three basic points in general outlines:
The First Insurmountable Step: The Origin of Life
The theory of evolution posits that all living species evolved from a single living cell that emerged on the primitive earth 3.8 billion years ago. How a single cell could generate millions of complex living species and, if such an evolution really occurred, why traces of it cannot be observed in the fossil record are some of the questions the theory cannot answer. However, first and foremost, of the first step of the alleged evolutionary process it has to be inquired: How did this “first cell” originate?
Since the theory of evolution denies creation and does not accept any kind of supernatural intervention, it maintains that the “first cell” originated coincidentally within the laws of nature, without any design, plan, or arrangement. According to the theory, inanimate matter must have produced a living cell as a result of coincidences. This, however, is a claim inconsistent with even the most unassailable rules of biology.
“Life Comes from Life”
In his book, Darwin never referred to the origin of life. The primitive understanding of science in his time rested on the assumption that living beings had a very simple structure. Since medieval times, spontaneous generation, the theory asserting that non-living materials came together to form living organisms, had been widely accepted. It was commonly believed that insects came into being from food leftovers, and mice from wheat. Interesting experiments were conducted to prove this theory. Some wheat was placed on a dirty piece of cloth, and it was believed that mice would originate from it after a while. Similarly, worms developing in meat was assumed to be evidence of spontaneous generation. However, only some time later was it understood that worms did not appear on meat spontaneously, but were carried there by flies in the form of larvae, invisible to the naked eye.
Even in the period when Darwin wrote The Origin of Species, the belief that bacteria could come into existence from non-living matter was widely accepted in the world of science.
However, five years after Darwin's book was published, the discovery of Louis Pasteur disproved this belief, which constituted the groundwork of evolution. Pasteur summarized the conclusion he reached after time-consuming studies and experiments: “The claim that inanimate matter can originate life is buried in history for good.”24
Advocates of the theory of evolution resisted the findings of Pasteur for a long time. However, as the development of science unraveled the complex structure of the cell of a living being, the idea that life could come into being coincidentally faced an even greater impasse.
Inconclusive Efforts in the 20th Century
The first evolutionist who took up the subject of the origin of life in the 20th century was the renowned Russian biologist Alexander Oparin. With various theses he advanced in the 1930's, he tried to prove that the cell of a living being could originate by coincidence. These studies, however, were doomed to failure, and Oparin had to make the following confession: “Unfortunately, the origin of the cell remains a question which is actually the darkest point of the entire evolution theory.” 25
Evolutionist followers of Oparin tried to carry out experiments to solve the problem of the origin of life. The best known of these experiments was carried out by American chemist Stanley Miller in 1953. Combining the gases he alleged to have existed in the primordial earth's atmosphere in an experiment set-up, and adding energy to the mixture, Miller synthesized several organic molecules (amino acids) present in the structure of proteins.
Barely a few years had passed before it was revealed that this experiment, which was then presented as an important step in the name of evolution, was invalid, the atmosphere used in the experiment having been very different from real earth conditions. 26
After a long silence, Miller confessed that the atmosphere medium he used was unrealistic. 27
All the evolutionist efforts put forth throughout the 20th century to explain the origin of life ended with failure. The geochemist Jeffrey Bada from San Diego Scripps Institute accepts this fact in an article published in Earth Magazine in 1998:
Today as we leave the twentieth century, we still face the biggest unsolved problem that we had when we entered the twentieth century: How did life originate on Earth? 28