Does nature and the complexity of organisms point us toward a creator? Or did everything we see in the world come from Evolution?
"Evolution" can have two meanings:
"micro"evolution refers to changes or variations within species. Example: parents with blond hair can have a child with dark hair; certain tendencies for diseases can be "carried" in certain people; short parents can have kids who grow up to be tall...BUT two parents with arms will not have a child who has wings.
"macro"evolution refers to the change of one species into another. This is what is often meant by "evolution" as a way of explaining where all life came from...that it started simple and then became more and more complex.
From last week: if a certain species evolved into (branched off into) different, other species, we would expect to find lots of "in-between" fossils in the ground - we don't.
Let's say all of the complex life we see today came from one, simple, single-celled creature...which evolved into higher and higher forms of life: the question still has to be asked - Where did that first living thing come from?
Two scientists - Miller and Urey - set out to answer that question by combining a mixture of gases in test tubes and sending an electric charge through them. By doing this, they produced amino acids, which strung together make proteins. They said this simulated what happened at the beginning of the universe. But - did they use the right chemicals? Were the gases they used really the ones present at the beginning of the universe? And in what amounts? If you use different starting products, you get different results. (For instance, many models of the early earth contain cardon dioxide and nitrogen which would form nitrates, and nitrates destroy amino acids, which are the building blocks of proteins.)
But suppose the amino acids did form that way...couldn't they have come together to start life? NASA has found that the simplest protein that could be considered "life" is a string of 400 amino acids in a specific sequence. So, to come together by accident would be like blindly drawing the numbers 1-400 out of a bag, one by one, and getting them in perfect order.
Moreover, there are structures in complex living things that couldn't have evolved. (This is called the problem of "irreducible complexity".) One example is your eye. Every part is necessary - missing one structure, the whole eye fails. Think of your eye as being like a mousetrap: without any one of the parts, the mousetrap is of no use. For eyes to have evolved piece by piece would have meant some creatures had useless eye-parts-that-would-become-eyes...so these parts would have evolved (because they were necessary) - even though they were worthless.
Where did cells get the information to "know" what to become? Cells have "information" in them that tell them how to function and what to be...where did this "intelligence" come from if the first single-celled organism came together by accident?
Does all of this point to a Creator?
We can't "prove" that God was the originator of life. But neither can a person who believes evolution is the answer "prove" that life came from non-living things, or that one species turned into another, or that amino acids arranged themselves into proteins, which led to cells, which led to organisms...anytime someone concludes that something "probably" happened, it's a statement of faith.
Where will you put your faith? In the idea that living things all came from chance, randomly as chemicals came together, and that all living things we see today, in all their variety, started out as the same single-celled creature? Or that living creatures came from the mind and will of God?
