Fifty Scientists Speak

I need to find myself.  What will you find?  A minister of the Lord questioned a group of people.  He was helping them find themselves.  He asked the unsaved:

• Have you ever lied?  If the answer is yes, he said you are a liar. 
• Have you ever stolen anything, including time from your employer?  If the answer is yes, you are a thief. 
• Have you ever had sexual relations outside of the marriage bed?  If the answer is yes, you are a fornicator. 

If you answered yes to all of the above, you are a lying, thieving fornicator.  Doesn’t sound very flattering, does it?

When one really discovers the stark reality of who he is, Romans 3:23 becomes so very poignant:

For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God;

The bad news is that lying, thieving fornicators do not inherit the Kingdom of God.  The good news is: Jesus Christ stands ready at this very moment to forgive and deliver all those who call upon His name in faith, believing.  Are you yet to be born again?  Are you ready to shed your old nature and become a new creature in Christ Jesus?  Do you long to have all your sin and shame forgiven and forgotten and to have the power to follow Christ?  Today is your day of salvation.  Today is your day of true discovery.  Click onto “Further With Jesus” for childlike instructions and immediate entry into the Kingdom of God.  NOW FOR TODAY’S SUBJECT.

GOD SAID, Exodus 20:11:

For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.

GOD SAID, Psalm 14:1:

The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God. They are corrupt, they have done abominable works, there is none that doeth good.

MAN SAID:  According to evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr, “No educated person any longer questions the validity of the so-called theory of evolution, which we now know to be a simple fact.” 

Now THE RECORD.  It’s more subtle than the blatant unbelief of atheism and evolution.  Dealing with that is relatively simple, as this feature will once again demonstrate.  The word subtle describes the serpent that Satan possessed and used to beguile Eve.  Genesis 3:1:

Now the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?

Subtle means crafty, cunning, secretly deceptive.  Satan didn’t challenge the existence of God, nor did he challenge His status as Creator; he sowed doubt in Eve’s confidence concerning the inerrancy of the Word of God.  Satan added the word hath and a question mark to God's own Words, which opened the door to all of life’s troubles—and our grandmother Eve entered in.  Genesis 3:1: “And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said,…?”  Remove the seeds of doubt, “Yea,” and the “?,” and it reads, “Yea, God said…period.”  Satan sowed doubt and that’s all it took. 

Most of the purported leadership of Christiandom have long left the plain reading of the inerrant Scriptures found in the majority-text (see the Which Bible Series) and have served their congregations the doctrines of “what if” and “but if,”—but “what if” and “but if” just won’t do.  These doctors of unbelief are described by Jesus Christ as wolves in sheep’s clothing.  They are the sowers of doubt. 

To be robbed of childlike faith is to be robbed of the most valuable possession in the universe.  We protect our homes, cars, identity, and more.  These are all temporary things.  In childlike faith dwells the beauty and the glory of God—even eternal life—and this needs to be protected.  Embrace the Book. 

God’s Word, written thousands of years ago, never changes.  That is the very nature of real truth.  No matter how pseudo-science wrangles, the earth is still 6,000 years old and it was still created by God in six literal 24-hour days—and, of course, this is the truth. 

The following excerpts are from the GodSaidManSaid feature “Evolution Continues to Collapse--Now What?”

It’s not just the general “uneducated” population having problems with evolution.  The following passage is from Lee Strobel’s book, The Case for a Creator:”

There were one hundred of them—biologists, chemists, zoologists, physicists, anthropologists, molecular and cell biologists, bioengineers, organic chemists, geologists, astrophysicists, and other scientists.  Their doctorates came from such prestigious universities as Cambridge, Stanford, Cornell, Yale, Rutgers, Chicago, Princeton, Purdue, Duke, Michigan, Syracuse, Temple, and Berkeley. 

They included professors from Yale Graduate school, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Tulane, Rice, Emory, George Mason, Lehigh, and the Universities of California, Washington, Texas, Florida, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Ohio, Nebraska, Missouri, Iowa, Georgia, New Mexico, Utah, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere. 

Among them was the director of the Center for Computational Quantum Chemistry and scientists at the Plasma Physics Lab at Princeton, the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institute, the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the Lawrence Livermore Laboratories. 

And they wanted the world to know one thing: They are skeptical. 

After spokespersons for the Public Broadcasting System’s seven-part television series Evolution asserted that “all known scientific evidence supports [Darwinian] evolution” as does “virtually every reputable scientist in the world,” these professors, laboratory researchers, and other scientists published a two-page advertisement in a national magazine under the banner: “A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism.”

Their statement was direct and defiant.  “We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life,” they said.  “Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged.” 

They were not narrow-minded fundamentalists…or rabid religious fanatics—just respected, world-class scientists like Nobel nominee Henry F. Schaefer, the third most-cited chemist in the world; James Tour of Rice University’s Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology; and Fred Figworth, professor of cellular and molecular physiology at Yale Graduate School.

Together, despite the specter of professional persecution, they broached the politically incorrect opinion that the emperor of evolution has no clothes.  [End of quote]

As Science Digest reported:

Scientists who utterly reject evolution may be one of our fastest-growing controversial minorities… Many of the scientists supporting this position hold impressive credentials in science.  [End of quotes]

The book is titled In Six Days with the subhead, “Why fifty scientists choose to believe in creation,” and it was edited by John F. Ashton, Ph.D.  In the preface, Ashton writes:

At a university lecture several years ago, I heard a research scientist state that he did not believe that any scientist with a Ph.D. would advocate a literal interpretation of the six days of creation.  His comment was quite similar to statements made over the years by world-renowned scientists like Stephen Jay Gould and Ernst Mayr, both of Harvard.  In reply to the lecturer’s doubt about credentialed scientists agreeing with the Genesis account of origins, the meeting chairman offered the names of two well-known scientists who, he said, espoused belief in the Biblical account.  This incident stimulated me to research this book. 

However, my experience in organizing this book is that there are a growing number of highly educated, critically thinking scientists who have serious doubts about evidence for Darwinian evolution and who have chosen to believe in the Biblical version of creation.

In this book, 50 scientists explain their reasons for this choice.  All the contributors have an earned doctorate from a state-recognized university in Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, South Africa, or Germany.  They include university professors and researchers, geologists, zoologists, biologists, botanists, physicists, chemists, mathematicians, medical researchers, and engineers. 

The articles in this book are not exhaustive.  Space and publishing deadlines did not permit me to include contributions from many other scientists.  The 50 scientists who contributed to this effort gave their personal response to the question, “Why do you believe in a literal six-day Biblical creation as the origin of life on earth?”  No other requirements were specified.  [End of quote]

Today’s GodSaidManSaid feature will highlight one of the 50, and as months pass, we will, God willing, publish more.  A brief biography and excerpts from the feature written by Dr. Dwain L. Ford follows:

Professor Ford is Emeritus Professor of Chemistry, Andrews University, Berrien Springs, Michigan.  He holds a B.A. in chemistry from Andrews University and a Ph.D. in chemistry from Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts.  Over an academic career spanning more than 30 years at Andrews University, Professor Ford served in various positions including chairman of the Department of Chemistry and dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.  He was the recipient of five awards for excellence in teaching as well as three National Science Foundation fellowships. 

As a boy growing up on a farm in Minnesota, I came to appreciate the Bible stories at home and at church.  In spite of my mild case of dyslexia, I completed reading the entire Bible by about the time I graduated from elementary school.  My faith in God was strengthened by numerous answered prayers. 

When I entered graduate school in 1958 to work toward a Ph.D. in chemistry, my faith in Scripture was seriously challenged by my major professor.  I wondered if it were possible that I had been wrong all my life and my professor right.  He seemed very certain about his ideas and he wanted me to do research toward the development of his theory of biochemical evolution.  Since I was skeptical of his theory, I was asked to witness each of the significant findings of another graduate student working on evolutionary research next to me in the lab. 

As a scientist and a Christian, I have been forced to weigh the evidence available from both science and the Scriptures in an area in which experimental proof is impossible to achieve.  After examining both sides of this issue for 40 years, I submit the following reasons why I have retained my faith in God as the Creator.

Chemical evolution, based on random activity of molecules, fails to adequately account for the origin of the proteins required for even the simplest known free-living organism, Mycoplasma genitalium.  This bacteria has one chromosome, a cell membrane, but lacks a cell wall and has the smallest genome of any known self-replicating organism.  It has 470 genes, which contain an average of 1,040 nucleotide base pairs (bp).   This implies that the average size protein coded for by these genes contains about 347 amino acids.  The probability of forming, by a random assembly method, one such average-sized protein molecule containing the amino acid residues in a required sequence is only 1/10⁴⁵¹.

If the earth were made of pure carbon, it would contain only about 10⁵⁰ carbon atoms, but more than 10⁴⁵¹ carbon atoms would be needed in order to make enough amino acids to form the proteins to achieve the probability of producing one protein molecule with the prescribed sequence.  In other words, it would require an amount of carbon about 10⁴⁰¹ times the size of the earth in order to achieve the probability of forming one required protein molecule with the specifications above!  Realizing that the probability of producing proteins by a random assembly method is exceedingly small, some have proposed that DNA was formed by chemical evolution first and then it was used to direct the synthesis of the protein.  This trades one problem for another.  The random assembly of a gene containing 1,040 bp to code for a specific protein would be likely to require as much or more carbon than it would to make the protein directly by a random assembly method. 

With a problem this great in forming one gene, imagine the problem of forming the 470 specific genes found in the one chromosome containing 580,070 bp: M. genitalium. Michael Behe, in his 1996 book Darwin’s Black Box, uses the term “irreducible complexity” to refer to such situations where all conditions must be met simultaneously in order for the organism to survive. 

Even though there is general acceptance of the evidence for small genetic changes which may be referred to as microevolution, hard evidence for the formation of any new species by macroevolution is lacking. 

Evidence for intelligent design is widespread in nature.  For example:

1. 1. 1. The motorized rotating flagellum of some bacteria.
      2. Blood clotting and its control.
      3. The high degree of organization within a typical cell.
      4. Cell division and its control.
      5. The system for protein synthesis. 
      6. The human eye.
      7. The respiratory chain based in the highly organized mitochondria.
      8. The biosynthetic pathway in which acetyl CoA is the key compound. 

The writers of the Bible were under the inspiration of God (eyewitness) as they wrote and they were moved by the Holy Spirit (eyewitness).  God’s daily progress report during the creation week stated that “it was good” or “very good.”  Christ (eyewitness), the Creator of all things, endorsed the Genesis creation report by quoting from it and chiding others for their ignorance of it.  God wrote in stone that He had created in six days, and He is quoted twice in Exodus telling Moses to tell the Israelites that fact as well…and I believe Him.  [End of quotes]

The Word of God is true and righteous altogether.  Those who embrace it find "life and life more abundantly".  Childlike faith in Christ Jesus is the only standard God will accept.  Protect it. 

GOD SAID, Exodus 20:11:

For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.

GOD SAID, Psalm 14:1:

The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God. They are corrupt, they have done abominable works, there is none that doeth good.

MAN SAID:  According to evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr, “No educated person any longer questions the validity of the so-called theory of evolution, which we now know to be a simple fact.” 

Now you have THE RECORD.

       

 

References:

Authorized King James Version

Ashton, J.F., In Six Days, Master Books, 2000

GodSaidManSaid, “Evolution Continues to Collapse -- Now What?

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