Thanks for sharing that. I like the references to the 19th century.
The following is adapted from my book "Understanding Prayer Faith and God's Will" in which I say that evolution conveniently disregard the minute changes at cellular level that has to happen before a fish can evolve into a reptile, or before an living specie can evolved into the next level.
I once spoke to an acquaintance who believed in evolution. He claimed that simple life forms took millions of years to evolve into the complex diversities that we see today, which is the theory of evolution. It was proposed by Charles Darwin, who believed that life started by itself as the simplest basic cells. Over eons of time, they gradually evolved into more complex living organisms, and eventually into various kinds of life forms including plants and animals. With a view of the general landscape of living things and species, Darwin drew a “tree of life” diagram, and proposed that basic life forms evolved into more complex ones. If true, it would mean that at a very gradual pace, amphibians evolved genetically into reptiles, then to mammals, and finally into humans. But as to how the process could have happened, the theory did not offer any explanation of the intricate transformation at cellular level that would be necessary in order for evolution to happen.
When Darwin’s theory came about in 1860 AD, little was understood about cells. Science was not advanced and the use of anesthetics in medicine had just begun. Now, more than two hundred years later, with phenomenal progress in science and knowledge in the past century, microbiologists have found that even basic cells are not simple. Each unit – made of proteins, DNA and chromosomes – is in fact very complex and yet well organized; Darwin and his peers would have been astounded indeed if they had known this. Basic life forms such as amoeba appear “simple” only when compared to eagles, lions or salmon fish, for instances.
Today, modern discoveries come from research, improved scientific methodologies, plus precise and powerful laboratory equipment, which were not available during the nineteenth century. Scientists build facilities to smash atoms and measure the energy emitted by using sophisticated instruments. Having learned more about DNA, surgeons perform gene therapy. With our knowledge of “simple” cells with their intricate properties, it would be far-fetched to believe that they would be able to design and construct their own chromosomes in such an exacting manner. Today, there are still general postulations about how life might have started by itself and gradually evolved into the present state, but such loose and general hypotheses never attempt to explain the necessary DNA transformation that need to happen first.
Why then is there a case for creation? On earth today, so far, about 2,000,000 species of living creatures have been identified (which is only a conservative estimate), each with their own forms, functionality, instinct and intelligence. A spectrum of these would include 300,000 species of plants, 30,000 species of fishes, and 6,000 species of mammals. There are more species of invertebrates such as ground insects which live on land, as well as life forms that exist in the deep of the oceans. Could all these have emerged from “simple cells” that evolve entirely by themselves over millions of years? As we consider how trillions of living creatures live in a symbiosis manner in the ecosystems, one cannot help feeling that it would be mightily impossible for all these to have happened by themselves. When we look at the amazing diversity of life on earth, at the planets revolving around the sun along their set paths, and the regularity and rhythm in the universe, we have to wonder if there is more to it than meet the eyes. Can all these happen without a Designer who planned out the precise and intricate details?
