Article #297
by Bill Nugent
For over thirty years I worked as a carpenter in the residential construction and remodeling business. That was my day job as I studied and wrote. My homebuilding experience gave me great appreciation for how things are put together. Additionally, I have a brother and a brother-in-law who are architects. My father and maternal grandfather were engineers. Design and building runs in my family.
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Nature gives us interesting examples of engineering. A woodpecker is a living jackhammer. It’s stiff straight beak is backed by a spongy shock absorber material so the shock waves of its pounding on a tree doesn’t give it a concussion. It has a super long tongue for licking up insects deep inside rotted tree trunks. Amazingly it has a tongue “pocket” for storing its long tongue. The pocket allows the tongue to be sucked up into the woodpecker’s mouth and wrap around the back of its head!
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Another mind boggling example is the engineering of the fangs of a poisonous snake. The snake has poison bladders and muscles to compress the bladders forcing poison down through the hollow, sharply pointed fangs. The fangs are retractable. The fangs have hinge joints that enable the fangs to fold down to the roof of the snake’s mouth.
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Think of the engineering of these exquisitely designed hollow fangs. They are hinged teeth! They’re living hypodermic needles. It’s also what famed microbiologist, Michael Behe, would call irreducible complexity. Irreducible complexity is the fact that all of the anatomy of a snake’s fang and poison delivery system must be in place and be functional for such a system to be of advantage to the snake to enable it to survive. If the poison bladders are not present or if the muscles to compress the bladders are not present or if the fangs aren’t hollow or if the fangs aren’t hinged properly the system doesn’t work. A partially formed poison system would be hideous, nonfunctional and disadvantageous to the snake. It has to evolve all at once or not at all. No step by step Darwinian process could do it.
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Getting back to the woodpecker example, imagine an ordinary songbird evolving to become a woodpecker. The bird gets a mutation giving it a long tongue but it doesn’t get the mutation (or series of complex mutations) to give it a pocket to store the long tongue. It would look pretty silly with that long tongue dangling out of its mouth! All the parts of the living jackhammer system have to evolve at once or not at all.
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The evolutionists appeal to the principle of Natural Selection to explain the development of life. Natural Selection does indeed explain the survival of the fittest but it doesn’t explain the arrival of the fittest. Natural selection is a sorting mechanism, not a guiding mechanism. Natural selection sorts out life but doesn’t originate life. The supposed mechanism of Darwinism is genetic mutations and the accumulation of beneficial mutations. Natural selection doesn’t guide or originate the mutations. Mutations are random scrambling of nucleotide base pairs in DNA. Natural selection is a posteriori, it works on the products of mutation only after the fact.
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The overwhelming majority of genetic mutations are harmful or neutral. Less than one in two thousand mutations are beneficial. (see book: Genetic Entropy by Cornell Univ. geneticist, Dr. John Sanford, p. 26) Furthermore, genetic mutations simply scramble or delete nucleotide base pairs in the DNA and don’t add new base pairs except in gene duplication such as in Down’s Syndrome. Even gene duplication is not the addition of new information but just a duplication of pre-existing information. Mutations are often caused by radiation or mutagenic toxic chemicals, neither of which carry nucleotide base pairs to the DNA. Radiation and toxins simply cause glitches in DNA structure as DNA is being synthesized.
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Think of the vast number of new nucleotide base pairs that would have to be added to the DNA of a nonpoisonous snake to turn it into a poisonous snake. There’s no conceivable way a slow gradual Darwinistic accumulation of mutations could account for the exquisitely fine tuned engineering of a viper’s poison delivery system or a woodpecker’s bill and tongue jackhammer system or many other living engineering examples I could suggest. It would take a gigantic macro-mutation, adding thousands of nucleotides, perfectly sequenced, to the DNA to evolve all of the snake’s poison system at once. Such a giant macro-mutation of accurately sequenced nucleotides is as likely as winning a million dollar sweepstakes 10,000 times in a row in one day!
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DNA is a myriadly complex information storage and retrieval system. DNA is similar to computer software. Any software engineer at Microsoft can tell you that redesigning or adding to software doesn’t happen by chance. There is no accidental engineering. The academic guardians of Darwinism want us to believe that the finely tuned engineering of animals came about by billions of fortuitous mutational accidents. When a mathematician does the math on the probability of these genetic accidents occurring in an unguided universe it shows that the probabilities are vanishingly small. Would you bet your soul that there is no God?
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The evolutionist retreats again and appeals to “deep time” and says that given enough time, anything can happen. The second law of thermodynamics, the law of entropy, shows that unguided complex systems break down over time. Things move from order to chaos over time. For the evolutionist, deep time is a last refuge of the damned and what a flimsy refuge it is!
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Speaking of damnation, there’s a way to avoid it. God has provided a way to receive forgiveness of sins and to obtain entrance into heaven in the afterlife. God sent His Son, Jesus of Nazareth, the promised Messiah of Israel. Jesus came in fulfillment of over 300 Messianic prophecies written in the Old Testament hundreds of years before His birth. The 53rd chapter of Isaiah and other Old Testament passages foretold that Christ would suffer and die, taking the penalty of our sins upon Himself so that we can receive forgiveness and avoid the damnation of hell. Call upon the name of Jesus Christ today to receive forgiveness of sins!
Steps to salvation:
Jesus said “Ye must be born again” (John 3:7).
- 1) Believe that God created you and loves you and sent the Messiah (Messiah is Hebrew for Christ) to redeem you.
- 2) Believe that Jesus Christ came in fulfillment of over 300 Bible prophecies to die for you, to take upon Himself the penalty of your sins (Isaiah 53:5-6, John 6:29, Romans 4:5, First Peter 3:18).
- 3) Turn from sin and call on the name of Jesus to receive forgiveness of sins (Romans 10:13).
- 4) Receive Jesus as Savior and experience the new birth (John 1:12, Acts 2:38).
- 5) Follow Jesus Christ as Lord (John 14:21).
Prayer to receive salvation:
“Whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved” (Romans 10:13).
To receive the salvation that Jesus purchased for us at the terrible cost of His suffering and death on our behalf I invite you to pray this simple prayer:
“Dear heavenly Father, I thank you for sending Jesus, the promised Messiah, to die for my sins. I admit that I am a sinner. I repent of my sins and I ask for your forgiveness on the basis of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. I ask you to fill me with your Holy Spirit to empower me to serve you under the Lordship of Jesus Christ, Amen.”
If you prayed this prayer in the humble sincerity of your heart then you have received everlasting life, which includes power to live right in this life and entrance into heaven in the afterlife!
(C) 2016 William P. Nugent, permission granted to email or republish for Christian outreach.