Letters From Grandpa #6

• LETTERS FROM GRANDPA
• 6

Evolutionists steadfastly oppose any suggestion of intelligent design. Ball State University, for example, found itself in a firestorm of controversy when in August of 2013 Jerry Coyne sought to prevent astronomy professor (Eric Hedin) from advocating an intelligent design perspective in his course on "The Boundaries of Science." How sad! The “university” is supposed to bring “unity” out of “diversity”. It ought to be a place where all ideas and points of view can be freely discussed and examined. Unfortunately, this is not the case.

While many evolutionists claim no religious affiliation, your Grandpa believes that “Time” is their god. What Christians attribute to “God”, the evolutionist attributes to “Time”. If 5 billions years is not enough “Time” to explain evolution, they can easily double the “Time” to 10 billion. Since origins are beyond the reach of scientific investigation, the “theory” of evolution is a matter of faith. Just like the Christian, the evolutionist must have faith. Here is an example of evolutionary faith. It comes from Edwin Conklin, evolutionist and professor of biology at Princeton University. He wrote: “The probability of life originating from accident is comparable to the probability of the unabridged dictionary resulting from an explosion in a printing shop". Incredibly, Conklin is still an evolutionist. No matter how irrational and improbable, he still “believes” that after billions and billions of explosions, the “unabridged dictionary ”can “miraculously” appear by “accident”. Using his own illustration, he begins his hypothesis with a print shop, material in the print shop, and billions of explosions. Notice that he does not tell us where the print shop came from. Neither does he tell us where the letters in the print shop came from. Neither does he explain how billions of explosions just “happened” to take place in the print shop. Truly, the fool has said in his heart that there is no God! (Psalm 14:1)

If you were involved in an archeological dig and came across an arrowhead, you could easily conclude that it was not formed by accident. As crude as it might be, it still bears unmistakable evidence of intelligent design. In the course of your life you will come across an infinite number of other examples of intelligent design. Many of these will have the fingerprints of God.

Please consider these few examples of design which point to an infinitely wise Creator. The firefly, for example, produces a “cold light” which has neither ultraviolet or infrared rays. This chemically produced light has a wave length from 510 to 670 nanometers, and is apparently used in identifying a mate. An incandescent lightbulb emits only 10 percent of its energy as light; the rest is basically wasted, discharged as heat. A fluorescent bulb performs much better, emitting 90 percent of its energy as light. But neither of these is a match for the firefly. With very few ultraviolet or infrared rays, the light emitted by this insect is nearly 100 percent energy efficient! The design of the firefly, of course, is much more obvious than that of an arrowhead.

The electric eel, has a much more powerful electrical energy. It has 6,000 specialized cells that store power like tiny batteries, and when threatened or when attacking prey, these cells discharge simultaneously and emit a burst of at least 600 volts. This, as you know, is five times the power of a standard U.S. wall socket. I just watched a You Tube video titled “World’s Deadliest - Six Foot

Electric Eel”. To the rational mind this is an “incredible accident”.

The tiny bombardier beetle has the amazing ability to emit odious gases that are 212 degrees F. It seems that the beetle has been blessed with two dangerous chemicals, hydroquinone and hydrogen peroxide. To avoid self destruction, it also has an inhibitor to keep them from exploding. When approached by a predator the beetle squirts the stored chemicals into two combustion tubes, and at precisely the right moment adds an anti inhibitor which causes a violent explosion to take place. It is hard to “believe” that bombardier beetles reproduced and exploded for millions of years until they “accidentally“ got the right timing and avoided self destruction. And even more “miraculous” to “believe” that they would “accidentally” be able to pass on this life saving information on to the next generation.

The pistol shrimp is even more amazing. It can snap it’s claws so quickly that it creates a cavitation bubble with extremely high temperatures and a resultant water jet. The National Geographic News states that the temperature created in this bubble reaches 10,000 Kelvin, or 18,000 degrees F. Further, the shrimp is able to aim the resultant water jet and thus stun or kill small creatures in the ocean.

If Professor Conklin found 100 rocks on the sidewalk spelling “love”, what conclusion should he arrive at from this discovery? Without eye witnesses to testify, would it be more rational to “believe” that their arrangement was an accident, or by intelligent design? But if you think that arranging 100 rocks requires intelligence, please ponder the intricate design of what Darwin in his ignorance called “the simple cell”.

Geneticist Michael Denton PhD. writes in the GenesisFile.com “the simplest cell, throbs with life far more complex in structure and function than any mechanism yet conceived by humans. To grasp the reality of life as it has been revealed by molecular biology, we must magnify a cell a thousand million times until it is 20 kilometers in diameter and resembles a giant airship large enough to cover a great city like London or New York…What we would then see would be an object of unparalleled complexity and adaptive design. On the surface of the cell we would see millions of openings, like the portholes of a vast spaceship, opening and closing to allow a continual stream of materials to flow in and out. If we were to enter one of these openings we would find ourselves in a world of supreme technology and bewildering complexity…The tiniest bacterial cells are incredibly small, weighing less than 10-12 gms; each is in effect a microminiaturized factory containing thousands of exquisitely designed pieces of intricate molecular machinery, made up altogether of one hundred thousand million atoms, far more complicated than any machine built by man… The size, structure, and component design of the protein synthetic machinery is practically the same in all living cells… no living system can be thought of as being primitive or ancestral with respect to any other system, nor is there the slightest empirical hint of an evolutionary sequence among all the incredibly diverse cells on earth. Indeed the complexity of the simplest cell on earth is so complex that no man can fully elaborate the function of all the "parts" of the "simplest cell".

Darwin admitted in his Origin of the Species: “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down." Michael Behe, biochemical researcher and professor at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, believes he can demonstrate what Darwin feared. He advances the concept of "irreducible complexity." In simple terms, this idea applies to any system of interacting parts in which the removal of any one part destroys the function of the entire system. An irreducibly complex system, then, requires each and every component to be in place before it will function. He illustrates the concept by reference to a simple mouse trap with only 5 parts. Every one of these 5 basic parts must be functioning to catch a mouse. (1) The wooden platform. (2) The spring. (3) The bar to crush the mouse. (4) A device to restrain the bar. (5) The trigger. If any of these 5 components are missing, the device is useless. The “irreducible complexity” of the “simple cell” by comparison, involves literally “thousands of exquisitely designed pieces of intricate molecular machinery”. All of these thousands of parts must be in place for the “simple cell” to function.

Before blindly believing everything your professors teach, remember this old proverb: “The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese”.

As I keep reminding, I love you very much. I pray for everyone of you every day. I want you to always love the truth. God is truth, and loving the truth is like loving God! Those who do not love the truth are vulnerable to deception (2 Thessalonians 2:10). If you can tell the difference between a random rock and an arrowhead, you can also conclude that you are not an accident either. You were formed by a loving God in your mother’s womb (Psalm 139:13 - 16). His love is far deeper and greater than mine, and He wants you to be with Him forever. So do I!.

Love,

Grandpa Boyce