Following the 1859 publication of Charles Darwin’s book The Origin of Species…after 160 years of intensive field research looking in the fossil record for missing links that would serve as the transitional intermediate precursors needed in the Precambrian rock strata leading-up to the Cambrian Explosion of 530 million years ago…to support the gradualism of Darwinian macroevolution that “nature makes no sudden leaps”…this search has come up empty.
In the fossil record, there are zero…none…no half-way, transitional intermediate precursors…developmentally leading-up to the exotic new creatures Marrella, Opabinia, Wiwaxia, Hallucigenia, Anomalocaris, Trilobite, and others…new creatures popping-up together, all at once, and fully developed in the explosion of complex new life-forms on earth at the beginning of the Cambrian geological period.
The intensive research likewise looking through the fossil record for the supposed enumerable transitional intermediates that would show a clear pattern of the antecedent nodes…past forks-in-the-road…where developmental branches divide apart into new organisms…depicting again the enumerable linkages expected from the first single-cell bacteria to today’s large land mammals of Africa…and human beings…known as the theory of biological common descent…has also come up empty…other than the developmental changes that occur within discrete and discontinuous species over long periods of time…usually ending in extinction and an exit out of the fossil record.
As I look out at the present natural world…accessible to the general public as never before through nature documentaries on television covering every continent and nearly every location on earth…and countless books in libraries and bookstores showing photographs of representatives of nearly every life-form on the planet…I do not see any animals or plants in mid-point transition…on their way to some future radically different rendition…part-way toward the creation of new phyla types…for example.
Instead, I see all animals and plants…without exception…complete and already perfected in terms of their architectural body-plans and lifestyle habits…which cannot be the case if macroevolution is true.
If macroevolution is true…in 2020…there is no reason for the life-forms on earth to have stopped evolving at this present point in time. Chaotic change should be apparent everywhere we look in the natural living world…with radical new types popping-up through variant traits being chosen by natural selection…constantly pushing outward and expanding the boundary-lines of the varied ecological systems around the globe.
I do not accept the premise that life is a material thing that can come into being by the chance mixture of the precise combination of organic micro-molecules…that simply fall into place on their own to produce the extremely complex first living organisms of single-cell bacteria…possessing essentially the same DNA informational complexity that supports life today.
I do not think that life can be reduced to a materialistic causation…to be the product of an accidental, random-chance origin through a trial-and-error process.
I do not accept the idea that the precise locational placement of the hundreds of trillions of varied cell types…bone, muscles, tendons, skin, hair, blood veins, internal organs, a long front trunk and two large tusks…in the body-plan of a 23,000-pound African elephant…can initially self-assemble and then maintain its unique essence through new cell replacements throughout its long lifetime…without intelligent design to set-up and manage this process.
I do not think that the varied lifestyle habits of the lion, leopard, and cheetah…have a materialistic causation…that these lifestyle-habits tied to well-defined architectural body-plans…simply fell into place as a response in the reactive-mode to the varied survival opportunities available on the African savanna plains.
Today we do not see lions, leopards, and cheetahs putting-out variant traits that would fill-in the lifestyle habit gaps between these three big cats…producing lions and leopards that could run almost as fast as cheetahs…and cheetahs that are nearly as large in size and as strong as lions…hunting together in coordinated group-attacks to be able to take-down large prey like zebras and wildebeest…in groups of four or five cheetahs…like lions.
In Africa today…we do not see any of these three big cats putting-out new and innovative variant traits that fall outside of the standard list of talents and abilities exhibited by these fully developed, well-defined, and functionally brilliant predators.
In fact…we do not see any of the large mammals of the African savanna plains putting-out variant traits to be chosen by natural selection…that even minimally deviate from the standard and recognized essence that defines each type.
I think that the extraordinary phenomenon of the coordinated growth from adolescence to mature adulthood…with all parts of the human body growing in unison together as a whole-unit…requires an informational instructions package of inconceivably complex coordination that entails not only the commands to each living cell of where to locate and what to do…but also the communication network that integrates the growth of the entire body as one-unit…slowly and directionally over time toward a predetermined and scripted end-point…with a precisely orchestrated pace that is mind-boggling…yet that we take totally for granted as a result of being commonplace.
The simple arguments presented here…along with dozens more presented by other Christians in their books…are to me…objectively compelling for the inclusion of design in a worldview that utilizes the concept of the orderliness and intelligibility of the natural world…intelligible to human beings alone.
But these few simple arguments of mine are not themselves nuts-and-bolts evidences…are not objective empirical facts in favor of design…but are instead conclusions inferred from the objective empirical facts.
This should give everyone pause…who are interested in the creation/evolution debate.
And in my opinion…everyone should be interested in the creation/evolution debate…because of the singular privilege of the uniquely gifted capacity…for the orderliness and intelligibility of the exquisitely beautiful and wonderfully complex natural world being exclusively intelligible to humans…to humans alone…an innate ability that itself argues for a gifted rather than an acquired origin…above and outside of the ability of Mother Nature to produce…through a blind, accidental, and random-chance process.
The Cross in the Christian Life 