Answers to 15 Questions For Evolutionists

A prominent Christian website promoting Biblical Creationism has asked its followers to challenge teachers, professors and anyone else with 15 Questions about the Theory of Evolution.   Their campaign is called Question Evolution.    Although the questions do not actually challenge the Theory of Evolution, they are questions that certainly deserve carefully thought out answers.

The court of scientific inquiry is always in session, and every scientific theory is in the defendant’s dock at all times.  This is one of  the major reasons why science has managed to transform the world we live in in only a few hundred years.    Although public debates and websites do not actually serve to advance the frontiers of science, they do provide a medium through which the lay public can get a window into our rich heritage of scientific knowledge.

Please find below each of the 15 questions followed by a growing list of articles from different contributors providing answers from diverse points of view.

Question #1: How did life originate?

Quoted from CreationMinistries.com:

Evolutionist Professor Paul Davies admitted, “Nobody knows how a mixture of lifeless chemicals spontaneously organized themselves into the first living cell.” Andrew Knoll, professor of biology, Harvard, said, “we don’t really know how life originated on this planet”.  A minimal cell needs several hundred proteins. Even if every atom in the universe were an experiment with all the correct amino acids present for every possible molecular vibration in the supposed evolutionary age of the universe, not even one average-sized functional protein would form. So how did life with hundreds of proteins originate just by chemistry without intelligent design? See:15 loopholes in the evolutionary theory of the origin of life (Summary).

This is a very profound question. The research into the origin of life is one of the most exciting areas of research in biology. However, the theory of evolution makes no claims about how life began. It only provides an explanation for how live became so diverse as it descended and evolved from the first life form population. But when we say “only” we are still referring to an idea that is as profound as any that has been offered by science to date.

Some would like to say that the theory of evolution is incomplete without the ability to account for the origin of the first life forms from which all the rest have evolved. This comes from a poor understanding of science and theory formation. For example,  Newton’s Laws of Motion and Gravity do not explain the origin of mass, force, or gravity.    And the entire field of Chemistry does not explain the origin of atoms.   Theories such as these take huge bites out of the universe’s mysteries, but that does not mean that each one has to eat the whole thing.

Although some of the process of evolution may have played a role in the origin of life, we do no yet have  a comprehensive testable hypothesis for how life began.     This is no surprise since life is astronomically complex, and the event seems to have happened only once in the history of the planet.   This is why this is one of the most interesting and exciting fields in science.

Question #2:  How did DNA originate?

How did the DNA code originate? The code is a sophisticated language system with letters and words where the meaning of the words is unrelated to the chemical properties of the letters—just as the information on this page is not a product of the chemical properties of the ink (or pixels on a screen). What other coding system has existed without intelligent design? How did the DNA coding system arise without it being created?

This is another profound question on the order of question #1.  Again, this is not a question for the theory of evolution, since that theory does not address the origin of the first life forms or their DNA.   As described in the answer to question #1, our most useful and long standing scientific theories do not address the origin of the things in the universe they are explaining and characterizing.

Find answers to this question in the articles listed below:

How Did Life Originate

• Four Questions – Part 2 – How Old is the Earth and Why? Did Man and apes come from a common ancestor?
• Life’s Origin: No Soup For You.
• The Cradle of Life: Deep Sea Alkaline Vents
• No Origins in Evolution
• Hoyle’s Junkyard and the Origin of Life
• Fred Hoyle’s Junkyard Fallacy
• Evolution and the Origin of Life