Mutating Theory

Many people have been led to believe that organisms often develop favorable mutations based on their environments. For example, it’s often thought that bacteria can become resistant to antibiotics, thus proving that they evolve. But the website “Understanding Evolution” (produced by the University of California Museum of Paleontology and the National Center for Science Education), explains how mutations work:

“Mutations do not ‘try’ to supply what the organism ‘needs.’...For example, exposure to harmful chemicals may increase the mutation rate, but will not cause more mutations that make the organism resistant to those chemicals. In this respect, mutations are random—whether a particular mutation happens or not is unrelated to how useful that mutation would be.”

To illustrate, they explain that where people have access to shampoos with chemicals that kill lice, there are a lot of lice that are resistant to those chemicals. So either: 1) resistant strains of lice were always there—and are just more frequent now because all the non-resistant lice died; or 2) exposure to lice shampoo actually caused mutations that provide resistance to the shampoo. Based on the scientific evidence, they conclude that “the first explanation is the right one and that directed mutations, the second possible explanation relying on non-random mutation, is not correct.”

After numerous experiments, researchers have found that none unambiguously support directed mutation. In the case of bacteria, scientific experiments have proved that “the penicillin-resistant bacteria were there in the population before they encountered penicillin. They did not evolve resistance in response to exposure to the antibiotic.”

Therefore, mutations are not logical adaptations that make a creature better suited for its environment. They are completely random—the result of mindless, undirected chance.

Even if these random mutations could happen to cause a lump of a wing to begin to form, how would that help the creature to survive? In evolutionary theory, natural selection will enable the survival of creatures that develop some sort of benefit. But until it becomes a fully formed wing, any stub would be more of a detriment than a benefit. Consider the following observations from noted evolutionists:

“The reasons for rejecting Darwin’s proposal were many, but first of all that many innovations cannot possibly come into existence through accumulation of many small steps, and even if they can, natural selection cannot accomplish it, because incipient and intermediate stages are not advantageous.” — Embryologist Soren Lovtrup

“But how do you get from nothing to such an elaborate something if evolution must proceed through a long sequence of intermediate stages, each favored by natural selection? You can’t fly with 2% of a wing...” — Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould

“Darwinism is claiming that all the adaptive structures in nature, all the organisms which have existed throughout history were generated by the accumulation of entirely undirected mutations. That is an entirely unsubstantiated belief for which there is not the slightest evidence whatsoever.” (emphasis added) —Molecular biologist Michael Denton

Mutations do not work as a mechanism to fuel the evolutionary process. They are random instead of purposeful, and they only modify or remove information, but never add it—a requirement of the theory. Any mutation that supposedly creates a transitional form would be far more likely to doom the poor creature than to help it up the evolutionary chain. But don’t just take my word for it. About 150 of the world’s leading evolutionary theorists gathered at a Macroevolution Conference in Chicago to consider the question, “Are mutation and natural selection enough?” Evolutionist Roger Lewin sums up the conclusion of the conference:

“The central question of the Chicago conference was whether the mechanisms underlying microevolution can be extrapolated to explain the phenomena of macroevolution. At the risk of doing violence to the positions of some of the people at the meeting, the answer can be given as a clear, No.”

Please thoughtfully read this response from evolutionist Michael Denton, author of Evolution: A Theory in Crisis. Asked in an interview if Darwinian theory adequately explained what we see in nature, he very honestly admitted its weaknesses:

“The basic pattern it fails to explain is the apparent uniqueness and isolation of major types of organisms...It strikes me as being a flagrant denial of common sense to swallow that all these things were built up by accumulative small random changes. This is simply a nonsensical claim, especially for the great majority of cases, where nobody can think of any credible explanation of how it came about. And this is a very profound question which everybody skirts, everybody brushes over, everybody tries to sweep under the carpet.

“The fact is that the majority of these complex adaptations in nature cannot be adequately explained by a series of intermediate forms. And this is a fundamental problem. Common sense tells me there must be something wrong.”

Evolutionary theory is a “nonsensical claim” that is a “flagrant denial of common sense,” yet this is the story that we’re told repeatedly is a proven fact. There is something wrong.

Excerpted from How to Know God Exists: Scientific Proof of God (Bridge-Logos).