We live in an age of seemingly endless possibilities. The word impossible is like a fighting word. As discovery proceeds, the events that fall under its definition continue to shrink. Looking back over our history and considering how incomplete our knowledge is at any given time, one should use the word with extreme caution.



Nevertheless, from a practical standpoint our whole lives revolve around and depend upon what we believe to be possible and what we think is not. I think it's impossible to fix my computer with a hammer. So when it freezes up or loses data, I don't start hitting it with a hammer. I think it's very possible that a technician at a computer store can help and so I set the hammer down and call the store. Such practical reasoning occurs on a daily basis and makes life livable.

The question of our origins is a matter of odds as well. These comments from Stenger, a physicist, typifies the confidence evolutionists have in the spontaneous origin of the universe:

?Why not? Given all possibilities, why shouldn't it have happened? And why not all other possibilities as well? Our universe was formed in one of the infinite number of ways it could have formed. The particular structure of our universe came about by chance, freezing into form just like the six points of a snowflake.?

Evolutionists load the dice with infinite universes (even though we have a sample size of only one) and infinite time to make the odds of life coming to be by chance not a long shot, but a virtual certainty?since, after all, it is here.

Before we permit ourselves to get too excited about this ?anything is possible? argument, let's set the ground rules. If anything is possible?apples jumping off the ground and reattaching to trees, humans hatching out of chicken eggs, the desert sand turning into ocean, life emerging from lifeless matter?then there can be no certainty about anything. All science would end and we would fear putting one foot in front of the other because of the possibility of the floor turning to quicksand or disappearing entirely.

Yet such an uncertain world is not how things are, for you, me, or the most devout evolutionist. So by what process does a scientist partition his mind such that he can one day busy himself about in the laboratory clanging together test tubes looking for high probabilities and certainty, go to sleep, wake up in the morning and then announce to a classroom or in an article that high improbabilities make certainty?such as life emerged by chance and evolved? By so doing he accepts unquestionably, as a philosophical premise, that which he would never excuse in others or permit in his lab, namely that unlikely events are the ones we should bank on.

Remember, this same materialist most likely rejects extrasensory perception, remote viewing, miracles, intelligent creation, foreknowledge, life after death and the like not because they are impossible, but because they appear improbable.

In spite of how improbable any of the specifics of evolution are, they are set aside as simply a gap in our current understanding. This hopeful attitude translates into the assertion that evolution is not to be denied by logic, science, or math.

The degree to which this becomes absurd is evident by the following. If the possibility of a simple protein coming into existence by chance (this will be covered in much more detail shortly) is 1 in 100000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 (it's actually a much larger denominator than that but those are enough zeros for my point here), the ?1? in the numerator is viewed as a very real possibility. But it is not. All the zeros in the denominator indicate a certain improbability, not possibility.

Probabilities must be read two ways. The ratio denotes not only the odds that something could happen, but also the probability that it will not. If the odds of something happening are 1 in 10, then the odds it won't are 9 in 10. Odds for, of 1 in 10000000000, means odds against are 9999999999 in 10000000000. Extrapolate that to the larger number in the previous paragraph to see the surety that the protein will not emerge by chance.

Such surety is what all of us use every day in life in order to survive. It is also what the evolutionist uses when he returns to his lab, home after leaving the classroom, or after setting aside his latest manuscript on evolution.

From a strictly probabilistic standpoint, as will be shown shortly, the chance emergence and evolution of life is, by any reasonable definition of the word, impossible. It is as impossible as Mozart being tone deaf and creating his music by random piano tapping, Michelangelo painting the Sistene Chapel behind his back, or Mark Twain being illiterate and writing his books by randomly scrawling on paper. Yet similar impossibilities become fact to the materialist because other possibilities such as intelligent design are unthinkable.

The presence of the universe and of the life it holds are not really matters of chance. Scientific laws, not chance, make things happen in a particular way. Things with mass fall to the ground, north poles attract south poles, negative charges attract positive charges, and mass and energy are never destroyed, they just change places. An apple could jump to Pluto rather than fall to the ground (it is possible), and one could calculate the odds for that. But it won't happen because there is a law of gravity and several others that declare it won't. It's not really a matter of odds; it's a matter of law.

Laws (laws of information science, Law of Biogenesis, Second Law of Thermodynamics, declare and demand that without intelligent intervention, information cannot emerge from chaos, life cannot emerge from non-life, and once order is present it cannot compound and improve upon itself.

Since life is highly ordered and contains prodigious information (millions of volumes of encyclopedias worth), scientific law dictates that it could not have emerged from a chaotic primordial soup. Neither would scientific law allow existent life to gain increased complexity (evolve) and transmutate into increasingly sophisticated organisms from random events such as mutations.

The most obvious, well tested and sure laws in science, as well as practical everyday experience, demand that order come from order, information from information, and mind from mind. Spontaneous generation and evolution are directly contradictory to these laws. Probabilities affirm that as well.

Let me press home the two most important points (laws) that apply to the question of origins.

1. Functional complexity and information do not emerge from randomness and natural law.

2. Functional complexity and information do not progressively increase due to randomness and natural law.

If you would like science, something you can take to the bank and be sure about, there you have it. These laws are directly in apposition and contradictory to the two central tenets of evolution:

1. Functional complexity (life) and information came from randomness and natural law.

2. Functional complexity (living things) and information became progressively more complex as a result of random events and natural law.

Once these two principles (arguably laws) become your own, you can sort through almost any argument on origins. Here's how to do it. If you hear that scientists are observing life emerging from nonlife in the laboratory, you know that is suspect. It violates the logic of Law #1. If scientists say they have found missing links demonstrating that a simpler organism has evolved into a more complex one, you know that is suspect. It would violate the logic of Law #2.

Use of this logic puts us in tune with science and helps immunize us to fraud. For example, you will find that the life that was ?created? in the laboratory will turn out not to be life at all but mere organic chemicals, or, if there is life, it came from life that was already there as an ingredient or contaminant in the starting materials. Also, the manipulation of chemicals by intelligent scientists?even if they were to create life?does not prove no intelligence would have been necessary when life formed in the first place. That is, unless the scientists wished to claim that they were not intelligent.

You will also note that the missing link found in the fossil record was either a hopeful fabrication (like constructing a hunched over pre-human from a tooth and jaw fragment, as enthusiastic evolutionists have done), a distinct type of creature in its own right, or has brothers and sisters alive today that look just like the fossil, or is found in strata more recent than the creatures it supposedly evolved into (making the creature, its dad's father).

With these principles (roadmaps) in hand, let's now turn to the various lines of evidence materialists and intelligent design proponents put forth to prove their cases. We will explore how each position accords with science and reason. Let's determine which position flows naturally from the facts and is an inference from what we do know, not a position of faith based upon what we do not know.

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