Lecture

We continue in this lecture, number four, with the subject of origins. The question of the beginning of life we have opened up and argued that the secret of life is apparently locked into the DNA molecule, which scientists have been speaking about now for some years. The DNA molecule, which is an essential substance in the chromosomes of the living cell, is found in all living cells, though there are different types of DNA for different creatures. This DNA molecule is an exceedingly complicated molecule that is so long that the electron microscopes take pictures of this molecule, and it appears in the pictures as a coil that is somewhat ladder shaped. And, as we said before, there are these different nucleotides that are in ladder-like formation along this coil or spiral; and there are many, many different combinations of these four basic nucleotides that make up the DNA molecule.

The number of different DNA molecules is exceedingly vast, and this is a wonderful thing because, probably, the complexity of the DNA molecule is what makes it possible to have the great complexity in living things. You don’t see two leaves on a tree alike. You don’t see two people alike. There is great complexity and variety in all of nature, and this is due to the DNA molecule and other constituents of the cell, perhaps of which we don’t know so much; but the DNA molecule at least is capable of almost infinite variation, it would seem.

Now, of course, the making of the DNA molecule is itself so complicated as to be, one would think, out of all possibility. There are, however, other things that would have to be made also in order for life to begin. Some experiments have been conducted that make scientists hopeful that they will be able to make a living creature someday, make life in the test tube, as it is said. Every once in a while we find people speaking rather large claims about life having been created, or going to be created very soon.

One experiment that was very interesting was done by a scientist named Yuri. And Yuri, in a flask, boiled together some constituents which seemed to be what you might expect to have been around in an early atmosphere of the earth. These constituents would be ammonia, methane, water, carbon dioxide, and so on; and these constituents were boiled for a certain time, and an electric spark was passed through the mixture. When he collected the substances that were formed as a result of this reaction, he found that there were some simple amino acid compounds that had been formed. The theory, then, was advanced that just as in this experiment some simple amino acids were formed, that these could have been linked in later situations where there would be heat perhaps and sunlight and electric discharge, ultraviolet radiation, sources of energy that would come in and synthesize these basic amino acid compounds into larger polymers, into substances like proteins, and eventually perhaps into the DNA molecule.

It’s one thing to say that these simple compounds have been formed. It’s another thing to say that the great complexity of proteins themselves and of enzymes that are needed for the formation of cells and their activity and the DNA molecule itself, that all these things could be expected to happen just be accident from these basic amino acid compounds. Some have pointed out that even in Yuri’s experiment, the case is somewhat loaded against the natural situation, because Yuri had these materials in a flask and would draw off the results of this reaction and take then the results of the reaction away from the electric discharge and away from the heat and collect them separately. Whereas, if you had a natural situation where these compounds were formed by the interaction of the given compounds in the world of nature, the compounds formed would be decomposed more rapidly than they would be formed. They’d be decomposed by ultraviolet radiation and by their inherent instability. And so, although it is true that some very skillful syntheses have been done in the laboratory, it is still a long way off from the actual formation of DNA, let alone the complex things of a cell.

I quote from the book that I referred to, The Bible, Natural Science, and Evolution by Russell Maatman. On page 130, he says,

From time to time it has been announced that some chemists have moved one more step towards synthesizing life in a test tube. However, such syntheses are accomplished by using materials which are presently obtained only from living organisms, even though such materials are themselves not alive.

What he is saying is that in the experiments so far conducted, the chemists have not started from scratch. That is to say they have used perhaps parts of viruses and torn these viruses apart and then reconstituted them, and they have then used this material to form other material which acts like living compounds. But, again, the viruses themselves have DNA in them, and they are already a long step toward the things that the chemists want to synthesize. So to actually start from scratch, as nature would have to do, would be a very different picture.

On the other hand, I suppose it should be said that it is not true that if life were found to be possible to be made in the laboratory, it is not true that it would therefore follow that life would have developed by accident in the early stages of the formation of the earth. In the laboratory and in a mechanical situation, man can do very wonderful things, because man is himself a creature who acts rationally and purposefully and takes some of these things which nature perhaps might never combine and puts them together by art and by great care and skill. The fact that man, in the laboratory, might be able to form some of these living compounds does not necessarily mean that they would have started by accident. It would simply mean that just as man purposely puts these things together in the laboratory and gets a desired result, so the Lord God purposely put these things together in the early days of the earth’s creation, and He also got the result that He intended. So it is quite possible, I suppose, that theoretically man might make life and not bear upon the question at all as to whether life began by accident.

We should emphasize, of course, that the cell is not simply DNA. The cell has a boundary. The cell has many different components in it. The cell is a very complicated laboratory. Even some of the very simple cells have great numbers of enzymes in them, and these enzymes are catalysts that hurry up a particular chemical reaction and make it possible and practicable. Without these enzymes the cell cannot live, and yet specific enzymes are needed for specific activities of the cell. So, not only must the components be made, but they must be put together; and for them to be put together by accident, as we say, seems to be beyond any present expectation at all, although theoretically it is not impossible, I suppose, that God might allow someday some person to do it. The beginning of life, then, is something that the Bible does not say man cannot do. It does say that life began by a purposing act of God when He said, “Let the earth bring forth living things, the vegetation in all its multitude and its variety.”

The question further, however, is in the realm of biology whether or not species began by accident or whether species must have begun by the command of God. Here we have one of the real problems, the problem of evolution. And the question of evolution has really destroyed the faith of many people. It is an important thing. It is also somewhat of a technical thing. We cannot go into the technicalities of it, and yet it does seem to me that there are some new ideas abroad these days that are useful for the Christian to know and which really greatly relieve the old conflict – at least the alleged conflict – between the Bible and science in this department. I think it is important for us to realize that there is not much of an opportunity for a conflict between the Bible and science. I have said that the Bible is not a science textbook. We know that. There is very little of scientific data in the Bible.

There is one chemical reaction mentioned in the book of Proverbs. It speaks of an angry man “like vinegar upon soda” – the King James Version says “vinegar upon niter” – but the ancient Hebrew word “niter” clearly is the soda of ancient trade from the alkaline lakes of Egypt. “Vinegar upon soda,” of course, bubbles up in an acid-base reaction liberating carbon dioxide. Here we have a chemical reaction mentioned in the Bible, but as far as I know, it’s the only one outside of the familiar ones of combustion and so on.

So there is very little chemistry in the Bible, very little reference to biology or physics in any way, and in the Genesis account it simply speaks in the general terms that God made the different creatures. He doesn’t go into any detail. However, the ruling view in biology since the days of Charles Darwin – and in some circles, even before – has been that all life developed by natural causes, natural processes, from the initial life that was by accident. I think that Darwin himself believed that there was an initial creation but that this initial creation was followed by the accidental diversification of all forms of life, so that from the simplest cells finally we see the diversification of plants and animals and finally man.

The Bible doesn’t give any indication of such things. The Bible simply says that God said, “Let the earth bring forth vegetation,” and according to His fiat, the grass and trees and whatnot were formed. Then on the fifth day, God said, “Let the water bring forth abundantly the moving creature.” And it speaks of these moving creatures in the sea and in the sky, the birds, and finally the creatures upon earth, the cattle and creeping thing, the beasts of the earth, that these things were made after their kind. Various kinds of creatures were made by God.

The evolutionist says that all of these different types of creatures, organisms, were formed one from the other by natural processes, which they call evolution. There is here then probably a contradiction. At least many have though that the contradiction is severe between the first chapter of Genesis, on one hand, and science on the other – the science, of course, of biology.

I suppose there is a special reason for the influence of the evolutionary theory. There are various arguments for evolution. Some of them, by the way, are somewhat discredited. The argument from embryology, for instance, still is given, but I think that in advanced circles it is usually somewhat discredited these days. There are, of course, some similarities with the smaller beginning embryos of a chick and fish and mammal and man; but, actually, if you look carefully with a microscope, these similarities are actually differences. The embryo of a chick is always a chick embryo. It never develops into a fish. The embryo of a fish never develops into a mammal. Man has all the characteristics of mankind in the very earliest germ form, and as it develops, it develops rapidly into what is very definitely and recognizably human. So the argument from embryology and from vestigial organs is not as significant or as impressive as it once was.

But there is one argument that is very persuasive and that anyone can observe, and that is the argument from similarity. If you stop to think of mammals, all mammals are built from the same general plan. Indeed, that is why they’re classified together as mammals. And not only the mammals, but other forms of life are also on the same plan. The next time you carve a chicken you’ll notice that there are seven vertebrae in the neck. There are seven vertebrae also in our necks. I believe even the long neck of the giraffe has seven vertebrae. Why are there just seven vertebrae in the necks of all these animals otherwise so different? The chicken also has one bone in the upper leg, two bones in the lower leg, just as we do; one bone in the upper wing, like our arm, and two bones in the lower wing, like our arm. The similarity here of chicken and man and horse and whale have been often cited. There are these similarities that run through the animal and even vegetable world. This is a rather significant argument that anyone can see. Why is there this similarity? Creationists have said for many years that this similarity is due to the fact that God created them on the same plan. Evolutionists have scoffed at that and have said, “No, it is due to similar ancestry.” Well, the argument has gone back and forth for some time.

In Darwin’s day, he thought it was very natural to suppose that one type of animal developed from another. We see small variations as we breed animals. After all, you take a dog who is a nondescript dog, and you can breed out this type or that type of dog. You can take cows and breed some cows for heavy milkers and breed other cows for good beef cattle and so on. The fact that animals do vary and that you can change them and vary them in different ways encouraged Darwin and others to think that you could extend this process – extrapolate, as we say – and that it would be possible from dogs to make wolves. And from wolves foxes, and from foxes coyotes, and so on; and that it would be possible to go from one type of finch to another type of finch to another type of finch, until you have a whole series of finches, and the finch turned into some other type of bird. This was the idea: that there was no barrier that you could not go beyond, or that nature could not go beyond, in the effect of environment on the individual animal.

Indeed, in Darwin’s day, it was common to believe that environment did change the creature. The thought was that if a person exercised greatly as if he were a blacksmith, then his son would be a strong person, that the characteristics of the father would be passed on to the son. And if the son improved and increased those characteristics, then his son would be that much the stronger. The inheritance of acquired characteristics – as it was called – this would be a very fine mechanism of evolution, but it has not panned out. Today people do not believe that. It is against our ideas and our careful observations.

Actually, that view was denied by the careful work in breeding by Gregor Mendel, the Austrian monk, whose material was published, by the way, and sent through the libraries of England but was not recognized for its full worth. It was only in later years that the work of Mendel was rediscovered, and many felt when it was rediscovered that this would be the end of the evolutionary view, because the discoveries of Mendel and his breeding experiments – particularly with flowering peas and other garden vegetables too. The experiments of breeding that Mendel carried on seemed to prove that you never have in the next generation things that you did not have in the previous, that just as the Genesis record would imply that organisms always breed true to type within the limits of their species. And so it was thought by many that this was a good argument against evolution, and indeed the evolutionary view did have to change. They no longer could hold that species just naturally varied in all direction and that eventually they would branch over the normal species barrier and become new species.

The mechanism of evolution, then, was changed in the views of scientists. De Vries is given credit for a new understanding of the alleged mechanism of evolution, and this was the subject of mutations. De Vries argued that the mechanism of evolution was mutations. You know what mutations are. They are sometimes called sports. You see them at county fairs. At county fairs you have a six-legged calf, perhaps, or short-legged sheep, or double-sized tomatoes, something like this. These mutations sometimes can be caused artificially. Sometimes they occur naturally. Sometimes they are very unfortunate, of course. You see a person who has a disfigured lip, a hair lip. And during the Thalidomide scare, there were babies who were born whose mothers had taken some drugs during pregnancy; and the poor children were born without arms, or otherwise disfigured. We have these mutations, and they are obvious, and they do occur.

The question is: Do these mutations give rise to new forms of life? Now this is a question of fact. One might suppose that these mutations did, but the question is: Do they as a matter of fact? And de Vries argued that they did, but later study has brought a question on that conclusion. There are two things we could do. We could speak of the possibilities or of the opinions of those who work in the field. To take the latter view, we may say that there are accomplished biologists who, as a matter of fact, believe that these mutations do not add up to big changes that would bridge the species gap. The question is, you see: Do these mutations add up in linear fashion so that you can go form Species 1 to Species 2 by the accumulation of mutations? Well, the mutations are mostly either fatal or at least hard for the organism. Because of this, and because mutations only occur occasionally, some have argued indeed that the mutations do not add up in a straight line, but curve around and revert to the original type. Those who have studied it express themselves this way.

Now one man who is often quoted on this subject is the late Richard Goldschmidt. I have in a book that I have written – Man: God’s Eternal Creation – on page 34, a quotation from Goldschmidt, who was a geneticist in California, a man who was in a position to know. Now I’m not saying that Goldschmidt’s theories are the ones that we should adopt. Indeed, his theories are not widely accepted, I believe, but as far as his observation on this particular point is concerned, he was capable of speaking with some authority. His words are:

Nobody has produced even a species by the selection of micro-mutations [that is, the addition of small mutations]. In the best-known organisms like Drosophila, the little fruit fly that has been much studied, innumerable mutants are known. If we were able to combine a thousand or more of such mutants in a single individual, this still would have no resemblance whatsoever to any type known as a species in nature.

And there are others that I’ve quotes there. W.R. Thompson of Canada, on the next page I quote from him: “There is a great divergence of opinion among biologists, not only about the causes of evolution, but even about the actual process. The divergence exists because the evidence is unsatisfactory and does not permit any certain conclusion.”

Another one, J.N.S. Sullivan, says: “It is not yet generally agreed, however, that in mutations we have found the actual raw material with which evolution has worked. Observed mutations, say some authorities, are not sufficiently profound to explain the origin of species.” And I have other quotations there too, and I think we may say that there is no clear evidence that organisms change into other major types because of mutations that change the organism little by little until finally you have a new species.

Now the word “species” is not entirely satisfactory. I prefer to speak of a change of major types of life, because species are defined differently by different authors. Sometimes a different finch will be one that has just a slight difference in the shape of the bill, or a bird might be a different species because it has a slightly different color feather. And you can indeed go from one species to another if you define species in this limited type. If, however, you speak of a change from one major type of life to another, there seems to be no conclusive biological evidence that you can get from one to the other by mutations.

I should point out that in this fruit fly, Drosophila, that has been studied since 1910 at Columbia University, they have made every effort to change the fly into another species. You have x-rays used, changes of humidity, environmental factors of different kinds, now, of course, treatments with radioactive cobalt; and there are changes made in the fruit flies. There are mutations. You have fruit flies that are blind, fruit flies that have long wings or short wings or stubby wings or no wings at all, with hair on their bodies, no hair on their bodies, banded eyes. There are different types of fruit flies; and, yet, after now some sixty years of experimentation, it seems clear that what they end up with is fruit flies – only just various kinds of fruit flies. So mutations, again, make changes within a limited area, but that they are a mechanism for changing one major type of life to another is denied by many advanced biologists.

And so the biological evidence in favor of change from one major type of life to another is really quite questionable and is being, I think, more and more denied. In foreign countries, in England and in Sweden and Canada, there seems to be more of a tendency to deny the biological argument for going from one major type of life to another than here in America as yet.

Now, of course, there are scientists who say, Well, we do not know the mechanism of evolution. In fact, many scientists would admit that we do not know the mechanism of evolution, but they say it is very clear from the record of the rocks that evolution did occur. This puts it, of course, in the argument from history. The trouble is the record of the rocks is difficult to evaluate in detail. Geology is a big book, and I myself believe that the last chapter has not yet been written. I don’t know that we need to hold to the idea that all the different sedimentary layers of rock in the world were laid down by Noah’s flood. Some people hold to that view; but even if you adopt the usual geological position that these layers of rock were laid down over long periods of time, even there when the record of the rocks is taken at its face value as now interpreted by scientists, even there you do not have a clear argument for evolution from one major type of life to another. There are geologists, and evolutionary geologists, who admit that we do not find great numbers of transitional forms from one species to another that the evolution theory suggests.

On page 39, I quote from G.G. Simpson, who is a well-known evolutionist, and he speaks of this regular absence of transitional forms. He says it is not confined to mammals but is an almost universal phenomenon, as has long been noted by paleontologists. And does it mean that evolution is no longer held by these men? No, we should face the fact that they do hold to what they call evolution. And yet I think it is worthwhile to say that the evolution they hold to is not quite the same as the Darwinian. The Darwinian evolution may be called general evolution – that all things developed from one or two small beginnings, original cells. A type of evolution that is coming into the fore more lately is what might be called a limited evolution, sometimes I believe called polyphyletic evolution, that there were several different phyla, several different forms of life that began independently. And I must say, if I believed that life began accidentally in an African lake, I think I would suppose that it happened more than once. It would be almost as easy to believe that it happened a hundred times as to believe that it happened once.

So the polyphyletic evolution, or the limited evolution, holds that there were several different evolutionary trees – how many they do not say. And actually they don’t know, and the Bible doesn’t say. I think we could say that there were as many evolutionary trees as required to fulfill the statements in the Bible that God made this type of plant, God made that type of animal, and these various kinds were thus created.

This does not answer all questions, doubtless, but at least it does give us some right to say that the old argument between science in the Bible in Genesis is abating somewhat and should be less significant in the future, as we realize the limitations of evolution as modern scientific theory seems to analyze them.