I believe in Creation

So says Joseph Farah at WorldNetDaily, and so say I.

At issue with Mr. Farah is the latest wrangling in school boards--and the courts (what else is new?)--regarding the teaching of evolution on one side and Intelligent Design on the other.

Intelligent Design, or ID, basically says that life is far too complex to have happened by chance. Properly understood, ID makes no attempt to name the Designer or even to speculate on His nature, origins, or motives. (I capitalize that, as The Amplified Bible might, because of Whom we're really talking about, regardless of What anyone might think we're talking about.) That's because ID steers clear of untestable assumptions. Instead, ID tests the central assumption of evolution--that, given enough time, even the building of life can happen--and finds it false.

How false? Simple: evolution is what we call a null hypothesis, or a statement that things just happen in a certain way, without any outside intervention. In order to accept a null hypothesis, the odds against a thing happening cannot be any longer than nineteen to one--which statisticians express as "a five percent probability." You want to know how long the odds really are for just one cell forming? Even the maintainers of the "Skeptic's Dictionary" admit that the odds against DNA forming are on the order of one followed by forty thousand zeroes, to one. Of course, determined skeptics try to finesse that by saying, for example, that the parts of an irreducibly complex system do not evolve one at a time, but together. Just one problem: When success depends on two or more events occurring together, the overall probability of success is the product of the probabilities of the separate events. Thus for parts of a complex system to evolve together is actually harder than for any of those parts to evolve separately.

But that's not all that's wrong with evolution. Simply put, the earth hasn't been around that long--and it couldn't have been around nearly long enough for anything like "evolution" to have taken place. Ten thousand years ago, the earth's magnetic field would have been strong enough to rip it apart. If comets were seventy-six hundred or more years old, Halley's Comet would not have been naked-eye visible in its last visit, back in 1988--or at the very least it would have been a lot dimmer than it is. If the earth were half as old as the evolutionary astronomers say, then the moon would have been touching the earth. You name it; it can't work out.

That's why, according to Tom Wolfe (interviewed for this month's print issue of The American Spectator), some theorists speculate that the first-ever living cell came from a meteor strike from space. (Meteors apparently containing living matter have struck the earth. But the living matter is never reliably distinguishable from something you can find on earth anyway. So how did they get into space? Answer: meteors came from earth; see here and follow the frame link for "The Origin of Asteroids and Meteoroids.") That's also (though Wolfe did not mention this) why Francis Crick, no less, is openly speculating that life on earth came, not in a meteorite, but in an interstellar payload from an ancient civilization, now long since dead (and how does he know that, and where did they come from?). And it's because of goofy theories like that, Tom Wolfe goes on to say, that evolution will last another forty years and then "go down in flames."

So why are we continuing to lend credence to the idea that Intelligent Design is merely religion in scientific dress? As Farah says, evolution qualifies as that--or maybe as anti-religion. Either way, it's false. We all owe it to ourselves to stand up for truth against falsehood.