WorldNetDaily Poll: Life--or Something Like It

The poll question of the day on WorldNetDaily is deceptively simple: "What is the origin of human beings on earth?"

The options in the daily poll might be called, in this order:

1. Creationism: God created human beings in their present form. Actually, the more accurate position would be: God created man to be perfect, but man fell and thus assumed his present form.
2. Non-theistic Intelligent Design. This is for those who accept Intelligent Design but aren't willing to go so far as to call the Design-er by the Name of God. All that Intelligent Design says is that certain evidence--including the "irreducible complexity" of cells and the incredible intricacy of various life forms and their inter-relationships--bespeaks design, and not accident. Even a single cell is orders-of-magnitude more complex than a pocket watch--and yet no one would ever claim that a pocket watch assembled itself out of nothing, with a fully functioning movement. But Intelligent Design does not speculate on the nature or motives of the Designer. It's just that where you have design, you must have a Designer--which is why atheistic modernists are so afraid of it.
3. Theistic evolution--that God guided a process that took millions of years to run. This is a most unsatisfactory compromise of Scripture with the oft-repeated aphorism that "the earth and the cosmos are billions of years old." Multiple sources clearly indicate that this is not and indeed cannot be the case. And if the earth is indeed young, then evolution is impossible--and thus no case remains for mixing biblical truth with "scientific" conjecture that turns out to be unfounded and unwarranted.
4. Atheistic evolution. I'll say this for this position: at least its proponents are honest. They want nothing to do with God, and never did. A number of them have admitted why: because admitting the existence of God makes the liable for their sexual and other peccadillos. But the arguments against atheistic evolution are as telling as those against theistic evolution: that the earth just flatly isn't that old, and that "intermediate stages" would never have functioned, given irreducible complexity (see Intelligent Design above).
5. Directed panspermia. The most celebrated proponents of this theory are Francis Crick of DNA fame, and his colleague, Leslie Orgel. Crick knew perfectly well that DNA was too complex to have "evolved." But the man who once snidely told Winston Churchill that a campus brothel would be less objectionable to him than a chapel was not likely to give God the glory. So instead he said that an advanced civilization, presumably in another galaxy, fired a brace of missiles every whilch way, each laden with bacteria and blue-green algae. One crashed on earth, and we are its descendants. (Perhaps another such missile crashed on Mars, with less promising results, if the Mars Society is right and life might exist on Mars.) Of course, neither Crick nor Orgel are willing to comment on the origins, nature, or motives of this alien launch authority. We could speculate endlessly, but probably to no very high purpose. The chief strike against directed panspermia is this: where did those aliens come from? Directed panspermia is an "infinitely regressive" concept, one that assumes that you have to go back further, and further, and further in time to explain the origins of any civilization, advanced or retarded, if you are not willing to allow for a Creator. In short, infinite regression is a fancy phrase for begging the question.

Enjoy the poll for what it is--but at least vote in it with your eyes wide open.