Name
Professor Martin
English 1301
25 April 2008
The Intelligent Design Argument and the Theory of Evolution
“Though invoking God may not be strictly part of science, it is the spirit of science to follow the evidence and its implications wherever they lead us.  We shouldn’t shrink back from the God hypothesis if that’s what the facts fit” (Strobel 150).  Charles Darwin proposed his theory of evolution in 1859, and Darwin enthusiasts have tried for decades to fit the evidence they have unearthed to Darwin’s model of evolution.  At the same time, as more of the past is discovered, the harder it is to conform those discoveries to Darwin’s model, and the easier it is to follow the evidence as it conforms to the theory of Intelligent Design. Before one can argue for or against Intelligent Design, one must realize that though a theory, the argument “for Intelligent Design is based on physical evidence and straightforward application of logic” (Behe 717).  It is not religion based, and has nothing to do with the origin of life.  All that Intelligent Design argues for is the appearance of intelligence behind nature.  Evolutionists argue that having faith that something is true does not make to be good science.  Yet both an ‘intelligent designer’, and evolution require a certain amount of faith.  No one has seen a ‘God’ but no one has seen evolution in action either (Muncaster 224).  Darwin’s various arguments for evolution using the fossil record, the various models shown in text books, and the breakdown of complexity and mutations and the the universe become less and less convincing as more is discovered.  
The fossil record is commonly used as strong evidence supporting Darwin’s Theory of Evolution.  For example, scientists have sequenced skulls from the same species or related species to show that humans, for one, have evolved over time.  Ralph Muncaster, author of Dismantling Evolution, comments that sequencing skulls “is very weak proof.”  He says for instance, someone from the far future could dig up skulls from this generation with all its diversity from the different parts of the world, and sequence them in an order to show that one structure was a descendent from another. (79)  They could take skulls from Asia with their wide cheek bones and sequence them with the narrow bone structure of Europeans. Yet another way Darwinists use the fossil record to their advantage is through Darwin’s Tree of Life.  It is true that Darwin’s Tree of Life illustrates his ideas well, but his theory “is not supported by the physical evidence scientists have found in fossils” (Strobel 43).  According to his picture and theory, all animals and plants are related to one another through a common ancestor.  No animal is completely unique because every animal had evolved from the same first animal on earth.  For example, Darwinists say that birds came from reptiles.  They go back in the fossil record and look for reptiles with more bird like features to give proof, but they find that there is a gap between a bird and a reptile.  They do find an animal termed the archaeopteryx, which they call proof of a half reptile and half bird, the missing link, but with further investigation, they find that “it’s a bird with modern feathers … and different from reptiles in many ways” (Strobel 57).  This so called ‘missing link’ has no qualities of a reptile. The way its reproductive system is built, its bone structure, the respiratory structure, its balance, and muscle set up is exactly like a modern bird’s.  In fact this archaeopteryx has been placed millions of years after the first birds.  With the googles of fossils found, no transitional species have been found, the animals either have a quality, or they do not; they either have eyes or they do not, no animal has only a partial quality; the missing link, is still missing.  In the Origin of Species and according to Strobel, Darwin knew the fossil record did not support his Tree of Life.  He acknowledged that “major groups of animals, now called phyla appear suddenly in the fossil record” (43). The Tree of Life does not predict this group of animals, in fact the Cambrian Explosion turns Darwin’s tree upside down.  The Cambrian Explosion is a period of time in the past that suddenly a very large amount of animals with no seemingly relation to any existing animals, appeared.  As told by  Muncaster, the Intelligent Design Theory leaves room for fully formed creatures to appear suddenly, which is exactly what the fossil record indicates (82).
The Tree of Life is not the only wrong or misleading evidence shown for evolution, various examples in textbooks have now been proven faulty.   One of the most embarrassing mistakes is the example shown with a peppered moth pictured on a tree trunk.  Biologists have known from the 1980’s that moths don’t rest on tree trunks, they rest on the underside of leaves.  Yet another mistake is Haeckel’s Embryo drawings.  The picture shows fish, salamander, turtle, chicken, rabbit, and human embryos lined up and looking very similar as evidence for common ancestry. But, biologists have known for over a century that when one looks at the actual embryos, they are all extremely different, the drawings were faked.  Lastly, the 1953 Miller-Urey experiment shows how life’s building blocks may have formed on the early Earth, but conditions on the early Earth were nothing like those used in the experiment.  Lee Strobel comments that Miller used a hydrogen rich mixture of methane, ammonia, and water vapor.  Even though no one knows what the atmosphere was like in the beginning, there is “no evidence for [methane-ammonia] but much evidence against it” (37).  Scientist’s best guess now is that there was very little hydrogen.  This is because hydrogen is a very light chemical and would have escaped into space.  Instead they hypothesize that the atmosphere was composed of carbon dioxide, nitrogen and water vapor.  When using Miller’s mixture, one does not end up with the building blocks of life, amino acids; instead one creates formaldehyde and cyanide.  Formaldehyde desecrates proteins in the air just with its fumes, and cyanide destroys embryos. When one combines these two chemicals together, one gets an embalming fluid, which as the joke goes, has nothing to do with the preservation of life (Strobel 38).  There is no overwhelmingly accepted theory that explains how life began.  The immense amount of knowledge in chemistry to be known and the fragile state of life may mean that there will never be a commonly accepted theory of how life spontaneously risen.  And in the words of Bradley, quoted by Lee Strobel, that is why he is convinced that the ‘absolutely overwhelming evidence’ points toward an intelligence behind life’s creation” (41).
Darwin’s theory predicts that eventually as scientists go deeper into an organism, the complexity will become simplicity.  Sadly for Evolutionists, the opposite has come to be true.  As Strobel puts it, even the cell is horrendously complex.  Each cell is run by multiple ‘micromachines’ of which must be the right shape, the right chemical, and the right strength to make the cell work (197). In other words, Darwin’s theory has been proven wrong yet again.  Instead of living organisms becoming simpler, they become more and more complex the deeper one looks.  Michael Behe calls it “irreducible complexity” with its “signal transduction circuits, sophisticated reactors and all kinds of biological circuitry” (qtd. in Strobel 79).  Lastly, textbooks use fruit flies with an extra pair of wings as evidence that DNA mutations can supply raw materials for evolution. These extra wings have no muscles and the disabled mutants cannot survive outside the laboratory.  As one can see, the more research done in science, the less power evolution has in explaining our increasing knowledge.  At the same time Intelligent Design provides a foundation for guess work and further investigations in science (Hunter 13).
Not only do mutations do nothing for the creature, they are fatal most the time - only .1 percent of the time, do mutations help.  A mutation is like a typing mistake, a mistake in typing rarely if ever improves the sentence (Muncaster 152). If anything the typo takes information away from the sentence.  For example, the sentence, ‘The cat saw the rat.’  A mutation such as a deletion or frameshift would render this sentence unreadable.  Take the letter ‘h’ out and it reads, ‘Tec ats awt her at.’ The cell no longer knows what do to with the information and throws it out.  It is the same thing with mutations in animal genes.  For example, with the fruit flies, the only purposes the extra pairs of wings serve are to get in the way of the normal wings. Thus, the mutation spells out certain death for the estranged fruit fly.
There are many irreducibly complex systems in the body.  Irreducibly complex systems are objects or living cells that cannot be reduced to a simple ‘machine,’ all the parts must be in existence for the object or cell to work.  For example, eye sight.  The cornea, pupil, iris, along with all the other systems in the lens, muscles and retina with its “120 million rods and 7 million cones as well as a brain to interpret the information” (Muncaster 165).  For the purpose of this essay, let us just look at the light sensing cell, either a rod or a cone.  There are twelve steps the body must go through to get the result of vision.  Michael Behe gives the simplest explanation in his version of the biochemical cycle of a light-sensitive cell.  He says that first light hits the rod or cone in the eye and the light photon interacts with a molecule called 11-cis-retinal. This chemical then rearranges this energy from the photon into readable material called trans-retinal.  This change in information in the retinal molecule forces a protein in the eye called rhodopsin to bond tightly to the retinal information.  The change in the shape of the protein changes its function and thus is renamed metarhodopsin II.  This new protein binds to yet another protein called transducin.  Transducin was formally bonded to a molecule called GDP, but as transducin interacts with metarhodopsin II, the GDP falls off and a new chemical called GTP binds to transducin.  The GTP-transducin-metarhodopsin then binds to another protein called phosphodiesterase, which is located in the inner membrane of the rod or cone.  The interaction between these two chemicals enables the phosphodiestrase to cut a molecule called cGMP, thus lowering the concentration of the cGMP.  The cGMP regulates sodium ions in the cell creating an ion channel.  Thus when the cGMP levels drop the ion channel closes and that creates an over abundance of sodium ions which then travel down the opic nerve to the brain interpreted as vision (Muncaster 167). This is just one way Darwin’s evolution fails in its theory.  As said before, Darwin said that the smaller or the deeper one goes into a cell, the simpler the mechanics must become. This is still not the case.
Not only do organisms get more complex as they get smaller, but they also become complex as organisms get larger.  Take the universe for example; a statistical study by Dr. Hugh Ross, quoted by Ralph Muncaster says that the probability for everything in the universe to fall where it is now is about 10-166.  If even one of the 128 parameters was off by a small percent, life would not be possible. Just a few of the ‘must haves’ for life, and the chance that it randomly occurred are as follows:
	The location of our galaxy:				.1%   
The type of galaxy:					.1%
Our sun’s distance from the center of the galaxy:	.005%
The mass of the sun:					.001%
Our planet’s distance from the sun:			.001%
The tilt of the axis of Earth:				.3%
Earth’s rotation around the axis:			.1%
The mass of the moon and distance from Earth:	.01%
The position of Jupiter:				.01%
Earth’s surface gravity:				.001%
The thickness of the crust on Earth:			.01%
Oceans-to-continents ratio:				.2%        
Atmospheric pressure:				.01%
Carbon dioxide level in atmosphere:			.01%
Oxygen level in atmosphere:				.01%
Oxygen-to-nitrogen ratio in atmosphere:		.1%
The thickness of the tropospheric ozone:		.01%
Water vapor in atmosphere:				.01%
Soil mineralization:					.1%
Amount of bacteria in the oceans:			.01%
Amount of decomposer bacteria in soil:		.01%
Tectonic activity:					.05%
The number, intensity, and location of hurricanes:	.02%
Longevity of these requirements:			.0000001% 
In other words, if all of these possibilities came together by chance, and only chance, it would be considered a miracle. Yet a miracle by definition is not science and requires an intelligent being to intervene.
In conclusion, Darwin himself said, “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down” (Strobel 197).  Not only does the evidence for evolution crumble under scrutiny, but there is plenty of evidence against evolution as seen.  In the words of Dr. Collins, “The extraordinary fine tuning of the laws and constants of nature, their beauty, their discoverability, their intelligibility – all of this combines to make the God hypothesis the most reasonable choice we have.  All other theories fall short” (qtd. in Strobel 149).

Works Cited
Behe, Michael. Foreword. Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between Science and Theology. By William A. Dembski. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1999. 
Behe, Michael. “Design For Living.” Intelligent Design: Is It Science. +-717. 
Hunter, Cornelius G. Darwin's Proof: The Triumph of Religion Over Science. Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2003. 
Muncaster, Ralph O. Dismantling Evolution: Building the Case for Intelligent Design. Eugene, OR: Harvest House Publishers, 2003. 
Strobel, Lee. The Case For A Creator: A Journalist Investigates Scientific Evidence That Points Toward God. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2004.