Why I Stopped Believing in Evolution

When I was in high school and college, I was an evolutionist.

I was thoroughly schooled in the fine points of Darwinism, from the Stanley Miller experiment showing amino acids coming together in the "primordial soup" to the embryo drawings of Haeckel to the moth in England during the Industrial Revolution mutating to change colors against the dust-covered trunks of trees.

Furthermore, I was taught that every scientist and especially every thinking person believed evolution to be fact.  The only people who didn't believe in Darwin's theory of the origin of life were wild-eyed fundamentalists that believed the earth was still flat and that the sun orbited the earth.  I must also make the disclaimer that micro AND macroevolution were not differentiated- evidence for microevolution was passed off as evidence for macroevolution and abiogenesis, which in my opinion was intellectually dishonest.

Following my teaching, I scoffed at any attempt to bring creationism or intelligent design to the table.  I had been vaccinated against such anti-intellectualism.  Creationists were obviously living in the 18th-century and probably still rode in horse-drawn carriages. 

Needless to say, I was a hard sell.  It must have taken a lot of convincing and years and years of proof to persuade me to leave the atheistic notion of unguided natural selection and mutation leading to the presence of life, right?

Actually, no.  It was a funeral that changed my thinking.

In 1996, my senior year at Centre College, I was taking an advanced biochemistry and molecular biology course where we were studying in detail the miracle of DNA.  I had thoroughly studied the double-helix formation and the four bases (A,T,C, and G) that made up the genetic language that dictated the blueprint of the person or animal.  I studied the replication of DNA and the total miracle going on constantly in the nucleus of each cell.

Then, my grandfather died.

I remember standing behind his casket at his funeral, waiting to enter the church building for the funeral to begin.  All of a sudden it hit me- here was a man made up of 75 trillion cells.  He has all the parts of a living being- a brain, a digestive system, arms, legs, etc- and his cells are full of DNA.  He has all the parts that my education had told me are essential to life, yet he is lying here dead in front of me.  Therefore, I surmised, life has to be greater than the sum total of the material parts of a body.

There had to be something, I concluded, that left my grandfather when he died.  Something immaterial.  Nothing had changed physically in my grandfather from his last moment alive to his first moment dead.  He hadn't lost his heart or his brain or any other PART.  However, one moment he was alive and the next moment he was dead.

So, I began asking my friends who were diehard evolutionists what that non-material thing was.  What was it that left my grandfather so that one moment he was alive and the next moment he was dead?  No one could answer me.  One honest person, who is a professional biochemist, told me that the best thing he had to offer is that we are bags of chemicals, and when those chemicals are used up, we die.  While I appreciated his honesty, that didn't sound very convincing.  Certainly not enough to satisfy my curiosity.

I then began to ask my friends, "At what point in the story of the world did life enter the picture?  What was the particular combination of chemical reactions that moved non-living matter to living, breathing LIFE?" 

No one can answer me this question. 

And no one will be able to answer that question.  Because there is no answer to that question.

We can't concoct enough chemical reactions or put enough parts together to make life happen.  Life is imparted, not created.  Life is given from one living being to another.  That's the way human life happens- a living mother and a living father impart life to a baby.  For all of our intelligence and scientific advancement, we cannot make life out of non-life. 

Therefore, if we move back in time, there has to be an uncreated, eternal Being that was the first imparter of life.  This Being is known as God.  The eternal God, uncreated and sovereign, imparted life to the earth.  He created all the structures necessary for life, and then breathed the breath of life into the world.  Look around you- all around you you see living beings imparting life to other living beings:  human babies in the hospital, mother birds laying eggs and hatching new baby birds, horses giving birth to young.  All of these have one thing in common- life was imparted to the young by another living being. 

There is no chemical reaction that can impart life.  There is no assembling of right structures and right chemicals and right information that can spontaneously transform non-living elements into a living, breathing, replicating being. 

This is why I stopped believing in an atheistic, unguided, random mutation natural selection explanation for the beginning of life.  Life doesn't spontaneously generate.  It never has and it never will.  Do I believe in mutation?  Yes.  Do I believe things change over time?  Sure.  Those things, however, don't explain life.  It is intellectually dishonest to look at the similarity between chimpanzees and humans and jump to the conclusion that life originated by non-living matter spontaneously becoming living matter. 

Anyway, that's my story of movement from one thoroughly schooled in abiogenesis and evolution to my belief that life is a product of an eternal, uncreated, living Being who imparted life to this world.