Design Requires A Designer

“YES,” AND “NO,” SAY EVOLUTIONISTS

“EVERY HOUSE IS CONSTRUCTED BY SOMEONE, BUT HE THAT CONSTRUCTED ALL THINGS IS GOD.”​—HEBREWS 3:4

NO EVOLUTIONIST would contend that an inanimate house could build itself. But he is dogmatic that an inanimate universe did​—a universe with unknown millions of galaxies, each galaxy with unknown millions of stars, and all moving in awesome grandeur with split-second timing.

And much more than that. On earth, say the evolutionists, all the myriads of living organisms constructed themselves out of their ancestors, this continuing all the way back to an original first parent of everything, which spontaneously constructed itself out of nonliving chemicals. Neither is the evolutionist deterred from this course by the appalling complexity and the intricate and purposeful design found in all these living things.

We marvel at the ingenious inventions of human designers, but the greatest of their works is insignificant in comparison with the simplest living organism. With all their 20th-century scientific technology, they cannot even begin to construct a little single-celled amoeba. Yet they have no difficulty in assigning to blind chance​—random mutations with questionable help from natural selection—​the power to construct all life on the earth.

In this there is a glaring inconsistency. Evolutionists can blithely assign to chance the power to design all complex living creatures, and at the same time insist that extremely simple objects require the existence of an intelligent designer.

For example, a scientist digs in some ancient rubble, finds an oblong stone that has a groove circling its middle and confidently announces that it was bound to a stick and used as a hammer or weapon by primitive man. It was designed for a purpose by an intelligent creature. Not so, however, the feather of a bird. A flight feather may have thousands of barbs growing out of the shaft, hundreds of thousands of barbules out of the barbs, and millions of barbicels, or hooklets, to hold all these parts together for flying. If barbs get separated, they can be zipped together again by the bird’s beak. Zippers​—long before man “invented” them!

The product of an intelligent designer? Not to the evolutionist, who says: “How did this structural marvel evolve? It takes no great stretch of imagination to envisage a feather as a modified scale, basically like that of a reptile​—a longish scale loosely attached, whose outer edges frayed and spread out until it evolved into the highly complex structure that it is today.”​—Life Nature Library, The Birds, p. 34.

Another example of the evolutionist’s arbitrariness: The evolutionist finds a flat stone with a sharp edge, and he is sure this was designed by an intelligent Stone Age man as a knife or scraper. However, no designer is needed, the evolutionist tells us, for the little beetle called “mimosa girdler.” The female climbs up the mimosa tree, crawls out to the end of a limb, cuts a slit in the bark and lays her eggs there. Then she crawls back to the middle of the limb, gnaws a circle around the branch deep enough to cut through the cambium layer, and the end of the branch dies and falls off. The beetle’s eggs scatter and hatch, and the cycle begins again. The mimosa tree, in turn, benefits. It is pruned, and because of this lives twice as long​—40 or 50 years—​as it would otherwise. In fact, the mimosa tree puts out a scent to attract the mimosa girdler, and this little beetle can reproduce in no other tree. The flat, sharp stone required a designer; the mimosa girdler just happened. Or so we are told.

Another comparison: A small piece of sharp flint shaped like an arrowhead convinces the evolutionist that it was designed by man to use on the tip of an arrow or a spear. Such purposeful, designed things, he concludes, cannot happen by chance. But spiders are another matter, he says. Consider the spider Aranea. It has six teats, each having some 100 taps, each tap connected by an individual tube to a separate gland inside the spider. It can make separate threads or join them to produce a broad band of silk. Spiders manufacture seven kinds of silk. No species makes all seven, all have at least three, and Aranea makes five. Its 600 pipes do not all make silk; some extrude glue to make some of the web sticky. Aranea, however, oils her feet and never gets stuck. The source of these spinnerets? Legs became spinnerets, evolutionists say.

Reflect: The spider has the chemical lab to make the silk, the physical mechanisms to spin it, and the instinctive know-how to make the web. Any one of these is useless without the other two. They must all evolve by chance, at the same time, in the same spider. Evolutionists believe they did. Do you? Which could more easily just happen​—the sharp bit of flint, or the spider?

Let’s enter the space age to listen to Dr. Carl Sagan of Cornell University. “It is easy to create an interstellar radio message,” he says, “which can be recognized as emanating unambiguously from intelligent beings.” He believes that “by far the most promising method is to send pictures.” One suggested picture to send would show a man, woman, child, the solar system and several atoms​—all accomplished by sending a series of dots and dashes, each one called a “bit” of information, and requiring 1,271 bits in all.

Please reason on this. If 1,271 bits of information in a certain sequence suggested order and design and “unambiguously” proved it was “from intelligent beings,” what about the some 10 thousand million bits of information encoded in the chromosomes of every living cell? Evolutionists say the 1,271 bits of information ‘unambiguously prove an intelligent designer,’ but dismiss 10 thousand million bits of information as needing no designer, as just happening.

Do you not find such reasoning illogical, arbitrary, even prejudiced? If simple designs require a designer, would not extremely complex ones make a far stronger demand for an even greater designer? British theorist Edward Milne, when considering the origin of the universe, wisely concluded: “Our picture is incomplete without Him.”

[Picture on page 15]

THE ARROWHEAD REQUIRES A DESIGNER, BUT DNA DOESN’T?