In any debate it is good strategy to acknowledge your opponent’s strongest point up front, so in “How the Discussion About Faith and Science Has Changed,” I wrote:
There are still many things about the history of life on Earth, such as the long times involved and the huge number of beetle species, that may leave us thinking, “God would not create things that way.” But Darwin’s implausible explanation for evolution becomes more implausible with every biological and biochemical discovery, and we are still clueless about the origin of life.
If there are things about the history of life that make it hard to imagine why a Creator would create that way, it is much harder to imagine how Nature alone could have created everything we see in the living world. If you don’t believe there was intelligent design involved somewhere in the origin or evolution of life, or in the evolution of conscious, intelligent, humans, you essentially believe that the fundamental, unintelligent forces of physics alone could have rearranged the fundamental particles of physics on Earth into supercomputers and nuclear power plants and smart phones.
A Mathematician’s View
The short video “A Mathematician’s View of Evolution” dramatizes this simple argument and this article highlights the video and shows that, contrary to the narrative promoted by many in the popular media, science has no clue as to how life could have originated or developed into intelligent humans without design. If, as I claim, evolutionists are not close to understanding how life began and have no plausible explanation for how it evolved into intelligent, conscious humans, then virtually all of their evidence for unguided evolution is of the form “This just looks like natural causes, because God would not create things that way,” an argument used frequently and explicitly by Charles Darwin in his Origin of Species.
But let’s look at a few of those things about the history of life that may leave us thinking “God would not create things that way.”
Another video, “Why Evolution Is Different,” beginning at 16:03, shows how similar the evolution of life is to the “evolution” of software or automobiles or other human technologies, with similarities between new creations and previous designs, but with large jumps where major new features appear, for the same reasons. Another way in which the evolution of life is like the evolution of human technology is the often-observed phenomenon of “convergence,” where similarities arise independently in distant branches of the evolutionary “tree”: for example, bats and dolphins developed echolocation abilities independently. As discussed at the end of this video, convergence suggests common design rather than common descent.
The Only Other Known Intelligent Beings
And even if we think our Creator should have used a magic wand instead of creating step-by-step like we do: humans are the only other known intelligent beings in the universe, so why should this be taken as an argument against intelligent design? Notice that the God of the Bible seems to create through testing and improvements: after each step God “saw that it was good” and proceeded to improve on his creation. No matter how intelligent a designer may be, he still has to get involved in the details. And at the end God “rested from all the work of creating that he had done.” This seems to suggest that God did more than wave a magic wand!
The fact that the universe seems to have been around for 14 billion years before conscious humans arrived is not a big problem for most Bible believers, I don’t think, despite the conflict with a literal interpretation of the seven-day creation story of Genesis. Does it matter how much time passed before conscious humans were around to experience time? “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it really make a sound?” The fact that the universe had a beginning at all is a much bigger problem for atheists. Since there were no natural causes before Nature came into existence, the Big Bang makes it reasonable to take at least the first verse of the Bible, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the Earth,” as literal truth.
So, what is it about the history of life that cries out most strongly “God would not create things that way?” For many people, including me, it is not the long periods involved in creating and testing other forms of life, or the similarities between modern humans and earlier primates, it is the unsettling claim that conscious humans have been around for hundreds of thousands of years, since long before recorded history — and not just because of the apparent disagreement with the early chapters of Genesis. Just showing a million-year-old human or near-human skull seems to be sufficient to silence most critics of Darwinism, even if it does not provide any evidence for a Darwinian origin of humans.
The Most Important Step
Despite false and misleading claims about a 98 percent similarity between human and chimp DNA, and despite the similarities between the skulls of modern humans and earlier primates, anyone with common sense can see that the transition to modern humans was not a minor step but surely the most important step in the history of life. The fossil skulls unearthed by paleontologists do not answer questions like: how did the brains inside those skulls develop language and abstract reasoning skills? And more importantly: how did those brains become conscious, how did “I” end up inside one of those skulls?
Harvard paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson wrote:
It is a feature of the known fossil record that most taxa appear abruptly…. Gaps among known species are sporadic and often small. Gaps among known orders, classes and phyla are systematic and almost always large.
If you think about what gradual transitions between major groups of animals would have looked like, you will understand why we don’t see them in the fossil record. Gradual development of the new organs or new systems of organs that gave rise to new orders, classes, and phyla would require the development of new but not yet useful features. The development of new organs through their initial useless stages obviously cannot be explained by natural selection, since new features present no selective advantage before they are useful.
The first few minutes of “Why Evolution Is Different” provide further documentation, including a New York Times News Service report on a 1980 meeting of “nearly all of the leading evolutionists” at Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History, for the assertion that major new features generally do not appear gradually in the fossil record and could not be explained by natural selection even if they did.
My 1980s PC and my 2025 PC look very similar on the outside, but the evolution of my new computer from the older model still required a lot of intelligent design. And while this “computer evolution” may have occurred in steps, it was not really gradual. It occurred in sudden jumps (e.g., from 32-bit to 64-bit processors) and most of these major technological improvements would not be apparent to future paleontologists if they could only dig up the outer frames after the inner hardware and software had disappeared. And since major new features appear suddenly throughout the history of life, it seems quite reasonable to believe that the major new features that appeared in the human brain, which is far more complex than any modern computer, also occurred in sudden jumps, even if these jumps are now invisible to paleontologists, who only find the skulls.
We Are Free to Speculate
Thus, it seems reasonable to believe that consciousness might also have appeared suddenly, and I think we are free to speculate about when this momentous step might have occurred. According to the Genesis account, “God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.” When did mankind become conscious? The Genesis account could be interpreted to suggest that this happened after the human animal was formed physically. Please note that I am not claiming to have scientific evidence that conscious humans have only been around for a few thousand years, only that it is possible to believe this without being unreasonable or unscientific, and without disputing the findings of paleontology. All of this involves a lot of speculation, but what is truly unreasonable is to believe that human brains could have evolved without design over any length of time. The short video “Evolution Is a Natural Process Running Backward” shows, with a touch of humor and sarcasm, how unnatural unguided evolution really is.
In the last chapter of my 2025 book Christianity for Doubters I tried to address the question, “Why does God remain backstage, hidden from view, working behind the scenes while we act out our parts in the human drama?” I attempted to answer this by imagining what life would be like for us if God did “walk out onto the stage and take on a more direct and visible role,” and doubt became impossible. That would cheapen our greatest accomplishments, for one thing. Since we don’t know the mind of God, we can never be sure of our answers to this question. But we do know enough about Nature to be sure that unintelligent forces alone could not have created all the magnificent species in the living world, including intelligent, conscious, humans.