Christians should not be afraid to witness to the evolutionist. He is extremely vulnerable to a calm and serious approach. By asking him the right questions, we can expose his intellectual and spiritual bankruptcy. Here are some examples:
1). Is the universe eternal?
Possible answers:
“Yes.”
Your answer: “How does that square with the law of causation, that is one of the foundations of all science and all rational thought and discourse? Even the smallest thing is assumed to have a cause. How can the whole thing be un-caused when every part has a cause? Can the universe be its own cause?”
“No, it's thirteen billion years old.”
Your answer: “What was there before that?”
If he says, “Nothing”, then you ask “How could everything come from nothing?”
If he says there was “The singularity” or something implying the existence of matter or energy, space, time or the laws of nature, then ask him, “Where did that come from?”
2. Is our sense of the value of human life an illusion?
“Yes. We are no more special than other animals.”
Your answer: “But we kill animals, don't we? Is it okay to kill people?”
“No. I believe we have value.”
Your answer: “Well why do you believe that?”
3. Do good and evil really exist?
“Yes, and I think it's evil to try to enslave our minds to religion.”
Your answer: “Why do you think that? What is the source of knowledge and standard of right by which you judge? How can there be good and evil at all in an impersonal universe?”
“No, they're just conventions we've agreed to live by.”
Your answer: “Then you have no reason not to do a little evil now and then when nobody is watching?”
If you ask questions like these, you may get some interesting answers. Often, the evolutionist will get frustrated when he realizes he has no answer. Don't take it personally if he gets insulting. That's his natural reaction when his illusions are threatened. After all, evolutionists think that evolution is a fact that explains everything. When they begin to realize that it explains nothing, they sometimes forget their manners. Really, that's a good sign! It means you're getting to them.
Here are a few more questions that they can't answer:
4. If the human mind is ultimately the product of blind, undirected processes, how can it be trusted? In that case, all our “reasoning” may be just a trick for purposes of survival. There is no reason to believe that anything we say is objectively true, is there?
5. How did life originate in a world of inanimate matter? There are about two hundred proteins in the simplest living cell. What produced them, and how did they get arranged in such a complex fashion, and energized, so that life could begin?
6. Where did the information come from that is found encoded in the DNA of the simplest living things? The new science of information tells us that information only comes from intelligence, and only exists within designed systems. It is not information unless it follows the rules of a system of communication – that is, of a language. It must have a sender and a receiver that also obeys the rules of the language in decoding it and knows how to respond to it. (Read Werner Gitt's In the Beginning was Information.)
7. Who wrote the code? Coding systems, especially complex coding systems that have transcribers, interpreters, archives, storage systems, libraries, error-correction mechanisms and the like can hardly have come into existence without intention, without a designing intelligence and a master technician.
8. How is it that, in an undesigned universe, one that is supposedly characterized by randomness, there is a regularity and order that allows us to predict outcomes and “do science”? The God of the Bible upholds all things by the word of His power. He maintains order, and works miracles when He wishes. Nothing is truly random. But atheism can give no reason why science is possible. On his premises, all his “knowledge” and sense of order may be an illusion.
9. Why is the universe and the earth so remarkably “tuned” to the conditions necessary for life? (Gravitational strength, the distance from the sun, the magnetic field strength, etc.) Read The Case for a Creator, by Lee Stroebel.
10. How could the first living thing reproduce? The odds against the random creation and juxtaposition of the minimum number of proteins for life are astronomical. What happens if we factor in the elements of structure and order of a living cell? Now include the odds of it being so organized that it has the capability of replication? Anything with odds of one in ten to the fiftieth power is considered impossible. According to the experts in probability theory, nothing that unlikely ever happens. We're talking about odds many times smaller than that. But for evolution to occur, the very first living thing, our supposed “common ancestor” had to have that ability from the get-go, or evolution into higher forms would be impossible.
11. How did this proposed primitive organism develop animal conscious-ness? Did it come all at once, or in many small stages? Logic tells us that there had to be a point when it began. Until then, there was no reason why the various parts of the nervous system could develop or organize. Starting out with no brain, how did the brain finally come about? Until it was functional, it would be a useless organ.
But why assume that consciousness can be explained by material processes? It can't! Self-consciousness, even of the animal type, involves information, which is neither matter nor energy.
12. How did rationality, which is inseparable from speech and language, evolve from a primitive consciousness by random processes? In other words, how did that dumb ape become intelligent? How did he happen to invent abstract thinking and communication? To do that, he would have had to have already had them, which is a contradiction.
13. How did the consciousness of right and wrong evolve in animals evolving on the basis of survival of the fittest? Altruism is a great liability in a world of savages. Honesty and kindness won't get one very far among people without consciences. It only makes one fit to be a victim. Conscience, if it could develop somehow in that milieu, would soon have become extinct.
14. How (and why) did sexual reproduction replace the original asexual system? How did two different animals get the corresponding complementary parts, physiologies, mechanisms and motivations to make this work? What are the odds that they lived in the same place, and yet one became a fully-developed female and the other a male? How did they know what to do with the new equipment? Why would they want to do it? Furthermore, no one who has prototyped even a simple machine is foolish enough to expect it to work right the first time and regularly afterward. This is simply impossible!
It can be seen that evolutionists believe in miracles far more incredible than the ones in the Bible. Why do I say that? Because these sheer impossibilities that they say must have happened have no purposive cause behind them, no omnipotent, omniscient Deity to perform them. Apparently, against all odds, they spontaneously “just happen”! The whole universe, they say, came into existence by a “quantum singularity” (An event with no known cause) that then exploded and generated all the elements (They can't say how), all the stars and galaxies (They're not sure about the details), all life (They don't yet know how life began). One miracle after another, but no miracle-worker! But we are supposed to be the ones relying on blind faith!
Howard Douglas King
1). Is the universe eternal?
Possible answers:
“Yes.”
Your answer: “How does that square with the law of causation, that is one of the foundations of all science and all rational thought and discourse? Even the smallest thing is assumed to have a cause. How can the whole thing be un-caused when every part has a cause? Can the universe be its own cause?”
“No, it's thirteen billion years old.”
Your answer: “What was there before that?”
If he says, “Nothing”, then you ask “How could everything come from nothing?”
If he says there was “The singularity” or something implying the existence of matter or energy, space, time or the laws of nature, then ask him, “Where did that come from?”
2. Is our sense of the value of human life an illusion?
“Yes. We are no more special than other animals.”
Your answer: “But we kill animals, don't we? Is it okay to kill people?”
“No. I believe we have value.”
Your answer: “Well why do you believe that?”
3. Do good and evil really exist?
“Yes, and I think it's evil to try to enslave our minds to religion.”
Your answer: “Why do you think that? What is the source of knowledge and standard of right by which you judge? How can there be good and evil at all in an impersonal universe?”
“No, they're just conventions we've agreed to live by.”
Your answer: “Then you have no reason not to do a little evil now and then when nobody is watching?”
If you ask questions like these, you may get some interesting answers. Often, the evolutionist will get frustrated when he realizes he has no answer. Don't take it personally if he gets insulting. That's his natural reaction when his illusions are threatened. After all, evolutionists think that evolution is a fact that explains everything. When they begin to realize that it explains nothing, they sometimes forget their manners. Really, that's a good sign! It means you're getting to them.
Here are a few more questions that they can't answer:
4. If the human mind is ultimately the product of blind, undirected processes, how can it be trusted? In that case, all our “reasoning” may be just a trick for purposes of survival. There is no reason to believe that anything we say is objectively true, is there?
5. How did life originate in a world of inanimate matter? There are about two hundred proteins in the simplest living cell. What produced them, and how did they get arranged in such a complex fashion, and energized, so that life could begin?
6. Where did the information come from that is found encoded in the DNA of the simplest living things? The new science of information tells us that information only comes from intelligence, and only exists within designed systems. It is not information unless it follows the rules of a system of communication – that is, of a language. It must have a sender and a receiver that also obeys the rules of the language in decoding it and knows how to respond to it. (Read Werner Gitt's In the Beginning was Information.)
7. Who wrote the code? Coding systems, especially complex coding systems that have transcribers, interpreters, archives, storage systems, libraries, error-correction mechanisms and the like can hardly have come into existence without intention, without a designing intelligence and a master technician.
8. How is it that, in an undesigned universe, one that is supposedly characterized by randomness, there is a regularity and order that allows us to predict outcomes and “do science”? The God of the Bible upholds all things by the word of His power. He maintains order, and works miracles when He wishes. Nothing is truly random. But atheism can give no reason why science is possible. On his premises, all his “knowledge” and sense of order may be an illusion.
9. Why is the universe and the earth so remarkably “tuned” to the conditions necessary for life? (Gravitational strength, the distance from the sun, the magnetic field strength, etc.) Read The Case for a Creator, by Lee Stroebel.
10. How could the first living thing reproduce? The odds against the random creation and juxtaposition of the minimum number of proteins for life are astronomical. What happens if we factor in the elements of structure and order of a living cell? Now include the odds of it being so organized that it has the capability of replication? Anything with odds of one in ten to the fiftieth power is considered impossible. According to the experts in probability theory, nothing that unlikely ever happens. We're talking about odds many times smaller than that. But for evolution to occur, the very first living thing, our supposed “common ancestor” had to have that ability from the get-go, or evolution into higher forms would be impossible.
11. How did this proposed primitive organism develop animal conscious-ness? Did it come all at once, or in many small stages? Logic tells us that there had to be a point when it began. Until then, there was no reason why the various parts of the nervous system could develop or organize. Starting out with no brain, how did the brain finally come about? Until it was functional, it would be a useless organ.
But why assume that consciousness can be explained by material processes? It can't! Self-consciousness, even of the animal type, involves information, which is neither matter nor energy.
12. How did rationality, which is inseparable from speech and language, evolve from a primitive consciousness by random processes? In other words, how did that dumb ape become intelligent? How did he happen to invent abstract thinking and communication? To do that, he would have had to have already had them, which is a contradiction.
13. How did the consciousness of right and wrong evolve in animals evolving on the basis of survival of the fittest? Altruism is a great liability in a world of savages. Honesty and kindness won't get one very far among people without consciences. It only makes one fit to be a victim. Conscience, if it could develop somehow in that milieu, would soon have become extinct.
14. How (and why) did sexual reproduction replace the original asexual system? How did two different animals get the corresponding complementary parts, physiologies, mechanisms and motivations to make this work? What are the odds that they lived in the same place, and yet one became a fully-developed female and the other a male? How did they know what to do with the new equipment? Why would they want to do it? Furthermore, no one who has prototyped even a simple machine is foolish enough to expect it to work right the first time and regularly afterward. This is simply impossible!
It can be seen that evolutionists believe in miracles far more incredible than the ones in the Bible. Why do I say that? Because these sheer impossibilities that they say must have happened have no purposive cause behind them, no omnipotent, omniscient Deity to perform them. Apparently, against all odds, they spontaneously “just happen”! The whole universe, they say, came into existence by a “quantum singularity” (An event with no known cause) that then exploded and generated all the elements (They can't say how), all the stars and galaxies (They're not sure about the details), all life (They don't yet know how life began). One miracle after another, but no miracle-worker! But we are supposed to be the ones relying on blind faith!
Howard Douglas King
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