The following is one of the promised articles from the Unseen World, published by the Metropolitan Tabernacle. The article is written by Prof John Whitcomb.

For many years the general public has been given the impression that the theory of evolution is a proven fact accepted by all scientists. But in recent years a growing body of scientific opinion in the USA and Britain has been pouring doubt onthe most basic teachings of evolutionism.

The Natural History Museum in London - the world's foremost museum of life science - recently mounted an exhibition which exposed many of the weaknesses of evolutionary theory. The Museum's principal biologist described much of Dr Richard Leakey's proevolutionary television programmes as 'sheer fiction'.

This article outlines some of the highly improbable things which must be believed (like an act of faith) if we put the theory of evolution in place of belief in a Creator God.

The evolutionary perspective insists that life began with marine creatures - tiny, simple, marine forms of life - and that only vast ages later did the highly complex organisms appear on dry land.

Evolutionism is totally committed to the view that all living things appeared on this planet when the ingredients necessary for life floated together by chance, in a liquid environment, millions of years ago. Let us examine these tremendous claims.

We are told that long, long ago, the world was totally different from its present form. Two or three billions of years ago, or so evolutionism teaches, oceans were totally different from their present appearance. They were packed with just the right biochemical ingredients to come together to form micro-organisms. Of course, we have no geologic evidence in the earth's crust today that any such ocean ever really existed., This is a faith projection on the part of evolutionism - a hypothetical dreamworld, a strange, fantasy world, totally different from our Own.

We are also told that the atmosphere was altogether different from its present form in that it was a reducing atmosphere, with absolutely no oxygen present, because if oxygen had been present it would have destroyed or oxidised the life forms and then there could have been no evolution of anything.

According to evolutionism, the atmosphere millions of years ago consisted of methane, ammonia, hydrogen and water vapour. Great lightning bolts lashed through this soupy mixture, seething with biochemical ingredients waiting to become alive.

Furthermore we are told that in this totally unique, strange, wonderful world, the second law of thermodynamics did not operate. Now this is a law which is universal so far as we can tell in all galaxies and other planets in the universe.

The law states that through the passage of time a closed system (that is a system closed from outside interference) will tend downward toward disorder. In other words, in all highly ordered systems, the tendency is that disorder always increases as time passes. There are no significant, known exceptions to this process.

We are told by evolutionism, however, that in that marvellous world of long ago simple things, namely lifeless chemicals, with the passing of time became complex things. In fact they became living, self-reproducing organisms, and ultimately human beings.

This is an astounding contradiction of all that we see happening in the present universe. A beautiful, polished, new car, left to the vicissitudes of the total environment will tend toward rust, decay, ultimate collapse and uselessness. Eventually it will join the enormous, endless parade of vehicles deposited on the junk heap.

We are also told (by evolutionism) that in that wonderful world of life origins, the ingredients for life not only floated together by chance, but they stayed together. Today they float apart again! But we are told that in those days, things that floated together stayed together and became greater and greater in complexity until they attained the level of amazingly complex, self-reproducing, living organisms.

We must now consider the remarkable organism which supposedly resulted when all kinds of lifeless chemicals floated together in that wonderful world where the second law of thermodynamics did not operate, where reversible movements within a liquid environment did not operate, where there was a totally different kind of ocean and an -altogether different, atmosphere also. After making all these enormous faith projections or extrapolations - what kind of organism does evolutionism say was produced when 'life' first dawned?

Darwin used to say (and his earlier followers also emphasised this) that the end product was a simple little thing. It was a protozoan, an amoeba, a single-celled organism. It seemed reasonably feasible to think that something very simple might have resulted, from chance events occurring in the wonderful world of long ago.

But now that 125 years have passed and knowledge has advanced, we realise that the single-celled organism is not so simple after all. The National Geographic Society has published a 'geography' of the living cell; an atlas which embodies the fruit of biological advance in recent decades. One of their 'maps' of a single cell is reproduced here.

Our bodies contain hundreds of millions of single cells which are programmed in various ways to produce the fantastic complexity of the human body, and every one of them has within it all the information of a living system. The living cell has come under intensive study in the last couple of generations, and we now know that each tiny component part is vastly more complex than Darwin and his colleagues could ever have dreamed.

For example, it is now known that the outer membrane of each cell is so complex that it can breathe in and out of the cell materials needed or not needed, as the case may be, for its proper function.

Essential functions
Just inside the outer membrane the cell possesses such marvellous things as a messenger system, boiler houses and a vacuum cleaning system (the mitochondria and various vacuoles), together with numerous 'factories' which do things that modern science is only beginning to comprehend. All these functions are absolutely essential for life.

Inside the cell is the brain of the system, the nucleus, containing the astonishing deoxyribonucleic acid system of nucleic acid information units which are arranged like a double helix or double spiral staircase, intertwined around itself, which has more information programmed into it than may be found in a one hundred volume encyclopaedia in which each volume has a hundred thousand pages!

That blueprint, or template, which provides all the necessary information for determining what the next generation in the reproductive process is going to be like, has to be transferred from the nucleus to the outer cytoplasm by RNA messenger molecules that tell the enzymes which amino acids to build up into polypeptides and proteins by the thousand.

That is what all floated together by chance! Evolutionism believes that chance can do staggering things if only it has enough time in which to operate.

Mathematicians in recent years have issued an increasingly discouraging response to evolutionists in their constant appeal to time to bring about all these improbable events. In Philadelphia there was a great symposium held between some of the world's leading mathematicians and some of the world's leading neo-Darwinian biologists.

In this symposium the mathematicians said, in effect, 'We are sorry but you cannot endlessly appeal to the probability statistics of time and chance to allow impossible things to happen biologically in origins . You cannot use mathematics to solve your problem. '

Could the simple cell, which turns out to be highly complicated after all, really have come into existence by a chance coming together of all the necessary ingredients? Does the possibility of an enormous amount of time help to make the concept credible?

Picture a typewriter with only twenty-six keys and a monkey poking blindly at it, producing an endless stream of absolutely meaningless letters. How long would it take this monkey, poking away at fifteen keys a second, night and day, without ever getting tired, to spell out, say, the first verse of the Bible?

The monkey has only forty-four letters to accomplish - In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. How long would it take, according to known probability statistics, for that monkey to spell this out by pure chance?

The likelihood of the monkey achieving this feat is actually much greater than the likelihood of the vast number of complex chemical reactions occurring (in absolutely the correct order) to produce a highly complex single cell.

Yet, according to probability mathematics, the monkey's much easier task would take 190,600,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000 times longer than the entire age of the universe according to cosmogonists.

Chance takes too long
How much time does the evolutionist need for his chance processes? According. to evolutionary ideas the early history of this planet takes up 4,500,000,000 years. This is all the time evolutionism has available to accommodate its entire process of evolution to the level of the human race, let alone the original beginning of a single living cell.

Actually, evolutionism does not even have this much time, for according to evolutionary ideas about earth's history, the earth began as a highly molten mass of rock and metal, and it would have taken an enormous segment of the available time to cool down sufficiently for steam to condense so that things could start to float in the primeval ocean.

In other words the evolutionist is trapped in a negative time slot; he has no time for chance to achieve anything.

Clearly, evolutionism cannot explain life. It has no answers whatever to the origin of life. Every new biological discovery underlines the enormous complexity of self-reproducing organisms, rendering evolutionary theory utterly incredible as an explanation of how life arrived on planet Earth.

The only alternatives left to the modern mind are complete agnosticism, some form of occultism, or acceptance of the view that it was created by God. The last alternative will never be readily accepted by the natural man, because he is haunted by the proximity of his God. If he is created, then there must be a Creator and it is highly probable that man will have to answer to Him some day. Tragically, the rebellious heart of man always tends to recoil from this concept.