Curricula should include opinions that contradict Darwin’s conclusions

As a former atheist and evolutionist, I must comment on the editorial about the evolution debate. (May 14.)

Years ago, I vigorously defended the naturalist position, but over time, I discovered many logical questions and observations put forth by professional scientists that Darwinists either got angry about, skirted or outright dismissed.

I found this disregard, which bordered on arrogance, disturbing – so I began to investigate. As a physics teacher, I use mathematics as my instrument of verification, so my inquiry focused on statistical issues.

As for my present view of evolution, I’ll let evolutionary anthropologist Sir Arthur Keith speak for me: “Evolution is unproved and unprovable. We believe it because the only alternative is special creation, and that is unthinkable.”

I appreciate his candor.

The strongest pillar of my evolutionist beliefs was the geologically accepted age of the Earth. It seemed 4.6 billion years was sufficient for anything to be possible. Evolutionary doctrine states over time, chance associations of random elements under random conditions produced the necessary proteins to construct the first basic cells, and presto! Life.

Cells are the basis of life, and are composed primarily of proteins (300 to 600 in the simplest). Proteins are constructed with precise arrangements of 20 different amino acids. The simplest proteins are made of specific sequences of more than 100 amino acids, so I examined the laws governing the probability of this happening by itself.

Randomly building a 100-unit protein from 20 different amino acids is like randomly building a 100-letter sentence from the alphabet’s 26 letters. It’s not enough to have the letters, but they must be ordered correctly to make sense.

For instance, take the 32 letters in “The Red Sox are World Series champions.” If I put 26 unique Scrabble letters into a bag, and selected one at a time, hoping to randomly draw the sequence matching that statement, the odds are 1.9 billion trillion trillion trillion to 1 against getting that exact arrangement.

Since 4.6 billion years is 145 million billion seconds, even if I performed 6,500 trillion trillion trials per second, since the beginning of the Earth, I only have a 50 percent chance of drawing the right sequence after 4.6 billion years.

I find those odds beyond staggering. And this is for a sequence of just 32 letters, not 100.

Even if the odds were beaten, all I’d have is one protein – a few hundred shy of a cell. And as if these odds weren’t long enough, to make the cell function, I’d need organelles (coded DNA), three types of pre-programmed RNA, and a perfected division process to ensure all of this material would get passed on.

If a person is comfortable with this (and much more) happening out of the blue, they should be comfortable with having children being taught it as fact. Going deeper, though, this process teaches that life is an accident, and that our existence is fundamentally meaningless.

I’m aware rejecting this as a logical explanation of how life began puts me in a distinct minority. That’s fine.

I take solace from the honest admission of doctrinaire evolutionist Colin Patterson: “For over twenty years I thought I was working on evolution….[But] there was not one thing I knew about it….So for the last few weeks I’ve tried putting a simple question to various people and groups of people,” Patterson said. “[The] question is: “Can you tell me anything you know about evolution, any one thing, any one thing that is true?”

He added, “I tried that question on the geology staff at the Field Museum of Natural History and the only answer I got was silence. I tried it on the members of the Evolutionary Morphology Seminar in the University of Chicago, a very prestigious body of evolutionists, and all I got there was silence for a very long time and eventually one person said, ‘Yes, I do know one thing – it ought not to be taught in high school.’ Evolution not only conveys no knowledge, but seems somehow to convey anti-knowledge.”

I have absolutely no desire to see evolution removed from school curriculum, but rather to see it taught as a theory in the truest sense, which includes valid calculations and observations that don’t support its conclusions.

If allowing an open and respectful forum for uncomfortable, yet logical, points and dissenting observations is considered distracting, then I say let the distractions begin. When we stop allowing criticism of evidence and viewpoints we are no longer educating.

We are indoctrinating.

Jim Rose, of Bethel, is a mathematics and science teacher at Oxford Hills Christian Academy.