Obviously, evolution requires huge amounts of time to explain how the complexity of life we know today could have developed through a series of random accidents. As the orderliness and complexity of life have been better understood, the age of the earth and thus the length of time for evolution to occur has increased. Just in my lifetime, it has grown several billion years!
Given Enough Time Anything Can Happen
George Wald published a book in 1955 entitled, The Physics and Chemistry of Life (Simon & Schuster), in which he made the following statement: “The important point is that since the origin of life belongs in the category of at-least-once phenomena, time is on its side.”
“However improbable we regard this event, given enough time it will almost certainly happen at least once. . . Time is, in fact, the hero of the plot. . . What we regard as impossible on the basis of human experience is meaningless here. Given so much time, (two billion years) the ‘impossible’ becomes possible, the possible probable, and the probable virtually certain. One has only to wait: time itself performs miracles.” (p. 12) Time performs miracles? Is this really true or is it just wordplay? How much time is ‘enough’ for it to perform the miracle of producing life by accident?
Extremely Small Probability
Chandra Wickramasinghe, in an interview in London Daily Express (8/14/81) stated, “The odds against the spark of life igniting accidentally on Earth were . . . ’10 to the power of 40,000.’” This is a very large number and an extremely small probability! After all, there are only 10 to the 130 power electrons in the known universe!
Gary Park, in What is Creation Science, explains what this means. He says if each particle in the universe “could do one hundred billion-billion events (steps in ever onward and upward evolution) every second for 3,000 billion years (100 times older than anyone says the universe is), then in the span of history of the universe, 10 to the 170th power events could possibly happen. But to get a series of even 1,500 progressive events to happen in order (by accident), there is only one chance in ten to the power of 450!” (Jobe Martin, The Evolution of a Creationist, p. 35) Mathematicians call this zero probability.
Life Proves Evolution?
How do evolutionists answer this weighty argument? Julian Huxley: “No one would bet on anything so improbable happening: and yet it has happened! It has happened, thanks to the working of natural selection and the properties of a living substance which make natural selection inevitable!” So, in spite of the evidence against evolution taking place by accident, it is inevitable? If ‘inevitable,’ why have decades of controlled laboratory experiments failed to duplicate it? Again, George Wald (ibid p. 9): “. . . the spontaneous generation of a living organism is impossible. Yet here we are- as a result, I believe, of spontaneous generation.” In other words, the fact that life exists proves that, against all odds, evolution must have happened.
Is There a Better Alternative View?
An alternative view exists, one that answers the probabilities and does not commit such intellectual suicide. It states, in the beginning, “All things were made by Him (Jesus Christ); and without Him was not anything made that was made.” That is, nothing existed apart from His design and creative power. (John 1:3) There, now that makes sense!