Creationism is hardly ‘ fully discredited’

Re: Intelligent Design Is Not Intelligent, letter to the editor, Oct. 7. Steve McKay makes two points which warrant comment: He refers to creationism as “fully discredited” and he suggests that evolution is confirmed by “ample empirical evidence.”

To date, no one had come up with an acceptable hypothesis as to the origin of life from non-life. Richard Dawkins laid some ground rules in his book The Blind Watchmaker when he suggested that probability is a legitimate test of evolutionary processes. It should be noted, then, that secular scientists have the odds of life arising spontaneously from non-life at somewhere between 10- 1,000 and 10-40,000 according to astrophysicist Sir Frederick Hoyle. By 1991, the chemist Stanley Miller, a nucleotide patriarch, was still optimistic, but admitted that he “hadn’t found the right tricks, yet.” More recently, Michael Behe laid out the improbability of spontaneous biogenesis in painful detail in his book Darwin’s Black Box. From a scientific view he concluded that some Intelligent Designer was necessary for life to have started, and that perhaps God created the first cell and then let life evolve from there.

Secondly, if a creator chose to use evolution or if life evolved without a creator, then perhaps we would be seeing “ample empirical evidence” of it in the fossil record, showing an uninterrupted progression from the simplest life forms to the most complex. Instead we see evidence of an abrupt appearance of life on this planet. We see no fossil evidence of transitional forms between single-celled organisms and complex invertebrates. We see no evidence of transition between invertebrates and fish, or between major species of fish. And, finally, there is a total dearth of fossil evidence showing the “descent of man.”

Creationism is not “fully discredited” – quite the opposite.