By: Shafer Parker, FBB Content Director

I won’t try to explain why a growing number of mathematicians have issues with evolution, but I do think the fact is worth noting. I first came across this phenomenon when I watched a couple of YouTube videos featuring mathematician David Berlinski. In my view, his critique of Darwinism was devastating, made doubly so by his status as an agnostic Jew. Naturally, I started looking for more Berlinski stuff. Turns out he’s a mathematician with a sense of humour! Who knew that was even possible? In my continued search I soon came across a 2019 video from the Hoover Institution featuring Berlinski and yet another mathematician, David Gelernter, who had made himself a pariah in the scientific world by writing a warm, appreciative book review for Dr. Stephen Meyer’s book Darwin’s Doubt.

Now I’ve found my third mathematician, University of Texas El Paso professor of mathematics Granville Sewell, author of In the Beginning and Other Essays on Intelligent Design. Three months ago Sewell published an article on The Federalist website entitled “3 Realities Chance Can’t Explain About Life’s Origins That Intelligent Design Can.” It is those three realities, as explained by Dr. Sewell, that I want to discuss today, and I’ll begin by noting that the inclusion of “Chance” in the article’s title was no accident. As Sewell points out, modern evolutionary theory makes the claim that four unintelligent physical forces, plus chance, are responsible for everything we see and experience today, including the experience of experiencing the world around us. “This,” Sewell states, “is what you have to believe to not believe in intelligent design.”

Sewell then goes on to describe the “3 Realities” that cannot be explained by chance, even when chance is aided by four physical forces acting over billions of years. The first is the origin of life. Now if you have spent time reading about Christian apologetics, you already know the difficulties here. But Sewell takes a non-typical approach. Instead of a long explanation regarding the necessity of information to guide the formation of the proteins necessary for life, he simply points to the impossibility of designing any type of self-replicating machine. Imagine, he suggests, a machine that would not only copy itself, but would do so in such a way that the copy could make a copy, and so on. Not only are we nowhere near to making such a machine, he says, but even if science someday makes such a machine possible, “it will only have shown that it could have arisen through design.”

The second “reality” that evolution can’t explain is the origin of advanced life forms. In summary, modern observation of the replication of DNA (a process Darwin never even imagined) indicates that all observable mutations represent the loss of information. Or, to put it the other way, a gain in information through mutation has never been observed. For Sewell, it is time to remember “that we really have no idea how living things are able to pass their current complex structures on to their descendants, generation after generation—much less how they evolve even more complex structures.”

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Third, Sewell argues that evolution can never explain the origin of human intelligence and consciousness, but to do so he takes a very non-scientific approach. He references a picture taken in the 1950s of himself with two other children. “I saw the world from inside one of these children,” he writes. “I saw every picture that entered through his eyes, I heard every sound that entered through his ears, and when he fell on the sidewalk, I felt his pain. How did I end up inside one of these children?” No one can read these words without relating them to their own experience. But this phenomenon seems to fly over the heads of evolutionists. To them, consciousness is merely a matter of intelligence, the mere ingathering of information, as if the human brain is merely a complicated computer. This, of course, is nonsense. A one-year-old infant, who knows almost nothing, is already experiencing the “I-ness” that marks each human being and is already evaluating each experience from a unique perspective. This, Sewell argues, is “the one [question] evolutionists never seem to even wonder about: How did I get inside one of these animals.”

I find it interesting that this is yet another way to illustrate the uniqueness of the Biblical creation story. It unhesitatingly addresses the hard questions. Rather than run from issues such as the origin of self-consciousness, it points to the one unassailable explanation, that we were made by God in His image, and that in the act of creation God breathed into our bodies the breath of His life, so that “the man (note the article) became a living soul.” In other words, the eternally existent God imparted his self-awareness into the first human being at creation. Nothing like this is found in any of the hundreds of other creation stories man has invented. Look wherever you want, you will find that consciousness is either assumed (think of the creation stories of Hinduism and Mormonism) or ignored.

I’ll close with one last thought. Consciousness is not given to human beings merely to make them aware of their feelings about pain or joy. No, consciousness is given to make us able to develop a relationship with God, a relationship, not of equals, but nevertheless, between beings with distinct connecting points. Is God a spirit? We, too, possess spirits. Does God care about moral and ethical matters? In other words, is God more than a self-sustaining, self-replicating automaton? Of course He is. And, it turns out, so are we. From the lowest criminal that ever lived, to the very throne room of heaven, right and wrong matter, one might argue, more than anything else. It is simply not possible that four physical forces, plus chance over time, made us what we are.

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