'Stablish themselves, as by keen act of mind,
Each in its proper place; nor did they make,
Forsooth, a compact how each germ should move;
And from those primal germs came all life:
Thus then the new Earth first of all put forth
Grasses and shrubs, and afterward begat
The mortal generations, there upsprung-
Innumerable in modes innumerable-
After diverging fashions
How merited is that adopted name
Of earth- "The Mother!"- since from out the earth
Are all begotten.
Wherefore, again, again, how merited
Is that adopted name of Earth- The Mother!-
Since she herself begat the human race,
The human race just happened to arise. For Lucretius from Mother Earth and for evolutionists from mutations. Either way it is a euphemism for blind chance. And as with today’s evolutionary theory, Lucretius’ certainty was not from science, but from religion. Is it not obvious that this faulty and mostly useless world must have arisen on its own:
That in no wise the nature of all things
For us was fashioned by a power divine-
So great the faults it stands encumbered with.
First, mark all regions which are overarched
By the prodigious reaches of the sky:
One yawning part thereof the mountain-chains
And forests of the beasts do have and hold;
And cliffs, and desert fens, and wastes of sea
(Which sunder afar the beaches of the lands)
Possess it merely; and, again, thereof
Well-nigh two-thirds intolerable heat
And a perpetual fall of frost doth rob
From mortal kind. And what is left to till,
Even that the force of Nature would o'errun
With brambles, did not human force oppose,-
Long wont for livelihood to groan and sweat
Over the two-pronged mattock and to cleave
The soil in twain by pressing on the plough.
The sentiment is from antiquity, but it is no different than today’s evolutionary thought. It is mythology built on metaphysics.
But evolutionists will complain, for we have left out natural selection. Does it not provide a guiding hand? Evolutionist Joe Felsenstein agrees that biology’s DNA sequences, for example, are unlikely. But so what? He writes:
I can show you how to—regularly and repeatably—get a sequence of events that is extremely improbable. Every time. Just take a coin and toss it 100 times. The resulting sequence of Heads and Tails has a probability of only 1 part in the 100th power of 2. Which is about 1 part in 10-to-the-30th. Wow, that is really improbable. Yet you can do it every time! I guess that shows that people who toss coins are making unreasonable assumptions ...
In other words, biology’s astronomically unlikely designs are not a problem because all designs are unlikely. Strange that all those evolutionary experiments can’t generate good proteins from scratch. Can’t we just throw together a sequence like evolution did?
The problem with this utterly foolish logic is that not all designs work. In fact, the vast majority don’t work. When I say “vast majority” I mean, for all practical purposes, all of them. For a typical protein you would need more than 10^100 (a one followed by one hundred zeros) evolutionary experiments to create it. And no, we don’t find there to be convenient pathways evolution could use to gradually build-up the protein. Natural selection doesn’t help. That’s the case with most designs, biological or otherwise. You don’t magically have gradual pathways consisting of a long, long sequence of ever so slightly different intermediates, all leading to a fantastic final design.
Evolution is a modern-day myth. No better than Zeus up in the sky, throwing down lightning bolts. But today we should know better. At least Lucretius and the Epicureans can claim scientific ignorance. Today’s version of the myth, evolutionary theory, is a religiously-driven mockery of science. The religion is explicit in the evolutionary literature, as is the mockery of science. Religion drives science, and it matters.