The Hawaiian-Emperor Chain Provides Evidence for Catastrophic Plate Tectonics

Here's a breakdown of just how explanatory the Catastrophic Plate Tectonics (CPT) model is in comparison to both slow and gradual plate tectonics and the Hydroplate model. Let's take a look at the North Pacific. You'll need a map which shows the sea floor. Here's a link for your convenience. Bring up this link in a separate tab or browser and follow along here or reference these pictures:

The first thing you will notice about the sea floor in the north Pacific is that it shows a long line of seamounts and islands stretching from the Kamchatka peninsula in Russia, toward the south, and then going southeast to the Hawaiian islands. These are a long chain of volcanic mountains known as the Hawaiian-Emperor seamount chain, formed from lava flows on the sea floor.

The conventional explanation for this chain of volcanoes is that there is a hotspot in the mantle which sends up heated plumes of magma in a particular location due to convection cycles in the mantle. The Pacific plate, one of several tectonic plates that together form the crust of the Earth, is moving across this hotspot, and this forms a series of volcanic mountains that may or may not reach the surface of the ocean to form an island.

This conventional explanation is a good one. The Hydroplate theory does not even have an explanation for volcanism in the middle of a plate, as far as I am aware. The Hydroplate model suggests crustal plates with water chambers underneath that broke up catastrophically during the global flood and which may have moved sideways as the water was expelled from below. In that model, volcanoes occur at the margins of plates as they collide with each other. I have yet to find any reasonable explanation within this model for the existence of the Hawaiian-Emperor chain at all. The conventional model, in contrast,  does fit a number of lines of evidence and at least explains the existence of this chain.

However, there's more to this explanation. The CPT model involves rapid plate movements during the Biblical flood. In particular, at least one crustal plate subducted down into the mantle in a very short time (several weeks), setting off a catastrophic chain reaction around the globe and rapid tectonic movements that produced global flooding. The plate movements we observe today are remnants of these movements, but much slower than in the past. The conventional plate tectonics model, unlike CPT, assumes that current plate movements have been more or less constant for many millions of years at today's very slow rates.

How could we test which of these models is more explanatory? Well, here's one way of doing that. And you can do it from your home by looking at a map.

You have to understand that we can use the size of a volcanic mountain to estimate plate speed. If we assume a relatively constant rate of heated magma rising from this hotspot in the mantle, then the slower the plate moves, the more magma will accumulate in that spot. This forms a larger seamount. If magma continues to accumulate in the same spot, the seamount will reach the surface and become an island. If it continues even longer, the island will become larger and larger. If the plate is moving more rapidly, the seamounts will be smaller because lava did not have time to accumulate before that location on the plate moved away from the hotspot in the mantle. So how large these volcanic mountains are, and how far apart they are spaced, can tell us about the speed the plate was moving when they formed. There are going to be variations, but we want to look for overall trends.

We know where the hotspot is today. The largest and easternmost island of Hawaii is still experiencing lava flows today. It is still over the hotspot. If you move backwards along the volcanic chain, you are looking backwards in time. Not only do current measurements of plate movement indicate this, but radiometric dating concurs (though we can debate about the exact ages).

So let’s take a look at the chain. This is where the Google Earth link is handy because you can zoom in and rotate in order to look closer. Where the chain begins, the seamounts are all fairly small. If you compare them to the size of the largest Hawaiian island, there is a huge difference. This implies that the Pacific plate was moving much more rapidly than it does today when these sea mounts were formed. In fact, the entire chain of seamounts is much smaller than the Hawaiian islands at the end of the chain. This seems to imply rapid plate movements for most of this history, and then a profound slowing of the plate toward the end.

The most interesting feature of this entire chain is the very abrupt change of direction. The volcanoes were forming in a southward line (indicating that the plate was moving northward) and then they abruptly begin to form toward the east and only a little south. It's a very distinct inflection point. The seamounts immediately get smaller at the same time the direction changes. Not only are these first eastward seamounts smaller, but they are farther apart. All of these indicate an increase in speed. This tells us there was an impact on the east side of the Pacific plate that accelerated it toward the west. The plate increased speed and changed direction due to this impact. The plate which impacted the Pacific plate must have been the North American plate. So we can see evidence, in the seamounts, that the North American plate has crashed into the Pacific plate and altered both its speed and direction.

As you go from west to east (i.e. forward in time) after this impact, the seamounts grow gradually larger and closer together and then, as the speed of the Pacific plate drops off considerably, they begin to form islands. The islands grow larger and larger until you reach the largest island of all where there are still active volcanoes and slow plate movements and you have caught up to the present day. But this chain of volcanoes tells a story of much faster plate movements in the past.

Notice that I told you this assumes a constant rate of magma rising from the mantle hotspot. We can examine our assumption here. Is it reasonable? There are only three options: Either the hotspot is growing hotter, it is growing colder, or it is staying the same. If the hotspot is staying the same, we naturally come to the conclusion that the Pacific plate was moving much faster in the past and is now moving much slower. If the hotspot is growing colder over time, then the deceleration is even greater. If the Hawaiian islands are successively larger and larger even though the hotspot is now cooler than it was, then the speed in the past was even greater and it has slowed even more than we expect from a model in which the hotspot has remained unchanged.

The other possibility is that the hotspot is growing hotter and thus sending up more and more magma over time. This would make it possible for the plate movements to have been very slow the whole time. This is essentially the mainstream view. If the plate has been moving at a constant slow rate, then we would explain the increasing size of the islands by appealing to increasing temperature in the mantle hotspot. But that has a problem of its own. If the hotspot is growing hotter, what is causing that? And should we be concerned that it appears to be growing so much hotter than it used to be? In any event, it does not appear that these processes have always been occurring at a constant rate. Either the plate has slowed considerably or the hotspot has grown much hotter. I find the former much more reasonable for several reasons.

In this one volcanic chain, we have evidence, not only that the crustal plates are moving, but that they moved much faster in the past. But there’s more. We saw that the North American plate crashed into the Pacific plate and changed its speed and direction. This affects not just the Pacific plate, but the North American plate as well. This is most likely the impact that pushed up the Rocky Mountains. Conservation of momentum says that if the Pacific plate accelerated rapidly due to this impact, then the North American plate must have decelerated rapidly. This abrupt stop would crumple the North American plate along its western side. Not surprisingly, there’s a mountain range there.

These features are a lot easier to explain in terms of acceleration and deceleration of plates than if they were the result of slow, gradual processes with unvarying rates. This is just one piece of the puzzle for the CPT model. Yet it forms a handy side-by-side comparison of the competing models. 

The explanation commonly offered by mainstream geology for the larger size of the Hawaiian islands compared to the older seamounts is that the older mountains have shrunk over time due to erosion and subsidence. This explanation fails on multiple points.

1) There's no experimental evidence for this explanation, as far as I know. It is just thrown out there as a possibility.

2) It doesn't make sense of the similarity in size of most of the chain of seamounts. Do they shrink until they reach a certain size and then stay the same forever? Subsidence and erosion might be a potential explanation if we had a nice gradual increase in size all along the chain. Instead, we have what is supposedly tens of millions of years of seamounts that are roughly the same size, then a fairly rapid transition to much larger islands. The older north-south section is not significantly smaller than the younger east-west section.

3) The greatest erosion should take place on islands, not seamounts. Erosion forces should be stronger for the land above the water due to wind and rain and wave action. Once an island drops beneath the waves, that should slow its shrinking considerably. This should, again, result in a more even chain. That's not what we observe.

4) If we're suggesting that all of the islands and seamounts in the Hawaiian-Emperor chain were originally of similar size and some merely shrank due to erosion and subsidence, that simply doesn't work. If you take any of the Hawaiian islands, its footprint would cover several of the smaller seamounts in the chain. If the small volcanoes were widely spaced, it might make sense to suggest they had once been sizeable islands. But most of them could not have been that large initially because they are too closely spaced. A large mountain doesn't erode away into several small mountains. Subsidence might work if a tall mountain with several peaks sank until it appeared to be several smaller mountains, but it really doesn't look like that happened. Especially for the smaller seamounts, the ocean floor around them does not show signs of a larger mountain sinking. It appears relatively flat and undisturbed.

5) The older seamounts are not all that eroded. They're not gently sloping and rounded off. They don't appear to be the small remnants of eroded islands, in other words.

6) The erosion/subsidence hypothesis still doesn't account for the sharp change in direction or the drop in seamount size and increase in spacing afterward. The CPT theory accounts for all these facts at once.

Because of these lines of evidence, the Catastrophic Plate Tectonics theory has more explanatory power than either the mainstream Gradual Plate Tectonics view or the Hydroplate Theory, at least when it comes to explaining the Hawaiian-Emperor volcanoes. This is just one way of comparing and testing models. Creation science actually does offer testable models that hold up to scrutiny.

If Resurrection is Impossible, so is Abiogenesis

A resurrection from the dead is much more likely than abiogenesis (generating life from non-life by natural processes). After all, a dead body has all of the necessary parts for life present already. It already has many proteins produced and folded correctly. It already has a genetic code built within DNA. It has phospholipid membranes already in place. It has cellular machinery. By far the biggest problem for abiogenesis is producing all of these things by chance. Just getting any functional protein without guidance would take billions of years of chance chemical reactions. A dead cell already has many proteins in place as well as all the other chemicals and parts needed for life.

So why don't we observe resurrections all the time in nature? Why don't bacteria, for example, spontaneously return to life after dying? That's many orders of magnitude more likely than abiogenesis, yet we have never observed it. That ought to tell you that abiogenesis is impossible. Generating life from non-life, like rising from the dead, requires supernatural activity.

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Note that this is a very straightforward and obvious logical argument. It will always be easier to do one step than to do that same step plus extra steps. Both abiogenesis and resurrection require turning non-life into life. That part is the same for both. But with abiogenesis, you don't have the parts present yet so you also have to build and arrange them. Thus, it is necessarily true that resurrection is easier and more likely than abiogenesis.

What continually boggles my mind is how hard the atheists fight this very straightforward logical deduction. I've posted this argument in multiple online groups, and I continually get atheists who deny that this is true. They consider abiogenesis a "scientific" pursuit and resurrection the crazy ramblings of religious people. They refuse to consider that it is necessarily easier to animate a dead organism with all the needed parts already present than to build the parts, get all of them present at the same time and properly arranged, and then animate it. They laugh at the idea of even a microbe coming back to life and accept abiogenesis as necessary in order to avoid God as Creator. And they think they're being the rational ones.

I can only conclude that rebellion against God forces people to descend into absurdity to avoid the obvious truth that there is a Creator to whom we owe honor and obedience. Rejecting God eventually means rejecting rationality.

Apparent Age versus Mature Creation

There is an important difference between a mature creation and apparent age. God is not deceptive and would not create things with a false appearance of age. But he did create things mature. Careful study can show the difference.

For example, while Adam was created as an adult, and adults usually have to go through the childhood stages to reach adulthood, Adam didn't. He was created mature. However, he was not created with false signs of aging. Thus, on first glance, a doctor examining him right after his creation would think he was 20 or 30 years old due to the body size, ability to grow a beard, sexual maturity, etc. But on closer inspection, the doctor would notice something peculiar. There would be no wrinkles, no scars, no callouses, no belly button. Adam wouldn't show signs of actual aging or having lived years on the earth or having been injured in events that never happened or having been born. If he had, that would be apparent age, not merely a mature creation. Close inspection would be needed to indicate the difference. Whereas a cursory inspection and initial conclusion might point to a man who had lived a couple decades or more, closer and more detailed inspection would give reason to think he hadn't actually started as a baby and grown to adulthood, and thus the appearance of age would disappear.

Much the same thing is true when we study our planet as well. On first glance, there are a number of features that look, superficially, to be signs of great age. On closer inspection, there is evidence that they did not actually take a long time to develop.

One might look at the amount of sedimentary rock on the planet, which would indicate millions of years of slow sediment deposition (which is the way we usually get such sediment deposition), and think the earth is millions of years old. But on closer inspection, we see that there is little or no erosion between most of those layers and there are animal and plant remains in the layers that appear to have been buried very rapidly and are well preserved and in positions that indicate catastrophe. There are fossils that extend between more than one layer. There are soft tissues found in some of these fossils, including in the remains of dinosaurs, in which individual cells and their parts can be distinguished quite clearly. These features and others lead one to believe that the sediment did not actually take millions of years to deposit and that another, more rapid and catastrophic explanation fits the evidence best.

Perhaps the most problematic use of apparent age is to explain away distant starlight by suggesting that it might have been created in transit rather than originating at the actual star. Yet this would be apparent age, not merely a mature creation. Mature creation is creating an actual star instead of a dust cloud that must condense into a star. Saying that the starlight we see that appears to tell us chemical composition, location, distance, motion, and also events that have happened to that star (such as exploding into a supernova) did not actually come from an actual star or actual events would mean that starlight serves only to deceive through apparent age. What's more, if that were true, then the night sky is all a sparkling facade - a light show with no substance - and we have no ability to know what is actually out there in space or to study it. There are several potential explanations for distant starlight reaching a young earth, but apparent age is not one of them.

The fact that God created Adam as a grown man and trees that never grew from seeds and animals that were never juveniles does not allow us to ignore evidence of age like celestial events or to fail to seek good explanations for things like rock strata that might look superficially old. We can't lump all those things together as if they were all the same kind of thing. That's lazy and ignorant thinking. It's important to distinguish between apparent age and a creation that was simply created mature. We should not attribute deception to God or offer simplistic explanations that fail to account for the facts. Neither of those bring glory to God.

Genesis is Both History and Theology

A number of Christian theologians and apologists who do not accept a young earth view of creation teach that the first part of Genesis is not actual history. One of their common arguments is that Genesis 1 needn't be an accurate chronology of creation since the purpose of the passage was to show God as Creator and nature as not divine, but created, and that it was also intended to give the children of Israel a sense of history and purpose - a view of their place in God's plans.

I totally agree that those are purposes of Genesis 1. However, the Genesis creation account was also intended to give an accurate chronology of what happened at creation. This is true of pretty much all of the Old Testament. It tells an accurate historical account of what happened and also teaches the character of God and contains foreshadowings of Christ and God's plan for the redemption of mankind. These things go hand in hand throughout the entire Old Testament.

For example, take the story of Jonah. We know that Jonah's three days in the belly of the fish was a foreshadowing of Jesus' three days in the tomb. Jesus Himself alluded to this. We also know that God's change of heart toward Nineveh shows us God's mercy when people repent. The entire story of Jonah was really about redemption. It's a picture of Christ and salvation. But, that doesn't mean that Jonah wasn't a real person who really spent three days inside a real fish. The history is real, even though the story has many other purposes besides simply chronicling the history.

Another example is the story of Abraham sacrificing Isaac. Again, it's amazing to see the parallels to Christ - the sacrifice of an only son, the substitute sacrifice of a ram, even Abraham's statement that God would provide the sacrifice. It's very obviously a picture of Christ's substitutionary atonement. But, Abraham was a real man who really took his actual son to the top of a mountain to sacrifice him and who really found a ram to sacrifice in his son's place. The history is real, even though it means more than just history.

I could give many more examples. But the point is this: Why should Genesis 1 be any different than the rest of the Old Testament? Coming up with another purpose, or even multiple other purposes, for Genesis 1 doesn't mean it wasn't also intended to be real, chronological history. In fact, I would argue that this is an understanding of Genesis that is more straightforward, more in keeping with the genre and language of the Genesis text, and more in keeping with the nature of the rest of the Old Testament. The rest of the Old Testament is dual-purpose - history and theology. It would be quite singular and surprising if Genesis 1 was an exception, meant only to be taken as theology and not as chronology.

Creation vs. Evolution Frameworks

I hear all the time that evolution has disproven the Biblical account of creation. For some, this even leads them to discount Christianity or even theism all together. But is the evidence really so strong for evolution?

I have a master's degree in biology from a secular university. I've studied evolution in depth, and the evidence simply doesn't add up. It's not that there isn't any evidence. There is, but a lot of it depends on your interpretation. There are alternate interpretations that also make sense of the same exact data - and often some data that are more difficult for evolution to explain as well. That's why, overall, the creationist explanation fits better with the evidence. When you actually study the data and understand both frameworks well, you can evaluate which fits better. I've done that.

The main problem is that too many people evaluate the data with an incorrect view of the creation framework. They think, for example, that evolution is about change and creation is about staying the same. So when they see evidence of biological change, they think it's evidence for evolution and evidence against creation. But the truth of the matter is that both frameworks agree to a large extent on what we should see today. Both incorporate change. So you have to dig into the details of HOW that change occurs to really tell the difference.

Here is a very brief and simplified overview of the two views:

Evolution claims that organisms can become more complex over time and that information can be added to the genome through random mutation and natural selection. Evolution also claims that all organisms originated from a common ancestor and have gradually diverged into the many forms of life we have today through the buildup of these mutations.

Creation, on the other hand, claims that organisms were created by God as separate kinds that reproduce only within their kind. Creation also claims that random genetic changes, while they certainly do occur, will generally be neutral or degradative with respect to information content (though degradative changes aren't necessarily harmful to the organism and may sometimes be a good thing in some environments) and that some genetic changes may occur due to directed or programmed mutation rather than random mutation.

That’s not as simple as change versus no change.

Notice that to determine which of these frameworks is correct, one has to dig into the genetic mechanism for each observed change rather than going on more superficial characteristics like whether it is helpful to the organism.

For example, in the case of antibiotic resistance in bacteria (which is widely touted as strong evidence for evolution), in nearly every case, the actual genetic mechanism that confers resistance to the antibiotic involves dismantling or turning off some component of the cell. In some cases, for example, it's a pump in the cell membrane that, in normal bacteria, brings substances into the cell, which allows the antibiotic to enter the cell and kill it. In resistant bacteria, the pump doesn't work and thus the antibiotic isn't pumped into the cell. This is very beneficial to the bacteria, of course.

But the kind of change that provided the benefit isn't the kind of change that explains how the bacteria got there in the first place. It doesn't explain how bacteria might develop into a more advanced organism. It doesn’t even explain how the pump in the cell membrane could have developed. The bacteria didn't add new information. It didn't develop a super power that dissolves antibiotics. It didn't grow stronger. In fact, in most environments, the non-resistant bacteria have the advantage because they have a working pump that does what it's supposed to do. That's why, in the absence of antibiotic pressure, bacterial populations become non-resistant again. The normal, non-resistant bacteria outcompete the broken ones that are antibiotic resistant. The actual change in the resistant bacteria was a degradative one at the genetic and cellular level. This also explains how antibiotic resistance occurs so easily. There are lots of ways to break cellular components and, thus, lots of individual mutations that will have the same effect.

So, when you look deeper, you'll see that antibiotic resistance is actually good evidence for the creation framework because it isn't the kind of change that would produce upward evolution or create new structures. Instead, it's actually a degradative change on a genetic level, just as creation predicts, which happens to be beneficial to the bacteria in some circumstances.

Another good example of something that is thought to be evidence for evolution is speciation. Many people mistakenly believe that the creation view involves fixed species. This is not the case. What the Bible says is that God created organisms to reproduce after their kinds. Assuming that “kinds” and “species” are the same thing is a common mistake. The modern species concept is useful as far as it goes, but it is largely subjective where you draw the line. There is no reason to suppose that the species reflects an actual divide between significantly different organisms. Thus, there is no reason to think that there could be no speciation events within Biblical kinds.

The Biblical kind is actually thought (by creation scientists) to be roughly equivalent to the Family level of taxonomy, although it may vary in different organisms because the man-made taxonomic system may not always reflect the difference in kinds consistently. Thus, while speciation has been observed and there are also many other cases where the evidence for speciation is good, none of those cases provide any evidence against the creation viewpoint. We creationists expect speciation and variation within the Biblical kinds. What we don’t expect (or observe) is evidence of common ancestry for all life.

There are many examples like these where something looks like evidence for evolution at first glance, but on deeper investigation turns out to be consistent with creation or even supports creation better. For those who don’t understand the actual creation framework, it can look like evolution has mountains of evidence to support it. When you understand what the creation models actually predict, you realize that it’s more complicated than that. And when you start evaluating the real creation framework versus the evolutionary one, you start to see the evidence tip in favor of creation.

Scientific Support for the Young Earth Creationist Timeline

Here is a guest post from my husband, Doug. (He's awesome!)

It is often suggested that those of us who accept the young earth creationary timeline – otherwise known as Young Earth Creationists (YECs) – do not accept science, or are in denial of science, etc. Basically, these critics (who are often either evolutionists or Old Earth Creationists – OECs) seem to believe that we are ignorant of the scientific evidence which “everyone knows” has proven that the universe is actually billions of years old. They often suggest that we are simply clinging to our YEC interpretation of the Bible and are willing to ignore overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary. This notion could not be further from the truth.

 

In fact, the YEC model does have scientific support, and YECs are actively involved in scientific research on the matter. An article by Dr. Ronald Samec in the most recent Creation Matters provides a good example. (See Samec, R.G. 2014. Questioning Pulsar Ages. Creation Matters, 19(3):1-2.) This article discusses the traditional method of age determination for supernova remnants (SNRs) which yield typical ages for these objects which often exceed the YEC age of the universe. However, the paper also outlines a second chronological method which seems to me to be more objective and which seems to have more observational support (i.e. less model dependent and more observational).

 

This alternative dating method is based on the observed expansion rate of the debris cloud surrounding the SNR. With that observational data in hand, deriving an age estimate for the supernova event is simple mathematics. The interesting thing is that these ages typically fall well within the young earth creationary timeline and even more significant than that – they often match with a date on the Chinese calendar when just such an event was observed. This is phenomenal! The fact that these YEC dates match with recorded observations provides tremendous support for this method. Thus, it seems that this dating method (which yields dates consistent with the YEC chronology) is actually better supported than the more traditional method which is much more model dependent.

 

Note that this does not mean that every object in the universe is only thousands of years old. In fact, one of the most widely accepted YEC cosmologies (White Hole Cosmology) involves a great deal of gravitational time dilation on a cosmic scale. In this model, the entire universe was created during the same six ordinary days of creation (a few thousand years ago – by earthbound clocks), but the distant universe has experienced significantly more time than has passed here in the vicinity of the earth. This time dilation is predicted by the same gravitational field equations (from Einstein’s General Relativity Theory) that are used in modeling the Big Bang. The fundamental difference between these two vastly different results is in the boundary conditions assumed for the universe. And guess what, these boundary conditions are unobservable because they are quite beyond the edge of the observable universe. Thus, there is no objective reason to believe that one set of boundary conditions should be preferred over another. So it does not contradict the YEC chronology to point out that it is quite possible that objects in the distant universe have experienced more than a few thousand years of real history since they were created.

 

However, the main point here is to show that YECs are not ignorant of science, that they are not ignoring scientific discoveries, and that they accept the YEC chronology, not simply because they believe that’s what the Bible most clearly presents, but because they have good, scientific reasons of their own which suggest that it is reasonable.

Three Logical Prerequisites for Biological Evolution

One central question that proponents of biological evolution must answer is: How did the information in DNA arise? We might disagree on how much information is present in living things or even on how to quantify or define it, but pretty much everyone agrees that the DNA of living things contains information not found in non-living things and that complex organisms have more of it than simpler organisms.

So how did that information get there? Can information be added, bit by bit, through unguided natural processes? That’s what evolution claims. Yet, thus far, this step by step addition of information has not been observed. Until it is observed, the idea of common ancestry of all life is merely conjecture.

Of course, even if we could show that there are some instances in which information is added by unguided natural processes, that would be necessary to support common ancestry, but not sufficient. In order to even begin to make a solid case for biological evolution, one must show three things. If even one of these prerequisites is false, the modern theory of evolution (i.e. universal common ancestry via unguided natural processes) cannot be true. If any one of them cannot be shown to be true, evolution remains unverified and thus belongs to the realm of speculation, not science.

1: It is possible to add biological information.

Richard Dawkins describes evolution with an analogy of "Mount Improbable" which looks like an impossibly steep cliff on one side, but can be climbed by tiny little steps up the back. This is the evolutionist's concept of adding biological information in tiny steps, so that over time they add up to all the complexity we see among organisms today. However, Mount Improbable cannot be climbed unless it is, at some level, possible to go upward. If an organism only ever takes downward or level steps and cannot step upward, it will never get to the top, no matter how much time or how shallow the slope. Thus, in order to prove evolution, it is necessary (but not sufficient) to show that it is possible to add functional genetic information through unguided processes.

2: There are more upward steps than downward steps (or at least a way to get more upward steps than downward steps at least some of the time).

We know that genetic information is corrupted and destroyed through mutation. We know that there are many, many harmful effects when an organism's DNA is altered. In order for evolution to overcome this downward current toward catastrophic information loss, there must be an even stronger current upward (at least some of the time) in order to explain how the information was able to increase from that present in a tiny and simple organism to the information in a larger and more complex one.

Again, using the Mount Improbable analogy, it is impossible to get to the top by taking three steps downward for every step upward. There must be an overall trend toward increasing information. So even if there are a few examples of increasing information, they are not sufficient to prove evolution. If evolution is true, these upward changes must be the rule, not a rare exception.

3: There does exist a gradual genetic pathway that can be climbed in tiny, incremental steps.

In order for evolution to be true, not only does information have to be added over time, but each successive change must occur in a living organism and it must be conserved by being passed on to offspring. Thus, the change cannot kill the organism or seriously disable it, or the change will not be passed on. This must be the case for every step in the entire evolutionary sequence, no matter how small. At every step, there must be a functional organism. Thus, the changes must be gradual enough that the tiny upward steps (if they exist) can achieve each new level without killing or disabling the organism or impeding its ability to reproduce.

To use a simplistic analogy, if one tries to change from one word to another by changing one letter at a time (cat to cot to dot to dog, for example), there must, at every step, be an actual word that can be reached by changing one letter. In the Mount Improbable analogy, this means that there can be no upward jumps in the trail. If the maximum possible upward step is 6 inches, then there can be no 6 foot cliffs along the trail, or even 7 inch steps. If ever there is a step which requires more information than unguided evolution can provide, then evolution is falsified in that instance. It cannot account for the change in information in such a case.

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The problem with these three points is that, not only have they not been demonstrated, they aren't even adequately addressed by modern science.There has been a bit of discussion on Point 1, with a handful of examples that might show information increase, depending on the definition of information. However, even these are controversial and far from settled. There has yet to be shown any clear-cut examples of the addition of functional genetic information by unguided, natural means. There are plenty of examples of genetic change that benefits the organism, but being beneficial and showing an increase in information are not the same thing. While we have many instances of demonstrated change in organisms, it is not clear that these cases show the kind of change that is necessary to account for how the current genetic information in living things got there in the first place. Demonstrating a true gain of function mutation has proved very difficult, to say the least.

In addition to this, some cases of beneficial mutation appear to be non-random and thus may be a programmed response of the cell to change its DNA in response to specific conditions. This would be a directed mutation, not a random one. In such a case, no information has been added as the programming to cause this mutation was already in place.

So Point 1 above has not yet been conclusively proven. We don't even have adequate evidence that upward evolution (spontaneously increasing information) is possible. But that's just the first step.

Points 2 and 3 aren't even discussed, much less demonstrated. In fact, there is good evidence that Point 2 is false. Simply the fact that there are only a few cases where an increase in information is even postulated, compared to the huge number of examples where genetic change is known to destroy information, suggests that the downward current is stronger and that genetic information is far more often destroyed than built.

Furthermore, Point 3 is usually just assumed without any discussion. The assumption appears to be that the theoretical gradual pathway of increasing complexity is real, without bothering to determine whether the proposed intermediate steps produce a functional living organism or whether or not there are information cliffs, so to speak, that cannot be climbed in small, gradual steps.

There is also some very good evidence that large jumps in information would be necessary. Many critics of evolution have pointed out examples of irreducible complexity in which a system exists that cannot be produced by gradual changes, but requires several parts to all be present and properly placed and oriented in order to produce any function at all. Such irreducibly complex systems would be examples of informational cliffs that cannot be produced by small, incremental steps.

Unfortunately, the fact that someone can imagine a gradual pathway of increasing information that results in a living organism at every step doesn’t mean it actually exists. Science requires more than mere speculation to make a valid theory. Until these issues are addressed and evidence is provided that all three prerequisites are true, it is more than premature to speak of evolution as fact – it is downright dishonest.

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For further reading on this topic:

• Behe, Michael. The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism. Free Press, 2008.
• Carter, Robert. Can Mutations Create New Information? http://creation.com/mutations-new-information
• Sanford, John. Genetic Entropy. 4th edition. FMS Publications, 2014.