Evolution and Black Boxes

To me a black box represents anything that I have no idea how it works. For example, the computer I am typing this devotional on is a black box since I really have no idea how it works. Yes, I know that electricity and microchips somehow combine in an amazing way to allow me to compose black letters on a white background, but I still have little knowledge of this very sophisticated process.   

Back in Darwin’s day when the theory of evolution became of age the human cell was also a black box. Darwin, as well as the leading scientists of his time, knew little about cellular biology. The human cell was just a blob of protoplasm that didn’t need to be understood to support Darwin’s theory. 

However, unlike most theories, the theory of evolution still remains today, even though when new knowledge is found out, revisions are often made and sometimes old theories are completely abandoned. Clearly, what we now know about the complexity of human cells, should have sounded the death knell to the theory of evolution, however, the theory still stands today as the predominant explanation on college campuses on how life began.

But today the black box of the human cell has been opened and its contents scream for a divine Creator as the Author of human and for that matter all of life. Phillip E. Johnson astutely commented on the black box of biological systems when he shared: “Evolutionary biologists have been able to pretend to know how complex biological systems originated only because they treated them as black boxes. Now that biochemists have opened the black boxes and seen what is inside, they know the Darwinian theory is just a story, not a scientific explanation.”1

Apologist Frank Turek additionally states: “Scientists of Darwin’s day saw the cell as little more than a simple blob of protoplasm. They thought natural laws could perhaps create such a cell. But the science of today shows that the cell is a world of astonishing complexity containing all sorts of microscopic machinery and thousands of pages of genetic programming. If atheists could offer a naturalistic explanation for this, they would. Instead, they can do little more than belch insults or offer unsupported speculations that, even if true, do nothing to solve the problem.”2

In our world today there are still many black boxes that scientists are still trying to peer into. There, however, can no longer be any serious debate that evolution can’t explain the progression from amoeba to mammal to man, let alone how life came about in the first place. It is a bankrupt theory that ignores the contents of the black box of the human cell – once it became known – and instead hides behind a theory of make-believe, with not a shred of scientific evidence to support it.

In closing, molecular biologist Michael Behe concludes that even though God has fearfully and wonderfully created us, and told us that life is no longer a black box, thanks to the creation story of the Bible, scientists still haven’t a clue how life originated. According to Behe: “In private many scientists admit that science has no explanation for the beginning of life…Darwin never imagined the exquisitely profound complexity that exists even at the most basic levels of life.”3

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1 Charlie H. Campbell, Apologetics Quotes (Carlsbad, California: The Always Be Ready Apologetics Ministry, 2020), pp. 56 – 57.

2 Charlie H. Campbell, Apologetics Quotes (Carlsbad, California: The Always Be Ready Apologetics Ministry, 2020), p. 59.

3 Charlie H. Campbell, Apologetics Quotes (Carlsbad, California: The Always Be Ready Apologetics Ministry, 2020), p. 37.