This is part of a series debunking Lee Strobel’s video, “Case for a Creator”. View the rest of the series here:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6

Chris commented on this post, and recommended Lee Strobel’s “Case for a Creator” as something a “truth loving person” should read or watch. He claimed: “You will see proofs of God’s hand in creation that no scientist or Darwinist can explain away.”

I’ll take that challenge!

I located Strobel’s video on Youtube in 6 parts, and I’ve written rebuttals for each of Strobel’s major arguments. The 6 parts into which it was cut do not line up with the transitions as Strobel intended. I’ve included an embedded video and my arguments against the contents of that video in each post.

Before we start watching, let me point out that Darwin’s theory and modern evolutionary theory are not exactly equivalent. Many parts of Darwin’s original theory have been discredited, and later discoveries have expanded other parts of his theory far more than Darwin ever predicted. Darwin may have originated evolutionary theory, but it is in the same manner as Ford originated the automotive industry. Ford would probably be lost inside a modern vehicle with all its switches, buttons, knobs, glowing indicators, and computerization. Similarly, Darwin would be quite surprised about certain aspects of modern evolutionary theory.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zw-_rDZ76Z0[/youtube]

The intro is 8 minutes of part 1, and can be skipped without missing Strobel’s arguments. Stanley Miller’s old experiment about building amino acids is mentioned, and we discover that Strobel’s motivation was to understand positive changes in his wife, which she attributes to God after her “conversion” from agnosticism to Christianity.

At about 8:30, Stanley Miller’s experiment – which built amino acids from hydrogen, methane, ammonia, and water, is allegedly discredited because science no longer thinks that these elements and compounds were predominant in the atmosphere.

Hydrogen is H2, and can be readily extracted from other compounds through chemical or electrical interactions. Ammonia is NH3 – nitrogen currently makes up 70% of our atmosphere, and to the best of my knowledge, nitrogen has always been the predominant atmospheric gas. Methane is CH4. Carbon is found in just about everything on the planet, and water is H20.

What we can conclude from Miller’s experiment is that amino acids can be built without a purpose, and without design. Miller could not predict the exact types of amino acids that would be built, nor could he predict how those acids would subsequently interact. Wells statement about the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere narrows the possible locations as to where amino acids could have developed as in Miller’s experiment, but it does not refute that conditions can occur where amino acids develop without a conscious effort to create them. That the experiment failed using the alternative gases mentioned is immaterial: it merely indicates that life could not have originated in this manner above the Earth’s Surface. As far as I know, no significant scientific body presents “flying” as the initial state of life on earth, deferring to either inland swamps, littoral areas, deep-ocean volcanic vents, or even the open ocean.

Jonathan Wells, credited as “Biologist, Discovery Institute” is hardly an objective party. In his book, “Why I went for a Second Ph.D”, Wells writes:

Father’s [Sun Myung Moon's] words, my studies, and my prayers convinced me that I should devote my life to destroying Darwinism, just as many of my fellow Unificationists had already devoted their lives to destroying Marxism. When Father chose me (along with about a dozen other seminary graduates) to enter a Ph.D. program in 1978, I welcomed the opportunity to prepare myself for battle.