Evolution: bad economics

by Dave Mateer

Consider the following riddle:

A man starts a business selling widgets.  It costs $15 to produce each widget, and he sells them for $13.  The man receives no income other than the proceeds from the business.  Yet, after ten years of running the business, the man becomes a millionaire.  How is this possible?

The answer: Before starting the business, the man was a billionaire.

There are striking similarities between this man’s business and the idea of molecules-to-man evolution.  Evolutionists postulate that over millions of years, simple organisms containing minimal information evolved into increasingly complicated creatures.  This uphill progression requires a continual net increase in the amount of genetic information.  The problem is that the currently popular mechanisms of evolution (natural selection and mutation) result in an increase of information only in the imaginations of evolutionists.  Observational science has demonstrated repeatedly that these processes reduce information or at best shuffle existing information.¹

As information scientist Dr Werner Gitt has observed,

‘There is no known law of nature, no known process and no known sequence of events which can cause information to originate by itself in matter.’²

The reason that the riddle of the widgets is difficult is because of a critical piece of information that is deliberately withheld.  If we had started the riddle by saying, ‘There was a certain billionaire who decided to start a business,’ then the mystery of the riddle is removed.

We can clearly see around us that the world is full of design, information and diversity—it is a ‘millionaire’ world.  Because evolutionists are committed to a naturalistic explanation, they conclude, ‘Isn’t evolution amazing?  Look at what it has created!’  Yet common sense and observational science tell us that the very processes in which the evolutionist trusts are going the wrong way—losing information.  Thus, it’s a mystery, and many resign themselves to, ‘Well, given enough time, anything is possible.’  This is not a solution, merely a cop-out.

The Bible provides the critical information that the world suppresses.  It is true that the world we see today is a ‘millionaire’ world, but God originally created a ‘billionaire’ world.  We read that after the sixth day, God declared everything ‘very good.’  There was no death, disease, or suffering.  Today, as a result of sin, the world is cursed, although we see a remnant of the original beauty.  The world and all its creatures are suffering—we are on the way down, not on the way up.  What we read in God’s Word agrees with what we see in God’s world.  When we start with the Bible’s revelation about creation, the ‘riddle’ is solved.

The same principle applies to the ‘mystery of the gospel’ (Ephesians 6:19).  For many, their sinful nature tells them that they must do something to earn salvation.  If only they can do ‘enough’ good deeds, ‘enough’ ceremonial works, get baptized, or eat the right foods, then they will be right with God.  The problem is that they continually fall into lust, anger, deceit, adultery, pride, theft, selfishness, and a host of other sins of which their conscience convicts them.  Thus, their efforts at self-righteousness are futile; they merely store up wrath against themselves, which the individual will have to pay in an eternal hell.

Once again, the Bible provides the critical information that is suppressed.  All have personally offended God, and have earned His wrath.  Yet Jesus Christ bore this wrath for us, taking our punishment, so that His righteousness might be imputed to us.  Once this information is understood, the ‘mystery’ is solved.  Our conscience is not telling us what is right and wrong so that we can earn our salvation—it is convicting sinners so that they will trust in the necessary and sufficient sacrifice of Christ (Romans 2:14-16, Galatians 3:24-25).

For more information:

• How can I be saved from God’s wrath?
• Muddy waters: Clarifying the confusion about natural selection
• Mutations: New eyes for blind cave fish?

1. Although it has never been observed, it is theoretically possible that a mutational change could marginally increase the amount of genetic information.  But any marginal increase would be overwhelmed by the continual downward regression.  Evolution requires an ongoing net informational increase, the exact opposite of what we observe.  See the question and answer page on mutations for refutations of commonly cited examples of increasing information. [RETURN TO TEXT]

2. Dr Werner Gitt, In the Beginning was Information, Christliche Literatur-Verbreitung e. V.: Bielefeld, Germany, 1997, p. 107. [RETURN TO TEXT]