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Intelligent Design and Panspermia Both Deny
Darwinian Evolution
By Dr. Stephen Yulish - March
16, 2010
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  I was thinking the other day that many of those people who
want UFO disclosure by the government believe that life here on earth
originated somewhere else in the cosmos. They are not only looking for
human origins and see these aliens as saviors of our planet and
species, but they also thus deny the current scientific paradigm of
Darwinian evolution. They do not believe that we are mere cosmic
accidents but are the result of intelligent design by some faraway
cosmic benefactors. Ironically, they thus share something in common
with people of faith who also believe that we are not a cosmic accident
but are a result of intelligent design by a loving Creator called God.
“Who has ascended into heaven and descended? Who has gathered
the wind in His fists? Who has wrapped the waters in His garment? Who
has established all the ends of the earth? What is His name or His
Son’s name? Surely you know!” (Proverbs 30:4).
“It is I (The Lord, Holy One of Israel) who made the earth
and created man upon it” (Isaiah 45:11-12).
Of course, the chasm between these two groups is vast because
the devil is in the details, but it is my purpose in this paper to
show how both groups challenge the basic assumptions and paradigms of
Western, secular humanist, atheistic, rational, scientific constructs.
As I have done before and probably will continue to do ad
infinitum because my own personal experiences paint such a beautiful
word picture of what I am trying to say, let me once again be personal.
Please bear with me. I entered Case Institute of Technology in 1965 to
study Astronomy on a National Defense scholarship and student loan
program. I was very interested in UFOs and had already written a
science fiction story years before about a voyage to Mars for Analog
Magazine and I wanted to explore the questions of who were we and why
were we here, by looking skyward to the cosmos. I transferred to nearby
Western Reserve University a year later to study exobiology or life on
other planets in my ongoing quest for meaning. I changed my major again
in my senior year to human evolution and did all my requirements in
that year and graduated with a degree in physical anthropology with an
emphasis on human paleontology. When I did not find satisfactory
answers out in space, I looked to our genetic and biological origins in
the past in the convoluted evolutionary dance. My senior paper was
done on one of the missing links; a creature called Ramapithecus, and
was published in a prominent Japanese scientific journal. I again was
serious about this quest.
But all was not haphazard as it turned out because the real
Intelligent Designer, i.e. God, had a plan for my life all along and it
was not random although it was not was not what I had planned
“You intended to harm me but God intended it for good to save
many lives” (Genesis 50:20).
I could not pursue my graduate studies in evolution because
of the Vietnam War and instead taught public school in the inner city
as alternate service in Cleveland, Ohio where I was born and went to
school. After the draft lottery came out and I pulled 359/365, I
decided to go back to grad school in history (don’t ask!). When I
graduated with a PhD in 1975, I got a job at the University of Arizona
in Tucson. I even shared the dais a few years later at a national
conference on eugenics with noted evolutionist Stephen J. Gould (more
about him later). When I was denied tenure in 1982 for budgetary
reasons, I found myself in Phoenix working as a Jewish community
professional (Pharisee). When that ended due my divorce and other
factors, I found myself working in 1987 for a Christian company where I
eventually found Jesus after much debate and turmoil (actually He
found me but that is another story) and my present wife Paula. God had a
plan all along for my life. My seemingly diverse life experiences were
not random after all, and I finally found the answers that I had so
boldly sought first in the stars and later in the primates. I had gone
from Directed Panspermia to Darwinian evolution to Intelligent Design
and had found a loving Creator named Jesus Christ. But I am getting
ahead of myself. I now may have a Christian heart but I still have a
Jewish, professorial, non linear thinking head.
My famous colleague, noted Harvard evolutionist, Stephen J.
Gould, once said that we humans were but a “fortuitous cosmic
afterthought, just a cosmic accident”. Another of my heroes and role
models as a young man, noted scientist, Carl Sagan, also said that ‘the
cosmos is all that it is or ever will be.” He wrote that “only by the
most extraordinary coincidence that the cosmic slot machine has this
time come up with a universe that works.” Thus my two intellectual
champions, Gould in evolution and Sagan in astronomy, both believed in a
blind chance universe in which we arose from a primordial soup by
extraordinary fortune. They were both non believing, secular Jews as was
I, and that probably added to their allure. The Brookings Institute
was asked by NASA in 1960 to think through the impact that the
discovery of extraterrestrial life would have not only on religion but
on science as well. They found interestingly enough that scientists
would be most devastated because their entire scientific paradigm is
based on the Darwinian mythology and even though there are countless
challenges to it, nobody wants to tell the emperor that he has no
clothes. It would devastate our scientific mindset and educational
system. Noted British astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle mathematically
dismissed the chance of Darwinism evolution being a natural occurrence,
arguing that even if the whole universe consisted of organic soup
(which it doesn’t) the chance of producing merely the basic enzymes of
life by random processes without intelligent direction would be one
over one with 40,000 zeroes-too small to imagine. He believed therefore
that Darwinian evolution was an unlikely absurdity and instead he was a
proponent of the modern theory of panspermia where life on earth
originated somewhere else in the cosmos. Francis Crick, who won the
Nobel Prize in Chemistry for discovering the double stranded helix of
DNA, also believed that the earth was too young to have developed
evolutionarily. Crick’s aversion to religion led him to put forth the
theory of Directed Panspermism. He got around the concept of God by
stating that life on earth was brought here billions of years ago on
spaceships by more intelligent beings. Even the atheist, secular
humanist, skeptic, rationalist, and current leading proponent of
Darwinian evolution and leading critic of Intelligent Design, scientist
Richard Dawkins when interviewed by Ben Stein for his new movie
Expelled said amazingly that “perhaps life on earth was seeded by
extraterrestrials.” Leading secular humanist, atheistic scientists like
Hoyle and Crick and now even Dawkins seem to be closing the door on the
blind chance of Darwinian evolution and opening the door ever so
slightly on intelligent design from the heavens above. In my mind it is
only a small step (okay maybe not so small) from creation via an
extraterrestrial alien entity to creation by God in the heavens. Both
are not from this earth and are indeed extraterrestrial.
The 17th century, French mathematician and
philosopher, Blaise Pascal wrote in his famous treatise Pensees that it
is better to “bet” to believe in God and be wrong then to bet on
unbelief and lose that bet. There is far more to lose in the latter
case. This is known as Pascal’s Wager The eminent founder of game
theory, as well as the mathematician who worked with Edward Teller on
the Manhattan Project, the Jewish born, lifelong atheist, John Von
Neumann, on his deathbed tried to mathematically and philosophically
diffuse Pascal’s Wager and could not and turned to God. He accepted
Catholicism.
The militant atheist and renowned existentialist, Jean Paul
Sartre, according to his ex Maoist friend, on his deathbed (see National
Review 6/11/82) also supposedly said, “I do not feel that I
am the product of chance, a speck of dust in the Universe, but instead
somebody who was expected, prepared, prefigured. In short, a being whom
only a Creator could put here. The idea of a Creator here refers to
God.”
If it can happen to reprobates like Neumann and Sartre and
Yulish, it can happen to anybody. Don’t wait till death overcomes you
like it did Hoyle and Sagan and Gould to find out the truth These
brilliant yet prideful and unrepentant men probably stood before a
righteous God and told Him that He had not given them enough proof of
His existence but, “God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows” (Galatians
6:17).
And there is no purgatory or mercy for the dead only for the
living.
“Once to die and then the judgment” (Hebrew 9:27).
“Fear Him (God) who after killing the body has the power to
throw you into hell” (Luke 12:5).
But remember “God does not want anyone to perish
but everyone to come to repentance” (2 Peter 3:9).
“For everyone who calls on the name of the Lord, will be
saved” (Romans 10:13).
Stephen Yulish PhD has a BA in Human Evolution and a MA and a PHD
in History. He was a Professor at the University of Arizona and later a
Jewish community professional. In spite of all of this, he accepted
Jesus Christ in 1988 after a series of revelatory visions and a dream.
He now has MS but still serves the Lord everyday through his writings.
http://www.hearkenthewatchmen.com/article.asp?id=125
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