Feb 19 2009
Evolution Accidently Refuted by Muffin Analogy
Science can be difficult. Toss in some math and many people’s brains tend to shut down.
One of the latest findings in the evolutionary sciences perplexes me. But in a good way, as a brain-teasing puzzle might. Researchers have found steroids in sedimentary rock dating back 635 million years. The steroids are evidence of animal life, namely sponges, that existed 100 million years before the so-called Cambrian explosion of life-forms.
Huh. Wow. Cool. The steroids (think growth hormones in humans) were produced by the sponges and preserved in the rock. And scientists connected the dots.
Sure, for those who doubt evolution, go ahead and conclude that thousands upon thousand of scientists, when connecting their dots, are deluding themselves. Sure, some connections may be more tenuous than others. But if you fail to see the myriads of more obvious ones, that is your blindness, your failure to connect dots — whether the failure is in motive or ability or both.
I once heard a creationist argue that while he had his god, “God,” the evolutionists have their god, “time.” Time is the supernatural element we insert into our equations to magically fix what is actually broken.
That’s a nifty ploy. But it’s bogus. When I put a tin of muffins in the oven for 25 minutes, it is not the 25 minutes that does the cooking, it is the heat . . . over that span of time. The 25 minutes explains/describes how flat batter is transformed into a risen muffin non-instantaneously. And time actually does play an essential role. That role is about quantity — in this case, of the vast amount of energetic molecular interations needed to bake a muffin .
Granted, numbers like 635 million are extremely difficult to grasp. Allow me to try to illustrate how big that number is in terms of muffins. Blueberry, corn, or even oat-bran (if you must), your choice.
Say it takes 20 THOUSAND years to mix one bowl of batter and 25 minutes to bake a batch of 12, how many muffins could a baker produce in 635 million years?
Three hundred million — 300,000,000 — give or take a whole lot of crumbs.
Okay, maybe that didn’t help. How about this: If the average life of a muffin is 24 hours from conception to rebirth as human fuel and tissue, and a human being could survive on one muffin a day for the whole of his/her 75 years, how many muffins would a hypothetical tribe of Israelites — their number at a consistent 100 individuals — have consumed from their origination (just after Noah’s float) to today?
Sixteen billion — 16,000,000,000. I know, that’s impossible. Therefore, the Noah story is false. Who can conceive of 16 billion muffins? Why, if you lined up that number of muffins, the line would encircle the earth more than 40 times! Impossible. Even if they wanted to, no tribe of humans could eat that many muffins.
Imagine if we had tried to compute how many muffins all of humanity had consumed in the alleged stretch of time our kind has lived and munched! Why, that amount of muffins would no doubt stretch from here at the center of the universe, past the sun, and straight up to the throne of the great muffin-maker in the sky. Impossible. That idea is obviously half-baked.
