As a boy, I was fascinated with inventors and their inventions. Not just in the invention but the process. How did they do it? Why didn’t they give up after so many failures? Edison’s attempt to find the right filament for his incandescent light was exhausting. He reportedly said, “I have not failed 10,000 times. I have not failed once. I have succeeded in proving that those 10,000 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
I read several biographies of Edison, Bell, Ford, and the Wright brothers. Film biographies of Edison, Bell, Louis Pasteur, and Paul Ehrlich fascinated me. In almost every case, there was often philosophical and scientific opposition. “It can’t be done … We’ve never done it like that … The scientific community doesn’t approve…. The science is settled.”
Thinking Straight in a Crooked World
The nursery rhyme "There Was a Crooked Man" is an appropriate description of how sin affects us and our world. We live in a crooked world of ideas evaluated by crooked people. Left to our crooked nature, we can never fully understand what God has planned for us and His world. God has not left us without a corrective solution. He has given us a reliable reference point in the Bible so we can identify the crookedness and straighten it.
Buy NowRecently I have been reading two biographies about the Wright brothers. The most recent one is David McCullough’s The Wright Brothers. I also have the Audible version that McCullough reads. McCullough’s book is breezier than Fred Howard’s Wilbur and Orville, but Howard’s has more details that add to the fascinating story of how two young men accomplished what many critics said was impossible. One day after a bad test flight of their glider, “Wilbur was at such a low point that he declared that ‘not in a thousand years would man ever fly.’’’ (DM, 63). By the next morning, he was at it again. “The New York Times editorialized that a man-carrying airplane would eventually be evolved if mathematicians and mechanics worked steadily for the next one million to ten million years.” (FH, 130). Evolved. Man-flight didn’t evolve. It was conceived, planned, executed, practiced, and accomplished. Left to itself, human beings would never fly. But birds do, and do an exquisite job at it.
The Wright brothers had little money, no formal training in mathematics, mechanical engineering, engine design, or aeronautics. Their most formidable rival was Samuel Langley who had been given $50,000 by the War Department “to design and construct a man-carrying airplane for military use.” (FH, 125). His two “flights” were utter failures. When Orville added up the costs of the untested Wright Flyer, “the total came to less than $1000—a startling contrast to the $73,000 that Samuel Langley had spent in his unsuccessful attempt to achieve human flight.” (FH, 123).
• $1,000 in 1903 is equivalent in purchasing power to about $36,000 today.
• $73,000 in 1903 is equivalent in purchasing power to about $2,635,000 today.
What does any of this have to do with evolution? The Wright brothers studied birds. They constructed numerous gliders, tested them and refined them after observations and failures. They built a wind tunnel, an engine for propulsion, controls to steer, and propellors. Their designs were based on the structure of bird wings. Without the brothers, the Wright Flyer would never have been conceived, designed, constructed or flown, and yet the intricate nature of birds and every animal and humans somehow came into existence without a designer and an actual mechanism. Evolution is not a “thing” or mechanism. Nothing in “nature” mimics the claims of the evolutionists from “goo to you.” Nothing spontaneously came into existence and later “evolved” into what we see today just like the Wright Flyer did not evolve from an immaterial idea to construction and finally flight.
If Evolution is Right, Can Anything be Wrong?
If Scientists believe in evolution, why don't they practice what their faith preaches? Atheism cannot account for rationality, love or morality. This does not mean that atheists are always irrational, unloving and immoral, but it does mean that they can't account for rationality, love and morality given their assumptions about the origins of the universe and our accidental place in it.
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