“The debate is over. Evolution is a fact (even though no one has ever seen it take place.)” Evolutionists have never proved evolution. A something-from-nothing premise is not scientifically demonstrable. If it were, we would be seeing experiments on how nothing became something, but we don’t. Change within existing species is not evolution. When Tim Berra, professor of zoology at Ohio State University, compares biological evolution with the “evolution” of the Corvette, he is lying. It can’t be said any other way.1 There are various materials needed to make an automobile (where did the “stuff” to make the parts come from?), designers to conceptualize how the material needs to fit together (where did the information come from needed to design a self-propelled machine?), and workers to take the original design and the manufactured parts and assemble them to make a functioning machine (the parts did not assemble themselves). There is a fourth point. None of this works unless there is a moral worldview that states that once an automobile is manufactured people can’t steal them. The beginnings of evolution (as evolutionists explain the theory) knew nothing of morality. It was “nature, red in tooth and claw” and there was nobody around to say otherwise. Two technology stories demonstrate that evolution is impossible. If it takes designers and manufacturers and programmers to make a robotic arm, then how is it possible the stuff of the cosmos came together on its own to make us? There is a new four-fingered, three-jointed robotic hand that “can catch a ball, a bottle or a tennis racket thrown in its direction in less than five-hundredths of a second.” Here’s the key part:

“To achieve such rapid responses, researchers took inspiration from human learning methods of imitation, and trial and error. They used a technique called ‘programming by demonstration,’ in which the robot is not given specific instructions. Instead, researchers manually guided the arm to a catching position several times, until the robot learned to move into position itself.”

The designers, manufacturers, and programmers copied the way humans learned and transferred that model into their robotic arm. If it was necessary to design, build, and program a robotic arm, why wasn’t it necessary for the designers, builders, and programmers of the robotic arm to be designed, built, and programmed? Here’s what two of the robot-arm builders have to say about their work:

“We teach the robot. . . . The main novelty that we bring to object catching is in the way we transfer information from a human to the robot. We call this ‘programming by demonstration.’ . . . The robot can observe the task from a human.”

Now we come to the moral question. Not only must robots be programmed by humans to perform human-like actions, but they must be programmed with a moral sense.

“The Office of Naval Research will award $7.5 million in grant money over five years to university researchers from Tufts, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Brown, Yale and Georgetown to explore how to build a sense of right and wrong and moral consequence into autonomous robotic systems.

“‘Even though today’s unmanned systems are “dumb” in comparison to a human counterpart, strides are being made quickly to incorporate more automation at a faster pace than we’ve seen before,’ Paul Bello, director of the cognitive science program at the Office of Naval Research told Defense One. ‘For example, Google’s self-driving cars are legal and in-use in several states at this point. As researchers, we are playing catch-up trying to figure out the ethical and legal implications. We do not want to be caught similarly flat-footed in any kind of military domain where lives are at stake.’”

Why not let the robots “evolve” a moral sense? Why is it necessary to build “a sense of right and wrong and moral consequence” into robots? According to evolutionists, our morality evolved. The robots did not evolve, and they can’t develop a moral sense. They need designers, manufacturers, and programmers to do that, the very realities that evolutionists reject. At every level the theory of evolution meets insurmountable challenges that cannot be resolved.

1. Tim Berra, Evolution and the Myth of Creationism: A Basic Guide to the Facts in the Evolution Debate (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 118–119. [↩]