Several years ago, I asked a friend of mine to come and preach at my church. He is a skilled evangelist; in fact, he taught me how to evangelise when I was a new Christian. He is also quite a capable apologist, as all good evangelists need to be. During his message, he said something that really caught my attention. He mentioned that some atheists like to argue that religion is the cause of all wars, but in reality, the Encyclopedia of Wars shows that religion is only the cause of 7% of wars.

Why did this get my attention? Because I immediately recognised this was an argument based on Vox Day’s 2008 book The Irrational Atheist. It was not completely correct; the number is 6.98%, and it was Vox who calculated that number based on the Encyclopedia of Wars against his own extensive military history readings. But it was unmistakably an argument based on Vox’s book.

I asked my friend after the sermon if he had read or heard of Day’s book The Irrational Atheist. He had not. Had no idea who Day was and had never read the book.

This story is relevant to our review here because it highlights how influential Vox Day is, how influential his ideas are, and also how they are often very effective. You hear much less today about how much war is caused by religion. Have you noticed that? You are more likely to hear people say that all wars are bankers’ wars, or the result of imperialism or something like that. This is in part because of Day’s 2008 book. It changed the cultural understanding of what the fundamental causes of war are, and took away one of the so-called New Atheists’ favourite weapons.

The reason he was able to do this was simple: he did the math. He did what none of us thought to do, he sat down and actually calculated, to the best of our historical knowledge at the time, how many wars were known to be caused by religion. And this simple examination pulled apart the threads of a powerful rhetorical argument against Christianity.

Vox has done this again with Probability Zero: The Mathematical Impossibility of Evolution by Natural Selection.

The premise of Vox Day’s argument is relatively simple: if something happens in the physical world, then it can be quantified. This is a simple enough concept. The way it applies to Day’s book is as follows: if evolution is happening, what is the average rate of evolution? This is the thread that Day has pulled on to bring down the whole Evolution by Natural Selection edifice. A simple question to an evolutionary biologist in a debate in 2019, which could not be answered, has turned into a demonstration of the impossibility of evolution via any proposed natural means. The mechanisms simply do not work. They do not have the horsepower to achieve what we were told they could achieve.

I recommend that every Christian and non-Christian who is interested in the origins debate, in apologetics, or in understanding the way our world works should read this book. Because Day has effectively put the nail in the coffin of evolution by natural selection. Genetics was always going to be a threat to the naturalistic evolutionary argument because it was going to allow the theoretical claims of Darwin’s theory to be examined by direct observations of the genes of living organisms. But we just had to wait for the data to be properly analysed, and now it has been.

The mechanisms proposed to make the evolutionary hypothesis possible do not work. As another good book on this subject notes (Origin, by Graeme and Geoffrey Messer) evolution is not a recent theory but was originally proposed by the ancient Greeks, who believed in spontaneous generation, and also that all life evolved from simple forms to more complex forms. What Darwin did was propose the mechanism that made this origins hypothesis compelling, and allowed it to become the dominant academic theory of the diversity of life on earth. What genetics has done is show that Darwin’s mechanism is not powerful enough. What Day and Tipler have done is lay this out for us. The Messers (they are brothers) even note in their book that the theory of evolution by natural selection is the last holdout of the ancient Greek scientific establishment left to be turned over. And they predicted that as more data is collected, it will be. They were right, Day and Tipler have done just that. And rather elegantly too.

Despite the title of this book, Probability Zero, at its core, MITTENS (the mathematical impossibility of the theory of evolution by natural selection) is not a probability argument, though the book does go into probability to some degree. Rather, Day’s argument is a capability argument. It is a complete deconstruction of the ability for evolution to explain the diversity of biological life through natural means. It is rather simple, really. We now know, from genetics, how long it takes for genes to be fixed in various populations; this can be called the rate of evolution. And the rate at which natural selection fixes genes is far too slow to account for the amount of genetic differences between Humans and Chimpanzees and really anything else. Even the fastest recorded fixation events in history fall far short of being able to make up for the time problem. I encourage you to read the book so you can see how Vox Day uses Mick Jagger, Genghis Khan and lactose intolerance to show that naturalistic evolution just cannot achieve what has been claimed by secular scientists for 170 years that it could achieve.

To explain it very simply. You do not need to be an engineer or a physicist to know that if I told you that I travelled from Sydney to Melbourne in 60 minutes, there is not a car on the planet that could have gotten me there. To travel that distance, another means is needed. The laws of physics and mathematics require it. You just can’t get around this fact. Natural selection (plus parallel fixation, gene drift, sex selection, etc., which have been added since by other biologists) is effectively the car, or vehicle, that Darwin proposed as driving evolution. But it does not have the horsepower. It falls far short, and this is not theoretical, but observed. This has been confirmed by known fixation rates.

For evolution by natural selection to work, just for humans and chimpanzees, you need to explain how, on average, about 40 genes were fixed per generation, in every generation, from our proposed common ancestor, when it takes something like 1600 generations to fix a few genes, and we know this for a fact now. And this time frame and length of generations is being generous to the naturalistic argument. Vox uses a number of 1600 generations to fix genes, from E. Coli, and this includes parallel fixations (hence why I note a few genes). This is being generous, because even though humans have many more mutations per generation than E. Coli, the fixation rate is much slower, because of the birth rate barriers, less defined generation length (this is where Mick Jagger is relevant, read the book to see why), and other issues. This is important. Day is not arguing that large amounts of mutations don’t happen; we know they do, about 40 or 50 per human, per generation. His argument is about those mutations that are fixed, that is, mutations that are required to distinguish humans from chimpanzees and other animals. This fixation takes far too long for evolution by natural means to be capable of producing.

This is just a fact. A fact well demonstrated in this book.

As noted, this is not a probability argument but is rather a capability argument. Genetics has now demonstrated that the mechanisms that have been proposed to drive evolution by natural selection cannot have possibly done so. Just as you know, I cannot drive my car to Melbourne from Sydney in 60 minutes, nor an even more powerful car like a Bugatti Veyron. It is not possible.

This book is not written by the usual creationist crowd (who I really appreciate) nor is it written by the Intelligent Design crew (who are also great), but comes at this from a different perspective, which surpasses the probability arguments or appearance of design arguments that creationists often rely on.[1] That is what makes this book so valuable to read. While some probability arguments against evolution do exist in the book, they are not the core of the argument. Atheists and naturalists like to brush aside probability arguments by simply saying they are irrelevant, because, as they say, “We are here. Hence, evolution must have happened.” This is a tautology; using our existence as evidence of their theory is simply dishonest and lazy. However, it is also common.

Hence, the book’s examination of the actual capabilities of natural selection and all the epicycles biologists have proposed to bolster their theory over the decades is its most important contribution to this debate. Probabilities are abstract and, therefore, many people cannot comprehend their significance, even if they are conclusive. Showing that the observed natural fixation rates are too slow to vindicate Darwin’s theory is much more tangible. Everyone can understand how it is impossible for a car to drive from New York to L.A. in an hour. But that is effectively what proponents of evolution by natural selection are claiming has happened to create biodiversity. And we know this could not have happened. It is a certainty.

The book is not very long, and therefore it is not a massive read.

Day’s and Tipler’s writing style is clear and accessible. Day often uses humour, too, which is good.

You also do not need to have a degree in science, mathematics, or anything like this to understand the vast majority of the book. However, there is some stuff in there for the trained mathematicians and scientists to chew on, which bolsters the strength of the book. I won’t pretend that I could follow all the math in the book; I never studied it beyond high school, and even there, not at a high level. But this did not stop me from being able to understand the vast majority of the book and its implications. So, this book is accessible to the general reader.

I should also note that Vox proposes an alternative theory called Intelligent Genetic Manipulation to explain what is more likely to have happened. So, he is not just attacking academic structures, but is also constructively making claims about better avenues of scientific research for scientists to engage in. This is helpful.

I suspect that Probability Zero will have a similar effect on Darwinism that Vox Day’s earlier work, The Irrational Atheist, had on many other atheistic arguments, especially about what causes wars. This is because the concept is just so elegantly simple. Again, let me state it: what is the average rate of evolution, and is there enough time for what Darwin claimed happened? The answer is it takes at a minimum over a thousand generations, though the average rate of fixation is much higher, and hence there is nowhere near enough time for Darwin’s mechanism to achieve such diversity of life. Simple. Now, it is simply a matter for people to access the book and share it with others.

You can get it on Amazon and at NDM Express, where both the ebook and the hardcover are available. I highly recommend you read this, because creationists have been predicting for years that the genetic data we are collecting would one day prove that evolution by natural selection in the sense of goo to you change was going to be shown to be impossible. They were right, and they were vindicated by someone who simply did the math.