Thoughts on evolution #1

For the record, I believe the earth is billions of years old and that the creation days in Genesis one are therefore very long days. I believe in a literal Adam and Eve from whom we are all descended. I believe in a literal garden of Eden. I believe the appearance of new creatures over time in the geological record is a result of the creative work of God. But I can't believe in macro evolution as it is currently taught, and here's why:

The simplest organism we can conceive of (which is less complicated that the simplest organism we have actually seen in nature) has about 100,000 "steps" in it's little DNA stair case. You can bombard the little cells all day long with radiation of one kind or another and you can make minor changes in the staircase, but how in the world are you going to add 3.19 billion steps? Human beings have 3.2 billion steps in their spiral stair case of DNA. How are you going to add all that information? Mutations (radiation hitting the staircase and changing its structure) take place, but they don't add information. They just change the existing information.

So if you believe God started life and left it to evolve, you have to explain, not how the DNA structure might have been changed by mutation, but how 3.19 billion pieces of information was added to it.

Everyone has probably seen the picture of Darwin's tree of evolution. It's like a bush. Right at the base you see all the different life forms branching off. That's not what the geological record shows.

If you want to draw the tree to scale you can illustrate it using a football field. You start out with single celled organisms. These are the trunk, or the beginning of the tree. These stretch from one end zone to (I forget the exact placement) the 13 yard line at the other end of the field. All of a sudden you get some branches. Some sponges and whatnot. But long before you get to the 12 yard line you see a branching of the evolutionary tree into an inexplicable complexity of life forms. Billions of pieces of information were added in an astonishingly short period of time.

I've never seen a sensible naturalistic explanation for that. I've never seen one that could come close to being reasonable.