Origins in Collision
Basically, there are just two views of origins. The one says life came about via matter through time and chance, or as some put it, an amoeba in some primeval ocean of slime developing through billions of years into some higher form of life, eventually resulted in you and me. The other view of origins says life came about through intelligence. There is quite a width of views on Intelligence being behind the origin of life, from Young Earth Creationism through to the Deism of the once atheist, Anthony Flew, whatever has come into existence has come about through intelligence. But basically, for the layperson, it comes down to a clash between two views of origins. We originated from matter through time and chance, or we came to be through a higher intelligence.
The outcome of the MORI poll that followed the Horizon programme, “A War on Science”, on BBC2 back January 30 2006, surprised the British science establishment. Only 48% of those questioned said evolution best described their worldview. It was a lot less than expected. And what was equally surprising was that 22% chose creationism. And while one could expect even more than the 69% who wanted evolution as part of the science curriculum, a surprising 44% said they wanted creationism included in the school curriculum and 41% wanted to see Intelligent Design included. The President of the Royal Society, Lord Martin, said that 150 years after Darwin, “It is surprising that many should be sceptical of Darwinian evolution”.
On the 21st of February The Guardian reported: “A growing number of science students on British campuses and in sixth form colleges are challenging the theory of evolution and arguing that Darwin was wrong.” This was supported by a survey reported by The Guardian on August 15, 2006 – claiming 30% of students believe creation or Intelligent Design is the best explanation for the origin of life.
While those who come under the title of Intelligent Design Theorists might withdraw from using the name of ‘God’ as the Creationist’s description of the Creator, it is the Bible which gives the name of that Intelligence: “In the beginning God made the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1). This is one view of origins that is increasing in popularity.
For the three great monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, there was Mind, Reason, Logos, God or Allah. You and I, the world and the universe exist, because God existed before the world and the universe. The writers of the Old Testament made statements such as, “When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him?” (Psalm 8:3). In Psalm 19:1 the Psalmist claims that, “The heavens declare the glory of God, the skies proclaim the work of his hands”. In Psalm 33:6 the writer says, “By the word of the Lord were the heavens made, their starry host by the breath of his mouth”. Verse 9 then affirms that he spoke all these things into existence. “For he spoke, and it came to be; he commanded and it stood firm”.
This is one of the two views of origins. The Bible says it was Intelligence that brought the material universe into existence, including planet earth with its inhabitants. The Bible calls that Intelligence, God.
In this world-view Intelligence came before the material universe, before matter. So in the Beginning was Intelligence. Intelligence produced matter – the universe, our world and all else. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”.
The other view of origins is in contention with the first view and it is the most accepted world-view of today, which really could be put as, “In the beginning was matter”. Atheism, the disbelief in a Creator God, comes down to a view of origins that says, “In the Beginning was matter”.
For this ‘beginning’ scientists use the word ‘singularity’. Some describe this ‘singularity’ as extremely small and extremely dense. A Short History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson, was top of the book charts for quite some time, and in the top ten for 70 weeks (Sunday Times Culture Magazine, 09.01.05)! Although a populist writer, mainly in the field of travel, his venture into the area of the sciences has received many plaudits from the field of education. He was awarded the post of Chancellor of Durham University in 2005.
Listen to how Bill Bryson describes singularity on pages 27 and 28 of his best selling book. He asks us to think of the size of protons. You can get about 500,000,000,000 protons on the dot of an ‘i’. Then Bryson says, imagine shrinking just one of those protons down to a billionth of its normal size – then pack into that space an ounce of matter. That is what is known as ‘singularity’.
Then, having shrunk whatever the substance is, to a billionth of a single proton, Bryson says, you are now ready to start a universe. To quote Bryson on page 28 of his book he says, “In a single blinding pulse, a moment of glory much too swift and expansive for any form of words, the singularity, assumes heavenly dimensions, space beyond conception . . . . In less than a minute the universe is a million billion miles across and growing fast. In three minutes . . . we have a universe . . .. And it was all done in about the time it takes to make a sandwich”.
One can see why Bryson has reader appeal, but that is what is referred to as the Big Bang! - or a sudden expansion. A rapid expansion from something microscopic (or nothing) - to the universe we live in – “in the time it takes to make a sandwich”! Says Bryson on page 31, “It seems impossible that you can get something from nothing, but the fact that once there was nothing and now there is a universe is evident proof that you can”.
That is how Bryson represents the thinking of evolutionary scientists about how the universe began, - our universe came from nothing in about the time it takes to make a sandwich!
Christians also believe the universe came from nothing of course – but they believe that it was God who spoke it into existence. Many Christians welcome the idea of the Big Bang and use it for the ‘creationist’ argument! If the universe had a beginning, there must have been Intelligence responsible for its beginning and its being! But evolutionists believe the universe came from nothing, around 15 billion years ago or a little less – and now we have our wonderful ordered universe. Then - 4.6 billion years ago the earth got formed. And then - there was life. Then Bryson describes for the scientists how that life came to be.
“It was a singularly hostile environment”, says Bryson on page 63, “and yet somehow life got going. Some tiny bag of chemicals twitched and became animate. We were on our way. Four billion years later, people began to wonder how it all happened”.
One can see that Bryson has kept very close to Dawkins’ view on origins as we see on page 137 of The God Delusion where Richard Dawkins writes, “The origin of life is a flourishing, if speculative, subject for research. . . . I shall not be surprised if, within the next few years, chemists report that they have successfully midwifed a new origin of life in the laboratory. Nevertheless it hasn’t happened yet, and it is still possible to maintain that the probability of its happening is, and always was, exceedingly low – although it did happen once . . . . we can make the point that, however improbable the origin of life might be, we know it happened on Earth because we are here.” In the beginning matter, and matter created you and me.
So while on the one hand we can read Richard Dawkins declaring evolution to be a ‘fact’, here we read the belief of atheism. It has never been witnessed, that life came from non-life, but “we know it happened on Earth because we are here.” The Christian viewpoint also a belief says, “we know it happened because we are here, and the Bible tells us, “In the beginning God made the heavens and the Earth.”
When we read Bryson’s description of evolutionary origins should the British scientific establishment be surprised at the result of the MORI poll that followed the Horizon programme, “A War on Science”? Should there be surprise at The Guardian report of the survey that showed 30% of students believe in creation or/and Intelligent Design? It is this description of the origin of life as Bryson presents us with that stretches the credibility of the evolutionary theory in the public mind. Public disbelief in the theory is well expressed in a poem called, “Once I was a Tadpole” (author unknown).
- “Once I was a tadpole groping in the mire,
- Till I became ambitious and started to aspire.
- I rubbed my tail so vig’rously against the sunken log
- It disappeared completely and I found myself a frog.
- I struggled from my puddle and jumped upon dry land,
- And the feeling that was in me was glorious, and grand;
- It made me kind o’ frisky, so I hopped around a tree,
- Till I landed in the branches as happy as can be.
- And there I spent some aeons evoluting without fail,
- Till I became a monkey and grew another tail;
- But still I had ambitions, as aeons quickly sped,
- So I climbed down from the branches and walked the earth instead.
- Till my tail got tired of trailing on the hard earth every day,
- And twice within my ‘process’ that appendage passed away.
- Once again I evoluted, and, believe me if you can,
- I awoke one summer morning and found myself a man”.
Humorous? But isn’t that how Bryson expresses it for the world of evolutionary science? On pages 357 and 358 Bryson says, “everything that has ever lived, plant or animal, dates its beginnings from the same primordial twitch. At some point in an unimaginably distant past some little bag of chemicals fidgeted to life. It absorbed some nutrients, gently pulsed, had a brief existence. This much may have happened before many times.
“But this ancestral packet did something additional and extraordinary: it cleaved itself and produced an heir. A tiny bundle of genetic material passed from one living entity to another, and has never stopped moving since. It was the moment of creation for us all. Biologists sometimes call it the Big Birth” (p.357-8). You can read more of that on page 19 of his book. That is the evolutionary model of origins. Matter came before intelligence. Matter created intelligence, you and me.
The contention for creationists and Intelligent Design theorists is that we know that non-living things do not produce living things. Inanimate matter does not produce animate creatures. That is how things are and have always been in human understanding and experience. One can get bogged down in detailed arguments over the fossil record or the development from one species to another, but how did life originate in the first place? If Bryson’s explanation is a good representation of evolutionary science, what should we think when science informs us that Information Theory says that only information can pass on information? Wasn’t this the problem that Anthony Flew faced with his atheism?
Scientists tell us that whatever the DNA code is in any given life form - that is what will be produced. If there is no life then there is no DNA structure to pass on information to make something that we know as life, - however simplistic that life is. That is reality. That is how we perceive life to be and that is how life has always behaved. There is clear evidence for microevolution but not macroevolution. So is Bryson’s reflection of evolutionary science any less a miraculous explanation than that used by the creationist or the Intelligent Design theorist?
Atheists, materialists, evolutionists - want us, the general public, to fantasise about a time – just one time – far enough in the dim and distant past, when an accident of nature happened – a reversal of how science knows things to be - and how we don’t know, but life began, just as Bill Bryson has described for us. But there is nothing in the present that tells us that matter, in the dim and distant past, could have become life, even in its simplest form. Even if it does not involve the supernatural, being outside of human experience as we know it, that explanation of origins must surely include the miraculous, something materialists object to.
These then are the two basic opposing world-views on origins that are currently in strong contention here in the UK and elsewhere in the world. The one says there was Intelligence and that it was Intelligence that brought everything into existence. To state it from the Christian source, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”. The other world-view says the opposite, “In the beginning matter created the heavens and the earth”. Then somehow, matter produced intelligence, - us. One can argue about which should come first, intelligence or matter. All that we can agree on is, as Dawkins would conclude, we know we are here.
So where did we come from? For the Christian, Moslem, Jew, and implicit in I.D., it is Intelligence who “created the heavens and the earth”. For the Christian, it is not just that the Bible says, “God created the heavens and the earth”. For the creationist in particular it is the Bible view of origins and our existence and all it has to say about life on earth that makes more sense of the world in which we live. It gives meaning and hope to future life.
The Darwinian view leaves life meaningless and hopeless. As Kevin Logan reports of Richard Dawkins on pages 94-5 of his book, Responding to the Challenge of Evolution, “Amazingly, leading atheist Richard Dawkins, and similar media scientists, may have been an inspiration to creationists. A reaction set in against Professor Dawkins’ reduction of humans to ‘nothing more than . . . throwaway survival machines’ for genes. His militant atheism, often dismissive of, and offensive to Christians, caused the very thing he sought to eliminate – a creationist revival”. But just reading Bryson, one can’t understand why the MORI Poll that followed the Horizon programme should have surprised the scientific establishment to show increasing interest in creationism and ID, or why 30% of British students favour creationism and/or Intelligent Design as reported by The Guardian. While still in the majority and in control in the educational fields, the Darwinian view of origins is being challenged and is showing over recent years to be losing ground.
Revised 25/05/07
