Loose ends before I leave this topic.

While the process of evolution, both in life in general and human life specifically, has overwhelming evidence, the general theory of evolution is not perfect. And, as I said before, as a Christian, it would make my life more straightforward if the evidence pointed to a six-thousand-year-old earth where humans came on the scene as fully human, and there was no evidence in the record of the progression of life over significant periods of time. But that is not the world we find. We can be honest about what we see, or we can lie to ourselves and others.

In this blog, I’ve written before about how the final answers to the big questions of life —whether there is a creator, whether that creator is personal, or whether there was no creator —each have their absurdities. The religious are taught that their way of thinking is the moral default. They have also grown to rely on subjective truth: “I know God is real because I can feel him.” I spent 28 years of my life relying on subjective truth and personal experiences. Man, did we have some spetacular (but self-generated) experiences. My Christianity is now profoundly richer, as I live in accordance with objective reality. The atheists see the absurdities of religion, but not of their own viewpoints, and believe their view is the rational default.

Evolution’s Problems

I will call the grand theory of evolution, life appeared out of nothing and for no reason and through the process of natural selection has ended up where we are now, “spontaneous evolution.” It is just as hard for the atheist-scientist to appreciate the flaws of spontaneous evolution as it is for the religious to acknowledge their own bias against any evolution. However, spontaneous evolution has problems. I am hesitant to speak of them because the YECs (young earth creationists) have lied so much about the issues in evolution that I don’t want to be mistaken for them. I am not in their camp.

One of the first problems with spontaneous evolution is the issue of abiogenesis. This is the process by which chemical reactions give rise to the first life. For life to exist on the most elementary level, it must have a cell wall and the ability to reproduce and carry the same information inside that reproduction. That is “all” you need, but even that requirement is profoundly complex. I could save you a lot of research (and I’ve spent many hours examining this) by pointing out that there is no explanation or theory for how this could happen. With no laws of nature that can explain this, it appears impossible from a scientific perspective. The atheist-scientist is content with the notion that it must have happened, for example, lightning striking seawater, or around deep-sea thermal vents, because they are in a box. If there is no creator, it HAD to happen this way. Another silly proposal is panspermia, where aliens or a meteor deposited single-cell life here, but it only kicks the can down the road.

Dr. James Tour has extensively worked on this issue, and his lecture is presented here. He also participated in a three-hour debate at Harvard with Dr. Lee Cronin, a leading atheist and spontaneous evolutionist from Oxford, which can be watched here. If you do watch the Harvard “debate,” I will warn you that Dr. Cronin, a brilliant man, does not claim knowledge of how abiogenesis could have happened. Instead, as atheist-scientists often do, behaving just like the religious debaters, they focused on Tour’s bias as a religious man. The strawman of these kinds of debates, rather than honest debates about the evidence, is where you claim the other side’s views are flawed because they are religious or because they are atheists. This is what Cronin did, neglecting the evidence for abiogenesis because there is none, and claimed Tour is falling for the “God-in-the-gap” fallacy. Which is, if you can’t explain something scientifically, you stick “God” in that gap. But the atheist scientists do the same by inserting “Time-in-the-gap.” Just throw in a billion years, and somehow carbon-based chemicals can turn into reproducible life.

The other central problem area of spontaneous evolution, and I hate to say it, is the issue of transitional forms. I hate to say this, because the YEC argues “there are no transitional forms” in all of their debates. However, they claim that there are no transitional forms in the fossil record at all. That is not true, as there are a plethora of “transitional forms” in the fossil record, including for humans.

In the five-hour debate between “Gutsick Gibbon” (aka Erika) and Dr. Jerry Bergman (a leading anti-evolution young earth creationist), Dr. Bergman said that if there were one transitional creature between humans and apes, he would change his mind. Erika produced about a dozen such transitional forms in the fossil record, and he didn’t change his mind, but continued the mantra, “There are no transitional forms.”

However, the YECs are correct in the point that natural selection cannot produce complex systems that require being fully functional to have any reproductive advantage. The eye is the classic example. Yes, there are some primitive “eyes” in the fossil record, where a light-sensitive spot may be present on the skull. But a functioning, though simple and compound, eye appeared at least half a billion years ago in the trilobite. Even Darwin wrote in his On the Origin of Species. “To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances…could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.” You can find many other examples.

I will post this article from an atheist-evolutionist, which attempts to refute my point, but I found it wanting.

This article is getting long, but I want to transition with my next post, which explores how the concept of human evolution has influenced my understanding of a creator. My years as an evangelical, my God was a very small Bronze Age god. Since I’ve re-embraced science, I have found my concept of God to be much richer with a God who is far more mysterious than the God I knew before. I find it so sad that the Christian religion has declared war on science as the enemy. There is nothing more holy than curiosity about the cosmos that God has created and science is the best vehicle for that curiosity.

Another School Shooting

In connecting the dots to the news of the week, we had another school shooting tragedy. I wrote an article here 2-3 years ago about school shootings, and I made the point that the central driving force is the loss of meaning, or nihilism. I don’t think it is wise to believe in God only as a leap of faith, because such beliefs can give meaning, akin to Pascal’s Wager. But I do think that if you take atheism to its conclusion, you cannot have meaning. I am not in the same camp as many conservatives who argue that school shootings are because of the rejection of Christianity. Countries like Japan rarely have this kind of violence, and they are only 2% Christian. But with the combination of the idea of no God, that we evolve by a mistake or pure randomness, or that truth is relative, you cannot insert meaning.

David Brooks is a political conservative, one of the few remaining ones that I respect. He addressed the shooting yesterday and arrived at the same conclusion I had two years ago. You can hear his views here.

Respectfully, Mike