Gervase Markham, a Mozilla programmer, has an interesting viewpoint on macro-evolution. Basically, he is trying to say that although evolution as a process is pretty much not in dispute, that doesn’t mean you can just work backwards and say that evolution is how life came to be on this Earth.
Like Gerv, I’m a Christian, which is relatively rare for those in the computer programming field. However, I’ve had little trouble through my years reconciling my faith in God and Jesus with what we know regarding the nature of life. One of the things that has helped me was an excellent book my roommate let me borrow, Finding Darwin’s God.
First off, I think that we need to understand that whatever theories scientists can come up with regarding the creation of life, it’s going to be necessarily separate from evolution. Evolution is just a filter, that rewards types of life that are more suited to their environment than others. It’s just statistics taking its course over time, and as such requires that there be life beforehand. However, what evolution does for theories regarding the creation of life is that it drastically lowers the bounds for the creation process. Creation doesn’t have to involve starting with nice cuddly animals and fish, or even anything we call alive. It merely has to be something that can reproduce.
The current scientific theory regarding this seems to be the RNA world hypothesis, which essentially claims that the first self-reproducing chemical component was RNA (a nucleic acid, found in every living thing) which was formed in the turbulent conditions on primordial Earth. This RNA strand couldn’t reproduce by itself, but in combination with another strand would be able to duplicate limitlessly. So, this requires that two different, but compatible RNA strands manage to form, and come into contact, with conditions suitable to reproducing, before the strands are broken back down by cosmic rays. And this doesn’t even include such niceties are forming the cellular membrane, and turning from something akin to a virus into an actual living, metabolizing organism. But then again, however implausible it sounds, it could happen, and it’s not a horrible stretch to imagine that over 2 billion years, it would have happened somewhere, and stuck. Of course, the RNA hypothesis could be completely wrong. But my point is that it’s not a huge leap to get from a primordial goo into something that evolution could work on.
Gervase has a 3-point definition of a doctrine, which is what he says both macro-evolution and Christianity are. Or in other words, if you’re a Christian, you have no place even thinking that macro-evolution could be true. Here are his points:
- It’s a basic position that you hold about the nature of reality that’s not provable – it’s a faith position.
- It’s something that you put your trust in, and live your life on the basis of.
- It’s something you urge others to believe as the truth.
Gervase says that the idea of macro-evolution is something that can’t be proven (point 1). But that’s not true, I can think of an experiment right now that can prove it: Recreate a pool or something which simulates the conditions on primordial Earth, based on what we know of astronomy and geology. This can include weird oceans composed of nitrogen or whatever, meteors falling, cosmic rays, amino acids, the works. Then just sit and wait until you see signs of something reproducing. Remember than once we have something that can reproduce, natural selection can take over. Cosmic rays can provide the mutations, and a bad mutation mean no more reproducing strands. Of course, you may have to wait a while. Judging from geology, you may have to wait 2 billion years. But if you do glimpse something like this, you’ve effectively proven the RNA hypothesis.
He also claims that macro-evolution is something people put their trust in, and use to live their life by. The first part of that is true by definition for those who think macro-evolution is true, but the second is just laughable. There is no God of the macro-evolutionists, and thinking that macro-evolution is true is hardly what I think of when I hear the word religion. In the end, it’s just another theory. I must say I’m surprised to have read that argument from someone of Gervase’s intelligence, as it could have been as easily applied to Copernicus and Newton. After all, Newton claimed that gravitation was a universal force, but for all we know there could be a planet floating out there somewhere that doesn’t obey the laws of gravitation, and so since we can’t prove gravity is universal, you shouldn’t put your faith in it. :P
Finally, he claims that macro-evolutionists are, to be blunt, evangelizing their religion. I’ll remember this next time one of those annoying Darwin’s Witnesses comes knock, knock, knocking on my door at 8 in the morning, trying to pawn off one of their cheesy Books of the Cosmic Chemical Incarnation.
Now, my personal opinion is that God was in some way (if not directly) responsible for the creation of life on this planet. Exactly how he did it doesn’t concern me, and I can’t see why it should concern anyone else either. I’m not so proud that my life would lose meaning if it turned out that my immediate ancestor 5 billion years ago were 2 RNA strands that got together thanks to a rude meteor knocking them together. The way I see it, if God saw fit to make the universe look 10 billion years old, and to make it look like life started at the very tiniest bacterial stage, who am I to argue? The most perfect creations are the ones that you can set in motion, and never have to touch again.
In fact, I consider it an affront to God’s wisdom and powers when I hear people try to say that God created man and woman *POOF*, just like that. Think about it: Which would be harder to do for a being of limitless (or very near limitless) power, designing a creature on a sedentary rock that you just special-made, or creating this BIG HUGE EXPLOSION that created a Universe which was just PERFECT, with all of the forces balanced just so. This Universe doesn’t cave in on itself, it doesn’t fly apart, it’s not too hot, or too cold. In fact, everything about the Universe is perfectly set for the creation of life, and sure enough, here we are today. We can build robots and talking games and computers that can beat chess grandmasters, yet we can’t predict the weather 3 days out. I think that taking an action which would, 15 billion years later, lead to intelligent life is about the most awe-inspiring feat of ingenuity that I can imagine, and is certainly befitting a being of God’s (and only God’s) incredible skill.