Creationism or Darwinian Evolutionary Theory, by Wiz Ardozz

The observations that the British naturalist Charles Darwin made on his mid-nineteenth-century, “round-the-world” journey aboard the H.M.S. Beagle prompted his formulation of the theory of natural selection. Prior to his new, empirically-based theory, creationism was the prevailing explanation as to how life on earth came to be.

Pure creationism, whose most faithful adherents today are primarily fundamentalist Christians and Muslims, postulates that the physical universe and the life forms in it were initially conceived, designed, and constructed by an omniscient and omnipotent entity they refer to as God. According to them, the universe was designed and subsequently animated by this infinitely intelligent God.

The theory of intelligent design—the belief that physical and biological systems observed in the universe “result chiefly from purposeful design by an intelligent being rather than from chance and other undirected natural processes”—arose as a result of the seemingly self-evident observations of the beauty, complexity, and perfection exhibited by the world around them. Lacking any contrary empirical evidence, the only logical conclusion one seemed able to draw was that the universe and everything in it had to have been designed by a grand creator, much as how a watch—which was at one time the most complex and intricate man-made object—was designed and created by a watchmaker, but infinitely more magnificently in scale, scope, vision, and intent. The development of something so awe-inspiring, one would reason, could not have occurred randomly as a result of pure chance; it could only have been created by a perfect entity from its own image and acting on its own volition.

Instead of presuming that the cosmos came into existence as the result of a conscious decision by a single grand and intelligent entity, evolutionary theorists concentrate on the mechanics of its inception as explained by the natural sciences. As a development from the Big Bang, the universe was composed entirely of the simplest and most basic chemical element—hydrogen—which comprises a single electron orbiting a nucleus of but one proton. As a result of a finite but incomprehendably lengthy series of minute steps—that did occur by chance—increasingly complex structures arose over the course of five billion years.

Some of these newer complex structures allowed spontaneously improved biological forms to more successfully compete and survive in their environments; having incorporated these improvements and reproduced, they passed on the changes biologically to their offspring. Those specimens that were least suited to the unstable and ever-changing environments (due to such natural phenomena as fires, earthquakes, volcanoes, the raising or lowering of the salinity of the oceans, and even collisions with asteroids) often died before they were able to produce offspring. By this process of natural selection, increasingly more intelligent creatures gradually evolved self-awareness, the pinnacle of which is homo sapiens—or modern humans.

At its essence, the theory of natural selection is predicated on the notion that—according to Richard Dawkins in his essay The Improbability of God—“things that cannot plausibly be derived from very different predecessors can plausibly be derived from only slightly different predecessors.”

Evidence for the theory of natural selection is abundant and seemingly incontrovertible, unless one takes to heart the unlikely notion that the universe’s creator deliberately arranged the physical evidence to appear as though evolution by natural selection has indeed taken place. Fossils and the global distribution of animals and plants are found only where they would be expected to be if the theory were to hold true, and “that the genetic code is the same in all living creatures overwhelmingly suggests that all living things are descended from one single ancestor.”

At first glance, subjecting the two theories that purport to explain the existence of life as we know it to Richard Swinburne’s principle of credulity—that it is rational to believe that what seems true on the basis of experience probably is so, barring reliable counterevidence—leads to the determination that the theory of evolution and natural selection is the stronger one. In addition, his principle of testimony—that what people tell you is probably true, again, in the absence of plausible evidence to the contrary—would seemingly add strength to such an assertion, because of the plethora of seemingly incontrovertible, scientifically-derived evidence that probably seems to most people to be undeniable.

The theory of natural selection plausibly explains how what are commonly referred to as plants and animals—that serve as the physical vessels for what is essentially the organism’s “life force” (because a body that does not contain it is as dead as a limb that has been sawed from a tree)—have increased in complexity and diversity over roughly four billion years, beginning with the simplest “putative fossilized microorganisms”. Upon closer inspection, however, it cannot and does not provide evidence as to how life (that is, “the exhibition of metabolism, growth, and reproduction, along with response to stimuli and adaptation to the environment that originate from within the organism”) originated—seemingly spontaneously—from inert electrochemical stimuli (which themselves emanated from strictly physical elements).

With increasing precision, the physical sciences have been able to recount the conditions of the universe mere milliseconds after the event that brought it into being. However, regardless of how sophisticated the instruments become that can measure such things, they will never be able to detect what happened at the exact moment the Big Bang began—let alone what came before it. This is because of course nothing came before it. Time only came into existence along with space; this is why we call it space-time; there is no time without space. As the great theoretical physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking pointed out, asking what happened before the Big Bang is like asking what is north of the north pole. All events going back in time converge at the Big Bang, just as all longitude lines going northward converge at the north pole.

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And when it comes to the natural sciences, anything dealing with the nature of biology is beyond the purview of the physical sciences. This is why the natural sciences include both the physical sciences and the life sciences: each of which deal with completely separate phenomena. Physical phenomena of course have effects on biological phenomena, and living phenomena certainly affect the physical universe. But the laws of each of these branches of the natural sciences are completely distinct from each other, and in no way do these two different sets of scientific laws attempt to explain any phenomenon in the other totally separate domain of natural science.

A related line of scientific inquiry is how consciousness—the awareness of internal and external existence—appeared as well from what was originally strictly physical and then electrochemical impulses. The physical sciences and even the theory of biological evolution within the life sciences have so far offered no explanation, though some interesting theories have begun to be proffered; we shall stay tuned.

In the same way, and for the same reasons, that computers programmed with artificial intelligence can never self-reflect, emote, or use intuition (as opposed to algorithms and heuristics, which they do employ), the moments at which inert molecules and the structures that evolved from them into being alive have yet to be pinpointed by any natural science.

While computers can be and are being developed with increasingly higher degrees of intelligence (that is, the capacity for logic, learning, and organization of knowledge) and can approximate many of the functions of the human brain, they are not able to do certain things that human brains can: translate information into understanding and reasoning that can be accessed by the human mind—an entity not synonymous with but highly interactive with the human brain. Computers, like all of the life forms that exist in the universe, are constructed from lifeless elements and powered by rudimentary electrical currents. As talented and brilliant as humans are, relative to what they evolved from, one skill they lack is the capability to breathe life into what otherwise would be lifeless fixtures and figurines. Only God can do that, just as with the old saying among computer scientists: only God can create a random number. In some sense then, creationists—although many are limited by their outright silly attempts to refute biological evolution—make a valid point.

While natural selection seems a clear fact, Neil Donald Walsh, the author of Conversations with God, offers this observation. Many would assert that the survival instinct is a human’s most fundamental one. However, when faced with an innocent person who is trapped in a burning building, many people will put their own lives at risk and attempt to save that person’s life. Survival is not our most basic instinct; divinity is. We know this instinctually, because we have been granted life by what many call a creator, and not merely by some spontaneous genetic mutation.