My faith in God and in His Word is immutable and perdurable.
However, for the next several paragraphs, I'm going to set it down over here on
the desk for a moment while I bang out this post. I want to talk to you about
life, the universe, and everything.
You know my stance on how we came to be, ontology, and the
formation of the universe itself; there's no need for me to rehash that here.
But what if I didn't believe what I believe? What if I wasn't as sure as I am
about the origin of, well,
everything?
I'd like to invite you for a moment to let your guard down for a
moment because I swear to you that I'm not trying to convince you of anything.
I'm not going to try persuade you to think the way I do or to believe what I
believe. Can you do it? Can you step away from your own biases for a few
moments?
For a couple years now, I've quietly been migrating from my
previous interests in the humanities into physics, mathematics, biology and
related areas. I've been voraciously reading, watching, and listening to
articles, websites, videos, programs, and lectures on these subjects.
When a noted authority stands up and says, "space-time is
thus and so..." I listen. When a revered scientist says, "the data
reveal this, that and the other" I pay attention. And when a professor of
whatnot writes down a formula to calculate e, m, c, v, p, or something to do
with a quark, I rewind or reread it again until I understand it.
But there's one place where they lose me and, frankly, I can't
help but suspect that if you're honest that they lose you as well.
It's when they start talking about how life came to be on this
planet.
I'm putting my religious beliefs aside for a moment in saying
this and I'm asking you respect that. Their whole bearing in these
conversations changes when they make the leap from what is (or what might be)
into how life happened. There's a palpable smell of trying to wring
philosophical certainty from scientific probability. And it stinks.
They don't come across to me as honest at all. Sometimes it
feels like they are under contractual obligation to make statements that affirm
abiogenesis. Other times, they make illogical stretches that conclude that the
processes of evolution absolutely account for all life on this planet. The one
that absolutely blows my mind is when they make certain statements that
contradict the very foundation of their assertions in order to prove them. Here
are a couple examples that I hear again and again:
"In order for..."
"So that..."
As in, "in order for life to arise on this planet, these
things occurred..."
What the frell? The same people who lose their minds when
someone utters the words "intelligent design" have the gall to use
the phrase, "in order to"? There IS NO "in order to" in
atheistic evolution. The words, "in order to/for" and "so
that" presume by definition an objective, a goal, a chosen outcome. You
can't tell me life arose by chance and evolves by random mutations and use the
words "in order to". Those words are off limits to evolution.
Here's a perfect example of this insanity from an article on
"evolutionary-metaphysics[dot]net:
"Worms also inherited sensitivity to touch, temperature,
and light from their single celled ancestors. A cluster of light sensitive
cells has the potential to form a picture, and so there was strong evolutionary
pressure for such clusters to evolve into early forms of eyes."
WHAT? Are you freaking kidding me?
How the heck do RANDOM MUTATIONS somehow develop a sense of
PURPOSE? How does evolution experience a "pressure" to perform in a
certain way and to achieve a certain GOAL? This jerk just described INTELLIGENT
DESIGN, not Darwinian evolution.
I'm sorry, I really am, but if you subscribe to this garbage, you're
being sold intellectual swampland and you're buying into it willingly.
You can (and do) completely disagree with me on my conclusions
of life and it's origin, but for Pete's sake, people wake up. How can you
possibly swallow this crap?
Hypothetically, if I suddenly sprang into existence full blown
without any environmental indoctrination, sure, there's every possibility that
I would not settle on the Book of Genesis as the final word on the rise of life
in the universe. But I have to think that neither would I agree with this
rubbish that I see so consistently in evolution's literature today.
I challenge you to take an honest look at how articles on the
evolution of a species are written today and those tackling the astronomical
steps that led to the formation of life; take a good hard honest look and
you'll find that there is an enormous and glaring contradiction between what
they set down as their presuppositions (i.e., that life evolves through a
series of random genetic mutations that, if favorable to the organism, enhance
its viability and allow it to adapt better to its environment) and their sudden
veering off the tracks into a series of "this happened SO THAT this other
thing could happen IN ORDER TO allow this other improvement to happen."
If somehow I tomorrow decided God did not in fact create life,
the universe, and everything, I can tell you this without question -- I would
never buy into the mythology that is being peddled today. The very best I could
say is that I don't know. I wish, I really wish, that scientists today could be
so honest.
And I challenge you to take a look at what's going on in your
corner of this debate.
