Condicio Sine Qua Non

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.