Evolution

Charles Darwin goes to Heaven and is informed by St Peter that everyone who enters may ask God one question before enjoying their time in Paradise. Darwin decides to ask God why the Bible says the whole world and all its inhabitants were created in one week, when science has proven it actually took billions of years. “Oh, that”, replies God. “Sorry about that. My watch stopped.”

Well, this may not be a very funny joke, without meaning to insult anyone who is now rolling around with laughter. But that proves how difficult a question and how intense a debate this glaring disparity causes. Ever since the first scientific investigations into evolution, its collisions with religion have been numerous and often vicious.

How can we possibly reconcile such vastly differing views? Since Darwin there have of course been many scientists involved in evolutionary research, but let us nevertheless begin with a quote from Darwin himself:

"Probably all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from some primordial form, into which life was first breathed"

As any scientist will tell you, breath comes from life, not before it. So Darwin’s view is that there must have been some entity, some sentient being able to breath life into the very first life form. He does not specifically state this is God, but I would be interested to hear who else this could possibly be.

So Darwin was a religious man. One could argue this must have made publishing his findings all the more difficult for him, as he would have known the test of faith it was about to cause. But did he speak directly against Scripture? What does the Bible say about evolution?

The answer to that is of course pretty much nothing. The Bible’s job is not to teach us the how, but the why. It is widely believed that the book of Genesis was written by Moses. We can address at a later date precisely who he was; let us take it as read for now that he was a very wise man, whether you believe he was charged as such by God or not. However, he was not a biologist. Let us all suppose we were shown somehow that Moses was given his wisdom by God, and was told directly how the world was created. Would God have given him literal descriptions? Would he have told him about quantum singularities, the Big Bang, the expansion of energy, the formation of the Galaxy and Solar System, the cooling of the planets, the formation and evolution of the continents, plants, sea creatures, land animals, and, eventually, Man?

If he had, there is no way Moses would have understood. And whilst many religious believers will admit they do not always understand what God is telling them, in the case of Moses, how would he have spread God’s word efficiently and written the beginning of the world’s all-time best-selling book if he no clue as to what he was saying?

But here is the key: despite this, the Bible still does actually get it right! See the list I gave a couple of paragraphs ago? The earth is formed first, then the plants, sea creatures, land animals and humans. This we know from science to be true, and this is the correct order given in the Bible too. In fact the Bible mentions the birds came after the fish, followed by livestock, and man. Palaeontology shows us that at some point fish evolved limbs from needing to drag themselves from shrinking pond to shrinking pond, and eventually became amphibians, which led to the reptiles and the birds before the mammals, the group of animals that livestock belongs to. So the Bible misses out frogs, crocodiles and dinosaurs in its account of evolution. Big deal.

The mathematics of this is fairly clear. The Bible tells us God created these six things, these stages of evolution, in the correct order. If this was a fluke, it was a quite extraordinary one. Getting one right would be a one in six chance. The chances of getting all six in the correct order through guesswork would be one in 720. Earth, plants, fish, birds, mammals, humans. A perfect six.

Of course, the ‘other’ main issue which brings evolution and the Bible into conflict is the origin of Man. When the theory that we evolved from primordial apes was first documented, it was widely ridiculed by a society which had been taught, beyond doubt, that we were created by God, literally. So much so, that a commonly-used phrase of disbelief (“...and I’m a monkey’s uncle!”) quickly came into fashion, and stuck around to this day, even though our nieces and nephews are now only metaphorical monkeys.

But again, the Bible’s job is not to teach us exactly how God created Man. Let’s suppose that a voice boomed out from Heaven telling everyone in the world beyond any doubt that, in fact, evolution was not the way we were created. So what was it? The Bible says, “So God created man in his own image...he created him; male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27). But it doesn’t tell us how. It doesn’t tell us whether it was an oven and clay, (as Ted Hughes suggested in his children’s book 'How The Whale Became') or whether it was a long process of evolution. Even if God simply yelled, “Abracadabra” and Adam appeared, the Bible does not tell us. And no one can deny there must have been a 'how', else we wouldn’t be here in the first place.

One thing is for sure – if God created us, He created us with inquisitive minds, destined to find out about the world and the universe around us. Why create us this way if we were not intended to find out the truth? Not the truths of the Bible, which we were already told, but the 'other' truths, those of science, which God also created? The challenge we have been set is to reconcile both sets of truths. So here is my attempt at doing so.

Bears. Big, dangerous predators. They love fish, and don’t love being disturbed. Encountering a bear means get out of the way, or experience their wrath. But, like most other animals, they procreate the same way, from a DNA point of view. When a new bear is growing, it needs a template to copy so that it becomes a bear and not a turtle or whatever. You may be aware that DNA strands are formed in a kind of double helix pattern. In the quite brilliant TV programme 'Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey', astrophysicist Neil Degrasse-Tyson explains how a DNA strand is split in two like a zip, copied and then reconstructed to create a new animal.

Sometimes, though, a small portion of DNA strand is wrong. A tiny imperfection might result in a mutation, which had not been present in that species in previous generations. A small difference in bear DNA might result in, say, a bear cub being born with white fur instead of brown.

Of course, that DNA imperfection would then perpetuate, and more white bears would be born. Being migratory animals, it would not be long before bears found their way to more northerly, Arctic climates. And then what happens? The white bears would find they would be better equipped to hunt for food in the frozen north, where their white fur would camouflage them more efficiently. The brown bears would have to stay in forest habitat as they would not be able to compete against the white bears in the snow.

I have just described, in very simplistic form (but I am no biologist) the evolution of the polar bear. Science knows how evolution happens, and it is wonderful to be able to break it down into its infinitesimal components. But have we gone far enough? What actually caused the DNA imperfection, the mutation which resulted in a new species of bear? Blind luck? Or design?

Well that, of course, is for each of you to decide. But my point is that we do not have to make a ‘choice’ between whether we believe in evolution and whether we believe in God. Here lies just one amongst a myriad of explanations that others far more intelligent than me will discover. Explanations of how. How God created us, and did so by creating evolution, using the laws of science which He also created.

I feel as though I have rambled on for quite some time, and yet only covered the tip of the iceberg. Thanks for reading, and whether or not you decide to go on to explore the whole iceberg, good luck.

Creation

So where did it all begin? What do we know about the universe – not just the world – we live in?

Ask a random person on the street how the universe began, and they will say, “The Big Bang, of course. Everyone knows that”. Indeed, the Big Bang is the commonly accepted scientific theory for the origin of everything. There are some ‘problems’ with the theory which have challenged it down the years, but there are precious few theories which the seasoned pedant would fail to find fault with. Moreover, many of the questions surrounding the validity of the Big Bang have been answered, and, being no scientist, I am certainly not trying to gain any MIT qualification by giving you a thesis on the intricate astrophysics of the universe’s origins here.

The most common questions associated with what we know from science about creation are about how the implications of this knowledge affect our religious beliefs. An easy starting point is the very beginning of the Bible, Genesis 1:3 – “God said, ‘Let there be light’, and there was light”. Imagine a loud explosion accompanying this verse, and it’s as good a description of the Big Bang anyone writing thousands of years ago would be able to come up with.

So what is the problem there? Well, the obvious issue is that the Big Bang – the start of everything – is described in verse 3, not verse 1. What happens in the first two verses of the Bible, then? Verse 1 actually tells us, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” So, not with a Big Bang then?

The answer to this lies purely in how one might define creation. If we take the example of a ship, at what point might this ship have been created? Was it created when it first set sail? When the mast was raised? When the final piece was slotted, riveted or hammered into place? Or further back? Was it created on the drawing board? Even a master shipbuilder might admit that, whilst his blueprints show he has created something yet to be physically built, he himself is standing on the shoulders of giants, using discoveries which our ancestors pioneered centuries ago.

So when God created the heavens and the earth, does this mean they were already in place, before the Big Bang, even though we know from science this was not the case?

No – let us take a look at the second verse of Genesis 1. “Now the earth was formless and empty.” So our planet had no shape then. That is because, although God created the blueprints, the builders had not yet begun their work on the universe. And these builders? The very laws of physics and science we have come to discover and be fascinated by.

You may ask me why a God with the power to do anything would need to obey the laws of physics. To this there is a simple answer. If we go back to our shipbuilder and look at not just the blueprints but the finished article, we might see the fastest, most economical, reliable, unsinkable, most luxurious, largest ship ever. But it would not be able to fly. Had the shipbuilder wished to create something which flew, he would have designed an aircraft.

Had God wished his laws of physics to be malleable or disregarded completely, he would not have created a physical universe for us to explore. Why spend centuries discovering the laws of motion, gravity, magnetism and evolution, only to see things appear out of thin air? That would make no sense at all.

So, what about other religions? Do they agree with the Judaeo-Christian Biblical account? Arguably the closest neighbour to Christianity and Judaism is Islam. The Qu’ran mentions the creation of the universe thus: “The heavens and the earth were joined together as one unit, before We clove them asunder”. After this, Allah (God) “turned to the sky, and it had been (as) smoke. He said to it and to the earth: 'Come together, willingly or unwillingly.' They said: 'We come (together) in willing obedience'”. This follows scientific knowledge of the post-Big Bang formation of the universe, with all the elements within cooling, becoming denser and finding form (which the Bible, as we already know, states the earth had none of before these events).

The Hindu religion takes the view of several universal ‘cycles’, each cycle beginning anew, suddenly and violently, after the previous one has been destroyed. This is concurrent with a theory that new universes begin from the singularities inside black holes; all the matter necessary to begin a new universe is contained within the singularity which then explodes outwards to form another Big Bang.

Did our universe begin from inside a black hole of another one? Who knows? Certainly this may never be provable by science, but as far as religion is concerned, is it unfeasible that God created a universe previous to ours? Perhaps he wishes to see if we can avoid whatever mistakes the inhabitants of his other realms made. Obviously this is conjecture whether your perspective is religious, scientific or both, but is no less interesting.

At the risk of firing too many of the world’s creation origins at you, I will leave you with two more. Shinto, which states the universe began like an egg, from which matter was drawn out to form heaven and earth. And a line from the Aborigine traditional stories: “Suddenly dawn arose and Il-ba-lint-ja was flooded with light for the first time”.

Does science disprove religion with the discovery of the Big Bang? From this evidence, certainly not. The stories which have been circulating throughout our religious traditions have in fact been validated. Most of the stories themselves correlate with each other, though they are told in different ways.

Science and the Bible are in complete agreement concerning how the universe began.

Introduction

“Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind”

This revelation from Albert Einstein is oft-quoted but rarely, it seems to me, borne in mind. As a Christian myself I know many believers who see the pursuit of science as largely irrelevant and scientists as the ‘them’ in a ‘them and us’ mindset. Going to extremes, one may find those who dismiss scientific findings as going against Scripture, and therefore plain wrong.

But is science really the enemy of Christianity, or any religion? A serious proponent of their religion would surely risk alienating their relevant agnostics by claiming that science is somehow not the truth. And driving potential believers away hardly fulfils the evangelical duties Christianity and other religions would like.

“The Bible should be taught, but emphatically not as reality. It is fiction, myth, poetry, anything but reality.”

This is not an uncommon viewpoint. Here Richard Dawkins, arguably the world’s most famous atheist, tries to establish the Bible’s importance as purely cultural, and not at all historical.

However, science itself has shown this opinion to be completely uninformed. Archaeology has most recently been the best friend of the Bible within the scientific fields, unearthing stark evidence of many Biblical events and settings. So whilst I might argue on the one hand that religion should not shun science, on the other I could fight the case for why science should not be used to disprove religion.

Of course, it is true that there are many things science might not disprove, such as fairies at the bottom of the garden. But, trivial attempts at parallels aside, there are also plenty of aspects of our existence which we know to be true, such as morality, conscience and love, which science may never be able to prove or disprove.

Is there not a much greater connection between what we know and what we believe? Why would we have we been taught down the centuries to believe in the miracle of who we are but yet ignore the discoveries we make when we exercise our own innate curiosity? Do the marvels we discover have to mean we must reject the teachings of thousands of years?

I think there is a far more intrinsic and intimate connection between the seemingly clashing worlds of science and religion than some would have us believe. Using the Bible as a starting point, and involving whatever I discover about the world’s other religions, I am going to find out whether what we know now is simply what we have known all along.