Evolution vs. Divine Creation

Let me start off by saying that anyone who reads all of this, well, you have way too much time on your hands… though not nearly as much as I do.  I put together what you're about to read inbetween working on chapters of the book I'm writing, just to keep me busy when I'm not feeling especially creative. Having been raised as a catholic I thoroughly understand what makes people want to believe in a creator god, I admit, it’s a nice comforting thought.  What I’m going to do here is try to explain why atheism is the only logical conclusion to come to when considering life, the universe, and everything else.  I have no illusions that I will change the mind of anyone who believes in god so I’m really writing this for me and not you, but feel free to continue on.  I’m going to talk about many topics, from the origin of the universe to that of life, to the history of religion and religious beliefs, to a study of the bible itself, and as a result this will probably be posted in many parts so bear with me.  I’m not going to go in any particular order as far as the topics go but life feels like a good spot to start.

Life

Evolution vs. Divine Creation

How did life arise on the planet earth?  According to the bible god created the heavens and the earth, and all life in six days through his power and word and will.  Well that was an easy answer, guess we should move on to the next topic.  Wait could there be more to it?  Going by what the bible tells us god created all life during those six days.  There was no new creation afterward which means that all of the diversity of life came into being at once.  Think about the implications of that.  Humans and dinosaurs would have been sharing the planet.  As a believer you may say, so what, why couldn’t they have been?  Well there is one glaring flaw in that way of thinking, there is no other way besides the bible to confirm this assertion.  There exists no physical evidence to support the supposition that humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time, there is however, much evidence to the contrary. 

But wait, there is evidence of humans and dinosaurs together you say?  We used to call them dragons?  There are cave drawings and burial clothes with seemingly dinosaur/dragon images.  Even today people report sightings of dino like creatures around the world.  I’m sorry to say this provides no proof at all, claims and drawings and old fantasy stories do not equal evidence, especially when weighed against the counter evidence.  One thing that would prove beyond a doubt that man and dino lived at the same time would be the discovery of fossilized human remains in the same geological strata as a dinosaur’s.  To date, despite the massive amount of dino fossils unearthed there has been no such discovery.  There have been many hoaxes regarding human bones or tracks in the last 50 years, and while far too time consuming to get into each example, they have ALL either been proven false, or miraculously vanished somehow and could not be tested.  Anyone who would like to cite and discuss specific examples please do I will be happy to discuss it with you. 

Now is it possible that human remains may actually be found next to some dino bones?  Sure it’s possible.  That’s the thing with science, anything that could potentially be possible rules out the use of the word impossible.  Something being possible however does not mean it is probable.  This is where the power of the human mind comes into play, using logic and reason, what seems more likely to have occurred?  Of all the fossils of dinosaurs uncovered there are no human remains with them.  Of all the human fossilized remains found there are no dino bones present with them.  There are millions of years of time separating the last of the dinosaurs and the earliest man according to our geological records and radioactive dating of the bones.  Again, what seems more likely?  That we have yet to find a piece of evidence linking them, or that they didn’t exist together so no evidence can be found? 

If you accept that dinosaurs and humans did NOT live at the same time then you need not read further, because by accepting this you have rejected the account of creation given in genesis and thereby rendered the bible false or at least highly suspect from then on.  Many will not accept this though, and nor should they on its own, after all, lack of evidence is not evidence in itself for an opposing theory.  Though logical deduction does tend to point away from the biblical account.

What is the opposing scientific explanation for life on earth?  In a word, abiogenesis or biopoesis which is the study of how life on Earth could have arisen from inanimate matter.  Most amino acids, often called "the building blocks of life", can form via natural chemical reactions unrelated to life, as demonstrated in the Miller–Urey experiment and similar experiments, which involved simulating some of the conditions of the early Earth, in a scientific laboratory.  In all living things, these amino acids are organized into proteins, and the construction of these proteins is mediated by nucleic acids.  

The first living things on Earth are thought to be single cell prokaryotes, perhaps evolved from organic molecules surrounded by a membrane-like structure.  The oldest ancient fossil microbe-like objects are dated to be 3.5 billion years old, approximately one billion years after the formation of the Earth itself.  By 2.4 billion years ago the ratio of stable isotopes of carbon, iron and sulfur shows the action of living things on inorganic minerals and sediments, and molecular biomarkers indicate photosynthesis, demonstrating that life on Earth was widespread by this time. The sequence of chemical events that led to the first nucleic acids is not yet known. Several hypotheses about early life have been proposed, most notably the iron-sulfur world theory and the RNA world hypothesis. 

There is no standard model for the origin of life as of yet, there are many differing hypotheses, but all adhere to a similar framework.  It is also important to note that the gaps in our knowledge do not provide proof that god created life.  The gaps merely mean that we don’t know for sure YET.  Many people of faith have used their lack of understanding as evidence for god or gods.  Remember that before we knew what the sun was there was a sun god to explain it, though that seems silly now. 

Even though the initial emergence of life is still debated by scientists, there is little to no debate about what happened next, evolution.

Evolution is the change in the inherited traits of a population of organisms through successive generations.  This change results from interactions between processes which introduce variation into a population, and other processes which remove it. As a result, variants with particular traits become more or less common.  A trait is a particular characteristic, anatomical, biochemical or behavioural, that is the result of gene–environment interaction.

The main source of variation is mutation, which introduces genetic changes.  These changes are heritable, and may give rise to alternative traits in organisms.  Another source of variation is genetic recombination which shuffles the genes into new combinations which can result in organisms exhibiting different traits.  Under certain circumstances, variation can also be increased by the transfer of genes between species, and by the extremely rare, but significant, wholesale incorporation of genomes through endosymbiosis. 

Wait, isn’t evolution only a theory?  It’s not a fact or a scientific law.

I’ve heard this statement many times in my life so let’s clear this up really quick.  Many people learned in elementary school that a theory falls in the middle of a hierarchy of certainty, above a mere hypothesis but below a law.  Scientists do not use the terms that way, however.  According to the National Academy of Sciences, a scientific theory is "a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world that can incorporate facts, laws, inferences, and tested hypotheses."  No amount of validation changes a theory into a law, which is a descriptive generalization about nature.  So when scientists talk about the theory of evolution, or the atomic theory, or the theory of relativity, for they are not expressing reservations about its truth.  The NAS defines a fact as "an observation that has been repeatedly confirmed and for all practical purposes is accepted as 'true.'  All sciences frequently rely on indirect evidence.  Physicists cannot see subatomic particles directly, for instance, so they verify their existence by watching for telltale tracks that the particles leave in cloud chambers.  The absence of direct observation does not make physicists' conclusions less certain.  The fossil record and abundant other evidence testify that organisms have evolved through time.  Although no one observed those transformations, the indirect evidence is clear, unambiguous and compelling.

So what kind of evidence is out there supporting evolution? 

The animals we are most familiar with are tetrapods, they are vertebrates and they live on land. That includes humans, almost all domestic animals and most of the wild ones that any child would recognize: mammals, birds, amphibians and reptiles. The vast majority of vertebrates, however, are not tetrapods, but fish. There are more kinds of fish, in fact, than all the species of tetrapods combined. Indeed, through the lens of evolution, tetrapods are just one branch of the fish family tree, the members of which just happen to be adapted for life out of water. The first transition from water to land took place more than 360 million years ago. It was one of the most demanding such moves ever made in the history of life. How did fins become legs?  And how did the transitional creatures cope with the formidable demands of land life, from a desiccating environment to the crushing burden of gravity?  It used to be thought that the first landlubbers were stranded fish that evolved to spend more and more time ashore, returning to water to reproduce.  Over the past 20 years, palaeontologists have uncovered fossils that have turned this idea upside down. The earliest tetrapods, such as Acanthostega from eastern Greenland around 365 million years ago, had fully formed legs, with toes, but retained internal gills that would soon have dried out in any long stint in air.  Fish evolved legs long before they came on land. The earliest tetrapods didmost of their evolving in the more forgiving aquatic environment.  Coming ashore seems to have been the very last stage.  Researchers suspect that the ancestors of tetrapods were creatures called elpistostegids.  These very large, carnivorous, shallow-water fish would have looked and behaved much like alligators, or giant salamanders.  They looked like tetrapods in many respects, except that they still had fins. Until recently, elpistostegids were known only from small fragments of fossils that were poorly preserved, so it has been hard to get a rounded picture of what they were like.  In the past few years, several discoveries from northern Canada have changed all that.  In 2006, Edward Daeschler and his colleagues described spectacularly well preserved fossils of an elpistostegid known as Tiktaalik that allow us to build up a good picture of an aquatic predator with distinct similarities to tetrapods, from its flexible neck, to its very limb-like fin structure.  The discovery and painstaking analysis of Tiktaalik illuminates the stage before tetrapods evolved, and shows how the fossil record throws up surprises, albeit ones that are entirely compatible with evolutionary thinking.

Now if fish with feet aren’t enough to convince you let’s talk about some other transitional fossils.  Creationists like to claim that no transitional fossils exists, but they do, in abundance.  As evolution is a continually ongoing process ALL fossils are transitional fossils, but some people need more obvious evidence.  Archaeopteryx is one of those. 

Archaeopteryx is commonly seen as the earliest known bird, but many suspected that it was better seen as a dinosaur, one with feathers. Thomas Henry Huxley, Darwin’s colleague and friend, discussed the possible evolutionary link between dinosaurs and birds, and palaeontologists speculated, that dinosaurs with feathers might one day be found.  In the 1980s, deposits from the early Cretaceous period about 125 million years ago in northern China vindicated these speculations with discoveries of primitive birds in abundance, alongside dinosaurs with feathers, and feather-like plumage.  Starting with the discovery of the small theropod Sinosauropteryx, a variety of feather-clad forms have been found.  Many of these feathered dinosaurs couldn’t possibly have flown, showing that feathers first evolved for reasons other than flight, possibly for sexual display or thermal insulation.  Palaeontologists are now beginning to think that their speculations weren’t nearly wild enough, and that feathers were quite common in dinosaurs.

The discovery of feathered dinosaurs not only vindicated the idea of transitional forms, but also showed that evolution has a way of coming up with a dazzling variety of solutions when we had no idea that there were even problems. Flight could have been no more than an additional opportunity that presented itself to creatures already clothed in feathers.   

Creationists, though, dismiss these fossil studies. They argue that Archaeopteryx is not a missing link between reptiles and birds, it is just an extinct bird with reptilian features.  They want evolutionists to produce a weird, chimeric monster that cannot be classified as belonging to any known group.  Even if a creationist does accept a fossil as transitional between two species, he or she may then insist on seeing other fossils intermediate between it and the first two.  Check out a recent Futurama episode for a funny look at this topic. These frustrating requests can proceed ad infinitum and place an unreasonable burden on the always incomplete fossil record.

Nevertheless, evolutionists can cite further supportive evidence from molecular biology.  All organisms share most of the same genes, but as evolution predicts, the structures of these genes and their products diverge among species, in keeping with their evolutionary relationships.  Geneticists speak of the "molecular clock" that records the passage of time.  This molecular data also shows how various organisms are transitional within evolution.

Another major point raised by creationists and the religious is that of irreducible complexity.  They state that partially evolved organs can not function, and thus provide no evolutionary advantage and would not be passed on.  And example used frequently is that of the eye.  It has been said that half an eye is no good, or a quarter of an eye, either it was formed all at once in present working order or it could not be.  Anticipating this criticism, Darwin suggested that even "incomplete" eyes might confer benefits, such as helping creatures orient toward light and thereby survive for further evolutionary refinement.  Biology has vindicated Darwin: researchers have identified primitive eyes and light-sensing organs throughout the animal kingdom and have even tracked the evolutionary history of eyes through comparative genetics.  It now appears that in various families of organisms, eyes have evolved independently.  There have been MANY other organs cited by creationists, all have been shot down, from wings to bacterial flagellum.  And in animals today there exist vestigial organs, things which once had a use but no longer do and are evolving away, such as the human appendix, or the feet and toe bones of whales.

A couple other interesting things to note as far as evolution and the fossil record goes.  Homosapiens, according to the evidence available can be traced back to roughly 200k years ago.  Our humanlike ancestors go back much further, but those hominids are not human, though many species were very close.  Horse evolution provides very compelling evidence for evolution as well, check it out if you get a chance. 

Accepting the abundance of information supporting evolution does not necessarily rule out the existence of a creator god, but it does rule out the bible as a reliable source of information, and without that source evidence for the existence of a god becomes scanter.