Of late I have found myself feeding a long-dormant interest in some of the more knotty and difficult questions about the origin of life and its evolution. This was sparked by watching those videos from a few weeks back involving Dr. David Berlinski, a mathematician and philosopher, and his colleagues Dr. David Gelerntner and Dr. Stephen Meyer, as they discussed the problems with the current state of the Neo-Darwinian Synthesis concerning evolution.

That “modern synthesis” can best be described by the extremely clumsy, awkward, and rather downright ridiculous “Theory of Evolution by (Probably) Natural Selection, Biological Mutation, Genetic Drift, Sexual Selection, and Gene Flow”. This leads us to the extraordinarily painful acronym, TE(p)NSBMGDSSaGF.

No matter what the acronym, the problems with the Darwinian hypothesis of gradual change over huge stretches of time, resulting in new and distinct species from the machinations of, essentially, a “blind watchmaker” using random chance and mutation to achieve its ends, are so numerous and so large at this point that the entire theory has to be revised.

Of course, no self-respecting, tenure-seeking academic will ever admit this out loud. Only a remarkably small handful of very brave voices – most of whom either have tenure, therefore answering only to the Almighty (if they believe in Him), or have no interest in academic politics whatsoever and sustain themselves through their own good works outside of the academy – have dared to speak out against the current state of things.

But everywhere we look, it is becoming manifestly clear that the Universe itself had a beginning, and therefore had to come from somewhere – and that the moment of creation itself had to be instigated by something. The weight of evidence in support of the logical Prime Mover argument is so vast – literally as vast as the Universe itself – that to reject it strikes the dispassionate observer as frankly ridiculous.

Here is a series of videos that will help one focus one’s mind on the current state of affairs in the material sciences.

The first is Dr. Stephen Meyer talking about the cosmological evidence for intelligent design of some kind, working backwards through time to the moment of creation, and looking at the scientific discoveries and evidence that give us insight into that moment:

The second is Dr. Jay Richards, who goes from the macroscopic perspective of the Universe to the level of asking how and why life can exist, especially right here on good old Earth:

The third is Dr. James Tour, who goes right down to the microscopic level and asks how life can be built from basic inert organic chemicals and molecules:

And the fourth, which is not from that series of Discovery Institute lectures at the Catholic University of America but is rather from the Socrates In The City series, is a Q&A session with Dr. Michael Behe concerning the major flaws in the Darwinian hypothesis:

These four videos help summarise and expand upon the points made in the previous video from the Hoover Institute, which I give you here, that looks at the mathematical challenges to Darwinian evolution – and those challenges are huge:

No matter where we look, then, we are confronted with one terrifying (if you are a scientific materialist) tripartite conclusion:

The Universe and all that we see around us could not possibly have come from nothing, and life cannot possibly have come from some sort of chemical “soup” that just happened to be exposed to lightning, and that life cannot possibly have evolved into the vast complexity that we see around us today through the process described by Darwinian evolution.

The sheer number of things wrong with the materialistic hypothesis is staggering. In order for that hypothesis to work, we need an infinite amount of time – which we don’t have. We need life to emerge from not-life – which has never been done and might be impossible, though we do not know for sure. We need life to evolve according to, basically, random chance and mutation – which we do not observe in the fossil record. We need that process of evolution to create new information from existing information – but we observe the exact opposite happening when new breeds arise from previous ones, where information is corrupted and broken.

At every turn we are confronted with a conclusion that terrifies those who believe that there is a war between reason and faith: that those who believe specifically in something approaching the Biblical account of creation were right, and those who believe that everything we see around us arose out of randomness and chance were wrong.

It is necessary to interject here and point out that the Biblical account of creation is actually quite unique.

I have studied religions from around the world at various levels, ranging from fairly detailed in the case of Islam and pagan Norse animism to very superficially in the case of Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, and so on. What I know of the various creation myths followed by non-theistic religions says that they don’t really have a good explanation for how the Universe came to be, and whatever explanations they do have, do not coincide with observed facts.

Take the Hindu Vedic scriptures, for instance. These aren’t even terribly consistent, as Hinduism, being a highly syncretic faith, has no single dogma or doctrine for its followers to use. Some accounts argue that Brahma created the world, Vishnu preserves it, and Shiva will one day destroy it. But no matter which account you look at in the Vedas, one thing is clear: the gods exist contemporaneously with matter, and cannot be separated from it, and there is no beginning or end, but merely one vast endless cycle of creation and destruction.

The Norse followed a similar, though decidedly darker, mythology. They believed that there is all around us the vast yawning emptiness of Ginnungagap, the great abyss, with the realm of freezing cold, Niflheim, at one end, and Muspelheim, the realm of fire, at the other. At some point – their prose and poetic Eddas never did bother to explain exactly how this happened – the interaction of fire and ice created Bor, the first creature in existence. The Eddas go on to describe how all of creation came about more or less spontaneously, and how it will all end in astonishingly precise detail.

But, like the followers of other animistic faiths, the Vikings could never separate out the Creator from the created.

It is only when we get to the theistic faiths that we finally realise that matter and its creator are separate, and that the creation of the material Universe had a beginning. And this fits the facts around us, as far as we are aware.

It is at this point that the scientific materialist, who says that the Universe is what it is and can come into existence spontaneously and evolve through random chance, has a serious problem.

The facts around us tell us that this point of view is totally mistaken. Yet the scientific materialist is utterly confident, even adamant, that his view is correct.

So he does what everyone who has ever found himself in danger of being proven wrong does. He invents epicycles designed to make his theory plausible.

We have seen this before, with the flat-Earth crowd, who actually had a perfectly plausible theory GIVEN THE FACTS OF THE TIME. They argued that the Earth was flat, which was true from their point of view because they had no facts to disprove it. But the moment that those facts did come to light, they had to invent ever more ridiculous and outlandish ideas that decorated their thesis, when a simple application of Occam’s Razor would tell them that they were wrong.

We have also seen it with the geocentric orbit crowd, who again had a perfectly plausible theory given what we knew back then. They argued that all celestial bodies revolved around the Earth, and that the Earth itself was stationary in space. But when Copernicus came along with his heliocentric model – which, by the way, found cautious acceptance within the Church at the time, a fact that directly contradicts the silly notion that the Church suppressed scientific inquiry and debate – the geocentrists came up with ever more convoluted and crazy epicycles with which to defend their position.

So too we see with scientific materialism today.

The modern scientific materialist is forced to defend his position by resorting to “infinite Universes” of which we are but one, which very conveniently gives him a way out by allowing him to use precisely the argumentum ad infinitum (to use extremely poor Latin) that he needs in order to make Darwinian evolution work.

Even a mind as brilliant as Prof. Stephen Hawking’s had to resort to absurd contortions of logic by claiming that because the Law of Gravity exists, the Universe itself pretty much willed itself into existence. The sheer idiocy of this argument is one that even those with sub-90 IQs can figure out, and is a disgraceful stain upon the legacy of a man whose work in the field of physics is otherwise unimpeachable and legendary. He was indeed a great physicist and mathematician, but a subpar – and that is being quite charitable – philosopher.

Now, does this mean that the account of creation given in the first few chapters of the Book of Genesis is absolutely accurate?

No.

There are in fact two separate versions of the account of creation in Genesis. The first involves God creating everything in six days and resting on the seventh, and the second involves the Garden of Eden and the Fall from Paradise. Both are quite familiar to pretty much everyone. These two are reconciled in the Bible and considered quite compatible with each other. But they last just a few pages and leave a vast amount of guesswork and investigation to be done on the part of scientists – real scientists – investigating the origins of Life, the Universe, and Everything.

Is it literally true that God created the Heavens and the Earth and separated out the land from the waters and placed the sky above the waters and so on and so forth?

Probably not.

But what, exactly, about the Biblical account of Genesis contradicts the notion of the Big Bang, an event for which we now have enormous amounts of evidence?

The answer, as far as I can tell, is: pretty much nothing.

I am not a Young Earth Creationist. I do not in any way accept the timelines given by the YEC crowd that the Earth is at most 10,000 years old. But I fail to see any contradiction between a sudden and colossal release of energy, converted into matter and light, and the words, “And God said, ‘Let there be light'”.

We can sit and argue all day long about what the Bible gets wrong versus what it gets right. As far as I can tell, the Bible gets so much more right than it gets wrong that it is a far better and more reliable guide to answering the big questions of existence than any amount of scientific inquiry and evidence. But what has become absolutely clear is that the scientific materialist position, that everything arose out of basically nothing, is simple not compatible with the evidence at all.