|
Biology is the study of life. The natural world offers us endless delight and wonder, and the study of it - learning about the amazing variety of animal and plants, their inner workings, their behaviour and different habitats - is interesting enough to last a lifetime. Others want to know how life got to be the way it is. That inevitably involves some idea of 'evolution', because nothing stays the same in this world. But just as clearly (in our view) it involves some idea of creation. Until the 19th century most people in the West believed that God made the world. Millions of people, including many scientists, still do believe this, seeing in Genesis nothing incompatible with what science has discovered about the world.
After the intellectual revolution sparked by Charles Darwin, evolutionary change - in the past if no longer - was seen as a process where nature created itself. Many now believe that the origin of everything, including the amazingly precise and constant laws of physics that make our world possible, was a Big Bang some 13 billion years ago. Stars came and went, until eventually the Sun was formed, and biology began when bacteria somehow (scientists still do not know how) assembled themselves into highly complex, genetically programmed, self-reproducing cells from a soup of chemicals. 'Life' then continued to develop into more and more complex forms by mutations, becoming more and more various, until it reached its climax two million years ago with the emergence of human beings.
Those who are satisfied with this view include both religious and non-religious people. Many religious people believe that God helped the process along at all the points where it is difficult to think it could have happened by chance. In this website we discuss some of the problems with the Darwinian view, but we do not wish to cause offence in doing so. Creationists are indebted to Darwin for pointing out that some organisms are related. When Darwin wrote The Origin of Species most people believed that species had always been the same. However, Darwin went a lot further than simply disproving this notion. He argued that natural selection acting on naturally occurring small variations could eventually bring about very great change, and that to explain the origin of the differences between one species and another was to explain the origin of life. We do not believe this is so. To cross the species barrier is not to cross every boundary that makes one form of life (such as a horse) distinct from another (such as a butterfly). It just means that some species are related to each other.
Creationists divide into those who think the earth is about 6,000 years old, with fossils telling the story of Noah's Flood, and those who think that the Earth is older, with fossils telling the story of recolonisation after the Flood. Holding the second view, we have no wish to contest the order in which fossils appear, nor the evidence that most fossilised organisms lie in or very close, geographically and stratigraphically, to where they lived before they were fossilised. Indeed, when it comes to Earth history, there are only two major issues where we would beg to differ from the majority scientific view: genealogy (since the evidence of the fossil record is one of many separate family trees, not a unified 'tree of life') and chronology (since direct evidences of time needed to lay down the rock layers do not support billion-year timescales).
Palaeontologists have struggled for more than a century to find transitional fossils to confirm the predictions of Darwinism. But, with some exceptions, these have not been found. See Darwinist steps of faith - the many missing links. Radioisotope dating has been used to show that the fossil record unfolded over billions of years. We suggest that while the method is not itself invalid, the dates produced by it are not supported by the primary evidence of the rocks and fossils themselves. See An Earth billions of years old?
We think the fossil record is a story not of evolution in the Darwinian sense but of recovery after a global mass-extinction event. This is a big subject, so we have a whole website devoted to it at www.earthhistory.org.uk.
Genetic information needs an intelligent programmer to put it there. Animals have the ability to act voluntarily; they have life in a sense in which bacteria and plants do not have life. Because life in the sense of consciousness is not a property of matter, the existence of animals requires a life-giver. The normal word for such a being is "God".
Creationists propose that in the beginning God spoke and by his word brought a relatively small number of types of organism into being. Over time the genetic information with which these basic types were endowed enabled them to develop into a great variety of species, leading to the flora and fauna which biologists study today.
To illustrate the amount of evolutionary change that could have taken place within basic types, we have prepared a database of animal kinds. So the snake kind, for example, eventually gave rise to more than 2,000 snake species. We are not claiming that we have always drawn the boundaries in the correct place. To take the snake again as an example, it is possible that snakes themselves may have descended from a branch of early lizard. Genesis itself suggests as much when it says that the 'serpent' (or dragon) was fated (over time) to crawl on its belly - in other words, to lose its legs.
On this website we have included a few pages that touch on some of the critical issues, such as the biology of bacteria, the limits of evolution, the differences between reptiles and mammals and the differences between apes and man. We are keen to encourage discussion, and believe that students of all ages should be informed of both the creationist and Darwinist interpretations. While the concepts of creation and evolution are opposites in some respects, they are complementary in others.
The alternative to Darwinism is, strangely, difficult for some to accept: that we have a Creator who still sustains and directs his world and universe. He is not like the vengeful or apathetic gods of some religions, but the loving, gracious, concerned God who has revealed himself to the whole world in the world's best-selling book, the Bible. In the words of C. S. Lewis "Is He safe? Oh no. But He is good".
Some people find the idea of life being created by God difficult to swallow. In the words of Richard Dawkins; the notion that a God "chose to create it in such a way that it looked as though he was not there" does not allow him the freedom to believe. This is where faith enters and sadly where Dawkins, amongst others, lack the understanding of its importance: God has chosen to remain hidden, for us to exercise faith; without which we cannot please him. Hebrews 11:6
|
