tango

I've posted this a few times in response to questions in CA. To keep it somewhere I can find it easily, I figured I'd post it here too.

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If scientists could conclusively prove that life evolved from nothing by chance the Church would die out very quickly. Likewise if Christians could conclusively prove that God exists then the theory of evolution would soon be forgotten. Therefore we have to work with what we can observe and draw our own conclusions, since it is clear that neither side has conclusively proven their case.

So let's look at what we can see and look at how the two approaches (creation or evolution) stacks up against it.

I was created by my parents, who in turn were created by their parents, and so on. If we trace that line back we end up with some entity that was not created, a point of singularity if you will. The question then boils down to whether that something is God (with or without the capital G) or random evolution.

If we accept that the something is God then everything else falls into place. We can read the book of Genesis to see how we all got here.

If we wish to believe that the something is a random process of evolution we have a number of further steps of faith to take. Firstly we must believe that something came of nothing (defying all known laws of physics). Then we must assume that living matter appeared spontaneously from non-living matter (never duplicated in a laboratory). We must also assume that at no point during the life of these early organisms did anything happen to squash them (when only a single living thing exists on a planet it takes very little to qualify as an extinction level event).

Unfortunately believing in random evolution requires further leaps of faith. We have to believe, with no evidence at all, that fully functioning organs could develop almost instantly. For example, vision requires some kind of visual receptors, an optic nerve, and an area of the brain to process the signals (this is even before any form of focussing mechanism comes into play). A retina is no use without an optic nerve, an optic nerve is useless without a retina, and so on. So a working eye would have to appear in a single generation, otherwise it would serve no purpose and be "evolved out".

We would also have to accept that related species appeared at the same time. We can see how insects pollinate flowers - in the absence of insects then flowers are not pollinated, and in the absence of flowers insects have no food source. So how would a plant know to produce a flower unless it knew there was something there that would pollinate it? If it was ahead of the evolutionary curve the flower would serve no purpose and die, if it were behind the curve then the insects would have been and gone, and the flower would serve no purpose.

Frankly, I find it takes less faith to believe in creation than in evolution.