Like evolution, all scientific theories are a work in progress
In the 18th century, the existence of family relationships between different species was spelt out in the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus’s grouping of living things into species, genera, orders and so on, but there was no suggestion of how things got that way.
Oh that is not true.
Linnaeus, along with all naturalists of his time, subscribed to the idea that every living thing on earth had been created by God in the course of a single week.
How interesting that “Three hundred years after the great Swedish naturalist’s birth, scientists the world over are still using the system he invented to classify plants and animals” even though “there was no notion in his system of one species developing or evolving from another. That idea was still a hundred years in the future. ”
By the 1820s, the French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck was talking about inheritance of characteristics acquired as the result of striving (as the giraffe’s ancestors strived to reach higher into the trees).
By 1859, naturalist-biologists Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace independently came up with the idea of natural selection as the primary driver of evolution. Natural selection, that is, operating on variation, but with no understanding of where the variants came from, or how that variation was inherited.
In the early 20th century came the discovery of mutations as a source of variants and the incorporation of the Austrian botanist Gregor Mendel’s genetics into evolution science, but as yet without knowledge of the material basis of mutation and inheritance. This emerged in the 1940s, when DNA was recognised as the genetic material. Then from the 1950s onwards there was the determination of its structure and the cracking of the genetic code that revealed how it directs the formation of proteins…
Since then, we have recognised that evolution is governed by chance as well as by selection, that inheritance is complicated by things like gene duplication (where a chunk of DNA is copied twice and each copy can then evolve independently), horizontal gene transfer (where DNA is transferred between species), and even the incorporation of genetic material from viruses into our own genetic material. And of course there are plenty of other things that we still don’t understand…
So at every stage, we have an imperfect theory, full of gaps and inconsistencies…
Increasingly full of gaps and inconsistencies as it turns out. So why is evolution still being presented as a fact?
The first step in any scientific enquiry is deciding that something is worth looking at. So the possible results must be worth having and the research programme must have some prospect of success.
Without question, the value in convincing humanity of evolution is the death of God and overriding his authority.
The next thing is continual dialogue between hypotheses and data. The hypotheses must be open to modification in the light of the data and…in principle to correction in the light of further knowledge. This commitment to the possibility of correction is known as fallibilism, and is one thing that all scientific endeavours have in common.
It only takes a quick review of the intransigent adherence to Evolution to recognize that lack of commitment to the possibility of correction marks Evolution as NOT being a scientific endeavour.
From the 1920s up through the 1970s, scientists thought they had a satisfactory story for our cosmic origins…All of them, however…asked some variety of the question, “why did the Universe begin with a specific set of properties, and not others?”
- Why was the Universe born perfectly spatially flat,
- with its total matter-and-energy density perfectly balancing the initial expansion rate?
- Why is the Universe the exact same temperature, to 99.997% accuracy, in all directions, even though the Universe hasn’t existed for enough time for different regions to thermalize and reach an equilibrium state?
- Why, if the Universe reached these ultra-high energies early on, are there no high-energy relics (like magnetic monopoles) predicted by generic extensions to the Standard Model of particle physics?
- And why, since the entropy / chaos of a system always increases, was the Universe born in such a low-entropy configuration relative to its [organized] configuration today?…
In physics, we have two ways of dealing with questions like these. Because all of these questions are about initial conditions — i.e., why did our system (the Universe) begin with these specific conditions and not any others — we can take our pick of the following:
- We can attempt to concoct a theoretical mechanism that transforms arbitrary initial conditions into the ones we observe, including that reproduces all the successes of the hot Big Bang, and then tease out new predictions that will allow us to test the new theory against the old theory of the plain old Big Bang without any alterations.
- Or, we can simply assert that the initial conditions are what they are and not only is there no explanation for those values/parameters, but we don’t need one. [Emphases added.]
Although it’s not clear to everyone, the first option is the only one that’s scientific; the second option, often touted by those who philosophize about the landscape or the multiverse, is tantamount to giving up on science entirely. [Emphasis added.]
And so Evolution, which leaves the explanation of origins out of its purview, has given up on science entirely.
And so has Cosmology, which stubbornly holds to the Big Bang Theory despite all the evidence against it as well.
I make the following argument where one of three propositions must be true regarding how the universe came to be. I can further prove which of the three propositions is true, thus demonstrating with irrefutable logic the origin of the universe. My approach uses a simple process of elimination where the universe came into being either by nothing, something, or someone. These three headings cover every option imaginable and no matter what your view, it will fit into one of these three headings…So let’s look at each option rationally…
The Nothing option
The idea that nothing actually caused anything is really impossible because nothing by definition is ‘no thing’. If it turns out that ‘no thing’ can actually do something, then it cannot be nothing in the true definition of that word, rather it had to be something all along. That alone makes this option a non-starter…However…the idea that nothing begat everything is still argued as a possible candidate as to the origin of the universe…
Inflationary Theory or Cosmic Inflation says that the universe is expanding….this theory suggests that positive energy is exactly balanced by the negative gravitational energy. In other words, the total energy of the universe is zero, so it really consists of essentially nothing.
A look at Quantum theory and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, (according to some), provides an explanation for how energy may have come out of nothing. It has to do with ‘quantum fluctuations’. It assumes that particles and antiparticles form and quickly annihilate each other…One idea is that one fluctuation lived sufficiently long and had the right conditions for inflation leading to our universe. Of course if you delve deeper into such speculation, you have to conclude that in order for this to happen, there has to exist laws such as gravity, and/or particle pairs etc. That surely is not nothing…you don’t need to be a brilliant scientific mind to see that nothing cannot be the source of the universe…
Scientists who say that everything came from nothing are really saying that…nothing is really just a balance of negative and positive which equals zero, but it is a no brainer that something must exist in order for there to be positive and negative anything to take place.
The Something option
the Something option must be defined as a non-intelligent, non-aware, and non-living thing which produced the universe. This Something option could also include the universe itself. The Something option must also cater for the belief that this Something must be eternal, otherwise we are back to the Nothing option because something that was preceded by nothing brings us back to the Nothing option which we have already discovered is a non-starter…
The thing with the Something option is that because this option has to be non-intelligent, unaware, and possessing no consciousness…some questions need to be asked. How does an eternal dead something give birth to consciousness?…why is it that the non-thinking Something came up with better inventions and designs than humans who possess consciousness, a mind, and intelligence…. Albert Einstein or Sir Isaac Newton…would struggle to even understand 0.0001% of all that the universe had to offer, even if they could observe the universe from beginning to end. And considering that the whole universe was determined at the first moments of the Big Bang, then that gives this something with no intelligence less than a second to determine everything that the universe was, is now, and will be in the future…
The weakness with this option for many is that design, complexity, logic, patterns, laws, and life, and even code such as DNA suggests very strongly that there is an almighty consciousness at work. Many argue that these attributes are the result of a mind, perhaps even a programmer…
One of the biggest hurdles with not including a consciousness of some kind in the creation process is the fact that consciousness exists. You are the proof of that. “I think, therefore I am” said the philosopher…If existence started with no life or intelligence, then would life and intelligence exist today? It is a bit like arguing that the Universe came from nothing to suggest that consciousness came from something non-conscious.
Further, we have all observed that life comes from life…If we follow the timeline backward, it is logical that someone or some life form had to be the oldest or the first living thing. Like all things, there had to be a first…then the first life could well be an eternal life. If not then that first life came from non-life. Thus the observable facts to date do not point to life coming from non-life, and while it has certainly been tried, no one has ever produced life from non-living matter, nor have they ever made a dead creature come alive again…
The Something option also seems like a non-starter when you have thought it through. The problem is that most people do not think things through. They just don’t devote enough time to think about such things and often their conclusions are based on things they have read here and there, but they themselves have not thought about it deeply enough. Also, predefined beliefs can skew people away from asking such basic questions…
The Someone option
So this leaves us with the Someone option…it is the most believed of all the options and has been the standard premise in the history of the world. Even the early years of science was not about explaining the universe without God, but more about explaining how God created things. Some of the greatest scientists who have ever lived staunchly believed that God created the universe. Included are big names like the father of physics and creator of the scientific method, Sir Isaac Newton. Other big names include: Nicholas Copernicus, Sir Francis Bacon, Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, Rene Descartes, Blaise Pascal, Robert Boyle, Michael Faraday, Gregor Mendel, William Thomson Kelvin, Max Planck, and Albert Einstein….Einstein never came to belief in a personal God, but he recognized the impossibility of a non-created universe.
However…the idea that God created the universe…is obviously ludicrous to Atheists otherwise they would at least be Agnostic. Questions and protests that naturally arise from the idea that a god created the universe is “who made God”, “does God have a God?”, “what was before God?, “religion causes wars”, etc. Such questions and reasons however have little or nothing to do with why there might be a god.
Take the question “Who created God?”. The answer is simple, God is eternal. If God wasn’t eternal. then he wouldn’t be God. If God exists, then this God must be infinite, otherwise there was something before God meaning that God is not God. It is like asking the question, ‘what was before infinity’?
To the Atheist though, the idea of a creator is almost as offensive as believing in the existence of the tooth fairy. However, as much as your intellect may or may not be offended, it has to be said that the Someone/God option is still one of three possible options and surely it wouldn’t be fair to just write this option off based on bias or conflicting belief, especially if you have no evidence, logic, or argument to the contrary. Unfortunately this is what many do. They discard this option because of bias even though nobody has proof that there is no God…
As for the idea that belief in God causes wars…The reality is that man causes wars. And what effect does a religious war have on the existence of God anyway? Absolutely no effect at all. The reality is people fight over all kinds of things, often politics, power and land. Even so-called religious wars are often about these things when you delve in to it. Regardless, these rebuttals against a god have no bearing on there being a God at all.
But let’s be rational about this….Could it be that you cannot measure an infinite God using finite tools of which we are limited to? But should we then just take it on faith that there is a God? Well we do believe in many things that we have never seen such as black holes or even the Big Bang itself. We often work out the existence of something in the universe if mathematics makes it possible and in mathematics we do have infinity. Some things are simply deduced by deduction while proof of their existence is often beyond actually seeing them. So which of the three options is the most likely then?…There is no theory as to the origin of the universe that doesn’t come under one of these three headings: Nothing, Something, or Someone.
The only option
Let’s start with some basic logic and a process of deduction to see which of the three ludicrous options must be true…
It is said that…numbers are the language of logic, so let’s see what we can deduce from them. We know that the universe or multiverse (if you are that way inclined) is very very big and is made up of very very small things…If we start with infinity, then using simple sums, we can come up with every number imaginable including zero. This is also what we observe in the universe. We see a huge amount of phenomenon and things in the universe both big and small. But what happens if we start with zero? Well, we end in zero. Zero stays zero forever. Unless you add a finite number to zero somehow (apply a cause), you will stay with zero. So what does this prove? It simply means that even the most basic logic tells us that if there was truly nothing before the universe, then there would be no universe now. There would be nothing and no one, so no one to observe nothing. However, if the first cause was infinite, then it would explain the incredible amount of finites and zeros that we see. Thus, even the most basic of logic tells us that the first thing or cause of the universe had to be infinite, there is no way around this.
Whatever was first had to have no cause because that is the definition of first in this context. Once we understand that, then there are some interesting requirements that the original or first thing must have…If the universe has life, then life is part of the source of the universe. If the universe has order, then order is part of the source of the universe. If the universe has design, then the source of the universe has the ability to design. The ingredients and products of the universe must also be present in the source of the universe, otherwise they come from nothing which we already know is impossible.
The final analysis
God is described as a living conscious spirit (non-material being) that designed the universe, is intelligent, a law giver, programmer of code like DNA, eternal, and the source of love and life among an almost infinite amount of other things.
While the notion of a god creating the universe is offensive to some…that has no bearing on the existence of God at all.
When looking at what kick-started the universe and life, the following quote is very helpful:
“When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” – Arthur Conan Doyle.
A reality-based / right / right-eous relationship with God is based on believing and acting in accordance with the evidence that he is the Creator and we are his creation who can only live through sustained connection with the source of life, united with him in a relationship that identifies with him, acknowledges his authority and models our behavior after his.
This will come as a shock to the “name it and claim it” Christians who think praying a prayer is all that it takes, then you can go about your business as it suits you.
“What doth it profit, my brethren, though a man say he hath faith, and have not works? can faith save him?…Thou believest that there is one God; thou doest well: the devils also believe, and tremble. But wilt thou know, O vain man, that faith without works is dead?…by works a man is justified, and not by faith only.” (James 2)
“Now faith is
- the substance / reality of things hoped for / expected in the future,
- the evidence of / proof, indisputable premise as used in geometry to deduce things not seen…
Through faith – evidence of designer and sustainer – we understand that the worlds were framed / formed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear.
By faith Abel offered unto God a more excellent sacrifice than Cain, by which he obtained witness that he was righteous…But without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him.” (Hebrews 11:1-6)
This passage is not defining faith as blind belief. It is not the opposite of believing science’s or philosophy’s or religion’s claims of “evidence” despite having no scientific proof. It is true science – making a logical deduction about things we can’t see from what we can see.
Faith in a Creator, therefore powerful, life-giving and sustaining God, is based on the evidence of intelligent design in creation, available to everyone whether they have read a word of the Bible or not. The existence of religion throughout all cultures and time as worship and dependence on spiritual beings more powerful than humans is evidence of humanity’s innate consciousness of right and wrong,
“The just shall live by faith…For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead;” (Romans 1:17-20)
“the judgment of God is according to truth…Who will render to every man according to his deeds: To them who by patient continuance in well doing seek for glory and honour and immortality, eternal life: But unto them that are contentious, and do not obey the truth, but obey unrighteousness, indignation and wrath, Tribulation and anguish, upon every soul of man that doeth evil…For there is no respect of persons with God. For as many as have sinned without law shall also perish without law: and as many as have sinned in the law shall be judged by the law; (For not the hearers of the law are just before God, but the doers of the law shall be justified. For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these…shew the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts the mean while accusing or else excusing one another😉 In the day when God shall judge the secrets of men. (Romans 2:2-16)
- We can’t see God or the future, but we can logically deduce the existence of a unfathomably powerful designer from the immeasurably and thoroughly interconnected universe.
- The Bible provides a history of humanity from the beginning of our presence on earth, never invalidated, giving a basis for trusting the account of the future fate of mankind.
- From our own personal experience we can believe the record that humans cannot, by ourselves, overcome our self-centered nature therefore constantly bring damage and destruction to ourselves and others, AKA “sin.”
When we finally admit the existence of, and our need for, the all-powerful Creator to rescue us from the problems we invariably find ourselves in, we have to call upon him.
“As for me, I will call upon God; and the LORD / Yahweh shall save me…He hath delivered my soul in peace from the battle that was against me…Cast thy burden upon the LORD / Yahweh, and he shall sustain thee: he shall never suffer the righteous to be moved.” (Psalm 55)
Kingdom Come 