Dec 17 2008
Evolution is Religion
Every time I go deep into the woods, I am astounded by the fecundity of nature, by the myriad life forms taking root all around me. Living things abound, even in the dead of winter. The planet is teeming with them. The oceans are soups chock full of plants and creatures great and small. Even in the coldest, most inhospitable regions of our world, colonies of bacteria thrive. Others live on the hot rims of volcanic eruptions. Life is everywhere and thriving.
While engaging in a series of mundane tasks the other day, it suddenly occurred to me that evolution is religion. The great debate between Creationists and Darwinists is a contrivance – an artificial argument where the parties involved conspire against the reality manifest both in this planet of ours and in the stars. This is clearly evident to anyone paying attention to the march of living cells: one splits into two, two split into four, and so on until everything living comes into being. This sequence explains the seemingly endless variations found in nature, but it also begs the question: Where did that first living cell come from?
A genetic code is just that – a set of instructions by which a specific living organism takes shape. Any self-respecting atheist will insist that the rise of the first cell was purely happenstance, that the animate sprung spontaneously from the inanimate after an incredibly long series of random events. At face value, this appears to make sense. But the stars refute it.
The evolution of inanimate matter draws attention to the problem of the first living cell. Because we have become a species of specialists, the vast majority of us do not see the paradox here. Biologists break down living things to long chains of proteins, naturally assuming that the building blocks of life have always existed. Physicists study subatomic particles and see randomness at work in all things physical without giving much thought as to how this extends to their own living, breathing selves. Cosmologists compile more and more data pointing to the emergence of the universe from an infinitely dense point in spacetime 14.7 billions years ago, offering no explanation as to how the physical world can be both random and organized. Meanwhile natural historians present hard evidence that complex life forms have evolved from simpler ones, but stop short of explaining life’s origins. Everyone assumes that the other specialists hold other important pieces of the puzzle, and that together these pieces will reveal a mechanistic world that’s mathematically comprehensible. But the math never explains how that first living cell came to be.
The universe consists of countless stars organized into galaxies over eons. We know that before there were galaxies, stars, planets, atoms, or any kind of organized material whatsoever, there were subatomic particles running amok in white-hot plasma that was the direct consequence of the Big Bang. So again, I ask you: Where did the first living cell come from? Where did this urge to live and reproduce originate?
A logically consistent atheism must deny the existence of nature altogether. Both the laws of physics and genetic codes must be seen as mere accidents. There is no room for natural laws in any worldview that denies a Lawgiver, unless the universe itself has always existed. But we know this isn’t true. We know that everything points back to the Big Bang. We know that all matter can be reduced to four basic forces, and that a fraction of a microsecond after the Big Bang there were only two. What happens when we go back in time and reduce that two to one? Then we are standing eyeball-to-eyeball with God.
A true atheist must deny evolution because that seemingly scientific description of nature assumes a certain order to things that an utterly random universe cannot support. Hence, evolution is religion. This is so obvious that I don’t see how anyone can miss it. But we are a species of specialists, so the left hand never knows what the right hand is doing. When this fact is taken into consideration, it is amazing that we can figure out anything at all. Too much information. The particulars obscure the generalities. We can’t see the forest for the trees.
