A different view

We are born into the world as if from nowhere, in a birth we cannot remember, and when as adults we ask how the world itself arose, we find that its origin, too, is far from clear. This is the fundamental mystery of existence.

Does the Earth have a natural origin? Does nature have a creative power of its own, capable of producing things incomparably more complex than human intelligence and technology can engineer? Can human life be reduced to the properties of lifeless atoms, contrary to our sense of being distinct from the world?

In recent decades it has become difficult to ask these questions in an open-ended way. Institutions such as the National Academy of Sciences insist that the answer in every case is ‘Yes’ and that there is no scientific basis for a contrary opinion. Only one view of reality is permitted: the one that believes in self-creation.

But ‘life’ is something different from molecules. Life has to do with consciousness. Although bacteria and plants use the same DNA language as other organisms, they are not life in the sense that animals are. Our own experience as conscious beings tells us that there is more to reality than can be accounted for by molecules, however complex their organisation.

Since life is inherently and irreducibly wonderful, all we seem to have done in rejecting theistic explanations is to transfer the power of miracle from God to Nature, using scientific language to dress up a belief in natural magic. This does not mean that creation in 6 days furnishes a straightforward answer. The glory of the stars, the majesty of the continents and oceans, the secret lives of the animals that share our planet may all appear to deny a natural explanation of their existence, but they also do not speak directly of creation. Nothing is as it was. Everything that we examine lies at the end of a long history. Creation cannot be read from the universe’s immediate appearance.

The reason why the ultimate origin is hidden – why we cannot go all the way back to the beginning – is because there was a solar-system-wide cataclysm at the beginning of the rock record. This is an event we have become aware of only in the last 40 years, as a result of discovering that Earth’s oldest crust is completely missing and that the vast craters that deface the Moon are impact craters from that time. The whole phenomenon of plants and animals being so commonly preserved as fossils is a consequence of that cataclysm. Fossils are a record of organisms recolonising a world that had been rendered formless and barren.

This is also the key to understanding the many examples of evolution in the fossil record. After the cataclysm the planet was in constant flux, and species had to colonise sea and land afresh, diversifying as they did so into new species. Bacteria appeared first because they were and are the most prolific of all colonisers and were essential to the re-establishment of food chains. Other organisms gained a foothold as environments stabilised: first mosses and lichens, then fast-growing marsh plants, then trees, and at about the same time a huge diversity of land animals – diverse millipedes, insects, mites and spiders, reptiles, and in due course dinosaurs and mammals. In this unforced but revolutionary view, the mystery of so many obviously unrelated organisms appearing in such rapid succession begins to make sense.

‘Evolution’ has two meanings – one, the well established fact that most species originate from other species, the other, the presumption that all species are related and originated aeons ago from lifeless chemicals. More influenced by Darwin than we would like to think, we tend to confound the two. When we see species originating from other species, we think we are seeing evidence for the theory that life evolved from a ‘prebiotic soup’. However, organisms are manifestly too ingenious to be so explained, as are real examples of evolutionary change. Consider what is involved, for instance, in:

• lizards evolving into snakes
• feathered birds evolving into penguins
• land-dwelling quadrupeds evolving into whales and dolphins.

Examples discussed on this website include cnidarians (anemones, corals and jellyfish), ichthyosaurs (an extinct group of marine reptiles), turtles, and manatees. We will add others in due course.

No less wonderful are the life histories which do not exhibit a radical change in body form but instead an immense explosion of variation, as when

• a single species of fern gave rise to more than 11,000 fern species
• a single species of ray-finned fish gave rise to 42 orders and 431 families of ray-finned fish, comprising over 26,000 species
• a single species of beetle gave rise to 4 suborders and 168 families of beetles, comprising hundreds of thousands of species

The more spectacular the transformation or imaginative the variation, the more it becomes clear that such phenomena cannot have been accidental but were programmed from the outset – just as, within one life span, we know that the metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly or of an egg into a chicken is pre-programmed. Evolution of this kind in no way implies the denial of an original creation.

The site has several sections. After several introductory pages, a record of Earth’s colonisation walks the visitor through the early part of the fossil record, illustrating how the step-by-step appearance of plants and animals reflects a process of ecological recovery. Before the cataclysm looks at what the original world was like, while The old world destroyed argues that evidence generally taken to go back to the solar system’s birth is actually evidence of its destruction, of the cataclysm rather misleadingly known as ‘Noah’s Flood’. A series of diagrams and timecharts provide visual aids. The Key concepts page summarises the new thinking, followed by pages that treat a few of the concepts in more detail. In-depth discussions engage the general reader at a more technical level, with topics such as the origin of the solar system and the newly discovered ‘transitional’ fossil Tiktaalik. Finally, Genesis and other traditions considers the testimony of oral traditions that predate the invention of writing, on the basis that they represent a lost memory of how the Earth came into existence. They too tell us that the original world was destroyed.