New Kids on the Block

Let us leave God to get on with things and talk about ourselves, homo sapiens or ‘wise men’ for a while. If the evolutionists are right then we are the johnnies-come-lately, only having been around for about 200,000 years compared with the 3,700,000 years for life itself. During our short existence we have come to dominate Earth and gain mastery over all other species. Our accomplishments are obvious, from speaking, writing, reading, building, organising, thinking, learning, exploring, flying, computing, slavery, genocide and mindless entertainment we have no rival. We are supreme, or are we?

When we explore the wonders of our terrain and come across a big black bear or sleek slithery serpent we pray to God that we shall be spared. Perhaps a tiny insect gives us a tiny, tiny bite and we are rushed to hospital where an unseen bacterium slips into our system and kills us. With our gun and our cutlass we can, if we do not panic deal with the bear and the serpent, so if we are so clever why cannot we rid ourselves of the bacterium? Well one reason is that our own bodies each contain many thousands of species of bacteria that are performing essential tasks for our well being and survival, in fact there are trillions of individual bacteria inhabiting each of our bodies. How do we track down the rogue bacterium that gets in and kills us? In practice for most cases we have learned how to do this, but only with the support of the more kindly disposed bacteria that we host. These are our unseen friends and allies and according to symbiotic evolutionary theory we, the supposedly superior species are like them the direct descendants of some lowly and very ancient bacterium. Also unlike us bacteria seem to be infinitely adaptable, being able to mutate at will and to dodge around their man-made antidotes. Our medical scientists are at constant unsung war with these bacterial terrorists which are already killing off significant percentages of our population and we cannot automatically assume that we will emerge the ultimate victor. Thus we should avoid being too smug about our position in the society of the species.

However, vulnerable as we are I believe there is a credible case for our being unique on Earth, even to the extent that we may have broken away from the evolutionary process which most scientists believe brought us here in the first place. Later on I will consider how God, if He exists may have done this for us, either through Creationism or Intelligent Design, but for the time being I will look at how it could have come about within conventional evolution although eventually replacing it.

Firstly we must look at a remarkable quantum jump in the evolution of man. Life is thought, other than by Creationists as having started some 3,700,000,000 years ago, with the common ancestor of the ape and humans appearing 10,000,000 years ago. Life on two, rather than four feet came along 4,000,000 years ago, with the genus homo (early us) emerging 2,000,000 years later, culminating in homo sapiens (modern us) making our entry between 200,000 and 100,000 years ago. However it was only some 10,000 years ago that things began to happen in a big way. This was the dawn of civilisation: the beginning of life as we now know it. Our modern lives have come from virtually nothing to what we have today in 10,000 years. That may seem a very long time compared with each of our miserly life expectancies but let us put it into some perspective by treating the time since life began as if it were a twenty four hour clock: in these 86,400 seconds our common ancestor, the ape appeared four minutes ago, began to walk on two legs ninety seconds ago, became early us forty five seconds later and modern us, homo sapiens, only between nine and four and a half seconds ago. More astonishingly early civilisation emerged only half a second ago. And just look at what we have achieved in the last half second!

First let us look in a little more detail at what happened roughly between 12,000 and 8,000 years ago. Until then we had been wandering tribes of nomads seeking food where we could find it, principally through hunting wild animals, there being no other sort. However we discovered that we could domesticate animals thus providing sources of food that we could control and make available at will, thus reducing the need to hunt far, wide and dangerously for food whenever hunger threatened. Later on in what is now Iraq we began to cultivate wheat and barley and to harvest them and make them into edible foodstuffs suitable for ourselves and our animals alike. We had invented agriculture. These plentiful sources of food led to a huge population explosion and to the creation of permanent settlements with the concept of property ownership and the beginnings of urban drift as nomadic lifestyles were replaced by ‘city’ life. Soon there were organised ‘city states’ with central permanent dwellings and outlying farms. Civilisation had arrived.

So after perhaps 200,000 years of painfully slow development homo sapiens suddenly, in a mere two or three thousand years transformed itself into an organised self-sufficient civilised society paving the way for where we are today. How we got from then until now at a dizzily increasing pace I believe can be satisfactorily explained and will seek to do so later on. But what caused the original sudden jump taking us from wandering nomads to sophisticated city dwellers? Was God involved?

The Creationists maintain that God did it all. He created the world and all that was in it just a few thousand years ago, many creationists say between four and six thousand. Before that there was nothing. For many Christians, and others, evolution is wrong and the book of Genesis is right. Fossil remains, carbon dating and all other indications that animate and inanimate things existed millions and even billions of years ago are merely manifestations of what God had created. Why He should leave this misleading trail we do not know and can only speculate.

For most scientists and indeed for most people the idea of creationism is highly implausible, but that does not mean it might not be true. We should not get too worked up when dealing with believers in creationism, and there are lots of them, providing they in turn respect alternative points of view.

The vast numbers of people who accept the theory of evolution seemingly have no problem with the swift jump from nomadic life to civilisation, particularly as there is an evolutionary phenomenon known as punctuated equilibrium whereby nothing much happens for a very long time then all of a sudden a great deal happens. Thus even though they may well believe in God they do not necessarily believe He had anything particular to do with it other than creating the initial circumstances that evolution could occur. Thus the evolutionary explanation can appeal to the atheist and the true believer alike.

There is a body of opinion, however that accepts evolution but with the important distinction that from time to time there occurs a supernatural intervention rather than everything happening from the undirected process of natural selection that conventional scientific evolution hinges on. This is the theory of Intelligent Design which postulates that the science of evolution must include supernatural explanations of some situations. In particular the belief is that God is the designer and controller of evolution. To most scientists the idea that science should accommodate the supernatural is completely unacceptable; however a belief in intelligent design or God’s intervention could explain almost anything we want it to and in particular the emergence of homo sapiens and the sudden jump from barbarian to civilised man.

To me intelligent design is more credible than creationism but that does not make me believe it to be true. I simply do not know. In the circumstances I think it quite correct that scientists get on with their objective researches and continue to disregard any thought of supernatural intervention, even though individually they may well believe in God.

So whether we got to where we were a few thousand years ago as a result of creationism, intelligent design or evolution based on random selection, mutation and ‘survival of the fittest’ remains the subject of heated and often bigoted debate. The first two options openly pre-suppose the act of faith in believing in God’s existence. Evolution superficially does not require such an act of faith and hence is more amenable to the systematic development of theory supported by observation and verifiable experiment, but that does not mean it is necessarily right. However it does require the acceptance of our Supergod concept and that something or other did set up the initial conditions so that evolution could proceed. Even if, as most scientists believe and non-scientists perhaps blindly accept, the evolutionary process is the best available explanation of our existence, it does nothing to prove or disprove the existence of God.

Despite the reservations given at the beginning of this chapter I must admit to accepting that we humans are unique among the species. We have achieved vastly more than any rival in all respects save possibly ultimate survival. We may share thirty percent of our DNA with the lettuce and ninety eight percent with the chimpanzee but it is not immodest to state that we are vastly more accomplished than either, to the extent that we do not need to labour the point. But we do need to consider how we got into this pre-eminent position and the possible roles of God in getting us there.

Let us go on to assume the existence of God in some form, either as Supergod or in the generally accepted form of God as represented by the major religions but without reference to the specific teachings of any particular religion. We can then look at how God might have been involved.

He could as Supergod have set up the conditions for an evolutionary process that would eventually lead to us as we now are and as we are to become and left it that. He will not be involved any further and our future is pre-ordained unless we can gain sufficient understanding of the process and modify it in order to design our own destiny. At the other extreme Supergod may have become the God we generally accept as being around from the beginning to the very end, guiding us from time to time but giving us considerable degrees of freedom to do our own thing and eventually rewarding us for our efforts. As such having set off the big bang He could have intervened now and again to ensure that we remained on course to achieve His objectives on Earth and remain with us until we are all safely in Heaven.

In particular He could have intervened to cause homo sapiens to emerge with the special powers to enable our rapid development leading to a permanent superiority over all other species. Indeed He might not have bothered with the slow process of initial evolution and set the whole thing up a mere few thousand years ago. Or perhaps only yesterday? If that last remark seems rather trite then consider that if we accept He could have done thousands of years ago and left misleading evidence that there was something before, then He could have done it any time. After all some philosophers question whether we exist at all, the whole world being mere dreams from a non-existent body. But let us not get too fanciful and accept that He could have acted as a creationist or as an intelligent designer with same result that we are here now by His means.

Whether we are here through evolution alone, through creationism or intelligent design, let us accept that we are here, as we are, with or without the involvement of God. God may endow a true believer with something the rest of us do not possess and we must accept that the true believer truly knows there is a God although he cannot, and should not try to prove it to us. Let us equally accept that the atheist cannot know for sure that there is not a God; after all by his own admission there is no superior power that could tell him so. He only has his own faith in his belief of a Godless world and has no greater credibility than believers and should therefore be accordingly modest in his opinions.

So with or without God we suddenly got to the dawn of civilisation. What has happened since then and in particular in the last few hundred years is incredibly more dazzling and may have an explanation outside of evolution and even of God.

 

© Vic Forrington 2009

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