The Mystery of Life
Professor Thomas Alerstam ends his wonderful book Bird Migration as follows:
..We are compelled to resign ourselves to continuing uncertainty and confusion over how birds find the right migration route.
So, this book ends with an unsolved mystery. Actually I do not think that this is any major shortcoming. It might be hoped that we humans would gain a greater degree of inspiration from unsolved mysteries than from what we believe we know - in great things as in small. May the birds continue to fly over the earth, and may mankind wonder and investigate.
Writers on evolution may be divided into those who "wonder and investigate" and those who look for proof of their own pre-existing opinions. In the 18th century, the complex organization of the natural world was regarded as proof of the existence of God. When, in the 19th century, natural selection provided an alternative explanation, the new theory cast doubt on this "proof" and many lost their religious faith.
But the dogmatic mind abhors a vacuum and in the twentieth century, many scientists found themselves replacing the old Christian dogmas with new dogmas of their own. Faced with the ultimate mystery of the origin of life, the Cambridge Encyclopedia tells us that
Life began about 3000 million years ago, probably just once. The earliest organisms were short stretches of nucleic acid floating in a chemical sea..
( Cambridge Encyclopedia of Human Evolution , p. 9)
It is a curious fact that this is one of the most positive and categorical statements in the Encyclopedia. On more recent issues such as the origin of bipedalism, where we can judge on the basis of far more evidence and where common sense also might be consulted, the authors hesitate and are reluctant to commit themselves. Yet on the origin of life itself, earliest, most fundamental and most unknowable issue, they appear surprisingly confident that they know (more or less) what happened.
Scientists are human; and human beings often feel more certain about irrational beliefs than they do about rational conclusions. The theory of the origin of life is not really science, because there is no evidence that it is true. It is a statement made to fill a gap in human knowledge - in other words, a myth. Nothing that we know suggests that life can ever emerge spontaneously from "dead" molecules. Myths often have a purpose: the purpose of this one is reassure us that there is no absolute distinction between life and inanimate matter. This is not an easy thing to believe - all human experience and all of biology suggests that there is an absolute distinction. But the materialistic worldview makes this kind of possibly irrational belief emotionally necessary.
Evolutionists should perhaps remember the words of Newton:
I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
(Moore Isaac Newton 1934, p. 664, quoted in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations )
There are many forms of knowledge and there are many things which we shall never know. Perhaps the origin of life (if indeed life had an origin) is one of the things we shall never know. Just because we accept that reptiles probably evolved from amphibians, mammals from reptiles and man from the mammals, we are in no way obliged to accept that life evolved from inanimate matter. There are no fossils to prove that and certainly no serious experimental evidence. All our experience (and all science since Pasteur) suggests that life - no matter how relatively simple, though all known life is highly complex - has a special quality that inanimate matter does not have. We see living creatures die and become inanimate, but none of us has ever seen the process happening in the reverse direction. Every chicken has hatched from an egg, every egg has been laid by a chicken.
Evolution tells us how life developed. How life began and why life developed as it apparently did are more difficult questions: perhaps questions to which we shall never know the answer.
Evolution (or "transmutationism") was in many people's minds before natural selection occurred to Darwin and Wallace. It was becoming obvious that life had developed over long aeons of time. But how could it possibly be explained scientifically? The significance of the theory of natural selection was that it made it possible for the scientist to feel that he could explain evolution in purely rational and scientific terms, thus maintaining the continuity of scientific thought and making it possible to accept evolution as an explanation of the past without resorting to a theory of continuous creation.
The eighteenth century had not entirely discarded religion but it had reduced the role of God (except - for those who still believed in them, the events of the New Testament) to that of a First Cause or Prime Mover. It was easy to believe that God had created the universe - after all, it must have started somehow - but it was assumed that having set things in motion, God had left the universe to run itself, following the laws of nature, the "second causes." Evolution was difficult to swallow because it seemed to contradict that assumption. Looking back at how evolution unfolded, it appeared to have been a process of continuous, unpredictable development - something very much like a creative historical process. But must not a creative historical process (they felt) imply continuous providential participation in the events of this world? Would not that mean that the First Cause intervened later, rather than letting the laws of nature take their course?
Nineteenth century scientists felt the need to find some rational explanation - some natural law like the laws of Newtonian physics - that could explain in a logical manner the diverse and perfect adaptations of the natural world and the extraordinary fossils in the rocks. Natural selection offered (many of them felt) that explanation. Unlike the law of gravity, natural selection could not be mathematically proved or experimentally demonstrated - but it seemed such a perfect piece of logic that perhaps (it seemed) these were not necessary.
Even now, biologists with a materialistic world view continually refer to natural selection as the explanation for almost everything they see and describe in nature, even though modern evolutionary theory shows pretty clearly that natural selection alone is not enough to explain how evolution happened. The process of speciation (see link) actually seems to be more complex than that. But the materialistic biologist has an emotional need for natural selection as a dogma.
Without it, the biologist's exposure to the reality and diversity of the natural world leads him naturally to a state of wonder and incomplete understanding. If he is a materialist, he has constantly to assert that evolution is a simple matter of cause and effect. The sheer simplicity of the natural selection formula reassures him that he is dealing, after all, with something quite straightforward and easy to understand. By contrast, the less dogmatic student of nature, whatever his beliefs, can allow himself to "wonder and investigate" without expecting to find simple all-explaining solutions.
Natural selection explains how organisms adapt to changes in their environment. Those which are less well adapted to the life they lead will tend to die out. By contrast those which are better adapted will flourish and over time will increase in numbers. This must occur. But natural selection is a kind of discipline rather than a progressive principle. There is nothing active or positive about it. The question is not whether or not natural selection occurs, but whether natural selection is sufficient to explain the wonderful evolution of life.