A Curious Girl: Evolution and Creationism

Mr. B wasn't here today so we watched a video on evolution instead of having a lesson. Richard Dawkins, 'The Blind Watchmaker.' Seeing as there were only four people who bothered to turn up, Christina and I spent most of the time arguing with the oblivious Dawkins, who seems to consider evolution a counter-argument to the creation of the universe by God. John and Elaine were the other ones there, Elaine had seen it before and John was taking it about as seriously as we were, so never mind :)

I thought Dawkins was OK with his arguments for evolution, but hadn't even touched on the argument against God. For one thing, the existence of evolution wouldn't disprove God at all, it would just disprove a strictly literal interpretation of Genesis 1 - it wouldn't remove the factor of God. For whilst evolution can continue spontaneously by natural selection, evolution starting spontaneously seems implausible to me... massive great molecules of DNA suddenly start synthesising protein? Uh, how? It's still unclear. God is not removed from the equation just yet.

In my opinion, evolution can co-exist with God quite nicely. If he had created all organisms with unchangeable forms in a changing world (because even if nothing else changes the world, humanity can and does), the organisms would not be able to adapt, and so would die. So evolution is useful. Even if Genesis 1 is literal (rather than representational) truth, this kind of evolution can still exist and still be divine will, even if it does fit in with Dawkins' blind watchmaker.

The other thing is, just because evolution seems random, and not representational of any conscious act, doesn't mean that it wasn't. To comprehend a universe, a world, a field, a single blade of grass is still mystery to humankind, so how do we know if there is a direction or not? God can understand the movements and laws of everything - he created them that way. I believe that with evolution or not, God knows and has initiated the movement of everything in the universe. This is not quite predeterministic - he gave us the power to affect things as well - he allowed our brains to develop, in effect giving us some of that creator potential - his image. It was a pretty awesome thing to do this. Essentially he gave us the opportunity to mess everything up, which is much much worse than if I gave the yeast in my last Biology investigation the opportunity to choose whether to produce carbon dioxide or not, or whether to take part or not, or even whether to stay in the beaker or to go off and sabotage everyone else's experiments as well.

So I tried to come up with an analogy for the divine will behind apparent random chaos, and thought of ten-pin bowling, fireworks, snooker, and then remembered that Isaac Asimov has already beaten me to it, and did so a long time ago. A story called The Darwinian Pool Room, where the main character compares humanity's attempts to interpret creation to a naive person regarding a pool table after the game has been played. The balls are all in pockets, except for the cue ball - how did they get there? At first one might assume that the balls had been put in by hand. On the other hand, it might be that from a single shot, the player had sent all fifteen balls into pockets - a state initiated by will, disrupting order to create chaos (balls going in all directions), to then create another kind of order (balls in pockets).

Asimov says, 'Genesis 1 could be made to fit the billiard-ball scheme. The Creator could have spent his time calculating all the necessary variables and relationships into six gigantic equations. Count one "day" for each equation. After having applied the initial explosive impetus, he would then "rest" on the seventh day, said seventh "day" being the entire interval of time from that beginning to 4004 B.C. That interval, in which the infinitely complex pattern of billiard balls is sorting itself out, is obviously of no interest to the writers of the Bible. All the billions of years of it could be considered merely the developing single act of creation.'

So in other words, there was a purposeful initiation. Of course, this was all just speculation, and maybe it isn't six equations, but simply six periods of time - I have no problem with imagery in the Bible, there's plenty of it in the words of the prophets and in Revelation.

So to put it bluntly, I see no reason why evolution would even have a remote chance of disproving God.

Gotta give credit to Richard Dawkins, he sure knows how to make me think.

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