Opening Your Precedent

I know, it's Monday, not Wednesday or Friday, but I needed to get this out. I don't want to talk about it on Wednesday, because it's not about writing; nor do I want to discuss it on Friday, because it doesn't deal strictly with faith. Although, after reading it, it may seem like evolutionists have more faith than they profess.



Let me burst the bubble right off the bat: I'm not trying to abolish evolution. And I feel like the scientific model of evolution and the beginning of life mirrors eerily close to the creation model in Genesis -- including a recent finding that indicates movements that sound very strikingly like "dividing the waters and making dry ground appear." And by posing several questions or problems I have with evolution, I am not then saying every theory attached to evolution is false and we should all adopt young-earth creationism. All I'm saying is, I don't see how the theory of evolution can be used as an argument against the existence of God. Maybe many scientists don't do that; but that seems to be a broad perception, at least in the Christian community, and I want to argue with that.

Here's my problem with evolution: every act of creation has a precedent. I will illustrate this with a simple chronology, and see if we can follow this. I wrote a book. I was able to write a book because other books were written before it. The first book ever written could only be written because writing existed -- because sounds could be made into and out of symbols. Writing came into being because language existed; language existed because, in a very basic sense, sound existed. (In an even deeper sense, two beings came into existence simultaneously which could not only encode an idea, but also decode it. That, in itself, could take up a blog post.) Think about this for a minute: some very basic ideas may be transmittable in other ways, but complex human interaction is only possible through sound. (Yes, sign language: but sign language came second, and relied upon an existing language.) Now we're breaking down into physics: sound exists because vibrations exist -- and sound can only be used with a receptor to the sound. That is, unless we use touch (like honeybees), a certain frequency of sounds has to be picked up and translated into the brain. Interestingly, our voices produce the same frequency of sounds that our ears can pick up, but we're jumping back into the future now. So at a basic level, sound cannot exist without vibration, and without molecules bopping into one another and transmitting across space. Molecules cannot bop into one another and transmit across space unless molecules (and their attendant atoms) are resilient enough to maintain their form as they're smashing into one another across space. Atoms are resilient enough -- that is, they are the way they are -- because......

Because.

Therein lies my problem. Here we see diversity on almost an absurd level at the very basic structure of the world -- the periodic table -- so much so that some extra protons, neutrons, and electrons turn helium into lead. And it does this when -- if the universe really came ex nihilo, out of nothing -- there is no reason they should. Atoms, as a basic building block of everything, do not need to be the way they are. Why should they? What predicates the formation of atoms in a certain way?

Now we fast forward again, billions of years (let's say). Even evolution must predicate itself on the fact that nature is what it is. No reason. It just is. We can say certain parts of the human body are the way they are because of everything that has come before. But only to a point. There is still that moment -- call it grace, call it what you will -- that the laws of nature, gravity, physics, could have performed differently, and the whole thing would have fallen apart, but they didn't. If just one of any number of laws had formed itself at the beginning of time a little differently, we wouldn't be here.

Some may argue, then, that: well, if things didn't work out right we wouldn't be here to argue it. That is, if nature had lent itself to non-life, there wouldn't be a question because there would be no one to form the question. Valid point. There's a certain elegance to marrying yourself to a form of study that gets to leave questions blank because they're simply outside the scope of experiment and investigation. A form of study, say, that makes it suddenly acceptable and normal to take a few things on faith.

So maybe this would have been a fine topic for Friday. But I've got a good one already planned. See you Wednesday.