Value Added

The Atlantic magazine may close editions with an interesting question that is somewhat humorous, but also thought provoking.  For July/August, 2014, the question was: WHICH ANIMAL HAS MOST CHANGED THE COURSE OF HISTORY?  The ten answers from the ten selected respondents were: Colo, the first gorilla born into human care; The mockingbird collected in the Galapagos archipelago; Lucy (skeletal remains indicating mankind originating in Africa); Martha, the last known passenger pigeon; Rin Tin Tin, or whichever wolf was the first to slink up to a Paleolithic-era campfire; horses; earthworms, the male chimpanzee in Zambia who trusted Jane Goodall; rats (used for research); and, the first animal to emerge (perhaps the comb jelly or the sponge).  The affirmation of natural evolution was affirmed or implied in the response of those who were occupied with biology in answering the questions.  The remainder stayed with the social impact related to this or that choice.  For example, the choice of the mockingbird included the following explanation relating to the young Darwin at Galapagos: Could the varieties have diverged from a single common ancestor? “Such facts would undermine the stability of the Species,” Charles Darwin wrote in his journal.  Many more facts had to be synthesized to complete the undermining, but when it was finished, God was no longer required [for many] to explain creation.

There are a number of questions that grow out of paragraphs like the one above – which can be found in abundance through the years since 1859 when Darwin’s classic book, The Origin of the Species, was published.  The questions relate to the debate that has followed the publication.  To give value-added to the variety of orientations about the creation there needs to be objective response to the general public which is not oriented to the evidence, and has not received in pedestrian language the answers to common questions about spontaneous evolution.  (Society testifies to about the same percentage of persons believing in God as was generally accepted before the Darwin theories emerged.)  If God is no longer needed to explain the creation, why does faith persist?  The evidence is clear that there are intra-specific changes in species.  The assertions about inter-specific changes need considerably more research to verify for doubters, the theory into factual confidence.  Even if the changes (inter-specific) can be shown to occur, what evidence is there that God did not originate the creation, perhaps in a big bang, and in the process provided for the evolving of life after the explosion?  Scripture notes God present in the creation and the initial chaos related to it. The order of the development of life beginning with necessary resources like sunlight and water preceded the simpler forms of life, and ended with mankind.  With nature set in order God finds it to be very good.  Except for origin, the creation and evolution account may ride together.

Some scholars assert that the work is accidental.  Theory is complete for the naturalist, even if accidental.  If it is finished, God, if God there was, is presumed to be no longer needed to aid in finding nature’s source, maintenance and future.  An army of scholars is working on the ideas, theories, facts related to nature and the emergence of human life, so to suggest that the task is finished and odd in not providing species above mankind.  God’s command to the first human is to dress the garden and know it.  That means work and education.  There must be faith that we will find more and more of what we need to know to gain closer and closer proximity to what God meant for his creation.  If all came to us by a big bang, why could not God set off the explosion?  If species evolved from species, could God not have followed that process?  When we studied the organs of the human body, our logic told us that flying debris could hardly have formed the magnificent human eye, ear, with brain and blood flow through a heart pump that can maintain a constant rhythm for a hundred years catching rest in the fraction of a second between beats.  It is not possible to prove there is no God, but to gain unity about the direction of nature there is possibility to probability that there is.  When evidence relates only to nature, why does that study have to bring contradiction between persons of faith in God seeking truth and persons of faith in nature alone seeking truth?  Scripture begins with the same form/void condition of earth as that of current science lessons.