Back in the late sixties and early seventies our family subscribed to a then popular series of TIME-LIFE books. There were several series of these books: a Science Library and a Nature Library, to mention only two. My children occasionally used those books as reference books during their school years when doing school projects. Some older readers may still have some of these books on their bookshelf but generally these days you find them only in Op Shops. Before relegating mine to the Op Shop I figured that in my retirement years I should really read them before disposing of them. And I’ve made good progress in the last couple of years – I only have one to go.
What particularly struck me however is how these books repeatedly assume that things such as evolution, natural selection, the survival of the fittest are proven facts. Okay… I don’t want to just get into a debate about whether all living things originated in some kind of primordial soup millions and millions of years ago. For me there is a more important issue. Did it all happen by chance? Was it just due to a random collision of atoms? And if so where did those random atoms come from in the first place?
My problem is not just with the theory of evolution – and let’s remember that it is, after all, still a theory – nobody was there to see it happen. Well, there was someone who saw it happen. That someone was God. He told us a few things about it on the first pages of the Bible. The story begins this way: “In the beginning God…!”
That’s the heart of the issue. If you argue for randomness and that this world is the product of time plus chance, then you cut God out of the equation. The problem is that there are some complexities in our world that can only be accounted for by attributing them to an intelligent designer.
Let me give you just one example. Water! It’s interesting that there is a law in physics that is almost universally applicable: when things get hotter they expand and become less dense; when things become colder they contract and become more dense. There is however a remarkable exception to this rule: water, as it approaches freezing point. Instead of contracting and becoming denser, it actual expands and becomes less dense. You can see the outworking of that in the ice-cubes that you add to your refreshing summer drink. The ice cubes do not sink to the bottom of your glass, they float. And that is just as well for the fish in our rivers and lakes, isn’t it? If water followed the rules of physics and continued to get denser all the way through then rivers and lakes would freeze from the bottom up. The poor old fish would end up flapping around on the ice until they expired. We have a creator God who, very considerately for the fish, designed water so that it would expand and float just before freezing point.
Okay, I can hear you saying, “But all this is no doubt due to the molecular structure of water.” True! But who designed the molecular structure of water? It didn’t just happen. That would be giving the combination of ‘random chance’ plus ‘time’ too much credit. I draw great comfort from the opening words of the Bible: “In the beginning God…!”
That brings me back to those TIME-LIFE books and their frequent references to evolution. I have no problem with micro-evolution – our great variety of dogs today have come about because of millennia of cross breading. But that’s a far cry from claiming that some billions of years ago we crawled out of that primordial swamp. As I read those TIME-LIFE book I come to the conclusion that it takes a lot more faith to be an atheistic evolutionist than to be a Christian. The secular evolutionist has to believe in many, many miracles. He has to believe that fish became amphibians. He then has to believe that these amphibians became reptiles and then believe that eventually some became primates. I only have to believe this one thing: “In the beginning God…!” All the rest simply flows from that fundamental truth.
John Westendorp