Darwin And The Crisis Of Christianity

By: Andrew_McKillop

THE PRIMAL SOUP
In the primal soup of our ex-democracies in meltdown, as we thrill to one petty demagogue after the other, the 'recourse to religion' is surely making a comeback.  This will also bring back the 160-year-old crisis of Christian, Juadaic and Islamic doctrine set by the theory of evolution. Darwinist defenders of "large scale abiogenesis-based evolution" present things as follows. Four and a half billion years ago our young planet's naked land masses were almost completely engulfed by shallow primordial seas, their waters formed by inorganic atmospheric and volcanic-tectonic chemical processes.  Powerful winds gathered random molecules from the atmosphere and some were deposited in the seas. Tides and currents thrust the molecules together.  Then, somewhere in this ancient shallow ocean or at its edges the miracle of life began. The first organized form of primitive life was a tiny protozoan one-celled animal. Billions of protozoa soon populated the ancient seas and were completely self-sufficient in their sea-water world, feeding on bacteria and other organisms, which had also miraculously been formed. Much later on, life in the seas spread to the land and to the air.

Darwin was certainly schooled in The Classics, and had read Aristotle who believed that inorganically decaying material could be transformed by the “spontaneous action of Nature” into living animals.  His rather crude theory was finally rejected, but Darwin's theory holds that over billions of years, billions of random inorganic chemical combinations will produce a primal soup of living cells. Via random mutation and natural selection, these will morph into the variety of organisms that are living today.

Darwin was intensely religious, but not as religious as his wife who he did not want to offend by publishing his famous book, and delayed publishing it for a considerable time. Darwin believed in "the chain of life", also called the Tree of Life.

This concept - a chain or tree of life - is a controversial subject: Darwinists have to explain why there are no clear "intermediate" or "bridging" species. Even in his own lifetime (1809-1882) zoologists, animal physiologists and paleontologists, among others had attacked his theory of “missing links”, saying it is misleading because it suggests that only one link is missing in each segment or part of the chain, or part of the tree's branches. In reality so many links are missing that it is not evident whether there ever was a chain. Species yes. Clear evolutionary links between them, no.

But this discussion already accepts primal soup. We would first have to accept and believe this  "molecules-to-man" process. We would supposedly accept: (a) evolution of simple molecules into complex molecules, (b) evolution of complex inorganic molecules into simple organic molecules, (c) evolution of simple organic molecules into complex organic molecules, (d) evolution of complex organic molecules into DNA or similar information storage molecules, and (e) final existence of self-reproducing and evolution-capable multicellular organisms, which do evolve.

THE JUST-SO STORY
None of this is easy to believe. Defenders of Darwininian "large-scale evolution", which we can call macroscopic evolution have beaten a retreat to defending microscopic evolution (not to be confused with mutation), calling this Neo Darwinism.  Keeping the debate off macroscopic evolution, from the Primal Soup through chimps and porpoises, parrots and Papuans, to Urban Industrial Man and his primal urge to consume, is the strategy used to keep True Science believers believing.

The basic problem is simple to state: any macroscopic evolution, like any microscopic evolution would need multimillions of atoms welded together the right way into biochemical links, for example "protein stubs", the bases for making proteins. Even the simplest cell, of algae and bacteria, contains tens of thousands of intricately designed pieces of "molecular machinery". This cell will need one hundred thousand million atoms placed in exactly the right frameworks and structures to operate - totally unlike anything found in inorganic chemistry. Putting the bases together "by random combinations" and producing organised life able to reproduce would take an awful long while to try out. At least as important, some trace of the organisms produced in the "development and linking processes" would be expectable, but these links do not exist in Nature today, nor in fossil records. 

Scientists lack plausible just-so stories for most of evolution, except microscopic evolution in highly specific, and special laboratory conditions.

Macroscopic Darwin-type evolution needs leaps of faith. Fish evolved to lungfish then to amphibia. Happily for Darwinists, there are lungfish. They could be the missing link but looking at a lungfish, then at the "before-and-after" of fish and amphibia, is troublesome even for Believers. However, Darwinists tell us to believe the process kept going: the amphibia evolved into reptiles, which curiously evolved both into birds, and into mammals, which finally made it to the crowning glory of Man.

CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE STAYS HOSTILE TO DARWINISM
Especially for Christian doctrinal controllers and checkers, Darwin is often discredited by calling him a "crypto Christian". His theory, like their religion, needs huge leaps of faith not reason - and the proof of this is his macroscopic evolution theory which is indistinguishable from a miracle. Before Darwin, most zoologists postulated 'immaterial vital forces,' or drivers of a basically mysterious nature which forced evolving organisms ever upward to more complex and perfect states. Without this drive - which for controllers of religious doctrine can only be God - only random change can explain why there are mice, men and mosquitoes as well as whales. Why would they evolve in any specific way?

Alternatively for religionists, they can call God the random changer, but this sets huge doctrinal problems because it would mean serious rewriting of the overt and underlying doctrine of all the "Holy Books". As a direct result of this but rarely admitted, defenders of the official religious doctrine of all three Religions of the Book (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) discredit and reject Darwinism, but conversely often accept Big Bang theory. The Universe could have formed itself spontaneously - but not, please not, living things on this tiny planet!

Whether organisms were ever programmed to evolve into higher states is a difficult question for religious doctrinists: why would God firstly place inferior and unevolved creatures on Earth? Also, if God "programmed evolution" we might suppose there would be no random processes - in fact the more logical process called "saltation" or evolution by leaps or jumps, which better fits the fossil record might have been closer to "Godly evolution". Religious doctrinists also reject saltation.

For decades in the late-19th century, Darwin's macroscopic theory was treated as "catastrophic for religion". No biblically derived religion could include Darwinism and remain uncompromised - except as Max Weber, the founding sociologist remarked - through doctrinal religion's adoption of the "natural selection" evolutionary accelerator, a basic principle of Darwin's macroscopic evolution. This concept of "social Darwinism" was powerfully exploited by defenders of liberal bourgeois wealth accumulation, inequality, and the social class system, then evolving with 19th century industrial capitalism. One of its triumphs, and not the least has been that today, the entire scientific ethos and conventional social philosophy of modern Western man is committed to Darwinian theory.

One highly spurious excuse for this is - apart from the fairy story of biblical creationism and the theory of planet hopping panspermia - that we have no obvious scientific alternative to Darwinism. There is No Alternative - the same way as we have "no alternative to capitalism".

This de facto situation of a near total absence of any alternative theory has remained an enduring strength of Darwinism, ever since his book appeared in 1859. It is the default solution and the organized religions have not only exploited this but have long since adapted (we could say evolved!) with Darwinist junk science - in order to discredit it, now often using molecular biology and the science of genetic modification to help them.

The return of "the evolution debate", for and against Darwin, is likely under conditions of stress and insecurity, but only adaptive change in both religious and scientific doctrine can bridge this massive gap - through the acknowledgement that where we came from, and how we got here, is an unanswerable question. Whether you believe in the God you invented, or not, you can't know: you are human.

By Andrew McKillop

Contact: xtran9@gmail.com

Former chief policy analyst, Division A Policy, DG XVII Energy, European Commission. Andrew McKillop Biographic Highlights

Co-author 'The Doomsday Machine', Palgrave Macmillan USA, 2012

Andrew McKillop has more than 30 years experience in the energy, economic and finance domains. Trained at London UK’s University College, he has had specially long experience of energy policy, project administration and the development and financing of alternate energy. This included his role of in-house Expert on Policy and Programming at the DG XVII-Energy of the European Commission, Director of Information of the OAPEC technology transfer subsidiary, AREC and researcher for UN agencies including the ILO.

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