'The fool who has said in his heart there is no God above.'
Now we have thrashed out the issue of the beginning of the
universe, let us move to the creation of all life on Earth. What is the alternative
if not God? Could it be chance? Well,
like I said in earlier articles, this is a most often quoted misunderstanding;
the fact that evolution doesn’t need and cannot have a designer does not mean
that it is the action of pure blind chance. The thing is evolution is in itself
an absurdity, the oxymoron of nature itself, for while it is indeed filled with
random and unpredictable creative events, it is geared by its very nature
towards well built and efficient mechanisms so that it looks like these
mechanisms were ‘designed’ with a purpose in mind.
Evolution is succinctly defined in the sentence “What works,
stays.” What we need to understand is that for every species of living organisms
alive today, thousands have gone extinct. Evolution is not magical, it is
simply a natural process of refinement, adaptation an d extinction. It is quite
like the course of any life, we are born weak and ignorant, we grow, learn,
adapt to our environment. Some of us adapt better either by luck or by talent and
bloom; others don’t adapt as well and fade either into poverty or ill health or
early death. But in the end, we all die. This is evolution; at some stage every
species will become extinct just as they were born; it is series of life cycles
encompassing species of different life forms.
What Darwin observed when he first began thinking about
Evolution was that in the Galapagos Islands was a proliferation of different types
of one animal spread across a not too huge area. He wondered why God would go
to the trouble of making so many different types of the same animal with different
qualities. Over time and with experiments, he realised that it was the
difference in their environments that had made that animal evolve into
different forms. Living things are quite capable of changing over time and what
animals are found in a place or situation is determined by what qualities help
them survive in that place or situation – ‘Survival of the Fittest’.
So from the earliest days when life first appeared, it has
and still is a random combination of cells in genes that make individual life
forms. But what this means is that there is a diversity in make-up of life that
there is sometimes one or a few with qualities that others lack. Added to this
is the fact that random genetic mutations can occur that give organisms a
quality or (handicap) that others don’t have. In the right situation, usually
one of stress, the organisms with the right quality survive and pass their
genes on to their offspring. Given enough time, they and their offspring become
predominant in that area. So evolution which is a blown up picture of the cycle
of birth, growth and death is not blind chance even if made up of chance
events. It is a trial and error process that picks out every success in
hundreds of errors and improves on that success while replicating it. It
repeats this process over and over again over millions of years that its
achievements though painstakingly slow seem like the work of a Supreme
Designer. What is more, evolution has been proved without doubt to be a
scientific fact, one that every educated person in today’s world should be
quite familiar with.
