Welcome to the club.

And despite thousands of years, still today there is a four-way division between millions, or billions, of people who, either follow their religion's account of how God created the world, those who believe that there is no God and everything evolved by itself without anyone's intervention, those who believe in evolution without excluding the possibility of a God, with a fourth group who believe in intelligent design without following any religious teaching - and all four sides include quite eminent minds, as well as the non-thinking masses consuming their preferred view second-hand, pre-cooked, ready-made, out of a can.

If this is the case still 2,500 years on, you must not expect this treatise to resolve the issue once and for all humanity, or even to help you make up your own mind. That may well happen, but if it does, it would be your own conclusion, a child of your own brain. Rather, in the manner of ancient Greek philosophy, the aim here is to bring some clarity to the issues, try to pin down the questions, so that you do not have to reheat any pre-cooked food offered up to you, but can better judge such offerings when served up by others.

IMPORTANT PRELIMINARY PARAMETERS

This is not about the existence of God.

I first lectured on evolution on 2nd March 1975 and then once more, both times as an invited guest speaker, whereas this is being written in January 2021. And very little has changed, either in my own mind or on the related issues despite enormous advances in the science involved, the resulting mountains of information, as well as my own lifetime thinking about and studying this fundamental question. It is our most basic human need to know where we have come from and how we ended up travelling on this train we call our planet as passengers. And so I never stopped reading up extensively on the subject.

The first thing we need to do is to separate the concept of God from religion and by that we mean any organised religion. Because they have nothing to do with each other. Religions are man-made. This must be obvious because there are so many of them, each contradicting the others at least in some important aspect. Whereas God, if he exists, would not contradict himself without being less than a god, omniscient and omnipotent.

Even so, we are not here to weigh up God against evolution.

By Creation in the title we mean intelligent design. Intelligent design does imply a designer or creator, of course, otherwise it is neither intelligent nor design. And if the mind presumes such a possible designer to be a personal God, that may seem reasonable, but we need to be strict in excluding this from present discussion. Here we look at and discuss the painting, not its possible artist. Was this painting created by an artist, or did it happen some other way? Once we have drawn conclusions about this work of art, so to speak, then some may choose to draw inferences about its creator, but that is for them to do. Any references we make to God in this essay are hypothetical, a language matter.

We must also state from the outset that, although this piece sets out to be objective in weighing up evolution versus creation, evolution is much more on trial here because, out of the two, it is promoted as 'scientific,' based on science the method, and by this measure it must be judged. If a proponent of creation believes on 'faith' alone, or because his holy book says so, there is no point in arguing with him - there is nothing to discuss with him.

COMMON GROUND

Without attaching any special significance to this, there is some common ground between evolution and certain religious accounts of creation. From our studies of mitochondria we know for sure that all human races on the earth today have a common ancestry, just as chronicled in (for example) the Bible. Said Bible (Genesis, written around 1500 BC by Moses) also teaches the same order in which life forms appeared on earth, from lowest to highest, as evolution does, although other religious accounts of creation differ, and neither of the above is an issue under present discussion.

If all humans have a common ancestry, obviously something has progressed (evolved, if you like) to make some of us almost white or almost black, the contrast at the extremes being startling; something has changed dramatically at the very pinnacle of life forms, humans, and if we decide to call that evolution, then evolution there is - end of story. Also, we see viruses mutating before our very eyes, while some microbes develop resistance to antibiotics. And we witness changes in the universe, e.g. stars dying and collapsing into pulsars, black holes etc., new stars forming, galaxies merging etc. and therefore the universe is evolving.

However, there is a difference between any dictionary use of the word evolution, such as 'my business has evolved from working alone into a global brand', to a theory which proposes that life sprung all by itself out of a random collection of lifeless molecules and then progressed higher and higher, into complex organisms, then plants, birds, fish, mammals, primates and finally man himself - to repeat, out of nothing and without intelligent intervention. This is the evolutionary theory we need to discuss here, the continuous transformation of one kind of life into another, an ongoing process which sets out to explain the origin of every living species on earth, past or present.

I have heard very eminent minds, including scientists, religious clerics, natural history experts and medical doctors, state that Darwin's evolution is perfectly compatible with the existence of an intelligent God, that neither precludes the other. I would have to objection to that statement except that, taken together with the end product, as seen in all living things, it implies acceptance of intelligent design, whether one likes it or not, thus prejudicing the discussion. Because no scientist or biologist ever denied that all living organisms function intelligently, to say the least, at biological level. The complexity and intricacy of the processes which enable life in all its forms and all its complexity is truly staggering - it is a natural wonder. If we admit to a display of intelligence, then it must come from someone intelligent. And if there were a God who decided to set off an evolutionary process, which resulted into intelligent-design-once-removed, so to speak, then intelligent design there is - end of argument. Alternatively, if it was not God who started off evolution or who let it run as the blind, random process as taught from school upwards, shaped mostly by the environment and by chance, chance changes in DNA, which enable those few lucky inheritors, the fittest, to survive, then why even consider the existence of a totally unnecessary God? We might as well conjure up anything out of our imaginations. And there lies the contradiction in the above bipolar position that God and evolution can coexist, because evolution teaches there is no such thing as intelligent design, and therefore no designer - call him God or whatever you like.

So we have a right to know, scientifically, is evolution "very ingenious" as one evolutionary biologist called it, or is it a blind process, and therefore completely unintelligent? We cannot have it both ways.

Nevertheless, the existence of God or otherwise is not a difficulty we face with the theory of evolution, as implied by the aforementioned experts. A good, honest mind must accept truth whatever it is and wherever it leads - that is the essence of Greek philosophy. Our problem, for the purpose of this essay, lies in any logical contradiction, either created by religious belief or evolution.

Today's technological marvels, medical advances and scientific achievements, like space exploration and DNA analysis, to mention but two, have led most of humanity to accept everything presented to them as 'scientific' for fear of seeming foolish or ignorant, in the same way religious fanatics will accept anything their clerics tell them for fear of being excommunicated and becoming outcasts or, worse, punished by God. In any event, most people are not scientists, so they have no choice but to accept science on trust. So a lot of 'scientific' statements go unchallenged, even though scientific doctrines are overturned on a regular basis by science itself and, worse, some theories presented as facts later prove to be extremely unscientific. This passive acceptance of all things 'scientific' is just as dangerous as religious credulity or any other blind doctrine.

To repeat, in this treatise we do not attempt to prove or disprove either thesis, either creation or evolution. We set out to offer a possible logical framework, which could provide the basis for the scholar, not so much to reach their own conclusion, but to guard against blind belief, religious or scientific, peddled as dogmatic truth. And it must be said that, since Darwin, the theory of evolution has been sold wholesale, always brushing aside the inconsistencies and paradoxes it creates, in the same way most religions of the world ask their followers to just swallow certain illogical absurdities on faith alone.

A TANGLED MESS

From the days of Darwin, his theory of evolution became a question of science versus religion. That is not surprising given that Darwin's main opponents at the time were religious leaders or ordinary religious people who thought evolution contradicted their belief in the Bible. They took it for granted that acceptance of evolution was tantamount to acceptance of atheism, hence the hasty retreat by some clergy of our time into said bipolar position (above) of a God starting off an evolutionary process, in order for them not to appear ignorant in denying a dominant, by now, 'proven' scientific theory. What a convenient compromise.

So the issue of an objective evaluation of evolution as a scientific, historical fact has been tangled up in the mind with so much 'political', if you like, position-taking that it is difficult, if not impossible, to see with clarity. And I include the minds of biology students, from school upwards, qualified scientists, or any thinker who delves deeply into this subject for the first time.

To them and to the likes of them the first message must go out loud and clear that they must separate in their own minds, the issue of God's existence from ready-made, second-hand religious belief. This is worth repeating. As we set out above, religions are man-made; that is why there are so many of them and at loggerheads with each other in dogma and otherwise, when clearly all mankind shares the same origin, and nobody disputes that, so we could not have different Gods for different people. And this is what has led many to atheism, quite naturally, because they perceive the obvious man-made, as in religious belief and practice, and they conclude, quite reasonably, that God must be man-made too. After all, it is in the context of religion where most people heard of God. It might also be said, some religious doctrines are patently irrational to downright stupid, whereas God, if he exists, by definition, is the greatest mind.

Therefore, if God does exist he is, by definition, the God of, not religion, but of maths and the laws of physics and chemistry and the God of biology too. And if he is not the God of those sciences, then he cannot possibly exist as defined in most of our minds, as a personal, intelligent creator of our universe and ourselves, where highly complex, highly tuned laws operate towards the constructive result we see around us.

Do we see God in maths, physics, chemistry, and biology? Do astronomers, surgeons, etc. see God in their daily studies? Some do, and they tend to stay quiet about it. But in this essay, to repeat, we stay clear of this question, examining only the evidence for intelligent design per se, versus a process called evolution. We should have asked instead, do astronomers, surgeons etc. see intelligent design in their daily work?

A FURTHER CAVEAT

If indeed there is a God and if he is the God of maths and of science and the creator of the universe, this does not necessarily mean that he has created what some humans perceive as 'the world' we live in, i.e. the earthly world we inhabit, including disease, war, evil, suffering and the destruction of our environment, while at the same time designing the wonderful nature everyone suddenly says they want to protect now. The common expression, 'God made the world' creates confusion in simple minds. The issue of evil and suffering is a separate question, just as complex, and one must, at all costs, avoid jumping between the two issues, or indeed jump to this issue prematurely. "If God exists, then he must take the blame for all the unspeakable evil and the suffering we see around us and have seen for thousands of years." And as soon as they say that, they quickly add, "There is no God." Then how did all this come about? "Evolution!" Ah, it is so good to have off-the-peg beliefs, out of a tin, instead of spending hours cooking our own fresh fish and a lovely salad. The ancient Greeks showed more clarity on this, writing that humans inflict evil and wrongs on themselves and others, then blame the gods for their own actions.

This "If God exists..." is an emotional reaction, rather than a rational thought, understandable (no patronising intended) because we cannot, apparently, claim on the one hand that God designed, for example the human body in such a wonderful way, and everyone agrees it is amazing (an understatement) and on the other hand see children suffer with bone cancer, adults brutalising each other etc..

Or, as others say, "There probably is no God, so stop worrying and enjoy your life," again confusing God with religion and religious constraints. Religions do tend to be prohibitive, with man-made rules, some well-intended some not, but effectively imposing controls in order to secure their followers' loyalty through fear - fear they might displease the almighty, a frightening prospect, or at least fear of becoming social outcasts (in the same way biology students might fear failing their exam and facing poverty, if they denounced evolution). Such religious prohibitions are mostly around sex and sexuality (hence the counter advice to stop worrying and enjoy your life) because sex is such a powerful urge, if religions can control that, they control you like a ring through your nose - (in the same way anyone promoting 'free sex' will secure the loyalty of numerous ardent followers, the alternative being fear of frustration and a miserable life.)

However, if there is a God, then obviously he designed all the pleasures we are capable of enjoying through our bodies and minds, and any restrictions such a God would have placed upon us would have been perfectly compatible with the logic of the bodies and brains he gave us. Therefore your own brain should tell you that sex is not like a good meal, a single act can have consequences affecting your entire life and the lives of others, good or bad, glorious or downright catastrophic. Similarly, do not violate other people's rights or property, otherwise you too will suffer theft or vengeance, do not kill or you too will get murdered - lack of such restrictions creating a lawless, destructive, messy world all round, a real hell to live in. Most man-made legal systems impose such restrictions anyway without reference to any god, including on sexual activity, e.g. for the protection of children or to prevent violence, emotional scarring, genetic disease etc. You cannot have sex without restrictions as in cooking and eating; even there one is wise to self-impose restrictions otherwise you poison yourself, or worse. Some people resent perfectly sensible restrictions because they enjoy smoking which kills them, or persist with an unhealthy diet that causes cancer and heart disease; not surprising then they will resent restrictions on sex from a hypothetical God they cannot see. The difference being that sex also affects others, sometimes for generations to come, so it does have to have restrictions.

It is other man-made restrictions that lead to unhappiness and pain, religions being guilty here, but also social conventions, political doctrine, cultural traditions and so on, all man-made. Entire societies mutilate their own children in the name of morality or tradition, or cripple them mentally and emotionally for fear of God. In older times they used to sacrifice children to please their gods. And in the twenty-first century, still, some kill women for not wearing specific clothes. Some prescribe meaningless formalities and rituals which enslave their followers, as if their own wise and loving God is a bit simple or stroppy, irascible or forgetful. In the same vein, some forbid all contact with the opposite sex, even visual contact at the extreme, or impose lifelong celibacy on their clergy. And millions from many disparate religions mutilate their own bodies or inflict great suffering or depravation on themselves in the hope of winning favour with their chosen deity in true sincerity, as if they could emotionally blackmail said deity into granting favour, again presuming that their creator delights in seeing such suffering and is subject to human manipulation, and is a bit stupid anyway. Such practices and such rules are inane and hold people prisoner, whereas the god they claim to espouse must have designed their human brain to think and to act freely, to exercise reasoning and to seek happiness through mind and body.

Men are always the guilty party here, not any god.

So the idea that, if we accepted intelligent design, we would be succumbing to "worry" and to unreasonable rules, has been the result of religious or cultural dogma, and must be rejected as a false premise.

THE TROUBLE WITH RELIGION

I exchanged correspondence once on this issue with the now late British author Catherine Cookson, after she had written of her own agonising regarding God's existence, her Catholic indoctrination, and Jesus', Mary's and God's failure to come to her aid, as she saw it, when she had needed it most. She had then sought to find answers in any number of 'Christian' denominations and had found none, like countless others before her who had, in her words, died hoping only to find answers 'on the other side.' She had ended her article by saying, if confronted by God after her death, her defence for leaving Catholicism, religion in general, and for her religious doubts would be, "You gave me a mind, I used it..."

Her words are a perfect illustration of how the idea of God has been so entangled with organised religion in the minds of many, and how religious teaching has a lot to answer for in ruining many people's lives by claiming for themselves exclusive representation of man before God, each religion to the exclusion of all others for the most part. Although an equal number may claim to have found solace in religion, it is interesting that they belong to different religions doctrinally or otherwise, in conflict with each other, and therefore incompatible with one God and creator of the universe and ourselves, so they may have found solace in some other emotional state or a thought within themselves. This might be different for those who claim to have been granted solace by God himself, without religion, not an issue for discussion here as it can neither be proved nor disproved by outsiders.

The problem starts when there is a splinter or a random group who perhaps gather for regular study, and someone brighter or more eloquent emerges as leader or chairman and his interpretation is listened to, and if a follower misses a meeting he gets a call, and rules begin to emerge, inevitably tainted by personal opinion, and a man-made religion begins to form under the guise of God's guidance, a powerful cocktail of pressure and fear and guilt and other emotions or thoughts.

It is no wonder, therefore, that so many find the thought of an intelligent creator nonsensical and have sought alternative explanations as to our existence, evolution being one of them.

You can see extracts of my letter and Catherine Cookson's two-page reply, while we progress with our current issue here, but what this was supposed to illustrate was how powerful religious indoctrination can be in emotional terms, how painful any subsequent rational questioning (she even suffered a breakdown), and how fear instilled by religions plays a part in the way some end up viewing religion before rejecting the idea of God. Just like the earnest, honest, intelligent Catherine Cookson had thought, wrongly, God should be able to be found in some religion or not at all.

One possible explanation for her experience is that, as atheists preach, there is no God. This may seem unreasonable to some but it is possible that cosmic events have led up to this point by some unfathomable process beyond our current comprehension. If we exclude this as a philosophical possibility at the very start, we cannot trust any other conclusion we may reach further down the line - our brain would have shown to be prejudiced, that we have closed our mind.

Both sides of the argument are guilty of dogmatism in equal measure. Instead of philosophical, the issue of evolution versus design has become adversarial, with all the dishonesty and tactics one might expect from having something to gain by winning. Your own belief in evolution may have started at school or the home you grew up in. Clearly, your religion depends mostly on where you were born, sometimes what street number you were born at, or what parents you had. How can people feel so strongly that they are so right about what was an accident of birth? It is rarely an individual choice, and even then, people convert in both directions, cancelling each other out and on superficial grounds, more often than not, like how their new faith has made them feel inside. Quite obvious aberrations are brushed aside, like the Crusades, the Spanish inquisition or more recently the murders in Northern Ireland, for so-called Christians, or suicide bombers, warmongers and mass murderers from other religions, all in the name of God. Galileo was nearly killed for stating that the earth revolved around the sun, rather than the other way round, contradicting the religious doctrine of his time, that the earth was at the centre of the universe.

Once I watched decent, honest, good folks searching for a disappeared young girl as they prayed in public that God help them to find her, "So that people would come to the Church of Scotland and praise God." The presumption was truly staggering, that any creator of the universe might endorse their narrowly defined religion with a miracle on their behest, thus indicating that the whole world should become members of the Church of Scotland. What if God disapproved of the Church of Scotland? Would that not hinder rather than aid their search? The girl was not found and I am confident this had nothing to do with God, but the presumption was unbelievable.

And we say more later about presumptions made by evolutionists.

History is full of warnings about following our beliefs with great passion, confusing emotion with reason. A certain Apostle Paul was killing Christians before becoming one himself, to say nothing of present day terrorists and their various religious backgrounds. Remember the Nazis and how millions were persuaded by them that the Arian race was superior, and that the Germans were the best of the Arian race? And how the Church co-operated with them, or how other religions bless war and indiscriminate killing or even call for war? The Ku Klux Klan claimed links to Christianity while Christianity taught all men were created equal by God. Try walking into certain bars and say, over a drink or two, that being while and racially English is nothing special in any way whatsoever - no more special than being anything else. Japanese Kamikaze pilots killed themselves for nothing, as it turned out, sacrificing their lives on totally artificial but fundamental, to them, beliefs regarding their emperor-god and religion.

We are, all, very attached to our beliefs because our beliefs are our deepest identity. This is what we are and we do not want to change ourselves. It takes a very big mind to admit one's fundamental beliefs are wrong. Some people spend their whole life passionately believing in some political party, others in the opposite party just as passionately.

And the same goes for some atheists and for the passion they display against believers in God.

It is not in the nature of human beings to be able to see absolute, universal truth simultaneously in all its aspects. Indeed, one of the greatest intellectual problems of our time is to unify our theories of relativity and quantum physics, and that would be truth on a very tiny and narrow field of human knowledge. Yet how difficult this is proving to be.

ALL OPTIONS ON THE TABLE

Philosophically, objectively, the other possibility must not be discounted either, namely that God does exist but there is a rational explanation for all this evil and suffering on planet earth, even if we do not know what it is, and that God has nothing to do with suffering and evil. And our problem here is this: if there is such an explanation to be found, it cannot possibly come from maths or science. It could conceivably come from recorded history but, other than that, any explanation could only come by revelation, which brings us full circle to religion, defined above as man-made, and the numerous conflicting accounts of how we got to be here, what happens to us after death, if anything, and related doctrines. And if such divine revelation has been given, why would God then allow so many conflicting false answers to swamp his own revelation - what would be the point of divine revelation then? Indeed some quote the Bible to show there is no soul and no life after death, others to show we go to hell or heaven - the very same Bible used by both.

There is a third possibility, of course, that God chose not to reveal his reason for allowing evil and suffering on his earthly creation, perhaps for the time being. Because, if there is a creator of the universe, one thing you can be sure of is that his mind is vastly larger than our own. We humans cannot even compete with our own man-made computers when it comes to exchange of information - computers can exchange all the encyclopaedias of the world, one computer to another, within seconds, whereas it would take a man a whole eternity to read - and would be impossible to memorise. Or try explaining the colour red to a blind man, or explaining mathematical calculus to someone illiterate. And yet the gap between our human brain and the mind of any God would be infinitely greater. So, if there is a God, we must never imagine we would be capable of understanding whatever he might tell us.

One related issue we need to add here is the question of time. If there were an explanation, or if there was an event which explains our imperfect (to say the least) human world, one might say it should have been resolved after so many thousands of earth years. God's view of time would be different from our own, of course. God, by definition, is not subject to time, time is a dimension of our material universe. But still, how could God be happy to witness his own creatures, so beautifully designed by him, suffer for so long and so badly within their own time frame? He would have been aware of their capacity for pain because that obviously was part of the physiological design of our minds and bodies. Does he not care that we feel so much pain for so long within our time frame?

If science and history offer nothing of value on the above, and if religions are man-made, philosophy does not help much either. Philosophy is what we are engaged in here - we are trying to define and pin down the questions, 'the essence of the thing', which is what philosophy was intended to do (see article) - not to pin down answers, that is not always possible, and virtually impossible, if we do not know all there is to know about an issue. Philosophy was invented to stop our thinking going astray and the thinker from misleading himself. It is more of a prohibitive STOP traffic sign, rather than a road sign to pinpoint destinations. Anyone attempting to resolve the issue of God, evil, and human suffering philosophically, would better make sure he knows all the evidence on the subject, and good luck with that.

One way or the other, this issue of evil and suffering must not enter into our considerations of evolution versus intelligent design. It too is a separate subject.

WHAT IS THE REAL ISSUE

All this may sound like we have strayed far from the question of evolution versus intelligent design, and into the existence of God and the human condition, so this is a good point to restate the issue under discussion: We are not here to debate whether God exists or if he is responsible for our earthly woes. The issue here is whether the evidence supports the theory that life and living things evolved without intelligent involvement through a process we call evolution, or whether we do see evidence for intelligent design.

The one thing already agreed is that evolution is not a person, does not have a mind and cannot be intelligent; it is defined as the totality of a number of random events, most of which ended up in failure allowing for the remaining chance successes to survive, by natural selection or otherwise, and to procreate and multiply.

HOW DID WE END UP HAVING THIS DISCUSSION?

As Catherine Cookson would say to God (see above), we can only think with the minds we have. So it is important to step back and look at what we have been hearing throughout our own personal lives, what we have been taught, and what we have been told to believe, regardless of whether we accepted it or not at the time, whether in religious, scientific or other terms, even if we rejected it subsequently.

For thousands of years before Darwin, man had been trying to come up with some explanation, some story, of how 'all this' came to be. For Hindus the universe was created by Brahma. Buddhism has no creator god but the Japanese Kojiki narrates a story of how everything came to be including the first gods and the Japanese islands. In Islam there is no equivalent, except several references to Allah creating the world, which echo the Bible, but in no particular order. The Bible forms the basis for Christian belief, and Jewish tradition goes a little beyond that.

In ancient Greece, the richest mythology ever was the start of the most systematic search for answers regarding all natural phenomena, resulting, later on, into the development, by the same Greeks, of philosophy, maths, the sciences, medicine and more or less everything which went on the form the basis for our modern world and Western civilisation.

So in that search, when the early Greeks witnessed thunder and lightning, they (the general masses) commented that Zeus was angry and threw thunderbolts. When high winds rose out of the blue and caused storms that sank their ships, it was the god Poseidon who had got angry. And so on.

We know that the great Greek philosophers did not believe literally in the twelve gods of Olympus. The richest mythology man even produced was a sign of their superior intelligence and imagination, creating volumes and volumes of stories about every aspect of life and the natural world, but their philosophers knew how to differentiate between myth and science. There is evidence that the general population also, for the most part, did differentiate between the two. After all, it was those same Greeks who produced said mathematicians and scientists - see above link. Perhaps, we hope, two thousand years from now people will not say about us that we relied on horoscopes, Tarot cards and crystal balls to run our daily lives.

So the time came when we learned that thunder and lightning were caused by an electrical discharge, that winds and storms were caused by barometric lows in atmospheric pressure, and so on, and, most important, that no gods were involved in such processes, they were manifestations of the laws of physics operating on our planet.

You might think that science has rescued us from such ignorance, if ignorance it was. To repeat, as Einstein said, credit must be given to the same Greeks who had created all of that rich mythology for then progressing on to maths and to the natural sciences, as in Aristotle and Archimedes and Euclid, and Pythagoras and all the others [See ANCIENT GREEKS] who turned away from Zeus and Poseidon as explanations.

The big lesson and their biggest gift to humanity was the fundamental understanding that no god is necessary for the natural phenomena we see around us. And so scientific thinking was born.

Since then, we have gone much further to understand chemistry, biochemistry, astrophysics, relativity, quantum mechanics etc. which sciences, collectively and individually, provide us with proven theories about how our world works - proven experimentally (important to remember this word in our consideration of evolution) - without the intervention of any god. In fact, for someone to say now that a certain natural phenomenon happened because God caused it seems ludicrous and ignorant, betraying a simple mind.

Yes, but hold on a minute...

This is very different from asserting that there must always be a different explanation, other than intelligent design, or that nothing ever could possibly have been done by God. So if you ask, how can it be the laws of physics and chemistry of our universe are so complex yet so finely tuned - the actual numbers so specific - as to enable all the wonders we see, against immeasurable odds, knowing that the slightest deviation in the same laws would have resulted in nothingness? And they reply, there must be an infinite number of other universes, but we are lucky to live in the one where the laws are such. Which is no better than saying it was a miracle by the god Zeus. And it is not just the finely tuned laws of physics, it is not just the perfect distance of the earth from the sun - inside the Goldilocks Zone, the habitable zone around a star where the temperature is just right - not just that our oceans regulate and even out earth temperature for the same purpose of a habitable paradise... It is not just that our sun is quite unusual compared to other stars, it is not just the role of the moon in our lives plus its orbit, size, and the dust that covers it, but also so many, almost infinite, other details which have coincided to make life possible on earth, let alone intelligent life - life way beyond just microbes floating in the atmosphere of Venus, if such exist - a big IF. From the superabundance of water on earth, unlike anywhere else we know, and the truly astonishing properties of water, to so many other details which have nothing to do with the laws of the universe (same as everywhere else), but a huge number of 'coincidences' on top of the universal laws, so that the odds against us being here were almost infinite.

You then ask, how did life spring from dead matter, if all the clever scientists in the world have been unable to do the same in their sophisticated laboratories (repeatable experiment being the essence of scientific theory), and they reply, we do not know how it happened, but it must have happened because we are here - a self-serving argument like religious doctrines. So it must have happened, by chance, and that first life had the ability to reproduce as well - an unimaginable feat, otherwise it would be useless no matter how many times it happened, and it would never have progressed to anything else.

If this were an answer in a court of law, any judge or jury would have decided that the witness was being disingenuous. Such suppositions, 'presumptions' was the word we used earlier regarding religious beliefs, indirectly intended to dispose of the necessity of God, are the 'scientific' equivalent of conjuring up new gods on mount Olympus - a magical primeval soup, this time. Even the virgin birth of Jesus is more believable; at least there was a human egg there to start with.

THE TROUBLE WITH EVOLUTION

In summary, it is important to repeat that, for all that trying by the greatest scientific minds, science has not been able to create even the simplest form of life, a living cell, out of any mixture of elements or molecular structures, despite knowing exactly what a cell consists of, its chemical composition and functions, and despite having studied its structure in great detail, including its DNA/RNA more recently. This is the same scientific human brains who can send spacecraft billions of miles into space to hibernate in waiting, then wake up and reactivate in order to land, years later, on a tiny rock travelling at thousands of miles per hour through an infinite darkness [like the Rosetta spacecraft and its Philae which landed on a comet] - an incredible achievement. These are the same brains who have designed and built the most incredible computers and software and then miniaturised them enough to be put into the palm of a single hand.

But not a single living cell created by scientists yet.

And Professor Brian Cox tells us that, after the first living cell emerged (accidentally) the merger of a mitochondrion with a cell into one entity was so unlikely, it is supposed to have happened only once. Might I add, or not at all? Or would I sound unscientific?

Two improbables do not make a right.

Have you ever seen a chart, diagram or description of how complex a single cell is? If not, it will astonish you. It is just carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and other elements we have available with easy access, but the number of interconnected parts of it, the number of chemical processes within it, the sheer mind-boggling intricacy of it is astonishing to the best brains. Loren Eiseley, an evolutionist, in his book Immense Journey wrote, "To grasp in detail the physio-chemical organisation of the simplest cell is far beyond our capacity." No wonder science have been unable to create one.

It is the most embarrassing question ever put to an evolutionist, does life come from non-living matter? Is it reasonable to believe that what scientists have failed to produce in modern, sophisticated laboratories under carefully controlled conditions came about by accident, all by itself? Is this not a much bigger leap of faith than most religions demand of their followers?

And we will not yet mention the subsequent evolution of that cell into higher forms of life.

And yet evolution is not being taught as a theory any more, but as fact.

Even if scientists achieved such a creation in a lab in the future, it would only prove just how much brain power it takes to achieve the creation of life - how much intelligent design - it would be a staggering achievement by any standard.

And then, if those amazing human brains had managed to create a basic living cell, they would still have to make their living cell reproduce, (otherwise it could not be called life) then develop, with their highly intelligent scientific help, into a multi-cell organism, and then into higher and higher forms of life, and so on, culminating into a human brain able to take over and repeat the process, creating new forms of life in its own image, and so on.

METAZOA

This jump from a single cell to a multi-cell organism, a metazoon, is almost as vast as the creation of life out of dead matter. Metazoa are not just clusters of cells, their cells are differentiated and specialised. Moreover, they communicate with each other and work harmoniously, otherwise the organism would die in no time at all. If this gap from single to multi-cell cannot be bridged, the whole mechanism of evolution collapses. How this happened is said by scientists to be one of the most difficult questions and perhaps unanswerable. So, even if we accepted that life sprung out of dead matter somehow, a very generous supposition given that we have been unable to repeat the event in our laboratories, evolution still falls at the next hurdle.

Three improbables so far, but what about the next evolutionary step up, the emergence of higher forms of animals?

In the so-called Cambrian Explosion, innumerable new species suddenly appear - in the blink of an eye, so to speak. Every palaeontologist knows that most new species, genera, and families and nearly all new categories above families appear suddenly, without gradual, transitional sequences.

Both the sudden appearance and their complexity are often explained away or overlooked by evolutionists. But these animals were neither primitive nor generalised in their anatomy. Does this not suggest creation rather than evolution on the balance of probability?

As for man himself, even now, one hears the occasional news on television and in scientific journals, of human skeletons being discovered identical to modern man, each time in older and older eons (eras). With added evidence that variants (hominoids) were degenerate races, descended from Homo Sapiens, due to mutation, isolation etc., not his forefathers With the exception of Cro-Magnon man who is thought to have been superior to modern man in brain and body. Examples of modern man found earlier and earlier each time - does this not raise questions about the evolution of man himself, from apes, then hominoids and finally Homo Sapiens? We do not claim to have answers here, just whether it raises questions or not.

We know that the vast majority of mutations in any species are degenerate (recessive), not beneficial, and even the beneficial ones do not really change much, certainly not enough to change fish into mammals, or reptiles into birds etc., unless of course you are looking for an evolutionary explanation to everything which is unexplained and you must exclude the possibility of intelligent design. Which would be perfectly legitimate to do, because that is the job of science, to explain natural phenomena in terms of the laws of nature, rather than any God - just as long as you propose evolution as a possible alternative theory, with all its many caveats, and no more than that, certainly not as fact.

We see on the news regular examples of medicine fighting to overcome genetic diseases caused by mutations in our children, but when did you hear of a new mutation producing a child so superior as to be pronounced an evolutionary step up from the rest of us? That is how mutations work, they are detrimental by far, not a good way of going from amoebas to primates with eyes and brains and inbuilt knowledge of what to eat and how to survive and thrive in our complex environment, no matter how gradual Dr Richard Dawkins' evolutionary 'slope'. And you would not wish mutations on your children, believe me. Besides, who or what force would he pushing your subsequent descendants up Dr Dawkins' slope, instead of rolling down again, backwards?

Richard Dawkins once gave a demonstration by releasing a cannon ball to swing towards his head, trusting that the laws of physics would stop it short of crushing him. 'That's how much we must trust science.' But there is a difference between trusting the laws of physics and trusting science, as he went on to admit recounting the evidence given in an unrelated court case where, as he put it, scientific evidence was proven false, because "science can never give answers one hundred per cent guaranteed." In other words, science cannot be sure about events of a few days ago, but can be absolutely adamant about the evolutionary process of several million years ago. Ridiculous.

In fact, his own demonstration proved the point: yes, we can trust what is proven by repeatable experiment, like his cannon ball, but should be extremely cautious otherwise. There are a lot of observations which science has not been able to explain, certainly not with experimentally proven theories - repeatable experiment being the very essence of science.

THE 'ABOMINABLE MYSTERY' IN 2021

In 1879, Darwin wrote to his friend Dr Joseph Hooker: "The rapid development as far as we can judge of all the higher plants within recent geological times is an abominable mystery." The mystery he referred to was the sudden appearance of flowering plants, angiosperms, which make up the vast majority of all known living plants.

Now, in 2021, Professor Richard Buggs tells us, "In the fossil record they appear very suddenly in the Cretaceous, dated at about 100 million years ago, and there's nothing that looks like an angiosperm before them and then they suddenly appear and in considerable diversity".

Why is there no evolution of the angiosperms? And why, when they appear, are they already so diverse? Indeed, how long would it have taken for plants to evolve flowers and seeds, and how did they manage to reproduce and survive in the meantime, all those millions of years in between? Darwin found this very difficult to explain without contradicting his theory of evolution.

Is the mystery solved? No, it is not. Now, in 2021, Professor Buggs, an evolutionist (of course) says: "One hundred and forty years later, the mystery's still unsolved. Of course, we've made lots of progress in our understanding of evolution and in our knowledge of the fossil record, but this mystery is still there."

We could never ask anyone to accept conclusively that evolution is thus disproved, certainly not ask science to declare that plants were created by God - it is not the job of science to draw such conclusions. But we can state with confidence that questions such as this should raise doubts as to any theory about events of such distance and such complexity. Surely, preaching evolution as fact despite so many 'abominable mysteries' is dishonest and unscientific.

It seems therefore, without jumping to any further conclusions, that atheistic evolutionists have replaced one form of blind credulity and prejudice with another: This is worse than looking at storms and saying Poseidon sent it. Maybe there is no God, but to proclaim that intelligent design cannot ever be the explanation to anything, that no god could possibly be involved in anything, and if we cannot find an explanation, then it must have happened by chance - such assertions have nothing to do with science, this is just 'religious' fanaticism. And it has nothing to do with logic, it is unintelligent emotion.

Using the word 'abominable' also suggests there was an emotional dimension to Darwin's search for his theory, it was not just scientific. Probably angered by the clergy, more than we know of, or angry with religion in general, something we can understand, he really WANTED to believe in evolution, just as today we see many who, not just do not believe in God, but do not WANT to believe in God. Indeed, today, the latter still fall back to the nonsense spoken by the creationists of that time, in order to dismiss the idea of a creator.

FACTS AND THEIR ASSEMBLY LINE PRODUCTION

The name of this fish species (picture) is coelacanth.

If you had opened any encyclopaedia under coelacanth any time before 1938, this is more or less the information you would have seen:

'Fish of the group coelacanthini with fleshy fin bases and narrow symmetrical tail, dating from about 150 million years ago. A possible link between sea and land animals. The species became extinct 60 million years ago.'

On December 22nd, 1938, however, the curator of the local museum at a small port in South East Africa, Miss Latimer, was examining some sharks brought in by a trawler. She came across a very strange fish, about five foot long, which she could not recognise. She sent a description of it to a famous fish expert, Professor J.L.B. Smith. Professor Smith looked at it with shock. "My surprise," he said later, "would have been little greater, if I had seen a dinosaur walking down the street." Because that fish was a live coelacanth. Scientists had only known about this fish from ancient fossils. But here was a living specimen unchanged, exactly like those ancient fossils.

Professor Smith had believed that the coelacanth was in the direct evolutionary line to man. From the fossils, here was a fish seemingly starting to grow legs. Except that now he had to admit those fins never grew into anything. Millions of years later they were still the same. And since then, a lot more live specimens have been caught.

The question here is this: Would Professor Smith now still claim this was a link between sea and land mammals? Coelacanths turned out to have survived perfectly well without 'adapting' into anything different. Obviously, there was no need to do that because they were perfectly capable, perfectly designed, if you like, to survive as they were.

If you were a blind follower of evolution who had cited the coelacanth as an evolutionary link, some new explanation was required for those fin 'adaptations', for that fish, for possible links between sea and land animals. And this is what science does, and rightly so, it progresses by accounting for new observations. But this is different from explaining away evidence which does not fit in with a theory while sticking to the theory. Changing the theory to account for the facts is different from adapting facts to the theory. This lack of change in the coelacanth had to be explained away somehow and it was: Coelacanths were pronounced to be unique in the evolutionary history of living species.

Explaining the difficulties of evolution away is no different to following a religious creed, as others more eminent than myself have said many times, like Douglas Dewar as far back as 1931, a British barrister, ornithologist and author of several books including Difficulties of the Evolution Theory. "The average biologist, accepting as he does evolution as a creed, fails, when writing, to distinguish between established fact and theory, and in consequence, sets forth theories as if they were proven truths. In my view such procedure is inexcusable in a treatise dealing with any science." Presumably he had read quite a few of such treatises on order to become an ornithologist.

We are now in 2021 and every time we hear about, or see a new discovery of some animal or plant characteristic which leaves us astonished in its complexity and sophistication, it is always called an adaptation, clearly implying that it evolved all by itself. 'This remarkable adaptation, that remarkable adaptation...' you might think it is a salesman talking, promoting a product using well practised, well-chosen words. And remarkable those biological features are, but adaptations? You and I might adapt to living at high altitude or by building muscles to do manual work because we have within our bodies pre-existing properties enabling us to adapt, but is this the same as (for example) a giraffe growing a neck it never had (as in Lamarckism - see note below), an elephant growing a trunk, and blind things growing eyes, with the corresponding muscles and brain components to control the same and to interpret the visual information - not to mention that the collective number of biological characteristics of all living species taken together would number in trillions and trillions, each one having come about, we are told, through chance changes in the species, changes passed on genetically to subsequent generations?

You cannot accuse all scientists of being disingenuous any more than you can accuse followers of any belief system, but we do have every right to challenge anyone whose thought process has been taken over by their education, indoctrination or conditioning, whether a scientist or otherwise, to the point of an uncritical mind. For some, the question of language is an added issue because our past lives have given us a vocabulary which then shapes our thinking - scientists have to think with language like the rest of us. And if we do not learn a new vocabulary, we cannot modify our thinking. Which is why the ancient Greeks invented philosophy, a method for the systematic challenging of our own cosy, habitual thoughts in search of absolute truth.

CALM DOWN A BIT

A few years ago, I saw an eminent American biologist on a television documentary preparing, with huge enthusiasm, to travel to the Far East in order to witness for himself what he called "speciation". What had been reported was a change in the plumage in some specimens of a previously well-documented bird species. A change, according to him, qualifying as sufficient to pronounce the emergence of a new species. I wished then that I could shout back at him to calm down and to be more critical of his training as a biologist. Because, to me, this was a perfect example of people calling themselves scientists on the basis of a university qualification, using 'scientific' terminology in order to adapt the facts to the theories, as had happened with coelacanths. A new bird species? Maybe. Maybe one not observed before? One way or the other, any dog breeder will tell you that new traits can emerge through breeding or interbreeding, without the emergence of a new species. And any gardener will tell you that plants adapt according to how they are pruned or the soil they are planted in and people change according to how they eat or exercise. But all of that happens according to pre-existing properties in our DNA, without any evolution. Computer programmers will then confirm just what an expert job it is to then re-program instructions into software, let alone biological DNA, before such instructions are passed on to the next generation. Not impossible, but it requires intelligence and design (intelligent design) beyond what non-programmers like me can do, and way beyond what any scientist can do in the case of DNA, without using pre-existing gene insertion, splicing etc.

The point here being that adaptations to the environment have very narrow limitations and cannot change one species into another, unless of course you define every single change as a new species - every new dog breed, every trained athlete, every racially mixed baby.

Indeed, no species need ever change into another because all the millions of them on earth today have survived, including the lowest forms of life, which should all have become extinct my now, having failed to adapt so as to compete with other species by evolving into higher forms of life.

We have come across this kind of evolutionary 'evidence' before: birds that double their size to survive, birds that change their colour or change their beaks. They must be very clever birds indeed, because I, a human being at the pinnacle of the evolutionary ladder, would like to change several things about myself, and pass better genes to my offspring, but I have not the faintest idea how to do it. This may sound glib, but I would like to suggest that the beaks of the Galapagos finches, those of hummingbirds and the tongue of some woodpeckers are, each one, so complex and so amazing that I consider evolutionary explanations worse than glib, downright ridiculous.

A new species? Are we saying then that black people are a different species from white people? No, they do not say that. It would create problems on many different levels. Definitions are being adapted for other than purely scientific reasons, and some scientists believe this is their privilege, to decide what we call what and why. And like in any professional group, it is considered taboo to contradict or question the honesty of professional colleagues, especially scientists, when their pronouncements are in harmony with accepted wisdom. They set the rules for themselves, in this case what constitutes a separate species, and by their own rules and parameters they pronounce evidence for speciation, going on to pronounce evidence for evolution.

Maybe this was a new variation in the species, and you can call it a new species, if you like, but then this becomes evidence that a blind force called evolution once upon a time took dead matter, created life out of it, and that simple life gradually developed it into you and me without any intelligence involved, without design. Not always presented as simply as that but, whatever you call it, this is not science, it is closer to blinkered religious thinking. How many stages would that first-ever living cell have to go through, provided it survived long enough in that environment, each stage improbable in itself, in order to reach the pinnacle of evolution, the human being and a human brain? Too many to mention, actually. Where is the repeatable experiment that science itself demands in order to accept the premise regarding any one of those evolutionary stages? Are we not entitled and perfectly reasonable to demand irrefutable evidence for each evolutionary stage individually and specifically and, if not forthcoming, to reject the premise of a dead soup becoming the miracle of the human being at its peak?

Instead, they work backwards: We know evolution is a fact, so how do we explain the emergence of life from dead matter? Answer: it must have done, there is no other explanation. How do we explain the giraffe's long neck? Grass must have run short and they had to reach up to trees - over millions of years, naturally. Presumably there is a different explanation for all the other species which survived in the same environment, at the same time but with much shorter necks. Irrespective of the logic of this, the assumption always is that evolution is the only possible explanation. And the same goes for the explanation to every single animal or plant characteristic in all their infinity. It is always on the axiomatic premise that it must have been evolutionary. We do not know how it happened, but it must have been evolution.

And that is the trouble with evolution.

We are not suggesting that all scientists think like this, nor pronouncing the theory of evolution disproven forthwith, we ARE sounding alarm bells as to how cautiously we should listen to apparently scientific pronouncements without questioning them for fear of appearing unscientific.

There is a large number of scientists who seriously doubt evolution, most of whom are silent, or they many challenge one particular aspect of evolution without denouncing evolution as a whole. And the problem such scientists have is that they cannot offer an alternative scientific explanation for the emergence of life other than creation, which implies a God, and it is not the job of science to offer God as an explanation. That is definitely unscientific.

However, it is a very unscientific mistake to make to insist on a certain theory just because one cannot think of an alternative - the ancient Greeks showed that two and a half thousand years ago and how right they proved to be. A certain Norman Macbeth, a Harvard-trained lawyer, said once, "I have no objection to explanations, if they are good explanations. Unfortunately, in the field of evolution most explanations are not good. As a matter of fact, they hardly qualify as explanation at all; they are suggestions, hunches, pipe dreams, hardly worthy of being called hypotheses." Jean Rostand, a French biologist, said, "No, decidedly, I cannot make myself think that these slips of heredity have been able, even with the co-operation of natural selection, to build the entire world, with its structural prodigality and refinements, its astounding adaptations - I cannot persuade myself to think that the eye, the ear, the human brain have been formed in this way."

Science continues to progress and old theories or 'scientific' notions have been proved wrong many times and have to be discarded on a daily basis, even now, without this discrediting science as a whole. It is in the nature of science that the search for truth continues for ever - science is a method, not a body of knowledge. Why should evolution be exempt from this when it is trying to explain events of millions of years back, when it creates so many logical contradictions, and while most evolutionary explanations are hypothetical?

Human beings, including the most intelligent, find comfort in embracing ready-made theories which fit in a) with their own emotional makeup and b) their fundamental beliefs developed subconsciously over a lifetime. If you think that religious or scientific beliefs are exempt from this, ask yourself how much discomfort it would cause to you to suddenly realise your own beliefs were all wrong, and how much you would struggle to convince yourself otherwise.

AFTER OPPOSITION, ART AND COMPOSITION

Having separated the issue of God from religion and the issue of religion from intelligent design we should be in a better position to think objectively.

For the atheists reading this, we have not just proved that God exists and solved the greatest question ever to trouble mankind because, to repeat, this is not what we set out to do. The issue here was not God's existence but whether the evidence points towards intelligent design in living things, vis-à-vis a process called evolution. We are discussing the work of art, not the artist.

Speaking of art, there are certain minds who might offer a unique perspective on this, people who have studied both science and art at a certain high level throughout their entire lives. We would still have to trust their honesty, of course, as well as their ability to think intelligently in the abstract, as in philosophy. But once we have ticked all of that, what is it that such minds might tell us?

Art is not a matter of taste or personal opinion as the masses think or indeed as lifelong scientists might imagine - in fact, art is far more complex than science. And for those who have attained a deeper insight and sound judgement in the arts, the universe, including life on earth, displays the properties of a great work of art. This does not mean a simplistic 'it is very beautiful' or 'it gives us pleasure' nor 'it's perfect, works well, I really like it' (please, see above link on The Arts in General) but rather that it displays, objectively, the properties we need to see in order to declare a painting, sculpture, musical composition or a novel as a great work of art necessitating a great artist. This might include consistency of purpose, integrity, meaning, complexity, and many other intangible qualities such that might enable a critic to declare that this is, for example, definitely a Picasso or a Michelangelo, a new-found Mozart or a Shakespeare. In some instances, the sheer complexity, intricacy and ingenuity of design goes way, way beyond any imaginable biological (evolutionary) advantage, or any functional necessity in the inanimate world. Human artists as well as scientists have always turned to nature for inspiration or solutions to technological problems. Nature has always got there first or, if we are first, we tend to damage it.

Quite separately, regarding its undoubted beauty, the ancient Greeks showed that beauty is not a matter of 'it looks nice', but that beauty is linked to truth and intelligence - they even devised (or discovered) a mathematical formula for visual beauty. They showed that beauty has meaning, as in the opposite of meaningless simple-mindedness. All parts of a work of art must work harmoniously towards a single purpose displayed in a way our evolutionist friend (above) called "very ingenious." You can either see that or you can't, you cannot make someone else see it. Others may look at or hear the same work of art but can only say whether they like it or not, but it takes a certain mind to recognise the multiplicity of meanings beyond the surface appearance and the signature qualities of a great artistic genius. As I keep telling my students, art is not for entertainment or decoration, it serves to reveal deeper meanings. In turn, meaning does not mean a simplistic 'everything happens for a reason' but rather a comprehensive, long-term goal the importance of which man has woken to suddenly in his desire to 'protect the environment,' and the realisation that the environment was doing much better when left to itself than when left to us, to our methods and to our management.

This is an alternative way of addressing the issue of evolution versus intelligent design and may come as a surprise to those who had always believed that the answer lay either in science or religion and its holy books, or in philosophy. The difference is that the latter three can be articulated, while art evaluation can only take place within an individual mind and is far more difficult to communicate to others. So both the religious believer and the atheistic evolutionist are being asked here to stretch their minds beyond their habitual daily thinking and start judging and evaluating in a very different way, equally without emotion, without prejudice and without fear of any contrary conclusion they might see for the first time.

If you have believed in evolution all your life, you are not being asked to reject your previous thinking but to consider other factors as well.

TO END ON A LIGHTER NOTE:

Both my carnations and my cyclamens share the same patch of garden, their roots even tangled up. The cyclamens flower in our cold English winters, while my carnations at the height of summer. Evolution would have us believe that each has 'adapted' to its original location after millions of years, but both carnations and cyclamens originated in roughly the same parts of the world, and in any event they survive perfectly well in my English garden, as indeed they did in our Mediterranean Greek garden when I was a child. If they have adapted, they seem to have adapted to both England and Greece perfectly well without changing into something else, therefore that capacity was pre-existing, built into them from the start, part of their makeup. Trying to explain every characteristic as an evolutionary adaptation is just bigotry.

The recent discovery of the switching of genes on-and-off (epigenetics) showed that a species can change due to properties already present in its DNA, and these changes can be passed on to subsequent generations, rather than through evolution which creates fundamentally new DNA, as previously understood. In other words, changes in living things need not be explained through current evolutionary theories by default, and there may be other factors unknown to us as yet, but already present in each species, without evolving in the Darwinian sense. To try and explain every single plant or animal characteristic through evolution is to attribute to a blind random process more intelligence than the brightest humans who ever lived, at the very least. We might add, epigenetics have shown such changes to be small, and a long way from accounting for every species on earth and for every biological characteristic of each species.

If you asked me how I met my wife and I said, 'I saw a frog one day and I kissed it and it became a beautiful princess,' you would think I am bonkers. And yet evolution is preaching something far more incredible, that all the beautiful women on this earth came from a soup of dead molecules, that there was not even a frog there in the first place. And all the intermediate 'scientific' accounts of how that happened require a leap of faith, each one far greater than any religion demands of its 'blind' followers.

If you were the jury and God was brought in before you accused of creating the universe and life on earth, and if God pleaded Not Guilty and said, "I did not do any of it, it must have happened all by itself," would you, the jury, find God Guilty or Not Guilty of creating the universe and the earth, and life? That presupposes that you would see God before you, in that scenario, and you would have to believe then that God existed in the first place - but think: is our inability to see the artist a good reason for declaring that the painting must have painted itself?

FACT OR FICTION?

The theory of evolution as it stands now involves a number of absurdities and must be discarded at some point as the explanation of how life came about in the first place, how so many different species came to be, their infinite characteristics, and of the intricate complexity of every living thing, in the same way that the Standard Model is being questioned increasingly in cosmology. Evolution may re-emerge in a new format, closer to the dictionary definition of the term evolution, rather than its current 'scientific' definition used in biology, if some new, fundamental evidence emerges. Or, like the Standard Model, it may crash with a bang after a new Einstein shows either one to be false. Or both theories may become increasingly obsolete over time and, if that were to happen, it would not be the job of science to proclaim that God created the universe and ourselves. To repeat what we have been stressing from the outset, that would be a separate, non-scientific question. To coin a phrase, "Stop worrying about that and enjoy your life." The rejection of scientific theories is a normal, regular event - even classical Darwinism has been rejected as obsolete by evolutionists as Lamarckism was rejected before it, with new theories emerging together with an admission that no single theory is fully satisfactory. The only exceptions to this rule are when repeated experiment has validated the theory time after time. Since evolution has not been validated in this way, it may turn out to be a phenomenon of mass scientific delusion of historic proportions, the greatest scientific fallacy ever. And the different, competing evolutionary theories emerging from time to time confirm even more how much alarm-bells should sound; effectively it means that "We do not know how it happened but it must have been evolutionary, one way or another." That is not science, not fact, certainly not truth by any standards or the standards set by the ancient Greeks two and a half thousand years ago, a philosophical standard unsurpassed since then by any seeker after truth.

Science must have measurement and experiment, and if not, it should keep its mouth shut, unless the scientist expresses personal thoughts in a non-expert capacity, without any claim to specialisation or special authority. So there are two scenarios where science can never make conclusive pronouncements, number one as to distant objects and the laws of physics in outer space and number two what happened on earth millions of years ago, especially with complex living organisms. Throughout history scientists have been proven wrong on much more accessible phenomena and far too often to be regarded as the new omniscient gods, a modern replacement of the ancient Greek gods on mount Olympus.

Evolution at the present time fails to explain a lot of things, and is too poorly understood as a process to be a certainty. As we demonstrated above, scientists do not like to give God as the explanation of any phenomenon, and that is perfectly reasonable because that is not their job - they are there to investigate natural phenomena. But to say no God could possibly be involved is no different to religious prejudice.

As mentioned, cosmologists often say there are problems with the Standard Model as a theory and they may have to discard it, but nobody ever says that about evolution as a theory, despite similar problems, because that would imply, straight away, a God and intelligent creator - impossible for some to swallow after so much argument with religious believers. And that means combative advocates of evolution are just as truculent as their equivalent religious preachers.

Until then, we should always treat with caution anything presented to us as scientific, and never accept 'scientific' to mean gospel truth - some of the greatest fallacies were called scientific once.

Above all, we should expect and demand that scientists stick to science facts and do not take it upon themselves to enlighten us on non-scientific questions. The great late comedian Tommy Cooper told a joke once, which went like this. A man walked into a famous auction house with a violin and a painting under each arm wanting to sell them. The house experts took both away for analysis and soon came back. "Sir," they told him, "we have good news and bad news. The good news is that you have here a Stradivarius and a Rembrandt. Unfortunately, Stradivarius was a terrible painter and Rembrandt made rotten violins."

© John K Smyrniotis
London 2021