Spontaneous Devolution

         The third millennium since the birth of Christ staggers unsteadily to its feet in an era of unprecedented change. The fundamental beliefs of Western society have been radically altered in the past one hundred years. In nation after nation, average citizens have placed their faith in the teachings of scientists who preach an all-powerful, post-modern pseudo-Darwinism. Life, they tell us, is a marvelous accident that began by chance and has been 'honed on the hoof' by the process of natural selection.
        Today's scientific storytellers would have us believe that the universe, in all of it's complexity, just... uh... happened. After an immeasurably complex universe accidentally burst into being, life miraculously followed suit, arising of its own accord, spinning itself from its own bowels through the happy coincidence known as evolution.
        'Evolution as Creator' has become the new orthodoxy of scientific spokespersons kept busy dispensing pat answers to the credulous masses. Yet evolution is not a universal principle (the universe often behaves unpredictably, and is notoriously devoid of principles). Evolution is an inherently human attempt to understand and control a universe that is beyond our understanding.
        The belief that life accidentally evolved is not based upon fact, but upon faith in the human intellect. Naturally speaking, no way exists to empirically validate assumptions about an ancient past; experiments that attempt to divine the origin of life are based upon data gathered in the here and now.
        To draw conclusions from current data, experimenters must assume that 'universal principles' were the same in the beginning as they are today. This assumption must be taken on faith. But what if energy - or matter - were fundamentally different in the past... in a way that we currently cannot detect?
       There is a fundamental problem with those who would place science in the role of the final arbiter of absolute truth. As any number cruncher knows, slight inaccuracies in the data - when multiplied by extrapolation - can lead to wildly inaccurate conclusions.
        Based upon improvable tenets, 'Evolution as Creator' is a fundamentalist faith in denial. It is the cardinal contemporary maxim, the one belief that must be accepted as fact by all right-minded persons. It sails across the consciousness of our era in regal majesty: the Titanic of faiths: man-made, rock-solid, and unsinkable. It is a proud, carefully constructed monolith plowing through icebergs of conflicting data. If only time could stand still! Then the concept of 'evolution as creator' would endure forever!
        This essay does not seek to debunk genetic principles of inheritance, or the obvious adaptation of life forms to their environment through natural selection. Rather, it addresses the concept of evolution as popularly misapplied. Stretched far beyond natural selection, evolution is commonly asserted to be the primal creative force. But as a meta-concept to explain the creation of life, evolution is woefully inadequate.
        Let us consider how scientists typically come to share common beliefs. First, an idea is proposed ("Disease is caused by germs"). Next, the idea is tested under rigorous conditions designed to disprove it. Finally, the original concept is disproved, or is not disproved. Theories are refined and retested. Over the years, ideas that cannot be disproved tend to accrue the veneer of validity.
        The scientific method of theory, test, refinement and retest has debunked the myths of the past ("frogs are spontaneously generated from mud") and led to new discoveries. However, an essential part of this scientific method cannot be applied to the concept of 'evolution as creator.' The experiments of scientists can observe contemporary phenomena only. Divinations regarding the distant past, or predictions of a distant future, cannot be rigorously tested in a laboratory. This convenient fact has assured the continuance of the popular theory of evolution. Evolution's prolonged acceptance might be called the survival of the specious through the process of natural deception.
        When theories cannot be tested, there is no risk that they will be discredited. The belief that evolution created life, imaginatively grounded in an unknown past, cannot be empirically validated. There is no danger of discrediting the fanciful. If questions are raised, another fanciful concept can be introduced to explain away every doubt.
        Case in point: twentieth century discoveries indicated that our universe, and time itself, is finite, with a definite beginning and an eventual end. This was quite a breakthrough, since in Darwin's day, time was assumed to be limitless (increasing the chance of life's accidental emergence).
        A limited universe presented problems to evolutionists. In a finite universe, given finite parameters of time, the odds were impossibly slight that life could have occurred by chance. (Could a tornado assemble a refrigerator from the raw materials? Within a limited time frame, could heat and light accidentally assemble an amoeba, which is astonishingly more complex than a refrigerator?)
        Given the limited age of the universe, what could explain life? Did lightning strike the sea to spawn the first bathysphere? Did life actually occur by chance, given impossible odds in a finite universe?
        To answer these questions, some theorists now propose an infinite series of universes ballooning out in every direction, inhabiting an infinite number of dimensions. No evidence exists to support such a concept, but why be hindered by the facts? Who can disprove whimsy? Who can contradict conjecture... especially when it is set in unknown dimensions?
        Considering its fatal flaws, why has the idea of 'evolution as creator,' proven to be so powerful? How did Darwin's theory become an article of faith to brilliant souls who should have known better? The answer can be found in the nature of humanity.
        Deep within every soul is a hunger to know, a desire to comprehend why we exist. The simple brilliance of 'evolution as creator' is that it meets this need with an understandable paradigm that we can believe and then conveniently forget, moving on to more interesting things.
        Faith in evolution has become a substitute for knowledge of God. Because it is amoral, evolution smiles equally upon all beliefs and lifestyles.
        Who can criticize the morality of the ocean? Can mountains forsake their responsibilities? If we lie, break hearts, share needles, or ruin lives in more subtle ways, what does it matter if we are just hunks of animate matter? If we murder or steal, cheat our neighbors or play the hypocrite, can't we just blame it on the moon?
        If we evolved by chance, all that we do is justified. This provides a powerful, subconcious motive for acceptance of the conscience-numbing belief that 'evolution' is the creator of all life.
        To put the popular belief in evolution into perspective, let us briefly consider the history of scientific thought. As we begin to scan the scope of human history for commonly held scientific beliefs regarding the creation of life, one concept looms larger than the rest by virtue of its historic, near-universal acceptance by learned scientists. That concept is Aristotle's theory of spontaneous generation.
        When Aristotle claimed that life was "spontaneously generated," he offered as proof the fact that frogs are created by the action of sun on river mud. This theory was adopted for almost two thousand years by the world's wisest thinkers.
        Aristotle was just one voice among many. As the centuries passed like acorns falling close to the tree, other gifted thinkers astonished their peers with the impenetrable depth of their wisdom.
        What ever happened to the late, great, flat earth theory? It was not based on Hebrew or Christian scriptures, but was a product of secular theoreticians. Who ever believed the one about the sun revolving around the earth? For hundreds of years, this concept was defended by secular scientists and worldly clerics. These concepts are now gone: gone with the wind, every one... dearly departed to that great, Theoretical Graveyard where old concepts rest in state, their bones bleaching in the sun (the same sun that circles the earth, right?).
        In more recent centuries, Newtonian physics raised its elegant, rational head. As a conceptual model, it ultimately failed to accurately summarize natural relationships in the universe (close, but no cigar... there was this problem, you see, with time, which appeared as a constant in his equations).
        To improve upon Newton, Einstein propounded an interesting space/time continuum. This inventive approach appears to have elements of accuracy, but if history has any lessons for us, it would not be wise to bet the world on Einsteinian infallibility.
        Back in our own time, many believe that life evolved - by chance - from the action of sunlight upon inanimate matter. Wait a minute... is this really a new idea? Haven't we heard this somewhere before? Why, of course!
        Evolution is Aristotle's theory of spontaneous generation, exhumed from a moldering grave, dressed in technospeak and hungry for followers. Indeed, because we should know better by now, 'evolution as creator' can be considered to be a degraded version of Aristotle's concept: gloriously magnified with the assiduous assistance of a vast herd of independent minds. The theory could be considered proof of the power of intellectual entropy: Spontaneous Devolution.
        In the pseudo-Darwinian version of Aristotle's theory, the sun hits river mud (or primeval soup de jour), steeps for a few billion years, and voila! Skyscrapers, air conditioning, Brad Pitt, automobiles... you name it!
        The biggest difference between the evolution and spontaneous generation is the time frame ("...add a few billion years and stir to taste"). O, Darwin, if ever a whiz there was, you was!
        When ideas are old enough, they can be sold as new. Before evolution's true believers trash creationism, they would do well to examine their own gullibility.
        The high priests of science were not satisfied to make better mousetraps. Hungry to explain all things, armed with a splinter of knowledge that amounted to an unholy relic of dated data (as all natural data are dated), they built a new religion upon improvable assertions, fortified by faith in their own almighty intellects.
        The intelligentsia, converted to the Gospel According to Carl (Sagan, that is), proceeded to evangelize the rest of us.
        Like many zealous converts, believers in 'evolution as creator' are now trying to force their faith upon the unwashed multitudes in the United States of America. By promoting evolution as the only acceptable approach for presentation in the public schools, they attempt to forcibly convert America's children to their unproven point of view.
        It would be best if the United States remains open to divergent points of view, especially in the classroom. Unfortunately, pluralism is often promoted in name only. This appears to be the case with evolution's true believers, who would force our children to kneel and eat their half-baked ideas at the altar of conjecture.