Evolution or Creation? Why Not Both?

OK, I've heard it all my life. Evolution vs. Creation. It has always puzzled me. I don't understand the conflict. For the record, I believe in God; the God of Abraham, the God who led the Hebrews out of Egypt, the God who chose Mary to bear Jesus, the God who Is Jesus. I also believe in science, in the sense that I think we have people of intelligence who can figure things out. They can ask questions, search for answers, test the answers for reliability, adjust their thinking and ask new questions.

If that didn't turn you away already, let me tell you why I don't understand the conflict. If that God exists, as I believe he does, then he is powerful enough to have created the world in an evolutionary process. To me, the thought that God could create all of this out of nothing, but doesn't have the intelligence it takes to have created evolution just doesn't make good sense.

Just because some people have figured out a logical order of steps in which something was made doesn't mean that they can duplicate the process and make that something themselves. And it doesn't mean that it "just happened" when they can't come up with the answer to the last question. For example:

Big Bang! Note that, even though this is almost universally accepted, it is still refered to as a theory. That's because they can't answer those last few questions, and they are very important questions if this is ever to become more than just a theory. There was this tiny pinpoint of matter that contained all there is in the universe, then BANG, it exploded and expanded and gathered into pockets of matter that became stars and galaxies and worlds and us. OK, so where did this tiny pinpoint of matter come from? What made it go BANG? Why did it not uniformly expand into a universal cloud of dust, and nothing more? Why did those random bits of the simplest elements combine to form life?

Let's forget about those other questions for now and focus on the last one. The current line is that there were these few elements that got heated up and mixed together and broke apart and reformed until one day there was something they called amino acids. Then these bounced around and combined and broke apart and reformed countless times until one day there was life. HUH? Did all of that add up to, "It just happened."? It seems easy enough to believe, if you don't look at it too closely. It's all a lot of scientific jargon when you try to get the details, so how about we compare that to something common that we can all relate to?

Try, a pencil. In it's simplest form a pencil is a stick of wood with a hole in it, another stick, made of carbon that happens to be just the right outside diameter to fit into the hole in the stick of wood, (the hole in the stick of wood has to be through its long axis and not through the short axis, or anything between), a bit of rubber, and a metal band that's just the right size to hold the bit of rubber onto the end of the stick of wood. We'll say that our pencil is one of those that doesn't have paint on it. We'll also say that all four of these elements just appeared in the proper dimensions, so that they can be put together to form a pencil.

We're already taking a lot for granted here. How many trees had to live and die before one of them produced that stick of wood that was 'so long' and of 'such diameter' with a hole through its length, 'of this other diameter' and almost perfectly flat on each end, when it fell off of the tree? But let's say that it did, indeed, happen just that way. The same kind of questions can be asked in regards to the stick of carbon, the bit of rubber and the metal band, but we allow that they all exist.

The question is, then, what monumental set of random circumstances had to occur to let them all fall together into a pencil? Well, the pure science people say, "It didn't happen the first time, or the second, but after so many millions of times it 'just happened'." Really? I challenge you, all of you, any of you. Take these four elements, already machined to the proper dimensions, and drop them on the ground. Do it a million times. Do it a million times with a milion sets of the four elements every time. How many times do you think you'll end up with a pencil? My bet is "None" No, for all its simplicity, a pencil is a relatively complicated thing to produce from scratch, and it's just a pencil. So, tell me again how these few simple elements bounced around and 'just happened' to produce life.

No, if you can't put your faith into the thought that a pencil could just happen, then don't try to convince me that you or I could. There was some small amount of intelligence behind the production of the pencil and I believe that if you really consider what you're talking about you will have to agree that there must have been some intelligence behind the creation of life.

I'll pose the same question in a different way. Think of all those simple conveniences we have; a drinking glass, a shirt, a light bulb, a loaf of bread, anything that you can name. These are simple things, and relatively easy to produce. It think we can all agree that they are all simpler than a living creature, even a worm is more complicated than a drinking glass. But, if these things are so much simpler than a living creature, why did none of them 'just happen'? Why was it that the first person to become self aware didn't look around and see all of these things lying about, waiting for him to find a use for them. Surely there was enough time that passed to have produced at least a candy wrapper, or something, anything.

But, no, all of the things we have were produced after life began. All of these simple things were too complicated to 'just happen', and you accept the sense that says it had to be so. Yet, you can still believe that life could just happen.

I've read Carl Sagan and I watched him on public TV when he turned Cosmos into an entertainment piece. I saw him standing in a lab, next to a beaker. He told us that scientists have reproduced the conditions of primal Earth inside the beaker. They added heat and electricity and speeded up the millions of years of random events that must have occured before the dawn of history. Lo and behold, they formed amino acids, the building blocks of life, in a laboratory. Well, it's been some years since then and I don't recall any announcements that they have taken that to the next step and produced anything that can be called life. Nothing has crawled out of that beaker and said, "momma?" Do you think they shut down the lab after Carl left the set? I don't. I expect that they're still soaking up tax dollars and donations, trying to come up with something that will make them appear to be doing something worthwhile. But nothing further has come from it.

That's because it takes more than just random events to produce even a lowly bacteria. It takes more than just random events to produce a candy wrapper.

Yes, I believe that the Big Bang happened. I believe that God said, "Let there be Light!", and Bang! it happened. Out of nothing, he produced that tiny pinpoint of matter that held everything that ever was or ever will be. He made it explode in just such a way that it formed galaxies of stars and planets and life and, yes, pencils and candy wrappers. There are some in my church who would deny me and say that I am a heretic for saying such a thing, but I believe it to be true. If they choose to put limits on their image of God, well, that's between them and God. To me it's a simple matter to say that God is more powerful and more intelligent than we are, and that if he chose to create evolution that's fine by me.

You see, I'm stuck in the middle. My church friends say, "No, God just created all that there is and evolution has nothing to do with it." My non-church friends say, "No, it just happened and evolution took over and here we are." My church friends point out that it doesn't say precisely that in the Bible, and so do my non-church friends by the way.

I have a brother, a real flesh-and-blood, born-of-the-same-parents brother, who says that he believes that the story of the world's creation is literal truth, and that God just put those dinosaur bones in the ground for us to find. He doesn't trust carbon dating and says that just because we interpret the results a certain way doesn't make it infallible truth. He points out that a half-life of so many thousands of years for a certain quantity of carbon found in once-living material means nothing. No one has ever taken a sample of carbon-14, or whatever, from a living thing at the point of death and waited for thousands of years to verify that it actually behaves the way the scientists say it behaves.

I have to say that he does have a good point here. If something we want doesn't happen in a few days or a few years then we lose interest and move on to something else. Take the War on Terrorism for an example. We didn't go in and destroy all of those evil terrorists in 30 days, so now we're tired of the game and we want a different President. Quite often, scientists give us things in terms of thousands of years or millions of years and, as long as they're talking about things in a past tense, we're fine with it. But, let them tell us that something in the future won't happen for a hundred years or so and we go look for something else to occupy our time. Where is the Super-conducting Super-collider? It's on the scrap heap, because we got tired of paying for it. Well then, why didn't it just happen? It had to do with the smallest of particles running into each other. There should have been one already set up and waitning for us a few million years ago. Right?

Yes, I believe in God, but I also believe in science. There are other worlds out there and some day we'll go to them. Eventually, we will find life on other planets, maybe even intelligent life, and we may ponder the same questions together. That is, if we can do it before the last trump sounds. I hope we have time, but even if we do I won't live to see it. Still, in my belief, there is a promise that all will be revealed and all questions will be answered. I hope that means that all of existence will be "replayed" for us. I hope we'll get to see those first amino acids form and we'll get to see who invented the wheel and who really assassinated Kennedy and what happened to Jimmy Hoffa and why did my paycheck come up short in July of 1996 and everything that we all ever wanted to know. Till then, at least I have Star Trek.