Church Voices

I am not a scientist and can hardly be called a reasonably informed layman in science. Nevertheless, I have gathered from my reading that the three fields of cosmogony, abiogenesis, and paleobiology have reached somewhat of a consensus in the past 50 years or so. For the sake of a brief point, consider them each in turn.

Cosmogony is a branch in cosmology which focuses specifically on questions regarding the origin of the universe. According to Stephen Hawking, “almost everyone now believes that the universe, and time itself, had a beginning at the big bang.” What has been empirically confirmed has recently been mathematically corroborated by a prominent team of astrophysicists who proved that any universe whose empirical description involves expansion “must face the problem of a cosmic beginning.” Oxford Philosopher Anthony Kenny is not dull to the implications. He observes that “a proponent of the big bang theory, at least if he is an atheist, must believe that the universe came from nothing and by nothing.” Indeed, this is precisely what philosopher Quentin Smith does believe, contending that “the most reasonable belief is that we came from nothing, by nothing, and for nothing”. The other option, which Smith also has at one point advocated, is that the universe is self-caused.

Abiogenesis is the study of the origin of life from non-life. The past 50 years have decisively dashed any hope the Miller experiment may have elicited in 1952. Most now believe that earth’s early atmosphere was a composition of nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and water vapor, which has been experimentally unfavorable for even the development of the molecular building blocks for life. This, too, has been mathematically buttressed. An academic symposium entitled “Mathematical Challenges to the neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution” was called in 1962 to discuss what appeared to be insurmountable probabilistic difficulties facing origin of life scenarios (the problem has since only intensified). Australian molecular biologist and physician Michael Denton refers to issues in abiogenesis as “the great cosmogonic myth” of our time. Francis Crick says an honest man must state that “the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle”. Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe also plugged the numbers and found them disparaging, resulting in their propagation of exogenesis, the view that life must have transferred from somewhere else in the universe. Crick soon followed suit with his directed panspermia, where the earth was seeded with primitive life forms by some extraterrestrial civilization.

Paleobilogy is a sub-discipline in paleontology that studies the fossil record of biological organisms. In Darwin’s day, the assumption was that such research would uncover multitudes of transitional fossils linking species to other species. But as the discipline has matured that assumption has not. Geology professor David Raup comments: “We are now about 120 years after Darwin and the knowledge of the fossil records has been greatly expanded. We now have a quarter of a million fossil species but the situation hasn’t changed much. The record of evolution is still surprisingly jerky and, ironically, we have fewer examples of evolutionary transition than we had in Darwin’s time.” Instead, what scientists are finding is very densely populated regions of fossils of fully matured species that are not preceded by earlier ones. Stephen Jay Gould therefore proposed the now celebrated punctuated equilibrium, the view that instead of being produced by a gradual transitions, new species suddenly explode onto the seen at once.

Now let’s step back and assess the situation. According to science, after the universe either spontaneously popped into existence uncaused out of nothing or gave birth to itself, extraterrestrials seeded earth with primitive life forms which thereafter at various times in the course of history abruptly explode de novo entire species at once.

I submit that this is not science, but naturalism in a state of crisis.