'You', your joys and your sorrows, your memories, your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.**Francis Crick, the British scientist, who won the Nobel Prize for physics jointly with James Watson, the American scientist, for their work in discovering the double helix structure of DNA.
Thus wrote Francis Crick in the beginning of his book, "The Astonishing Hypothesis."
This is the knowledge that really astonishes us: we would really like to know how we came into being as a species and how it is that we reflect on our own genesis.
Men have reflected on this for thousands of years. I say "men" not out of some bias, but because I think that women are less likely to wonder about the genesis of the human race; it would seem to me that women who bear children may have a more intuitive feel for how life came into being and how our sense of astonishment and arrogance regarding our genesis started, because they know that no one is born without a mother and a father.
Furthermore, for those who believe in the Bible story, I differ from many men who blame Eve for giving Adam the apple, the forbidden fruit that would reveal to Adam the knowledge of good and evil, a knowledge that got him and Eve thrown out of the Garden of Eden. Every generation takes the same bite, trying to achieve in one stroke a sense of what reality is -- no one has patience, a sense of obedience, or a sense of gratitude. However, in the world of Francis Crick and James Watson, good and evil are delusions anyway.
Discovering the structure of DNA gave Francis Crick and James Watson the knowledge of how genetic material recreates itself, thus they had an explanation of how the living species came into being and how the homo sapiens evolved. Charles Darwin's Theory of Evolution had gained its best justification; there was no logical reason for God to exist and the Bible was just a bunch of fairytales.
Essentially, all the discussion about evolution, the formation of the universe, the nature of Homo sapience and all the rest of the astonishment of existence, and the awe of the human mind, boil down to one thing: is there a God or is there not a God; i.e., did a Supreme Being or Intelligence create the universe or was it an accident that cannot be fathomed by the human mind or proven through the scientific method?
This is a worthwhile debate and we should take it step by step, so that those of us who are destined to make it to the 21st Century can move on with it.
The overwhelming majority of Americans who were born in the 20th Century will not make it intellectually to the 21st Century; they will remain mired in the 20th Century and its horrible excesses: wars, revolutions, drugs, depravity, mayhem -- in short, they will remain mired in atheism (the denial of God,) and agnosticism (the rejection of God.)
When I was studying biology during the early sixties, after the euphoria of the discoveries regarding the structure of DNA and its relationship to Darwin's Theory of Evolution, I remember that one of the popular riddles being touted in biology classes was, "which came first, the chicken or the egg?" There was the usual debate and the professor would say, "no one can prove either case; there would be no chicken if it wasn't for the egg and there would be no egg if it wasn't for the chicken."
When I think about it now, I can say that if God created the universe and the animals in it, then the chicken came first; but if the Big Bang theory is how the universe was created, then, of course, the molecules of the egg came together at random and the result was a chicken, or as other species were born, such as dinosaurs, saber tooth tigers, et cetera, each of them with their own genes coming together quite accidentally and producing a dinosaur, a saber-tooth tiger or whatever.
As ridiculous as the latter case might be, the overwhelming majority of scientists of the 20th Century believed this and taught it at the university level -- even in church-owned schools.
However, I think that the Theory of Evolution has been treated unfairly by the scientific minds of the 20th Century, such men as Bertrand Russell, Carl Sagan, Francis Crick and James Watson, and the like-minded scientists of past centuries. I think evolution did occur, and I agree with my old biology teacher, Dr. John Hare (Etymologist and graduate of the University of California, Berkeley,) that there is really no contradiction between the belief in God and evolution.
I think that God created the universe and our world through an evolutionary process. That's why phylogeny recapitulates ontogeny. In other words, as Dr. Hare taught his students, the evolution of man goes through many stages, with each stage resembling a more complex animal than the previous stage, starting with the single-celled animal, then a shark-like creature, a marsupial, a chicken, a pig, and then man -- I don't remember the exact stages. I'm not being facetious; this is biology at the university level.
Now as crazy as this might sound to you, I do believe this, because there is overwhelming evidence that man does evolve and improve in so many areas of human development. Many religious leaders and preachers don't believe in evolution, and there are a good number of scientists who point out that there are no fossil evidence of creatures at intermediate stages of evolution. The pure scientists would argue that evolution takes millions and billions of years and that any such intermediate stages would be obliterated by time. Even though this is not absolutely convincing, there is some truth to it.
However, I look at this in a different way: there is much evidence concerning the evolutionary process even within the lifetime of one human being, if we consider that men not only evolve but also devolve. If we study history objectively then we can see that on the average many nations are stupider today than during the height of their empires. For example, the Sumerians invented writing, the Babylonians calculated the movements of the planets to two hundred thousand years, the Ashurai invented the wheel, the Greeks excelled in philosophy and the arts, the Romans set down the laws and excelled in architecture. Today, the descendants of these civilizations cannot rise to that level of achievement. There are no Gilgameshes, Sargons, Ashurbanipals, Aristotles, or Solons, respectively. Even in our own history, there are no men like George Washington, John Adams, and Ben Franklin -- the framers of the US Constitution. Today, many of the elected leaders of the American people are trying to remove the name of God from the public documents and institutions and have already increased taxation beyond the levels of what made the Americans of 1776 revolt against the British. We have definitely devolved. And I don't want to pick only on us Americans, the French haven't produced great writers and artists like Voltaire and Rodin, the Germans don't have anymore Beethovens and Goethes. More and more English people sound like Eliza Doolittle....
Of course, one might say that look at all the scientific discoveries, the medicines, et cetera; but this does not prove evolution; even the apes learn by trial and error. No -- men do devolve also and not just intellectually, but also fundamentally. Look at the suicide bombers. Need I say more?
Without God, nothing makes sense.
The Scriptures were recorded by the greatest minds of each generation of scribes for thousands of years; the Scriptures are the only documents that have stood the test of time and that still have a tremendous impact on the improvement of individual lives. Jesus came two thousand years ago. This fact cannot be denied; it's historically accurate. What Jesus taught was the fulfillment of the original Scriptures. His disciples and apostles carried on Jesus' teachings. The greatest civilizations of our day have emerged out of Christianity, and even though today we are in a death struggle against the barbarian of this age, the terrorists, Christianity is still the only viable alternative to madness.