This is written mostly in response to Leanne’s comment, but I also want to share the conversation with my readers.

Leanne, I hope I didn’t give the impression that I was angered or felt insulted!

I appreciate and, I admit, quite like the emotional reasons for finding the world beautiful. I am frustrated, when looking at politics generally, that people cannot stop and think about their actions and stop fighting each other. But every person, myself included, will attack other people even if that is only expressed in a thought.

The beauty of science, as far as I am concerned, is that it explains and offers so much to us. I can’t sit here and say that there is no God (just that I find it unlikely) and I definitely cannot say that the universe was not “created”.

What I can say is that a God/creator is more likely to have set up the universe (not the Earth alone) in such a way as the rules that physics identifies and incorporates into formulae could come to exist and would lead to life. The alternative - that He created a universe, allowed it to express itself scientifically and then intervened at a critical point on one particular planet to make a creature that looks very much like every other but that has an incurable ego - is not particularly appealing to me.

The first option, the one I consider more likely, would incorporate evolution in a theistic universe; the second option would create a theistic universe that requires intervention that would suggest active cruelty on the part of the God that allows the random acts of violence that the news makes us so familiar with to happen.

I have to say I am far more comfortable and less scared of a non-theistic world. If there is a God who allows the cruelty typefied by the actions of hostage-takers in the Middle East, then He is not one I would like to meet. If He doesn’t exist or is not able to intervene then He is far more acceptable to me.

On apes, we did not evolve from apes. We share a common ancestor who’s evolutionary line split at some point in the past. This meant that those animals that lived in coastal areas evolved to take advantage of the sea’s bounty and, eventually, became us. Those that remained in forested areas became more suited (as other apes are) to living in trees. The ‘out-of-Africa’ evidence suggests that humanity migrated from Africa by following the coasts. No major religion’s creation texts even hint at this.

The Guardian newspaper once said “And on the [insert day number here, I cannot remember which it was] day God created the Earth and all the fossils in it”. The question is asked, why would the fossils be placed there in a Christian creationist reality?

Science has an answer to your points: Flowers smell sweet because nectar is sweet - that is what attracts pollinating insects. Pollinating insects, in some cases, drink the nectar. Bad smells are not likely to arise in this situation. Having said that, there is a flower (the Rafflesia arnoldii) that smells of rotting meat (more info). We also like sweet smells for the same reason as bees - sweet food is nutritious and sustains. We think of sugar as being bad for us not because it is naturally bad for us but because we refine the sugar and eat it in unnaturally large quantities.

Science also predicts there to be few solar systems with planets suitable for life. The range of habitats on Earth, however, that are populated suggests that life could survive elsewhere easily. The real question is whether life can evolve in those situations in the first place. I expect there will be life found elsewhere than on Earth and not necessarily on planets like Earth (though of course planets like Earth may well host life too). The exploration of space is one of the things that I think humanity has a moral obligation to start with zeal. Only when we have realised (en masse) the relative insignificance of Earth on the galactic (and indeed universal) scale, will people stop fighting petty wars.

The beauty of evolution, though, is that the chance of human-like life evolving even on a carbon-copy (interestingly carbon-copy suggests something about the carbon-based life…) of Earth is ridiculously small. Earth has hosted life for 3billion years (3,000,000,000 years) and in that time humans have only evolved once. Throughout the intervening period any creature you can imagine has already evolved and evolution hasn’t stopped - it is carrying on right now and more creatures, that you cannot imagine, will evolve in the future. Human-like life, Vulcans from Star Trek, are not only unlikely - it would be facile to expect them to exist at all.

You say “now the earth for its survival would try to evolve in ways to rid itself of its infestation- disease maybe” but the Earth does not evolve - it hosts an amazingly complex ecosystem but of itself is not alive. The aim of life (and the inevitable result of evolution) is that the fittest survive. If a disease killed every creature it infected (or all of a species) it would quickly run out of hosts to infect and would cause its own extinction. For this reason evolution puts brakes on the success (depending on your point of view) of a given virus or deadly bacteria. In fact most viruses and bacteria do not kill as an intention but as an unfortunate side-effect if they kill at all. Evolution takes a long time so evolutionary processes have not been able to keep up with humanities ability to kill other species. The current epoch is one of only a few times when there have been very few massive predators. Obvious creatures spring to mind like gorgonopsid, Tyrannosaurus Rex, giant birds and the sabre-tooth tiger. Humanity is not the ultimate creature, but our collective egos allow us to think we are permanently damaging the planet - in geological time our impact is negligible.

Your final comment about Darwin being taught as fact and that it could remove people’s hope is wrong for two reasons:

  1. Stopping something from being taught as fact (which it is) because you don’t like it is not a balanced way to teach science. You may as well say that you don’t want history taught because it wasn’t all nice. Evolution is an accurate description of biology and, while there are an extremely small number of scientists who have doubts about the theory, there is no alternative scientific theory that proposes a viable alternative via known mechanisms. The vast majority of scientists believe the theory is sound.
  2. Evolution, and the supposed implication that there is no God, does not remove hope. Hope is something that people can only genuinely have if they believe they are in control of their destiny. If one thinks they are subject to the whim of an omnipotent God who, evidence suggests, is not entirely benign, then what hope is there then?

Posted In: Science