Beginnings 5

Site Menu

The only acceptable explanation for life is that is was created. This is anathema to many, but we must not reject a theory if the experimental evidence supports it.

| Back | Home |

SO ... HOW UNSCIENTIFIC IS CREATION?

'This notion of species as"natural kinds" fit splendidly with creationist tenets of a pre-Darwinian age. Louis Agassiz even argued that species are God's individual thoughts, made incarnate so that we might perceive both His majesty and His message. Species, Agassiz wrote, are "instituted by the Divine Intelligence as the categories of his mode of thinking." But how could a division of the organic world into discrete entities be justified by an evolutionary theory that proclaimed ceaseless change as the fundamental fact of nature?'

Stephen Jay Gould (Professor of Geology and Paleontology, Harvard University), 'A quahog is a quahog'. Natural History, vol. LXXXVIII(7), Aug.-Sept., 1979, p. 18.

'If living matter is not, then, caused by the interplay of atoms, natural forces and radiation, how has it come into being? There is another theory, now quite out of favour, which is based upon the ideas of Lamarck: that if an organism needs an improvement it will develop it, and transmit it to its progeny. I think, however, that we must go further than this and admit that the only acceptable explanation is creation. I know that this is anathema to physicists, as indeed it is to me, but we must not reject a theory that we do not like if the experimental evidence supports it.'

H. S. Lipson, FRS (Professor of Physics, University of Manchester, UK), 'A physicist looks at evolution.' Physics Bulletin, vol. 31, 1980, p. 138. But how complex are things... ?

'In 1973, I proposed that our Universe had been created spontaneously from nothing (ex nihilo), as a result of established principles of physics. This proposal variously struck people as preposterous, enchanting, or both. The novelty of a scientific theory of creation ex nihilo is readily apparent, for science has long taught us that one cannot make something from nothing.'

Edward P. Tryon (Professor of Physics, City University of New York, USA), 'What made the world?' New Scientist, 8 March 1984, p. 14.

| Back | Top of Page | Home |