I'm a very new subscriber to "evolution". I'm Paul Carline, English by
birth but resident for the past twenty years or so in Scotland, mainly in
Edinburgh, where I now live. Was brought up a Catholic, but 'lapsed' in
my student days. However, I still describe myself as a Christian and have
never ceased to believe in a divine origin of the universe and of
mankind.
I studied modern languages at university, but have been interested in
science and particularly in the evolution debate for a long time. Have
read many books challenging Darwinism: Michael Denton's book was a real
eye-opener and both Phillip Johnson's and Michael Behe's books have been
excellent confirmation of my longstanding conviction that Darwinism
(other than as applied to minor adaptation) is a major fraud perpetrated
on an unthinking public. Darwinism remains as the last bastion of 19th
century materialism, Freud and Marx having been soundly discredited -
though, as with Darwin, there was always a core of truth in their
positions. Evolution *is* a fact; there has been change and development
and there is a lot more evolving to be done for humans, primarily of a
spiritual nature. The success of Darwinism is clearly due primarily to
the apparent - but spurious - scientific credibility it lends to an a
priori materialist-atheist philosophical position.
Anyone is of course free to choose whatever view of the world suits them.
What is unacceptable is for a small but powerful elite to impose their
views on the majority and to dictate the ground-rules for the pursuit of
knowledge. This might not matter so much if the materialist agenda were
confined to a few university philosophy departments as only one of a
number of competing world-views. But Darwinism as meaning chance-driven,
meaningless, purposeless, random change fuelled by a naked competition
for survival has had a devastating effect on the modern psyche.
So-called free market capitalism is merrily destroying the planet before
our very eyes in the name of competition, survival of the fittest and
'reproductive success' (where dividends are the offspring). Agriculture
and medecine are dominated by a stupid reductionist approach which sees
everything only in terms of energy use and transformation (cows can be
treated as ambulant metabolic factories and therefore may be fed on
virtually anything, including the ground-up remains of other animals);
medecine becomes a sophisticated war against fiendishly clever, mutating
microbes, which have to be fought with increasingly powerful and
dangerous chemical weapons. The net result is a planet struggling to
survive the combined assault of a science and technology that has lost
touch with the wholeness of life.
More specifically in terms of the current debate (theistic creation vs
naturalistic evolution) I see the following priorities:
1. To continue to point up the inadequacies and inconsistencies of the
neo-Darwinist position and to try to ensure that the case against is
brought to the widest possible public attention, particularly in the
education system
2. To continue to develop 'the middle ground' between materialism and the
fundamentalist Christian position.
I am particularly interested in the second of these two areas (by
default, since I have no competence in palaeontology or biology). If the
case for divine creation is not to remain purely a matter of faith (not
that there's anything wrong with that), it will be necessary to attempt
to show or at least plausibly suggest how a divinely-initiated and
-guided evolution could have taken place which is also in accord with the
known facts.
In particular, there must be an adequate theory of the origin,
maintenance and transformation of form which can live with quantum
mechanics. If there is actually 'nothing there', but only fields of
energy, what is it that is creating and sustaining form? And how can one
hypothesize the large-scale changes in form, structure and function which
have led to the observable development of new species without either
accepting a Darwinist gradualism or a multitude of special creations? Is
it possible to imagine some way that formative forces could work which
would allow for dramatic changes ( we have a living example, surely, in
the transformation of a caterpillar into a butterfly - through an
intermediate stage of complete chaos)?
My own view is that we have to learn to look beyond the individual
organism for the source of form. It is *not* just encoded in the genes.
There are formative forces raying in from all sides from the cosmos and
more particularly from our solar system. The work of Lawrence Edwards on
the influences from the moon and planets on the form of leaf buds is
groundbreaking work and points in a new direction which can break out of
the conceptual prison of the reductionist mentality.
Enough for today. I have lots more ideas, including the need to look more
closely at what Genesis actually tells us about the origin of our
universe. But I'll wait to see if I get any feedback on this - and also
to catch up on the major strands of the debate - before I say any more.
Regards, Paul Carline