New
Valued Compaq Customer (fjm@ici.net)
Sun, 8 Mar 1998 18:07:15 -0500I have been reading the mail here for a couple months and thought it was time to introduce myself. My name is Francis Maloney. I earned a bachelor's degree in the seventies in botany and a masters degree much later in an unrelated field. I work as a self-employed carpenter. I live with my 12 year old son in a seaside town in Massachusetts.
In college, I learned the principles of natural selection and the theory of species divergence; evolution was presented to me as fact. My eagerness for acceptance into the field, my hunger for answers and the absence of any equally authoritative challengers made me a thorough convert. Once I had grasped the concept of evolution, reproduction with slight error leading to species divergence over long periods of time, I set about to explain everything I could by fitting it to this theory. I discovered it was so broad that I could construct an evolutionary scenario for every observable facet of life both animal and human.
The unfortunate side effect of the evolutionary perspective was that it reduced biology to mechanics. The emergence of life on earth was ascribed to the random concentration of complexity on a molecular script with no meaning beyond survival and reproduction. When I had the opportunity to go on to graduate school I realized that, for me, it was the big question that mattered. Biologists presented the case of 'Why' as closed; but deeper things went unanswered and would not be answered in school, where I feared I would only be lost in rooting out of more intricate pieces of the same pattern.
In my twenties on a dark night in central Mexico after a few, no doubt petty, minor defeats, I looked up into the sky and said, "I give up, my life is worthless to me , you can have it". That was the beginning of a difficult walk into Christianity. Ten years later with the birth of my son, I joined an evangelical, (southern Baptist), church. and ten years after that I became an active member participating in missions trips and teaching Sunday school.
In the church, I found myself in conflict with some of the literal interpretations of the bible. In particular, the six day creation and Noah's flood. I had no conflict whatsoever with Jesus Christ so I kept my doubts to myself about these minor details. I did find that, in spite of my education, I did not know, with any kind of authority, what the evidence was for evolution. When I thought back about the proofs of the central theory, the only things I could remember for sure were moths changing color and squirrels on the Kaibab plateau. I had studied plant morphology which included the plants known in the fossil record. Everything was set in an evolutionary framework; sporangiophores gave way to primitive angiosperms which, because of the marvelous adaptive ability of the flower came to dominate the plant world. I never dared to critically examine the underlying but unproven assumption of descent.
Many young people brought up in the church are intimidated by science because of the abrupt transition of thought needed to train as a biologist or a geologist. This doesn't have to be; a search for truth does not conflict with Christianity. My objective is to sort out which claims of evolutionary biology can be substantiated and which cannot and to use that knowledge to break the hold of naturalism on our scientific establishment. The thinkers who broke the hold of the dark ages like Okham and Copernicus were either Christians or theists who operated in a Christian culture. It was this culture that cut the floor out from superstitious belief and allowed science to function.
Our culture today is naturalistic and commercial and the ancient spiritist mythologies are flooding back in. Many scientific claims made in the popular media are, I think, products of the public relations departments of corporations. Much of the research reported has, at its source, an agenda to push a product or a philosophy. Unless one gets down into the nitty gritty details, one does not know what is true and what is engineered to appear true. Unfortunately, the relatively-clean-from-bias publications are not readily available once you have left the field.
The bible says the creation is the evidence of God, (Romans 1:20-23), the evolutionist says that competitive selection of traits over time accounts for all the life we see and God can be eliminated as uninformed superstition. If evolution occurred as a natural process, God the creator is a myth. If evolution occurred but is God-directed, it is not a natural process but a supernatural process which scientists never will be able to explain. This is why the evolution-creation debate is so controversial and so critical, there is no middle ground. I have been reluctant to accept that view but I see no way around it. Perhaps the best explanation we will ever be able to understand is "God created the heavens and the earth." In the meantime, it's an interesting debate.
Francis Maloney
fjm@ici.net