| Feature Article – March 2005 |
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The officer standing in front of his squad notices differences. This man’s boots are dirty; that one has a moustache; the one next to him looks Chinese. The sergeant at the edge of the platoon, however, only sees patterns and similarities: toecaps and rifle barrels all perfectly lined up, each rank tapering smoothly in height from tallest to shortest. Both are looking at the same squad of soldiers, but the officer’s view is that of the non-scientist, the sergeant’s is the scientist’s view. In fact, a good definition of science is “making a pattern of nature”. (It also explains the difference between the two types of sermon, one that differentiates (“this person is saved, that one isn’t”) and the kind that seeks to be inclusive.)
If, instead of soldiers, every object and creature on earth were lined up, like a repeat of the Noah’s Ark myth but on a gigantic Cecil B de Mille scale, the one in front would want to say “that one is living, but the ‘thing’ next to it isn’t – quite,” and “that person is human; the creature on his left isn’t – quite.”
Even until living memory this would be the accepted view. The biologist saw an array of living things, from a whale down to a bacterium. The chemist, working from the other end, could produce an equally impressive array from an atomic nucleus up to long-chain molecules, but couldn’t make the jump to something as complex as a bacterium. “Only God creates living creatures” has been the traditional belief. Between the two there was a distinct gap. (Remember “the God of the gaps”?)
But scientists like to close gaps. So in 1828, Wohler created potentially living (organic) stuff, urea, out of dead (inorganic) matter. In 1935 W.M. Stanley isolated a virus which could reproduce itself (the definition of ‘living’) but which could be kept as white crystals in a bottle on a shelf. It won’t come as a surprise that the active part was a large molecule of DNA in animal viruses, RNA in plant viruses. This, in turn, led to the brilliant Dutch biochemist, Victor Werker’s landmark discovery that inorganic material can be given a metabolism. That clinched it. Research activity exploded. Now the human genome has been mapped, Dolly the sheep was cloned, humans can be, all opening the door to genetic therapy and designer babies. Leave aside for a moment the moral issues of this. What we have is a reconciliation of the two great Creation myths in Genesis 1 & 2. An inorganic compound is given life in a laboratory from the very same stuff that our Judæo-Christian God is said to have gathered and used.
It’s far from “all over bar the shouting”, though. There’s the matter of ‘irreducible complexity’ – aspects of our makeup so complex that they could never have evolved simply by survival of the fittest, it is claimed. Let me illustrate.
Imagine a Stealth Fighter aircraft. It seems unbelievably complex to a small boy today, but we oldies remember the Wright brothers’ stringbag and Frank Whittle’s primitive jet engine. We can see how today’s plane has evolved smoothly in a mere 100 years. Given the 15 billion years of our universe, could not anything have evolved, however complex, given that timespan?
But imagine if Marconi had never invented radio, and all that complex ‘comms’ equipment in a Stealth fighter appears suddenly, out of the blue, without any antecedents. That’s what the anti-evolutionists are saying about some complex parts of the jigsaw that only work when combined with others and have no conceivable use otherwise or before. They could not have ‘evolved’, they say, and they have a point.
Think of a viaduct, reply the Darwinians. If you try and build up from the sides, it will always collapse when you try and complete the top of the arch. What you must do first is build a timber understructure, or ‘shuttering’, and lay the stones on that, then remove the shuttering. If you had not seen that happen, you may look at a stone arch and think it a miracle. Remember, we are almost totally reliant on skeletons, fossils and other ‘hardware’. The soft tissue, which would provide priceless information about the intermediate ‘shuttering’ – how living things came to be the way they are – has almost all perished.
What about the human soul, though? Surely that is unique? Not in the way we think.
There is some mileage in this. Everyone’s DNA is unique, or unique enough – and even if two people had identical DNAs, their circumstances would make them discernibly different people – but the whole point of Watson & Crick’s discovery is that the building blocks of our DNA are identical, they are simply ordered differently. If you believe in an orderly God (and not an arbitrary, whimsical one, as some prayer meetings I have attended would seem to envisage), then this is entirely acceptable. Study of dolphins, chimps, parrots and our domestic pets has confirmed that we are not all that different, simply more complex, differently ordered. The ‘ontological’ nature of the soul (whether or not it is ‘saved’) is a later accretion, much contaminated by Greek philosophy (and wishful thinking).
The old, tidy Newtonian world has been superseded and replaced by Quantum Mechanics. Hitherto, an object has been here. Or else it is there. With ‘QM’, it can be, sort of . . . both here . . . and there (like my reading glasses). Nothing is cut-and-dried. Religion must follow suit, and in places there are signs that some Christians are emboldened to follow the Epiphany Star of Truth wherever it leads.
There has never been a more exciting time to be a scientist – or a Christian.