wo questions confront us every day of our lives. Where do we come from? And where are we going? As the T truism goes, we can only understand where we are going if we can but better understand the trajectory that set us in our present course.
And here, we are not just talking about the trajectory that technology took us and its impact on the state of the planet.
That we can understand. Quite evidently, the sad state of our planet is a casualty of the advances technology came with, that ravaged our planet with pollution and a rapid depletion of resources. So we understand where this will take us. We now want to know how everything started.
If we at least knew all about how existence came to be, we would be in a better position to r eally understand Nature and ourselves, and would have the wherewithal to recreate things if ever we ever reach a tipping point of doom. After all, we would have all of Nature’s secrets with us.
But no one in this planet can claim that we understand all about how Nature works. So, what goes further than the fact that we now know enough to augment or destroy Nature? It is the question of what made this delightful playground so nicely laid out for us. Do we still have a connection with that Primal Impetus? If it is “God”, have we any hope of finding this Being and asking a bunch of pertinent questions?
If it is Evolution, do we have any hope of re-finding—in a fully conscious way—all the mechanics of this auto-process that brought us all this complexity…the secrets of which—
though embedded in our cells and organs and our brain—we are still battling to fully understand?
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Let us be clear about one thing. Our bodies are composed of millions of cells, each doing a wonderful job. Now, a dog does not worry about what makes its tail wag or why it has to eat…at least that is what we think. It only knows that things work in a wonderfully coordinated way.
When things go wrong for any reason—say, the dog got bitten by another dog—it trusts that by licking its wounds something positive will happen: that the blood flow would cease and a magical process of healing will take place. Soon, it is as good as new.
For the more curious (like us as a species), we want to go beyond this mere trust in the system. We want to know how this process works. The white blood corpuscles, we know, generate certain stringy materials that cover the open would with scab, and the cells underneath the scab then rearrange themselves to work under this protective cover such that when it is all done, the scab falls off and there is new skin—
just as good as the old one.
And there are two levels to the why of it all. The first, even the dog knows. It is so that the body is repaired and we can continue with our lives. The “larger” question is why must we continue with our lives? What is it all for?
Although we can be aware of a good part of the process, there is still much about the cell we do not know. It takes time and trouble—years of dedicated study—to find out how the system works. And yet it is within us. And atop of it all is a very smart brain that is given the task of working it all out.
But even now it cannot figure out something that was there in all its complexity 65 million years ago—when dinosaurs last roamed this planet—and even well before that.
So there is no denying that this Evolution—if we may call it that—is a very smart process indeed… no matter how much we may wish to dumb it down. Some might argue that it even had a periscope into what it wanted to be before it set 2
out to become what it became. Even Richard Dawkins does not really dispute that Evolution is driven by design.
His argument is that Evolution felt its way through like a
“blind clockmaker”—the actual title of one of his books—and that through many small trials and errors it was able to come up with a small step that made it survive better and outperform its rivals, until it reaches near the top of the “hill of complexity” to become remarkably adapted.
According to this line of reasoning (or more like a line of argument) we have come a long way, baby! But the journey is so long—millions of years—that we can’t quite remember it all… like a great grandfather who hardly remembers his own children, let alone their children’s children.
Where we come from is where we have been. And at least the body knows that because it is doing what it has always done—whether “we” (our conscious memory banks) know exactly how, at this stage. Sadly, our brain has to “relearn”
all this knowledge…and still it falls far short.
There is a cop-out we can use when things get too complex.
We can say that it is “axiomatic”. In other words, it is just
there…so deal with it! But that cop-out is not good enough for this book. We need to come up with something more conclusive, something we can wrap our minds around.
Let us address “Who made the maker?” and see if it is a sound argument. One might aver, “If we cannot say ‘God (a Maker) made something’, we cannot equally say ‘Evolution made this’, for what made evolution?” In short, by merely substituting “What” for “Who” we are not really advancing the argument. Both are premised on a basi s that is axiomatic and mysterious: that something made Life.
So, if by “making” we mean a process of synthesis that required orderliness and intelligence to arrive at, we are also contrasting it with blind force…for example, wind blasting sand onto a rock and thus carving its surface into certain patterns and shapes.
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But Evolutionists have it slightly better. By believing in
“What” rather than “Who” they remove the idea of an Absentee Landlord—who we address later in the book. In other words, if there is “God” why doesn’t he reveal himself even in cases of foul murders, thefts, rapes, war, etc.?
And that opens up another matter. Does “God” have to be a man whereas there are at least two sexes? How do we know
“God” is male and not female? This a much-debated concept in modern times…but at this stage in our book it does not advance our progress by much. We want to know who or what designed the Life we see around us…because designed it is. For now, it matter not that it is “God” or “Evolution”.
Not until we get certain fundamental answers.
So, merely making “Evolution” the answer does not make the basic constructs or arguments go away. For, we would still want to know what put the fundamentals there—even if we are talking mere hydrogen, the simplest element. Making Hydrogen the final axiom is, we averred, a cop-out. If we leave it at that, it opens up more questions than answers…as we are about to find out in the next chapter when we deal with the constructs of time.
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