The question of the origin of the universe and the birth of life has long been of interest to mankind. Evolution and creationism are the two main explanations for this problem. Evolutionary theory argues that species change through natural selection and genetic variation, while creationism explains that an intelligent designer created the universe and life. The two theories use different rationales and logic to interpret the origin of the universe and the birth of life.
The question of where everything in the universe began has been answered in different ways throughout human history. Up until a certain point in history, people in different cultures often sought answers to the question of where they came from by telling stories about the creation of the world by beings with supernatural powers beyond human comprehension. In 1859, however, a groundbreaking and scientifically accepted theory was published that explained how the world came to be the way it is today without the need for such a transcendent being. In his book On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin laid out a system for explaining the philosophical questions that every human being has pondered at one time or another, using only the visible. As a result, to this day, the question of where the world came from and how it came to be the way it is today is largely framed by two opposing arguments: evolution and creationism.
The truth is, it doesn’t really matter where you come from. If you don’t know about it, you can still live your visible life. However, in a world with so many values and conflicts, it’s hard to get a sense of where you came from and why you exist if you don’t have an idea of how you should live in the world. In this article, we’ll consider the origins of everything in the universe and discuss where we came from and what attitude we should have toward the world. First, let’s take a look at one of the two opposing positions, the theory of evolution.
The theory of evolution consists of three main propositions. First, species are not immutable. Given enough time, a biological species can undergo a process called evolution, resulting in a new species with a different appearance. Second, this evolutionary process can explain almost all of the diversity of life. This means that the roots of many of the different species that exist today can be traced back to a single origin. Third, this huge process is driven by “natural selection”. Let’s talk about natural selection here.
A classic example is the observation of industrial cancerization of the peppered moth during the British Industrial Revolution. As the trees became mostly black from industrial soot, the lighter-colored moths were heavily eaten by birds, and the darker-colored moths had an advantage in survival. In other words, individuals with genes that give them an advantage in survival will survive and thrive, increasing their population, while those with genes that don’t will decline. Another example of natural selection is the survival of bacteria with genes that make them more resistant to common drugs.
In other words, natural selection is the process by which individuals with genetic traits that favor their survival in a particular environment survive and become part of the change. In the end, what evolutionary theory is saying is that the changes made through natural selection have accumulated to create the diversity of species. At first glance, this seems like a natural process. Indeed, genetic variation is a scientifically observed and proven phenomenon. But the question is whether it can explain the emergence of new species. We used the example of the peppered moth, but that was a mutation within a species. The best way for a moth to break out of its natural enemy relationship with birds is to grow larger and larger and develop physical defenses, such as claws, to compete with them. If moths mutated within the species in this way, and if the individuals that were favored to survive remained and those that were not declined, then the moth species itself should have disappeared, leaving behind a species of large flying creatures that could compete with birds.
In response to the limitations of this explanation for species change, evolutionary theorists’ new explanation is that the changes we can observe occur over short periods of time, so there are no apparently large changes. It is possible for gradual changes to accumulate and cause the emergence of new species, given enough time. However, if gradual change occurs and organisms change over a long period of time, there must be, or have been, organisms that are intermediate in form between all species. And if new species emerge from gradual change, the intermediate stages must consist of many successive steps, not just one. However, evolutionary theory does not provide a model of the evolutionary flow of any living thing.
The explanation that the complexity and sophistication of biological entities is shaped by natural laws, such as the laws of physics that govern simple particles like electrons and protons, rather than by an intelligent designer, has this limitation. And evolutionary theory can only explain how life began. It doesn’t explain how the first entities we can call living things appeared before that, or how the universe came to be, or how time began. Now let’s take a look at how the other side of the argument, creationism, and specifically intelligent design, explains this.
According to Richard Dawkins, the 19th-century theologian William Paley made the following argument in his treatise Natural Theology.
Suppose I were walking in the grass, and a ‘stone’ caught under my foot, and I questioned how it came to be there. Contrary to what you know, you might answer that it was always there. And it would not be very easy to demonstrate the absurdity of this answer. But suppose you found a ‘clock’ instead of a stone, and if you had to answer how it came to be in that place, you would hardly be able to think of an answer like the one before: I don’t know, but the clock has always been there.
In other words, it’s inconceivable that an object like a complex, sophisticated “clock” could have been created by chance and placed on the ground by natural processes. Paley goes on to write
A watch must have a maker, that is, a person, or persons, in some time and place. He made it deliberately; he knows how to make it, and he designed it for its purpose. The evidence of design that exists in a watch, all the evidence that it was designed, is also present in a work of nature. The difference is that the works of nature are much more complex, perhaps even beyond our imagination.
No living thing could be created by science and technology in the same way that parts are assembled. Much less by chance. This is because living things are so complex and sophisticated. We don’t even know all the ways our bodies interact with each other yet. It’s impossible for something as sophisticated as a human being to have been created by chance; there must be a designer.
Let’s see if the existence of this designer can explain the origin of the universe (preceding the origin of life), which Darwin’s theory could not explain.
If there is a designer who created a universe governed by certain natural laws, one might ask, where did the designer come from? Even if we concede that there is a designer who created the designer, this designer’s lineage must have a starting point. If time had no beginning and no end, it would be infinite, and the points in between the entire flow of time would be undefinable. This can be seen if we consider the concept of infinity in more detail.
When we think of the concept of “infinity,” we tend to think of something so large that we can’t easily define its size. We simply think of something incredibly large. But we can’t actually imagine infinity. As a simple example, we know that a vertical line never ends in our hypothetical world, but no matter how far we walk on it, we can’t find the number “infinity”. At any point, the number is finite. Some might argue that because the vertical line is infinite at both ends, it has no beginning and no end, but because there are points in between that have definite values, it is possible to reach a point that has a finite value even though it has no beginning and no end. However, this argument doesn’t take into account the directionality of the vertical line. We think of a vertical line as having a fixed value because we imagine that we have written numbers on it at regular intervals, but if we erase all the numbers and just think of an infinite line with infinite ends, we don’t know whether a point in the middle divides the line by 1/2 or 1/3. Because it’s infinite in length. A vertical line with a number on it, as we usually think of it, is not an example of actual infinity because it is nothing more than a number that we arbitrarily assign to any point and write a value of 0. In other words, any point in the middle of an infinite line with infinite ends cannot define an absolute, not a relative, position.
The reason time cannot be actually infinite is because we are here in the present moment. If time has no beginning and is infinite, then this moment is an unreachable moment. Therefore, if time has no beginning, this moment is unreachable, and the very existence of this moment is proof that time has a beginning. If we can trace back the designer of the designer, and the designer of the designer, and so on, that is, if there is no first designer that we can reach, then that means that time is infinite, which contradicts the above explanation. Therefore, the finitude of time requires a first designer who can transcend time and cause its beginning. This is the designer we can call the Absolute, God.
So far, we have presented three main arguments for the existence of a designer, an Absolute, who created the world through the blind spot of evolution, the theory of intelligent design, and the concept of infinity. Of course, all of these arguments support the existence of an Absolute. The existence of an Absolute does not imply a chaotic state in which the universe is run by a single entity at will. Rather, it implies that there is a unique and orderly principle of the universe, that there are certain truths that penetrate all things in the world, and that there is a unifying moral standard for human thought and behavior. At the very least, it allows us to make efforts to steer ourselves away from the confused and cowardly behavior of rationalizing things in our own favor on a situation-by-situation basis. This kind of thinking, which starts with acknowledging human limitations, will allow us to treat the world with more care and caution.
