Copyright 2004
Can we determine if biological life on earth
just happened or if God created it? We can't determine if the God of Abraham
created life, but we can evaluate whether or not some type of intelligence
created life.
When police investigate a death or a fire they
don't necessarily need to encounter a murderer or an arsonist to know if
a crime occurred. They try to determine how the death or fire occurred
and then decide whether it could have happened naturally. Many times they
can determine if arson occurred by examining the way a building burned
even though the fire might have destroyed other evidence.
For purposes of this essay, intelligence can
mean a higher dimensional being such as the God of Abraham, some other
god like being such as the Spider Woman and her two sons from the Hopi
accounts, extraterrestrials, or the idea behind Gaea that the earth itself
is somehow alive. The intelligence could even take the form of some type
of beings creating life then creating physical bodies for themselves on
the planet.
The search for life on other planets provides
an example of looking for evidence of intelligence. If a space probe to
a distant planet were to send back pictures showing a structure like the
Eiffel Tower, the Great Wall of China, or the cylindrical tanks often found
at oil refineries, we would assume intelligent beings had lived there.
No natural process would produce such structures.
People at one time believed Mars might have
intelligent life because the planet contained lines that from earth looked
too straight to have been produced by a natural process. Higher resolution
pictures later proved that the lines weren't straight like canals, but
crooked like rivers.
The primary natural process is chaos which
is irregular and unorganized. Chaos produces rivers with irregular watercourses.
Chaos wouldn't produce straight canals, perfectly round tanks or sophisticated
structures like the Eiffel Tower. Chaos would produce a forest of irregularly
spaced trees, but not an orchard with trees organized neatly in rows.
We tend to think of biological processes as
natural because we are biological beings. However, for biological life
to be natural it must result from the interaction of physical forces and
the various chemical elements and the molecules that they produce without
biological processes.
The complexity of biological life and processes
argues strongly for the intervention of some intelligence in its existence
and development. Whether RNA or other complex molecules can develop solely
through physical, non-biological processes is an open question.
The theory of evolution has often been touted
as a way for life for develop without intelligent intervention. However,
the procedures evolutionists claim occurred are more consistent with the
actions of an intelligent being.
Evolutionists believe life developed as simple
cells and then became more complex over a long period of time. Many computer
programmers use a similar approach when developing large programs. They
develop basic programs and gradually add more complex features to them.
Complex technology has been developed in the same way over many years.
Thus development of life under evolution would
be consistent with how an intelligent being might develop biological life.
The process of making animals more complex would be inconsistent with chaos.
Chaos could rearrange genetic information through a process allowing genes
to move among different species, but wouldn't create it.
Many of the molecules in the cell would have
had to be available at the same time. A random creation process couldn't
have created everything at the same time. There is also the problem of
coordinated development of the complex system of bones, muscles, nerves,
etc. needed to move an animal around.
The design of the cell is inconsistent with
chaos. The cell is digital while chaos is analog.
Chaos produces continuous variations. No two
river courses, mountains, etc. are alike. The cell reproduces itself exactly
except when acting on an instruction causing the new cell to access different
instructions. Some research indicates some reproduced cells may have less
"junk DNA" then the parent cells.
Normal cells function precisely according to
the inputs they receive. Chaos produces constant variations in the interaction
of physical forces. The amount of energy the earth receives from the sun
varies over time. Even the earth's orbit around the sun can vary.
Biological life isn't immune to the influence
of chaos. The relative distribution of different forms of genes depends
on chaos. Physical factors like temperature, rainfall and amount of sunlight
influence which characteristics of a plant or animal best suit it for survival
at a given place and time. The presence of other species also influences
which genes are most useful for survival.
Recognizing evidence of intelligent design
is easier than determining how such an intelligence could have created
life. Extraterrestrials could have brought fertilized cells to earth and
placed them in an artificially created environment for development. If
such an event happened in the distant past no recognizable technology would
be likely to survive to the present, even if something had been left behind.
The beliefs of groups in Africa and Japan that their ancestors came from
other planets provides potential evidence of possible extraterrestrial
involvement in life on earth.
Extraterrestrials might also have placed the
basic RNA/DNA on meteorites in the form of viruses or spores and launched
them into space. Those that landed in favorable environments would have
developed. Discovery of such material on meteorites could provide potential
evidence of life coming from this source.
Explaining creation of life by a higher dimensional
being would be more difficult because of the difficulty of perceiving the
possibility of something outside the 3-dimensional Euclidian box we live
in. Such a being could manipulate energy and various forces to produce
a desired outcome or project himself into the 3-dimensional world to directly
produce outcomes.
Such a being could have the capacity to design
reality so that biological life would be self developing. That is, physical
laws including such factors as the spin of subatomic particles could be
set in such a way to predispose certain environments to produce life. Under
this scenario life would appear to have occurred naturally.
A hyper-dimensional being could produce basic
molecules such as RNA in space where the necessary chemicals could be kept
isolated from chemicals that would prematurely degrade them.
Direct evidence of action by a hyper-dimensional or other type being wouldn't exist. However, such a being might provide accounts to intelligent life forms, such as the Genesis account or the Hopi accounts
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