Preface
THIS BOOK EMBRACES several areas of scientific inquiry that pertain to human origins and destiny. There is an "A–B–C" to its theme, except in reverse order. The opening chapters take the reader into cosmology, the middle chapters focus on biology, and the latter chapters address anthropology. Each chapter adds pieces to the jigsaw puzzle of how the cosmos and life and man originated, and I attempt to join the pieces without benefit of having seen the picture on the box cover.
Each of us has a world view that we believe corresponds to the true image on the box cover. But since no one has ever seen the box cover, all of us are ignorant of not only the true picture, but its unifying fabric. The relationship between the two is called philosophy, an intuitively held ground rule that cannot be logically falsified. One philosophy, materialism, postulates that the image comes from properties of the fabric. Another, theism, teaches that Intelligence designed the picture, using fabric it created. Thus, the starting point of materialism is fabric while that of theism is Intelligence. Since each world view makes different choices about where to join the pieces, each creates a different world. This means that the final picture we create really comes from the creation that we picture.
Early in my scientific career I became impressed with the way differing world views influence how data is interpreted. I soon realized that all conclusions require assumptions that are colored by philosophy. For example, the earth was once believed to be at the center of the world and the planets were thought to be God's domain. These ideas originated in Greece about 500 B.C. and found their way into the tradition of the church and became accepted by a thirteenth-century theologian, Thomas Aquinas. His imaginings
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of God's activity were so unified with the ecclesiastical view of physical matter that when confronted with the fact of planetary motion, he concluded that angels must be pushing the planets around in their orbits.
Aquinas's need to interpret events led him to assign a cause to things within his experience. He understood planetary motion in terms of angels — not because the fact of such motion demanded it, but because angels pushing planets made sense within his world view. Today, people believe that chemical slime came to life of its own accord and that in time it became man. As was true of Aquinas, this belief makes sense to their world view. But just like with planetary motion, the fact of biological change is not at issue. Instead, the question is Who or what is doing the pushing?
There is something within man that prompts him to explain what he sees. It is a universal experience common to every generation. But true explanations come from factual observations, and confidence in them grows as we see more. Let me illustrate this with a simple example. In the colder climes, a modern housewife with a broken refrigerator might place a glass bottle on an outside window ledge to keep milk cold during winter. The next morning she awakes to find the bottle cracked and the milk gone, and ponders why it happened. She decides to put out another bottle only to find milk missing and the new bottle broken the next morning. She then recalls reading in the local newspaper about neighborhood thefts and suspects hungry vandals may be stealing her milk. But her husband remembers an article about orphans going door to door asking for food, and wonders whether they may be taking the milk. But a neighbor later suggests looking for the cause in the expansion of water as it freezes.* Taking his advice she changes over to plastic bottles and the problem disappears.
* Most things shrink as they cool, but water mysteriously reverses direction near the freezing point allowing ice to float and fish to survive winter seasons.
Since no one had actually seen the bottles break, no one really knew why they broke. Each person explained the event by assuming something familiar. The housewife presumed vandals, the husband orphans, and the neighbor the expansion of freezing water. Moreover, the fact that the milk bottles were no longer broken may have been a coincidence; perhaps vandals had been responsible but found another food source the day the change was made to plastic bottles. We can believe that expanding water broke the glass bottles only with a certain level of confidence. If we want greater assurance we must repeat the experiment by putting out large numbers of plastic and glass containers on randomly chosen cold nights and record what happens. If bottles are never broken when plastic is used and are always broken with glass, then we know that vandals or orphans are not our problem. Confidence in our conclusion improves when the number of observations increases.
About twenty-five years ago I was invited to address an international conference held at the University of Pennsylvania. Over a thousand scientists and
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engineers were in attendance from countries all over the world. I recall walking to the podium, looking across the huge auditorium and thinking to myself that the most important part of my presentation would not be the theoretical equations that explain what I had to say, but rather that each person present be able to reproduce what I said when he or she returned home. The capability to reproduce was more important than theoretical possibility, because science is concerned with beliefs that can be established or discarded on the basis of observation. Any belief will do, provided it survives the scrutiny of everyone who tests it.
Suppose I said, "Center a green jelly bean in three hundred grams of clay, bake it for five hours at 400°F., allow to cool and bury it in six feet of sand at full moon. After eight days a little green man will emerge."
As silly as this may sound, if after returning to their respective countries each did what I had said to do and after eight days little green men emerged, the jelly bean recipe would become universally recognized as scientific truth.
Science is indifferent to what happens provided it is seen by all. If the Russian, the German, and the Frenchman could each create little green men out of jelly beans, and if scientists in Japan, Italy, and every other country could do likewise, then green jelly beans would become the object of intense scientific research. The reason is that the phenomenon would be universally experienced.
The problem we face in questions of origin and destiny is that our inquiry essentially involves one-time events that cannot be reproduced for our examination. We are free to design experiments whose data may be repeatedly examined, but it is an entirely different matter to realistically impute the results of those experiments to circumstances billions of years removed in time. Thus, as a practical matter, when something happens only once it becomes a matter for legal rather than scientific inquiry. We can guess at what happened and use science to gather evidence to support one or another hypothesis. But science has no proper jurisdiction in matters of origin or destiny. It can only provide evidence to a jury.
And this brings us to another dilemma. The jury — in the broadest sense, all of us who are concerned about the questions of origin and destiny — does not have a working knowledge of modern science. Large segments of the population are hopelessly lost trying to comprehend the meaning of what science says it has proved true. Most people, therefore, must depend upon the "expert" to tell them what it all means. But science can only describe things that are reproducible, like repeatedly measuring the time it takes an apple to fall. But we cannot measure yesterday or tomorrow; instead science can only confirm something in the present. Moreover, this confirmation occurs in such highly specialized fields that the rest of us are, for all practical purposes, helpless to verify the conclusions the "expert" presents as evidence.
The Bible, on the other hand, makes certain absolute statements, e.g., "In the beginning, God created. . . ." Creation is set forth in the Bible as a
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religious doctrine whose validity depends on revelation rather than observation. Since not everyone accepts the Bible as "God breathed" and therefore trustworthy, the "knowledge" that "God created" is not universally accepted.
In effect, the two world views present us with different vehicles for deliverance — one is the God described by Scripture, and the other is the progress advanced by science. This progress is universally demonstrated in tractors for food and electric light bulbs and rockets to the moon. But although the eternal truth claimed by the Bible is selectively experienced only by those who believe, yet there is no logical reason why the two systems of truth cannot rationally coexist. However, the implicit assumption in our day is that "selective" knowledge is untrue because truth must be experienced universally.
Did the world have a beginning, or has it always existed? What of life itself? What was its origin? And how did man come to be? Taking their cues from outdated beliefs and popular stories, many will join the pieces of the puzzle and create the aforementioned box cover with little if any regard for the natural pattern that is miraculously painted across the fabric of the universe. This popular outlook is a modern blindspot that downplays "providence" in favor of attitudes mesmerized by a methodology that extols physical matter. One might accept this indifference were it not for the infinity that truly separates the thousands of biological miracles operating in just one cell of our body each second, rendering man's greatest achievements small by comparison.
How we join the pieces is determined by how we conceive reality. The stakes are really very high because the present construction concludes that science is man's best hope for the future. However, if our 5,000-year history of wars, prisons, and bloodshed means anything, then the prospect of nuclear suicide may more truly be our fate than any "inevitable" advance toward Utopia promised by present attitudes. This book proposes a box cover that gives insight into human failure, perspective on human achievement, and exposure to a destiny away from slime and through space-time. The paths we walk may at times be unfamiliar — yet they will lead us to conclusions that could prove invaluable, and that offer escape from our past, and the present hope of a glorious destiny.
ROBERT GANGE
