Life - How Did it Get Here? By Evolution or Creation?

That's the title of a well meaning (but deeply flawed) book published by Jehovah's Witnesses, known as the "Creation" book (to Witnesses). OK. I'll now answer the question it poses, absolutely, finally, and irrefutably. Only joking. Let's think about the question itself though. I'd like to suggest, no assert (posit? I hate that word...) that the question itself is questionable, that it is a false choice type of logical fallacy. In other words: what's preventing life from "getting here" by Evolution AND Creation, OR neither? The question is loaded, so to speak. Of course the unnamed author(s) of the book already have a head start on us - they know the answer, and work backwards from that (so that you're probably best reading the last "preachy" chapter first to understand the bias of the whole book). Now, I'm not saying that life DIDN'T get here by creation, but neither am I ruling evolution out. I think that the exclusive claims of the Creationists (Witnesses are day-age Creationists) and the Evolutionists are both incomplete without the other, and perhaps they are both incomplete even with the other. My personal opinion is that there is more to life than meets the eye, but of course I can't prove it in a lab - nobody can. I do feel that Evolution has not satisfactorily explained the emergence of life from non-life (though I've read the explanations), but that evolution does seem to be at work in nature seems obvious, and is put well here by Carl Sagan (Cosmos p42):

The fossil evidence could be consistent with the idea of a great designer; perhaps some species are destroyed when the designer becomes dissatisfied with them, and new experiments are attempted on an improved design. But this notion is a little disconcerting. Each plant and animal is exquisitely made. Should not a supremely competent designer have been able to make the intended variety from the start? The fossil record implies trial and error, an inability to anticipate the future, features inconsistent with an efficient designer (although not with a designer of more remote and indirect temperament).

If nature is a car, then perhaps the evolutionists see natural selection as the engine, and point to the wheels moving as proof of the correctness of their theory. Yet the creationist sees the foot on the pedal, how it controls the engine, and how the hand at the wheel steers the car, and perhaps sees no (need for the) engine at all. We can see how both views are only correct when they include the other. I know metaphors can be made to prove anything, but maybe, just maybe, on this twisty road that led to us, that's how things are.

Drip, drip...

I was standing under a shelter this morning, waiting for the bus, as the sky slowly wrung out its endless grey clouds over Saltburn-by-the-sea (under-the-rain). Apart from a few pauses - whilst the cloud was moved into a new wringing position? - the rain seems to have, well rained (in its raining, as the Bible would say) for a week. I knew we should have called our son Noah.

Anyway, I stood watching a drip - many drips - drip (in their dripping) from the top of the shelter to the path below. A constant drip, drip, drip (and unheard on the pavement below: splash, splash, splash). And I thought, how tied - nailed - to the present moment we are. Don't ask me why I thought that. Why did I think that, I ask myself? Water drip-drip-tick-ticks like a clock perhaps. I think my thought was that I couldn't physically make a water droplet STOP, mid-air, like you would see on a photograph. We are IN the moment, constantly, and yet the moment is constantly moving - it cannot be stopped. I know that our perception of the moment can be changed by chemicals (internal and external). I could think that the drop was moving faster or slower than it actually was. That's not the same as actually affecting the droplet though, is it? It's only affecting myself. And the flow of time cannot be affected actually (in everyday life).

Affecting yourself and not the droplet sounds like a Buddhist admonition. That's funny, because the only Buddhist literature I've read contains a saying of Thich Nhat Hanh which fits snugly into this post, and it's stayed with me ever since reading the book:

dwell in the present moment, it is a wonderful moment.

I think being aware of the moment, as I was whilst watching the water drip from the shelter, can be a very useful experience (which you can have whenever you choose). And some assert that this is the path to immortality - that an infinity of time is perceptible within the shortest moment. Perhaps in a way, if the moment is all we have (after all, what are memories but past moments?) then we have as much now as we would have if we lived forever - we are living forever now, within the (unperceived) moment, which we could slice into smaller and smaller moments, without end (this reminds me of this). Yet the moment itself is just as fleeting, it does not change. We are carried along on a string of moments, all connected, to our deaths.

This is made poignantly clear in The Sweetshop Owner (spoilers ahead), where the main character becomes insidiously trapped in a routine (outside the moment?) in which past and present blur; a (final) walk becomes confused with a race run at school (we never find out if he won, only that he run), waiting for a daughter who deserted (or better: deserts, present tense) him becomes waiting for death itself ("she will come, she will come"). His daughter does not come, and the story ends a moment before his own death - as it must, being told in the first-person. His death, unheard by the reader, is like the silent splash of the water droplet on the pavement. A reviewer on Amazon(.co.uk) complains

One thing I hate is books that end inconclusively, especially when you've had the patience and persistence to see it through to the last page.

I think he wanted to hear the splash. Or at least for the daughter to come, and give meaning to the main character's life, right at the end. This is why I love the book so much - and why Mr Reviewer above didn't? - it is true to life, with all of its mundane, unseen and unheard tragedies. Go and read a fairy tale if you want closure. Me? I'm dwelling in this moment, it is a wonderful (but wet) moment.