Warp Drive and Snake Oil Salesmen
I love inventing games. I rarely get them to the point where you can actually play them unless they are card games, but I love inventing the various bits of games.
A couple of years ago, I started working on a game that involved faster-than-light travel. Now, the thing that interested me at the time was that in many science-fiction books and movies many different forms of ‘FTL’ existed. Among these are naturally occurring gates, intentionally created gates extra dimensional travel and the ubiquitous warp drive.
One of the most amazing movies ever created was the movie Galaxy Quest. In that movie, among other plot elements, was the idea of a bunch of has-been actors being taught how to use a spaceship by a bunch of extreme fans; these fans having entire encyclopedias that lay out the exact workings of this futuristic starship.
In movies and books about life in early America, one popular plot element is the ‘snake oil salesman’. These individuals went from town to town, just ahead of lynch mobs, selling a variety of homemade concoctions to gullible townspeople.
“What,” I can hear you asking, “do these two things have to do with each other?” The answer is that they both have a better idea of how their products work than do the purveyors of biogenesis. Oh, and they both knew they were peddling fiction.
The best defence we have seen so far on this thread for the evolutionary idea of abiogenesis is that some of the material for the first life may have gathered on clay or formed via a lightning bolt. This is not remotely close to a theory of how that organism arrived or what it was like.
And yet its proponents speak as if evolution was a proven fact of the universe. Nothing in all of science, we are told, makes sense outside of evolution. And they don’t seem to see that these are contradictory. “I have no idea how this happened, but it is evident that it did,” seems to be the argument.
It is absurd for the Evolutionist to complain that it is unthinkable for an admittedly unthinkable God to make everything out of nothing, and then pretend that it is more thinkable that nothing should turn itself into everything.
― G.K. Chesterton
How are these reconciled? I would argue it is because they have to be. Consider a classic locked room mystery. You have the Duke’s body in the room, with a bullet hole in it and blood all over, and you have some serious locks on the doors. No one could have gotten in… except someone must have gotten in. How that mystery gets resolved will depend on your presuppositions (and the skill of the mystery author). No gun, no bullet, no way for someone to have been in the room, but you will still assume a murder. Still, assume a murderer.
Which the author might provide you. They might provide you with a secret compartment or a hole through which the murderer fired a bullet.
Or the author might surprise you and have it turn out to be a suicide involving a gun made out of dry ice and strings.
But the point is that you don’t know how it happened… but you have your presuppositions. You come to the story assuming certain things, and you read the story. And a good author will find a way to ruin your presuppositions.
So, what of evolution? It seems to me that the problem with believers in evolution is that evolution is not the conclusion to their argument; it is their starting point. It is impossible for them, indeed for pretty much anyone, to say, “I come to this discussion ambivalent as to whether the world and all that is in it came about through blind chance of purposeless nature or the intentional act of an omnipotent God”.
And this is true socially as well. It is hard to imagine someone saying, “I don’t really care whether my views line up with the great mass of educated elite or a small group of extremist Christians”.
Christians need to argue in favour of creation because it is a cornerstone of our theology. We are not ambivalent as to whether God created the world or it came about by chance. We are not ambivalent as to whether the world was created very good or whether it randomly appeared after aeons of blind atoms careening about an uncaring universe. We believe that death came with the sin of Adam; it is not the building block of Adam’s creation.
If, on the other hand, you deny the existence of a creator God, if you believe that our world came about by chance, if all we have is blind nature; then evolution is your best bet… indeed, practically the only bet. One reason why evolutionists are so bad at debating the issue, indeed why they are so reluctant to debate, is that they literally can conceive of no other option. The mere suggestion of any other option is philosophically offensive.
