Hi Jeff. You write: >When I was fifteen years old, a local business backfilled an area to extend >a parking lot. They used ash from a coal fired power station to fill the >area to over 10 ft deep. At some time later, a 20 minute thunderstorm cut >an 8 ft deep gully through the semi-stable ash. I walked through the gully >an hour after the storm. By that time, the storm runoff had slowed to a >trickle. What I saw was astounding! All of the features that make the >Grand Canyon instantly recognizable, to anyone who had merely seen pictures >of it, were laid out before my eyes in miniature with walls as high as I >could reach. I wish I had gone back with a camera.
Here the world was demonstrating something for you, a gift of knowledge as it were. The Grand Canyon is truly an awe inspiring creation, human artists spend their lives trying to emulate the great majesty and mystery of that landscape. And before your eyes, that landscape was created in microform, in the space of 20 minutes, by the agency of precipitation. Had you taken some pictures, I'm sure you could fool many people into believing it was the Grand Canyon itself, so long as the scale in the pic was unclear. This is a very profound, Jeff. Please think hard on this, a great thing was revealed to you. Having seen that for yourself, can you still assert the impossibility of the creation of life by similar means? Is a single cell organism more complex really than the Grand Canyon? Some of you may find this a sterile idea, but please think further. You might find God not to be hiding in a 2000 year old book, but right beneath your feet. Life is not an artificial creation; it came from the rocks themselves. Are you a bird that has landed on the apple tree, or an apple grown from the tree itself? I disagree with Harry that we shouldn't ask origin questions, although his general point ( the origin of the universe itself ) may prove to be an impossible question to answer. In the case of life on Earth, that seems to be a very reasonable question to answer, and we're making some good new progress with that in our current space exploration. I encourage you to question Evolutionary Theory, it's what science is all about. No serious scientist will say to you, "believe this or leave". I wish you had better motives, but that's irrelevant and my own prejudice. It really doesn't matter what your motives are, just like the rain I mention above, it cuts away the dross and leaves behind a beautiful work of art. All that's required for us to come up with the correct theory is for enough of us to keep questioning and randomly banging away. Doesn't matter who or why. I can at least guarantee you that the end result won't be Darwin ( nor God for that matter ) but some new, more beautiful and perfect thing. K.
