NigeriansTalk

Here is a response from my per­sonal blog to Think­ing about Evo­lu­tion, writ­ten by Femi Owagbemi, a med­ical doc­tor in Nige­ria. I couldn’t resist post­ing it here. This and other responses from Square One can be found here.

Evo­lu­tion is not just a bio­log­i­cal con­cept. It occurs in all facets of life. It is nei­ther merely a human phe­nom­e­non but is com­mon to all life and even some­times to non-living things as we manip­u­late them to suit our own evo­lu­tion. I believe the aim of all evo­lu­tion is to increase the chances of sur­vival and to improve the qual­ity of that survival.

I will not pre­tend to fully under­stand bio­log­i­cal evo­lu­tion by nat­ural selec­tion as it is a con­cept that requires some seri­ous study to be fully appre­hended. More­over, there are many the­o­ries as to the processes involved and as to the actual mem­bers of the sup­posed ances­try of mod­ern Homo sapi­ens or Homo sapi­ens sapi­ens and our said rela­tion­ship with this ancestry.

What is cer­tain is that fos­sils have been found and prob­a­bly many more will be. If these find­ings are real, as I am apt to believe they are, and not forged, then these so called human species from the early Aus­tralo­p­ithe­cus to the late Homo must have existed. The facts speak for them­selves. Whether what is pro­pounded from these find­ings is cor­rect is another mat­ter entirely. Sci­ence itself evolves as more infor­ma­tion becomes avail­able. Many of the the­o­ries that reigned back in the day are now obso­lete. The Earth was once believed to be flat and sup­pu­ra­tion was once thought to be essen­tial for wound healing.

Faith that is true does not deny the facts. It seeks to offer the truth about them. This is where con­tro­versy should arise if there are dis­sent­ing views and not over unde­ni­able facts. Cre­ation sci­ence has there­fore given room in cre­ation­ism for the facts pre­sented by the fos­sils. This young-earth cre­ation­ism and non-traditional old-earth cre­ation­ism does not deny the facts but offers pos­si­ble expla­na­tions while main­tain­ing belief in cre­ation. Their the­o­ries are Flood Geol­ogy for young-earth cre­ation­ism and the Day-Age and Gap the­o­ries for old-earth. Tra­di­tional cre­ation­ists, I believe, still stick with cre­ation with­out enter­tain­ing the pos­si­bil­ity of pre-historic man’s existence.

I believe that all life as we now know it was cre­ated by God at a time that the earth was with­out form and void or unoc­cu­pied. I believe that all of mankind as it exists today is from the first man and woman – Adam and Eve, both of whom were cre­ated by God and did not evolve from a lower life form. Adam was formed as a man and he came to life when God breathed into his nos­trils. He formed Eve from the rib which he took out of Adam and thus set human­ity into motion. They only needed to pro­cre­ate thereafter.

They both started as intel­li­gent beings capa­ble of social inter­ac­tion. I believe Lucifer was cast down after his rebel­lion before this cre­ation or re-creation if you choose. This may have led to the destruc­tion of the world which existed then and prob­a­bly had all these pre-historic crea­tures such as the so-called ances­tors of man and dinosaurs, fos­sils of whom we see today. Hence, the earth became form­less and vacant.

I can under­stand adap­ta­tions such as a weight-lifter build­ing mus­cle and hav­ing his/her bones become more sturdy or the loss of such mus­cle mass in times of star­va­tion. I can also under­stand an increase in my skin pig­men­ta­tion when I’m exposed to more intense sun rays and a return to my nor­mal com­plex­ion when I’m back to less ‘radi­a­tion’. I can even under­stand how long pow­er­ful arms and curved fin­gers, fea­tures that made aus­tralo­p­iths agile in trees became less pro­nounced in Homo who did not need to be a good climber.

What I’m yet to under­stand though is how these phe­no­types trans­late into the genes for expres­sion in gen­er­a­tions in the dis­tant future or how organ­isms from dis­tant phyla or classes could have been related in the past how­ever dis­tant that past might be. Homo sapi­ens sapi­ens may there­fore some­day evolve into some species yet unknown once we can no longer inter­breed and thus become repro­duc­tively iso­lated, right?

My lim­ited under­stand­ing how­ever does not repu­di­ate the pos­si­bil­ity of bio­log­i­cal evo­lu­tion. I in fact tend to believe that the power that makes it pos­si­ble for mankind to be per­pet­u­ated by pro­cre­ation such that only one man and woman needed to be cre­ated, and that fer­til­iza­tion pro­duces a mass of cells which becomes an embryo, fetus etc., that such power can also cause organ­isms to evolve to higher life forms.

I am there­fore not afraid to believe bio­log­i­cal evo­lu­tion could have taken place some­time. I how­ever believe Adam was not a prod­uct of this process. I also think it is para­dox­i­cal to believe God has power to cre­ate the world we live in and to do all we believe he has done, indeed to say he is both omni­scient and omnipo­tent and yet deny the pos­si­bil­ity that he could carry out some­thing as sim­ple as bio­log­i­cal evo­lu­tion – at least as sim­ple as the nat­u­ral­ists or Dar­win­ists have por­trayed it.

I will end by con­ced­ing that just as the sci­en­tists have insuf­fi­cient infor­ma­tion to make incon­tro­vert­ible con­clu­sions from their find­ings, cre­ation­ists may also have insuf­fi­cient infor­ma­tion to refute the the­ory of evo­lu­tion by nat­ural selec­tion save to say Adam was not a part of it. This refu­ta­tion in the extent to which it can go is based on the bible which I must say, we have not yet fully under­stood. The sci­en­tists work cease­lessly to improve their asser­tions. Cre­ation­ists must also seek to under­stand the bible better.

I must add that I also do not believe that man as we know him now, being the most com­plex of species, will evolve into any higher life form. I believe every­thing the bible says about our ori­gins and our destination.

Oluwafemi Owagbemi
OAU Teach­ing Hos­pi­tals,
Osun, Nigeria