'Loose Talk'
By Benjamin Benedict

Possibilities

Richard Dawkins makes an easy mark out of ‘Creationists’, ridiculing their concept of God.  He ridicules those – some teachers even – who embrace the concept as written in the Scriptures, that the World is less than twenty thousand years old.

Strangely Mr Dawkins rarely if ever employs the science of astronomy which in his favour states that the Universe itself is about fifteen billion years old. This is because astronomical science, as opposed to evolutionary science is a lot less sure of itself.

Evolutionary science now has DNA to back it up but astronomical science doesn’t even have a clue as to whether the Universe will ever contract back into its original form or keep on expanding forever.

There was a thought that black holes might provide a means of travelling enormous distances across the universe which would otherwise be impossible without more generations passing in the course of the journey than have gone by since Homo sapiens first appeared. It now seems that a black hole is not ‘open’ long enough for such a trip to be made. In Universal terms we appear to be stuck where we are, within the confines of the speed of light. If I was a betting man, I would say that such a proposition is likely to be ‘on again–off again’ any number of times, in the next century or two. If I was even more of a betting man, I would add another ‘if’ and say that if we can keep this earth together for long enough it is only a matter of time before this speed of light limitation is kicked into touch one way or the other.

And this is what makes Dawkins stick in my throat as much as the Creationists themselves. If I was to say that there is more involved in evolution than survival and procreation, it would not be at all controversial. Evolution after all is about a species finding a better way, not continuing along the same path forever, but then again in scientific terms a better way must necessarily demonstrate greater efficiency and it would follow that in the course of time there would be a weeding out of those less efficient, leading to a winner in the evolutionary stakes. You can of course call us the winners, but we are nothing without the losers and being winners doesn’t streamline things at all. Changes in species appear at random and they either work or they don’t. All this goes on in the context of many different environments and what might work in one, won’t work in another. This is efficiency in the narrowest of terms. In other words evolution is not some nicely demonstrated scientific principle, it is the most wonderful creational chaos which might just as well be triggered by God as anyone or anything else.

Definitive explanations are like great cities. You think that they are there forever, but they are not. I am afraid that possibilities are the best we have to go on. No, that’s not true. Possibilities are the greatest thing going, and I am not afraid at all.      

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