Darwin team takes on Gods work

A group of Christian creationists in the United States distributed unusual presents last week. These were copies of a book that suggests God and Allah didn’t do in the beginning exactly what many believe.

Coincidentally, scientists under mountains on France and Switzerland’s border began experiments that might or might not say the same. Whatever the case, arguments between creationists and evolutionists will undoubtedly hit higher decibels.

The book is Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species published 150 years ago last Thursday, nine months after Darwin’s 200th birthday anniversary.

The free copies hit campuses on Wednesday. Experiments at the Larger Hardon Collider began a few days earlier.

Darwin’s book advances the theory that new species evolve from previous ones. The Hardon experiments aim at checking another theory, the Big Bang — what happened at and after the moment the universe came into being.

Christians, with creationists at the forefront, believe God created the universe and everything in it in six days. Everything, therefore, is today as it was. As a result, any talk humans might have evolved from apes, for example, sends creationists ballistic.

Known arguments

The US creationists’ version of On the Origin of Species includes an introduction written by Mr Ray Comfort, an evangelist. Predictably, the debunk-Darwin introduction re-asserts known arguments. It hardly contains nothing of Darwin’s propositions scientists have proved correct.

Like their Christian counterparts, Muslims believe One God, Allah, created the universe and everything in it in six days. Darwinism isn’t much of an issue in the Muslim world. Nonetheless, Muslims have their own gung-ho creationists.

Most prominent is Mr Adnan Oktar, who writes under the pen name Harun Yahya, in Turkey. He is currently working on volumes — 5.85 kilogrammes each — of his Darwin-debunking manifesto The Atlas of Creation. He has already beaten Mr Comfort in free distribution to schools in Europe.

Additionally, copies in 57 languages, including Swahili and Albanian, are available. For Muslims lacking appetite for evolutionary debate, a refuge exists. The Arabic word for days, ayyam, also translates to “ages” or “long periods of time.” Whatever human beings discover no matter when it came into being, Allah created.

That view resembles that of Rev Charles Kingsley of the Anglican Church. On reading Darwin’s book, he wrote the author, saying he thought noble “god has to constantly create new forms and fill in the gaps that he’s left in his own creation.”

The Hardon experiments aim at investigating happenings in “long periods of time,” 13.7 billion years ago when scientists think the Big Bang occurred. Prior to that, there was nothing, then the universe. It isn’t that simple.

Something scientists call singularity — infinitesimally hot, dense, and small existed. What it is, nobody knows. The thinking is the singularity inflated, not exploded, and, Voila! The universe came into being, cooling and up to present expanding toward infinity.

Scientists will do this at the Hardon lab: accelerate at mind-boggling speed beams of protons, elementary particles with a positive electric charge, in opposite directions in a 27-kilometre tunnel. Proton collision will reproduce the Big Bang conditions, as scientists theorise. May be, may be not.
Anyway, scientists will document whatever happens. Adding to whatever human beings know and can prove Darwin might end up just another infinitesimal in the universe scheme of things. How little human beings know will become even more evident.