The View From 1776

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Eliminating God from the universe is the very first order of business for the liberal-socialist mind.  Without God, man stands alone as the creator-god of all he surveys.

This was the motivation behind Charles Darwin’s theory of life-as-an-accident and the evolution of all life forms from that accident, purely by chance mutations and survival of the fittest. 

But Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth” predicts a Biblical-style event that contradicts one of evolution’s most fundamental assumptions.

Mr. Gore predicts a global-warming catastrophe featuring massive flooding, with major portions of the earth under as much as twenty feet of water, together with increased frequency and intensity of huge storms, wildfires, and droughts.  Great numbers of species, Mr. Gore tells us, will perish and the world as we have known it will cease to exist within ten years if we don’t ratify the Kyoto treaty.

In short, we face a repetition of the Bible’s account of the great flood which Noah survived in the ark.  God saved Noah; Mr. Gore will save humanity.

That is what evolutionists and their opponents in the 19th century dismissively called catastrophism, a major event that fundamentally alters the course of life on earth.

Catastrophism is, according to the Wikipedia, “in geology, the doctrine that at intervals in the earth’s history all living things have been destroyed by cataclysms (e.g., floods or earthquakes) and replaced by an entirely different population. During these cataclysms the features of the earth’s surface, such as mountains and valleys, were formed.”

Darwinian evolutionists dismiss catastrophism, because it conflicts at the most fundamental level with the assumptions necessary to support the speculative hypothesis of evolution. 

Charles Lyell, Darwin’s geology professor, advocated instead the doctrine of uniformitarianism, without which the infinitely slow process, over billions of years, of Darwinian evolution is insupportable.

The PhysicalGeometry.net website explains: 
http://www.physicalgeography.net/fundamentals/10c.html

“Uniformitarianism is one of the most important unifying concepts in the geosciences. This concept developed in the late 1700s, suggests that catastrophic processes were not responsible for the landforms that existed on the Earth’s surface. This idea was diametrically opposed to the ideas of that time period which were based on a biblical interpretation of the history of the Earth. Instead, the theory of uniformitarianism suggested that the landscape developed over long periods of time through a variety of slow geologic and geomorphic processes. 

“..... The theory of uniformitarianism was also important in shaping the development of ideas in other disciplines. The work of Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace on the origin of the Earth’s species extended the ideas of uniformitarianism into the biological sciences. The theory of evolution is based on the principle that the diversity seen in the Earth’s species can be explained by the uniform modification of genetic traits over long periods of time.”

Uniformitarianism is even more essential in contemporary evolutionary theories such as that of Richard Dawkins, who postulates that DNA is a digital record of all life forms that have ever existed, a giant computer file into which each new chance mutation that survives the process of natural selection is saved.

In “The Blind Watchmaker,” Professor Dawkins writes: “The messages that DNA molecules contain are all but eternal when seen against the time scale of individual lifetimes.  The lifetimes of DNA messages (give or take a few mutations) are measured in units ranging from millions of years, or, in other words, ranging from 10,000 individual lifetimes to a trillion individual lifetimes.  Each individual organism should be seen as a temporary vehicle in which DNA messages spend a tiny fraction of their geological lifetimes.”

Evolution thus could not have occurred as hypothesized had there been any major catastrophes, such as the predicted global-warming, that wiped out life forms as the carriers of the DNA digital files.  If that happens, then evolution, in Professor Dawkins’s version, would have to start all over from square one and create vast new chains of gradually increased digital information in the DNA molecules, added by chance mutations.

This leaves Al Gore’s theory of global-warming catastrophe in an uncomfortable position.  If his predicted worldwide cataclysm can occur, why only this one time in the presumably trillions of years of geological and biological uniformitarian gradualism postulated by the hypothesis of evolution?  Have the evolutionists been wrong all along?

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