Could God have created a universe where life started with an ingenious system we call RNA and DNA which would evolve to thrive in many environments, and into a being of sufficient thinking capability, to supply a soul?

This question is another version of an old and dishonest ploy used by creationists to try to trap scientists into admitting that there is a God. But the creationists are not nearly as clever as they believe themselves to be.

Here’s how it works:

Admit a few facts that science has established beyond all reasonable doubt.
Point out things that science cannot (yet) explain.
Claim that God, or some variety of religious belief, provides the answers that science cannot, thereby proving the existence of said God.
This approach is known as the “God of the Gaps” fallacy – the axiom that whatever gaps exist in scientific knowledge can only be filled by the agency of God. This fallacy has been around at least since the middle of the 19th century, but it never seems to lose its appeal to creationists. Whenever science fills in one of the gaps, they just move on to another one.

From God of the Gaps

But let’s play out this little scenario anyway.

It’s true enough that science has no explanation for how the fundamental forces that govern the nature and existence of matter – the strong and weak nuclear forces, electromagnetism and gravity – came to be. More specifically, science can’t account for the various mathematical constants that govern their strength. Small tweaks in these constants would result in a universe in which molecules or planets would not form, thus precluding the existence of any recognizable form of life. If you want to say that some power beyond human comprehension accounts for these constants, then I can’t really argue with that position.

But the assumption that the particular set of physical constants we observe lead inevitably to the evolution of intelligence is just another fallacy. Our existence is the result of a long chain of contingent events, none of which was inevitable or even foreseeable.

To pick a couple of highlights, consider the Permian extinction 250 million years ago. 70% of all vertebrate phyla perished in this event. The ancestors of mammals did not, although the reasons for their survival are far from clear. The Permian extinction was caused (probably) by the convergence of several catastrophes – an asteroid impact, massive volcanism and extreme greenhouse effect warming due to methane release. Change the timing or presence of any one of these factors, and the composition of surviving phyla changes dramatically. Mammals, as we know them, would not likely have evolved.

Same thing goes for the Cretaceous extinction, the one that cleared out the dinosaurs (except for the therapods), and opened up the ecological space for large mammals. If that asteroid had missed Earth, dinosaurs (which had dominated Earth for far longer than the mammals have) would probably still dominate.

Our own primate lineage has gone through a number of severe population bottlenecks, reducing the number of our ancestors to a few thousand or even a few hundred at various points. Any number of disasters – climate change, disease, predation, competition – could have wiped out our ancestors long before they evolved the capacity to imagine a Higher Being in their own image. Many hominin species were in fact wiped out at this time

From Late Pleostocene Human Population Bottlenecks. . . (Toba)

So yes, given a certain set of physical constants, I think it was fairly likely that nucleic acid/protein based life would evolve. But the evolution of bipedal large-brained hominids was a freak occurrence, fantastically improbable and not at all foreseeable or inevitable. It is no evidence at all for divine agency.

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