(This article was first published in Jordan’s Living Well magazine)
One day this teacher walked into the classroom with an unusually somber look that I shall never forget. As I discovered in due course, he had intention
ally put on that deeply solemn face because he wanted to tell us a cautionary tale, one that required special dramatic effects.
The teacher, whose name I shall withhold, began his Oscar-winning performance by telling us that his next-door neighbor died a week before. Miraculously, however, he told us that she was given another shot at life and that he just had a chat with her in the staircase of their building where he accidentally bumped into her. He asked her what she witnessed in her brief afterlife encounter and she told him that she saw many women hanging by their long hair which was tied to ceiling rails made of hell fire. This was, she revealed to our mesmerized, almost tearing teacher, their punishment for not covering their hair while they were alive.
Apart from the incredulity of it all, as a young boy fearing for the fate of my mother, whose only sin was not to veil her hair – and having fiddled with matches in my childhood enough times to know how instantly human hair combusts and vaporizes – I intuitively asked the teacher how those women kept hanging from their hair if the rails were on fire. Slightly irked by my interruption, the short and plump story teller walked slowly towards me. As I waited for a comforting explanation, he struck me on my face with a slap that still bellows in my ears each time I recall this story. My eye bruised for a whole week and the teacher later refused to acknowledge that his blow had caused my injury.
Nevertheless, I am grateful to this teacher, if you consider him to be one, because that incident was instrumental in my subsequent shift to atheism in my late teens. After a phase of religious piety induced by such fear and indoctrination, I spent the latter part of my formative years adamantly believing that we invent the concept of God when our limited thinking fails to find a scientific answer to our existential questions. And it is from such vantage point of neutrality and non-partisanship, ridding oneself of all ideological baggage, that one can truly begin to make an informed and unbiased opinion on whether or not there is something out there. I started my quest right there, from the liberating playground of atheism, free from all taboos and inhibitions.
What I concluded after years of arduous soul searching – and some research – was that Darwin’s theory of evolution attempts to trace, with significant shortcomings, the fossil trail to find out how we got here, but does not tackle the many questions of why , simply because science is not interested in providing such answers. The latter questions, which I shall attempt to briefly raise here, left me with the only two logical, inescapable conclusions.
One, that the formation of our planet with its vastly diverse contents is simply too much of a coincidence to have been the outcome of an indiscriminate explosion. Two, that the course of human evolution – if the theory were valid – could not have been solely guided by an animalistic drive to reproduce and survive. While my subjective proof can never be conclusive, in both instances I found the circumstantial evidence of order, design and a higher spiritual predisposition to be overwhelming.
Let us look first at our amazing planet.
I kept thinking to myself, while in rejection mode of all deities, that if Earth was the result of a random accident, then it was too much of an accidental convenience that this planet should contain such an infinite array of inbuilt potential that keeps facilitating scientific discoveries and inventions. Inbuilt is the keyword here. If Earth was indeed formed by an haphazard event or series of events, then why isn’t it all just useless sand and rocks? Why should the incredible variety of different elements and gases exist at all – and be capable of chemical reactions to form the raw materials enabling the means of production and the other substances conducive to sustainable life?
For example, in a randomly shaped world, why should there be an invisible force we call electricity, and why should different metals exist that conduct this energy? If it’s all a pure coincidence, we could have simply been permanently stuck in the non-conductive stone age, for eternity. But we did not. Like children placed in a mystery castle, there was always a door that lead to the next level. We just needed to find it and discover how to unlock it.
Dig and you shall find – and our species did just that. From coal to iron to copper, what we excavated from under the earth was even more useful than what we found on its surface. The same questions persist. Why, for example, should oceans of petrol exist and have the propensity to burn and make possible every single advancement we enjoy today? To my mind, this was too much of a mere good luck or a chance occurrence. If our planet was a car, it was just loaded with countless options that, although concealed, kept unraveling over the centuries. But they were always there, thrown in for us to explore and enjoy. Why should it be this way? Randomness by definition implies chaos, so why is Earth equipped with so many items favorable to scientific advancement and human refinement?
These questions were everywhere I looked. I could actually write a book, and I just might one day, to count the staggering instances and examples of the components of our planet that complement each other, from the camel that crossed the first desert, the timber that built the first vessel, the wind that pushed its sails, the stars that guided it, the water that irrigated the first plant, which yielded the wood for the vessel, to the astonishing marvels of modern science, all of which could not have been possible had the harmonious plethora of basic ingredients and factors not been there in the first place. It may sound like a cliché, but it is undeniable that the inspiration to fly and the basic shape of the machine came from the birds in the skies, otherwise we wouldn’t have even dreamt that it was possible to defy gravity.
Of course, it is the miracle of the human mind through adhering to scientific method, detractors would say, that was able, over millennia, to connect the pieces of the puzzle and triumph in overpowering and conquering our environment, not any outside metaphysical force. True, but those pieces had always been there, waiting for us to complete the picture. We did not invent science. We simply keep discovering its unlimited potential. We do not set its rules, we merely learn them.
So although I was resigned in my comfortable atheist denial, I was constantly bewildered at the signs of intelligent design that cannot be explained away by evolutionary science. To me, the most fascinating miracle of all came, literally, out of thin air. Strangely enough, wireless technology, which most of us today take for granted, played a major part in affirming my belief in the implausibility of sheer coincidence to account for Earth’s multiplicity of hidden tools.
Whether it is the remote control devices all around us, radio stations, cellular phones or satellite TV, the inbuilt capacity of plain old empty space to actually constitute a complicated medium capable of carrying a wide spectrum of electromagnetic waves transformable into sounds and pictures is just too astounding it beggars belief. We may have gotten over the fascination of the invention of wireless communication by now as we casually converse everyday in crystal clear audio and view laser sharp video. But sometimes when I watch a live football game on TV or just reach out for my cell phone, I cannot help remembering that what connects me with the other end is pure nothing, absolute emptiness, the same void that existed all along ever since the first life appeared on Earth, with this void’s same advanced inherent capacity to carry such a variety of traveling data. Why, I keep asking, should this otherwise unsophisticated nothingness accommodate such science-fiction-like characteristics?
The other evidence I found in our fantastic species.
For me, the deficiencies of Darwin’s theory lay not in the incompleteness of the fossil record. Regardless of whether or not we did evolve from primates, and leaving aside the problems in the supposed mechanics of such evolution, the real insufficiency of Darwinist science in my opinion lies in not involving itself with the parallel spiritual narrative of the development of our species.
For example, Darwin’s theory does not attempt to discuss why humans, who have reached the highest rank on the scale of evolution, went on to develop an odd instrument such as a conscience, a total anathema to the ruthless laws of the jungle? If the law of natural selection dictates that the fittest animals are the ones that will survive, why did the gold medalists betray their nature and mutate a burdensome tool that has no place on the evolutionary racing track?
Some would say that humans have no effective conscience in real terms, and would argue that the tens of millions of people wiped out by fellow humans in wars in every single century ever since history has been recorded is only testimony that we are but a breed of intelligent, yet bestial animals devoid of conscience (indeed, in the heyday of colonialism and slavery, Darwin’s writings were invoked more to justify the subjugation of lesser evolved peoples by superior races than it has ever been useful for a better understanding of the behavior of micro organisms).
But as we, homo sapiens, climbed the linear ladder of evolution, it is undeniable that instead of totally abandoning that debilitating compartment of conscience in our brains, as the law of survival should have it, we have been evolving in the opposite direction, by espousing, if at least only in principle, increasingly humanitarian outlooks towards each other.
That we may do so ‘only in principle’ is not sufficient grounds to discard the trend towards non-animalistic charity and compassion, all foreign concepts to the amoral and dry mechanism of evolution. For if evolutionary wisdom prescribes that successful survivalists would eventually drop all excess biological luggage that may slow down their progress, then why, after billions of years, do we still hang on to ethical impediments, even if only in principle? Why do we bother at all?
My simple answer is that, despite the resemblance, we are and must be something much higher than just a better species of animals. For if we were the ultimate super animals, then why do we not seek to have the prototypical animal survivalist characteristics? Why did we not evolve into the most efficient cannibals ever by devouring our human competitors in grand ceremonies, as intelligent animals would do?
Instead, we inexplicably try to revert to something called morality, if at least in appearance, to govern our social relationships. Despite our practical failures, we still attempt to write volumes to develop laws and legislate strict adherence to order. We proclaim ideals such as natural justice and equality. We are nostalgic about intangible concepts such as traditional values. We abhor murder and strive for peace. We condemn lying and value honesty. We live in families and preach generosity and benevolence. No evolutionary account can explain why we laugh and why we cry, why we fall in love and why we feel melancholy, why we enjoy poetry and music, perhaps opera and theater too, why certain odors are pleasurable while others are not, why we care about personal hygiene, why a sunset moves something inside of us, why a rose smells sweet and signifies sweetness, why we cherish beauty, why we feel pity, why the smile of our children carries a magical, inexplicable charm that means the whole world to us.
I never wrote anything that had so many questions and so little answers. But here the questions contain the answers within them. We do all of the above because, despite the exceptions, it is this whole spiritual intensity of life instinctively instilled inside of us that delineates us from animals by many light years, much further and away from beasts than evolutionary proponents would have us believe. There was absolutely no reason for us to have evolved in this refined direction, except because our souls have an inborn uniqueness to all other living species, constantly seeking to uphold good over evil.
Inborn by whom, I leave it up to each of you to decide. It is not as important which software you decide to use as long as we agree that we are products of the same supreme hardware.
But rejoice I do not yet, for this point is only at the remote outskirts of faith, just outside the frontiers of enlightenment, with so many still unanswered questions. Nevertheless, it is undoubtedly the strongest and most scientific form of faith, as it is not inherited or indoctrinated, but rationally reached out of free will, and in no small measure due to the martial art skills of my fourth grade religion teacher.